Marxian alienation, capitalism, and the commodification of the individual
Now, I may not be a Marxist in any sense of the word, but I have been reading what I can in terms of theory (really dry by the way, also, you can be a leftist without reading theory). Marx described alienation in a pre-modern notion as a worker being made to feel foreign to the products of their own labour. A modern version of this is being the commodity, we don’t own ourselves anymore. We are what’s called “human capital stock” if you work, you’re being depersonified and labeled as a resource meant to be used until it is no longer profitable, our value is in what we produce and not from being a human. Alienation is far more than feeling separate from what you make anymore, it’s not owning yourself, it’s making yourself a caricature of your favourite aspect of humanity and running with it until you realize that the hole in your person-hood hasn’t been filled. We don’t own the means of our own direction anymore, if we did in the first place.
The reason things like plant parenthood, cottage-core, handmade food, and minimalism/maximalism are becoming so popular is because of capitalist alienation, if we cannot own ourselves, we can own possessions that make us feel like we own something that is personal and real, the sad part is we buy our own bullshit for a while, accumulating a personality or getting rid of all the things that don’t make us feel human. This is why minimalism and maximalism have an appeal even though they’re polar opposites, we can’t own ourselves, but we can feel like it for a while. It’s not a cure however, we’re still in the system directly and by yielding for its demand of consumption, we strengthen it unwittingly. There’s no way I’m going to tie this back to solarpunk, this post isn’t about hope, it’s about realizing the images and hopes we have are being marketed towards us because we don’t know any other way besides the way under the system we grew up under or were assimilated into.
By rejecting these notions, we strengthen ourselves and by talking about it with other people, we expand class consciousness. Now should be a time of direct action, recruitment against the systems that seek to oppress us and take away our humanity. The hope lies not in the individual, but the collective, the radical notion of working together to overthrow an archaic hierarchical system is deemed an abomination by both the capitalist and their bureaucratic puppets, but we will fight for it anyway. Not because we choose to, but because we have to.
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