Even for those fortunate enough to have a job, nine times out of ten, work is meaningless drudgery. The hours of labour are not thought of as part of one’s life. They are nothing to do with you as a human being. The product of your labour belongs to someone else, for whom you are just a “factor of production”. Life begins the moment you step outside the workplace, and ceases the moment you re-enter it. This phenomenon was well explained by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour?

First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague.

External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.[46]

Thus, for the great majority, life is mainly taken up in an activity which has very little meaning for the individual; at best, it is tolerable; at worst, a living torment. Even those who take a job like teaching children or nursing sick people are finding that the satisfaction they get is being taken away, as the laws of the market-place force their way into the classroom and the hospital ward.

The feeling that society has reached an impasse is not confined to the “lower orders”. In the ruling class also there is an increasing feeling of malaise and pessimism with regard to the future. One looks in vain for the great ideas of the past, the confidence, the optimism. The constant bragging about the supposed wonders of the “free market economy” have an increasingly empty ring about them, as people begin to take stock of the real situation – the millions of unemployed, the attacks on living standards, the fabulous fortunes made through speculation, greed, and corruption.

It is ironical that the defenders of the existing order accuse Marxism of “materialism”, when the bourgeois themselves practise the most gross and vulgar kind of materialism, in the dictionary, not the philosophical, sense of the word. The mindless pursuit of wealth, the elevation of greed as the dominant principle of all things, is at the centre of their whole culture. It is their real religion. In the past, they took care to conceal this from view as much as possible, hiding behind a screen of hypocritical moralising about duty, patriotism, honest toil, and all the rest. Now it is all out in the open. In every country, we see an unprecedented epidemic of corruption, swindling, lying, cheating, theft – not the petty theft of ordinary criminals, but looting on a massive scale, perpetrated by businessmen, politicians, police chiefs and judges. And why not? Is it not our duty to get rich?

The creed of monetarism elevates egotism and greed to a principle. Grab as much as you can, however you can, and may the devil take the hindmost! This is the distilled essence of capitalism. The law of the jungle, translated into the language of voodoo economics. At least it has the merit of simplicity. It says bluntly and clearly what the capitalist system is all about.

Yet what an empty philosophy! What a miserable conception of human life! Though they do not know it, the lords of the planet are themselves mere slaves, blind servants of forces they do not control. They have no more real command of the system than ants in an anthill. The point is that they are quite satisfied with this state of affairs, which gives them position, power and wealth. And they grimly resist all attempts to carry out a radical change in society.

If there is a single thread running through human history, it is the struggle of men and women to gain control over their lives, to become free in the true sense of the word. All the advances of science and technique, all that humans have learned about nature and ourselves, means that the potential now exists to gain full mastery over the conditions in which we live. Yet, in the last decade of the 20th century, the world seems to be in the grip of a strange madness. Human beings feel even less in control of their destinies than before. The economy, the environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat – all seems to be under threat. Gone is the old sense of security. Gone is the feeling that history represents an uninterrupted march towards something better than the present.

Under these circumstances, sections of society look for a way out in such things as drugs and alcohol. When society is no longer rational, men and women turn to the irrational for solace. Religion is, as Marx said, an opium, and its effects are no less harmful than other drugs. We have seen how religious and mystical ideas have penetrated even the world of science. This is a reflection of the nature of the period through which we are passing.

  1. MECW, Vol. 3, p. 274.