Marx and Digital Machines

Front matter

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MIKE HEALY

Alienation, Technology, Capitalism

Introduction

Introduction

The Seeman Model

Alienation - the Marxist Perspective Alienation and Reification

Blauner and Alienation

Wendling and Alienation

Autonomist Marxism and Alienation

Introduction

Data Collection Process Participatory Action Research (PAR) Target Group: ICT Professionals Target Group: Scholars

Target Group: End-Users

Ethical Considerations

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

Introduction

The Meaning of Professionalism Current Research on ICT Professionals The State of the IT Industry

The Alienated Working Environment of the ICT Professional

Control of the Work Process xiii x Contents

4.7 Relationships with Professionals Working for Other Companies 48

4.8 Re-engineering the Work Process 49 4.9 The Management 50 4.10 Theorising the Alienated Condition of the ICT Professional 53 4.11 Issues of Validation, Reliability, Bias and Ethics 56 4.12 Conclusion 57 5. Researching ICT: The Scholars’ Alienated Experience 59 5.1 Introduction 59 5.2 ‘The Academic Environment 60 5.3 Alienation Theory in Education 67 5.4 The Scholars’ Perspective 69 5.5. The Participants 71 5.6 Commitment to the Subject 72 5.7 Creativity 74 5.8 Collaboration 76 5.9 Research and Competition 78 5.10 Control of Outcomes 83 5.11 Institutional Pressures 84 5.12 Analysis 85 5.13 Issues of Validation, Reliability, Bias and Ethics 88 5.14 Conclusion 89 6. Alienation and Work: A Common View 91 6.1 Introduction 91 6.2 Career Change? 91 6.3 Greater Choice? 93 6.4 Analysis 95 6.5 Conclusion 97 7. ICT, Senior End-users and Alienation 99 7.1 Introduction 99 7.2 ICT and the Senior User: Research Themes 100 7.3 ICT and Learning 101 7.4 Southwark Pensioners Action Group (SPAG) 103

7.5 The Group Sessions and Individual Interview Processes 104

Contents xi

7.6 ‘The Hands-on Sessions 104 7.7 ‘The Basement Tapes 105 7.8 Motivations 107 7.9 Alienated Attitudes Towards the Technology: A Shared Sentiment 108 7.10 Whos this Technology Designed For? 109 7.11 Consequences of Lack of Control 112 7.12 Practical Benefits of the Hands-on Sessions 114 7.13 Intangible Benefits 115 7.14 Barriers 117 7.15 Unanticipated Developments 119 7.16 Analysis 120 8. Critique and Conclusion 123 8.1 Introduction 123 8.2 A Moment of Self-Reflection 129 8.3 Concluding Remarks: Resolving the Problem of Alienation 130 Notes 137 Bibliography 139

Index 153

Acknowledgements

Homer, Chaucer and Cervantes record that no journey is taken alone; encounters with travellers add to life’s rich tapestry, encourage reflection, presenting new directions and possibilities. So, first thanks go to the participants of the study: the ICT professionals, particularly Ian, the union organiser, the scholars, and the pensioners in Southwark, especially Mary Philipps, without whose participation the research upon which this book is based would not have been completed. I have tried to preserve their presence in the narrative as people rather than simply subjects for study. Secondly, I would like to thank my doctoral supervisors, Professor Simon Rogerson and, especially, Dr Ben Fairweather (formerly) at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CSSR), DMU for all their helpful comments and for making each conversation with them fruitful and productive even when I was in unlikely places such as a Spanish phone box with heavy, noisy lorries trundling by. Thanks should also go to the peer reviewers for encouraging me to strive for both greater clarity and brevity. I must also mention Andrew Lockett of University of Westminster Press who has been of great assistance in answering my many questions concerning form and content.

Finally, I thank Joy for encouraging me to undertake the research in the first place, for believing I had something to say on the issues covered here, and for being supportive throughout. I could not wish for a better person with whom to share life’s journey.

CHAPTER |

Introduction: Contradictions of ICT

“The iPhone controls me, I don't control it?

Christine, Professor of Cinema Studies

A profound contradiction exists at the heart of our interaction with Information Communication Technology (ICT): it offers a myriad of possibilities to enrich our lives yet it habitually fails to deliver on its promises, leaving us grappling with profoundly negative experiences at global, national, local, organisational or personal levels. The outrage concerning Cambridge Analytica and Facebook impacted across all these domains. The ProtonMail service, developed at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was designed to aid a more open, yet secure, Internet, prioritising the protection of civil liberties. Ironic then, that ProtonMail was the mailer selected by those working for Cambridge Analytica when they, allegedly, harvested 87 million accounts from Facebook. Berners-Lee warned of the loss of control of personal data, the spread of misinformation on social networking sites, and sought greater clarity of political funding and use online (Berners-Lee 2017). Problems associated with issues such as Big Data are indicative of the contradiction since ‘Big Data technologies promise to create certainty in a highly uncertain world, yet through their logic of digital solutionism they exacerbate the crises’ (Fuchs 2019a: 49). Digital technologies drive the development of ever more sophisticated weather systems analyses helping us to understand climate change, yet the data centres used to carry out this work adversely impact on the environment by contributing 17% of ‘total carbon footprint’ using 30 billion watts and wasting 90% of the energy they use (Isberto 2018). Electronic voting, envisaged as the future method to secure democratic elections,

Healy, M. 2020. Marx and Digital Machines: Alienation, Technology, Capitalism. Pp. 1-5. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book47.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 carries its own set of problems (e.g. the 2019 elections in New South Wales, Australia) and is vulnerable to failure (Switzerland) or mismatch between local and central voter registration databases (France, EU election 2019).

The ICT industry, perceived as offering high quality knowledge-based jobs, has a male gender bias deeply rooted in the sector (European Commission 2018a). In 2017, most European Union ICT specialists were men: the share of female ICT specialists was 17.2%, a decline of 5.3% from a decade earlier. For many Chinese ICT professionals, working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week is the norm. The same can be said of the video game industry where hours of work and pressures arising from delivery deadlines create a stressful, harmful working environment. Child and forced labour form constituent parts of the ICT production cycle (Know the Chain 2016) and ICT is instrumental in enabling the development of modern slavery (Theron 2019).

Ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence include the possibility that Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmers and data scientists, often innocently, use existing texts to guide AI development thus importing bias, based on gender or stereotyping, into AI code. The fiasco associated with 2020 grades for the UK's International Baccalaureate and A level results, have revealed the profoundly biased assumptions that can reside deep within AI algorithms. As these cases show, the negative impacts of suspect AI programmes can have devastating consequences on people's life chances. ICT has been overtly politicised in the international race for technical supremacy as evidenced by concerns over Huawei and 5G expansion. The introduction or upgrading of ICT systems threaten jobs or facilitate greater surveillance of employees.

The genesis of this contradiction can seem to be inadequate technology, poor decision making, ineffective ethical policies, problems emanating from limited end-user proficiency, or a mixture of all these. Hence, the belief that better technology and/or better policy initiatives/ethical frameworks and/or improved end-user education will resolve the contradiction. In reflecting upon the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, Berners-Lee tweeted the problems were caused by ‘bugs, in the system. Bugs can cause damage, but bugs are created by people, and can be fixed by people’ (Berners-Lee 2018).

Yet despite the wide-ranging and sometimes positive initiatives flowing from this approach, the contradiction remains, and deepens and widens as more people use increasingly complex technologies. Apart from issues such as system security and the deliberate misuse of ICT, experience of ICT can, for example, lead to normally calm people becoming enraged with their digital devices or technology in general; drive those proficient in a range of other skills to denigrate themselves by saying ‘I am useless with computers’; feed a fear of what ICT can do; result in an adverse disruption of family and work life; and facilitate major economic crises or influence the outcomes of elections. The smart phone has replaced the alarm clock as one of the most oppressive pieces of technology. Even an Amazon digital video doorbell creates civil rights issues.

Introduction: Contradictions of ICT 3

This book addresses one simple question: what feeds the central contradiction where people experience ICT in a profoundly contradictory way? I argue that approaches such as calling for better technology and/or more effective end-user education as well as greater regulation of the digital sphere, are inherently limited. They may identify manifestations of the problem but fail to provide fundamental solutions. I explore the problem from a radically different perspective and demonstrate how valuable the Marxist concept of alienation is in researching and explaining the contradictory nature of ICT. This book is a contribution to the growing pulse of interest in Marx’s approach which can be detected in contributions to journals such as Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation and triple C: communication, capitalism and critique, indicating that the contradictory reality of ICT is beginning to be addressed by researchers using theories of alienation.

This book is not an overview of theories of alienation, nor does it aspire to be the definitive study of all the problems embedded in ICT. It does not set out to provide final, absolute proof that Marx’s theory of alienation is correct. Its ambition is more modest: asking if Marx’s view of alienation provides greater explanatory power and clarity than other theories of alienation in helping us research and understand the contradictory nature of ICT.

The 1844 Manuscripts (Marx 1970b) and The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1970) were the first two works of Marx I read as a young clerical worker in the British Civil Service in the early 1970s at the time when I was also becoming a militant trade unionist. This was a time when my practical activity often clashed with and forced me to reassess my assumptions about the world. I struggled with both books, but they spoke to me about the society in which I lived and helped me grope towards the glimmerings ofan understanding of that world. They challenged my perceptions, encouraging me to see things from a different perspective. I would not have called myself a Marxist then - that came much later - but those books were the beginning of my journey to becoming someone who is (so succinctly put by Alex Callinicos (1995)) a naturalist materialist, who embraces Marxism as a social theory and is a revolutionary socialist in practice. Marxism also taught me that it is never enough to simply proclaim a viewpoint - it must be tested, authenticated and continually buttressed with evidence from real, practical life - and to see theory and practice in a dialectical relation.

There are two overarching traditions informing alienation research: Marx’s approach, and the Seeman perspective, the latter being the choice of perspective for most researchers. The differences between these two traditions are examined in greater detail in chapter 2. Suffice it to say for now that while both lay claim to a materialist analysis, there any similarity ends. Marx sees manifestations of alienation as deriving directly from capitalism’s conflictual and contradictory nature and it is therefore a normal response to the problematic technological burdens we confront, requiring a totality of view based on economic and social relations. The Seeman approach locates alienation within a specific instance, describing it as an abnormal response to life’s pressures requiring suitable context-specific measures for its alleviation. It seeks to decouple expressions of alienation from the wider perspective and places the emphasis on the individual. This book argues that Marx’s perspective offers more fruitful avenues of exploration of alienation than the Seeman route (and/or any of its derivatives).

My focus on Marx’s theory of alienation to ICT centred on the following themes:

e Is Marx’s theory of alienation effective when investigating the experience of participants in three distinct settings: ICT professionals, scholars, and senior end-users in the Southwark Pensioners’ Action Group (SPAG), as they relate to ICT? The decision to investigate alienation within these three scenarios was informed by the need to provide a range of apparently contrasting settings, each linked to ICT. These settings cover those who create digital commodities, those who research the ethical and societal impact of those commodities, and those who use the technologies. This choice is discussed in further detail in chapter 3. My decision to focus on ICT professionals, scholars and pensioners in south London also arose simply because I have taught aspects of ICT, such as web design, as well as the societal and ethical implications of ICT at Westminster University and have lived in Southwark so I was drawing upon an academic context and a geographical area with which I am familiar.

e Can the explanatory power of Marx’s theory identify a commonality of experiences both within and between these three settings?

e How does his theory provide a framework for undertaking the research, revolving group discussions and individual interviews, in these three settings?

An additional question also arose that was directly related to the method employed in the research: how far can participatory action research (PAR) make a positive contribution to researching alienation?

Chapter 2 covers theories of alienation, particularly those of Seeman and Marx and includes reference to alienation and reification. Chapter 3 outlines the rationale for the chosen methodology - critical realism (CR) - underpinned with PAR. It provides a description of the organisations and participants of the settings and details the processes involved in obtaining the appropriate data. Chapter 4 covers the setting concerned with ICT professionals; Chapter 5 focuses on scholars researching ICT; Chapter 6 draws upon the experiences of both these groups; and chapter 7 investigates the relation between mature end-users and ICT. These chapters constitute the core of the book and each includes a description and analyses of relevant data. Chapter 8 discusses the extent to which the research themes have been addressed and identifies areas

Introduction: Contradictions of ICT 5 of possible further research. It also provides a critique of the research process as well as providing a conclusion. Marx’s view of alienation is contentious and is regarded as difficult to operationalise presenting significant challenges and risks for research underpinned by his approach. But we all enjoy a good argument, don’t we, and normally there is no effort or fun to be had in scaling a three-foot wall: the higher the climb, the greater the view.

There is one important concluding remark required. The Covid-19 virus burst onto the world while this book was being finished and while it is too early to extensively detail the impact this virus will have on the use of digital technologies, sufficient evidence exists to indicate that it is likely to have a profound negative shock on ICT professionals and scholars. The consequences for end users will take time to emerge.

Chapter 2

This chapter examines in detail the two contrasting approaches to alienation by Seeman and Marx. It was the discovery and subsequent publication in 1932 of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1970b), which ‘rapidly became one of the most widely translated, circulated and discussed philosophical writings of the twentieth century’ (Musto 2010: 94), that provided the impetus for a wide interest in researching alienation. In 1969, for example, the US National Institute of Mental Health compiled a bibliography of 225 articles concerned with alienation. More recently, ICT has driven research on the complex and contradictory relationship between technology and society evidenced by the emergence of Digital Humanities as an academic discipline, and an increase in journals, conferences, books, and publicly and privately financed research projects. However, mainstream non-critical, alienation research has confronted three problems. First is the shadow of Marx, with all its political implications; second, the difficulties in undertaking measurable, quantifiable work demanded by the dominant positivist framework; and finally the concept of alienation is frequently defined as a vague descriptor for feelings of unease or dissatisfaction.

2.2 The Seeman Model

Seeman’s 1959 seminal paper attempted to resolve these problems and to ‘present an organised view of the uses that have been made of the concept; and [to tie] the historical interest in alienation to modern empirical effort’ (Seeman 1959: 783). Distilling the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Adorno and Wright

Healy, M. 2020. Marx and Digital Machines: Alienation, Technology, Capitalism. Pp. 7-26. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book47.b. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

Mills, Seeman constructed five categories of alienation: powerlessness; meaninglessness; normlessness; isolation; and self-estrangement. Another category, cultural estrangement, was added after the tumultuous events of 1968. These categories encouraged research programmes using metrics to determine, measure and interrogate alienation within the positivist frame. The explicit (erroneous) inference is that studies of alienation using Seeman are non-polemical, non-political and independent of ideology. Since Seeman’s perspective informs most research investigating alienation it is appropriate to outline and critically evaluate his model.

Powerlessness is the belief that a person's ‘own behaviour cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes or reinforcements’ she wants (Seeman 1959: 784). While treating powerlessness from the standpoint of the ‘objective conditions in society (Seeman 1959: 784), he focuses specifically on ‘powerlessness as expectancy’ firmly rooted in the discrepancy between an individual’s expectations for control (Seeman 1959: 785) and the minimal possibility of achieving such control. Seeman acknowledges that the concept of powerlessness draws upon the work of psychologist, Julian Rotter (1954) (cited in Seeman 1959: footnote 6: 784). Powerlessness as ultimately determined by an individual’s perceptions of her experience.

Meaninglessness as the ‘individual’s sense of understanding the events in which he is engaged’ or the lack of clarity about what she is expected to believe. It is derived from ‘Adorno’ treatment of prejudice’ (Seeman 1959: 786). Excessive meaninglessness derives from an inability to predict outcomes of events and to determine the consequences of acting on a given belief. Conversely, meaninglessness is minimal when satisfactory predictions can be made (Seeman 1959: 786). Thus, the strength or weakness of meaninglessness should be measurable.

Seeman drew upon Durkheim’s notion of anomie to develop the concept of normlessness where ‘social norms regulating individual conduct have broken down or are no longer effective as rules for behaviour’ (Seeman 1959: 787) and/or where individuals have become disconnected from social conscience. Individualism is elevated to such a degree that people cease to consider or care about the concerns, needs and aspirations of others. The driving force of anomie is society’s inability to meet individuals’ aspirations, resulting in deviant behaviour.

Isolation, Seeman argues, occurs when individuals ‘assign low reward value to goals or beliefs that are typically highly valued in the given society’ (Seeman 1959: 789) creating feelings of separateness from society and the desire to impose changes that reflect their own priorities and imperatives. Isolation can be linked to other concepts within his typology to ‘be profitably applied in conjunction with one another in the analysis of a given state of affairs’ (Seeman 1959: 789). As with his previous aspects of alienation, Seeman talks about the possibility of developing measures that can determine the isolation of the individual.

Seeman's concept of self-estrangement conveys ‘the loss of intrinsic meaning or pride in work and the failure to be fulfilled by the activities in which one is engaged’ He believes this aspect of alienation is the most problematic for description and usage in analysis but maintains that ‘the basic idea contained in the rhetoric of self-estrangement — the idea of intrinsically meaningful activity - can, perhaps, be recast into more manageable social learning terms... to see alienation as the degree of dependence of the given behavior upon anticipated future rewards, that is, upon rewards that lie outside the activity itself” (Seeman 1959: 590 italics in the original). The words ‘degree of dependence’ underline Seeman desire to measure alienation. Cultural estrangement is ‘the individual's rejection of or sense of removal from dominant social values’ (Seeman 1991: 351) seeking to explain why individuals or groups do not accept and follow a set of commonly agreed standards of social practices.

In moulding this typology, Seeman sought to achieve two objectives. Firstly, to make the concept of alienation more accessible by describing various forms of behaviour thereby providing a toolbox for investigating those behaviours. His approach facilitates the construction of various measures acting as surrogates for his six categories — for example, job satisfaction or loneliness - which are designed to illuminate the alienated state by using techniques such as self-reporting questionnaires, with results being processed through statistical programs. However, his scheme has several problems.

First, constructing a list of various conditions of alienation requires consideration of the relation between each component part, including their interaction. In Seeman’s scheme ‘there is no theoretical structure between the six dimensions and presence of all six dimensions is not required’ (Rayce et al. 2009: 81). Seeman acknowledges there may be inner connections between his categories, but he insists that three aspects, powerlessness, meaninglessness, and normlessness, operate independently of each other. In doing so he slices the notion of alienation vertically, thus decoupling the different strands. Yet he also confirms that the categories of his scheme could ‘be profitably applied in conjunction with one another in the analysis of a given state of affairs’ (Seeman 1959: 789). However, this concession undermines Seeman’s view that his categories of alienation are separate research domains. Attempts have been made to resolve these difficulties and contradictions. Blauner (1964), among others, sought to establish a relationship between Seeman’s categories hoping to remake Seeman’s scheme into ‘moments of a single process’ (Harvey et al. 1980: 202). The attempts to try to reconcile the contradictions within Seeman’s view of alienation acknowledge that his scheme had entrenched weaknesses.

The second criticism is linked to his second objective, to prise alienation research from the Marxist influence. Seeman’s method slices the notion of alienation horizontally by treating ‘alienation from the personal standpoint of the actor - that is, alienation is taken from the social-psychological point of view’ (Seeman 1959: 784) encouraging researchers to see the individual person or group as experiencing an exceptional moment thus reinforcing the notion that each instance of alienation is unique arising from a conflation of quite specific circumstances. This emphasis on immediacy focuses on solutions applicable to particular circumstances, constructing a barrier to generalising from the specific instance.

The problematic inherent in Seeman’s contradictory approach is expressed in the research informed by his perspective, or one of its derivatives, with alienation itself becoming merely another category synonymous with issues such as emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and employee voice. Alienation ceases to be the cause of and the explanation for the manifestations of discord: instead expressions of discord become the antecedents of alienation. It is inverted and conceptualised as either a mediator providing a relation between inputs and outcomes or as the consequence of categories decided by the researcher. It is considered by degrees allowing for conclusions that portray one group as experiencing greater (or lesser or, indeed, no) intensity of alienation than another. The implication is that an alienated state can be increased or decreased by altering inputs such as employee voice. Accordingly, alienation ceases to be a meaningful concept and is easily replaced by sentiments such as disaffection, dissatisfaction, cynicism, disillusionment, or pessimism, denoting various degrees of unease. Consequently, researchers are not misapplying Seeman’s notion of alienation, they are simply, and often unknowingly, expressing the contradictions and problematic implications inherent in his approach. Ceasing to focus on the societal relations that mould our alienated state, researchers instead undertake a technical exercise in constructing appropriate questions and metrics, and appropriate statistical analysis. Invariably, the audience for such research are those at the top of hierarchical structures, such as management/ employers/organisations who, it is argued, can alleviate our alienated condition by, for example, adopting more progressive employment policies.

A third criticism of Seeman’s is that he fails to provide a non-political and non-polemical view of alienation because it is seen as a state of mind requiring modification and, in the work context, HR managers are often seen as offering a potential role in reducing alienation. These conclusions are intensely political in two ways. First, they implicitly accept the dominant relation of managers over labour. This is a recurring theme in much of the research output looking at, for example, job dissatisfaction and alienation at work. Reference to the overarching causes for the contradictory and conflictual relation between workers and their employers are absent from such research. The Seeman lens emphasises how alienation negatively impacts on employers’ needs and focuses on solutions linked to the specific instance with recommendations for action that are invariably targeted at management initiatives. Essentially, this is a business case approach to researching alienation from an idealist perspective which sees alienation as an intellectual problem concerned with the subject’s perceptions and pursuing remedies designed to impact solely on the consciousness of the subject. By accepting existing employee-employer

Theories of Alienation — Seeman and Marx II relations, Seeman reinforces the view that even if it is management practices and attitudes that foster alienation, it is the management that can ameliorate the problem.

Secondly, the language describing those who express dissatisfaction identifies the alienated as the problem because of their deviant behaviour. Managers are urged to ‘alleviate alienation among workers to reduce costs associated with deviant activities (Shantz et al. 2015: 390). The use of the word ‘deviant’ implies a presupposition that we should aspire to natural and normal non-deviant behaviour and commit to a given organisation and adhere to its imperatives. Such conclusions flow directly from Seeman’s view of alienation because each of his categories identifies the individual (or group) as exhibiting abnormal, aberrant or criminal behaviour. Seeman’s approach is implicitly biased in favour of existing social relations and the imperatives of hierarchical structures. Consequently, researching alienation from the Seeman perspective is highly politicised.

It is also polemical in focussing on core suppositions of Seeman’s thesis to construct processes supposedly designed to iron out the wrinkles inhibiting the smooth working of the corporate experience and minimise organisational conflict. Seeman’s approach shows bias against research involving the collective voice of organised labour. Participants complete a myriad of questionnaires and/or are subject to pre-defined semi-structured interviews, while considered solely as atomised individuals with problems that can only be resolved by an external agency. Accordingly, Seeman’s perspective has created and continues to support a body of work that denies other, more critical, ways of researching alienation. Failure to engage with relevant critical texts encourages research publications that contribute to and support a discussion which moves almost seamlessly between references, for example, from Marx to Seeman to Blauner to Weber and Braverman, without fully delineating the real differences between these traditions. For a sustained insightful critique of Seeman see Harvey et al. (1980, 1983) and Warner et al. (1985) on the problems and contradictions inherent within Seeman’s approach to researching alienation. These papers are relatively unknown but together they provide a rigorous, scholarly and forensic examination of the ‘Seeman problematic’ (Warner et al. 1985: 364) and in doing so develop the critical tradition in this area. The first paper undertook a dialectical analysis of the history of alienation research to conclude that it is possible to develop a ‘theory of alienation which was historical and critical in nature’ (Harvey et al. 1980: 229). The second paper scrutinised Seeman’s 1959 claim to have constructed his five categories of alienation using other, authoritative, sources. By linking these original sources back to Seeman, Harvey et al. show that in several critical instances, he erroneously refashioned previous work to fit within the frame of ‘positivist canons of explanation and validation (Harvey et al. 1983: 45). The paper concludes that Seeman’s approach employs ‘Procrustean canons that allow only a selective construction of an operational definition’ of alienation (Harvey et al. 1983: 46). The final paper examined the latent content and ideology within the Seeman approach.

Seeman’s approach is fraught with contradictions which ultimately flow from a non-critical approach to researching alienation. He treats alienation in the same way classical economics regards crisis as a passing accidental disturbance which arises because the ‘incomprehensibility and irrationality of crises is ... a consequence of the class situation and interests’ of the ruling class (Lukacs 1971: 105). Yet Seeman has one redeeming feature. References to powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and so forth as well as the subsequent attempts to use his framework, are an admission that there is something deeply disturbing about the way we live. It was this ‘something’ Marx sought to address in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

2.3 Alienation - the Marxist Perspective

Marx’s theory of alienation has a chequered history but, as a critical interest in alienation re-emerges, so does the awareness and the significance of Marx's contribution. Moreover, as Costas and Fleming argue, Marx’s tradition ‘yields important insights’ in the exploration of alienation (Costas and Fleming 2009: 360) with, recent examples being Langman and Ryan (2009) drawing upon Marx’s presentation of alienation to explore contemporary global culture, Hall (2018a, 2018b) looking at academic life, Silver (2019) seeking to reconstruct Marx’s theory of alienation, and Healy and Wilkowska (2017) looking at the impact of alienation on dignity at work. After reviewing research concerned with work and alienation, Archibald argues that ‘globalization and competition... increased objective powerlessness and subjective alienation’ (Archibald 2009a: 337) and that those seeking to study alienation from a Marxist perspective should be prepared to read widely and deeply on the subject.

Silver (2019: 90) asserts it is unnecessary to rehearse the key elements of Marx’s theory of alienation since the ‘general thrust of Marx’s account is well known. This assumes that Marx’s approach is widely understood when the evidence suggests otherwise. Further, in the current climate when we can detect a stronger pulse of interest in his view, re-stating Marx’s position should encourage a rigorous engagement with his relevant texts. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx 1970b) were the start of a larger project exploring the nature of capitalism and should be considered in that context. The tendency, when referring to Marx’ theory of alienation, is to decontextualise the Manuscripts from Marx’s other work and to further decontextualise the section on alienation from remaining chapters in the Manuscripts.