‘The state’s large population also guarantees that most people within a state are strangers to each other. […] Hence states need police, laws, and codes or morality to ensure that the inevitable constant encounters between strangers don’t routinely explode into fights. That need for police and laws and moral commandments to be nice to strangers doesn’t arise in tiny societies, in which everyone knows everyone else. […]

Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find a tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.’
Jard Diamond, The World Until Yesterday

[It might seem that Diamond is question begging when he writes, 'Hence states need police…' But he's actually saying, large dense populations whose social reproduction depends on specialisation and cooperation need states and states need governing authorities in order to function.]

‘Anarchia must be there; it also can’t work as a totalizing approach.’
Meredith @ 117

Is this where the thread has settled?: ‘play where you can; occasionally walk across the grass; be helpful at work.’

Loathe the patronising coinage ‘crapwork’ btw.

Quite a lot of assumptions about class, status, etc packed into this… (not that I’m in proposing doctors mopping the floors).

How does anyone manage?

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PqcPCgsr2u0C&lpg=PA267&ots=-KSvy548gV&dq=%22strong%20shank%20connecting%22&pg=PA267#v=onepage&q=%22strong%20shank%20connecting%22&f=false

Actually, that seems completely likely to me. The fruit grows wherever it feels like and you have to perceive it before you can pick it. “Perception is hard” is one of the earliest and most stubborn results in robotics. It intuitively seems easy to humans because we have a highly developed instinct for it, but if you’re trying to design a robot to find the fruit on a tree, I’m pretty sure that’s still well beyond the current state of the art. If you want to pick only the *ripe* fruit and leave the unripe fruit on the tree to be picked next week, that’s even worse. The fact that this requires no “specialized training” from a human perspective does not, at all, make it easy for a robot.

Assembly lines, by contrast, can (and do) put all the parts in prearranged locations so the robot can just do a preset series of motions and hit the part every time.

Laundry under current technology is actually a not too bad example of the limits of automation: it’s the human’s responsibility to put the laundry and detergent in a prearranged location (inside the machine) because the machine is helpless to do those things for itself. It’s the human’s responsibility to select an appropriate set of wash settings because the machine can’t perceive what kind of laundry is inside it and deduce what settings are appropriate for it. It’s also the human’s responsibility to fold the laundry afterwards if they want it folded, because that’s a task too difficult to automate (although trivial from a human perspective).

As for the supervisor of a fleet of mopping robots, I thought about that, but wouldn’t that inherently lead to *more* alienation rather than less? Who is emotionally invested in acres of flooring spread out among 50 different buildings? And someone has to manufacture robot parts, which is back to the assembly line. (Of course, under capitalism, most of the profits will go to the business owner, and as little as possible to the robot herder. But sweeping away the institutions of capitalism is the least of the obstacles standing in the way of the hobbyist’s utopia.)

(Obviously, the above most plausibly holds for kinds of wort that don’t require a lot of specialized training — mopping, laundry, etc. For the kind of work that does require specialized training, my inclination is to agree with JWM et al that the work experience of such work as drudgery is mostly if not entirely a result of alienated work conditions.)

But what technology gets developed has a lot to do with social conditions. American manufacturing has undergone a lot more automation over the past 40 years than American agriculture. It seems unlikely that this is because making cars and aircraft is universally easier than picking fruit, and therefore easier to automate. It seems quite likely that it is because people building cars and aircraft were unionized and well-paid, so there were strong incentives to eliminate work rather than just pay for it. But if you have a low-wage work force, better yet one that’s paid by the piece, there’s little incentive to provide better tools.

If hospital floor-moppers were paid like physicians, I think janitorial practice would embrace more automation. Perhaps the mopper’s role becomes something like overseer of a robotic mopping fleet. More effort might be devoted to measuring where and when mopping really needs to take place to preserve sanitation, rather than doing it everywhere on a fixed schedule. Perhaps there would be more effort put into designing floors and buildings to be easy to clean, or to require less cleaning in the first place, rather than leaving low-paid workers to deal with choices made higher up. It’s amazing how much seemingly necessary crapwork can be eliminated or improved if you suppose that anyone from undocumented immigrant to CEO may end up having to do it.

Considering how many people appeared to be misunderstanding me (at least, I hope it was just misunderstanding and not misrepresenting), I thought explaining at length was the lesser evil.

Which I never argued that it hadn’t been (or that it couldn’t be in the future). Confusion ensued.

Salient @105: There’s a long middle ground between marginal reductions and reductions to zero.

Right, and I only ever argued the impossibility of the latter. Seems you’re making my point for me; that long middle ground is between me (reduction is possible, but not to zero, so the plight of the drudgeworker remains as an issue needing consideration in any achievable society) and straw-me (no improvement is possible, the status quo is the best of all possible worlds and must be defended).

Salient @104: Do you really, honestly feel that “the end of feudalism, the emancipation of the slaves, the labor movement, social democracy” are not four examples in which societies succeeded in drastically reducing the amount of unpleasant work?

Yes. I would describe them instead as some reduction, some rearrangement, and a lot of old wine in new bottles. See the working class? They’re still there, under another name. The material conditions of workers have improved, thanks partly to technology and partly to social changes. And nobody doubts that the end of slavery was important. But social democracy has not gotten people to stop pushing mops or scrubbing toilets while living in subsistence conditions — it just means they now own their cheap clothes and rent their run-down apartments and buy their low-quality food (sometimes having to borrow at ludicrous rates against their next paycheck to do so) instead of being issued them by their lord/owner/the company store; and God help them if they get sick, because nobody else will. They’re free people who have to take personal responsibility for their own lives, don’t you know.

Many, many people still spend most of every day doing drudge work, even though the institutions that compel them to do so have changed.

It’s hard enough to believe that we could someday in the future achieve a society without large numbers of people living by drudgery (it would be great if we could even get it below a majority!), but sheesh, if you think we’re already there, you really don’t know the right people, and haven’t held the right jobs.

JWM @107: The exact same task can be tedious, unpleasant, degrading when done under orders from someone else but very satisfying when done of one’s own choice.

Well, this may be the real meat of the disagreement. Yes, in theory, that could happen, but I think it is likely to be rare, compared to the tedious and unpleasant tasks that remain tedious and unpleasant regardless of who makes the decision when and how to do them. That’s why the idea that dealienation could remove all need for tedious, unpleasant work strikes me as far-fetched.

Let’s leave housework for a minute and consider, say, mopping the floor of a hospital. (I assume we can all agree it must be done with some minimum frequency for sanitary/safety reasons.) Do you expect the doctors to enjoy mopping their own hospital and derive personal satisfaction from it? I don’t; if you put a mop and bucket in the doctors’ lounge and expected the mopping to get done voluntarily there’d be a round of “I didn’t go through medical school for this” jokes and then dirty floors, unless someone has the authority to write a schedule and compel them to keep it. Ditto the nursing staff. So someone else has to be brought in and hired to mop the floor.

They could be paid a decent wage, with benefits, and job security, and a retirement plan, in some other society than the one we have now. But they’d still be living by mopping floors, not following the dreams of their heart.

This remains true regardless of whether the hospital is owned by a corporation, the government, a nonprofit organization, or the doctors and nurses as a collective; in all those cases, none of the people with actual health care skills wants to waste those skills mopping the floor. Maybe, in the nonprofit case, you could find someone who valued the contribution they were able to make to the nonprofit’s cause. Would you want to count on that?

Steven’s story is interesting, but I wouldn’t bet on it generalizing widely enough to fill the needs of whole societies. He doesn’t even follow the story to its end — once he voluntarily picks up the garbage and, most likely, puts it in a garbage can, where does it go from there, without a city employee (I presume, since it was a park) to take the garbage cans to the landfill?

For that matter, where do the garbage cans come from? Some hobbyist handcrafter of garbage cans? Do you really think there will be enough of those to let the society get by without garbage can factories (especially considering handcrafters’ much lower output per man-hour, which is after all why all these industrial methods were invented)? Ditto the garbage *trucks*, which I defy anyone to handcraft without access to factory-made parts and machine tools (although they would certainly be justified in taking pride in their accomplishment if they did!).

Every day people interact with dozens, if not hundreds of products made by alienated labor. Most, if not all, of which would be impossible, impractical, or vastly less efficient to be made solely by people who enjoyed making them, acting on their own initiative with nobody giving orders. Are you suggesting giving up technological society and all its benefits? Or, if not, who makes and distributes and cleans all the things that are no fun to make and distribute and clean? (An earlier draft of this sentence included “fix”, but some people enjoy fixing things, so I’ll spot you the people who fix everything that needs fixing. Although they still need parts, and tools, and transportation to the work site, and means of communication so they can find people who have things that need fixing…)

Steven Tran-Creque makes this point very well @56 and elsewhere upthread.

Not exciting but do find it relaxing personally. (I don’t wash anything by hand and I take a book along.) All in all, I’d say I have absolutely no problem whatsoever doing my laundry. Otoh if I was doing other people’s day in day out…

Marginal reductions in the amount of crappy work may well be worthwhile. But IMO we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking we can reduce it to zero.

There’s a long middle ground between marginal reductions and reductions to zero. (The snark writes itself!)