Postmodern Theory and Internet George Ritzer

conceptualization of alienation—most clearly articulated in his Economic 

and Philosophic Manuscripts (originally published in 1844) and The German 

Ideology (1846)—that is challenged by prosumption.

5

 According to Marx the 

essence of humanity is its engagement in the act of self-creation. The reason  

for this is that human beings are distinguished from other animals because 

people make their own ‘nature’—they, in effect, produce the conditions of their 

own existence.

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 People who do this are exercising their human essence; those 

who do not are alienated from it.

In capitalist society workers live in a state of alienation because their engagement 

with production is a matter of survival rather than self-creation. Most 

capitalists, because they fail to engage their creative powers, are even further 

removed from this essence. To reiterate, for Marx, the worker (or proletarian) 

does not produce to realize his creative powers—he produces for a wage. The 

capitalist (or bourgeois owner), on the other hand, does not even produce.

7

 

Unlike the proletariat, the bourgeoisie have no hope of escaping their alienation 

as once they cease to own the means of production and employ others to 

produce they, literally, cease to be capitalists. One consequence of this is that, 

while the worker may aspire to end his alienation by overthrowing capitalism, 

the bourgeois owner is compelled to (unconsciously) embrace his alienated 

existence.

But why, we might ask, does the bourgeois owner fail to see her existential 

condition? For Marx the answer is rooted in the fact that the capitalist is not,  

in fact, powerless: her money and capital exert power for her.

The bourgeoisie live inescapably alienated lives as their capital (including their 

technologies) constitutes an artificial kind of humanity. The owner himself 

thus is dependent on things to express an ersatz existence. While both the 

worker and the capitalist are alienated, according to Marx, ‘the worker suffers 

in his very existence, the capitalist suffers in the profit on his dead Mammon’ 

(Marx, 1844: 4). In effect, the capitalist is more than just dependent on his 

capital—he is insulated by it.

But what of the conceptualization of alienation as, more directly, the outcome 

of the capitalist-worker wage labour relationship? This, surely, is the form 

of alienation that Toffler and others forecast will be eliminated through 

prosumption. From this more familiar understanding of alienation, the fact 

that the products of the proletariat’s labour are not owned or controlled 

by the worker (but, instead, by his employer) generates what can be termed 

product-alienation. Moreover, through the systemic drive to generate surplus 

Digital prosumption and alienation ………………………………………………………… Edward Comor

http://openfile.org.uk/archive/gil-leung-things-are-circulating/

3/18 

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value involving the degradation of workers, yet another form of alienation 

emerges—process-alienation.

In both product- and process-alienation, work is not performed to satisfy 

direct needs. Instead, for workers, the aim is to gain the means (the wages) 

required to satisfy needs through subsequent purchases. Under these 

conditions people are compelled to sell their capacity to labour to capitalists 

as if it is just another commodity—in effect, a thing. As a result, human 

relations become structurally disjointed as working people, especially as they 

become appendages to ‘the machine’ of production, have little or no direct 

relationship with one another or, for that matter, their own humanity  

(Cohen, 1968: 218-19).

Toffler and subsequent prosumption theorists anticipate a remedy to product- 

and process-alienation. As people come to produce what they consume, and 

labour becomes engaged in direct forms of exchange with others (rather 

than for money), the prosumer is re-connected with both other people and 

to her own creative essence. Johan Söderberg, to give just one contemporary 

example, embraces open source prosumer software as ‘a showcase of the 

productive force of the general intellect… It underpins’, he says, ‘the claim 

by Autonomist Marxists that production is becoming intensively social, and 

supports their case of a rising mismatch between collective labour power  

and an economy based on private property’ (Söderberg, 2002).

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Such optimistic conclusions are premature. One reason I say this is that 

arguments citing product- and/or process-alienation as core underpinnings  

of contemporary alienation are unsustainable—unsustainable both empirically 

and logically.

Recent research by Peter Archibald documents that worker alienation has 

not declined in relatively ‘developed’ political economies (nor has it been 

exported to the ‘developing’ world). Indeed, those who have escaped 

industrial society’s dehumanizing factories (those ‘progressing’ into service 

sector positions) usually live with less job security and more pervasive forms 

of surveillance, not to mention the daily stresses of handling, processing and 

acting on never-ending flows of information.

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 Archibald also cites polling 

data in which overwhelming majorities say they either are not engaged or 

actively disengaged from their work. Thus, despite the much hyped rise of a 

new ‘creative’ economy (Florida, 2002) the empirical evidence for a decline 

of alienation stemming from fewer industrial occupations is, at best, uneven 

(Archibald, 2009).

Digital prosumption and alienation ………………………………………………………… Edward Comor

http://openfile.org.uk/archive/gil-leung-things-are-circulating/

4/18 

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