Alienation Blog

A place to share material connected to my book on alienation

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Interview about Alienation with Mark Bergfeld

I did an interview with my friend and comrade Mark Bergfeld, and Socialist Project Canada have kindly put it on the internet!

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I'll be speaking about the book tomorrow at the London Radical Bookfair.

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Bread and Roses Award Shortlist

I'm delighted to announce that the book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Bread and Roses award for Radical Publishing. This is an award organised by the Alliance for Radical Booksellers in the UK, an important network of independent radical bookshops across the country, including Bookmarks, who published the book, and News from Nowhere in Liverpool, where I spent a fair chunk of my late teens.

The shortlist is incredibly strong, and I'd urge people to get hold of and read all of the books. It's a real privilege to be listed alongside these authors. View the whole shortlist, and more information about the award, here.

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My Review of an interesting new book by Peter Hudis. Although I think Hudis’ book is an excellent study of Marx’s thought, it makes some claims about both the need and possibility of a specific alternative to capitalism that I am sceptical about. 

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Jim Wolfreys' excellent talk on the political economy of bullshit from Marxism 2012. Jim analyses the way in which management jargon reflects the needs of managers in dominating alienated production.

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In the book I used the example of Foxconn’s vast factories in China, which produce parts for various Apple gadgets, to demonstrate that mass factory conditions are still prevalent today. A few years ago there were a number of tragic suicides there. Now it seems workers have found a more collective response to their alienation…

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Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital

In this letter to Socialist Review Phil Webster questioned why I hadn't used Harry Braverman's 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital in the Alienation book. Well, the straightforward reason is that I hadn't read it. However, Phil's letter inspired me to get a copy, and I have to concede that he is right. It is a profoundly useful study of the nature of work under capitalism which is, in the main, as relevant today as it was in 1974. 

Braverman's work is particularly interesting because of the way it poses the problem of management as one distinctive to capitalist wage-labour. Labour has always needed to be organised, but wage-labour takes this question of organisation entirely out of the hands of the workers themselves. When a worker is hired to do a particular job, and paid according to the completion of the task at hand, far less attention to detail is required on the part of the employer. On the other hand, when labour-power is purchased for a period of time rather than for a particular task, it creates the imperative to get as much as possible from the work in the given time period. As Braverman puts it: “It thus becomes essential for the capitalist that control over the labour process pass from the hands of the worker into his own. This transition presents itself in history as the progressive alienation of the process of production from the worker; to the capitalist it presents itself as the problem of management.”

Braverman helpfully casts the growth of management in terms of separation between the conception and execution of a task, rather than the slightly misleading terminology that is sometimes used of material vs. intellectual labour. This is helpful for some of the arguments I challenge in the book which place too much emphasis on the significance of the growth of forms of labour which are primarily intellectual. Braverman situates the problem in who controls and designs the labour process, rather than the kinds of work involved.

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Marxism 2012

I will be speaking about Labour and Alienation on Friday at Marxism 2012. It's part of the Introduction to Marx's Philosophy course, alongside Dan Mayer and Jack Farmer. If you haven't booked up for Marxism yet, do it now, it'll cost more on the door. 

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On Sean Sayers on Alienation

This is a short review for International Socialism of Sean Sayers' book which came out around the same time as my book did. I like Sayers' work a lot, though I have  a few differences which are highlighted in the review. His book is obviously a lot more academic than mine, and is a good place to enter in depth the debates that I could only skate over in an introductory work. 

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=786&issue=133

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Soren Goard wrote a very positive review of Alienation for Socialist Review.

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About

This is a blog to share material relevant to my book Alienation: An Introduction to Marx's Theory. I wrote the book in 2011, and it was published in 2012 by Bookmarks. You can buy yourself a copy from them here, if you so desire. Since publishing, I've had various bits of interesting feedback and ideas, so I've set up the blog so that I can share it all in one place. I hope it's of use to someone.

Dan Swain