Most of us spend the majority of our adult lives at work in some way or another. Office jobs with dull protocol, service jobs with rude customers, or industrial jobs where we keep the world working with our skilled labor. Have you ever wondered why it’s so commonplace to complain about our nine to five lives that there is literally a movie called “9 to 5” and a whole television series devoted to office jobs (literally called “The Office”)?

Why are we expected, especially in our middle adult years, to hate the jobs at which we labor for our livelihood? In addition to this, why is everything so wrapped up in what we do for work? What is the first thing that people ask on dating sites, after all? “What do you do for a living?”

Perhaps our 19th century friend Karl Marx may have some of these answers in his twin concepts of alienated labor and wage slavery. Though Marx lived during a crescendo in the Industrial Revolution, where factory jobs were becoming commonplace among men, women, and children, these two core concepts of Marxist thought very aptly still apply to workers today.

Applying for jobs, getting jobs, then hating jobs. It seems like an endless cycle. In this hypercapitalistic world, we are always looking for ways to climb that ladder, make the promotion, or move on to a better job. Rarely do the movers and shakers remain at the same company for long. And if they do, they find themselves restless and complaining. Working five out of seven days of a week lends itself to both physical and mental exhaustion, regardless of the profession.

To understand the framework for Karl Marx’s whole theoretical system, it’s important to understand some of his ideas about human nature. Early in his work as a younger philosopher, Marx comes to the realization that what makes us human is our need to create. Indeed, the uniqueness of our humanity that separates us from other species is this creative drive. 

This can come out in different ways. Some people paint, write cool stories, make silly content videos, knit, or engage in other artistic endeavors. But other people build things, assist others through service, make food, and the list goes on and on. You do not have to be an artist to use this creative drive we have. And that is how capitalism exploits the drive.

According to Marx, once this drive is harnessed by capitalism, in the form, for instance, of working in a factory, where the worker becomes alienated from the product. Think about when you make a paper airplane for fun. You fold it up and then toss it across the room. You have as much fun as that creative urge has given you. Imagine working in a paper airplane factory, where, for hours on end, you have to fold airplane after airplane. You get some idea about Marx’s idea of alienation.

The worker is alienated from the product because they cannot access it for themself, for one. The product is shipped off to strangers, and after a while, there is a sense that this is not a thing that the worker is doing of their free will anymore. The worker is tied into a system that demands the product but cares little for the producer. And this is where wage slavery comes in.

The worker, alienated from the product, continues the process of creating the product over and over again because the worker is sucked into a sort of slavery. In this system, the worker is required to work to make money to feed the worker and/or the worker’s family. The worker cannot exist without wages, because by the Industrial Revolution, a bartering system is nearly eliminated in the Western world, and the majority of workers are working in a capitalistic setting. If they do not obtain wages, they will starve.

As such, the worker is stuck in a form of slavery, in which they are forced to do work they may despise in order to continue collecting the wages that are required for their continued existence. Getting out of this system is difficult if not impossible, and subverting it is challenging, to say the least. But the worker remains tied to the wages.

So let’s take this back to our own daily routines. Who among you yearns for respite from your job, more than your week of vacation allotted by your boss? Do you ever wonder why you have to continue working until you are too old to continue? Perhaps something we take for granted, like working a weekly job, may be counter to a part of our human nature. Definitely something to think about the next time you grab your morning coffee before work.