\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\naidn:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI think you should watch this
\nyella creens
\n\u201chandfools of yella crayens\u201d
\nthis made me feel true inner peace for the first time in months
\nThe piano arp perfecrly matched the crayon pour omg
Remember the Marx-flavored analysis of how weird it is that the Crayola Factory Tour in Easton, PA is essentially a reenactment of this now-obsolete depiction of factory work, such that \u201calienatedly perform industrial labor\u201d is now the guides\u2019 actual job description?
I remember watching this Mr. Rogers clip in my childhood (although I don\u2019t remember the narration - and now I\u2019m wondering if I\u2019m confusing this with a similar, but unnarrated, clip from Sesame Street depicting the process of making crayons in a mid-20th-century American factory).
And yup, your link claims that these were two separate, albeit similar, television productions made at different points in the 1980s. I think the Sesame Street one had orange rather than yellow crayons? It\u2019s a memory dredged from pretty far back in my childhood.
There\u2019s a sense in which the minimum-wage employee doing the factory reenactment labor is not very different from other types of historical reenactors. I assume that the people employed by Colonial Williamsburg, say, are not making great money. But it seems odd to describe a guy blacksmithing for the public using 17th century equipment as \u201calienated\u201d from his labor in the same way as a factory worker. Maybe because Marx lived in a time and place such that factories were novel and blacksmiths were not, but to us today both factories and blacksmiths are anachronistic.
Well I think part of it is that with a blacksmith’s forge and tools you can make anything, so whether you’re making a horseshoe or a wrought iron gate it’s still the product of your willed action and applied skill, whereas it’s not only impossible to use a crayon factory to make anything other than crayons, a worker can’t even make them in any other way than standard and in fact can’t make a single entire crayon from scratch themselves
So the most you could say is “this guy works, and there are crayons, to be sold to others for exchange value”. Alienation! Except the tour guides aren’t even producing crayons for the sake of purchase and use by others, they’re just producing them for the sake of participating in production!
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