“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
Much ink has been spilled on how to distribute the earth’s resources so that each receives according to their need. Far less has been spilled considering the first half of that poetic and oft-cited sentence: how to organise the world so that people contribute according to their abilities.1 When the question of contribution-via-work is brought up at all, it is usually posed in terms of how to motivate people to work (what if, in a theoretical future socialism, everyone just lazes around?).
But I have begun to consider the question from the other angle: what if getting people to do work is a manageable challenge, but creating a world where they can exercise their full abilities is far more difficult? What would it mean to build a world where everyone could contribute in a way truly commensurate with their potential abilities?
This might sound lofty, but the problem it addresses currently manifests in concrete ways. Sure, many people want and even need more money, but this isn’t all I hear when I observe the gripes and suffering of the even-semi-middle-class. Many also mourn for their untapped potential, and rue their chronic boredom. Hidden in the concept of a “mid-life crisis” or a “Formerly Gifted Kid” or “going back to school one day” or really any form of switching jobs or careers is the sense that it must be possible to be something that would be a truer expression of one’s abilities. There is, very obviously, an injustice when some do not receive according to their need. But there is perhaps also a kind of injustice or social pathology when people cannot contribute according to their abilities, or even develop those abilities.
Part of my recent musings on this matter occurred because, as a Harvard grad (sorry) I am generally sent, either by algorithms or people, whatever the latest writing might be on What The Harvard Kids Are Up To. Recently, an article in the New York Times profiled the relatively guiltless willingness of today’s Harvard undergraduates to “sell out”; to go work in finance or consulting right after graduation in order to “make a bag.” Indeed, surveys show the number of students who enter university prioritizing earning money has been creeping steadily upwards, ever since the 70s.
The article is full of gemlike quotes, many from administrators and professors who clearly view this selling-out as a problem, perhaps one worth tolerating only because it brings the university money. (“Roger Woolsey of Union College said schools didn’t want to push back too much on [investment and consulting firms] recruiting students in their sophomore years because they could lose revenue from recruitment advertising.”)
But two things stood out most of all. Firstly, despite being (in some cases unabashed) sell-outs, most of the students were still keen to describe their ultimate life goals as something else. Sure, they told their professors or the journalists, they were going to secure cultural, educational, professional and literal capital first, but eventually they were going to use all that to do something better, more meaningful.
Secondly, the article didn’t truly have a clear analysis of why selling out might matter. For all that this article generated buzz (Harvard articles tend to), it couldn’t quite answer this question: why should we care if Harvard kids want to earn a lot of money? What’s the problem? Only two quotes really touched on this, I found, both related to a certain Mr Desai,
a professor at Harvard’s business and law schools, [who] wrote a 2017 essay in The Crimson titled “The Trouble With Optionality,” arguing that students who habitually pursue the security of prestigious employment foreclose the risk-taking and longer-range thinking necessary for more unusual or idealistic achievements.
There’s a loss for the world there, the professor points out in stock-options-style language. This selling-out probably deprives humanity of whatever else these youth could be up to, whether in teaching, invention, creative work, politics or more. Perhaps conscious of this, the students tend to justify their decisions to their professor by pointing to their eventual other-plans, the ones that will happen after they make money.
Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”
But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”
Absolutely, of course. Come to my reunion with me, I’ll show you some very different people than the fellow freshmen I once knew.
However, there is still something else to be said, hidden adjacent to the point “you go to work and you become a different person.” It’s not just that the people who become investment bankers and management consultants all end up wearing the same puffer-jackets, or thinking in a particular way. Any job or pursuit can reshape your habits or even your brain (writing lefty articles on the internet is no different.) No, it’s that all jobs that we do for pay will in some ways deprive us of the agency to act and develop as we see fit. And some jobs do this a lot more than others, because they require a level of estrangement from the impulses and relationships we might otherwise have with people and the world around us.
We go to work, and we are transformed and sometimes deformed by it, yes. But also, along the way, we might lose the sense we could have had agency to choose at all, that there really was another option besides selling out. And that loss is more final than the others.
This big loss isn’t something that ever fully gets described in the NYT article, but it’s a form of alienation. It isn’t described that way because it is an idea that sits uneasily with prevailing ideologies. As a result, however, both the students and the professors interviewed aren’t quite able to explain what it is they want from education or work or life; they can’t describe what they might really long for.
Even during my time at Harvard, more than a decade ago, finance and management consulting took over the campus each year, and snapped up whoever they could to strategically administrate capital (for all the awe that finance and management consulting jobs can generate in certain circles, it’s really just that).
Meanwhile, certain friends, the kind who read their Marx even outside class, would disrupt the recruitment events by attending dressed in suits and then getting up in the middle of the event to loudly describe the way that Goldman Sachs drove up wheat prices, leading to starvation and other food crises. This was not a popular move with their fellow students. It was, however, correct.
When I read the recent article on generation Z, I missed any mention of that kind of intervention. Where are the kids yelling in the recruitment events, I wondered nostalgically?
Perhaps the years of disrupting finance recruiting are long past. And yet. It’s not all totally nihilistic yet, it seems. If one reads what the current Harvard students are saying, it is that they want to earn money so that they can finally go do something else after that.
For example, the article notes that effective altruism is yet popular with the students as a philosophy, and it attributes this to “how pessimistic its members are, and how much they feel like life is beyond their control.” The logic, in short, is that it’s not possible to change the world directly, through organising or art or day to day contributions at a smaller scale. But money does change the world, so if one aspires to do good, the fastest route is to play the game and send the money elsewhere. Over and over again in the article, young people explain they just want to work in fancy finance jobs but only to allow themselves to give that money away or do something else.
Of course, some of this is surely just lip service, what you’re supposed to say to a reporter or on a first date. But I think it is more than that, given the data about disengagement at work, about people’s craving for meaning in their lives. The kids are willing to sell out, but they know that selling out means missing something. They tack that “something” at the end of the fantasy, like a messianic vision or the promise of heaven. One day, they’ll get to do something meaningful as well. Meanwhile, they’ll hold on to a very specific conception of what it means to give “from each according to their ability” and imagine that their contributions are enormous charitable donations.
What if the best thing we have to contribute isn’t just money? To put it another way, what if the problem with capitalism wasn’t just that it causes Goldman Sachs to starve people in Africa, but (also) that it causes smart and interesting people to work at Goldman Sachs?
Yes, I of course know the starving people are the more immediate emergency. But: what would it mean to consider these twisted phenomena, inequality and alienation, as two sides of the same coin?
I have used this word, alienation, intentionally here. The New York Times, of course, does not use the word alienation. But that is what is at stake.
In the original Marxist German, the rather poetic term for this is Entfremdung, an estrangement from the self. The worker, in Marxist theory, is estranged from himself because he cannot really see himself as the author and director of his own actions. He does not choose the terms of his daily actions, nor his daily purchases, nor even his relationships with other people, because the economic system in which he lives makes only a certain kind of existence survivable and/or imaginable. Just think of all the finance guys on the subway on the way to work, furiously thumb-typing emails, wearing near-matching outfits and chugging thermos flasks. How much of that lifestyle is truly their nature, how much did they really choose? Even as consumers, we are alienated, in that our possessions are not really the result of our choices or self-directed purposive thought (as they might be in a pre-modern society, where we make and consume things for one another in tight-knit groups of those we care for). In fact, theories of alienation suggest, we are not just estranged from ourselves or from our jobs and belongings, but also from other people, who we come to see as their job titles, or as competitors, or as the right sort of girl to swipe on on Hinge, so we can settle down within the appropriate timeline.
In this broad sense, alienation is both the reality and the felt sense (which may not necessarily arrive together) that, despite aspirations to the contrary, we are not exhibiting meaningful agency in our relationships with ourselves, or others, or anything around us. We are not reshaping the world around us, molding it to our own “nature” or our hopes and dreams. Instead, capitalism is reshaping us.
We can see the effects of alienation poignantly enough when we consider children. Ask a child what they want to do “when they grow up”, and for the most part today they still want to be doctors, teachers, nurses, artists and gymnasts, trash collectors and construction workers, zookeepers and nature-dwellers, moms and dads, and even, sometimes, writers. Why? Because those professions and roles, besides being heuristically available, sound meaningful. You could heal people, you could change their lives, you could make beauty. You could also in the process remake yourself. 2
Then we grow up, and we do what’s available, not what’s meaningful, and it’s not just that it’s miserable a lot of the time. It’s that it changes us so that we no longer think we can do anything else.
It’s almost inspiring, then, to consider how nearly everyone, all children and former children, even the finance bros, even the Elon-Musk-Lovers, even the guys who dream of their crypto empires3, hold on to a hope that they can cash out eventually into meaning. So many want to believe what they are doing isn’t just about wealth, it’s also about good. One could argue that making money is the dominant narrative for many of how meaning is even produced. But the fact remains that all these folks can’t complete their fantasies without believing that on the other side of wealth there is also an end to alienation.
“Alienation” is not some magical or wholly spiritual phenomenon. It’s a factual description of what becomes possible or impossible when most of life is about the profit margin. It’s what helps explain why (as the NYT itself notes, contrary to media buzz) the average Harvard student isn’t protesting food shortages in Gaza, he’s working for a company that creates them there or elsewhere.
Despite this concreteness, I’m conscious that “alienation” is a term that comes across awkwardly and weirdly, at least to most people. It’s a curiously slippery term, too, one that people tend to nod at more than fully interrogate. I don’t think this is because the concept is all that difficult; it really simply refers to the idea that we are estranged from certain core aspects of our human-ness in modern life, and from one another, and from what we could make and become. Not only is this easily intelligible, but most people I know feel this way a lot of the time.
No, I think the term slips away precisely because it describes something so ever-present, and yet so counter-hegemonic, that the moment we put the realisation down other, more culturally-powerful ideas begin to erase it from our intuitions like waves upon footprints in the sand. My colleagues and I have found this kind of strange conceptual amnesia comes up when we’re teaching other Marxist terms, like “social-reproduction”.4 Each week during a course, the students would ask us what social reproduction is (it’s the labour of making people, and making them ready to go to work.) We’d explain, and they’d get it, and even discuss it at length, and then next week in seminar the students would ask us once again. What is it, exactly? It’s difficult to hold on to ideas when we are positioned to ignore them in order to get through the day.
Just as we are set up by both work and culture to see social reproduction as love-not-work, we are also set up to not even notice our own alienation.
This, I’d suggest, is why the New York Times cannot quite identify what is troubling about the Harvard students (nor can the quoted Harvard professor, not entirely). It’s not just that students aren’t taking on the really big problems of the world, and are often instead contributing to them. (Though that is worrying too!) It’s not just that work “makes you a different person.” It’s that certain kinds of work take something particular from us, both individually and collectively, and part of what they take is our abilities and our relationships and our consciousness of them.
What is happening when we take bright young things and teach them to trade derivatives is a profound form of alienation, a phenomenon experienced by most human beings of course, but one which reaches its ironic zenith in the form of the supposedly brightest undergraduates in the world showing up to a Goldman Sachs recruiting meeting. It’s not just that this specific form of specialised labour blunts many of their finer possibilities, it’s that it will reshape them to meet goals that are not really their own. To make a “bundle”, after all, you must make your brain in effect a very clever computer for someone or something else to use. Sure, alienation is a difficult concept to hold on to consciously, but it will be at work all the same; it will express itself as boredom, as affairs and luxury spending, as mid-life crises (again, come with me to my Harvard reunions and I’ll show you). Most of all, it will result in the eventual impoverishment of the mind and of one’s hopes. And indeed, that impoverishment is one we all face, to different degrees, when we labour in the service of abstract entities, doing things we would not otherwise do.5
Is this just an unbecoming rant against my fellow students, the ones I found most grating? Perhaps. Allow me to express it anyway, as a longing for a different sort of future for us both, and for the many people who never went anywhere like Harvard and work jobs that whittle away at their potential.
And then let me desist and return this to an appropriate level of analysis.
Inequality and poverty matter deeply, and so do the environmental effects of capitalism. These problems are covered in spades elsewhere, sometimes even stylishly and effectively. Yet having read and written about what tends to motivate people at work (often a sense of purpose, agency, and mastery), I suggest we turn our attention to something else. On the left, we could perhaps also try to remind people of what capitalism does to even the comfortable among us, to the inner workings that make us: to our brains, to our imagination, to our selves and our estrangement from them and from each other. We could ask if we are not also impoverished, all of us in this system, in terms of what we’re able to be and contribute.
One day, maybe even soon, the investment analysts wearing puffer jackets could be replaced by AI. Then they will have to face the question that those of us on the left should have been considering all this time, and posing to everyone around us: what would it mean to work in a way that developed your truest abilities? What would it mean to contribute according to these abilities? Imagine that we all somehow end up with what we need: what then would you long to give?
Many people think this line is from Marx, but it’s not. It’s from the French socialist Louis Blanc.
I distinctly recall being told by an aunt, right before I entered Harvard, that the reason to pursue a liberal arts education was to make my brain a more interesting place to live. I thought this was SO BORING and a terrible cliche. She was right.
(Yes, even the crypto cults tend to tack on something or other about changing the world one way or the other.)
Sita Balani and Zara Dinnen had this chat with me, among others.
(Notice, by the way, that many jobs also involve non or less alienating moments; like being teachers or doctors or therapists. These are, sadly, the desired professions of children far more than Harvard undergraduates.)
This hits a big nail on the head. People go against their foundational natural intelligence and loose touch of what their basics needs are. Abstract appetites take over. Cleverness substitutes for intelligence, etc. What could be more abstract than effective altruism? They don't know how to go back to their foundations, which are not gone and will proceed to haunt them.
These huge appetites of ours. A Very Wealthy, Very Successful person eats huge proportions, can't metabolize it, shits out the excess, calls it wealth, puts in a storehouse for later use.
Really, a failure of education.