Alienation and Socialism

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?"