£10 (plus £1.50 p. and p.) ISBN: 978-1-912710-14-0
Robots Have No Bones is Fred Voss’s follow-up collection to The Earth and the Stars in the Palm of Your Hand, also published by Culture Matters.
Robots in the workplace – computerized metalworking machinery – mean a loss of the tactile impact of ‘working’ a machine tool. And workers are still pushed to breaking point, working long hours in poor conditions and always on the tightrope of the poverty line.
In a series of sympathetic, sometimes visionary poems, Voss takes us into the lives of the American working class, manual workers who have been betrayed by successive politicians. Technological advances like robots mean that that there is enough wealth being created for working people not to have to work so hard, for so long, and for so little – but capitalism makes that impossible.
Like the machine presses he writes about, Voss’s poems stamp in our minds the nature of capitalist work, and the way it dehumanizes us. They also remind us of the potentially revolutionary strength of working-class people, who remain undefeated in the fight with oppressive bosses, venal politicians, and the financial class whose avarice is as automatic, ingrained and inhuman as the robots they use to make profits.
