George Orwell (1946) always encouraged writers to reveal why they write and why a particular subject interested them: ‘I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in.’ To help assess my motives, and the age I live in, I provide in this Preface an account of what has led me to write this book.

My interest in alienation emerges from two places filled with different sorts of smoke. The first place was the Aberdeen Trades Council and Social Club, the hub of organized labour in Aberdeen until its closure in the 2000s. It possessed a multiplicity of rooms in a grand granite 19th-century building in which various trade unions, community campaigns and political groups held meetings. For some reason most of the meetings I attended were in the badly ventilated at best, windowless at worst, rooms in the basement. It was the 1980s and 1990s, prior to the smoking ban, and a thick acrid fug of cigarette smoke rolled around every meeting. My eyes would be stinging by the end of a speaker’s closing remarks. But I learned a lot there. Some of what I learned was to do with the formal part of a meeting and the topics under discussion, such as how to end Apartheid, the General Strike of 1926, gay rights and what this new form of conservative politics called ‘neoliberalism’ would mean for Britain and working-class people. It was a good grounding in Socialism 101, and a valuable education in theory, politics and history. It was there that I first encountered the thick and lush forest of Marxist theory in which it was so easy to become lost, wandering down the pathways of the forces of production and real subsumption, or ensnared by the thorny bushes of base and superstructure. I remember a young me fumbling through a presentation on alienation in one of those rooms, trying to make sense of concepts such as species-being to both myself and whoever happened to have turned up that night.