machine, and it is only the simplest, most monotonous and most easily
acquired knack that is required of him.?®

Furthermore, this division of labour also aligns men into hostile
classes and strata. Therefore, while it widens the possibilities for
mechanisation and increased productivity — as has been rightly
appointed out ever since the rise of capitalism, this structure on
the other hand divides communities into hostile camps.

That is why this division of labour is an aspect to the
phenomenon of ‘alienation’ — a phenomenon that characterises
contradictions at a definite stage in the development of social
production. To paraphrase Marx, alienation visists the working
people because control, organisation and planning of production
are the pre-rogative of the capitalist while the worker is degraded
to the level of a mere production force separated or alienated from
his own knowledge, judgement and will — which are embodied
in the product of labour.

With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct
proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not
only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity —
and does so in proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
The object which labour produces confronts labour as something alien, as
power independent of the producer. The more objects the worker
produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the
dominion of his product, capital. The worker is related to the product of
his labour as to an alien object.?®

It is also a fact that neither tools nor the product of the worker
are his property. Thus in the very process of production — as
pointed out in the above quotation — he becomes alienated from
his work. At work he is thus the property of the capitalist and is
alienated not only from his work and the product of his labour,
but from himself as well.

If the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active
alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation.>®

It is this alienation which is the root cause of all sorts of
schizophrenic values and tendencies in capitalist societies today,
values which have given rise to attitudes of general hostility
toward and resentment of society as such among the working
people.®! And it is in this context that Che Guevara wrote that the

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