“First, workers are alienated from the product of their labour. What they create does not belong to them, but to the owners of capital. The products of work confront workers as something external and powerful, appearing in the form of commodities, profits, and wealth controlled by others. The more workers produce, the poorer they become in relation to the world they have created.” Your painstaking research as a specialist separates you from intellectual and creative life.
Second, workers are alienated from the process of production. Labour under capitalism is not freely chosen or creatively fulfilling; it is carried out under compulsion in order to earn wages and survive. Work is organised to maximise profit, not human satisfaction, turning labour into a means to an end rather than an end in itself. You do not write what you want to but what will sell.
(For too long, anyway: ideally you are shaping the field via research but this morphs too easily into placing articles in journals for the sake of points on your annual report.)
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Also, and off topic: when I first moved here, I expected to ignore everything and be off to New Orleans/elsewhere every chance I got. Expect less.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 