textsfromsolarpunk

Amazing. It's almost as though capital itself should not be the driving force of society...

I think looking around at what's worked well in the past is a good way to decide what "should" happen. Not that we have to be limited to that, but it's a good reality-touchstone for the conversation.

To me, the New Deal-era economy, if it had had racial justice and women's rights, is the best example I can see for what I would think is a good economy. The government is going to keep a close eye on creating jobs, creating a strong safety net, and reigning in the oligarchs who are trying to unbalance the system. It ushered in decades of prosperity. It was good (again, for white men at least).

It's a little hard to compare against socialist societies, because the West does its best to wreck any socialist country that might start working for its people, so that it can "prove" that socialism doesn't work. So there's a strong argument that socialism actually works better than historical examples would suggest. Cuba is actually a really instructive example in terms of what it does well (medicine in particular) even facing economic warfare from almost the entire rest of the world. But, even with that caveat, I still think that structuring an economy similar to 1930s through 1960s America (again, just with racial and gender justice added to it) seems like what works the best.

If you are a mother taking care of a child, is that a job?

Yes. The ability of one parent to draw enough of an income that the other parent can focus largely on child care and "living" as distinct from working, is one of the key features that makes me like the New Deal-era US economy. That's as much an important part of my happy utopia as would be a happy life for the "working" partner in one-job families, with rewarding, balanced, satisfying work.

Actually, I think I remember seeing some kind of studies that argued that women in some Scandinavian countries seem to be happiest among modern societies, based on working like 10-15 hours per week. They have time for the family but they're not stuck at home going out of their minds like a 1950s housewife. (And obviously everyone should be able to do whatever they want to do, just that as the tradition seemed like it worked well in practice.) I tried to find them to send to you but I ran out of motivation before I did.

But yes, short answer, whichever partner is taking care of the family shouldn't be working full time. That is clearly insanity in the modern system and fueled just by greed of extracting value from people with no regard for what it's going to do to us long term.