Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism

Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 1
Global Capitalism and the
Intensification of Human Alienation
(page 2)

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Significantly, the situation of the middle class and of young professionals—the so-called “yuppies”—is not as good as it seems. They may have money, but they must give up their lives for it. Often their “high salaries” are not that high if you take into account the number of hours they must work. An associate in a top law firm, for example, who works 80 hours a week for $150,000, makes less per hour than a skilled union worker who has a high hourly wage and receives time-and-a-half for overtime. It is a sad story that in the drive to maximize profit, global capitalism transforms many managers, professionals, and yuppies into working machines who thoroughly internalize the values of present-day capitalism, which boil down to this: work, consume, work harder, and consume more.

The middle class and those lucky workers who have well-paying jobs still try to live according to the standard—and excess—of the American dream. They still upgrade their cars and computers every few years, whether they really need to or not. But underneath this, alienation and stress are reaching extreme levels. Everybody is working harder. The upper classes must work longer hours to sustain their comfortable, often extravagant, materialistic lifestyles in order to compensate for the poverty of their souls, while a growing number of people within the lower classes must work long hours just to survive. Such pressure leaves no time for genuine human interactions, resulting in growing stress. This stress, in turn, induces aggressive behavior in the workplace, where human solidarity is becoming rarer and rarer. As the rat race intensifies at the expense of solidarity and cooperation, people are driven more openly by egocentrism and the desire for power. They are increasingly willing to step on others to save their lonely, frightened selves.

Global capitalism today means working longer hours without job security. If you don’t play the game right, you get “downsized” (an ugly euphemism for firing or layoffs). Thus, to stay on the path of success and hold onto your comfortable lifestyle, you must not only work long hours, but also combine your “pleasant,” “cooperative,” “team player” package personality—the typical market personality of the boom era of the stable mid-20th century—with the aggressive, cunning character emblematic of an earlier era of capitalism.^[1]

In the mid-20th century, many people held jobs in large companies, which they kept for a long time. This gave people a sense of security, as well as a chance to establish friendships and a feeling of belonging, at least superficially. For workers who belonged to a union, solidarity in common struggles strengthened these feelings of camaraderie and belonging.

Today, even this fragile and superficial sense of belonging and security has been deeply eroded. Many unions have been busted or weakened. Many companies, even large ones, are being swallowed up or forced out of business by the consolidation pressure of global capitalism. The sense of security is lost, as workers are “downsized” regularly and forced to change jobs frequently. Once the unions were significantly weakened, companies went on to further undermine worker solidarity by increasing the utilization of temporary workers, who do not stay in any one workplace long enough to form strong social bonds with co-workers. Companies that provide these “temps” have actually become the biggest employers in the U.S.

In short, in today’s economy, companies go under or change location frequently, unions are weakened, and the proportion of temporary workers has increased dramatically. The end result is that job security simply does not exist for a large number of working people.

The globalization of companies also forces employees to relocate frequently. People are expected to pick up and move family and possessions to a completely different state or even another country, making it impossible to establish long term roots in any given community. This, in combination with frequent downsizing, union-busting, and the fantastic growth in the number of temporary jobs in the U.S., has further destroyed the feelings of human solidarity and belonging that are essential for sane survival. If a temp worker, for example, works for a different company every week or month, such a person has a far harder time developing friendships.

Lack of job security in combination with long hours of work exacerbates the growing sense of isolation and loneliness. These, in turn, lead to and intensify the deep anxiety and/or depression that come from being deprived of a sense of human belonging. As stress and isolation increase, this weakens the power and authenticity of people’s individual humanity. An insecure person who is terrified by her intolerable fears and anxiety becomes susceptible to conformist social pressure. She must conform to the majority’s expectations or fall apart. These expectations can best be summarized by a popular slogan on teeshirts and shopping bags: “Shut up and shop!” But a person whose life consists only of work and shopping is dehumanized. The only power she has is to sell herself on the job market like other human commodities, and to shop frequently—if she has a decent job—in an effort to suppress the emotional pain that lurks deep inside her psyche.

The Death Agony of Community and the Rise in Loneliness

The erosion of human contact is evidenced by the death of community life. In the U.S., the sense of community life in the inner cities and suburbs has been disappearing for decades. The lack of community life in the suburbs, where community centers have been replaced by shopping malls, and people live isolated from one another in little boxes, is common knowledge.

The current suburban boom in organized after-school activities is not an adequate substitute for a true sense of community. All it means is that ultra-busy parents drop their kids off at soccer practice, rush them from lesson to lesson, and then grab a hurried dinner in a noisy fast-food restaurant or in front of the TV at home, with no chance to linger and talk, or to form genuine human relationships with neighbors and friends.

The situation in cities is not much better. The busy and isolated nature of the lives of the occupants of large apartment buildings creates a conscious feeling of alienation that can be traced back as far as the 1950s and 1960s, when such structures became common. People who have lived in the same apartment building for years are lucky if they get to know any of their neighbors at all well. It is common just to say “good morning” and “good evening” in the elevator, without knowing anything about the person.

But as we enter the 21st century, this deep human alienation is getting even worse. It is a common perception that people are getting too “busy” to interact with other humans face to face. Spontaneity is so rare that people today are hard-pressed to call up a friend in the morning and manage to get together with her the same day. A week’s notice is required. Almost no one dares to show up at a friend’s house without an appointment. Nowadays, a call to a friend is usually answered by a machine. It may take as long as a week or two before your call is returned, and then it is probably answered by your machine. It is another week or two before you actually meet your friend, because each of you has such a “busy calendar.”

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