Hector & cops in cars ... so alone

[Terrance]

Chinoy, Ely _Automobile Workers and the American Dream_

Assembly line technology reduces skill content, social relations,
eliminates the possibility of self-fulfilment at work, 
and is therefore dehumanizing.

Yes, it's best to stick to one's specialty, keep up one's skills an all
... 

Consumerism is the result of alienation at work. Out of work pursuits
are often a response to the shortcomings of work induced by technology
or capitalism. 

Industrial society brings its characteristic mode of alienation to the
man on the assembly line. Ely Chinoy found that nearly four-fifths of
his sample of automobile workers cherished the dream of leaving the
factory forever. 


Mostly they longed for the independence of small businessmen. 

As he approached middle age, the worker sadly renounced his dream, and
resigned himself to the assembly line.

This alienation of man from the machine, which stands against him,
imposing its rhythm on him so that he is a satellite to its motions, is
something that is common to all industrial societies, whether they be
capitalist or socialist. 

But Hector is a cop. 

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where
capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train
the
individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad
humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for
work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual
and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the
priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over
work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God;
weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their
God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or
a moralist, I appeal from their judgment to that of their God; from the
preaching of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the
frightful consequences of work in capitalist society. 


Paul Lafargue, _The Right To Be Lazy_ 


http://129.15.102.140/~huntercr/Past%20Courses/HSCI2333/Lecture8.htm