 Related worries might also apply to claims about the prognosis for alienation, in particular, about whether and how alienation might be overcome. Consider, for instance, Marx’s view that communist society will be free of certain systematic forms of alienation, such as alienation in work. Marx’s view about communism rests crucially on the judgement that it is the social relations of capitalist society, and not its material or technical arrangements, which are the cause of systematic forms of alienation. For instance, he holds that it is not the existence of science, technology, and industrialisation, as such, which are at the root of the social and psychological ills of alienation, but rather how those factors tend to be organised and used in a capitalist society. (For present purposes, just assume that a society is capitalist when its economic structure is based on a particular class division – in which producers can only access means of production by selling their labour power—and when production, and much else, is driven by a remorseless search for profit.) In volume one of Capital, Marx writes approvingly of workers who, through time and experience, had learnt ‘to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used’ (1996: 432). If this had not been his view, Marx could not have, consistently, also suggested that communist society – which, on his account, is similarly technologically advanced and industrial—could avoid this kind of alienation. This suggestion is, nonetheless, strikingly sanguine. Marx is confident, for instance, that the considerable gulf between the gloomy results of adopting machinery in the capitalist present (where it increases the repetitiveness of tasks, narrows talents, promotes ‘deskilling’, and so on) and the bright promise of its adoption in the communist future (where it will liberate us from uncreative tasks, create greater wealth, develop all-round abilities, and so on) is easily bridged. However, Marx’s ‘utopophobia’—that is, his reluctance to say very much, in any close detail, about the future shape of socialist society – prevents him from offering any serious discussion about how precisely this might be done (Leopold 2016). As a result, even the mildest of sceptics could reasonably worry that a range of difficult empirical and other questions are evaded rather than answered here.