The "but who will do the dirty jobs?" question is one of those pseudo-philosophical questions of bourgeois ideology that abstractly deals with "man's condition." It is a question that takes takes a real, historical situation (under capitalist commodity production, there exist wage-paid jobs that are offensive and/or soul crushingly monotonous) and abstracts it, extending it through time and space, as though it is an organic part of the human species. The evocation of the curse of Adam in Genesis is sometimes used to buttress this idea. Why is it so hard to see beyond wage labor and the division of labor in the context of bourgeois social relations? One of the prerequisites of communism (actually, the main one) is the abolition of wage labor and the dissolution of the division labor. Yet, I've seen posts by members of this group that say, "The concept of doing what one likes to do for a job is a dream relegated to the few totally gifted and possibly to a future communist society," "Socialism doesn't do away with class differences entirely,""technology will do the jobs,""higher wages will make the jobs attractive." This sort of socialism "..only idealizes the existing society, takes a picture of it free of shadows and aspires to assert its ideal picture against the reality of this society,"(Marx, Class Struggles in France). Several writers seem to be unaware of what Marx wrote about wage-labor. Reading The German Idealogy, Capital, or really just about anything Marx wrote would do a lot to dissipate the mystification surrounding "The Job." All jobs are "dirty" when carried on at a crushing pace, or in dulling monotony for 8-12 hours, 5-6 days a week. Repeating the same task endlessly for the valorization of capital is a "dirty" job. Marx sums up the wage-laborer's situation beautifully when he says in Wage-Labour and Capital: "If the silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-laborer." As opposed to the slogan, "Jobs not jails," how about: "Jobs are jails"? The lot of the wage worker is tied up with class differences. "Jobs" will become less "dirty" when they become work done by all people on an equal basis. Then, the responsibilities of production as well as the rewards of labor will be shared by all in common. This begins as wage-labor and division of labor ends. This "dream" is intrinsic to socialist practice. "[Revolutionary] socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary intermediate point on the path towards the abolition of class differences in general, the abolition of all relations of production on which they are based, the abolition of all social relations which correspond to these relations of production, and the revolutionizing of all ideas which stem from these social relations."--K. Marx, The Class Struggles in France _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
