: What!? All work is 'to some degree' skilled? Have you ever spent 6 hours a day at a cash register? 8 hours cleaning bathrooms? Or didn't your college ever let you have a taste of that sort of 'skilled to some degree' work? The distinction between skilled and unskilled work is paramount.Cobblers, even skilled work involves boring repetition to some degree, and some people on super-market checkouts are skilled labour- Staff at Aldi memorise prices, rather than scan, and hence get £7 an hour. Sewing is a skilled activity, as is weaving, and I'll bet both can be cripplingly dull. Skill is not index of pleasure in a task. Being enslaved into doing any job is wrong.
: See my post on craft-idiocy.
Seen it, doesn't dispute it.
: Really?
Really. Fordism is the industrial process of saving labour time, at the expence of quality, industrialism simply is the application of mchinery to production - without the logic of capital behind uindustry, it need not take a Forsdist approach - hence I was assuming my shoe-workshop to be highly automated, with people using the machines on an ad-hoc basis.
: You would return society to preindustrial artisanship? Such a mode of production could only provide for minorities. To reject the industrial revolution is simply insane utopianiam...
I am not rejecting the industrrial revolution, at all, I think its a splendid thing, in part, as per morris' argument, though, once we have gone through it, we may well wish to purchase back some of the wealth we have sacrificed in terms of job satisfaction and personal esteem - artisanship is a luxury. I am not *advocating* a return to such, I simply note morris' logic as to how such might occur, if he is right that personal labour is more pleasurable...
: If you say so... but it sounds like you haven't had much exposure to work...
I don't need to, my point is that work would be our hobby, and that while factories now provide enough wealth to build mansions for our masters, they might in the future produce enough wealth to be mansions for us to play in.
: If artisanship is really the answer, Bill, how come socialism didn't emerge out of feudalism? You are forgetting the ABCs of dialectical materialism...
I thinkuing you are mistaking my argument - artisanship is not 'the answer', it may well be the product. Socialism couldn't arise from fuedalism, because it would require abundance to create socialism - 0nce we have that abundance, we can abolish the working class once and for all.
: Who are you trying to fool? Morris wasn't a Marxist at all.
No, are you sure? After all, he and Elenor Marx formed teh SOcialist eague, with Engels' backing, he explicitly explains Marx in his 'Socialism from the Roots up' - he wasn't a Leninist, and that's where he has found disfavour.
