I'm so sorry, Marx, that I'm not so sorry

I came across Ed Gaesler a few months ago speaking about how work provides one of the last true opportunities for our socialization as a species, since educational institutions and churches in the contemporary period seem to highlight the agenda-heavy politics of these social structures themselves, and the enculturation and socialization which should have been inherent but emphatic in them comes a far second. In an unrelated note, the picture above is the view from my room.

As is this one. It usually gets foggy in the afternoons, since I am staying in a city 5,000 feet above sea level, nestled in a gigantic mountain range spanning 7,000 square miles. 

I usually work in my room, with this view, and with beer. (And with that specific beer can above, it's been two months and I haven't finished it yet). Because my work does not require me to mingle with people (which is why I chose it as my work now as opposed to the dozen years I spent intermingling with people whom I was desperately teaching how to be people), I am truly alienated from other men and from my species-being. And because it is a profession the system of which I have no say in but pays me nonetheless, I am alienated from both the process and the product of my work. Herr Marx, I am one among the billions of people that you will shake your head at sadly and whom you will be trying to emancipate from capitalism, had you still been alive.

I am not certain whether I would want to be emancipated the way Marx would go about it, however. Not that I agree with Professor Gaesler (who speaks about more efficient ways by which the United States should not de-incentivize people from working, though I don't disagree with him either). It is true that alienation is a condition, and that we have been both so far and so near the Industrial Revolution and we are continuously struck with the explosive, exponential growth of marvels heralded by the Scientific Revolution that we are still faffling at what our lives and our labor should mean at the tail end of modernity (we call it "tail end" only because we are still in it). Professor Gaesler's point seems to take for granted that alienated work is inescapable, but we might find ways by which to mitigate this alienation - make it more humane, more rewarding, i.e., more incentivized, more open to small, unique but potentially groundbreaking start-ups - all for upholding how work can offer us the way to be more human as well as to be more open to one another's ideas and employment of skills. Work makes us necessary to one another.

Not so strange, for this last phrase was also Marx's point. Without the alienated labor, however. It's not strange; it's not even ironic. Somewhere along the way we saw the necessity of work in a capitalist setting, because time itself became seen as a commodity. And with that came an even rarer commodity: time alone. Solitude. This is where Professor Gaesler and I explicitly part ways - what is valuable in some lines of work now is that you can be left alone while you work for people whom you do not see, working on things made by people whom you do not see, your work getting delivered to people whom you do not see and who do not even know you exist, getting paid by people whom you do not see but who do know that you do exist, although in some vaguely nebulous way. The only faces of people you do get to see are those on your bank notes.

I value work for the solitude it gives me, and I can only afford that by being alienated, which, of course, alienates me even more. It is a testament to how close I am to glorifying alienated labor by saying that it is valuable. I am not certain whether Marx foresaw this when he was writing about the factory conditions in the 19th century, but there is an entire category of people who would rather be digital nomads than socializing human creatures. (This would beg an ontology of the posthuman, utilizing Foucault and some others, but not my brain cells, which couldn't be bothered at present - they are busy ignoring the privilege and hubris it took to write this fiasco).

That is why so many of us post food shots, and travel shots, and window-view-with-fog-and-pine-trees-and-beer shots: we are gloating about the solitude we can afford, utilizing alienated work that we unthinkingly think is necessary (or deliberately announce is valuable), so that we can buy more solitude and hyperreality in order to convince us that this is truly what our lives mean.

This. This is what life means. Beer. And a window. For ease of barfing. You pig.

I will leave you with an irony, however, that ties the themes of this entire thing quite nicely: The Neo-Marxist Slavoj Žižek saying, "Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots." Stick with beer. Which are made by people whom you do not know, which is, of course, unnecessary anyway.