Daily Learn: Adorno

Three Significant Ways Capitalism Corrupts and Degrades Us
1. Leisure time becomes toxic - Free time should be an opportunity to develop ourselves and to acquire the tools to change society. But in the modern world, leisure has devolved into the "culture industry," designed to keep us distracted, unable to understand ourselves, and without the will to alter our political reality.

2. Capitalism doesn't sell us the things we really need - Our real wants are carefully shielded from us by capitalist industry so that we end up forgetting what we truly need and settle instead for desires manufactured for us by corporations without any true interest in our welfare. Though we think we live in a world of plenty, what we really require to thrive - tenderness, understanding, calm, community - are disconnected from the present economy.

3. There are proto-fascists everywhere.

The primary obstacles to social progress are cultural and psychological rather than narrowly political or economic.

A Radical View of Power

According to NYU professor Steven Lukes, power is the capacity to bring about consequences. In a social context, there are 3 faces or dimensions of power:

1 Overt Power is the power to make decisions during conflict.

2) Covert Power is the power to control the agenda, by deciding to ignore or deflect existing grievances. It is the power to transform potential challenges about inequitable outcomes into non-decisions. This is maintained by a ‘mobilization of bias” – a dominant set of beliefs, values, and institutional processes and procedures that privilege some groups in relation to others.

3) Ideological power is the power to shape desires and beliefs, making people want things opposed to their own self-interest and thereby averting open conflict and grievances. It is the power to transform inequities into non-issues. It can be at work despite apparent consensus between the powerful and the powerless.

The Alienation of Capitalist Work

Marx is best known for his two unsparing critiques of capitalism: capitalism is essentially alienating and exploitative.

Capitalism is alienating in 3 specific ways:

1. Workers are alienated from other human beings.
Workers must compete with each other for jobs and raises. But competition between workers brings down wages. This is not only materially damaging to workers, it estranges them from each other.

2. Workers are alienated from the products of their labor.
Capitalists need not do any labor themselves – simply by owning the means of production, they control the profit of the firm they own, and are enriched by it. But they can only make profit by selling commodities, which are entirely produced by workers. Thus, the products of the worker’s labor strengthen the capitalists, whose interests are opposed to that of the proletariat. Workers do this as laborers, but also as consumers: Whenever laborers buy commodities from capitalists, that also strengthens the position of the capitalists.

3. Workers are alienated from the act of labor.
Because capitalists own the firms that employ workers, it is they, not the workers, who decide what commodities are made, how they are made, and in what working conditions they are made. As a result, work is often dreary, repetitive, and even dangerous. Enduring this for an extended period of time means that one can only look for fulfillment outside of one’s work; while “the activity of working, which is potentially the source of human self-definition and human freedom, is … degraded to a necessity for staying alive.” As Marx says, "In his work, therefore, he [the laborer] does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside of work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.

Source: Karl Marx's Concept of Alienation