Work and waste
Dear Editors,
You believe that in a future socialist society work will be shared. Yet no system will be so efficient as to train everyone to master every skill needed to keep a technological society running—it takes a half-lifetime to master only one profession!
Even if it were possible, the laws of the division of labour hold that someone is still going to have to do boring shop floor work and that will mean that they will have a low status. Such inequality can hardly be described as a socialist ideal.
In addition, even you now agree with the opposition to nuclear power. But just as you now believe that it's impossible to have nuclear power without poisonous nuclear waste, so it's impossible to have industry without poisonous industrial waste. De-industrialisation will be an answer to our main solution: the pursuit for human happiness.
J.D. Moreno,
London SW19
Reply:
The skills necessary for running a highly complex industrial society are collective not individual or personal. It will be for socialist society to choose how far to automate production in order to remove drudgery and danger. If they cannot be eliminated then the danger and drudgery will have to be shared by a society that will understand that the work needs to be done if socialism is to continue functioning effectively. It is in this sense that we say work will be shared. No-one will be expected to do the same repetitive and dangerous work for a lifetime.
We do not envisage socialist society as one in which everyone will have all the skills to do everything ("It's your turn to be the brain surgeon this week, George!"). What we do look forward to is a situation where skills and talents currently trapped and distorted by capitalism are given the opportunity of full and free expression according to personal taste and inclination to do "useful work not useless toil", to use the words of William Morris.
Socialism before anything else will be a society of equals. Status and inequality will be meaningless concepts recalled only as hateful features of class society.
Waste is not inevitable—it is only a by-product of production which cannot be reused profitably and disposed of without incurring a loss.
De-industrialisation is not an option for the human race. Who would wish to do without the means now available to provide comfort and sufficiency for all? At a more prosaic level, would our correspondent wish to have dental treatment in the absence of a pain-killer administered by a hypodermic syringe?
Editors.
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