Last week, I wrote about how even the meaning we find in our work is part of how we are exploited as workers. This week promises a path forward and how we can lean into the alienation that results from that exploitation.
Before we can get into what this means practically, we must look at what it means to be alienated at work. When we begin to see that even our desires to do our job are alienating.
Karl Marx talked about alienation, describing how the move towards wage labor separated workers from the product of their work. If you were a cobbler, you created and sold the shoes yourself. There was an identification with the process and the output. Marx claimed that the separation of tasks and the labor process alienated people from the result.
“Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage labourer.” This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.” 1
Modern work does obfuscate this further. Speaking personally, there have been products that I have worked on that did feel like I was connected to the product produced. However, when it came to seeing the value of that work directly (In terms of pay), it was clear that I was not really the owner of what I produced. In many ways, this push for employees to feel like owners obfuscates the fact that they are really alienated from their work. Many companies will even give some equity to employees to increase the illusion of ownership, but these shares are minimal when compared to the ownership stake of investors and senior leadership.
The critique of work is nothing new.
The critique of work as alienating has been incorporated not just by critics of capital but also by the entire field of human resources management, which has, since the middle of twentieth century, incorporated the alienating effects of labor into strategies of human relations. The critique of the alienating effects of labor has led to various attempts to transform the workplace, not by establishing worker control but by infusing work with activities meant to be fun and engaging. The influential responses to alienation are to be found not in the debates about work and human nature in philosophy, but in the way in which work, at least in some fields, has been restructured to offer different sorts of engagement. Moreover, the more people live their social lives in and through work, the more work is transformed from an alienation of human beings from human beings to the only social contact, the only social life some have. It is not alienation that we see in contemporary work but, more often than not, motivation, a desire to realize oneself in and through employment. 2
Read continues:
It is not just commodities, things, that are fetishized, seen to possess value, but also subjective qualities and states that are all seen to have values, just as the world of things does. As Georg Lukács writes,
“Subjectively—where the market economy has been fully developed—a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article.” 3
However, alienation is not just a concept tied to work; alienation is fundamental to the experience of being human. The very process of becoming a subject is a process of alienation. In his recent book, Embracing Alienation, Todd McGowan describes it like this:
Subjectivity comes into existence through a process of alienation that produces a divide between the subject and the symbolic identity that it takes on in the social order. As a subject, no one can become identical with a symbolic identity because the subject relates to this identity from a distance. There is always a divide between who I am as a subject and what I am as an identity. 4
Our subjectivity is how we see ourselves, which will always differ from how we identify. I may see myself as a father, husband, son, writer, American, etc., but none fully captures how I see myself, nor am I within the intersection of all of those identities. This isn’t to dismiss the importance of intersectionality but to recognize that it doesn’t address the fundamental issue of alienation.
We adopt various identities, and “Identity enacts a depoliticization of the subject. All identity is conformist.”5 When we link ourselves to an identity, we conform to the expectations that exist around that identity. We try to fit a model of what it means to be a father or husband based on our understanding of what expectations are for those roles.
The search for an identity that fully corresponds to who we are is an attempt to cure alienation. Identity obscures the alienation of subjectivity by making the subject appear reducible to its identity. 6
The alienation of subjectivity reproduces itself in excessive acts that it performs to compensate for its lack of self-identity. Or one could say that the failure of identity leads to overidentification. The subject becomes a figure of excess in response to its alienation, and this opens new paths to satisfaction. 7
At work, this is that drive to do more, to be more to achieve a raise, a promotion, a great review ranking, whatever it may be. You over-identify with your role.
This is especially prevalent in the United States, where one of the first questions we often ask when meeting someone new is, “What do you do?” There is an assumption that our jobs are our identities, and we take that to heart. We over-identify with our jobs and our achievements, which leads to burnout.
“Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.” 8
However, “[a]lienation is unavoidable for the speaking being, no matter at what point in history this being exists because it is tied to the structure of signification rather than the nature of the social order.” 9
We name things and create alienation in that very act of signifying. We will never perfectly correspond to any name or title. With this, it becomes clear that there is no place where we entirely belong. To be free then isn’t having a name that fits. It is recognizing there isn’t a place where you belong.
The acceptance and embrace of one’s failure to belong to any place is the basis of emancipation. Emancipation requires recognizing the appeal of displacement rather than longing for a home that no one has ever had. 10
We are often led to believe that alienation is the problem. If only I could figure out who I truly am or find a community… but the drive to escape alienation is part of the problem.
Things go wrong in the modern epoch not because it generates alienation but because people take flight from the alienation it reveals. The collective inability to accept alienation as constitutive leads to modernity’s worst sins. Oppression occurs through the refusal of alienation, the attempt to create a way of living that would escape the trauma of alienated subjectivity. 11
When we oppress people, it is often because we refuse to recognize how they are alienated. We cast them into a role or a stereotype and “refuse to allow this person to exist as a divided and contradictory subject with desires that are at odds with themselves.” 12
This sense of alienation and the promise that alienation is fixable create a vicious cycle that is part of how capitalism operates. We think that if only we could buy the house, get the title, or have the latest gadget, we would be complete and end the alienation, but it never does. But it gives us something to chase.
Even though capitalism forces subjects to experience their alienation, it does so while also promulgating the promise of a cure for this problem. Under capitalism, alienation appears as a remediable problem, not as the structure that constitutes subjectivity. This is the key to capitalism’s structure and to its attraction for even those who don’t benefit materially from it. 13
This brings us back to a common theme for this newsletter: contradiction.
Identity emerges through its relations, not by isolating itself from everything that is different. This means that every identity involves contradictions. 14
And with contradiction, we are led to a dialectical approach to face it.
Dialectics is the exploration of the contradictions that inhere within every identity. Whatever seems identical is ultimately revealed, through a dialectical interpretation, as self-divided and involved in what is other to it. For Hegel, contradiction is ontological, and alienation is the way that contradiction manifests itself in the subject. 15
We feel alienated because we have internal contradictions. Although parts of our identity seem to form a cohesive whole, they are all incomplete, and we are divided and filled with contradictions.
And we usually see contradictions and alienation as negative, but what if we didn’t? What if we could see this as a good thing?
Alienation is a positive process for Hegel because it takes us away from our given situation and forces us into an encounter with what is other. Through alienation, we become who we are as we become different from what we are. Alienation allows us to recognize that what appears opposed to us is actually constitutive of who we are. 16
When we see contradictions positively, they don’t undermine our identities. They become constitutive of who we are. As “Walt Whitman famously wrote in the poem “Song of Myself,” “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)”
When we can accept that we are full of contradictions
it puts us in a position to think about emancipation not as a future to be achieved but as a different way of relating to the present. We can recognize not just that we don’t fit within the present but that we cannot fit in any social order. The failure to fit is not a situation to be remedied but the condition of possibility for emancipation. 17
One final area that is important to talk about is community. We often think of the communities we are part of as where we belong. We see community as the solution. In organizations, leaders are often told to build a culture or community for their team to create a shared identity. As you probably guessed by now, this is another path to alienation.
[C]ommunity is fool’s gold. We invest ourselves in community to escape the problem of alienation, but this problem returns with a vengeance when we experience our failure to belong to the community. It always appears to us as if others really belong while we are stuck in the position of striving to belong. Community doesn’t succeed because no one can ever become secure in their belonging. Alienation always trumps identity. The problem with an investment in community is that it encourages us to turn away from the pinch of alienation rather than recognize ourselves in this discomfort. 18
Community is, by its nature, an exclusionary principle. There can be no community where everyone is included, or it becomes “public.” Community is the very state of exclusion. This is important to remember when organizations talk about inclusivity. Inclusivity in an organization is always a contradiction. You can only be inclusive if you have a view excluding those not part of the organization. Inclusion in a community is always based on exclusion.
Community shields us from those who would challenge our identity. It serves as a protective layer that works to make identity secure. The position that one occupies in a community obscures the problem of subjectivity, while the public brings this problem to the fore. Choosing community over the public appears comfortable, but it traps us in the unfreedom of an oppressive retreat from our alienated subjectivity. 19
What is the solution? Mcgowan’s solution is to Embrace alienation and not only embrace it but allow alienation to be the force that connects us.
Alienation, the distance that separates people from each other and from themselves, is what they have in common. Alienation is universal. 20
This is something that we see in the most promising social movements. They fight against the oppression that alienation causes. They fight for people to be able to be complete in their contradictions.
At their best, efforts at social change are attempts to fight against the escape from alienation that creates an oppressive world. This is what we see at work in great political ruptures like the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the suffragist movement, the US Civil Rights movement, Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter. These projects fought against oppressive symbolic identities that act as barriers to the experience of alienated subjectivity. They assert the right of alienated subjectivity against the authorized distribution of social places. In each case, the political struggle targets and wants to overthrow a social order that obfuscates alienation. 21
In the end, this recognition of our contradictions and alienation allows us to be in solidarity with others—not as a community but as a public.
It is only as alienated beings that we can find ourselves where we aren’t. It is only as alienated beings that we can experience solidarity with equally alienated others. 22
The solution is to be where we are, accept alienation, accept internal contradictions, and fight against attempts to oppressively enforce the expectation of conforming to an identity.
What does this mean as a middle manager?
As a middle manager, you often want the group to feel like a team, but attempting to form a team identity unwittingly will only increase alienation. When we review team members’ performance, we also classify them on a spectrum, and against our others, we give them another identity that we expect them to correspond to.
Recognize that any identity as a team member, a specific role, or a rating or review is not who the person is. Allow the person to be a contradiction. Think about these questions:
- How can you see a person not fitting in as a good thing?
- How can you connect not based on identity but on alienation?
- How might you avoid labels and trying to define the identity of your team members?
- Marx, Karl, Capital Volume 1 ↩
- Read, Jason, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Mcgowan, Todd. Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves – all future quotes are from Embracing Alienation unless otherwise specified. ↩
- Ibid (p. 17) ↩
- Ibid (p. 18) ↩
- Ibid (p. 35) ↩
- Han, Byung-Chul, The Burnout Society ↩
- Mcgowan, Todd. Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves (p. 43). Watkins Media. Kindle Edition. ↩
- Ibid (p. 47) ↩
- Ibid (pp. 71-72) ↩
- Ibid (p. 74) ↩
- Ibid (p. 76) ↩
- Ibid (p. 91) ↩
- Ibid (p. 91) ↩
- Ibid (pp. 93-94) ↩
- Ibid (p. 110) ↩
- Ibid (p. 121) ↩
- Ibid (p. 145) ↩
- Ibid (p. 133) ↩
- Ibid (pp. 149-150) ↩
- Ibid (p. 150) ↩