Alienation

The human psyche under capitalism

The Editor

04 Apr 25

This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

In the typical western city, one does not have to search very hard to find the signs: derelict buildings, littered streets, homeless with pockmarked faces pushing carts filled with bottles. Across North America, opioid abuse and a cost of living crisis have sent homeless populations climbing against a backdrop of city blocks scorched by wildfire, ground tremors from fracking, mass flooding by storm surges and condos of glittering glass. In 2018, Chris Hedges published one of the most potent illustrations of capitalist alienation with America, The Farewell Tour.

In the book, he sets the table early: “Hurricane after hurricane, monster storm after monster storm, flood after flood, wildfire after wildfire, drought after drought will gradually cripple the empire, draining its wealth and resources and creating swaths of territory defined by lawlessness and squalor.”¹

Hedges then introduces us to Christine Pagano, a woman who fell into drugs during high school after her stepfather was caught sleeping with her 16-year-old classmate and her home life imploded. Years after experimenting with heroin, she would turn to prostitution in order to feed a $500 heroin habit and sold her body in Jersey City to Wall Street traders, business executives and bankers “who were the prostitutes’ main customers.”² She shares that this was preferable to Camden, New Jersey, where “‘the poverty is so bad. People rob you for $5, literally for $5. They would pull a gun on you for no money.’”³

Then there is Robin Rivera, the product of a troubled home who later earned minimum wage at a hair salon in Los Angeles. She accepted a proposition from a talent agent in the pornography industry in the hope of making ends meet. “‘They tied me up and hung me from the ceiling,’ she said,” adding that she was also electrocuted with a cattle prod. “‘They put a hook in my ass’” and “‘tied my ponytail to it. They tied my arms to a barrel. They tied my legs to a barrel. He put a vibrator on me…Five hours is a long time. For $900.’”⁴

Depravities of this kind are rarely discussed in the media. This could be due to the sheer numbers of those who indulge—up to one-quarter of web searches and one-third of downloads relate to pornography, after all. But it is corollary to the economic imbalances and deprivations of the economic sphere, the “rough neighbourhoods” on the other side of the tracks in our cities or the beggars encountered at home and abroad. As noted in “Ecology,” capitalism turns both land and people into commodities—“venal objects”—and this becomes the lived experience for all-too-many in rich and poor countries alike.⁵

When Marx discusses “alien capital” confronting “alien labour,” he is spotlighting two economic processes which move on their own momentum, as though independent of human agency.⁶ Human beings are creative by nature and we define ourselves by conscious, self-directed activity. Under capitalism, this is rarely the case. Individuality and self-expression is seldom found in production; work is transactional and conducted under authoritarian oversight for a wage on which to subsist. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx writes that “the need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.” It is this need of money that elevates exchange-value to the highest priority, with use-value of only secondary consideration to a profitable exchange. Work is reduced to a pursuit of that universal commodity, money, and it is only in that cramped space of time off the job when we are free to express ourselves, largely as consumers. Due to the energy consumed by employment, leisure itself is distorted and becomes a site of excess and expense. Born of this common need for money, we see an extension of products which appeal to our base instincts, subservient only “to inhuman, depraved, unnatural and imaginary appetites”—of the sort highlighted in the above paragraphs.⁷

As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm interpreted Marx, “alienation leads to the perversion of all values.” Because economic aims are “the supreme aim of life, man fails to develop any truly moral values,” and “the riches of a good conscience, of virtues, etc.” are impossible as they lack monetary impetus.⁸ The capitalist system of production severs society from the splendour of nature and turns individuals into replaceable parts—whether they be numbered employees and managers or prostitutes and johns. Freethinking and meditative contemplation is thus muzzled with individuals crippled by a pursuit of exploitation and libidinous excitations. Downstream from a mountain of emissions and cheap labour are resort vacations and cruises, restaurants serving high-priced cocktails and IMAX movies with sensory-melting special effects. This is what passes through the free time of conforming consumers under capitalism today.

Engels saw this “spiritual-barrenness” through all echelons of society. Corporate conglomerates are the fountainhead of prepackaged, empty pleasures but there is a social context to it. Everyone seeking to maintain or improve their standing within the capitalist hierarchy ultimately become slaves to their own employment—even elite financiers and CEOs become “slave of his own capital and his own profit-getting.”⁹ Even the ruling class beneficiaries of capitalism’s wealth find themselves with limited agency when it comes to maintaining their standing. If they do not open mass markets, pollute, debt-shark or shrewdly exploit, they will simply be overtaken by a more capable servant of capitalist expansion.

The total alienation of the individual by the ever-complex and expanding process of capitalist production is the reason behind mental health epidemics. In the United States, 90% of people believe there is a crisis of mental health and 20% experience acute symptoms. In Canada, almost half the population is estimated to experience episodes of mental illness by age 40. In Britain, depression is the condition most commonly encountered by the National Health Service and the instructor Mark Fisher observed: “Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia…an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’—but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”¹⁰ Supporting the Marxist theory of alienation are the many studies concluding that the more a country is penetrated by capital relations, the worse the mental health becomes. Fisher explains: “When it actually arrives capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.”¹¹ The implication is that less-developed countries contain communitarian cultures that are less eroded by capital and experience lower rates of mental illness when compared to the hyper-competitive, technologically advanced and socially isolating realms of wealthy capitalist nations.

But the task of building an unalienated, harmonious society necessary to individual freedom and human flourishing will not be accomplished by sliding backward on the development scale. Marx did not advocate for an anti-capitalist world, but rather, a post-capitalist one. This means negating the liberal order by incorporating capitalism’s high economic productivity while removing its deleterious effects on the social fabric and natural environment. Capitalist productive forces have brought humanity an enormous capacity to produce but an incredibly inefficient and wasteful manner of allocation. By exerting a conscious, democratic control over the production process, a material output could be allocated according to need rather than payment. The pursuit of exchange-values creates an alienating and immoral world but the pursuit of use-values reverses this effect. Houses to live in rather than speculate with. Medicine to save lives rather than profit. Nature for its aesthetics and life-giving functions rather than plunder. Food grown for nutritional quality instead of an ultra-processed quantity.

Use-values demand broad input from consumers and workers, they demand the elimination of noxious products and exploitative services from production, they demand positive, humanistic outcomes from artificial intelligence, they promote free time and activity that nurtures the latent talents within all individuals. In other words, they place moral virtue, community, family, mental tranquility and natural beauty into the heart of economic production.

A post-capitalist and unalienated free association is one where people are their own masters, liberated from state authority, irrational market fluctuations and corporate dictates. To quote Marx, “the associated producers regulate their interchange with Nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it… Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis.”¹²

Alienation

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