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The concept of alienation is an umbrella concept that includes powerlessness, meaninglessness, social isolation, cultural estrangement, and self-estrangement. For researchers, the study of alienation is a three-fold task: first, understanding the discrepancy between individual values and actions and general living and working conditions; second, analyzing the overt and latent forms of oppression in social structures; third, accounting for social circumstances that hinder or facilitate individual or collective action against those alienating structures. Alienation, Society, and the Individual provides a timely and broadly representative overview of the most recent developments in alienation research and theory. Alienation, Society, and the Individual makes it clear that alienation research has come of age. Further theoretical developments remain important and as demonstrated In this volume, which revives theoretical debate so as to reformulate classical concepts in view of developments in modern society, the concept of alienation is now increasingly applied to empirical research in a variety of fields. Included here are theory driven evaluations of empirical research on migrant workers, as well as comparative studies on differing liberation ideologies in South Africa. This volume reflects the effects of political developments in Eastern Europe on Marxist alienation theory. While Marxist theory remains important, it is no longer directed exclusively toward criticism of capitalist society. New applications include a critique of Eastern European state socialism, analysis of consumer, rather than capitalist society, and uncommon examples of empirical research carried out within a Marxist framework. The book concludes with a chapter that evaluates recent theoretical and methodological innovations and sets priorities for future research. Alienation, Society, and the Individual offers an unusual combination of theory and practice that make it a state-of-the-art volume. It will be read by sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in alienation by writers throughout the world. At least in the economically advanced nations, one reason for the rediscovery of alienation is the need for a term to denote the relatively new phenomenon of dissatisfaction in the midst of material prosperity and political freedom. The contributors to this volume collectively seek a concept of alienation that will be a useful tool in social diagnosis--a key to identifying causes of undesirable social conditions. The result is a collection of essays in policy-oriented social theory, keyed to problems of modern life at the end of the twentieth century and written from richly diverse cultural, political, and philosophical backgrounds. The linchpin of the volume is the essay by Melvin Seeman, which discusses and connects two distinct approaches to alienation theory, one that emphasizes subjective feelings and one that emphasizes social structures as definitive of alienation. The other essays range from theoretical critiques of Marxist and Durkheimian explanations, to the role of alienation in political systems in East and West, to empirical studies in Swedish factories and among Israeli kibbutzim. In all the essays, the idea of alienation as a loss of the sense of belonging to community plays a role. Some of the essays are critical of a communitarian approach, some deal with it obliquely and others overtly espouse it. All are policy oriented, suggesting explicitly or indirectly work- and community- dealienation strategies for modern industrial societies. This book is useful as a supplementary text in social and political philosophy courses, and sociology and social psychology courses dealing with urban problems.
Alienation from one's fellow human beings is rooted in the development of class society itself, the authors argue. It can be overcome only through the revolutionary fight for a society both free of domination by the capitalist class, and with complete democratic control of the government and economy by working people.
How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center. No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.
Over the past two hundred years, work experiences have changed greatly, causing new issues such as heightened boredom and alienation, but also new levels of obsession with work. This book looks at the modern changes in work, examining global patterns but also special features of the work culture in the United States. For the world, the United States, and also key groups such as women and children, understanding the modern history of work goes a long way toward explaining key issues in the U.S. work culture today.
A potent glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workplace control mechanisms which prevent workers from defending themselves from exploitation For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market. This book reveals the raw truth: The labor market is in fact a mere veil over the exploitation of workers. Peek behind it, and we clearly see the extraction, by a small but powerful class of productive property-owning capitalists, of a surplus from a much larger and propertyless class of wage laborers. Work Work Work offers us a glimpse into the mechanisms critical to this subterfuge: In every workplace, capital implements a comprehensive set of control mechanisms to constrain those who toil from defending themselves against exploitation. These include everything from the herding of workers into factories to the extreme forms of surveillance utilized by today’s “captains of industry” like the Walton family (of the Walmart empire) and Jeff Bezos. In these strikingly lucid and passionately written chapters, Yates explains the reality of labor markets, the nature of work in capitalist societies, and the nature and necessity of class struggle, which alone can bring exploitation – and the system of control that makes it possible – to a final end.