societies, an unfreedom deriving from that most decisive of
all forms of alienation of the human being from the
essence of his own being – what Marx called the
“alienation of labour”. For it this alienation, which,
according to Marx, leaves the human being feeling most
human only in the exercise of his most animal capacities
(eating, drinking, fucking and herd-like ‘partying’ etc) and
most animal in his most essentially human capacities – the
God-like capacity for creative activity or ‘labour’. In slave
societies, the labourer as such is a mere commodity to be
bought, sold and disposed of in any way by his master. In
capitalism it is the individual’s labour power and time – no
less separable in essence from both their body and mind,
that suffer the same fate – becoming a commodity to be
sold and disposed of in any way dictated by capitalist
owners of the means of production and their master, the
Market.
The new modes of mass production developed with
capitalism leave the individual’s most individual creative
potentials either unfulfilled or exploited – both in
conditions of unemployment and even, if not above all in
conditions of so-called ‘full employment’. The two
principle Mantra of Marxism can be spelled out as follows.
In class societies life as creative sensuous activity is reduced
to ‘earning a living’ – to earning a life – through a type of
‘work’. Work in turn – and in its very essence is
prostitution – the enforced economic prostitution of both