A long time ago, in what must seem like a galaxy far, far away, a man named Marx, sitting in a London library, wrote an essay about “alienation of labor”. Trotsky and Lenin and Mao got it all wrong in so many ways, but good old Karl had a good idea about alienation of labor that still applies to modern American state capitalism. Make no mistake about it, America is not a strictly capitalist country. In fact, our corporate coddling at the expense of the American worker looks a lot more like fascism than Adam Smith’s laizze faire dream of God’s hand moving across the marketplace. Anyway, Marx said that there was a time when we made things for their use. If you made a shoe, it was because you liked making shoes and/or needed shoes for your family. Once the fact of industrial capitalism became the economic model, no one made a shoe any more. A worker might make a part of a shoe, or even put together parts of shoes made by other workers. No one made shoes for the joy of making shoes any more. Workers made shoes for the weekly paycheck after industrial capitalism dominated the marketplace. Thus, we were “alienated” from our labor. Americans no longer are dominated by industrial capitalism because we are no longer an industrial nation as we were in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Nevertheless, the economic system of a service economy with state sponsored assistance to capital interests still has us working for the paycheck. A very great many of us provide some kind of service in the way of selling cars or teaching school or even practicing law not because we love that kind of work, but because we’re led to believe that we must have credit cards and a house in Edmond and an SUV and deoderant and Polo shirts and whatever else it is that advertising has created as a demand in our lives. We trudge to our insurance office or bank or whatever because we don’t like the work but we NEED the paycheck. We’re alienated from our labor. We get on that credit treadmill when we’re 19 or 20 years old and we stay there for another half century until we die of a stress related heart attack or stroke out. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THAT WAY!!! It is possible for you and me to do that which we love for the love of the work and let the money be damned. It’s not easy, though. You have to either throw out your television or be strong enough to avoid being manipulated by the constant messages of sex and death that come out of the commercials and the programs and the movies and whatnot. You have to be able to set your own priorities and discriminate between wants and needs — a very adult thing to do in a very juvenile culture. You have to be strong enough to laugh at your peer group when it buys its SUVs. You have to be strong enough to withstand the stares and condemnation of people you’d like to have as friends. You have to value a very different path. It must be important to you to read philosophy and spend quiet time thinking about what you believe is important. OUCH! Who does that??!!?? You must find your pleasures on your own and not be handed them by others. You must actually be an individual rather than one who merely mouths the comforts of atomization as you’ve been taught by the Henry Adams machine that put you in rows and columns for 12 years of school, Pavlovian responding to bells once an hour. You DO realize that all that schooling you suffered was subliminal training for you to be docile when you clocked in at your local factory, don’t you? The American Dream, so-called, is a nightmare of soul deadening enslavement to an oligarchial few who are now in control of the levers of our society, our culture, our economy, our very minds and thoughts. We use their words to express what can’t be expressed: our ennui, our angst, our frustration, our sublimation of ourselves to the outsized female breast selling us another useless and senseless piece of crap.
Nevermind, my children, nevermind. Go back to your blow things up gratuitous nudity slasher movies and lust after sleeker and faster penis substitutes. Class dismissed.