We know workers dislike domination. And contra Lyotard, they also dislike exploitation. But might a significant number of workers actually enjoy being estranged from the objects of their labor? Or at least, might they be indifferent enough to not see alienation as a problem?
Consider that as an alienated worker, I am encouraged to be utterly unconcerned with labor conditions outside of my own workplace. Or the quantity and quality of production of commodities that I do not consume. Those are the concerns of management and the bourgeoisie. My alienation provides a perverse degree of "freedom" from society, to focus only on my individual consumption and not the conditions of my fellow workers.
Whereas in a communist society of free and equal producers, I am supposed to have an interest the labor conditions in all workplaces in a society, as each directly affects the amount of social product available for consumption. The degree of political control needed to make that happen equitably seems extremely time-consuming and limiting, and I imagine a lot of workers would be turned off by it.
Perhaps that is why most 'socialist' experiments have never really addressed alienation, and why most workers seem completely resigned to the hyper-alienated existence mediated by apps and nation-states despite everyone allegedly agreeing on how horrible it is.
31 posts and 4 image replies omitted.Not exactly, but I enjoy the complex schema my psychology constructs to cope with it. It's a refined sort of taste
>>2832645Alienation is also a legal term. The labourer is objectively alienated from the products of his labor and therefore deciding on their fate, because he's hired for his labour power and paid the market price for it in legal separation from the means by which he produces. The subjective effects of this separation are conditional in their historically determined manifestations, but they are nonetheless significant to Marx's later work. In the first volume of Capital, this is understood to be the basis of the working class' intellectual and physical immiseration as "an appendage of the machine" from Chapter 6 onwards. This is how I understand it in relation to the species-being, in the sense of man's creativity as harnessed for production guided by the self-destructive capitalist drive to valorize dead labour as opposed to production for the sake of usefulness based on human reasoning. David Harvey has a good video going over alienation in case my rambling doesn't elucidate it
If you do particularly dull work, you can think about other stuff while doing it. If the work process is rearranged by psychology experts to make it more engaging and empowering and blahblahblah, this can make your quality of life worse.
Amerikans enjoy the aliénation of workers
Most people are goycattle slaves and as long as they have Netflix and food they don't care about anything, we will never see a socialist revolution in our lifetimes