I usually think of the lonlieness of the type that Louis refers to as confirmation and expression of Marxist alienation theory. So loneliness is a
social ill of all of capitalism. I believe I posted earlier on this auto-culture thread regarding the contrast between cars and other forms of mass transportation , with the former being more isolating or alienating and anti-collective. The greatest division of the working class is into individuals, who feel lonely and powerless
(objectification, reification).
Cars as a mass transportation form also allow and influence a more scattered and thereby more isolated and lonely residential pattern. Thus, less ghettoization and pabable massing of workers in their daily lives.
On low-grade attention and thought in toil, Marx notes this in Capital, work monotony as stressful and deadening of the mind. This fits fine as far as the bourgeoisie are concerned. When I worked in an autoplant one summer, I remember memorizing poetry on the job to fight the alienation. As ever increasing mechanization decreases the physical difficulty of work, the mental dimension of toil becomes a larger and larger portion of the alienation of work.
Driving a car is definitely my best mechanical skill, so I amen Yoshie's thought too, in the sense that I am operating a machine. However I have found that long city to city road trips are actually deep thought sessions, especially travelling to and from political conferences with comrades. Also, I have been doing a lot of "reading" of taped books riding. So,
I find it possible to engage thought wise abstractly, with the low level car driving thought on automatic pilot.
>>> Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> 05/06 2:03 PM >>>
>I would also like to call attention to the fact that driving car is very
>much like factory work in one sense: it forces drivers to pay _constant
>low-grade attention_ to their machines and surroundings so as not to cause
>accidents. This need to pay constant low-grade attention is very mentally
>stressful and yet does not require meaningful intellectual engagement. The
>same need is imposed upon workers inside factories, so they have to put up
>with the same kind of stress before, during, and after work hours.
>
>Yoshie
>
This is a tremendous point. Driving to and fro work has always seemed like an extension of the work day to me. When I lived in Houston, Boston or Kansas City in my Trotskyite heyday, I always had to drive to work and it was a major drag. One of the reasons I was anxious to move back to NY was so I could use public transportation. When I am on the bus in the morning, reading the NY Times, and flirting with women, I feel relatively free. The thought of driving to work, as some of my co-workers do, seems horrible.
One of the points made a week or two ago in a David Harvey thread on M-I was the contradictions between the long and short term needs of the working class. In the short term, it is crucial to keep auto workers employed. They have more social power when they are in union jobs in heavy industry. In the long term, we have to replace cars.
The whole question of transportation, housing and personal relations get intertwined. One of the aims of the Bauhaus school was to create new housing structures that would foster greater class and human solidarity. One of the failures of contemporary socialism is that we can no longer theorize what such solutions might look like today.
I personally am convinced that one of the greatest social ills in America is loneliness. You can look at a glossy magazine like New York and see hundreds of personal ads. Highly successful yuppies can not make connections with the opposite or same-sex. This is related to the atomization of the modern urban milieu. Even in the case of people who are in long-term relationships, the loneliness can exist, or even be greater.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)