hypo

[philibusters]

Imagine we lived in a communist country.  All jobs pay the same.  If one job is more strenous than another job they are compensated by having to work less so that a coal miner would work 1/4th the amount of time as a lawyer and ideally his extra free time would compensate for the tougher nature of the work.  To sum up all jobs are equally desirable.  What role does affirmative action have in such a society?

[Ilovecheese]

I'm from the the former USSR and there racism was punishable by government. If some type of an advantage was publicly given by an institution based on class/race/etc the director of that institution would be imprisoned.
The Soviet Union practiced racial assimilation, meaning a group of peopl from race A woul be moved and made to live with a group of peopl of race B, that way racism would lessen.
In merit to such government policies everyone was treated equally simply because if a person was held back due tosome  factor that should be unrelated to weighing the person's worth, that person could easily write a report on the people who are weighing his worth, those people would be taken care of by the government.
Also, in USSR, not sure about other communist countries, education was mandatory, children were made to go to school and each school had the same quality education, except for specialized schools which would pick out students from all over the country based on their intelligence. Since education was open to everyone and everyone had to graduate from school, higher education institutions would not take race into consideration since everyone was given the same chance to succeed in life.
So to answer your question, no, there would be no need for AA in a communist country because of governmental policy of equality.

[philibusters]

excellent reply, I was focusing more on law not being a particularly desirable job, but I think what you say captures the goals of our society, giving everybody an equal opp.  Some people here say in 25 yeas there will be no need for AA cause all schools will be relatively equal.  Personally I find that doubtful.

Just wondering, did you think everybody really did receive a comparable quality of  education in the U.S.S.R. in reality, or do you think it was more in name only?

[Ilovecheese]

The quality of the education was the same since the Soviet government created the curriculum. All textbooks were the same, all schools were given similar resources. Ofcourse teachers would vary in their teaching ability, but overall education was quite similar in all parts of the country. Plus, there were periodic school tests; a group of people who were from the Board of Education would come to schools and make sure evrything was going on as the center in Moscow desired. In addition to governmental check ups, each school had mandatory checks of classes, when the Principal and his assitants would sit in on every class and see if teachers were doing their job properly.

And law related professions were not quite popular in the Soviet Union, not because of salary because they got paid more than the average worker, but because there were not many openings for lawyers, since there were no private practices.

[SCgrad]

yeah, the history lessons were lies upon lies no matter what school you went to.

[Ilovecheese]

yeah, the history lessons were lies upon lies no matter what school you went to.

I don't belive that history lessons or any other lessons were untrue. Objective information was presented in classes, no teacher was saying that horrific events happen becuase of capitalism. Prpaganda was kept out of schools and brought to people through enterntainment. There is no Soviet action film that does not have some type of an evil spy from some capitalist country. Such things, however, were not uncommon in the United States just as well.

[redemption]

(Since nobody responded to my highly opinionated, highly confusing, stream of conscious post (I don't blame you), maybe I can make some of the same points through a hypo)

Imagine we lived in a communist country.  All jobs pay the same.  If one job is more strenous than another job they are compensated by having to work less so that a coal miner would work 1/4th the amount of time as a lawyer and ideally his extra free time would compensate for the tougher nature of the work.  What role does affirmative action have in such a society?

I don't get this hypo. Sounds like coal miners get 4x the hourly pay of the average. Is that it?

Also, what's the connection between this "hypo" and affirmative action?

[philibusters]

the hypo was that all jobs are equally desirable.  I was going to say that they all paid the same with the same hours, but some people would protest some jobs like being a coal miner is harder than say being a lawyer, so that it was still not equal.  I was just trying to make the hypo so that are jobs were theortically equally desirable.

[philibusters]

yeah, the history lessons were lies upon lies no matter what school you went to.

I don't belive that history lessons or any other lessons were untrue. Objective information was presented in classes, no teacher was saying that horrific events happen becuase of capitalism. Prpaganda was kept out of schools and brought to people through enterntainment. There is no Soviet action film that does not have some type of an evil spy from some capitalist country. Such things, however, were not uncommon in the United States just as well.

When I was in undergrad I took a soviet film class.  Some of the stuff was really good.  Ones I especially liked one Strike (I liked it a lot more than Battleship Potemkin), Cranes are flying, Ivan's Childhood, and Solaris (I liked that one so much I bought it), I also liked some of the post-soviet movies we watched including Repetance and Burnt by the Sun (which I also bought), but yeah Soviet movies did always have some propaganda.  The storngest piece of propaganda, or at least the one that left the biggest impression on me was teh scene from strike at the end, where the workers are getting killed, and rather than see a bunch of melodramtic deaths, they show the bull getting his throat slit and slowly dying-watching that bull die (it was real they really slit a bull's throat and filmed him dying) left a huge impression on me.

[redemption]

I'm totally confused.

Your "hypo" depends on the assumption that not all jobs are equally desirable. Otherwise, there would be no mention of coalminers doing 1/4 of the work.

Anyway - we'll see if anyone else gets it.