Alienation - more than just a feelin'

You walk into the fluorescent-lit gas station minimart at 6 in the morning, hoping to get a coffee to help you on your drive to the airport. You make your coffee and come stand in line. The man in front of you is angrily shouting at the two young men standing at the cash register. You overhear him screaming something about burned hot dogs and how he needs to talk to the manager, before he storms off. You expect the cashiers to be irritated at their discourteous customer, but they happily smile at you, ring you up, and wish you a happy day. You strike up a conversation (a short one, mind you, you do have a plane to catch) and enquire about how they can be so cheery getting mistreated early in the morning while toiling at a minimum wage job. One explains that he’s an evangelical Christian who loves work as the lord’s vocation for us all, while the other, a Hindu, explains how Krishna teaches us to embrace our duty, however unpleasant it can be. They are fast friends despite their religious differences and love their job whatever others might think of it.

The critique that capitalism is “alienating” is one of the most persistent allegations against the economic system. It speaks to something deeper and existential than the critique that capitalism is exploitative. Both criticisms, of course, were first put in robustly theoretical terms by Karl Marx, although our contemporary notion of alienation goes back to Hegel. In his magnum opus Das Kapital, Marx argued that capitalism is systemically exploitative in the way it extracts surplus value from the workers (surplus value being the ultimate source of profit). The critique that capitalism is “alienating” is an earlier one, made in notebooks unpublished in his lifetime. Despite this, the notion of alienation remains sprinkled through his later works, including Kapital itself.

The charge that capitalism is alienating speaks to an experience a lot of us share. Our work is demanding and unrewarding, the fruits of our labor make our employers rich while we see paltry raises, consumerism promises fulfillment than never seems to fulfill us, we work long shifts even when we would rather be spending time with our family, etcetera. This all boils down to the fact that capitalism treats us as mere cogs in a profit-making machine, depriving us of the meaningful experiences we all really strive for in life.

To really bite, this critique that capitalism is alienating ought to be universal. Surely, if capitalism as a system is alienating, then we all share this same experience of alienation. Despite this, there are always many folks who love their work. Usually, this is only work that has some tangible benefit for humanity, is well compensated, or is otherwise enjoyable. Yet all this speaks to a rather confused understanding of alienation. It treats alienation as merely a subjective, psychological phenomenon. Surely, this experience is a part of alienation, yet it is merely a symptom of what Marx really means by it. Rather, alienation is an objective set of social relationships, not our experience of alienation. Our experience is shaped not only by that objective social relationship but by our ideology, personality, and values.

What, then, is alienation? In Hegel’s telling, it is a feature of the subject’s work. The individual has desires and needs and works to reshape their objective world to suit those desires and needs. They make something, say a loaf of bread because they are hungry, or a hammer because they need to build a house. Yet once they have worked on their world and remade it in their image, whatever they have made becomes something other and alien, such that it has some independence from their needs and desires. The bread can get moldy or stale, the hammer can break. There is always a kind of otherness, and this is where alienation comes from. It is literally turning something internal (our intentions or image of what we create) into something external and independent.

In his early 1844 Manuscripts (or Paris Manuscripts), Marx modifies this Hegelian concept and turns it into a feature of capitalist labor. Bread isn’t alienated from us simply in virtue of being bread as an object, but as a commodity. Marx argues that Hegel conflates objectification with alienation. Hegel thinks of us as subjects as his point of departure, so whenever we make an object we make something that becomes alien to us. For Marx, we’re objective, material beings that happen to have a subjective consciousness, so of course we create things like bread to survive. In other words, it’s not alienation to create a material object because we are a material object that works. The bread is very much an expression of our nature, and not a loss of self. What makes objectification into alienation is when the process of labor is taken up and dominated by some institution that we do not control, even if we created it. That institution, for Marx, is the capitalist enterprise (though under other conditions it could be states, churches, universities, and so on).

Marx defines four types of alienation characteristic of a capitalist economy:

(1) alienation from the things we make … when we make a commodity, we make something that is owned by someone else and for the purposes of someone else. The bread I made will enrich the guy who owns the bakery, while I continue to make a paltry wage. It could be sold to anyone, including the police officer who breaks up the strike I’m on over my low wages.

(2) alienation from the process of labor … when we make a commodity, we are following a plan set up according to the ends or purposes of our employer. If the baker turns off the air conditioning to save money, we simply have to put up with the heat blasting from the oven into our workplace. No amount of cologne and deodorant can control the stink while we wallow in our disgustingly hot workplace.

(3) alienation from species-being … this is the most esoteric form of alienation, describing the way we are alienated from human nature itself. Human nature is both creative and social, which is to say productive, and we utilize that productive creativity for our fellow human beings. We learn from them, embracing their needs as our own, and depend on them to meet our needs. Your needs become mine, and mine become yours. Capitalism weaponizes this against us, as we are socialized into functioning as mere cogs in the machine. It imposes on us a need for money, and forces us to toil away for the income we need to survive. It does not do so in an intentional or conspiratorial way, but as what Hegel calls the “cunning of reason”. Society is a big, rational system that operates in ways no individual agent ever fully understands (at least not without stepping back and spending decades analyzing society instead of doing stuff).

(4) alienation from one another … this is the most obvious form of alienation. Capitalism turns all into competitors in the marketplace, fighting over the same scarce opportunities to survive. Businesses treat consumers as dupes to be fooled by clever marketing and grifts. We all become increasingly atomized, and struggle to relate to one another as people instead of as competitors. Capitalism also conceals our relations of interdependence. We don’t see how we all depend on each other, since I buy bread from the grocer not the baker who actually makes the bread.

Notably, all these forms of alienation have both objective and subjective dimensions. Human beings are both subjects and objects in different ways, as we have seen. When we are alienated from the object of our labor, an object we created is lost, but we can also experience that loss. When we are alienated from the process of labor, we are placed as a cog in a vast objective machinery, but we also can also feel dominated. When we are alienated from our species-being, we become less than human in an objective, material sense, but we also can feel dehumanized through this. When we are alienated from each other, we become competitors in a marketplace, but we can also feel that loss of community. Importantly, the psychological and emotional states do correspond to these objective realities and are an inherent part of it, but because our psychology is influenced by ideology and personal experience everyone interprets it differently. Yet the objective, material reality persists regardless of how it is interpreted.

We are all people with a conscious subjectivity, yes, but we are also all material bodies with physical needs and capacities. We relate to one another as both objects and subjects. Alienation modifies that by reducing our social relations to objective ones, making our subjective relations superfluous.

Consider going on a date. While some toxic and superficial individuals go on dates purely on objective grounds (which is to say, they want someone who looks sexy), well adjusted people go into dates looking for someone who is physically and personally compatible. You dress cute in the hope of attracting them, but you also put your best foot forward in terms of your personality. You objectify yourself, emphasizing your most attractive characteristics, but you don’t reduce yourself to a mere object. You too are enticed by their appearance, cute clothes, etc, but also by their personality. So in a certain sense you objectify the romantic partner, but not in an alienated way. Thus, a healthy date is an encounter between two people relating to one another both subjectively and objectively. Yet a dudebro (for the lack of a better term) alienated from women by watching too much manosphere content doesn’t relate to their date as a person but a lump of flesh. It’s a purely objective relationship, and they too relate to their partner purely objectively. They dress for sex appeal but pay no attention to their personality, treating women as disposable objects. This is why alienated young men so often find themselves embedded in misogynistic subcultures.

Alienation in the economy works the same way, concealing the subjective, social content of our social relations behind objective, material structures like money, property, employment contracts, and so on. Marx sums this up nicely in his Capital, famously stating:

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.

Though he doesn’t use the term alienation, the concept is clearly there. The Hungarian philosopher Lukács would pick up on this, identifying a modified version of Hegel’s alienation running through Marx’s work in the 1920s (those earlier manuscripts where Marx theorizes alienation wouldn’t get published until a few years later).

To put it one way, in Marx’s account we’re all both subjects and objects, but in capitalism the objects we have created have become independent from our will and confront us as a vast, implacable social machine. It dominates us, such that we can no longer relate to one another as subjects and such that our own subjective will and aspirations become a mere means to discipline and exploit us.

All that is to say, alienation is more than just a psychological state. The alienated social relations persist in objective reality however we interpret them, and one can be alienated as a worker while still being a happy worker. In fact, perhaps the happy worker is more alienated than the unhappy worker, since the happy worker is less able to recognize how their dreams and aspirations are being constrained and controlled by the instrumental needs of businesses and governments.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everything in life is always alienated. We do have a few little islands of unalienated life, and these little islands often provide the most meaningful moments in our lives. Family, friends, romantic partners, sports leagues, colleges, universities, and churches can provide this outlet. Classical social democratic parties like the German Social Democratic Party of the late 1800s and early 1900s put great effort into creating hiking clubs and other spaces for workers to enjoy some space free of alienation. In fact, genuine solidarity would be impossible if alienation was absolute.

Yet to take the analogy of islands to its logical conclusion, if the islands are our spaces free of alienation, then the inexorable totalizing tendency of capitalism is the climate change slowly but ceaselessly raising sea levels. The family becomes a space colonized by consumerism where women’s domestic labor “frees” men to work longer hours, or increasingly, where men and women are forced to work long hours to pay for childcare. Friends start to sell us garbage from some multi-level marketing scheme they got grifted into. Churches and temples increasingly become a vehicle for drawing tithes and selling holy books. Sports teams become tools for sports gambling firms, corporate advertisers, and sweatshop owners selling team jerseys. Universities chase grants, alumni donations, and bureaucratic metrics to secure funding. Since these non-alienated spaces still depend on an alienated economy, they remain under constant threat.

Those “happy workers” become useful idiots for expanding this commercialization of unalienated spaces. As they don’t understand the alienated conditions they inhabit, they become willing vectors for this process of accumulation. Commercial interests always find the easiest marks in people who are subjectively unaware of their intentions. The only way to protect ourselves and those spaces which grant us some refuge is to grasp the ruthless character of the institutions