Every morning, millions of workers clock in—not to create something they can call their own, but to surrender their bodies and minds to a rhythm they do not control. The warehouse worker’s scanner beeps every eleven seconds. The rideshare driver’s route is calculated by an algorithm she cannot see. The adjunct professor prepares three new courses for the semester knowing his contract will not be renewed. All of them perform tasks whose objectives are perfectly clear: move this box, deliver this meal, convey this information. Yet the reason they do it, the sense that this activity belongs to them and leads somewhere worth going, has vanished. Work is intelligible but empty. It has significance but lacks meaning.
This is not a psychological problem that therapy can cure. It is not about finding your passion, building your personal brand, or practicing mindfulness in the break room. The structural void is necessary, embedded in the system from its very beginning. To understand why work feels so meaningless today—why even “good jobs” often feel like something that happens to us rather than by us—we need to look at what human labor had to become for capitalism to come into existence.
Work and Its Disassembly
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels understood work as something inherent to human beings. In its most elementary form, labor is the way human beings mediate their exchange relationship with the natural world. We imagine a result, shape tools to achieve it, and transform raw material into something that satisfies a need. In this process, three elements come together: our purpose, the means we use, and the object we transform. A carpenter designs a table, measures the boards, picks up the saw, hammer, and nails, and produces the wooden structure. In the end, the table emerges as proof, as the materialization of her idea. The tool does not dictate the objective; the worker does. The object is not alien; it is the objectification of her need. This is the process that Marx called the “organic metabolism” between human beings and nature, and it constitutes the foundation of every civilization we have ever built.
The Soviet psychologist A. N. Leontiev developed a theoretical framework in continuity with this conception. Human activity, he argued, begins with a need—biological or social, of the stomach or of the imagination—not yet directed at anything specific, merely a felt lack. Hunger, cold, the desire for shelter, the need for recognition. When this need finds an object capable of satisfying it, that object becomes a motive. Activity is then carried out through actions, each oriented toward a conscious goal, and these actions are performed through operations—the automatic, skillful movements that depend on immediate concrete conditions. A person wakes up feeling hungry, goes to the kitchen to eat some bread, as she does every day: the bread is the motive for doing so. The action is the act of walking to the kitchen and taking the bread, while the operation is the locomotion and the coordinated flexing of fingers, adjusted to the weight and shape of the loaf. All three levels—motive, action, operation—form a living whole.
Yet for Leontiev, in the exploitation of labor, there is a crucial internal dissociation within the work process, between the objective meaning of activity and personal sense. Meaning is the real, objective, socially shared content of an activity: what actions are, technically and historically, fixed in language and tools. When we say “carpentry,” we refer to a body of knowledge that exists independently of any individual carpenter. Personal sense is what the action means to me, the concrete individual performing it, given my motives. When the two coincide—when I build the table because I need it, or because I take pride in my craft, or because it will shelter my family—work is whole. When they come apart, action becomes hollow. I may perfectly well understand what I am doing, but not that it has any intrinsic purpose; it is a means to something else.
This dissociation is the core of the process of alienation of labor. Marx identified four aspects of this phenomenon, which appear as moments of a single historical process: first, the worker is separated from the product of her labor, failing to recognize the world of objects she produces and thus, second, she is also separated from the very activity of production, which becomes torment rather than fulfillment. In relation to other human beings, she becomes, third, separated from her species-being—that is, from her capacity to consciously direct the transformation of the world; and finally, fourth, she is separated from other human beings, who appear as competitors, bosses, and antagonists rather than collaborators.
The Separation
The fact that Marx listed these four aspects of alienation in reference to the capitalist mode of production does not imply their exclusivity to this historical moment and context. These aspects manifest in a variety of relations of domination that have had specific historical functions. This is what Leontiev’s psychology helps us to see.
If we look closely at the development of capitalism, we perceive that the aspect of alienation in relation to other human beings precedes and prepares the ground for the others. The violence that prevents the peasant from cultivating his land is not merely a theft of property; it is a rearrangement of his very hierarchy of needs, a reformation of personality operated through fear. From there, the other aspects of separation follow as consequences: the separation from the means of life, then the separation from activity itself, and finally the separation from the product—which, inverted in consciousness, appears as commodity fetishism.
Violence produces damages and imposes consequences that become priority needs. When violence destroys the peasant’s village, his need for shelter leaps to the top of the hierarchy; only a wage can supply it. When enclosure deprives him of his common fields, his hunger can no longer be appeased by the land that always sustained him; he needs money to buy the bread he once harvested with his own hands. This means that violence is not an incident in the history of capitalism—it is its condition of possibility, the mechanism that transforms self-sufficient people into workers dependent on the market.
The result is that such vital needs can only be supplied by commodities, acquired with wages obtained solely through submission to the will and direction of another subject, in possession of the means of life. The worker does not sell his labor power because he wishes to; he sells it because he cannot do otherwise. The choice between accepting factory discipline and starving to death is not a choice in the properly human sense—it is the coercion of the empty stomach. In other words, the economic subordination that defines wage labor is preceded by a more fundamental subordination: the reordering of needs by violence.
This subordination completely strips work activity of its inherent sense, which becomes merely a form of selling the use-time of one’s own body to ensure survival. The activity that should be the expression of human will—labor as vital process, as Marx described it—becomes its opposite: a means of perpetuating physical existence under conditions that contradict human dignity. And this survival, in turn, is mediated by the acquisition of commodities that, to the consumer, are fetishized: they promise the maintenance of life and the filling of needs without revealing the real process of their production. The commodity conceals the alienated labor that produced it, just as the wage conceals the violence that imposed the need for it.
Thus, violence has, from the very beginning, a crucial role. Not as a historical exception, but as a structural foundation. It does not disappear when capitalism consolidates; it merely changes form, becoming invisible, silent, incorporated into the “laws of the market” that economists celebrate as neutral. But its effects on the worker’s personality remain: the feeling that work is something to be endured, not something to be realized; the belief that the meaning of life must be sought outside work, in leisure or consumption; resignation before an activity that occupies most of one’s waking hours without ever belonging to the one who performs it.
Violence as Midwife
Before capitalism could exist, most people had to be dispossessed of the conditions that allowed them to work for themselves. The peasants in England, for example, were violently expelled from their common lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Fences were erected; villages were burned; the homeless were whipped and branded with hot iron. Artisans were crushed by the competition of large manufactories backed by state power. In the Americas, indigenous peoples were decimated or pushed westward so their lands could be enclosed. Enslaved Africans were transported in chains across the Atlantic, their bodies converted into “means of production” for plantation agriculture. Marx called this “primitive accumulation” and insisted that we remember it was written “in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”[1]
The objective was to create a new class of people subjected to new ways of life. For this, they could possess nothing beyond their capacity to work and, to leave them no choice but to sell this capacity to whoever controlled the land, tools, and raw materials. As English peasants were pushed into cities, they did not find freedom. They found what Marx described as “bloody and terrorist laws” enforced through the whip, the branding iron, and torture—measures designed to discipline them to the new system of wage labor.
Violence was not a birth pang of newborn capitalism. It was its midwife. Without it, the system could not have been born.
Violence was essential here because it operates directly on the structure of human needs described by Leontiev. When a conqueror burns your village, a landlord’s enclosure deprives you of subsistence, or a slave ship breaks your body, the need for physical survival leaps to the top of your hierarchy of motives. All the complex reasons you might have for working—craft, community, the rhythm of seasons, religious significance, the pleasure of competence—are flattened into a single urgent demand: stay alive. The threat of pain or death reduces the richness of human psychology to the immediacy of biological survival. It does not merely alter property relations; it restructures personality. It imposes a new hierarchy of needs on the victim, making submission appear as the only path to existence. The peasant who once organized his life around the harvest festival becomes a factory worker who lives for the weekend, and then for the hour when the shift ends.
Once the separation was accomplished, a new form of coercion could take over. The worker no longer needed to be beaten into the factory—though beatings were common in the early days—because the market would do that work. Without land or tools, without access to the means of producing one’s own life, you are forced to find an employer. The “economic laws” of capitalism, which bourgeois historians celebrate as freedom, are in fact a silent whip. The worker is “free” in a double sense: free to sell his labor power and free (bereft) of any other means of survival.
Here we see the third dimension of alienation in action. What Marx called our “species-being”—the capacity to shape our environment consciously and collectively—is not destroyed. It is confiscated. The bourgeoisie does not merely own the factories; it owns the worker’s motive for activity. As needs only become motives when they find an object capable of satisfying them, the owner who monopolizes the means of life interposes himself between the worker’s hunger and her bread. The wage becomes the only bridge. The worker does not work because work satisfies her, but because not working means starvation. She knows she is sewing a shirt, but she does so for a wage, not for someone who will wear it whom she will never meet.
From Formal to Real Subsumption
This was only the beginning. Once capital had separated the worker from her purpose, her tools, and her raw material, it did not limit itself to controlling the duration of labor. It began to transform the very content of work.
In what Marx called “formal subsumption,” the capitalist simply takes over a preexisting labor process and intensifies it—longer working days, faster rhythm, fewer breaks. The work itself remains recognizable; the artisan still uses her familiar tools, but now under the boss’s clock. There is, however, a physiological and social limit to this strategy. A body can only endure so much pressure before breaking, and broken bodies do not produce surplus value. Thus capital advances to “real subsumption.” It revolutionizes the technical basis of production, introduces machinery, decomposes complex crafts into simple repetitive movements, and organizes workers into a collective organism where each individual is merely a “living appendage” of the machine.
The effects are devastating and terribly familiar. The worker no longer designs the product, does not choose the tool, and does not even set the pace. The machine does. Or rather, the logic embedded in the machine does—the “anatomy” of the apparatus dictates the worker’s posture, rhythm, and gestures. The direction of the process is determined beforehand by engineers and managers; supervision is carried out by foremen and, increasingly, by algorithms that compare performance in real time against a preestablished model. The worker’s very attention, which in artisanal labor was focused on the raw material and the objective, is now entirely captured by external demands: keep the pace, don’t deviate, hit the target.
The Body in the Supply Chain
The Fulfillment Center
Spend one hour in the distribution center of a major retailer like Amazon and you will see real subsumption in its barest form. The worker does not know where the item is going, who ordered it, or what it will be used for. She knows only that she has fifteen seconds to scan it, place it in the correct box, and move to the next one. The “purpose” of the work is entirely beyond her reach, determined by a logistical network spanning continents. The “tool” is a handheld scanner that monitors every one of her movements, evaluates her speed, and sends alerts if she stops for too long. The “object” is a commodity she will never use, passing through her hands on its way to someone else’s door. All three moments of the labor process—purpose, means, and object—have been systematically removed from her control and concentrated in the hands of capital.
But it is not merely that she does not control the rhythm—it is that the scanner is the rhythm, and the rhythm is not hers. Her feet move automatically between shelves, calculating distances her body has memorized but her mind no longer registers. Her back curves and straightens in a cycle that will repeat four thousand times in that shift. Her hands—protected by thin gloves that do not prevent calluses—grab, scan, deposit, grab, scan, deposit. The sound is a patchwork quilt of electronic beeps, each marking another commodity separated from the one who moved it. The bathroom break is monitored by an invisible timer; conversation with the colleague beside her is a deviation that the algorithm records as “inactivity.” There is no foreman with a whip, but there is a screen showing her position relative to the peer average, and that screen is, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the whip of today.
She is not using the scanner; the scanner is using her. Her body has become the interface between the algorithm and the commodity, an electrical conductor that does not need to understand the circuit to complete it. At the end of the shift, she feels in her joints a weariness that has no proper name—not the exhaustion of someone who built something, but of someone who was used as a channel for something to pass through. The sensation is not of production but of consumption: her body was consumed by time, moved by a logic that does not belong to her.
The Platform
Or consider the gig economy. The Uber driver does not set the fare, does not choose the route, and does not evaluate the passenger. The app does all of this. The “entrepreneurial freedom” celebrated by Silicon Valley is, in reality, a technologically advanced form of real subsumption. The driver owns the car, yes, but the platform owns the information, the customer relationship, and the dynamic pricing that can rise or fall without warning. The driver’s activity is fragmented into isolated, standardized microtasks, each governed by an invisible plan. The personal sense of work—driving as craft, as social encounter, as navigation of the city—is replaced by the sole motive of hitting the bonus target before the algorithm changes the rules again. The five-star rating is not recognition of her skill; it is a disciplinary mechanism, a way of making her internalize the customer’s whims as her own standard of performance.
The Newsroom and the Classroom
The degradation of work has spared not even occupations that once seemed immune. Consider the contemporary journalist. Thirty years ago, he went out into the street in search of stories, cultivated sources, discussed angles with an editor who knew his trajectory. Today, he receives “SEO alerts”: notifications that a given topic is “trending” on Google searches, accompanied by a list of keywords that must appear in the headline and opening paragraphs. The story no longer arises from curiosity or public commitment; it is generated by a traffic optimization algorithm. The editor no longer discusses the angle; he approves the “performance” of the text in real time, measured by clicks, time on page, and shares. The journalist writes, but he does not write what he judges important—he writes what the attention-measuring device determines to be profitable.[2]
The same occurs at the university. The adjunct professor prepares three new courses for the semester knowing his contract will not be renewed. He does not choose the content out of intellectual conviction, but because the department demands a “curricular matrix” compatible with the ministry’s evaluation metrics. The research he would like to do—slow, uncertain, potentially transformative—is postponed in favor of quick articles for indexed journals, which the evaluation system demands so that he might, perhaps, one day, have stable employment. He teaches, but not as he would like; he researches, but not what he judges important; he thinks, but under conditions that transform thought into commodity. The “academic autonomy” spoken of in university statutes is, for him, a cruel joke: he does not even control the schedule of his own classes, determined by a management system that assigns him classes at seven in the morning or nine at night without prior consultation.
This is what it means to say that, under capitalism, the worker is alienated from himself. His vital activity is determined by forces that present themselves as external necessities, not as expressions of his own will. He performs actions whose meaning he comprehends—scanning, driving, delivering, coding, grading, filing—but whose motive is alien. The work is not his; it belongs to the capital that organizes it. And because the work is not his, the product is not either. The app, the article, the package, the grade—all pass through his hands and out of his life.
The Fetish and the Fog
But it is here that capitalism performs its most impressive trick. It takes the result of this alienated labor—the commodity—and presents it as if it had a life of its own.
Marx called this “commodity fetishism.” When we go to the store or click “buy now,” the product appears before us as an autonomous thing, endowed with intrinsic properties: this phone is elegant, that coffee is artisanal, these sneakers are authentic. What remains hidden is the entire social process that produced them—the cooperative labor of thousands of people, the expropriation that created the working class, the exploitation that extracted surplus value, the ecological destruction that externalized costs, the surveillance that monitored every break the worker took. The commodity seems to possess its own power, its own value, its own desirability. It appears as a natural fact, not as a social relation. The phone does not advertise the worker who assembled it; it advertises its “innovation.” The coffee does not mention the picker; it mentions its “story.” The story, of course, is never the true one.[3]
This is the final inversion. In production, the worker is separated from the personal sense of her activity; she understands what she is doing, but it means nothing to her. In consumption, the opposite occurs: the buyer is captured by an immediate sense of desire, utility, or status, but cannot access the objective meaning of the social relations condensed in the object. The commodity seems full of sense, but its meaning is mystified. The worker leaves the factory emptied of sense; the consumer enters the market filled with false sense. The same system produces both experiences, and the commodity is the medium that connects them while hiding this connection. The worker who manufactured the phone cannot buy it; the consumer who buys it cannot imagine it.[4]
Leontiev’s distinction between meaning and personal sense helps us see how this works at the level of consciousness. In a non-alienated activity, the socially fixed meaning of an action (what it is, technically and historically) is inseparable from the personal sense it has for the one who performs it (why I am doing this, what this represents in my life). Capitalism systematically severs this bond. In the factory, objective meaning is visible but personally empty. In the shopping mall, personal sense is vivid but objectively opaque. The commodity fetish completes the alienation by making the product appear as if it were the source of meaning, rather than the alienated labor that produced it. The advertisement does not show the factory worker; it shows the lifestyle the commodity promises. The promise is a substitute for the meaning that was stolen.
Beyond the Void
This is not merely an intellectual puzzle. It has political consequences. If we believe the problem is that we have the wrong desires, or that we need to find our “passion,” or that we should consume more ethically, we will be looking for the solution in the wrong place. The emptiness of work and the fascination of commodities are two sides of the same coin, minted by a system that needs to separate people from the sense of their own activity in order to keep extracting profit. Individual self-help cannot fix a structural fracture. Buying fair-trade products cannot restore the worker’s purpose. The “mindful” meditation app is itself a commodity, produced by the same alienated labor it pretends to soothe. The question is not how to find meaning within this system, but how to change the system so that the unity between human purpose, human tools, and human objects can be restored.
This unity has existed before. And it still exists, in fragments, wherever workers retain some control over their process: in a cooperative bakery where members decide what to bake and how to share the proceeds; in a community garden where the harvest belongs to the neighborhood; in a unionized factory where members set the pace and challenge production metrics; in the open-source project where developers choose what to build and why; in the mutual aid network where care is given freely, not sold by the hour. It is not a utopian fantasy; it is experience rescued from memory of what work can be when motive, action, and object belong to the same person.
But fragments are not enough. Monthly Review, since its founding by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, has argued that only a radical social transformation—a transition from private control of the means of production to democratic and collective management—can generalize this experience, transform it from exception into rule. Cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and open-source software are valuable not as ends in themselves, but as schools of self-management, as practical proofs that another way of organizing work is possible. Their limitation, however, is evident: they operate within a system that compresses them on all sides, through pricing, competition, and accumulation. Without organized political struggle pointing toward the supersession of capitalism itself, these islands of autonomy risk becoming mere comfort zones for a privileged minority, or being simply absorbed by the market.
The task, therefore, is twofold. On one hand, to build and defend these spaces of non-alienated work as forms of immediate resistance and laboratories of the future. On the other, to organize the working class for a structural transformation that eliminates the very basis of wage labor. The struggle for fewer working hours, for dignified conditions, for democracy in the workplace, for universal public services—all these struggles are, at once, defenses of life against capital and stages on the path toward a society where free labor replaces forced labor.
Capitalism did not create work. It created a particular form of work in which the worker is systematically dispossessed—not merely of the product, but of purpose, tools, and raw material. It began with violence, continues through the silent coercion of the market, and culminates in a world where the products of human labor appear as independent powers that dominate the workers themselves. From violence to fetish, the thread is continuous. And so must our resistance be.
References
Leontiev, A. N. Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978. Original: A. N. Leont’ev, Deyatel’nost’, Soznanie, Lichnost’. Moscow: Politizdat, 1975.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Early Writings, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Review, 1975.
Mészáros, István. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin Press, 1970.
Sheehan, Helena. “Capitalism and the Crisis of Meaning in Our Times.” Monthly Review 78, no. 2 (June 2026).
Yates, Michael D. Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022.
Notes
[1] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 895. All quotations from Marx in this article have been verified against the standard English edition; translations from Portuguese are by the author.
[2] Yates, Work Work Work. Yates documents the concrete experiences of alienated labor in the contemporary economy; the present article offers the structural basis that explains why these experiences are inevitable under capitalism, not merely accidental.
[3] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 163–77.
[4] Sheehan, “Capitalism and the Crisis of Meaning in Our Times.” Sheehan diagnoses the “fog of meaninglessness” that has engulfed contemporary society; the present article proposes to show, mechanically, how this fog is generated—step by step, from inaugural violence to final fetishism.