Page 18 RAIN October 1980 Thus, said the President, we unlearned how to raise our own children, how to cook oµ.r own meals and make our own music. Paid technicians now provide our food, our music, and our ideas in prepackaged form. "We have reached the point," the President remarked, "where parents consider that only state-certified professionals are qualified to raise their children adequately." Having earned the right to leisure, we appoint professional buffoons to fill our emptiness with electronic entertainment, and <;ontent ourselves with complaining about the poor quality of the goods and services we consume. . • It had become urgent, the President said, for individuals and communities to regain control over the organization of their existence, over their relationships and their environment. "The recovery and extension of individual and social autonomy is the only method of avoiding the dictatorship of the state." The President then turned to the Prime Ministerfor a statement of the new program. The latter began by reading a list of twentynine enterprises and corpora_tions whost; socialization would be· sought iri the National Assembly. More than half belonged to the consumer goods sector, in order to be able to give immediate application to the principles of "working less" and "consuming better." ~ To translate these principles into practice, the Prime Minister said it was necessary to rely on the workers themselves. They would be free to hold general assemblies and set up specialized groups, following the system devised by the workers of Lip, where planning is · done in specialized committees, but decisions are taken by the gen-. eral assembly. The workers should allow themselves a month, the Prime Minister estimated, to define, with the assistance of outside advisers and consumer groups, a•reduced range of product models and new sets of quality standards and production targets. During this first month, said the Prime Minister, production work should be done only in the afternoons, the mornings being reserved for collective discussion. The workers should set as their .goal the organizing of the producdve process to meet the demands for essential go0ds, while at the same time reducing their average worktime to twenty-four hours a week. The number of workers would evidently have to be increased. There would, he promised, be no shortage of women and men ready to take'these jobs. The Prime Minister further remarked that the workers would be free to organize themselves in such a way that each individual could, for-certain periods, work more or less than the standard twenty-four hours for the same firm. They would be free to have two or three part-time jobs, or, for. example, to work on construction during the spring and in agriculture towards the end of the summer-in short, to learn and practice a variety of skills and occupations. To facilitate this process, the workers-themselves would be helped to set up-a system of job exchanges, taking into account that the 24-hour week, and the monthly salary of 2000F ($500) to which they would be entitled, should be regarded as an average. Two people, said the Prime Minister, should be able to live quite comfortably on 2000f a month, considering the range of collective services and facilities which would be available to them. But no one -need feel restrained by this: "Luxuries will not be prohibited. But they must be obtained by additional work." As examples, the Prime Minister cited the following: a secondary residence or summer cottage represented about three thousand hqurs of labor. Anyone seeking to acquire one would work, in addition to the twenty-four hours a week, three thousand hours in the-building and construction sector, of which at least a thousand hours would need to be completed before a loan could be raised. Other objects classified as nof!necessities, such as private automobiles (which represented about six hundred hours of labor), could be acquired in the same fashion. "Money itself will no longer confer any rights," the Prime Minister stated. "We must learn to determine the prices of things in working hours." This labor cost, he added, would rapidly decline. Thus the individual with some do-it-yourself skills would soon be able to acquire, for only five hundred hours of additional work, all the elements needed to assemble his or her own house, which should not take more than fifteen hundred hours to put up. - The government's economic aim, the Prime Minister stated, was to gradually eliminate commodity production and exchange by de-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz