The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

by Kenan Malik

Under capitalism, labour becomes something to be despised rather than to be embraced. A worker, Marx writes, ‘does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind’. To be human is to occupy one’s hands and mind. But under capitalism when one does this, when one works, one feels most estranged from oneself. The worker, Marx writes, ‘only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating’. But ‘in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal’. Hence in a capitalist society, ‘What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.’