: Fortunately for us, capitalism has brought about advances that mean few people have to lead lives of such drudgery. There is very little manufacturing, for instance, left in the UK. SDF: In the real world, of course, the "lives of such drudgery" are lived by the residents of the nations of the South, which contribute to Northern economies at the rate of six Marshall Plans a decade.
: That which does remain is largely hi-tech and hi-skilled. Primary industry is all but extinct.
SDF: Not in the whole world it isn't.
: As for job sharing, the sad truth is that most people are incapable of doing jobs that would be described as skilled or professional. That is because, to do these jobs, you have to have a skill or a profession. Most people don't. Seems obvious really. The only way around this would be to educate / train everyone to an extremely high standard. This hardly seems practical.
SDF: Practical for whom? The aristocrat who wishes to retain his/her class monopoly upon the opportunities to attain "skills" and "professions"?
: In any event, many people probably do not have the native ability for such work,
SDF: Is it "native ability" which the aristocrat seeks to hoard?
: and more still would have no inclination to undertake years of further education. the though of gangs of gangs of building workers being press-ganged into training for accountancy is a rather chilling one.
SDF: It CAN'T be worse than the current reality...
: There will always be jobs that are more boring than others and the least educated / skilled will always do them.
SDF: The capitalist elite says, in self-satisfaction, "so we, the owning class, should continue to limit the options of the majority to labor or starvation..."
: This is necessary for the orderly function of society as the best jobs are usually the most difficult and need the most talented and skilled people to do them.
: There will always be jobs be thought of as drudgery despite the fact that the actual standard of even the worst jobs is increasing.
SDF: Jeremy Seabrook, on the other hand, argues that the world's people are being forced out of a relatively benign rural poverty into a state of urban poverty that is far worse. Who's right?
: This means that it is better to serve fries than to work in a coal mine for 20 hours a day (just about), so Adam Smith's vision in this respect is becoming increasingly out of date.
SDF: And, in the future, the world will become increasingly dependent upon its coal reserves, as oil reserves dry up, no thanks to those who think that coal mining is "increasingly out of date".
: Just as the "poor" in the West are richer than the middle classes of the past in absolute terms, the standard of the worst jobs that humans have to do in capitalist societies improves with time.
SDF: And that part of the world that is not "the West" is to be wished away?
