“The three forms of alienation [Alienation from the object of labor, Alienation from the activity of labor, and Alienation from one’s human identity] have existed for centuries, with some scholars arguing that labor has been alienated since the dawn of man, when the first farmer had to go out in the cold to plant his crop. But Marx’s fourth form of alienation -the alienation of man from man- is unique to capitalism, and therefore relatively new. In this form of alienation a worker looks upon his employers as his enemy and other workers as his competitors. People should be close, but capitalism drives them apart. They compete for grades in school; they compete for jobs after graduation. Once in jobs they see each other as exchangeable economic units. Their social relationships dissolve. They grow alien to each other under capitalism. It is this alienation of man from man that has intensified with capitalism’s advance, to the point of mass loneliness.” -from Ronald Dworkin’s How Karl Marx Can Save American Capitalism
Here, my feelings are mixed. On one hand, I fully agree with the spirit of Dworkin’s point. And this is where I see the main reason for recommending the book. At the same time, you have to note a certain amount of hyperbole. I, for instance, have never looked at my fellow workers as “competitors” or “competed for grades in school”. I have seen my employer as “the enemy”, but that is only when they’re acting like micromanaging assholes. In fact, what Dworkin seems to be mainly describing is what goes on in middle and upper management. This is because what you’re dealing with there are a growing number of people attempting to justify their jobs by coming up with new policies that generally fuck with the lives of those actually doing the work.
But my experience with my co-workers is that of the only reason worth going to work every day –that is outside of the money. People at the bottom of the ladder tend to bond, if for no other reason, for the complications imposed on them by middle and upper management. Still, Dworkin’s point is justified by the Jack Welch approach in which turmoil is encouraged in order to shake off those who are producing the least.
That said, Dworkin’s emphasis on the alienation between man and man (which includes females (as I’m guessing Dworkin is (am using the term “man” in the metaphorical sense of “mankind” (leads to some interesting results. My concern begins when he diverts the issue to the psychological (that is without offering any real political or social policies to address the issue of alienation (at the neglect of very clear economic issues: The very fact that you cannot have a situation in which you have 1% of the population feasting at the table and the rest of us fighting for the crumbs and not expect the problems we are having.
In that sense, Dworkin’s book feels like little more than a misdirect: the denial of an addict of producer/consumer Capitalism.