Work is broken: Marx, alienation, and the Great Pretending

How a viral post on the death of the corporate job echoes Marx’s 19th-century critique

Sep 04, 2025

A recent viral post on the “death of the corporate job” describes the emptiness of modern work. Marx saw the same frustrations nearly 200 years ago — and his critique still speaks to us now. Read on…

A decade ago, I was walking near Union Station in Washington, DC with a friend and we passed a bronze statue of a woman holding a torch, looking determinedly ahead. Her circular plinth was inscribed: To the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty.

“That’s strange,” I said. “An economic philosophy didn’t kill those people. Totalitarian regimes did.” C’est moi, ever the literalist.

My friend turned on me swiftly. “Yes, it did. Communism is evil.” We argued: was the problem communism itself, or the way power had been abused under its banner? I didn’t think much about communism or capitalism then — I was just that boorish type (great at parties) who demands precision, and my only objection was to the plinth’s sloppy phrasing.

What I see now, with the benefit of an emerging interest in philosophy, is that most of us have been misled about Marx and communism. When Marx was writing in the mid-19th century, he was reacting to what he saw as the evils of another economic philosophy: capitalism. And if you read him closely, the problems he identified in capital-based economies echo our modern complaints with surprising force.

Case in point: The recent viral post “The death of the corporate job,” which argues that much of modern white-collar work is meaningless performance — meetings about meetings, strategies for strategies, and a whole “Great Pretending” in which no one believes in their role but everyone keeps playing it. The author, Alex, contrasts this emptiness with a growing trend of workers using corporate jobs as financial scaffolding while pursuing side projects that feel like real work.

The frustrations Alex describes aren’t new. Marx was describing them in the 1800s. His writings link capitalism directly to this kind of hollowness that Alex depicts. Which suggests it’s worth taking a second look at Marx, and what he diagnosed as the root of the frustrations that we still feel today.

In his essay, Alex shares a friend’s account of his typical day at a London bank:

He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn’t point to a single tangible thing.

Instead, the work day is a cascade of intangibles. After endless meetings and plans, Alex writes: “Months later, something might happen. Usually, it's a minor adjustment that could have been made in an afternoon by anyone with common sense.”

Everyone knows much of corporate work is theater, he says. And the pandemic could’ve been a turning point for reinventing how we approach work, but we let that opportunity slip by. Instead, we’re back in offices, pretending again. This time, though, the pretense feels different: more conscious, more exhausting.

Alex’s complaints resonate with Marx’s writings on alienation, which Marx says is the condition of labor under capitalism. That alienation is the result of four conditions: separation from the product of one’s labor; from the act of production itself; from other people, who are treated as means to an end; and from our own human nature, which includes the drive for community and for self-directed creative work.

Alex’s essay resounds with the existential hollowness of corporate work today. That hollowness is what Marx was diagnosing, too. Capitalism’s treatment of labor as just another input among many dehumanizes us and deprives us of the ability to create holistically, leaving a sense of futility and ineffectualness in its place.

Or as one London banker put it:

“I enable decision-making,” he said, then caught himself. “Whatever that means.”

The hyperspecialization of today’s corporate milieu is the biggest contributor to this disconnection. Each worker has a tiny role and no clear impact — to the extent that another of Alex’s friends couldn’t even describe in practical terms what her job was.

Alex paints a picture of:

back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They’re managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They’re creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.

That last notion is central to the scheme: improving things that are working fine. As Marx pointed out, capitalism is excellent at achieving its extremely narrow goal: producing things in greater numbers and more cheaply. Even if we don’t need another version — slimmer, bigger, 2.0, 3.0, ad nauseam — we’re getting it, because in the end, we’ll buy it, using the money we earned as labor.

If a single person builds a bicycle start to finish, it might take twenty hours of labor. But if hundreds of workers each specialize in a single detail — one shapes the gears, another attaches spokes, another threads chains — a factory can turn out hundreds of bicycles in the same time. The product is cheaper and more abundant, and capitalism produces incentives that drive ineluctably toward this kind of specialization.

But for the worker who spends their days stamping the same gear or threading the same chain, what pride or connection is there to the finished bicycle?

Marx believed that work is a human need, a means of self-realization — but not the kind of work where your input is so divorced from any recognizable output that you see yourself in nothing. That severed condition of work (depicted satirically in Severance) is widespread in today’s economy and is, per Marx:

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.

On Substack, a growing chorus blames feminism for the alienation that some women feel in the workforce. They say that feminism sold women out when it encouraged us to join the men at their own game. Some women are leaving the workforce and explicitly tying that decision to ideas of femininity and traditional gender roles. (Though the scientist and writer Elena Bridgers, whose article was part of the chorus and whose work I respect, has pointed out that actually, as gatherers women were the main providers of calories in hunter-gatherer societies, disproving the idea that only men were traditional providers.)

But it’s not just women who are dissatisfied with work. Men are, too — as noted by Marx generations ago and given modern framing in Alex’s essay. I think the alienation that Marx described may be at the root of some women’s workplace dissatisfaction, which is being miscast as gender mismatch. In reality, this is a problem that crosses gender lines.

Companies talk about the “flywheel” strategy of corporate profits, where each step propels the next in self-sustaining momentum.

Capitalism itself is a flywheel. As companies grow more profitable, they buy political influence to keep themselves that way — and to grow richer still. Perhaps the US perfected this with Citizens United, which declared the First Amendment rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on influencing elections and policy. Corporations have more money than any of us and far narrower goals. So we end up with politicians advancing paradoxical ideas — like for-profit companies being more trustworthy than the government we elect to run prisons — or auctioning off national forests to strip them bare. Meanwhile, the little guy cheers, convinced that private companies’ uncapped profits are a public good.

Alex describes “ecosystems of mutual nonsense,” and he’s right. Nonsense flywheels are everywhere: automated products, automated incentives, automated thinking. Companies build things we don’t need, then spend fortunes marketing them back to us. And those multimillion marketing budgets? They’re not funded by venture capitalists — they’re funded by us, every time we buy what we’ve been persuaded to want.

The problem with capitalism is that there’s never a moment in the flywheel to stop and ask: what is this all for? The supreme principle is to acquire more capital. Today, companies hunt for profit opportunities in gradations of difference — the tiniest marginal improvements to efficiency. More, more, more. “Record profits” are celebrated as triumphs.

But what if profits weren’t the only, or even primary, incentive? What if we rewarded employee wellbeing, positive community and environmental impact, innovations that reduced suffering or improved health not because they could be commodified but simply because they mattered?

We’ve been in capitalism’s grasp so long that we’ve been trained to think these things are impossible. But why should they be?

One reason we don’t entertain other possibilities is that many of us are complicit in preserving the status quo. As Alex writes,

It's like a corporate version of the emperor’s new clothes, except everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we’ve all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it.

Capitalism is entrenched in every layer of our lives — our society, culture, politics, laws, and most urgently, our livelihoods. That entrenchment creates an enormous sunk cost, and in this case there’s no fallacy in viewing it that way. To upend what sits at the root of everything would mean pain and havoc, not just for those at the top but for everyone.

Think of a ship that capsizes and sinks, littering the ocean floor with synthetic debris that slowly leaches toxins. Over decades, a local ecosystem forms around the wreckage. Ideally, you’d remove the contamination — but to do so would mean destroying the life that has grown to depend on it.

Capitalism’s focus on profits above all is a kind of wreckage: a capsized ship leaking poison. Yet ecosystems of life have built up around it. To clear it away would mean tearing apart what survives there. That’s the dilemma — the wreck is poisoning the water, but it has also become the structure that sustains life as we currently live it.

There’s a saying that capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others. This reflects common acknowledgement that capitalism does have problems, but there’s no better option.

A simultaneous benefit and curse of capitalism is that the profit motive optimizes output. Taken to a point, that’s positive, insofar as it makes consumer goods more accessible to more people. But it quickly leads to a state where we accumulate heaps of stuff. We throw out that stuff when it gets unfashionable, worn, or broken, in the process rendering extinct the repair professionals who once made a living through the satisfaction of making the unworkable work again.

What is the true bargain behind our cheap goods? It’s greater material comfort in exchange for unfulfilling jobs, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety, consumer mindsets that are nearly impossible to break, and relentless abuse to natural environments. Did we ever agree to that bargain? Do we agree today?

Though if we don’t agree, what’s the replacement? The current system is engraved into everything. And even if it weren’t, the key problem I see is this: there are certain jobs that need to get done but no one would choose them if they had meaningful alternatives.

How could we ever create a fair system that supports people in doing work that’s fulfilling but also ensures that we have waste management workers, meatpacking workers, and other roles that are at the bottom of the preference ladder?

I’m offering more questions than answers. Because I want to emphasize that my point here is not to suggest that replacing our current system would be easy. It wouldn’t be — and in fact, I’m personally quite comfortable under capitalism. There are downsides and tradeoffs to every approach. But it’s clear that the current system is failing us as a society. And I have to believe that there’s a better option out there.

Strange Clarity

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