The Young Marx's concept of alienation

How crucial is the concept of alienation to the young Marx?

Marx’s philosophy stands or falls with the concept of alienation. Something so central to his overall outlook would necessarily be something that occurred to him at an early stage of life and was succeeded by developments and modifications of this core thesis. To provide an example from other fields, thinkers as varied as psychoanalysts Freud and Jung, political philosopher John Stuart Mill or physicist Albert Einstein had their core ideas, either at an early stage (Freud, Einstein) or found themselves under the shadow of other thinkers and then after a crisis set out with their own philosophy which they modified and developed till their death (Mill, Jung).

Marx too changed his theories in his early years from an almost liberal-democrat position to a communist one. And this process too worked itself out in his youth when he was deeply influenced by Hegel, Bauer and Feuerbach whose concepts he later repudiated or modified. In this way he stands closer to Mill and Jung then Freud and Einstein.

What is of key interest is the core element of his thought process: man’s alienation from himself; was part of his discourse on history and its laws from the outset. His later developments were unique interpretations of the causes of this alienation and the ‘laws’ he believed were at work which gave rise to this condition through history.

It is no surprise that his early influences at the University of Berlin were Hegel, Bauer and Feuerbach; each of these stressed the concept of man alienated from himself. Marx joined the Young Hegelians and went through a series of stormy revisions of theories postulated by the people who influenced him. Added to the list of influencers were Max Stirner and Moses Hess.

I will first briefly go through the conceptions of alienation by these varied thinkers who influenced the young Marx and then put forward his own postulates on the same. I hope to show by the end of this essay my starting point that Marx’s philosophical doctrines stand or fall with his concept of alienation.

In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel put forward the theory that there is a universal Mind (some translate this as Spirit) of which individual human minds are the parts. However individuals are not aware of the universal Mind but only of their particular minds. In this ignorance they get alienated from themselves and from each other. As Peter Singer puts it in his outline of Hegelian thought, ‘people (who are manifestations of Mind) take other people (who are also manifestations of Mind) as something foreign, hostile and external to themselves, whereas they are in fact part of the same great whole.’ This philosophy shares elements with the non-dualistic or advaita school of Indian Philosophy. Here too there is one universal consciousness of which we are parts and we live in a world of alienation, separation and illusion only when we see the forms, particularities and separation and not experience the whole of which we all are a part.

Hegel was a determinist and believed that eventually man would be conscious of this error and the historical series of conflicts between the ideas of one group that made other groups subservient in an eternally violent, alienating dialectical struggle would be over once they became conscious of this truth.

One can see how the form of dialectic, the historical determinism and concept of alienation attracted Marx. In his early philosophical manuscripts Marx mentions Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind as ‘the true birthplace and secret of his (Marx’s) philosophy’

While Hegel dealt with this Universal Mind as a form of man’s alienation Feuerbach, another Young Hegelian made religion its source. In his Essence of Christianity, he explained that ‘Man imbued God with what was his own essence as a species. The relation between subject and object was thus reversed; henceforth it no longer appeared that Man created God, but that God created Man.’ He critiqued Hegel’s positing a universal Mind outside man as a similar form of alienation as Christianity which put God outside man. His belief was the more we ‘enrich our concept of God, the more we impoverish ourselves…thus humanity can regain its essence , which in religion it has lost.’ Feueurbach’s main thesis was to get back all attributes of man which he had projected outside himself back into himself and thus end his alienation.

Bruno Bauer, a lecturer in theology was another influence on Marx. Similar to Feuerbach he also found religion an alienating process and ‘the chief illusion in the way of self-understanding.’

Moses Hess was credited by Engels for being the first to reach communism by the philosophical path in his Communist Confession. However his approach to Communism did not have the aggressive elements of class war to achieve its ends as Marx would later suggest. Nevertheless Hess had an undoubted influence on Marx. Gareth Stedman Jones outlines Hess’s outlook on communism: God had seemed outside humanity because humanity itself lived in a state of separation and antagonism. But with the coming of communism, hell would no longer exist on earth, nor heaven beyond it; rather, everything that in Christianity had been represented prophetically and fantastically would come to pass in a truly human society founded upon the eternal laws of love and reason.

Max Stirner’s, The Ego and Its Own, published in 1844 critiqued Feuerbach by stating his idea of Man was again outside man. This Man with a capital M was similar to Hegel’s Mind, or orthodox religion’s God. It had the same depersonalising attribute of being outside of man and by being objectified it contained the essence of man, and thus became a kind of human religion as opposed to a godly religion. It made man appear beneath Man and again a subject to a master and so continued his alienation and lack of freedom.

It is important to show all the influences Marx underwent in the heady years from 1837 to 1844 in Berlin. He was regularly critiquing, learning, adapting, remoulding, modifying, rejecting thinkers he was exposed to. As mentioned earlier the common problem, was the problem of alienation, the removal of which would give all humans their ultimate freedom. After going through the various influences on Marx’s thought we can now dwell on his unique diagnosis and prescription to the problem of alienation. Something uniquely his own and something he developed much before the penning of both his Communist Manifesto in 1848 and his later focus on the economics behind his theories in Capital.

In an essay entitled On The Jewish Question, Marx went away from God, Mind and Man and offered his radical explanation to the problem of alienation. It was Money. Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

This money existed only insofar as private property existed. It was private property that had created earlier feudalism and present capitalism. And so Marx went further to state ‘this private property is the material, sensuous expression of alienated human life.’ And it is itself represented by money.

It is from this universal alienation that Marx found himself looking for a class of people that was universally alienated and through which could occur humanity’s universal remedy. He finds this class of people in the proletariat. In his Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right published in 1844, four years before his Communist Manifesto he finds: A sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering….a sphere in short, that is complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through that total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.

There is very little mention in earlier writings of the proletariat. It appears almost like the universal character of human alienation led him to seek a class of people who suffered almost universally from this condition. In the unregulated working hours, poor wages and squalid living conditions Marx had found a completely alienated class.

Logically, if alienation was to be universal then it had to affect all classes and not only one. Marx fills this gap by writing in his first published book, The Holy Family, about the bourgeoisie or the owners of private property. He writes how, though alienated too, they were comfortable in their alienation, knowing that in this alienation they also possessed their only power and also a superficial existence with material comforts. Alienated in mind, they covered it up with their material comforts.

This was in stark contrast to the unbearable alienation of the proletariat. While the proletariat owned nothing but their labour which they sold, the bourgeoisie owned private property and the means of production but due to this alienation could not see the essence of genuine productive work, they could not see its inherent beauty. In Marxist terms they could not see its ‘use value’ only its ‘exchange value’. In his Early Philosophical Manuscripts he writes about how private property has this dehumanising and alienating quality. ‘The dealer in minerals sees the market value of the jewels he handles, not their beauty.’ To the inherent quality of objects the bourgeoisie was blind. He could only see these as a means to an end, that of more money, their exchange value. Objects were either used for the gratifying sense of possession or for using as a means for more money. This condition occurred as mentioned earlier due to a single cause, private property.

So far I have shown Marx dwelling on the negative aspects of the human condition i.e. its terrible sense of alienation. I will now attempt to show Marx’s vision of the world once this soul-robbing alienation was removed.

For Marx the essence of humanity was a dynamic activity between subject and object. He believed that human beings could not be passive spectators of events. And could not be passive observers who could contemplate the world and thus reach an objective evaluation of it. Such a condition was a philosophical illusion. Every interaction changed both observer and observed or worker and the thing worked upon. He found the essential nature of man in a natural state (that is a state where he is not alienated from himself) as one of productive joyful work. ‘Man produced ‘’universally’’. He produced even when he was ‘’free from physical need’’, he therefore formed objects ‘in accordance with the laws of beauty’’.

Man was not a passive being who could exist without interaction with matter. In fact no living species could. What made man unique was his need to realise himself through his work. Man’s conscious life activity was ‘in creating a world of objects by his practical activity.’ In a state of connectedness with nature man would fully develop his natural powers and essential qualities and find himself in ‘a world that he has created.’ Emancipation in this way would be both a matter of knowing and being. It is only in this state that man would not only realise his bond with his productive work, his inherent and essential qualities but also in his bond with other men that had been robbed and cast into the sphere of debasement, cruelty and competition through the institution of private property and money. This would result in what Marx termed the ‘whole man’. Not one who debases himself, sells his labour, commodifies himself and everything else; and finds a few scraps of satisfaction in the brutish satisfaction of instinctual desires after he has finished his alienating and dehumanising labour, but by actually being the productive person that he naturally is.

Here Marx also critiques the classical economists of a century earlier. He finds in Adam Smith a person who describes the laws of demand and supply, of the invisible hand of the market, of the self-interest of the producer, of the benefits in the division of labour – as though these were natural. In fact Marx posited that Smith merely described a debased alienated condition and detailed it not a natural one. Rather than understanding the historical processes that shaped it and the essence of humanity behind it, Smith and other classical economists merely described it. For Marx classical economics was just a superficial detailing of man’s alienated state.

Marx delved into man’s current state and how society’s cultural mores were but a reinforcement of its material relations by doing so he envisaged a materialist conception of history. Ideas, philosophy, politics, religion, art were all a ‘superstructure’ in a word instruments, used by the ruling class. The classes themselves were ultimately based on their material relations. Relations based on who owned the means of production.

In conclusion, the period 1837-1844 were years when Marx had all but completed his understanding of man and human history. Later works were oriented towards further action and analysis. His Communist Manifesto was an activist agenda explaining what the human condition was at that time and the means of overcoming it. In Capital he explained in economic terms what his theories were based on. But all this rested on the influences in his younger days where he was exposed to the concepts of alienation. His work in those seven years was to rediscover the causes behind this alienation which made him critique all earlier theorists. Not only was the concept crucial to Marx it also was an emotionally fulfilling one. In all the rationalistic style of writing, Marx appears consummately passionate about his theories and ideals. As Gareth Stedman Jones quotes the early Marx in his Early Philosophical Mansucripts: ‘Money was the ‘’alienated ability of mankind’’. In a ‘’human world’’, by contrast, the general confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities expressed by money and exchange value would be impossible. There you could only ‘’exchange love only for love…..’’’

Hartog, Historicity and Heritage

Patrick Wright’s book ‘On Living in an Old Country’ which examines the way we percieve and look at history today is interesting indeed. While reading it this morning I came across his reference to a French Historian named Francois Hartog. Francois attempted to explain the different ways in which we attempt to connect to history across different periods. He called these ‘regimes of historicity.’ An interesting term. It made me ponder over the way we relate to and deal with history in different eras and how history is never just the past but our interaction and reaction to the past in the present.

During the 19th century, at the height of Imperialism, History was looked at for inspiration for the future. After all it was the memory of the great works of antiquity – the marvelous intellectual and administrative achievements of the Greeks and Romans that inspired the Renaissance and from there modern science and the Enlightenment.

History then was looked at for inspiration as a long linear line of progress. The White Man’s Burden, his civilizing mission. His ‘Historical’ mission to save the world by ushering into it modern scientific thought.

History was of the monument – Monuments were there to inspire the present towards a golden future. Statues of Plato, Artistotle, Socrates, Newton, Nelson or Wren were inpirational. They embodied the virtues needed for the onward march of western progress.

Then came communism and the Marxist simplification of History as an eternal bipolar class struggle. Suddenly History was to be re-written. Most of the achievements that Enlightened Europe looked up to were to be condemned as either feudal, capitalist, monarchist or bourgeoise. In fact history was only to be looked at with disgust as a series of mistakes and abominable cruelty not to repeated as the Communist state took its masses to a classless utopia.

Then came post-colonialism and the sudden freeing of colonies. History again came into play differently. It affected the formerly colonised and the erstwhile colonisers differently. And in fact both showed a bipolar disorder in their view of history.

The former colonies rediscovered a series of national heroes from the past whom they enshrined in monuments for present inspiration. India’s new emblem was the famed Ashokan pillar, streets were named after natonalist heroes and legends of the past. Cities were renamed to their earlier pre-British titles – Madras became Chennai, The Hyderabad state became Andhra Pradesh, the place of the Andhra peoples as Madras presidency became the place of the Tamils. But it was bipolar - at the same time they also wanted to remove a lot of the embarassingly backward memories of the country's history - caste discrimination, superstitions, customs like Sati or in China footbinding - and look more to the future then to the past. Nehru looked at the gigantic steel plants and heavy industry as the Temples of a new India. This India as an India of the future not the past.

The former colonialists had a similar bipolar view. They looked back with pride, sadness and nostalgia at their glorious imperial years when they ruled the world and brought civilisation to millions. While, at the same time, running away from it as a period of mass exploitation, a misconcieved linear idea of progress, the horrors of imperialist greed and jingoism that brought about two World Wars. Bipolar disorder again.

40-50 years ago writes Hartog - a monument of the past was put up to inspire the future. There were three utopias people were looking at – the European and American powers were looking at a liberal, democratic, modern post-colonial world order. The Communists were looking towards their classless Marxist utopia and former colonies were looking the the birth and growth of their brand new nations into the new global powers. What an exciting time for the ‘future’.

Recently Hartog says – the world’s new ‘regime of Historicity’ is pure ‘presentism’. The memorial has replaced the monument, heritage has replaced history. History is not an inspiration for the future anymore. Everything has changed. History is purely to be enjoyed the way a film, a cricket match, a circus or a TV serial is enjoyed. Purely for the joy it gives in the ‘present’. There is nothing deeper to it. With this replacement of ‘history’ by so called ’heritage’ History has become big business. A 'Heritage' industry. It’s a multi-billion dollar tourism industry of 17day/16 night whistle-stop tours of historical sites. Purely to be enjoyed in the present and then forgoteen about.

Hartog says history now is no more about the future – about inspiration for the future – about a context for the future, but purely like the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Enjoy it for 2 hours and then go home, sleep and back to work tomorrow.

Presentism and Heritage have replaced the Past and History. And as the past ceases to inpire but only to entertain - does that mean we have nothing more to look ahead to apart from the fun of the 'now'?

Spirit Voices

They came to me
In Spirit voices
Voices with no words
In childhood they came
As alone-ness or a streak of sunlight
They entered winter wool
And moist eyes
A heavy heart
A fragment of paper

They saddened with dusk
Or dying
Last breaths
Fallen leaves
Sandpaper faces
And creviced wrinkles
Sadness held them like a cup
And one felt a tight embrace
Of fear
Fearing the wrenching seperation
And detachment of sadness
Into an ethereal realm
Of lightness far away

In happiness
One held thoughts
And songs
And love
Heavy
Like a filled water balloon
One spattered love
In bursts of laughter
Splattered that water balloon
On a wall
And felt happy all over

They come to me
These spirit voices
Less frequently now
Less than they used to
They come with attachments
Of reason
That open along with the file
They don't smear
They formulate and think
But I still wait for them
Still wait for myself rather
To still open
And just open
And wait
Because they'll come
Again

Literature?

I’ve just finished reading the morning papers. Was thinking how our newspapers can be like the minds of people with multiple personality disorders. An IPL celebration a few pages ahead of the massacre of 76 CRPF personnel by Maoists. Rihanna talking about her pals having an Indian wedding a few pages up from a srap dealer dying of radiation he picked up from scrap containing Cobalt-60 lying around at a scrapyard. And then of course movie reviews – and then, how India is second only to China in the increasing sales of Light Commercial Vehicles.

The great news of 3G technology now being approved and auctioned by the government to private bidders came right below the radioacive waste and on the right of the Home Minister’s offer of resignation after the Maoist massacre in Dantewada.

It was while reading Eric Fromm, a brilliant psychoanalyst, that I got his description of the insanity of our media. Advertisements for shirts that will make you irresistible next to a child’s rape, amputated limbs next to a brand of designer sarees for weddings.

What does it mean? Has the world got so complex, and do all of us live in so many small particles of the world that we ourselves are like the newspapers – bits of unrelated human matter living out our own parts, like these unrelated and unrelatably unconnected articles – and we only become a part of a whole unconsciously by a scientist’s cold laws – Adam Smith’s supply and demand, Comte’s sociological theories, Freud’s priniciples of drives and instincts, Toynbee’s theories of factors that influence history. Is that what makes us a part of a whole – a theory in an academic lecture or Marxian discourse – an abstraction, observation, reflection, analysis, empirical statement?

After puzzling and being baffled over today’s papers – I sipped some steaming hot tea and closed my eyes under a cool fan that provided a tranquilizing respite from the scorching 40 degree Delhi summer outside.

As I closed my eyes in this safe haven – the paper stories came to life in my imagination – the growing up of these CRPF men, the time they were boys, their parents and school. Being brought up in their neighbourhoods, their parent’s responses to their decisions to apply for the paramilitary forces. Their children. The regular reports of their postings to their families back home. SMS-es, chats with kids.

And then the ambush, the soldier lying screaming as a bullet, mortar, shrapnel is inside him slicing into his body parts – maybe his eyes, genitals, spine – crushed, agonising. Screaming helplessly minute after minute, hour after hour to silence. Probably being kicked by one of the attackers and beng stripped of his ammunition and weapons in response – maybe thankfully shot in the brains as a respite to get out of the agony.

And then the reflection of the story – 400 words – next to a shirt brand that makes you irresistible to women and prospective emplyers, above the new 3G revoution that’ll make our mobile phone internet surfing be at double the speed, below a vibrant headline of the do-or-die IPL game tonight.

I opened my eyes, in this cool safe, secure South Delhi flat of mine, sipped some more tea that was growing lukewarm, as my eyes opened – imagination under closed eyes converted to analysis over opened ones. The paper had so much that I wanted to know – so much more information that I needed and wanted. How is our economy growing? Car sales were a good sign for India but what progress was their on alternative cleaner energy sources to petrol and diesel? When are the Nilekani’s Unique Identification Cards going to be out? What impact will that have on a nation – that is now traceable, accountable, contactable? I read about a Bangladesh judge thankfully banning Islamists from forcing women under the veil required in the shariat? More questions – how do moderate Islamist states function and integrate Sharia with modern democratic principles?

I wanted to grasp so many subjects that would provide keys to this plethora of puzzles in the newspaper laid out in front of me – the variety of contexts that I needed to have to each of the stories that intrigued me. Economics, Political Science, History, Sociology, Psychology, Ethics - would give me some answers I thought.

But then I realised I rarely read the newspaper in such detail. And then where’s the time to get to know so much?

More importantly I realised that this Multiple Personality Disorder, this skipping, unrelatedly on the surface of human events – carefully sliding over the dehumanised thin ice that prevents us from falling into any of the cracks of tragic human experience and pain that the stories hold in their limited words – keeps me away from being a media hound.

Am I an escapist then? An avoider? Perhaps. Somewhat. But I don’t think entirely. I like novels, or books that dwell through an entire experience of a subject. Is that an anal psychological trait? One thing at a time? Top to bottom? In depth? No. I don’t think so. I think a novel does justice and lives out a story. Fully encompasses, holds, delves and experiences. Falls under the thin cracks of these newspaper stories and drowns in the depths of human life and feeling. The Grapes of Wrath made us experience the Joads in their pain during the Great Depression across the hundreds of pages of that voluminous tome. And yes, I’m sure the New York Times had the heading and story (next to attractive adverts and baseball no doubt) of Depression deaths due to starvation. But I felt it in Steinbeck, lived and breathed with Tom Joad.

I’m still in my safe haven. I’m extremely community unfriendly, quite isolated in my own bubble. Perhaps I can grapple out of my self-centred existence – my comfort zone – and do more for my commnunity respond more as a citizen. (I actually plan to work on those traits this year. It’s a goal I’ve put down.)

Another goal this year of mine was which degree I would choose as a field of study because I plan to complete my graduation in this ripe middle age and start the first year of my chosen degree this year (in a few months in fact). I scrolled through in great detail the courses of London Universities Distance Education section on the internet.

At the end of all the dwelling and ruminating - I didn’t go for psychology, economics, sociology, media studies or politics that I’ve talked about above.

I went for Literature.

I have always been with crumpled skin
Trying to feel through crumpled things
My thoughts dumped in crumpled bins
Freckled, pocked and sticky sins

I lived curled in womb-like warmth
‘Til I was unfurled, pinned
Pinioned, stomped
Breathless, windless
Sudden junk

Was hurled, uncurld
This swirled within me
I got drunk and stunk
Living
Mephistophelian funk

I loved, lost, lusted, mistrusted
Digested, Joked and Jested
Divorced, Debauched
De-drunk ‘til I slunk

Whimpering into quiet
Non-smoking edges of walls
White and logical
Analytical and brailled

I fingered blind reason
With pricked hands of faith
Bled through to dullness
Crimson to grey-green

I became translucent
Opaque, dull
Un-quaked

I neither uncorked nor paced
Didn’t steam got spaced
I lie crumpled now
In shedding skin
Crouching muscles
Hidden for a gym
I look lost
Talent-less, tossed
Not knowing begininings
Nor middles or ends
I find no bookmark
To rest awhile
I roll on
Urchinned entwined
Feeling in commas
Pausing at stops
Sometimes thinking my own
Sometime others quoted thoughts
I’m crumpled-stiltskin in
A corner found
Neither living nor dead
Not fading not found.

The Grand Cricket Appraisal

With the sheer variability of cricketing conditions - from the pitch to the weather conditions - affecting cricket scores, putting some sort of yardstick or benchmark for what determines good team scores, batting and bowling in the three forms of the game might sound like sheer stupidity.

But I’m embracing that stupidity and making a list of yardsticks for the fun of it, knowing very well how subjective it is.

There is a mild degree of objectivity in these yardsticks though. And in some ways one can use these yardsticks as a very broad thumb rule for the success or failure of teams and individuals.

OK here’s the Grand Cricket Appraisal

These are what I consider good or bad scores for teams:

Test

Lousy
100-200

Average
200-300

Good
300-400

Very Good
400-500

Outstanding
500+



ODI

Lousy
100-200

Average
200-250

Good
250-300

Very Good
300-350

Outstanding
350+



T20

Lousy
100-120

Average
120-150

Good
150-180

Very Good
180-200

Outstanding
200+

And here are what I consider good batting averages for individual players (for ODIs and T20s strike rates are essential too)

Great Test Batsman
Average – 50+
Strike Rate – N.A.

Great ODI Batsman
Average – 40+
Strike Rate 100+

Great T20 Batsman
Average – 35+
Strike Rate 140+

And for bowlers:

Great Test Bowler
Average – below 25
Economy Rate – N.A.

Great ODI Bowler
Average – below 25
Economy Rate – below 6

Great T20 Bowler
Average – below 20
Economy Rate – below 8

All comments, tomatoes, rotten eggs, suggestions, solutions, opinions invited

Boring Test Cricket

After my interest in test cricket being the "real" cricket got stirred again during the India-SL 3 Test series, the same interest completely zoned out in a horrendously dull and boring 3rd day's play of the deciding 3rd test between New Zealand and Pakistan at Napier.
After NZ got a sizeabale 250+ lead, Pakistan crawled their way to 128 for no loss by stumps.
Now, this could have been seen as an epic fightback, but after watching intently for over 2 hours I found it painfully dull and uninspiring, from a cricket lovers point of view. There are huge chunks of time in test cricket when absolutely nothing happens. The bowler runs in dunking almost the same thing ball after ball with slight variations and the batsman just defends decent delvieries and takes singles or twos of somewhat poor balls.
I contrast todays experience with the one I had yesterday during the mega-scoring 2nd T20 between India and Sri Lanka. The degree to which bowlers were under pressure to think and variate on each and every ball was amazing. Every ball was worth its weight in gold. One of the lessons of yesterday's match was Ishant Sharma who started off bowling beautifully yet ended up expensive with 2/42 of 4 overs. The reason he was expensive was he began in test mode with short bouncing and seaming deliveries and full, inswinging yorkers. One of those lethal yorkers was a classic test dismissal, bowling Dilshan for a duck. However after that, he carried on in Test mode against Sangakkara and Jayasuriya. He barely varied his pace at all. Therefore, while he got 2 wickets, he ended up expensive. In T20s the bowler needs everything - his test repertoire of full swinging yorkers, and short accurate bouncers to the body (the only test ball that ould be expensive is the one swinging outside off stump, while that can induce an edge in test cricket in the shortest format it allows batsmen to free their arms and whack). Apart from the yorker and short ball, the fast bowler needs a variety of slower balls - the very slow back of the hand knuckle ball, the leg cutter and the off cutter, also the slow bouncer and slow yorker. Every ball needs another strategy.
At the end of the day a bowler succeeds in any of the formats by being unpredictable. That's how a yorker after a succession of short balls gets a wicket, a googly after many leg spinners gets a wicket, a doosra after several offspinners, a quick arm ball after a series of flighted off spinners, an inswinger after several outswingers......
It's unpredictability which rewards a bowler in any of the forms - and the greatest pressure to be unpredictable comes in the T20 format.
Now, with batsmen too, the pressure to score takes them away from careful technique to unpredictable forays with both the willow and the stance. Backing away to the leg-side to make room, the dill-scoop, the moving towards off, the standing ouside the crease to convert a yorker into a full-toss, the reverse sweep etc. etc. etc. etc.
Fielding has to be at its best and so does captaincy, because every ball needs a careful look at the field and a word of advice to the bowler. There is no greater pressure on bowler, batsman, fielder and captain then the marvellous innovation of the millenium - the Twenty20!