June 26, 2006: Alienation Today

Writing in 1963, Habermas considered the hypothesis that the primary motivation behind the Marx-Engels Communist Manifesto has virtually dissolved in the face of contemporary capitalism:

Furthermore, in advanced capitalist countries the standard of living has, in any case, risen to such an extent, at least among broad strata of the population, that the interest in the emancipation of society can no longer be articulated directly in economic terms.

In other words, to invoke the famous metaphor of the Manifesto, the rising standard of living was breaking those chains that worker of the world had nothing to lose. The defense of this claim makes interesting reading forty years on from when it was made, particularly now that Europe is no longer the front line of the Cold War.

The crux of Habermas' argument is the claim that:

"Alienation" has been deprived of its palpable economic form of misery.

He then examines two aspect of this alienation: deprivation and domination.

On the deprivation side he claims that "the pauperism of alienated labor finds its remote reflection in a poverty of alienated leisure." This seems to be based on the assumption that the major source of alienation is among the employed. The view from 1963 could not possibly anticipate the unemployment crisis of the following century and factors such as homelessness that followed in its wake. As the very concept of "job security" evaporated in the "new economy" of Internet-based globalization, deprivation has become palpable again. If, to use Habermas' words, we no longer worry about "scurvy and rickets," we certainly worry about substance abuse. (This morning the BBC has been running a story that, on their Web site, has the headline, "Alarm at Europe cocaine use rise." The European Union now accounts for 25% of users worldwide. Just for the sake of comparison, though, the United States covers more that 40% of those users.) Thus, "palpable" deprivation is still with us and with a vengeance!

Meanwhile that "poverty of alienated leisure" is there, too. Yahoo! News today ran a story from Reuters that began with the claim:

Americans are more socially isolated than they were 20 years ago, separated by work, commuting and the single life, researchers reported on Friday.

So, even if our personal economics allow us to have leisure, it is as much an experience of alienation as it was when Habermas developed his argument forty years ago.

Where do we stand with respect to domination? Here Habermas claims that domination "has divested itself of its undisguised expression, as a relation of power embodied in the wage labor contract." In other words domination no longer hides behind the terms of that contract, but today the question of whether there is a contract at all trumps the extent to which a contact conceals a hidden agenda of oppression. Domination now exercises itself through the channels of part-time commitments that are frequently outsourced to sites where there is less likely to be arguments over contract terms. Habermas wanted to believe that the concept of a "wage slave" was, for practical purposes dead and buried; but it turned out that the concept was only sleeping. Can we argue today that the Internet is responsible for its awakening?

I had better stop here; with my recent writing about nostalgia, I should avoid trying to argue that things looked pretty good forty years ago!