Severance

A Tale of Marxist Alienation

I recently watched Season 1 of Severance in anticipation of the Season 2 release. I’ll avoid talking about major plot points, but minor spoilers follow if you aren’t familiar with the series so if you want to watch it without knowing anything about it, then stop reading now. Also note this is about the Apple TV series, not the 2006 horror-comedy of the same name, which I have not watched.

The basic premise of the series is the severance procedure whereby a person can become completely detached from their work personality. As the Severance Wiki describes it:

A biotech corporation, Lumon Industries, uses the severance procedure to separate the non-work memories of some of their employees from their work memories.

The concept of the severance procedure aligns nicely with the Marxist theory of alienation. Being science fiction, Severance simply takes this theory to the extreme. In Severance, people who undertake the procedure no longer have any memory of being at work. They can live their lives without any concern about their work, they are simply missing those hours of their memory. On the flip side, their at work personality only knows work. The very first episode of the series draws the comparison between the workplace and hell. For one side, all play and no work, for the other side, all work and no play. But in reality, both sides are the same person, they have just been artificially severed from each other.

And that’s all I’m going to say about the show itself, I recommend watching it to see how it all plays out.

What did Marx say about Alienation?

Alienation exists throughout Marx’s work, but the most succinct analysis can be found in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in his notes on Estranged Labor. The entire work is worth reading, but I will do my best to explain it here. Marx begins by explaining the concept:

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

This disparity between wealth production and wealth accumulation is the basis of the entire capitalist economic system, which Marx would later expand upon in Capital with the theory of surplus value. To put it simply, the workers produce wealth that they themselves will not enjoy. Thus they are alienated from the product of their labor - it is simply a means to achieve a wage, which is much less than the total value of their labor. As Marx explains:

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

I have highlighted a couple of the most important sections in this passage. This is a perfect description of how most workers feel under capitalism. Workers do not labor for the sake of labor but rather out of compulsion to survive. Therefore they have no attachment to their job other than out of necessity. In Severance, they do not even know what their job is. They have no memory of it. They sacrifice a part of themselves to avoid the memory of work. Their work belongs entirely to the corporation. This is not that different from reality under capitalism.

If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

The worker is alienated from the product of their labor in order to increase the wealth and satisfaction of the capitalist. Or as Marx puts it:

It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.

This is the product of the wage-labor system, which requires private property. This is why “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” And the abolition of private property necessitates the abolition of wage labor and as a consequence of that the end of the alienation of the worker. As Marx wrote, “Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other.” Therefore, in order to solve the problem of alienation, we must solve the problem of private property and the entire mode of capitalist production.

It is not enough to demand an increase in wages. Reform is part of the class struggle and Marxists do support any battle in favor of improved conditions for the working class, but the struggle does not end there. Rather than the motto “A fair day's wages for a fair day's work,” Engels proposed “Possession of the Means of Work —
Raw Material, Factories, Machinery — By the Working People Themselves.” And Marx put it even simpler, “Abolition of the wages system!" That is the goal of the communists.

James Connolly, revolutionary Irish Marxist

For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth. - James Connolly