William Meecham wrote:

>The French are showing the way to make late capitalism livable.
>Reduce the work week at the SAME pay.  The overproduction must
>be confronted.  Depression/recession anyone?
>wcm

I guess that is a slightly "more just society", but only for those who have
full time work, or any job for that matter. The trend these days is away
from permanant jobs and towards "the evil" of casual work as described by
John Pilger's piece on the Liverpool dockers sent to us recently. (Thanks
for that if you're still on the list) This trend is described as the
"return of the proletarian dimension" of the workforce by Karl Heinz Roth:

        "...whovever has followed the main strands of the debate in
        social history will soon notice that recent developments in
        society are drastically contradicting the deterministic
        improvement traditionally proclaimed by social scientists:
        the 150 year rise of the penniless and landless "rebels" to
        become an industrial proletariat of wage workers, and from
        there to an integrated "labour force" receiving sick pay and
        pension guarantees. What we are now seeing is a genuine return
        of the proletariat dimension, since behind the term proletariat -
        once cynically and contemptuously used to rally the workers by
        generations of reactionary labour leaders - lie all those elements
        which the sellers of labour power are now experiencing again on
        masse: insecure jobs, the break-up of "normal working hours",
        sudden wage cuts, increasingly shaky guarantees for the risks
        of sickness, invalidity and old age."

Higher pay certainly would make life more livable. But it also reduces
profits. The problem always is that in a free market the capitalists paying
less are likely to out-compete and ultimately eliminate those providing
better conditions.

So, since the "generous boss" is always destined to die out and eventually
become extinct altogether in a free market, only the impossible
contradiction of "monopoly in the service of free enterprise" proposed by
Trezy Kilbourne could provide the conditions for decent lives for workers
under capitalism. That monopoly in practice is of course what Chomsky
refers to derisively as "socialism" for the rich. It is no solution at all
for ordinary people, or at least not for most.

Bill Bartlett
27 Emma St
Bracknell Tasmania

       "The goal was "to eliminate all foreign competition." The US
        therefore took pains to drive its French, British, and Canadian
        rivals out of the Western hemisphere, so as "to maintain the
        area as an important market for U.S. surplus industrial production
        and private investments, to exploit its vast reserves of raw
        materials, and to keep international communism out" - rather
        like Europe and Canada themselves. Here the term "communist" is
        to be understood in its usual technical sense: those who appeal to
        "the poor people [who] have always wanted to plunder the rich," in
        Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's phrase. Much the same
        was true of the Middle East, to which the US extended the Monroe
        Doctrine after World War II, with enormous consequences for
        southern Europe, North Africa, and the region itself." -CHOMSKY