Great article, but one of the articles it cites early on (the one about breaking out of the activist mold) has a line that baffles me.
“The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine or education — instead of healing and bringing up kids being common knowledge and tasks that everyone has a hand in, this knowledge becomes the specialised property of doctors and teachers — experts that we must rely on to do these things for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society.”
Andrew X
Is he really suggesting the abolition of doctors and teachers? Is he aware of how absurdly hard it is to be a doctor or a teacher?
People with pedagogical or medical expertise will always be needed, but not in the current format.
Teachers and doctors - as they exist currently - are the product of a factory model of education and healthcare. They are hard jobs because they are poorly fitted to the complex needs of real people, who are not products on an assembly line.
It is that structure that alienates us from our own education and caring for one another. That is what is being addressed here. There might be “teachers” and “doctors” in a world without this factory model, but they likely wouldn’t be full time specialised roles.
Okay, unless you’re going to give me an explanation as to what that means in specific, it sounds like your argument simply speaks to your lack of imagination.
You said that “doctor” likely wouldn’t be a full-time role.
You need like 6 years of grueling education, plus years of experience, to be a reasonably good doctor. If you don’t go through all of that, you very well may end up killing someone if you try to practice medicine.
It simply isn’t practical to teach everyone the whole shebang and expect them to be able to work part-time as a doctor and also something else.
This is an anarchism sub. Anarchism isn’t just thinking 6 years into the future. If that’s what you mean by “foreseeable” then sure, this won’t happen on a large scale in that time frame. These things take longer. If that’s all you’re saying then you’re not saying much.
Unless you’re saying this could never happen, in which case again I would say you simply lack imagination.
I think that unless we can fully automate healthcare, there really isn’t a way we can do it. Perhaps I lack imagination, but how would you do that? What did you come up with?
The only reason people still work 5 days a week is because of bullshit jobs. Basically, our economy is set up in such a way that jobs increase to fill the labour market, even if those jobs really don’t matter. People thought in the 50s that the 3 day work week would become standard, but it didnt happen for this reason.
If we had a society that was built by and for people rather than capital, we could eliminate a huge amount of the work we do. People would be free to have leisure or to train and reskill. We could have more medically trained people - either full doctors or nurse practitioners, OTs, physios, etc, spending less time on the job. It’s obviously better for society to have more skilled people with more time on their hands. Plus they could learn other skills and do other things rather than spending all their time in one job, cross-pollinating and gaining experience in more areas.
Plus, a huge amount of doctors’ time is spent in bullshit jobs, writing certificates just so a person can get time off of school or work or for welfare. This is all in service of an economy that demands that everybody be “productive” at all times, even though that just means moving imaginary tokens around. This isn’t to mention the increased level of health that would exist if we weren’t getting up at the crack of dawn, getting through rush hour and working for 8 hours then coming back home to collapse and do it all again for most of our lives.
Also, I just want to add that when I said you “lacked imagination”, I wasn’t trying to imply that you are essentially incapable of imagination. I’ve thought a bit about that phrase, and I think it’s not great, and I should find a way to say that a person has not yet imagined that world, because that’s what I really mean. “Lack of imagination” could mean that, but it’s obviously a confrontational way to put it and I’m sorry I phrased it that way.
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