Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)

The amount of collective effort that goes into shaping consumer demand is nearly inconceivable; it takes a lot of work to create the feeling of needs for new clothes.

To work according to your contracted duties, to master the tasks you are expected to do and be content enough to do them is seen as a form of slacking off in the modern workplace.

Our knowledge of and orientations within workplaces are shaped by the work we do. A cleaner will navigate a workplace, and indeed the world at large, differently to a senior manager: knowing your place is a spatial as much as it is a psychological phenomenon.

Even without the technical know-how of exactly how something was made or brought to the consumer, how much effort it requires, it is possible to reorient our knowledge of the world; to look at a building and wonder who built it, and under which conditions. When we do this, we can see everything around us as a product of human effort, of world-makin

Workers are expected to act as an emotional buffer, smoothing over passenger concerns and must appear to do so voluntarily.

This doesn’t mean we can easily abandon them though, but rather that marketing, social pressure, the expectation that our identity be expressed through consumption (and the evisceration of other avenues for its expression) conspire to make these ‘needs’ feel urgent and deep.

Class is a mechanism that permits some people to make themselves heard but enforces silence on others, denying them power and agency.

The self-exploitation that characterises the experience of contemporary capitalist work is not just a source of individual misery but a means of guaranteeing profit.

At the level of the individual, this means the exploitation of what Han (after Johan Huizinga) terms ‘homo ludens’ – the playful elements of human personality – and the gamification of work. This means the merging of work and leisure, with work increasingly resembling play, and leisure treated as something we can and should make profitable; each ho

Given that, under capitalism, work becomes the only avenue for self-development, respect and fulfilment, this is a genuine fear of a loss of self.