Amateurism is a Good Thing!

When communists say that they're for establishing a world without definite professions, many people blink. They cannot imagine such a world. In fact, such a world would be altogether antithetical to the reactionary American Dream, which is that of taking someone else's living doing what you love. And you are only supposed to love doing one or a couple particular things, and love them obsessively forever. The American Dream is hence not only a vision of exploitation, but also of a narrow-minded mentality that says "it's best to know a lot about a little". It is very specialized.

Imperialism entrenches a certain division of labor: there are those who survive by doing manual work and others who survive by doing mental work. At the present point, this divide corresponds to whole sections of the world in an overall sense. There are labor-intensive countries, where manual tasks dominate, and capital-intensive countries, where mental tasks dominate. These respectively are the Third World and the First World. The First World populations overwhelmingly enjoy an easy and non-laborious existence at the expense of the Third World populations. They (First Worlders) have lots of access to college education and desk jobs and just generally have lots of leisure time. Third Worlders on the other hand tend to barely get by and tend to overwhelmingly work with their backs tirelessly, 12 hours a day or more very often. They do not generally have access to the same levels of education, leisure time, and sedentary job options that First Worlders do, or even close. It will be an important task of communist revolutionaries to reconcile these distinctions; to abolish the oppressive international division of labor. Yes this means abolishing professions. It means giving the oppressed and exploited the opportunity to engage more fully in mental labors, achieving a balance in the nature of what kinds of work they do. And it means compelling the exploiter populations of the First World to also participate in doing useful, manual work for the planet they inhabit and the people who live therein.

So anyhow, how does one get past professions? Many people have a hard time conceiving of the relaxation of access to certain types of work as a good thing. For instance, many people believe that doctors need to be experts, and thus that only a few people should be doctors. Likewise, many people believe that art is only really art if it is done with the expertise of a professional. Hell, even just with hobbies, there are even First World college students who don't consider people who play video games on a casual basis (that is, the majority of gamers) to be "real gamers" ( ;-) ). Etc.! Legitimacy belongs only to experts in this narrow type of outlook, and things are done better if left exclusively to experts (especially in intellectual fields).

In socialist China, a very different agenda was pursued by the Maoists during and around the time of the Cultural Revolution. This approached aimed to break down what remained of the oppressive division of labor in China. Let us look at what some of the results were:

In Health Care: In 1949, China only had 12,000 Western-trained doctors for a country of some 500 million. By 1965, there were 200,000, but most of the medical care was still concentrated in the cities! This in a country that was still overwhelmingly rural! New doctors were encouraged to work at elite urban hospitals, and to focus on making a career for themselves. Meanwhile, most peasants—the vast majority of China’s population—had little or no access to modern medical care. Such an approach to health care could only help to widen inequalities in society and strengthen the influence of capitalist tendencies.

Mao and those who rallied to his line sharply criticized the direction being taken by the Health Ministry, calling for radical transformations. Under his leadership, the focus of health care shifted to the countryside, even as overall health care improved in the cities. One of the most exciting developments of the Cultural Revolution was the “barefoot doctor” movement. Young peasants and urban youth were sent to the countryside and briefly trained in basic health care and medicine geared to meet local needs and treat the most common illnesses. And doctors went to rural areas—at any given time, a third of the urban doctors were in the countryside. Life expectancy during the period of Mao’s leadership doubled from 32 years in 1949 to 65 years in 1976. The policy shift on health care spoken to here played a big role in producing that impressive result! By the time of Mao's death, some 90% of China's population had access to basic medical care. Following the termination of the "barefoot doctors" program in 1981, it took only a few short years for that percentage to plummet to just 5%. Even the World Health Organization has been forced to concede that the "barefoot doctors" program was a genuine success. This is one excellent example of how learning a little about a lot rather than a lot about a little is actually a superior course. It produced many more doctors for China, thus radically increasing access to basic medical care and improving the life expectancy of the population in a big way.

In the Arts: An explosion of creativity among the masses swept China. Cultural troupes and film units multiplied in the countryside. Between 1972 and 1975, Beijing held four national fine arts exhibitions, with 65% of exhibited works created by amateurs, that attracted an audience of 7.8 million, a scale never reached before the Cultural Revolution. The ordinary masses were brought into the field of culture in unprecedented ways. As a result of vigorous promotion of socialist culture among the masses, China wound up with a multiplied array of short stories, poetry, paintings and sculpture, music, and dance. (We can argue about the limitations that were probably wrongly placed on artistic expression, but no one can deny that interest in the fields of art and culture increased in a big way as a result of the drive to establish a socialist cultural life.)

In Science: “Open-door research” was introduced: research institutes were spread to the countryside and involved peasants; technical laboratories literally opened their doors to workers; and universities set up extension labs in factories and neighborhoods. Popular primers made scientific knowledge available to the masses. The ordinary masses were brought into the field of the natural sciences.

The division of labor was also attacked in various other ways. In the field of education, textbook learning was combined with field work to give students a more rounded picture of the world. In the workplaces, professional management was replaced by various alternatives at various points (some more contrived and limited than others). The most progressive of these gave ordinary working people decision-making authority in their workplaces and required that former professional managers spend time in production. In the military, rank insignia was abolished and a campaign launched to combat officer caste mentality. China's People's Liberation Army members were also expected to help the general working population out with the tasks of production. Society was made more equitable all around in these and other ways.

Contemporary communists, that is Leading Light Communists, are not afraid of de-specialization. It brings with it not only greater equality in society and not only the freedom to engage in all sorts of fields of endeavor without being confined to a particular one, but also superior results in terms of the betterment of the human condition.

Sources of stats:

1. http://revcom.us/a/139/STRS-en.html
2. http://revcom.us/a/141/Mao_true-story-pt2-en.html