Can Marxism help you become your best self?

Delhi police cops doing Yoga (Picture: Govt. of India)

New year means a deluge of adverts claiming to promote well-being—detoxing, going dry and generally becoming a better you.

While the wellness industry generates millions, the crisis in well-being grows unabated.

Economic insecurity, anxieties about the climate catastrophe and the rise of the far right and racism are growing.

But our unhappiness is also rooted in the way the system affects our daily lives. Capitalism makes us sick—with unhealthy, stressful work patterns, polluted, overcrowded living spaces and highly processed foods.

Then successive governments axe welfare systems and support services that once offered help. We have escalating mental health problems, addictions, obesity and malnutrition—and many have nowhere to turn. 

To add insult to injury, the bosses then coopt the idea of well-being to flog us diet plans, apps, proteins and endless lotions and potions.

This commodified, distorted idea of wellness is prominent precisely because capitalism is making us unhappy.

The response to this systemic failure is to blame individuals for making poor life choices and pressure us to take responsibility for healing ourselves through consumerism.

Getting back to work, however crap the job, is supposed to solve all our problems. There is, of course, no discussion about how the organisation of work itself, the micro-managing, the ruthless focus on performance and productivity, contributes to ill-being.

Many mainstream thinkers argue that people get happier as societies get richer.

However, in the 1970s, the Easterlin Paradox identified a gap between social wealth, Gross Domestic Product, and measures of well-being.

The research showed that, if you are poor, an increase in wealth brings access to food and shelter and improved life expectancy. For poorer people it does enhance well-being.

But the relative gains become smaller as society become more affluent.

Mainstream economists defend the idea that a market system enables individuals to pursue their interests. But the sale of commodities is about maximising profit, not maximising happiness.

Marxists have a distinct approach to well-being. We are in favour of anything that ameliorates the damaging impact of capitalism.

More leisure time, more access to exercise and fitness, more support for those who are struggling. 

For Karl Marx, the capitalist system violates our potential for collective happiness. His concept of human nature is based on our capacity to work collectively to satisfy our needs. This is a dynamic process, in which new talents, and new aspirations and social connections are constantly generated.

Capitalism turns this potential into ruthless competition, subjects it to the anarchy of the market and the rigid discipline of the workplace.

So capitalism alienates us from our human nature. Every human being has the potential to develop unlimited skills, abilities and interests. As the poet Walt Whitman wrote, we all contain multitudes.  

But capitalism crushes our individuality and reduces our labour to the status of a commodity. The system creates “mentally and physically dehumanised beings”, Marx wrote.

“Private property has made us so one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc—in short, when it is used by us.”

All our physical and mental senses are dominated by “the sense of having”, he observed.

But having stuff only brings momentary satisfaction. It cannot compensate us for the loss of our potential to act together and shape the world around us.

Researchers from different disciplines developed Hope Theory. They argue that people with hope and a sense of agency over their future are healthier and happier.

That hope can be generated by resistance and the possibility of a society where our ingenuity is focused on promoting collective happiness.