Use of word *little* as ironic editorializing? My post didn't address any of the above as I was writing to a specific point (not to mention limits of e-mail). Any one who has read my posts (and I don't send that many) knows that I am consistently attentive to both political democracy and worker control (though not in post to which you responded).
As for alienation being *something that socialists should care a lot about*, I have a hunch if we looked at my posts to e-lists over the years (and I first subbed in 1993), we'd find that the proportion commenting on alienation and related topics is higher than most. I'm one of those folks who doesn't buy the Althusserian epistemological break between the young and mature Marx.
In any event, the Soviet system mitigated against opportunities for productive work allowing for individual initiative, personal satisfaction, and development of both mental and physical abilities. So yes, data collected by Soviet sociologists I mentioned in another post indicated that workers opposed threats to job security and they were alienated from the work process. Contrary to Soviet theorists, work in the USSR did not cease to be a source of alienation despite elimination of the bourgeoisie. Marx, in addition to citing capitalist exploitation, pinpointed the character of the work process and absence of opporunity for worker creativity and autonomy as sources of alienation. Assembly line work and unskilled manual labor in general was just as tedious and uninteresting in Soviet factories as in capitalist West.
Of course, mass of people in former Soviet Union now experience alienation and job insecurity. Michael Hoover