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I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt only tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Marx called that alienation of labor.”
“What?” he asked.
“You can google that phrase, ‘alienation of labor’ and you’ll get a ton of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years.”
“They’re Marxists though?” he asked.
“Most of them, yeah,” I said.
He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”
I’m optimistic in the sense that I do think you can get quite a few of these people, at least temporarily, on our side. They’re usually opportunistic and you can sort of convince them that it’s better to stick with you than it is with the big Kapital, because they don’t really have a school of thought.
You’re gonna wanna make sure to watch out for them tho’ because they are also the type of people, who will sell you out for a coin. I think they ultimately refuse to change their mind because it forces them to face discomforting truth. Which is why, even if you provide them with irrefutable evidence and they somehow accept the evidence you provided, instead of lashing out at you, they will still shift their mindset to “Well I can’t do anything about it. I shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
It’s a lack of discipline. It’s why people can do Slavery, even though they fully understood the cruelty and immorality of Slavery, they knew it was bad, they didn’t wanna be a slave, they didn’t want their people to become one. But they didn’t wanna plow the fields themselves either, better to have someone else do it. Then when it had already gone on for too long they started pondering about blowback, which made people even more scared to release their slaves.
We keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, but eventually we’ll become aware of this and build class consciousness, where the cycle is going to end.