Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >From Adam to Angela:
> > Sure, I could imagine an
> >alienation-reducing airline collective with participatory input from all
> >where the pilot shares the duty of cleaning the toilets but this is not the
> >natural tendency of the demands of the incredible complex infrastructure
> >that goes into making all this work.
>
> Speaking of alienation as a product of contradiction between simple and
> complex isn't a very sophisticated move, to put it mildly.
I'm intensely allergic to attempts to describe the (distant) future except in the most general terms (and to the extend necessary to provide a perspective on the present as history). But just examining the present we can see factors that might well reduce this "problem" to manageable proportions.
Two preliminary observations. One, Adam seems to equate "unpleasant" with alienated (and both with lack of intellectual challenge), which is not necessarily the case, and secondly he treats alienation as a platonic essence: it is all or nothing. This leaves no room for historical consideration of it which would see it as partly relative to various surrounding circumstances.
He leaves out, for example, the tremendous leap which sheer shortening of work hours (whatever the work might be) would constitute. And this is one of the main factors which link present to future: the battle for shorter hours began over 150 years ago, and needs to be picked up with renewed vigor. His particular example of airline travel and its complexity ignores the fact that the pressure of time generated by life in capitalist society is responsible for most of the demand for airline travel. We do need to slow up life considerably -- and that is another thing which can be battled for in the present. I don't know whether such slowing up and a consequent debunking of various demands for efficiency would reduce greatly the pressure of alienation or not -- but I'm pretty sure it would change the nature of the "problem."
To arrive at a preliminary summary. I don't know what it would mean to eliminate alienation; I don't know whether alienation would be alienation under all possible circumstances. And when it is separated from the whole of life and made a subject of philosophical inspection in the abstract it approaches being an unintelligible concept.
Carrol
[The scare quotes around problem are because I don't like the word but can't offhand think of a better one right now.]