Christianopolis restored meaningful hands-on work lost to industrial alienation

Evidence

WORK. One of the most serious human problems brought about by industrial capitalism has been the psychological alienation caused by a person’s daily labor for wages in a business or industry owned by another individual who reaps both money and a higher standard of living as a result. A not-too-different alienation is found in modern socialist and communist societies in which the extensive bureaucracy required to manage industry also intrudes between worker and product. The unity of a meaningful life with productive “hands-on” work, lost to thousands of people at the bottom of today’s society, was integral to Andreä’s ideal organic city. In Christianopolis, manual labor was called “employment of the hands.” All people spent equal amounts of time at work and at leisure. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 390

Categorization

• XREF: Merchant here reads the organic utopia as proto-alienation critique — echoes Marx-across-the-courses vein and ch17’s peasant handmill energy-autonomy autonomy thread.
• QUESTION: Merchant brackets socialist bureaucracies as equally alienating alongside capitalism — worth probing how this egalitarian-organic lineage sits in her larger Marxist-materialist account.