Alienation and Socialism

Abstract

The immediate motive occasioning this letter was the worker E. Kopanitsyn's letter to the newspaper Izvestiia (December 8, 1986) in which he eloquently recounts his difficulties with a new machine manufactured in a factory in the city of Cheliabinsk. After telling what effort it had cost him to get this machine going, Kopanitsyn in a fit of temper exclaims: "I am completely unable to understand one simple thing: How could such a machine come into being at all? The hands of many workers touched it, except that these were not working hands. Can it really be true that no one, not a single person, was aroused enough to say: Just what are we doing here, brothers?"