Comment by almostgotcaught
5 hours ago
How many people agree with the above but "disagree" with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Lololol
Edit: I'm already down one - for people that don't read wikipedia here are the 4 dimensions of alienation of a worker as listed in the wiki:
1. From a worker's product
2. From a worker's productive activity
3. From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-being)
4. From other workers
Edit2: People [in America] will moan about their jobs, their bosses, their dwindling purchasing power, their loss of autonomy, etc etc etc but then come back as champions of capital. You see it all the time - "my job sucks but entrepreneurialism is what makes America great!!!!!!!". I've never seen a more rake->face take than this (and on such an enormous scale). It's absurd. It's delusional.
I don't specifically disagree with Marx's theory of alienation. However I disagree with communism. I think communism makes the problem worse, not better.
Identifying the bad stuff is not hard. Marx is far from unique in being able to do that. I find his class framing and assessment of the roles the various classes do in the status quo to be particularly good even if it ought to be deeply unflattering to the HN tax brackets.
Advising on where to go from there in an actionable way that produces good results is the hard part. Marx didn't do it. Those attempting implementation of his ideas have an exceptional record and not in a good way. And worse still, some of the worst aspects of those movements are the ones that stuck around to be peddled again and again under different brands.
The bad idea from Marx that lead him astray into pseudo-science territory wasn't worker alienation. It was the labor theory of value (and the other stuff he created to make it looks like it works).
Worker alienation is perfectly visible on the real world. I don't think anybody disagrees it's common.
But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile".
At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers?
There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...
Developers used to be freer to choose their tools, organize their routines, decide the result of their work, acquire transferable knowledge, and had access to their tools without any link to any organization (though that one has been steadily improving instead of post-peak).
There is more to alienation than equity.
> But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile"
Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!"
This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East.
Flourished, you say?
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Surely Marx would disagree with such assessment and call it idealistic and not grounded in material reality?
There is no reason to buy into the whole Marxist framework just because you share one single sentiment that various thinkers had before and after him.
> one single sentiment
Lol alienation of labor is not a single "sentiment" - it's a core principle. So like it or not you share a core principle with Marx.
The sentiment is shared with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc and probably lots of other less known people. Marx's theory of alienation is far more developed and nuanced than the generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people of various political inclination, not only Marx.
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