One of my roommates graduated from the U of A in December of last year with a degree in Creative Writing and English. Ever since then, she has alternated between seeking hopelessly for a "real job" and trying to eke out a living at a low-paying, zero-respect job that was nothing more than part-time work for her as an undergrad. As I was reading Critique of Everyday Life, I couldn't help but to relate it to her, specifically, the section where Lefebvre outlines the basics of Marx's theories on alienation.
When she first graduated, my roommate -- let's call her Susan -- was excited at the prospect of "taking it easy" for a little while before joining the real world. The idea of concentrating solely on her easy if low-paying job for a short-term period, sounded like a vacation from "real work," the idea of which both made her feel exhausted and scared. For about the first six to eight months, she was content. Work was easy and brainless, and she'd just begun to date someone new. We might even call it "leisure" time. Lefebvre goes into great detail concerning his ideas about leisure, and how it is virtually inseparable from the idea of work. Sure enough, time passed, and what had been at first new and exciting for Susan, turned into something rote and meaningless. I noticed that she had begun to spend less time at home, and the time she was there was mostly spent watching TV or sleeping. Her cleaning habits became more slovenly and she seemed to be caring less and less about things she'd cared about when she was in school. It wasn't long after the one year mark hit that she confessed to me that she was depressed. Work had become a time-suck that she dreaded, and time spent away from work seemed short and fruitless. She told me that she felt she was "wasting her life away in the same pointless routine."
Some people might call this the "quarter-life crisis," and maybe it is, but I also think it's evocative of something larger than that. Lefebvre quotes Marx extensively in his Foreword, concerning the alienation of labor. When I came to that section, I ran out of my room and read it out loud to Susan.
"What constitutes the alienation of labour? Firstly, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable, and not happy . . . Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself. " (59)"[His labour] is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but a mere means to satisfy needs outside himself." (60)"Estranged labour not only estranges (1) nature from man and (2) estranges man from himself . . . it also estranges man from his species." (60)
By the time I was done reading all of that, she was rolling around on the floor, moaning, "That's my life! That's my life! OH GOD, EW. MY LIFE." With the useless nature of her work being her sole output -- something she was not used to, having been in school for sixteen years -- she had slipped into a depression, which according to Marx and Lefebvre, was caused by an alienation from herself and from life in general. She spends most of her time focusing on a job that requires almost no creative input from her, and which she feels no ownership over.
Oddly enough, knowing that two dead white guys had successfully predicted her situation decades before she was even born, did little to assuage her. Hopefully she will get a new job very soon.
Ashley
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