After ascending the Tower Bridge in London, viewing its in-house museum, and peering vertiginously into the River Thames through sections of glass flooring, you have the option of continuing into the bridge's engine rooms to learn more, via a display of Victorian mechanics, about the bridge's historical workings. At the end of this second section of the tour, a short documentary plays on a loop. The film features archival photos over which play voice recordings of past bridge workers describing their time working on the bridge.
The film is more moving than one might expect in what is, essentially, a museum devoted to a steam engine. The workers speak of their nervousness the first time they were left in charge of raising the bridge, their devotion to the bridge in the face of long hours, and their pride at having played a small roll in the bridge's life. One worker notes the fact that, no matter where you travel in the world, you are likely soon to see an image of the Tower Bridge in one form or another. "That's my bridge," he says.
These memoirs fly in the face of a good deal of Marxist theory. The kind of work these men, by their own accounts, devoted themselves to and take enormous personal pride in having done is, more or less, the kind of work a certain kind of 19th-century radical (both Marxist and otherwise) saw as the epitome of alienated labour. Here are men employed not for themselves but by an impersonal state, men producing neither goods for use nor even goods for trade, but rather providing a service to international trade over which they have no control. While some of the men working on the bridge are trained in specific skills, none of them did work one could call artisanal. They own neither a set of skills they can call their own nor the products of their own labour. In short, this is the kind of industrial labour that, to both Marxists and less systematic dissenters like William Morris, should have alienated the workers forced to do it.
How, then, to account for these men and their apparently heartfelt pride in their work? The condescending answer would be simple false-consciousness: These men have been so indoctrinated into state capitalism that they have learned to love their own oppression. In general terms, there is certainly something to this notion. History is not lacking for people who have defended, sometimes to the death, systems that oppose their own best interests.
That explanation, however, seems hard to apply in its full force to comfortably well-off workers in a generally liberal democracy. That is to say, these are not men denied the opportunity to learn of other possible ways of life or so impoverished that they could not have sought other jobs.
If false-consciousness doesn't fully cut it, then, there seems to me to be another, less systematised, and maybe more literary, explanation: nostalgia.
This interaction between alienation and nostalgia is maybe easiest to see in the current, crudely political case of Trumpian yearning for traditional factory jobs.
We might look at it this way: It is not immediately obvious that regimented, assembly-line jobs are a working-class utopia, and you do not need to dig very far into labour history to discover that such jobs were, in their supposed heyday, often greatly disliked; one could write a history running from the sit-down strikes in Ford plants in the 1930s through to the dens of iniquity that some GM plants were the 1980s. Yet Trump and his ideologues yearn, or at least claim to yearn, for a return to these jobs. Given the details of both the jobs in question and the history of labour organising when those jobs were dominant in the American economy, it would seem that there is less a careful theory of labour here than a knee-jerk desire for the good old days.
Surely something similar is at work in the Tower Bridge. Our smiles at these working-class recollections have as much nostalgia in them as does any Trump rally, if considerably less evil.
None of this is to deny entirely the central Marxist notion of alienation. Surely there is something to the claim that some workers are more alienated from the products of their labour than are others. However, it seems equally likely that the lived experience of that alienation involves are a fair amount of nostalgia for the conditions of the generation past. And if it seems unlikely that one could ever be nostalgic for the working conditions of the modern call centre or fast fashion sweatshop, we need only turn to Upton Sinclair's thoughts about the coal mining jobs some commentators today so desperately want back.
If alienation is 50% nostalgia, the clear problem is how far back that nostalgia runs. If I am nostalgic for the work my grandfather did (an electrician in the public service, as it happens), and he was nostalgic for the work his grandfather did, is there some end point to the regress, some moment when labour was actually experienced as non-alienating in its own moment? Or is it turtles all the way down?
