A Profession Is Not a Personality
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to the trailer for his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
As an economist, I’ve heard plenty of complex explanations for Karl Marx’s famous opposition to capitalism. Fundamentally, though, Marx’s reasoning comes down to something simple: happiness. He believed that capitalism made people unhappy by treating them as part of a machine in which the person is expunged and only productivity remains. “The spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him,” Marx wrote in his 1844 essay “Estranged Labor.” “It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.” Workers are objectified, in his view, made into miserable shells.
Whether or not you agree with Marx’s assessment of what the capitalist system does to us, many. Too many people who work hard and strive for success -objectify as excellent work machines and tools of performance.
