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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

I think it's highly linked to alienation.

Say you're working in a call-center for an insurance company. You could look at it one way - you're a small part of a great thing, the idea of inn-sewer-ants, that means people in society have some level of safety when things go wrong.

But it becomes alienating when you see that it, along with pretty much all business, is a construct to funnel wealth to the people at the top, whilst extracting as much value as it can from the powerless people at the bottom.

Capitalism is innately more alienating the closer to the bottom you are, because due to the division of labour, people no longer have much of a connection to the results of the work they are doing, unless they are in an industry that is innately creative, such as coding, or vocational and involves seeing the direct results of helping people out.

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Alienation may be part of it, but it could also be due to a variance in how people perceive the world.

A health insurance company might have employees with different understandings of how the world works. Some may feel they are helping people who are sick, and others may feel they are skimming money off the top of sick people.

The former employees might feel quite satisfied with their work and the later naturally feels depressed and anxious.

So would it folllow that more naïve people are less likely to feel alienation?

Or the more cynical people are more likely to feel alienation (not because alienation causes cynicism - though it does - but because cynicism causes alienation).

But ideal workers who are neither naive nor cynical - how do they see the situation?

There is evidence that mildly depressed people tend to have a more accurate outlook on the world.

I think that's the crux of it. Society has got more complex with industrialisation and globalisation. There's those at the top who have autonomy and are well paid and then you have an army of workers at the bottom who have no say in anything. Capitalism is fundamentally about exploiting labour - you have to extract more value from the worker than it costs to hire him to make a profit. Exploiting labour has become a lot easier in the last 40 years with developing countries joining the labour pool.

> Capitalism is fundamentally about exploiting labour

That's a very Marxist view. And no, it's not. Capitalism is fundamentally exploiting the planets resources, mostly hydrocarbons.

You can easily pay people a fair market wage and still produce a profit by exploiting the planet or even just market inefficiencies.

The Marxist view assumes that if there is profit it should be shared between workers for their labour.

This view completely ignores the costs and risks involved with capital expenditures.

It also assumes that markets are efficient, they're not.

You should tell the Marxist-Leninists that they aren't supposed to exploit the hydrocarbons.

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