: MDG
: : I have another idea: the crappy miserable jobs, like picking grapes or cleaning toilets, should be the work of young people, done either for school credit or college money (public grants) while they're in high school or after high school, before college. It would be universal service, akin to the military...: : I don't think that further job rotation will be necessary, with one exception: serving in government.
: Well put!
: Following in the footsteps of Robert Owen* is to follow some very respectable footsteps indeed.
: I could quibble, MDG---but I won't. Any revolutionary party with this plank---would Wellstone, Nader, or Kovel go this far?---would most likely have me pleading to join. I really respect your reconsideration of the job rotation idea...
Thanks Barry, though I never really rejected job rotation entirely (at least in my mind -- I might have done so in a post for argument's sake). I have the merest knowledge of what socialism and communism really are (same with Lark's anarcho-syndicalism), but I do know that I want the world to be a better place -- in a liberal/left/green kind of way. This ignorance, paradoxically, can be beneficial, in that I'm not locked into any dogma (at least with regard to economics).
As I like to say, there's good and bad to be found in almost everything
(I'll say this for Hitler -- his SS had the best uniforms), and I think we can take the best of Marx and Keynes and all the rest and create a fusion system even better than than what those men thought up themselves -- a system which is best suited for the 21st century. That system could, and likely should, include job rotation of one kind or another.
I suppose as a committed Marxist you'd reject a fusion system, or any other system besides communism, and in the end you might be right. But that's why we're all yakking on this board, right? To find the strenghts and weaknesses of ideas. I believe that's what you reds call dialectics.
