Workers are Ever-More Alienated At Work. Here’s What Means For Class Struggle During a Pandemic

Why the Politics of Anti-Alienation Needs Alienation to Function

image created by, and used with the permission of, Sabato Visconti

In an earlier article, I talked about alienation, and how it (along with exploitation) forms part of the core of the anti-capitalist Left’s critique of capitalism. I defined it as such:

the worker does not make their own decisions about what they will produce, where and how it will be sold, under what conditions they will work, so on and so on. These decisions are made by the owner(s) of the workplace, who hold it and its means of production as their private property.

In a more metaphorical sense, the degree of alienation that a given worker faces is exactly the degree to which the way that their workplace is actually run deviates from how they would choose to run their workplace.

Ending this discrepancy (along with ending exploitation) is the ultimate goal of the radical Left — but, as I will explain, the Left’s basic ability to recruit and to take action relies on this alienation. This presents something of an issue.

1 — Historical Shifts in Alienation

Photo by Sylas Boesten on Unsplash

If you read weird political manifestos from a hundred or so years ago, even the far-right ones all assumed that (in the developed world) workers would naturally want to have control over their own workplaces — the question was one of somehow convincing them to take that control in a way that wasn’t entirely hostile to the aims of the owners; this is what a lot of fascism was ultimately about — a way to redirect a class struggle that even the fascists saw as a direct outgrowth of material reality.

However, if you read modern-day politics, it’s entirely the opposite — even the far-left assumes that the workers will have to be convinced to seize control over their workplaces.

This is a startling change, made all the more startling by how unacknowledged it seems to be by even the far-left.

So: what changed?

Photo by scottishstoater on Unsplash

The simplest answer, in my opinion, is that workers change jobs more often now than they did 100 years ago. If you expect to be at a given job for your whole life, it will certainly seem worth it to attempt to — for example — unionize, strike, and win concessions. If you expect to be at a given job for a year, or even just for a season, what is the point of going to all that trouble to build power that you will just inevitably lose?

In a word, part of the modern challenge of conducting class struggle is that the proletariat is so very alienated from their own work that they don’t even care enough about that work to see it as worth the effort of reducing the forces that cause that alienation — they are caught in a deeply undesirable equilibrium. It would seem that the only way for workers (or, at least, workers in the parts of the world with deeply unsteady jobs and fairly high standards of living) to break out of this would be for the economy to once again be in a position in which people expect to stay at the same job for long periods of time. It is unclear if this can happen.

2 — Why Alienation is Needed For Class Struggle

So, people have been posting about the possibility of a general strike in the US on April 20th:

I support the idea of this, in spirit, at least. But there are three problems with it:

nothing would compel them to keep to their promise afterward

there are so many unemployed people right now who would be scabs

most potential strikers don’t want to kill us

It is this last point that is most relevant to my point here — that they do not want to kill us. They, to a certain extent, feel unalienated — they want to be doing what they are doing, they feel that they in some sense have a duty to do it.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote an essay on the economics of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”:

David Graeber liked it enough that he retweeted it — but there was one paragraph controversial enough to pieties of the anti-capitalist Left that even he argued against it. The substantiative part of the paragraph was simply:

…it’s not actually notable that — as Graeber makes much of — jobs where you help people, or otherwise do something satisfying, are paid poorly. Graeber acts as though it’s a vast political conspiracy, but it’s really… not. Wages are defined by supply and demand. The more satisfying a job is, the more people will want to do it. The more people that want to do a job, the higher the supply will be. The higher the supply, the lower the wage.

This is such a shocking and hideous idea to most leftists, because it suggests that feeling unalienated from your labor — having some sort of extra-market and intrinsic motivation to see it be done — really just results in it being that much easier for you to be exploited; for you to receive a lesser portion of the value that your labor produced.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

There is a class of worker for which this is very commonly true — care workers. This is:

…work that involves connecting to other people, trying to help people meet their needs, things like the work of caring for children, caring for the elderly, caring for sick people or teaching is a form of caring labor. Some kind is paid; some is unpaid. …What is really distinctive about caring labor is that it is usually intrinsically motivated. People do it for reasons other than just money, even though there is often money involved, like you need to get paid to work, or you are exchanging the care of a family member in return for a share of another’s family members wage. Still, we always think of care work as something which involves a sense of commitment or obligation or passion for the person who is being cared for. That intrinsic motivation is a really important part of what makes caring labor so valuable and what insures it is being provided at a pretty high quality.

This intrinsic motivation is why nurses and teachers (among other sorts of care workers) are often so reluctant to strike — because doing so hurts people, people that they care about.

And, unfortunately, the current crisis has transformed nearly every non-bullshit (deemed ‘essential’) worker into a care worker — just as, at the same time, the bullshit of bullshit jobs has only been intensified within the prison-like confines of the home.

Photo by Thomas Le on Unsplash

Still, these suddenly ennobled workers are still going on strike — at Instacart, at Whole Foods, at Amazon, and perhaps even everywhere. Their demands are the same everywhere—a mixture of increased pay and company-provided protections. Notably, they are not joined by nurses — who are not sufficiently alienated to go on strike in the midst of a pandemic, and whose unions have merely lodged complaints and threatened legal action.

The question that so much of labor turns on, right now, is simple: are workers unalienated enough from their labor to want to make their lives on the job better — but still alienated enough to be willing to do what it takes to accomplish that?