Nearly bought an Esther Dyson book today in the Oxfam bookshop. ‘Release 2.0′. It seemed so dated and less than 9 years ago…it was the vanguard evangical capitalism that put me off as well. Still, Oxfam is a good cause and it’s only two quid so might get it tomorrow. But that’s not the real issue today.

There’s another book in there about work and alienation written in 1964 about the American car industry among other things. The focus is on industrial work, rather than white collar, but the author points out that the general experience of alienation is likely to be no less for this latter sector of workers. That’s only two quid as well, so now I’ve had my consumption cooling off period, I might just go and buy them both tomorrow.

So browsing through these books has got me thinking, especially as I’ve got a very full on contract for the next few weeks. The relative autonomy of my previous job has gone; there is a much greater quantity of bureaucracy to content with; there are more forms to be filled in.

The question I’m turning over is to what extent ‘de-skilling’ applies to the almost industrial white collar workforce which has emerged as the UK economy has shifted from the production of capital goods, to manufacturing goods to being a service based economy (but still relatively wealthy by the ability of companies based in the UK to suck in surplus value created elsewhere).

Does the emergence of networked and computer based work require more or less skills? Does the blurring of demarcation so that we all have to complete budgets and manage our own administration make us more skilled, or less skilled?

I need to come back to this, partly because I’m now off to a birthday party…partly because I need to finish reading Harry Braverman’s excellent ‘Labor and Monopoly Capitalism’.

Oh, the other books I spotted in Oxfam were Bukharin’s ‘The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period’ and Dimitrov’s ‘The United Front Against Fascism and War’. Both unfortunatly very heavily marked by pen (why do people do that?). And even though I’ve decided to keep reading about WW2, I don’t really know if I can stomach a Stalinist explanation for anything that happened.