exploitation
Dear friends,
We are bound in frames of colonial capitalism with systems of static purpose and design. Unless you live on the periphery, it is highly likely that at least some aspect of your existence fits within the western economic system. And unless you are centralised in a small handful of European nations (with, admittedly, high populations), you are probably contributing to those European nations prosperity, rather than your own. Naturally, with American imperialism this began to shift, and the global flows of resources and moneys are so deeply complex and intently mystified that tracing from primordial origins no longer serves meaningful purpose, but let’s do a little now anyway.
Capitalism emerged through violent processes of transformation beginning in 15th century Europe, where leaders leveraged desires for wealth and power to drive colonial expansion across the globe. This involved a dual process of material and ideological change. Materially, people were removed from their traditional relationships with land through enclosures and forced into wage labour, while skilled craftspeople were transformed into alienated workers separated from their means of production. This process was accompanied by colonial expansion that established global systems of exploitation and resource extraction [1].
The establishment of capitalism also required fundamental social and cultural transformations. This included the subjugation of women and devaluation of reproductive labour, most violently expressed through witch hunts, which helped establish the patriarchal control necessary for capitalist accumulation. Women’s unpaid domestic labour, childcare, and community care work became essential but unvalued parts of the new economic system [2]. Simultaneously, racial hierarchies were established to justify colonial violence and exploitation [3]. Both of these schematics of oppression continue today in ever more violent, sociopathic, and intergenerationally damaging forms.
These origins weren’t natural or inevitable, but rather emerged through deliberate processes of violence, dispossession, and ideological transformation that continue to shape contemporary (capitalist) social relations. New cultural institutions were created to maintain hegemonic control, transforming previous social values into ones centred on profit and accumulation. The Marxian tradition emphasises understanding these violent origins is crucial for recognising capitalism’s fundamental nature as an exploitative system rather than a natural way of organising society. But what are these systems now? And what the heck are dynamics?
The material conditions of capitalism in the 2020s are characterised by extreme wealth concentration, with the top 1% controlling more wealth than all world governments combined. This material dominance is maintained through new forms of exploitation, particularly through “innovations” like digital platforms and algorithmic control of workers entire lives. We’ve talked at length about how companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple have created digital fiefdoms that extract value from all social and economic activity within their domains [4]. Meanwhile, the traditional working class faces increasing precarity, with stable employment replaced by gig work and casual contracts, while essential public services are stripped away through privatisation and corporatisation.
Ideologically, capitalism maintains its hegemony through increasingly sophisticated means of manufacturing consent [5]. Social media algorithms create personalised propaganda, pushing users toward content that fragments class consciousness while promoting individualistic and reactionary worldviews. Digital platforms function as new cultural institutions that shape public discourse and prevent the emergence of collective resistance. Traditional media, largely controlled by figures like Murdoch, work in concert with these digital systems to naturalise consent to capitalist exploitation and prevent alternative visions from gaining traction.
The reproductive aspects of capitalism have also evolved, with the crisis of social reproduction intensifying. While women’s unpaid labour remains essential to capitalism’s functioning, new pressures from precarious employment and the dismantling of social services have made this reproductive work increasingly difficult to sustain. The system responds by commodifying aspects of social reproduction, from childcare to emotional support, while simultaneously devaluing and degrading these services. Moreover, in places like the United States, basic access to health care is not only stratified to the wealthy elite, but increasingly drawn on racial and gender axes. This has led to a perfect storm of psychological warfare against workers, particularly affecting those at the intersections of gender, race, and class exploitation.
Social institutions ranging from education to healthcare maintain rigid barriers against meeting genuine human needs while showing remarkable dynamism in creating new forms of exploitation. For example, universities remain inflexibly opposed to providing genuine public education or supporting critical thinking, while rapidly evolving new methods to extract value from students and workers through casualisation, metrics-based management, and the commodification of knowledge. Similarly, healthcare systems are increasingly rigid in denying universal access while dynamically developing new ways to generate profit from human suffering. Here, my friends, we start to see the rigidity of systems which may even claim “dynamism”.
The supposed dynamism of capitalist systems masks a fundamental rigidity. While markets and technologies evolve rapidly in pursuit of profit, the underlying structures of exploitation remain remarkably static [6]. We see this, particularly, in capitalism’s persistent reliance on unpaid reproductive labour, primarily performed by women, which forms an essential yet systematically devalued foundation of the entire economic system. The “dynamic” face of capitalism, which is actually its ceaseless drive for new markets, technologies, and methods of surplus value extraction, operates in parallel with rigid hierarchies of gender, race, and class. These hierarchies ensure continued access to devalued reproductive labour: the childrearing, housework, and emotional labour necessary to reproduce the workforce itself. This creates a striking paradox where capital can rapidly adapt production methods while steadfastly resisting any meaningful valuation of reproductive work or addressing intersectional worker needs.
This isn’t to say that there are not those working towards their own utopias.
The formation of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) is just one recent example of workers confronting both technological control and reproductive constraints. Workers organised specifically around issues of bathroom breaks, parental leave, and scheduling predictability. All points where profit-driven “efficiency” directly conflicts with human needs and dignity. Their success in becoming the first unionised Amazon warehouse (in the US) demonstrates how collective action can challenge seemingly immutable corporate structures. In Spain, the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation offers a different model of resistance, having developed an extensive network of worker-owned enterprises that explicitly prioritise worker well being “alongside economic viability”. Their integration of childcare facilities and flexible scheduling directly addresses reproductive labour needs traditionally ignored by capitalist firms.
The Zapatista movement in Mexico, has developed autonomous communities that integrate collective care work into their economic organisation [7]. Their caracoles explicitly incorporate women’s leadership and Indigenous understanding of collective well being, challenging both capitalist exploitation and colonial impositions on Indigenous ways of being. In Canada, First Nations-led movements such as Idle No More have confronted extractive capitalism through land defence which asserts sovereignty and relationships to land. These resistive movements frequently centre women’s leadership and cultural knowledge, refusing the capitalist separation of resource extraction from reproductive care for land and community.
We live within, however, a capitalist ontology which very quickly reaches and colonises our minds — from an extremely young age we are thrust into relation with capital. This ontological capture operates at multiple levels. At the individual level, precarity and debt create constant psychological stress that makes long-term, strategic thinking difficult. People trapped in cycles of survival labour often lack the mental bandwidth to imagine alternatives, let alone organise for them. The gig economy’s atomisation of workers further fragments collective consciousness, making it harder to recognise shared conditions of exploitation. Moreover, the colonisation of resistance is ever clear in how anti-capitalist movements are often recuperated into market logic. Thinking back on my post on how self-care transformed from a Black feminist concept into a commodified industry, or how workplace wellness programs individualise systemic issues [8]. Even our modes of resistance often unconsciously replicate capitalist temporalities and metrics of success.
We need frameworks for seeing the plural nature of reality, but we also need to tare down systems which reinforce division, hate and exploitation. Managing this requires dialogue and community. This is something that we’re building ever more of here, and I am so grateful to you for your reading of this post. Keep de-capitalising your mind, folks.
With love,
Aidan
Marx, K. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. ↩︎
Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the witch (Second, revised edition). Autonomedia. ↩︎
Sherwood, J. (2013). Colonisation – It’s bad for your health: The context of Aboriginal health. Contemporary Nurse, 46(1), 28–40. https://doi.org/10.5172/conu.2013.46.1.28 ↩︎
https://mndrdr.org/2025/the-labour-process-atomisation-and-social-media; Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. The Bodley Head. ↩︎
Chomsky, N. (1994). Manufacturing Consent (E. S. Herman, Ed.). Vintage. ↩︎
Dynamism under capital is ultimately anti-human, it seeks to evade or obscure the messy and annoying ‘organic’ parts of a human workforce. This, obviously, is deeply problematic for anything resembling humanist values and equality. ↩︎
https://mndrdr.org/2024/making-meaning-at-the-end-of-time ↩︎
Dear friends,
The acceleration of populist movements globally presents an interesting contradiction for analysis. Populism, a peculiar (if increasingly popular) political “logic” positions people against one another for the benefit of a person, or small group of people, vying for political power. Building on manufactured “us vs them” narratives, populist leaders will typically suggest the people need to rally behind their cause to take on the elites. The elites, importantly in this context, are not capitalists – but rather minorities that have been or can be depicted as evil, menacing, and controlling society. There is an aura of sophistication to the way populists speak, engage, and share their messaging, but above all else it is regularly xenophobic, racist, and comes with a chaser of hatred. All this in the name of clawing over some political power while allowing the continued exploitation of workers, and so on. Over time, populism has come to serves as a sophisticated tool for capital by leveraging new technologies to fragment class consciousness while continuing to reinforce the power structures it claims to oppose. This deserves our attention, particularly as we suffer from the transformation of social relations through algorithmic mediation and the cultivation of what can only be described as digital fascism.
Populism, which, positions an imagined “pure people” against a supposedly corrupt elite offers a relatively straightforward power grabbing tool for political figures – and so its proliferation globally over the last hundred odd years has an almost self-evident feeling. Because populism doesn’t demand truth, nor offer anything genuinely transformative, it does not upset capitalist status quo. Indeed, it can simply serve extant capitalist agendas, while keeping the working class fighting amongst ourselves. Populist campaigns across history have shown this, from Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement in 1930s America to contemporary figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi, populist movements have emerged as responses to capitalist crisis. They swoop in, purporting to connect with working class issues, and offer seductive but false solutions to systemic contradictions. While these movements often appropriate left-wing critiques of inequality, they invariably redirect legitimate working class grievances toward reactionary ends, substituting scapegoating for structural analysis.
The historical record reveals some distinct variants: right-wing populism, which typically combines nationalist mythology with racial grievance (c.f., George Wallace); left-wing populism, which attempts to build multi-racial working class coalitions but often remains trapped within capitalist logic (c.f., Peron in Argentina); and what we might call techno-populism, exemplified by figures like Elon Musk who marry Silicon Valley utopianism with reactionary politics. Each variety, despite their surface differences, shares a fundamental characteristic: they offer individualist solutions to collective problems while reinforcing rather than challenging capital’s grip on social relations. Frequently, populist movements have relied on technologies to advance their messaging, initially a reliance on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today demagogues harness algorithms and data analytics to micro-target their messaging – or just buy an entire social media platform and run it into the ground with fascist spam. This technological “evolution” requires theoretical framing to understanding how capital reproduces its hegemony through increasingly sophisticated means. Let me digress slightly to reactionary politics, first, though.
Marx offers a critique of reactionary politics, particularly his analysis of Louis Bonaparte’s rise to power, which provides a crucial substrate for insights into contemporary populism’s function within capitalism. Importantly, Marx observed how reactionary movements emerge during periods of class struggle, presenting themselves as defenders of “traditional” social relations while actually serving capital’s need to forestall revolutionary consciousness. His famous line about history repeating “first as tragedy, then as farce” continues to hold resonance as we witness capital’s recycling of reactionary tropes through digital means.
What Marx identified as “Bonapartism”, where a supposedly charismatic leader claims to transcend class conflict while actually intensifying capitalist exploitation, perfectly describes the function of contemporary populist figures. Nailed it. Analysis over… But not quite. The key difference lies not in the fundamental mechanism, but in its technological amplification. Where Bonaparte relied on army and bureaucracy to maintain power while appearing to stand above class interests, today’s populists leverage technological manipulations, algorithmic timelines, and digital surveillance to achieve the same end with unprecedented precision. Marx’s insight that reactionary politics serves to “represent” the masses while actually defending ruling class interests remains, devastatingly, relevant as the specific technologies of control metamorphose.
Historically, populist movements have emerged during periods of capitalist crisis, offering simplistic solutions to complex systemic problems while redirecting working class anger away from its true source. As we’ve touched on, the fundamental playbook hasn’t changed. Scapegoating marginalised groups, promoting nationalist mythology, and promising restoration of an imagined golden age. Rinse and repeat. But the mechanisms of delivery have evolved dramatically – and while this doesn’t change fundamentally the role of populism, it does alter the scale and damage. Where demagogues once relied on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today’s fascist authoritarians deputise traditional intellectuals to leverage data analytics, manipulate social media feeds, and micro-target their messages of hate and division. As with all right-wing ideas, the goal is to continue capitalist accumulation, exploiting and fucking over the 99% – fracturing working class solidarity while maintaining capitalist hegemony.
From the printing press enabling nationalist propaganda, through radio and television creating the first “celebrity” politicians, to today’s social media platforms optimising for engagement through extremism, each new communication technology has been seized by capital to enhance its ideological control. The key here is that capital does not care who on the spectrum is chosen to “lead” – it cares only that growth continues. In this humanity-destroying way, capitalism is tantamount to cancer. The only difference offered by new technologies is the unprecedented precision of manipulation. Social media algorithms don’t just broadcast populist messaging. Rather, they actively cultivate ideological bubbles, pushing users toward increasingly extreme content while creating the illusion of mass movement. Your feed becomes a carefully curated echo chamber, with each interaction driving you further from genuine class consciousness and deeper into manufactured tribal identity. Regardless of the “specific messaging” you’re seeing, this is true for you if you use any of Meta’s platforms. The resulting right-wing scream-fest of hatred and misguided anger coupled with the extremely inequitable capitalist model we continue to allow creates such angst and suffering and, remains, largely unidentifiable by the 99% due to hegemonic enforcement and cultural institutions.
The cruel genius is that populism, through its “almost truth” about exploitation, extraction, harm and division, transforms legitimate working class grievances into individualised rage, redirecting systemic critique into personal vendettas. Better yet, for the capitalists, cottage industries of hatred and “content creation” intersect to fuel accumulation and production of whole categories of misanthropic, cynical, and despotic media, merchandise, and more. Rather than recognising shared class interests, atomised “users” are encouraged to view their fellow workers as enemies, with algorithms helpfully suggesting which out-group to blame for their precarity. This technologically enhanced division serves capital perfectly – keeping the 99% fighting each other while the 1% continues accumulating wealth at our collective expense. The new found dictators rising to prominence through these platforms aren’t threatening the capitalist order; they’re its perfect products/pundits, offering the illusion of rebellion while reinforcing its fundamental logic. Or better yet, they are capitalists, beneficiaries of the worst of the system, seeing how it operates and perpetuating crueller and intersectionally more disadvantageous systems to solidify their own wealth and power.
This brings us to the wicked problem of electoral strategy in an age of algorithmic radicalisation. While the liberal fantasy of individual consumer choice in the “marketplace of ideas” has proven catastrophically inadequate, we must also reject the false populist promise of strongman solutions. The path forward requires rebuilding class solidarity and collective political consciousness – what we (or specifically Piper) might term utilitarian voting for the many, not the few. This means understanding elections as tactical terrain in an ongoing struggle, not as ends in themselves. When we vote, we must do so with clear eyes about the systemic limitations of electoral politics while recognising the material differences that policy choices make in working class lives – particularly at the margins and intersections of gender, race, disability and class. The myths perpetuated to forestall this kind of collective consciousness are as numerous, from the bootstrap fallacy of the “self-made millionaire” to the fiction of meritocratic mobility, capital relies on an elaborate mythology to naturalise its violence. These just-so stories about deserved wealth and poverty serve to individualise systemic problems, making structural critique appear impossible or naive. The ultimate success of these myths lies in how they’ve infected our ontological understanding. They make the artificial constructs of capitalism appear as natural as gravity – and even economists will tell you it’s not. We must remember that every “self-made” fortune rests on generations of stolen labour, every “individual success” story obscures a network of social relations and structural advantages.
What makes our current moment particularly dangerous is how new technologies amplify and accelerate these mythologies while simultaneously fragmenting our capacity for collective response. Ughh, I’m tired, are you tired? The same platforms that connect us also isolate us, channelling legitimate rage into algorithmic dead ends killing the development of genuine class consciousness. Filter bubbles abound, and rage lies at the end of every rainbow. Every click, every share, every angry reaction feeds the machine learning models determining what content spreads – letalone the deeply manipulated content priorities on platforms such as Twitter and “Truth Social”. All this, naturally, supports capitalist accumulation – more clicks, more ads, more engagement, more MAUs, more investors, more money! And engagement metrics inevitably favour extremist content that drives division over nuanced systemic critique – because who wants to listen to a Marxist when you’ve got Andrew Tate on the scene (present company excluded).
The “self-made” mythology really deserves scrutiny as a masterwork of hegemonic control. This narrative performs a dual function in service of capital, offering a phantasmic promise of class mobility while legitimising the structures that make mobility impossible. Like a cruel parody of Tantalus, the “American Dream”, hello white picket fence, or “Australian Dream”, just “a house”, I guess – the colonial-capitalist branding matters not, dangles forever out of reach, close enough to maintain hope while far enough to ensure continued submission to wage labour exploitation. This mythology operates simply: a very small handful of privileged workers do manage to ascend to petit bourgeois status through some combination of “foundational capital”, chance, and brutal self-exploitation. Their stories are then weaponised by capital’s (occult) cultural apparatus, transformed into morality tales about “hard work” and “determination” – better yet “GRIT” my absolute favourite psychology bullshit-ism – carefully excising any mention of structural advantage or stolen labour value. That’s right, these “self ascending” dickheads stole from you to get where they are. These exceptional cases serve as both carrot and stick – promising rewards for compliance while implicitly blaming the vast majority of workers for their own exploitation. “If they made it, why haven’t you?” (words that I’ve heard way too many times). The unspoken accusation, transforming systemic critique into personal failing – a joy.
The ideological sleight-of-hand ever effective because it leverages real examples while completely mystifying the underlying relations of production. Yes, some workers do become small business owners or climb the corporate ladder. But their individual success stories obscure how this limited mobility actually reinforces rather than challenges capitalist hegemony. The petit bourgeois small business owner often becomes an even more passionate vanguard of capitalist relations than the capitalist class itself, having internalised the logic of exploitation through their own desperate struggle to avoid falling back into the proletariat. They become the perfect deputies of capital, enforcing its logic at the micro level while championing the very system that keeps them in constant precarity. Not to mention the narcissistic, psychotic, torturous class of professional “managers” that capital deputises to “bootstrap enforcement” jobs.
Naturally the ingenious, come utterly evil, system transforms the potential energy of class consciousness into the energy of individual striving (or cutthroatism). Rather than organising collectively to challenge exploitation, workers are encouraged to view their peers as competition in a grand meritocratic game. What. An. Absolute. Load. Those “above” are more interested in pulling the metaphorical ladder up behind them than doing any work, and constantly in the process of creating new platitudes, torture technologies, and endless bureaucratic bullshit to keep workers busy. This process of selective co-optation serves capital perfectly – fracturing class solidarity while creating a layer of ideological enforcement within the working class itself. The. Worst.
We need both tactical savvy and strategic clarity. We need to deeply understand these technologies without being used by them, to use alternatives like Mastodon, Lemmy, and other decentralised systems rather than gargling corporate fascist propaganda on Bluesky, Instagram or Reddit. We need to find ways to build genuine solidarity that can withstand algorithmic manipulation. This means developing new forms of digital literacy and collective resistance – my assertion is that digital literacy remains one of the most foundational pieces of knowledge required to date, and Australia’s political leaders have spent a majority of the last term in office ensuring that kids have absolutely 0 exposure to any kind of analytical thinking or technology capabilities. Only by understanding how these systems work while refusing to let them work on us can we see “through” the shit – the constant normalisation of harm. The alternative is continued fracturing of the working class, with populist demagogues serving as the perfect instruments of distraction while we literally COOK OURSELVES ALIVE. The jet stream is gone, folks, we’ve already passed the point of no return on climate. If anyone’s willing to learn a lesson here, its the 8 billion of us who will be left here suffering when Musk’s on his way to Mars.
Deep time is such an important concept for our futures – and its something we absolutely have not come to understand. Caring for the future – generation, ecology, collectivism – these are things we notionally cared about as a society – now it’s militant individualism and capitalist propaganda all the way down. What the hell.
In solidarity,
Aidan
Dear friends,
I am fortunate to hold a role which affords me the ability to take leave. And gladly, I have a few days off this week, mostly to pack up our house as we move twice in the next six months. But, I can’t help but ponder the capitalist transformation of universities into profit-driven, productivity-obsessed institutions. You can think of this blog as a form of therapy, right? “They’re on a break but still harping on about capitalist infatuation with destroying academia, like, go lay on a beach you loser”. This capitalist interference in academia, again not suggesting there ever was a golden era, has led us to the latest in a very long line of hellish thought technologies imported wholesale from the corporate world – a culture of “publish or perish,” or “teach while underwater”. In this model, emphasis is given to “quantity” not quality, and certainly not to diversity. Amidst a litany of responses to this – the first, most common, being capitulation under the weight of hegemony, the second, being the exodus of the ruling class from the profession as their ill-gotten hoards support them, and competing thirds, for our discussion today, activist and “slow” responses.
“Slow academia” [1] is a concept which stems from the broader “slow movement” (that, according to Wikipedia authors, anyway, originated with “slow food” in the 1980s). This approach advocates for a more reflective, deliberate engagement with scholarship, pushing back against the commodification of knowledge and the erosion of time for deep thinking. Hot stuff, yeah? Well, maybe. Let’s dig into it.
Slow academia seeks to counter the quantification and marketisation of academic productivity, the precarious employment conditions pushing scholars to overwork, and funding models that prioritise quick, “impactful” results over long-term inquiry, sustained scholarship, and contributions into communities. The movement seeks to emphasise work-life balance, rejecting the always-connected culture that has colonised our world – after all, the hegemon suggests, if you’re not working, or scrolling Zuck’s propaganda orifices, you not really worth existing as a human. However, as is often the case with movements that challenge the status quo, capitalism has found ways to co-opt and twist aspects of slow academia to serve its own ends.
We talked previously, in passing, about the seizing of “mindfulness”, “work-life balance” and other leisure initiatives which have been co-opted into mini-industries, and which fundamentally place responsibility on individuals for failures, burnout, and “problems”, rather than addressing systemic issues. The concomitant rebranding of exploitative practices as “flexible” or “autonomous” work, are just a few examples of how the language of slowing has been commodified and stripped of any critical edge. Remember when everyone was super excited that Google’s corporate offices had pingpong tables? But then you realise no one could use them because they were so over worked? Nah, but notions of “happy work environments” are so frequently propagandist that the grim reality of forced return to office mandates, ever increasing despotism and micromanagement, and psychological torture carried out on behalf of the CEO are just the status quo – at least in most universities, and the Go8 with a pool table and game room for the professional staff that’s only gathered dust since the VC did the photoshoot in there shows that these glossy addons add one thing: propagandist dust – not lived realities.
We must confront the uncomfortable truth that the slow academia movement, which in its current form, often reflects and reinforces existing privilege structures within the academy. It’s lovely to suggest taking it slow, publishing where there’s a community impact, engaging with students in more meaningful modes, and so on – but the institutional rules do not reflect this. For instance, my institution does not recognise publications in platinum OA journals, rather if it’s not in Scopus, it’s not an academic output – and there’s no pathway for retort. The ability to “slow down” requires job security, financial stability, and flexible KPIs not available to many academics, particularly precarious workers, early-career researchers and those from marginalised backgrounds [2].
Moreover, scholars facing intersectional challenges are doubly, triply exploited and often end up picking up the slow, or rather, slack of the tenured professor, thus the luxury of resisting productivity pressures is a bourgeois and race/gender/ability/class-gap exacerbating relation – not a distributed socialist reality. The movement has been rightfully critiqued for centring the experiences of white, Western, tenured academics, inadvertently reinforcing the very power structures it seeks to challenge [3].
To truly transform academia and resist the deeply corrosive effects of capitalism on scholarly life, the slow academia movement must evolve an intersectional, socially reproductive, and/or class consciousness. This means advocating for structural changes to academic employment and funding models, centring the voices and experiences of marginalised scholars, and recognising how “slowness” as a bourgeois construct amplifies extant vulnerabilities, oppression, and practices which the academy exploits with glee. While, of course, not all “slow” scholars can be tarred with a bourgeois brush, the majority of bourgeois older white men who colonise and tumefy all over academia’s spaces gleefully adopt a “slow” moniker as they put their feet up on the backs of black women, and so on. Rather than allowing yet another progressive, activist, practice to become colonised by the hegemon, we need to find systemic solutions to overcome overwork, micromanagement, manipulation, psychological torture and stress in academia, reimagining “slow,” perhaps, not just as a personal practice but as a radical critique of capitalist values in higher education.
Short thoughts for a fast day,
Aidan.
Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. University of Toronto Press. ↩︎
Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., … Curran, W. (2015). For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 1235–1259. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v14i4.1058 ↩︎
Martell, L. (2014). The Slow University: Inequality, Power and Alternatives. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-15.3.2223 ↩︎
Dear friends,
Today I have been contemplating burnout.
Workers under contemporary fast capitalism are, like machines, left on piles of scrap amidst declining or decimated mental health and physical health – their only solace, that they briefly increased the stock price of their company. The intemperate nature of capitalist “reimagining” requires us to constantly reconfigure, redeploy, transmute, terraform, juxtapose, and so on regardless of our “job title”. I mean this in the sense that wave after wave of fast atmospheric shifts hit workers, demanding change, conformity, complicity and acceptance of new undermining and destabilising conditions in the system, just for us to subsist. Here is one of the most essential contradictions for workers under capitalism: consent is required for participation in wage-slavery, wage-slavery is required for capitalism, capitalism is indifferent to which wage-slave offers their consent, consent is mandatory.
Time was, before capitalism was violently and brutally globalised, that with access to adequate knowledge, skills, and physical locale, a select group of humans could opt-out of participation in capitalism. Through living in nations under different regimes, through “going into the wild”, or other radical forms of resistance, the alternative to capitalism was, essentially – at least in depictions, “being wild”. Hegemonic constructions of civilisation and civility, then, naturally arose from this false construct – those who lived in relation to land and place were less intelligent, less civil, they were less. Indeed, a large focus of cultural production, particularly in the 1940s, was around colonising, gentrifying, and capturing the imaginary that anyone not engaged in fulsome capitalist participation was utterly undesirable (thereby justifying genocides):
Bingo, bangle, bungle, I‘m so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go
Don’t want no jailhouse, shotgun, fish-hooks, golf clubs, I got my spears
So, no matter how they coax him (Yep!)
I’ll stay right here (Hillard & Sigman, 1947)
But, what does “living in the wild” even mean for burnout, Aidan? Firstly, let’s be clear, that living in the wild is a capitalist construct. The notion that nothing exists outside of capitalism, capitalist realism, has emerged in recent years as a way of understanding the ontology of labour-servitude that is enforced by our contemporary socio-economy. But notions of “wildness”, “civility” and “barbarism” are equally constructs designed to lead us to this eventuality. Historiography shows us that most of the world did not, in fact, at least in the last 3,000 years, live “in the wild” in the sense of Tarzan. But rather that sophisticated communities of social, economic, and essential care under a wide variety of political and social organisation systems proliferated.
European colonial thinking began placing these systems of organisation on hierarchical ladders at around the same time as the politics of race relations came on to the scene – a repugnant, but “useful”, tool for the morally unencumbered capitalist slave merchant – to profile intelligence, civility, “usefulness” and other outlandish, racist, and unscientific notions which have been discredited time and again. Though, that doesn’t stop Trump and Vance, Dutton, or Sunak, etc. from deploying variously racist, sexist, and vile divisive rhetorics. By using these tools, and through the continued manufacturing of history, we have arrived hard and fast – like a car fully slamming the break on after a 100mph race, at capitalist realism. Alternatives, in this world, are not only impossible, but they are fiction. As are the versions of “wild” life we see portrayed by capitalist and corporate media. Imbued with political messaging which demands there is no alternative to capitalism but barbarism, terrorism, violence, and death. In spite of the fact that alternative systems continue to exist and work – today.
So, burnout, what do? Burnout is a direct consequence of the intensified exploitation of workers, felt by knowledge workers and labourers alike, under late capitalism. As demands for productivity and efficiency continually increase, workers are pushed to their mental and physical limits, extracting maximum surplus value until they can no longer function effectively. Like the shipping containers in the desert filled with outmoded robots in I, Robot (anyone else remember this vividly?), workers are worked fast and hard until they retire or cease to function for other reasons (i.e., mental health). Capitalism throughout remains utterly indifferent to the reasons, of course, unless “enough workers” become a “real” problem. Theoretically, this process mirrors Marx’s concept of the reserve army of labour, but in addition to unemployment/underemployment, it also creates a cycle of burnout/replacement. Our socio-economic model treats workers as disposable resources. Not an investment, not even in the materials sense (qua. raw materials) where outmoded raw materials are still used for other purposes. Instead, humans and their labour become indistinguishable from the tools of production which have been replaced in the race for “bigger”, “more” and “better”.
Literally, capitalism demands using us up and discarding us when we can no longer meet the ever-escalating demands of the market. Even when an entire workforce or industry collapses, the bro on wall street could not care less, and so the system marches on. In the specific realm of knowledge work, this exploitation takes on yet another insidious form, as the boundaries between work and personal life blur, and workers are expected to be constantly available and productive – such that the equation of work for your leisure time has been replaced with work for work – or just die [1].
But hey, this is a cheery topic, why stop here?
The status quo, enacted through the mass weight of hegemony, gives us further insight into how burnout is normalised – even valorised – and perpetuated in society. The dominant capitalist ideology promotes a culture of overwork and self-sacrifice, framing burnout as a personal failure rather than a systemic issue. Indeed, “soft” burnout (or perhaps the CEO’s pretend burnout) is vastly different from the true psychology of burnout – but nonetheless the colonisation of words by capitalist hegemons rolls on. Work culture as cultural hegemony, naturally, serves to maintain the status quo. Here workers are ever forestalled from realising collective exploitation – with individualist answers offered to systemic issues by capitalists’ EAPs. Of course, we know from Gramsci, this also forestalls creative problem solving, future thinking, creativity broadly, and most importantly organising against this extractive and deadly system – together, the only way to collective liberation [2].
Adding to the mix, here, the role of traditional intellectuals offers us an interesting, if equally grim, analytical point. If we presume that traditional intellectuals are, largely, educated, critical thinkers, and somewhat autonomous under the proviso of capitalist loyalty, then we see a double stab of capitalist against prole, or rather against petit-bourgeois. Despite their potential for critical thinking, traditional intellectuals have become complicit even in their own exploitation and expropriation. The promise of social mobility and professional success acts as a form of consent and leads workers to accept and even embrace the conditions that lead to their burnout. The simultaneous acts of valorising work, espousing capital, and accepting the conditions that allow humans to be discarded because of individualist tendencies is a vicious and contradictory cycle – but no longer a contradiction of gloves-off capitalism, but rather one of “faced” human exploitation (as in there are actual perpetrators of sociopathy who think this shit is all fine and dandy, and worse, get off on creating conditions which burn colleagues out).
And what is suggested as the antidote to all this? Well naturally “self-care”. You’re bourgeois enough to have burnt out, so you must be bourgeois enough to have a spa day – that’ll fix ten years of expropriation of your labour, yeah? Yeah. But this, too, as with all things in our realist capitalist hellscape is commodified. What began, in pockets at least, as a radical act of resistance against systemic oppression has been twisted into a profitable industry that additionally burdens the worker with individualist notions of care, commercialised versions of wellbeing, and responsibility not with the capitalist and sociopathic micromanager creating the conditions of suffering, but again, with the “defective worker”.
This perversion of self-care serves a dual purpose for the capitalist class. First, it creates new markets for products and services aimed at “alleviating” the very stress and burnout that capitalism itself engenders, and has come to value. Second, and more cunningly, but with regular monotony, it diverts attention and energy away from collective action and systemic change. After all, why organise a union when you can buy another subscription to a different mindfulness app?
And while I’m on a roll, this wouldn’t be the blog it is without mention of technology’s role in all this. We have discussed ad nauseam, dear friends, how the potential of technology as a liberating force has been forever rewritten by capitalism into a sophisticated system of control and exploitation. Since there have been “tools of production” there have been techniques, modes, and models of worker exploitation matching the increased technology of the machinery to ensure control, subordination and solidification of class/race/gender hierarchies. The laptop and smartphone, introduced and marketed as tools of “freedom” and “flexibility” have become the digital shackles of the 21st century proletariat (okay, even I roll my eyes a little here, but the sentence sounded cool). With the hegemon perpetually valorising the degradation of boundaries between work and personal life, the 24/7 access to technology has all but obliterated “leisure”, in spite of what the ALP would have you believe after watering down the Greens’ legislation [3].
Stemming from technology use, remote work, here, touted as a remedy for work-life balance, has only intensified the extraction of surplus value from workers – particularly so in the case of precarious knowledge workers, shift workers, and other casualised and insecure workers. The home, in Marx’s day, a refuge from the demands of wage labour servitude, has been colonised by capital, and does not rest. Indeed, growing subjugation to invasive digital surveillance under the guise of “productivity monitoring” seals the deal.
As I wrote about open source LLMs and AI as a potential panacea to corporate AI-fanatic bullshit, this techno-dystopian reality is not an aberration but the logical conclusion of capitalism’s relentless drive for “efficiency” and “profit”. The question we need ask ourselves, as always, is “for who?” because I can tell you, my friends, it is not for me – and it is not you.
As we stand amidst the smouldering ruins of the 40-hour workweek, gasping for air in the acrid smoke of burnout, it is ever clear that tinkering around the edges of capitalism is insufficient. Liberal reform as led to liberal increases in work suffocation, choking on our own fumes, so to speak, as the planet burns. We need a radical reimagining of work itself, one that challenges the very foundations of the wage-labour paradigm that has defined capitalism since its inception.
Between growing calls for universal basic income, reduced working hours, and workplace democracy, I see only more ways for capital to incorporate, inculcate, and colonise. What about labour for the common good? What about care as a natural and native part of what we do as humans? What about sharing-economies at small scales, or just living in right relation with the land? These are utterly foreign, despicable, and insufferable qualities to capitalism and its capitalists. But these ideas, and more from smarter people than I, are amongst our only hopes for a society where burnout is a relic of a bygone era, rather than an individual issue for “someone else” as we compete for means of survival in late capitalism.
What a fucking world, friends.
I had a whole tirade about how AI could have been leveraged, but wasn’t, to liberate more of us, but that’s really a story for another day. In the meanwhile I hope wherever you are isn’t quite so grim, and you’re not as surrounded by burnt out people.
Much love and with solidarity,
Aidan
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/05/pwc-to-start-tracking-working-locations-of-all-its-uk-employees https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/nearly-half-of-dells-workforce-refused-to-return-to-the-office/ ↩︎
Gramsci, A. (with Bordiga, A., & Tasca, A.). (1977). Selections from political writings (1910-1920) (Q. Hoare & J. Mathews, Trans.). Lawrence and Wishart. ↩︎
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/workplace-laws/legislation-changes/closing-loopholes/right-to-disconnect ↩︎