Alienation: How We Are Taught to Value Ourselves

How valuable are we? This is an important question not only for somebody’s self-esteem, but also to capitalist economics. Let’s take a look.

We’re going to be crude and look at things from the perspective of a market capitalist. A person’s value is how much money they can make me. That is how capitalists are taught to view people. This bleeds from the capitalist to the rest of society, and it just so happens that this is a pretty important concept right here.

The capitalists pay our politicians (they fund their campaigns and whatever else they seem to need), so they have a lot of control over what is done in politics. Their control over our society is pretty total. The way they think is well distributed to society because they are the people who supposedly keep society running.

We’ve already run into a pretty big problem. For the most part, long-term employers are massive businesses. And who runs these businesses; who are the people who keep this well-oiled economic machine running? It isn’t the executives. It isn’t the shareholders or the board of directors. It’s the workers.

Now let’s look at that a bit more closely. Who are the workers? That is a good question; there are workers of all races, but there are also groups of workers that are materially disadvantaged, namely, and primarily in the United States, on basis of colonial oppression or patriarchy; mainly I’ll look at the colonial system.

The somewhat elevated status of white workers is made possible by the oppression of the colonized masses. The black and Latinx and foreign masses within the United States are the most marginalized. And this lets the capitalists oppress the white masses, while at the same time turning these white masses into tools to oppress the race-oppressed victims of the racial-capitalist system.

First, though, we need to ask another important question. How does capitalism continue? I would say that the only thing keeping capitalism afloat during this trying time is the forcing of workers into competition with one another. And now we get back to the question of value. To the capitalist, the people who are most valuable are those they can pay the least for the same amount of work. So, in reality, who is the most useful? The people whose labor is, in reality, worth the same amount as anyone else’s are now paid the least. This drives the price of labor down overall.

What does this mean for how we think about ourselves? In a capitalist society, it means that the people with the highest labor costs are those who are actually not as useful to capitalists. Of course not! It is out of self-interest that they seek to oppress people! And so to keep labor prices down for all involved, they must force them down further, convince people that they aren’t worth the same amount in wages. This is huge contradiction.

Now we look towards the central argument again. What does this mean for how we look at ourselves? Let’s try to get to our assumptions first. I assume that under a capitalist society, all people act in their rational self-interest, as the classical and neoclassical economists do. This means we act in a way to experience the least oppression. We do this without thinking about it, because it is so well embedded in society!

So when we act, we try to become the least useful to the economics of capitalism! And now we understand! The capitalists seek at the same time to make people more useful to them, and the people seek to make themselves less useful. And the value assigned to that person (which I’ll say is a measure of labor performed) is not determined by how useful they are. The use-value and the wage-value of the laborer are two totally independent things. And here is the contradiction!

And now how does this divide us from how we view ourselves? All of our actions are subject to how we are viewed socially, and they become commodities. Too much of one style of action, and we become lesser in wage-value. Too much of another, and we become greater in wage-value, but lesser in use-value. We make ourselves in ways that make it easier for us to exist materially, so that we have greater wage-value. Yet it does not benefit the capitalists to hire those greater in wage-value!

We create ourselves as commodities. We make ourselves act in certain ways so that we are not oppressed, and thus bring oppression upon ourselves and others. We make certain portions of ourselves, and consider them as outside of ourselves, activities that affect our value. And so parts of ourselves are not parts of ourselves, and we make ourselves into people that we are not, all in the name of capital! This is how we are so often urged to attach value to ourselves, and yet we are all the time showing how absurd it is. It is a drive of the market forces of capitalism, and built on contradictions.