In those who are above, alienation is always expressed in a subtle, disguised, and ambiguous manner, while in those who are below it is expressed in a coarse, direct, and frank manner.
— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Which alienation is worse? That of those who are above? Or that of those who are below?
In the final assessment, the alienation of the former is far worse than that of the latter. At least that is so, if the standard by which one measures is the possibility of overcoming alienation, as it should be overcome. That is because it is far harder for those atop the economic ladder even to recognize their alienation, let alone to dispel it. On the other hand, those who are at the very bottom of that same ladder, just because they are at the very bottom, are less easily deluded about being alienated.
It is for that very reason that Marx attributed to the proletariat — those in capitalist society whose labor produces the wealth of that society but who are denied all access to that wealth beyond what is required to keep reproducing themselves — the real possibility, for the first time in history, of fully realizing their alienation and therefore uniting with one another in order to free themselves from it. In so freeing themselves, furthermore, “those who are below” would also free “those who are above” and who remain, by that very position of superiority, willfully ignorant of their own alienation. In short, in capitalist society, Marx saw, everyone is alienated; but because of the “coarse, direct, and frank manner” in which the lowest class suffers that alienation, that class at last has the potential clearly to see and then to overcome the common alienation of all, from the richest capitalist to the most deprived social outcast.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)—photograph taken by John Wayall in 1875
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The situation has worsened significantly since Marx’s day. Alienation has become even deeper, and most especially even more hidden, since then.
Above all, that is owing to the success of such things as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which self-styled “Conservatives” have always detested, but which in fact saved the capitalist system in the United States from the collapse with which the Great Depression threatened it. The emergence in Europe, and eventual spread across much of the globe, of State-created and State-supported welfare systems travelled down the same capitalism-saving road, a road down which so-called Democratic Socialism still travels today.
At the same time, the very progress of the so-called integration into capitalist society of formerly segregated segments of the population — from people of color to women to differently sexed and differently abled individuals — has itself also contributed to the universally shared alienation of humanity from itself. Precisely by integration’s “tokenism” — allowing some individual members of such segments entry into the higher strata of the capitalist system — the system holds a carrot on a long stick in front of those who belong to those same segments, keeping almost all of them, and the system that their own efforts sustain even despite their own interests, running together along the same old capitalist road of universal alienation.
Through the combination of those two factors, the rise of the “welfare State” and the progress of “integration,” no clear end to that road remains in sight any longer today, this day more than two centuries after Marx was born. All hope of uniting and throwing off our collective chains has either vanished or become yet one more system-sustaining illusion.
Not even Christ — at least as that figure is ordinarily understood in Christendom — can any longer save us from what Paul in Christian scripture aptly calls “this body of death.”
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NOTE: This post addresses how the inclusion granted by so-called integration is actually a deepening of alienation, a way of worsening the universally human exclusion on which the long-current social system is based, and which that system always fosters. In my next post, I will examine how the earlier form of exclusion called segregation actually fostered — despite itself as it were — the creation of genuinely embracing communities of those very people who were kept segregated at the very bottom of the social system. Accordingly, I have entitled that coming post “Inclusive Exclusion,” in contrast to today’s post, entitled “Exclusive Inclusion.”