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By Root 313 0

may have witnessed the same motor blow up over the weekend, and decide to experiment with a different length of connecting rod. Everyone is progressing in knowledge, through a shared dialectic. The dialectic is between people, but also between iterations—you break things, and learn something new by taking them apart and talking it through. Here work and leisure both take their bearings from something basically human: rational activity, in association with others. This activity is directed toward something that appears as good within the horizon of a certain way of life: speed. To place oneself in the service of this master is to enter into a community and, as I learned outside the Buggy House, to open oneself to being schooled by one’s elders. This is solidarity.

I believe the question of whether work is “alienated” or not may be understood in terms of the kind of perception it affords. Marx held that it is through work that we realize our “species character,” and this consists in our being both rational and social beings. For him it follows that we get alienated from ourselves when the product of our work is appropriated, since that product is a concrete manifestation of one’s own most human possibilities. The worker’s product is “torn away” from him, and Marx suggests that it becomes an alien thing, hateful to him, because it is used by another. But why should this be? I find Marx unconvincing on this point. If I am a furniture builder, for example, what am I going to do with a hundred chairs? After all, I want to see them in use; this completes my activity of making them, and gives it social reality. It makes me feel I have contributed to the common good. But as the philosopher Talbot Brewer suggests, this raises the question of how direct the perception of use must be, if it is to play this role.

It is one thing for the Chinese factory worker to know that somewhere in the U.S. hinterlands, the vernacular rural American quilt that she has stitched together is being used, and that it has some culturally specific significance to the person using it, which she can barely comprehend. It is another thing for a carpenter to walk around a town and see the new entryway he designed and built for that store, to learn from a direct experience and from chatting with others of its functional and aesthetic achievements and shortcomings, and to modify future work in accordance with this running feedback that is picked up in the course of daily activities. There are, of course, a world of possibilities between these two extremes. One might read Marx as having gestured, at least, towards the plausible thought that the nearer one is to the carpenter’s end of this continuum, the less alienated one is from one’s own work.2

When the maker’s (or fixer’s) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn’t separate from its internal or “engineering” standards; the work is improved through relationships with others. It may even be the case that what those standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through these iterated exchanges with others who use the product, as well as other craftsmen in the same trade. Through work that has this social character, some shared conception of the good is lit up, and becomes concrete.

The geographical and cultural estrangement of the Chinese quilt maker precludes this kind of experience. There is another form estrangement may take: use may be utterly separate from production under conditions of radical inequality, even within the same city. This is especially so in the case of luxury goods, and it is plausible that someone in Beijing stitching together designer handbags for the plutocrats of that same city would find them hateful.

Consider how a similar set of facts may carry a different meaning when the inequality is overlaid with some sense of a res publica, or common wealth. Consider a panel beater who shapes sheet metal for Rolls-Royce, circa 1970. He