From the WSPUS Radio Series: Alienated Men (1972)

From issue number 2 (1972) of The Western Socialist

Have you happened to have heard the term alienation? It Is being kicked around a bit these days, especially by psychologists and philosophers. They tell us that modern man suffers from alienation — a feeling of not belonging, that one is a lost soul who is going through the motions of living with little, if any, consciousness. And among the theories on the cause of alienation we are told that the automated and computerized society of our times is responsible.

Well, no doubt there is some truth to this but the philosophers and behavior analysts of our times seem to be largely unaware of the fact that more than a century ago Karl Marx made use of the word and, in fact, explained it in terms that make it much easier to understand. Marx saw society as divided basically into two economic classes—owners, or capitalists, and workers. Now those who owned the factories, mines and workshops, the land and all that is in and on it, were not lost souls in the sense in which we speak in those times any more than they are today. It was the working class that was alienated — alienated, as Marx explained, from the product of their toil. The workers in those times, as today, were completely divorced from ownership and a consequent feeling of interest in the commodities which they were producing. They sold their mental and physical energies to those who owned the means and instruments of production and distribution and once the agreement was made those energies and the product of their toll was owned — as today — by those who bought the labor power — the capitalist class. In fact, Marx remarked that the workers had become mere appendages of the machines and if he could see the extent to which this machine-appendage relationship has grown in the plants of our times he would roll over in his grave.

For the feeling of alienation on the part of those who produce but do not own can only have been magnified in direct proportion to the intensification of industry in the last century and, particularly, in the period since World War II. True, there are a multitude of small businesses of all sorts in America today. Including small farms. But the mainstream of production is carried on in gigantic mechanized farms and in factories such as are found in auto, steel, copper, rubber, petroleum, and chemical industries — plants that herd thousands of workers under one roof to operate the machinery from production line to office. Can there be any feeling other than alienation among those who do the work in conditions such as these?

As a specific example that has hit the front pages of the newspapers and the TV documentaries, look at the case of General Motors vs. the United Auto Workers Union in the affair of the new Vega plant In Lordstown. Ohio. G.M. estimates that it has lost the production of some $45-million worth of Vega automobiles and Chevrolet trucks because of what it calls sabotage on the part of the workers. The workers contend that they can no longer keep up with the belt. They attribute the increasing number of faulty cars and trucks to the mad greed of the Company to speed-up the process and cut down on the costs of labor.

To whatever extent both sides are right in this argument there should be no argument that the workers understand more than sub-consciously that they are mere appendages of the machinery, completely divorced from any reason for interest in the finished product. And if anybody wishes to research the advantages of a job on an assembly line — at whatever wage — let him try picking up and putting down an ash tray, for example, for eight hours! Then imagine the guy or gal on the line doing one precision task at the same time trying to keep up with a steadily moving belt.

The way to eliminate alienation is to abolish commodity production. In a system of world socialism, where the earth and all that is in and on it belong to all mankind, alienation becomes involvement.