 If you're human and alive, there's a good chance you hate Mondays. Why is that? We don't have a lot of time on this earth. We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements. You might hate Mondays, but is it the Mondays that you hate? If you're lucky enough to have holidays, do you still get that Monday feeling? Of course not. That's because you don't really hate Mondays. You hate capitalism. All of our life we're told about the wonders of free markets. But how free are you really if, every day, you have to go work in a dictatorship like the capitalist workplace? How free are you if you're being ruled by outside forces and alienated from what you're doing? Let's see what Mark says. When I was a kid, people kept asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I kept not really knowing what I wanted. I needed a job, apparently. And no matter what it was, I spent a huge amount of my life doing it. After some thinking, I realized that if I wasn't going to hate my job, I needed to have some sort of meaning to feel like I was doing something worthwhile for others. I needed it to be something where I could keep learning and growing. Most of all, I realized I needed to have some control over my life while at work. I needed a certain amount of freedom. I quickly realized that these jobs are very hard to come by if you're not born rich. Why is this? In the previous video in this series, we saw how workers are forced to work for capitalists. In so doing, they continually produce and reproduce the capitalist social relations that control them. By producing more and more profits, workers continually strengthen by accumulation the power of capital. As capital concentrates into fewer and more powerful megacorporations, it grows its power over workers and society. To keep this machine going, workers are continually forced by the threat of deprivation to sell their labor power to capital. Once sold, their labor power is owned and controlled by bosses. A part of their time and activity, their life, is now owned by someone else, their boss. While we're at work, we are ruled by unaccountable dictators we call bosses. But with one difference, bosses have more power over the details of our lives than most dictators ever dream of. It's a very special kind of totalitarianism when bosses decide whether you even get lunch or bathroom breaks, threaten you about Facebook and Twitter comments, and force you to work for free when the day is done. We know why bosses have this power. They decide whom to hire and fire, they can assign people dangerous, harmful and humiliating tasks, and they decide whom to promote and offer opportunities to. Capitalism, they have the legal right to decide all of these things without any democratic control or input from most people affected by these decisions, namely workers. This makes the capitalist workplace inherently unfree. For Marx, this has major implications for life under capitalism. First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being, that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself only when he is not working. When he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. For Marx, what characterizes humans is our capacity for consciously self-directed activity, for freedom. Because labor under capitalism is unfree, it doesn't belong to our essential being. Second, labor is therefore not voluntary, but forced. It is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but the mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned like the plague. Because labor under capitalism is unfree, we don't enjoy it. Because we don't enjoy it, we don't feel a real need to carry it out. Instead, we end up working only to satisfy our external needs to survive, look after those we care about, and so on. Anyone who has turned something they love into a job has felt this in some way. Even things which are inherently valuable and enjoyable to do, like curing and helping sick people or teaching future generations, get much of that enjoyment sucked out of them as soon as you end up having to do it as your job. It doesn't have to be this way. If we were free, it wouldn't be. Thirdly, the external character of labor for the worker is demonstrated by the fact that it belongs not to him, but to another, and that in it, he belongs not to himself, but to another. The activity of the worker is not his self-activity. It belongs to another. It is a loss of self. The relationship of the worker to the act of production within labor is therefore a relationship between a worker and his own activity as something which is alien and does not belong to him. As capitalism alienates us from our products and our labor, it also alienates us from others, namely capitalists. If the worker relates to their activity as unfree activity, they relate to it as activity in the service under the rule, coercion and yoke of another, i.e. the capitalist. This is repeated in volume 1 of Capital, where he writes about factory labor as a hierarchically organized system of exploitation and oppression, and talks about how it confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. This is why the labor movement has traditionally labeled work under capitalism wage slavery. It's not because it isn't very different from real slavery, but because it shares one important feature with slavery. It's fundamentally unfree, and the only way to get rid of it on freedom is to abolish the social relations that maintain it. So, why do we hate work under capitalism? Marx argues that we hate work under capitalism because it's unfree. Deep down, we know we want to live with freedom and dignity. That's not possible in the workplace so long as they are governed by unaccountable dictators called bosses. What does it say about our society if, for so many of us, the great tragedy of our life just is a huge part of our life, the large part of our life when we have to work not for something we believe in or care about, but for an alien power imposed upon us? Marx also thinks that labor is a fundamental activity in human life. By subjecting this part of the worker's life to the rule of uncontrolled outside powers, alienated labor tears away from him his species life, his true species objectivity. This isn't inevitable. Marx's point isn't that we're unfree and that this sucks, though we are, and it does. It's that understanding how we are made unfree makes our emancipation possible. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. This is where the labor movement comes in. On the one hand, capitalism is fundamentally unfree, enshrining the dictatorship of bosses. On the other hand, it also generates a social force that pushes towards comprehensive human emancipation, the proletariat. Capitalism brings workers together, unifies them under a set of common interests, with the potential to replace capitalism with a truly free society. While it's in the capitalist's interests to maintain capitalism and their position of wealth, power and privilege within it, it's in workers' interests to overthrow capitalism and transition to communism, a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. In this video, we've looked at how capitalism alienates us by subjecting us to the tyranny of bosses every working day. In the next, we'll look at how it generates the social force that might just free us all, communism. Thank you for watching. Please like, share, subscribe for more of our stuff. There's a playlist below. If you have any questions or comments, please put them in the comments and we'll try to answer them either there or in the Q&A video.