You write that 'markets and labor power change the internal character of what is traded on them and the surrounding form of life in which they are located.' What is alienation? What is it that we’re alienated from or made alien to?
There’s a long tradition of writing about alienated labor that goes back to Marx’s very early writings. The concept refers to exploited wage labor within capitalism, where the worker is alienated from his or her work but also from fellow human beings and from what Marx famously called our 'species being,' our humanity, our freedom to collectively decide what kind of lives we want to live and to build the institutions to do that.
People today are alienated from all of those things. There’s nothing more alienated, in terms of labor, than having to follow a script in interacting with customers, either on the phone or at a fast-food joint, while you’re also doing some backbreaking or repetitive labor in horrible conditions. So, we’re no strangers to alienated labor. I think the popularity of freelancing, even though that’s quite mystified in certain ways, does speak to a hunger for creativity, for being able to determine how you use your time, being an individual, not just being under the watchful surveillance of somebody else.
But I would say the deepest meaning of alienation and being unalienated has to do with freedom and democracy. Capitalism steals from us not just our labor and energy but our ability to decide collectively the most important questions about how we want to live. How hard do we want to work? How many hours? How much leisure do we want to have? What do we want to leave for future generations? How do we want to relate to nonhuman nature? What should we do with the social surplus that we collectively produce?
These are fundamental questions, and they are decided now essentially by a small handful of people who appropriate the surplus we produce and basically use market mechanisms to invest for the sake of maximal expansion.
In other words, we live in a society where Elon Musk gets to decide that he’s firing a car into space for fun and that’s how our social wealth is being used.
Absolutely. Whereas there might be many other things that we would prefer to do with that wealth. We might even prefer to produce less wealth and to live more simply, companionably, socially, and easily in a more relaxed way. We could have a much freer and more democratic life. But that’s not compatible with capitalism."
- Daniel Denvir interviewing Nancy Fraser, from "How Capitalism Worms Its Way Into Every Aspect of Our Lives." Jacobin, 8 December 2022.
