Division of Labor

[Servia]

Is the abolition of the division of labor meant to occur in a later period of transition to truly socialist society?

[ckaihatsu]

Is the abolition of the division of labor meant to occur in a later period of transition to truly socialist society?


I'd say this all depends on *how specialized* the roles of social administration have to be, in reality -- today we're used to seeing financiers (the market) and careerist professionals in government being the ones with their hands on the levers, day-to-day, but it may not have to *remain* that way.

I'm recalling that the early Western empires were *built* on their abilities to handle administrative tasks efficiently, so that such nascent bureaucracies could always present themselves to everyone as being organizationally whole and therefore taking precedence over any-given 'smaller' situation on the ground, with any individual or local group. One key component of bureaucracy that was cutting-edge at the time was *triplicate* copies, so that for any given transaction one copy would go to the local person or entity, another would go to the administrator (political capital), and the third copy would be for the higher-ups and the archives (hierarchy).

These days the material matter of making a copy of something -- whether on paper or digitally -- is *trivial*, and yet our *social* organization is lagging far behind the potentials for what present-day *technologies* would enable. Modern social organization certainly doesn't *require* hierarchy or bureaucracy, yet here we are.

I'd look to see *how horizontally* any given social-administration of collectivized production / productivity could be, given that *any* records could just be immediately put into one or more libraries, and online, of course, for full public transparency and potential involvement, regarding any given social matter.

[Blake's Baby]

Short answer I think is that without liberating real human beings the revolution is pointless. The goal of the working class smashing capitalism has to be freedom from 'work' as we understand it. We will have more free time, pleasanter conditions in which we engage in creative labour, and more opportunity to engage in different forms of labour.

Marx didn't say he would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticise after dinner for no reason.

EDIT by the way there are at least 5 other threads more or less on this topic:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/division-labor-t193537/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/division-labor-t189063/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/division-labori-t166311/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/division-labor-t129301/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/division-labor-t117327/index.html

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't really like the implication that the transition to socialism is something that takes a long time. If it takes decades or more to "transition" to socialism, something is wrong. Now, Marx never says that the division of tasks in various production processes is to be abolished (that would indeed take a long time). What is to be abolished is each person having a fixed sphere of activity. This state of affairs is even today true only as an approximation, and to the extent that it is true, it's artificially imposed on the proletariat as part of its subjugation. The cultural and technical level of modern society is such that it would be easy for people to change tasks so that they weld in the morning and pour concrete in the afternoon and run scientific simulations in the evening (I'm not sure the socialist society will recognise criticism as socially useful expenditure of labour-power). So we're talking about something that will happen at the start of the socialist society (after the period of civil wars and revolutions where people will most likely be preoccupied with not dying to the extent that they wouldn't worry much about changing their qualifications).

[Blake's Baby]

He's criticising in his time off. We only to 'work' four hours a day and fully-automated luxury communism is ours, comrade.

I'm only being slightly tongue-in-cheek.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I still suspect that much of modern "criticism", particularly of the academic sort, will be seen as a social faux pas. Writing about Hamlet and using terms like "object little a" will be viewed the same way as shitting in someone else's cornflakes will.

[ckaihatsu]

Marx didn't say he would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticise after dinner for no reason.


People tell me *I* often criticize after dinner for no reason.


= D

[Luís Henrique]

Is the abolition of the division of labor meant to occur in a later period of transition to truly socialist society?

There is a technical division of labour, and a social division of labour. The former cannot be abolished without destroying the technological advances of the last 100,000 years; the abolition of the latter basically is the transition to a communist society.

Luís Henrique