2023-10-04

• Back in New York from ~3 weeks in France. Jet lagged. Beautiful to watch the sun rise on NYC.
  
• A few years ago, I read an introductory book about Karl Marx and Communism. I realized I had always held a pretty negative view of Communism, but that negative position seemed mostly motivated by parroting the opinions of people around me. So, in an effort to form my own opinion on Communism, I picked up an introductory text, which was designed to help average people understand Marx’s ideas. Overall, I came away from it still thinking Communism was bad, but I gained a new appreciation Marx and believe many of his ideas were quite prescient. Anyways, the main point of this post is not that I tempered a strong negative view by exposing myself to the details of the best arguments from the other side. That part is fine, but I’m more interested in talking about a specific idea from the book that stood out to me. At one point, the author is explaining Marxist theory and covers this idea of “worker alienation.” The basic premise, as far as I remember it, is that workers in a capitalist system become treated more and more like machines, and, as a result of the repetitive task completions in their work, they lose a connection between their work and their broader lives. In short, capitalism robs workers of their humanity, and work can and should be a deeply meaningful act for people, but it can’t be that under capitalism given the pressures to minimize costs and maximize production. Marx claims this is a moral atrocity and uses it as a supporting structure in selling his vision of a worker’s utopia. Whew. Ok. The thing is, at the time, I found this a very confusing idea. I didn’t really see what Marx meant by “alienation.” And I’ve come to realize that I didn’t understand it in two big ways. First, I didn’t understand conceptually how “alienation” could apply to someone’s job, and second (more importantly) I didn’t really understand what it would mean to be alienated in general. But recently, I’ve been having this “ahhhh that’s what Marx was talking about” feeling when it comes to alienation. These days, I’ve often been feeling very separated from most things around me. I feel…like an alien! It’s been a visceral experience, and I think alienation is the right word. It just fits. What’s really interesting is how you can read something a few years back, not totally get what it means, then have something happen to you down the line and gain a deeper appreciation for it. The existence of multi-year feedback loops is quite surprising to me. I think this is also a hallmark of “great art” (the meaning changes as you revisit it over time). But anyways…Of course, hopefully I feel less alienated soon! I think it’s mostly downstream of me going through some bigger transitions in my life. I don’t really have a handle on what exactly these transitions are, and that’s uncomfortable. But I think it’s some sort of adult version of when children at some point transition away from playing with teddy bears. What happens there? I don’t really know. It just seems like a thing that people go through. There’s nothing really wrong with teddy bears and there’s nothing really wrong with choosing to play with them or not. But at some point kids seem to reliably not want that, and go through a phase of alienation towards the thought. Maybe that process just keeps happening over and over with different teddy bears.

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