Postmodern Theory and Internet George Ritzer

However, and to repeat, neither product- nor process-alienation, although 

important, are adequate explanations for alienation’s persistence in the twenty-

first century. The fact that many contemporary workers are paid enough (or  

the market price of the commodity they produce is low enough) to enable them 

to purchase their outputs makes product-alienation itself a questionable basis 

on which to explain the longevity of alienation. Moreover, it is hard to deny 

that at least some people do in fact exercise their creativity and intelligence 

in the contemporary workplace. In phases of capitalism’s development and in 

particular sectors, the knowledge and skills of workers have been encouraged 

(and even relied upon)—from the artisan-based factories of the eighteenth 

century to software companies in the twenty-first. Typically, however, this 

dependence on the creativity and intelligence of employees becomes, over 

time, a costly problem for capitalists precisely because of their need to generate 

evermore surplus value. It is this dynamic, and resistance to it, that compels 

owners to capture and codify these intellectual capabilities through the 

development and use of technologies.

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Having noted these complex realities, at least some forms of alienation are 

more likely to be outcomes of something more fundamental. To uncover what 

this could be, let us dig deeper by returning to Marx’s assertion that capitalists 

are more profoundly alienated than their workers. Again, for Marx, the core 

of the matter lies in man’s removal from his self-creative essence. The fact that 

the capitalist owns property is what most directly distances him from others, 

nature and himself. Unlike the feudal lord who could not sell his property, the 

capitalist can. The structural conditions of feudalism compelled the lord to exist 

in what Marx called a ‘marriage of honour with the land’ (Marx, 1844: 26). 

The capitalist, on the other hand, owns things that are relatively obtuse. The 

lord possesses a place where he can live. The capitalist, more abstractly, owns 

wealth—something that, while often intangible, is always fungible. Quite unlike 

the feudal past, in bourgeois society personal relationships between people  

and property cease while ‘the domination dead matter over man’ becomes  

the norm (ibid.).

Not only is capital the source of the bourgeoisie’s power, it also dominates the 

bourgeoisie. Because, under capitalism, money, rather than personal qualities 

or traditional customs, gives the individual his status and power, that individual 

is wholly dependent on it. In this sense, according to Marx, the capitalist is not 

primarily a human being who intentionally seeks to control and exploit workers 

using capital. Instead, capital (or ‘the machine’ as Fromm puts it) itself rules. 

To quote Marx hypothesizing the existential reality of the capitalist, ‘I am bad, 

dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor. 

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

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

5/18 

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… Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their 

contrary?’ (Marx, 1844: 60).

Because capital takes on faux human qualities, the bourgeois individual is  

not compelled to confront his alienation. The worker, on the other hand, 

has no such ability. Thus, to repeat, proletarians experience their alienation 

directly. Without the power of capital to mask this state, the worker has no 

means of self-delusion. It is precisely this that furnishes the proletarian with 

the possibility of recognizing and prospectively overcoming her alienation.

Alienation and technology

In capitalist society people are dominated by a thing—capital. Not only does 

capital constitute the primary medium of social intercourse, it both empowers 

and disempowers. This is not to say that capital itself possesses this power. 

Instead, capital constitutes a form of exchange involving living, breathing 

human beings—it is, in fact, a process through which money and use values 

are converted, through labour, into surplus value. Machines and technologies 

are core components of this process as, typically, the capitalist puts his money 

to use by converting it to capital, and machines and technologies are used  

by workers to do this.

If, as discussed above, neither product- nor process-alienation are at the heart 

of the general condition of alienation, what is its fundamental basis? The 

answer, for Marx, is still to be found in the production process (a process 

involving four interrelated moments—production, distribution, exchange and 

consumption). This entails the need to exploit labour—the need to get more 

for less out of the people employed in one or more aspects of the process. 

For the proletarian, despite the rights and freedoms associated with the wage 

labour contract, resisting this exploitation has been the source of ongoing 

class conflict (indeed, this resistance has compelled capital’s generation and 

application of evermore sophisticated technologies).

It is precisely this ascent of ‘dead’ labour and its implications for the ‘living’  

that Marx believed propelled capitalism’s tendency to dehumanize workers,  

making them into little more than appendages of the techniques and 

technologies applied in the production process. In effect, capitalism’s 

compulsion to generate surplus value is what compels capitalists to treat 

workers as if they are machines or things. People, as a result, become tools  

of capital. As G.A. Cohen explains,

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

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

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