We spend most of our lives (if we aren’t unlucky enough to be unemployed) traveling to work, being at work, traveling back home from work. preparing for work or resting from work. Work or work related functions consume almost all our time yet we don’t control how our workplaces are structured, run or even how our labour is used while we are there. We are under the control of someone else, the manager, the boss, the machine etc… meaning we feel no real attachment to work and as work takes up our whole life, no real attachment to life either.
Neither do we have the satisfaction of the product of our labour, the boss takes it, sells it for money and gives us a faction of the price for which it sold. The fact that capitalist production is production for the generation of money causes further alienation as the product of our labour is inconsequential, what matters what we require is simply the money in order to buy the means to live.
Participation in society itself, our social relations are mediated though commodity exchange to take part in society one needs to sell ones ability to work, to submit to the tyranny of the workplace described above in order pay the rent, buy food etc… There is no escape. It is impossible for the normal person that does not own the capital to live without selling their labour. This coercion, submit or die is fundamental to the functioning of the capitalist system. No one would willingly submit to the total loss of control inherent to work under capitalism without some form of explicit or implicit threat to do so.
The freedom that bourgeois hacks say capitalism gives us is merely the freedom to choose: who our exploiters and oppressors are; to choose starvation or suicide and to choose between 20 types of toothpaste. The framework of our choices are not up for negotiation, we have no freedom to decide ourselves what we can choose between. We are only allowed to choose between the options predetermined for us by our exploiters.
You don’t have to be conscious of the your exploitation for it to occur, it is occurring irrespective of your recognition of it. Commodity production is inseparable from all of the above. As long as capitalism is permitted to exist, alienation and all problems associated with it, depression, anxiety, apathy and so on… will be with us and no doubt become worse.
It is no wonder why the incidence of mental disorders have been on the increase with the rise post-industrialisation in the west were our labour is not even embodied in a tangible commodity but in services and “financial products”.
Work, labouring is what makes us human, our ability to plan our labour is what separates us from animals, capitalism separates us from this must humanising feature of ourselves. instead we retreat to the behaviours we share with animals to find comfort: sleeping, eating, drinking, sex etc… Marx expressed it as “what is human becomes animal, what is animal become human”.
To directly quote Marx:
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? First, in the fact that labor is external to the worker, that is, that it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel well but unhappy, does not freely develop his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker, therefore, feels himself only outside his work, and feels beside himself in his work. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His work therefore is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that labor is shunned like the plague as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion.
Marx in the Carparx 