Latest news with #alienation
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I'll tell you what we need – Marxism
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force. Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces. This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time. Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer's argument is a sight for sore eyes: 'Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.' The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that. Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today's younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait. In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers. Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work. In his words: 'Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.' Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for. Last, Marx's freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or 'cloud capital' – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. Only through Marx's lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I'll tell you what we need – Marxism
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force. Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces. This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time. Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer's argument is a sight for sore eyes: 'Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.' The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that. Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today's younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait. In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers. Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work. In his words: 'Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.' Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for. Last, Marx's freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or 'cloud capital' – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. Only through Marx's lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
The Guardian
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dragonfly review – haunting, genre-defying drama of lonely city living
Twenty years ago, Paul Andrew Williams announced himself as a smart new British talent with his ferocious gangland picture London to Brighton, and his creativity has continued in film and TV ever since. His new film is a haunted, social-realist drama with elements of Mike Leigh but also moments of thriller and even horror. Williams isn't shy of stabbing us with an old-fashioned jump scare towards the end, which in fact challenges the audiences with its refusal of categorisation. There are two superb lead performances from Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn and an outstanding supporting turn from Jason Watkins. Dragonfly is about loneliness and alienation and about the eternal mystery of other people, the fear of intimacy and the unknowable existence of urban neighbours. Elsie, played by Blethyn, is an older woman who is quite capable of independent living in her bungalow, but a recent fall and an injured wrist has meant that her middle-aged son (Watkins), all too obviously to compensate for not visiting that often, has paid for daily visits from a private agency nurses. They are overworked and not doing an especially good job. Really, she doesn't need these nurses and by enduring them, Elsie is shouldering the burden of her son's guilt. Meanwhile nextdoor neighbour Colleen, played by Riseborough, is a continuingly strange presence. She is a melancholy, withdrawn figure, evidently on benefits and living with her huge American bull terrier, uncompromisingly named Sabre. Williams shows us that she is effectively living in a kind of platonic relationship, or mariage blanc, with this dog; the film periodically gives us startling shots of Sabre's colossal body in a kind of domestic nakedness sprawled on Colleen's bed. In a manner that may be insidious or predatory or just friendly and compassionate, Colleen befriends Elsie; the latter overcomes her initial nervousness of Sabre and she appreciates Colleen's forthright offer of help. Colleen goes down to the shops to get groceries for Elsie and after a few such trips they agree that what would be easiest would be if Colleen simply gets Elsie's debit card and Elsie gives her the pin number. Of course, the film allows us to suspect the worst and then suspect the worst of ourselves for suspecting it. Colleen seems to be unhappy and damaged but well-meaning, especially when she (for a laugh) buys them both a two-way radio so they can easily keep in contact – but then uses this radio to talk to Elsie late at night and semi-intentionally to allow bewildered Elsie to hear what's happening in Colleen's house. It is a riveting dual portrait of two gloomy people who really have, in a strange and dysfunctional way, found a new way of interacting and – importantly – this is a triangular relationship: Elsie, Colleen and the vast Sabre. But with a terrible inevitability, Elsie's uptight busybody son John (Watkins) arrives and there are awful consequences to a conversation he has with Colleen which Williams only shows us in long shot, withholding the truth about what he's saying. It's a stark, fierce, wonderfully acted film. Dragonfly screened at the Tribeca film festival.
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Branded a stranger by Labour on an island I call home
Jenni Daiches writes about her sense of alienation from the party after Keir Starmer's 'island of strangers' speech (Letters, 22 May). My father fought with the British Indian army in Burma and Singapore as a young officer during the second world war. He even got a mention in the king's dispatches. He elected to stay in the Pakistan army after partition in 1947. I graduated from university in Pakistan and arrived in the UK in 1972 for further studies, and eventually became a UK citizen, as legislation then allowed – a course that many people from that part of the world were encouraged to follow. I joined the Labour party, lived in Finchley, London, and endeavoured to make this country my home. And now Keir Starmer uses such inconsiderate and ill-thought-through language that I have never felt so estranged in my own country. Last week, I ceased being a member of the Labour party. I have never felt so 'othered'. Syed JamalTrefor, Gwynedd Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
