Alienation

I have been reading about Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, that workers have little control over their working lives, are alienated from natural social contact during work and neither decide how and what to make nor own the output of their labours. This distance, or alienation, with a more natural way of living, of a plurality of activities, has its origins in the division of labour, that we are each specialised, the shoe-maker making shoes, the baker making bread, the worker in a factory bending the same shape of metal over and over again, soul-destroying repetitive work. Of course manual production line work or other production of consumables is not the only type of work. These days there are so many white-collar workers stressed out with busywork of questionable surplus value.
Most people still live “lives of quiet desperation” as Thoreau put it long ago. I would hope that there is a best way to organise society yet I also think that capitalism is somehow the most enduring of ways, certainly not the most kind society but it seems somehow unavoidable. Nonetheless I find Marx’s argument on alienation, that we are very far away from a natural and satisfying way of occupying our time and labour, quite compelling.
I am certainly not an advocate of communism nor totalitarianism but I do find the human focus of socialism appealing. Liberal democracy is the most common form of government in today’s world, with a focus on individual liberty, hence ‘liberal’. Some countries, for example in Scandinavia, have social democracies, combining elements of centralised state control with individual freedom and individual accountability – maybe this is as good as it gets.