19. Alienation and the Future of Humanity¶
Core Argument¶
Under capitalism, despite staggering technological advances, society remains in the grip of uncontrollable, blind forces. The market economy reduces human beings to puppets of capricious, invisible powers, with bankers and stockbrokers as their high priests. Workers often feel degraded to the Roman status of a “tool with a voice,” while the post-war boom of 1948–73 has given way to permanent stagnation, mass unemployment, and a deep malaise that now threatens teachers, doctors, managers, and the savings of the middle class. The lives of billions are at the mercy of money markets and stock exchanges whose caprice surpasses that of ancient gods.
Marx’s analysis of alienation, developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, remains central to understanding this predicament. Labour under capitalism is external to the worker, coerced rather than voluntary, and belongs to another. The worker feels at home only when not working; work becomes self-mortification. This alienation extends beyond the factory floor into banks, hospitals, and offices, where white-collar workers face the same insecurity and stress. Even the ruling class exhibits its own malaise and pessimism, despite boasting of the free market.
Marxism rejects the existence of a supra-historical morality, showing that moral codes evolve historically and serve class interests. The institution of wage-labour, in which a human being sells himself piecemeal, is never questioned, while earlier forms of exploitation are condemned. Money relations have sunk so deep that people are referred to as being ‘worth’ a certain number of dollars, and commodities are treated with superstitious awe—the fetishism of commodities. The ruling class defends private property above all, using religion and morality to control the poor while disregarding these codes in private life.
Capitalist society is in terminal decline, economically, morally, and culturally, producing social disintegration and atomised egotism. The solution is not a return to primitive communism but a forward movement to a socialist world commonwealth, which will place past discoveries at humanity’s disposal. The rupture between humans and nature, and the division between mental and manual labour, have created alienation. Technology now offers limitless possibilities, but private ownership blocks human development. Revolutions, such as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Spanish revolution of 1931–37, unleash a great upsurge in culture and a thirst for learning, as ordinary people begin to see themselves as capable of controlling their own destinies.
A socialist society would abolish the division between ‘thinkers’ and ‘doers’ by raising the cultural level, reducing the working day, and combining learning with creative activity. The staggering advances of science mean the death of the sun need not mean the death of humanity; emigration to other galaxies becomes a possibility. Humanity has billions of years to solve these problems, provided class rule is replaced by global co-operation. Socialism will be humanity’s leap from necessity into freedom, enabling the elimination of disease, illiteracy, and homelessness as a starting point. As Trotsky envisioned, humanity will master its own biology and instincts, creating a higher social type, with the average person rising to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, or Marx, and new peaks emerging beyond.