I take one of the implicit points you were making to be that ownership (though you would put that word differently) is empowering and positive; no doubt it is. But I think it is not predicitively helpful to see it as underpinning the situation – rather what underpins the situation is the actual day-to-day of doing the job. The relation to capital is more accurately captured as a small constituent, the effect of which fluctuates with factors such as the nature of the job and company etc

Basically my point will be along the lines that the very concept of job satisfaction is created by capitalism – it presumes the current relations of property and production. You can ask a shopfloor worker what makes them happy, and try and maximize these factors – but they’ll still be a shopfloor worker and will still be constrained by the logic underpinning their employment.

I’m not saying that maximizing such factors isn’t a worthwhile endeavour of course.

The problem is that this one aspect cannot be reduced first to social relations and then the underpinning material realities. This is what you seem to think Marxism (or my brand of it) aims at: the idea that you can read off everything about a society from the current organisation of production and other such matters.

Achieving the happiness of all is a perfectly legitimate goal – and I have more to say on the relevance of job satisfaction (and other happiness barometers) and their use in any systematic world-view, but it shall have to wait til tomorrow as I’m frazzled and it’s bed time.

That’s not what we were talking about, however. I was talking about analysis of the social totality; you’re talking about one aspect of it.