: : Socialism is born out of capitalism---and capitalism has created [ I mean REINFORCED] the 'craft-idiocy' that resists the despecialization anticipated by Marx and Engels' German Ideology quote. : Obviously, craft-idiocy is preindustrial. And while the social relations of capitalist production has eroded much of this skill (division of labor in manufacture, machinery) for workers, capitalism champions the craft-idiocy ideal (through middle class professions, celebrities, and the highly-publicized like) as an ideology that promotes hierarchy. Which job rotation squarely attacks.
*I suspect this imbroglio has more to do with the somewhat pedestrian label you have attached to one of the cornerstones of modern communism. Just a feeling of course after reading a half dozen or so of these posts going back a few weeks. Instead of the rather ubiquitous "job rotation" try "libertine occupational sequencing" ...now that's anarcho-communist sheik comrade.
I'm wondering whether or not to your mind the question of job rotation shouldn't be left up to the workers themselves? The genius of NEP to me was to keep a (somewhat diminished) private sector which state run enterprises would compete against. State run enterprises would offer better working conditions and benefits than their private counterparts and would enjoy advantages as far as economies of scale go. This in fact, revived the country and led to Bukharin, in a fit of giddiness for which he would later pay for with his life to advise workers and peasants to "enrich yourselves."
The state run industries could sponsor just such an effort as you describe... (also, between you and I... that particular passage by Marx must have been written *very* late at night and can hardly be considered his best work considering the dire seriousness of the question posed by a bourgeois vs socialist division of labour. 'I can hunt, fish, play at cowboy and criticize'??? What was the old boy thinking there? Could he have been more obtuse if he'd tried?). If the concept works (and there's no reason to think it wouldn't) it would eventually find its way into the rest of society... already on the road to liberty, fraternity, equality under the red flag.
So the long of the short of it mate... do you see/think of revolutions as the violent and sudden break with the past as some seem to -or- is there something of the 'uninterupted revolution' ala Lenin or the 'permanent revolution' of Trotskii in you? Just trying to size you up. For the record I'm of the Leninist branch on these, though Trotskii's ideas on this particular topic don't give me much heartburn.* --K
