text transcription
I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt only tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Marx called that alienation of labor.”
“What?” he asked.
“You can google that phrase, ‘alienation of labor’ and you’ll get a ton of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years.”
“They’re Marxists though?” he asked.
“Most of them, yeah,” I said.
He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”
On the flip side, this was so incredibly demoralising that I think it's excellent propaganda. How do we make chuds feel like this?
There's no need to do anything. Chuds do this to themselves constantly. That's why they're chuds lmaoooo
75% of their time is spent being mad at things and the other 25% is making up things to be mad at.
I can see how this is demoralizing... though, that isn't how I took it. People very seldom change their opinions in the middle of conversations. This guy thought he had a novel observation about modern working life, only to learn it's two centuries old and shared by a group of people he's been told are evil and stupid and responsible for nearly everything bad in the world. Of course he's gonna recoil from that.
But in the same way a person doesn't change opinions all at once, I don't think he's gonna just "get over it". Gotta give people time to stew. Let em think on it in their own time. Maybe he papers over the contradiction, willfully stops thinking about it. Or maybe it nags at him. Only time will tell.