Working it

Marx wrote a great deal about alienation, estrangement and their unfortunate bed partner, the worker. To Marx, self-actualization (the realization of one's potential, unique gifts and capacities) should come about through an individual's working life.

Unfortunately, he observed, labour is what commonly robs a person of their right to individuality and the expression of their inner needs.

John Ruskin, (whose book Sesame and Lilies I owe the title of this blog to), felt similarly about the plight of the modern worker:

"You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog wheels and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last-- a heap of sawdust so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses...On the other hand, if you make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapaability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind them and within them." (Ruskin, Stones of Venice)

Having read both Marx and Ruskin at a young age, I don't think I am well-prepared for the work force. I thought I would launch into a beautiful career full of self-actualization but have found myself confused, doing some freelance work and searching for a full-time position that is of, at least, marginal interest to me. I'm not sure that my undergrad degree in Criticism and Curatorial Practice and frothy hatred of the Man are helping much either.