“If workers wish to own the product of their own labor, they must buy it like anyone else. No matter how desperate the workers’ need, they cannot use the products of their own labor to satisfy their need. Even works in a bakery can starve if they don’t have the money to buy the bread that they have made. Because of this peculiar relation, things that we buy – that are made by others – seem to us to be more an expression of ourselves than the things we make at our jobs. People’s personalities are judged more by the cars that they drive, the clothes that they wear, the gadgets that they use – none of which they have made – than by what they actually produce in their daily work, which appears to be an arbitrary and accidental means for making money in order to buy things… Instead of work being the transformation and fulfillment of human nature, work is where we feel least human.”
(Excerpted from George Ritzer’s chapter on Karl Marx, Classical Sociological Theory, 162)
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