Work

Reflections on today’s lecture 15/03/2019

“The worker . . . becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided, machinelike, labour.... he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine…”

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 80.

Is nostalgia for games and animated films particularly strong because we’re pining over a period of our lives exempt from the monotonous trawl of working life?

“The less you eat drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save— the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour— your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life— the greater is the store of your estranged being ...”

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Do we remember that life as feeling better and more colourful because we weren’t being drained of energy and thought by relentless shifts day in day out?

Liz