Strangers in our home world
We are alienated creatures living in our very own home world. That alienation stems from workers’ relationship to both the product and the process of their work, and has a wide range of unpleasant effects. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx stated eloquently that: ‘The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien’.
In the very first page of Capital, Marx begins to analyze the nature of our capitalist society, and he does this in terms of the commodity, the source of our alienation. We live in a planet-wide dictatorship of the commodity. This means that whether, as workers, we live in a liberal capitalist society or a modern authoritarian state of the left or right makes no difference. The commodity is capitalism’s most defining feature, transcending the varied political forms it might take. Our labour power which produces commodities has itself been turned into a commodity and is sold in the marketplace like any other. Although we live in a world where political ideologies battle it out with each other, capitalism is a global system. It is not defined by those political differences but by its having historically superseded slavery and feudalism.
The commodity is king
The commodity society is a world system in which the working class (that includes you, even if you see yourself as middle-class and educated) must sell its ability to work and produce objects or services in the marketplace for those who own and control the factories, offices, mines, etc. Alienation exists in modern liberal regimes, in the former USSR, in modern China, in the world’s many Muslim theocratic states, and in nations run by either left-wing military juntas or right-wing dictators. Alienation transcends all political boundaries, all political differences, and it ravages the minds of all populations of working people without distinction of national or other origin and regardless of the colour of their collar.
As soon as we step into our place of employment, our time is no longer ours. Nor is the object that we produce. Ours is a world where the needs of society are secondary, even though it is one where the ideology of our rulers maintains that the laws of supply and demand exist to meet them. Ideology is always an upside-down version of both our own experience and the truth. We work because we must earn money to buy the commodities required for our survival, so we sell the only commodity in our possession — our talents, skills, and energies known as labour-power. We do this because everything else is walled off from us: food, clothes, books, medications, offices, factories, land. We live in a prison while desperately believing we are free. Without that belief we would not be able to tolerate our imprisonment.
As prisoners, we live dispossessed of the world we inhabit. We walk streets that are not ours, lined with shops that invite us in to part with our limited money. Shops compete with each other to grab those pieces of paper we carry and to rinse those plastic cards. These pieces of paper and those cards mean everything to them, while we mean nothing. We may be treated like friends by workers trained to provide ‘customer satisfaction’ but we are really strangers. Here too, appearances are deceptive. They are the mirror image of reality. You walk into a shop where everyone smiles at you, but no one cares about you or, even if they do care, they remain shut in a fake reality, putting on an act that encourages you to spend your money on their owners’ wares. Their care is limited by the hope that their boss will sell enough to keep them employed. These workers are pressured by their bosses to entice you to spend, and with your restricted means you feel pressured having to resist that pressure. There would be no need to tempt anyone if these objects were already ours. There would be no need to feel any pressure at all if all we had to do was to walk into a store and take what we need. In a commodity world, however, we must suffer a psychological stress, and that stress is a key symptom of our alienation. As workers we have only one marketable commodity, labour-power, so the capitalists don’t need to coax us to sell it; we’ll have to sell it sooner or later if we don’t want to starve or become homeless. The community and the commodity are always at odds, each challenging the reality of the other. The days of emperors and feudal landlords have been replaced by the rule of the commodity; tomorrow we hope the community takes its place.
Come Monday
Every Monday, and every morning of the work week, we experience that dreaded anticipation of one more day selling our commodity, our labour power. This is another sign that our work is alien to us. Movies are made about alien invasions which humans join up to resist, but they don’t match in scope the reality of the planetary domination of the commodity today as it gobbles up your time, your energy, your health, and the natural world of which you are a part. The Matrix may be the best cinematic metaphor for this. Your labour-power, while it is your commodity, is worth nothing to you until you sell it: you are a slave of your very own commodity. It is attached to you like so much dead weight around your ankles. Monday morning blues is the sense of dread that comes with our recognition that we are living the lives of modern slaves. And just as those workers in the shops must feign interest in you with their eyes, and smile as you walk in, you too must work, cognitively feigning harmony amidst disharmony.
You must pretend to fit in, to look happy, to look like you are free, when really only capitalist employers are free. Your band t-shirt, your new shoes, your sharp jacket are all desperate attempts to feel cool, to foster the illusion of your freedom and individuality, even though you know that t-shirt, those shoes, and that jacket are mass-produced. If you recognised your true status and your true predicament, you would find your life just as intolerable as it is to those of us who yearn for freedom now.
Just as you blot out the truth of your mortality, you invest hefty psychological energy in your own personal lie. You work hard to pretend that your work is freely chosen, and you live in a community that is meeting its needs, when the reality of your status and predicament is never far away from your nose. You get a glimmer of that reality each time you pay your rent or mortgage, each time you calculate your savings, each time a country wages war, each time worsening climate change or environmental destruction hits you in another headline, each time the political clowns who run for office beg for your vote. You need to keep this reality firmly out of your awareness for as long as possible. It’s depressing (a word that means to push down, as your life is being pushed down or depressed.) So you get lost in your video games and in social media chats, in sport and shopping and other entertainments. Amusements and life are mirror images of each other just like the commodity and the community are. The less real life you live, the more entertainment you feel you need (or are force fed). You know that life is not just breathing, eating, and digesting, that there must be more, but entertainment seems the only way you have of filling up that hole inside, at least temporarily, like a drug.
Everywhere
There is almost nowhere to go in our modern world in which the needs of the commodity do not take priority. You can try to get away to a quiet park for a few hours to enjoy the natural world (itself a vast artificial amusement park created by employed gardeners). You can enjoy a good read, but even then you can’t quite forget that you are only temporarily escaping the world outside, a world that is not yours. It’s a failed escape, and you are now a failure. Even in that green place, your daily worries about the life you lead, the life of work, bills, prices, savings, are never far from your mind. You are nothing, and the commodity is everything.
You must cope with this alienation. The commodity world tells you that you must be a rugged individual. It tells you, don’t be a ninny who complains, who bursts their bubble; you must be tough; you must not let your alienation bother you or anyone else; stop thinking another world is possible; stop feeling as though this isn’t the best possible way for humans to live. Despite everything the commodity world tells you, you are a person with many potentialities, including a potential to create a human-centred world. That is within your power even if you don’t identify yourself as a socialist, as a few of us currently do.
In a world of alienation, we have no control over our environment. Commodity society is by nature wasteful. Vast amounts of wealth are extracted from us workers. This is wealth that needs to be banked, sold, exchanged, advertised, invested, and protected. And all that requires a mountain of organisations that each consume precious planetary resources. The gangs who run these rackets in every country also hire workers to protect their fiefdoms. They employ militaries who contribute hugely to environmental despoliation through their waste of resources and their bloody wars.(According to an article from 2022 published in Inside Climate News, the US military alone contributes as much to climate change as entire countries the size of Denmark). If we allow ourselves to think about this, it may upset us, but we have no direct control over the problem. Commodity society doesn’t care about us or what we think; it only cares about our precious labour-power and what we can produce for our employers with it. Many of us protest commodity society’s destruction of nature, and murder of humans, but we only protest because we are powerless and dispossessed. Instead of protesting, it is time for us to build a society of which we feel we are a part, not outsiders as we do now. Such a world is not dedicated to serving the commodity; it is not a world of alienation; it’s a world of community, of voluntary action, and one with the simple aim of meeting our needs.
DR WHO