Why Alienation Survives Every Economic System — Thoughts on “Crack Capitalism” by John Holloway

Do What You Love

So, you love baking cakes. Your friends love your cakes too. At some point, a natural question arises: Can I do this for a living? You quit your job and start baking professionally, gradually building a customer base. It becomes profitable enough to pay your rent and buy groceries.

But you soon realize that this comes with conditions. You have to bake a certain number of cakes each month, set prices at a level the market will tolerate, and keep costs down to remain profitable. One day, you notice that you no longer enjoy the process of baking. Since the activity has become purely instrumental, you conclude that you might as well bake whatever yields the greatest profit. Your creation no longer reflects anything personal. It becomes an alien object. This is what is commonly called alienation.

I borrow this example from John Holloway’s Crack Capitalism, a book about how to fight capitalism in the twenty‑first century. The story resonates with me because I went to art school and am surrounded by creative people who struggle with this exact problem. I suspect it feels familiar to many people today, since we are constantly told to “do what you love.” We are promised that if you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life. I once heard that one of the most common fantasy jobs on Wall Street is opening a café. Whether or not that is true, the sentiment is easy to understand. But the accounts of those who actually try are rarely encouraging.

Blame Capitalism

Whose fault is it? The most obvious villain is capitalism. After all, many of the constraints that make you miserable in your attempt to become a cake baker are imposed by market forces. In a utopian version of communism, this would not be a problem, because everyone would be paid the same regardless of what they do. Under socialism, you might receive government subsidies that allow you to sustain your operation without completely surrendering your love for baking. For instance, filmmakers in Sweden can tap into public subsidies to make films in Swedish.

Capitalism’s brutal efficiency pays people more for socially necessary jobs that few want to do. You don’t get paid much for being a graphic designer because there are more people who want to be graphic designers than there are clients who need them. The same is true for any job that many people find enjoyable. And even if you succeed in the creative industries, things are rarely idyllic. You face constant market pressures: speed, efficiency, pricing, and competition. The more efficient the market, the more intense these pressures become. I know many fine artists, and their stories are no better.

But let’s slow down and think more carefully. (And don’t worry, I’m not pro-capitalism.) It seems obvious that capitalism is the enemy, but there are many other forms of constraint. The laws of physics are constraints too. You can’t make a gravity-defying sculpture simply because you want to. There are biological constraints as well: your health, your stamina, your strengths, and your disabilities. There are legal constraints that exist regardless of the economic system you live under. Moral and ethical constraints are also largely independent of economic arrangements. Skill itself is a constraint. Even if you want to be a musician, if you never learned an instrument as a child, you will not be able to compose the music you imagine.

In Holloway’s book, he distinguishes “doing” from labor. One defining feature of “doing” is that its objective is not money. He often uses “creating” interchangeably with “doing.” What this describes, in effect, is a society full of fine artists doing only what they love. But artists face constraints that many others do not: talent. If you feel you are not talented enough, you may be frustrated by your own work. You look at a piece by a more gifted artist and immediately see that she is better than you. Moving to a communist country will not solve this problem. Working harder or longer will not necessarily help either; someone more talented may produce something better in five minutes. This is why so many artists, musicians, and writers are tormented by their own standards. When desire collapses under that pressure, they often experience what is called a “creative block.” This happens even when they are wealthy or supported by patrons. Economic constraints become secondary or irrelevant. When the antagonism is internal, “self-determination” offers no relief.

Capitalism is highly individualistic; communism is highly collectivist; socialism lies somewhere in between. The so-called “rice hypothesis” suggests that rice-based cultures tend to be more collectivist because rice cultivation requires synchronization, shared infrastructure, mutual dependence, and strict coordination. Wheat cultivation, by contrast, can be done independently. Empirically, rice consumption correlates with greater support for collectivist social values. In Japan, for example, art is often perceived as a selfish pursuit. If self-expression is your goal, socialism may impose more constraints rather than fewer, because you are expected to prioritize the needs of others.

There is something missing between “do what you love” and “blame capitalism,” and I will introduce two concepts often absent from Marxist critiques of capitalism, including John Holloway’s.

Desire vs. Drive

The first missing concept is the distinction between desire and drive. Understanding this difference is essential because they describe two fundamentally different ways people relate to work and labor.

Desire is relatively easy to grasp. For example, you may want to be a “writer.” That wish fuels your effort to publish, gain recognition, and build a career. You might become a dentist not because you love dentistry, but because you desire the financial security and social stability that come with it. You might pursue politics because you desire influence, recognition, or the ability to change the world. These are all socially mediated aims: desire is inseparable from status, recognition, and cultural value.

Drive, by contrast, is rarely named or even noticed. A simple example is knitting. Many people who knit do so not to be admired, recognized, or identified as “knitters,” but because they enjoy the activity itself. The repetition, rhythm, constraints, and gradual mastery are satisfying on their own. Whether the finished object has meaning is beside the point. The process is the reward.

This distinction helps explain a curious phenomenon: video games that simulate tedious or repetitive labor (farming, mowing lawns, cleaning houses, or waiting tables) attract millions of players. Very few people desire these jobs in real life, yet they willingly perform them for hours in games. The motivation does not come from desire, but from drive. These are different forces, and confusing them leads to serious misunderstandings.

There is a widespread assumption that repetitive, constrained, or non-creative labor is inherently dehumanizing. Industrialists and technologists who champion automation often argue that such jobs should be eliminated altogether because they are degrading. Holloway implicitly shares this assumption. But if that were true, it would be hard to explain why so many people willingly engage with repetitive, highly constrained tasks when stripped of economic pressure.

The same logic appears on YouTube, where videos of people performing repetitive tasks flawlessly (e.g. laying bricks, mincing onions, trimming hedges, polishing metal, parking trucks, or rolling dough) attract millions of viewers. These videos are not exciting or expressive, yet they are deeply satisfying to watch. What captivates viewers is not meaning or identity, but rhythm, precision, and mastery.

Many Olympic sports exhibit the same structure. Swimming, running, rowing, cycling, speed skating, shooting, and weightlifting all involve extreme repetition. Records are broken by shaving off fractions of a second or perfecting a single movement. While desire (prestige, medals, recognition) certainly plays a role, it cannot alone sustain years of monotonous training. Athletes endure these routines because repetitive tasks make progress measurable. Improvement is visible.

This stands in sharp contrast to many so-called creative professions. As a graphic designer, how do you measure progress? Twenty years of experience rarely impresses clients, and in some cases it even counts against you. Clients often prefer novelty over mastery. It is easy to feel stagnant, even after decades of work.

The difference comes down to this: some people are primarily motivated by self-expression, while others are motivated by self-discovery. These are not the same. Those seeking self-expression gravitate toward creative roles, but creative work does not guarantee freedom from alienation. Conversely, repetitive or “mindless” work is not automatically alienating. For those motivated by self-discovery, repetition provides a clear framework for improvement and a reliable sense of progress.

When technologists and policymakers argue that repetitive jobs should be eliminated, those who find satisfaction in them often have no language to respond. It sounds absurd to claim that mindless work can be meaningful. Yet not everything that matters to us has social meaning. The widespread privileging of “creative” labor over repetitive labor is a cultural prejudice, and it insidiously deepens alienation by denying legitimacy to forms of satisfaction that do not express identity.

Divided Subject

The other missing piece between “do what you love” and “blame capitalism” concerns what we mean by a subject, the “you” in “do what you love,” or the “author” of your work. In most Marxist thought, the subject is taken for granted. The subject is assumed to exist first and then to create value through labor. When Holloway speaks of “doing,” the existence of a doer is likewise assumed.

But this assumption deserves scrutiny. The concept of alienation, the very problem Marx set out to address, is fundamentally psychological. If alienation were not experienced as a problem, there would be no reason to search for a better economic system in the first place. Marx lived before psychoanalysis, but had it existed in his time, it is hard to imagine that he would have ignored it.

Earlier, I introduced two distinct sources of motivation: desire and drive. These two can align, but they often do not. For example, you might enjoy playing with numbers and patterns, yet have no desire to become an accountant. The pleasure comes from the activity itself, from drive, not from recognition, status, or identity. Desire, by contrast, is inseparable from social values: prestige, income, cultural meaning. You might love numbers but still prefer to be a creative director because that role carries a different symbolic weight.

These are only two of many competing forces within us. One part of you enjoys watching repetitive, mindless videos online; another part wants to see itself as disciplined and productive. As soon as the video ends, guilt appears. There is also the familiar split between mind and body, especially in cultures that encourage us to identify primarily with thought rather than with physical presence.

Despite these contradictions, we are trained to believe that there is a single, unified self. This belief is not accidental. Civilization depends on it. Imagine borrowing money and later claiming that it was not you who borrowed it, but another part of you. If we accepted such explanations, accountability would collapse. Cooperation would become impossible. Civilization requires us to act as if we were unified, even if we are not.

In this sense, the unified subject is a necessary fiction. It is so foundational to social life that we rarely question its existence. Once we name this fiction, give it a proper name, an identity, it becomes reified. The same process applies to money: without collective belief, it is just paper.

This insight is central to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. What we call alienation is not an unfortunate side effect of civilization; it is one of its conditions. The subject is always already divided. These internal contradictions are not bugs to be eliminated but features that make social life possible. A fully compliant subject would resemble a clone; a fully unconstrained one would resemble an animal. Neither are desirable to us humans.

From this perspective, the idea that a doer exists prior to doing is backwards. The doer emerges through doing. Identity is produced retroactively. This is why self-expression is, in a strict sense, a fantasy: there is no pre-existing self waiting to be expressed. Repetitive or “mindless” work can therefore become a form of self-discovery. The subject is not revealed first and then applied to the world; it is shaped in practice.

Language, laws, customs, tools, and roles existed before you were born. You entered an already-structured world. You did not invent the categories of “child,” “parent,” or “worker,” yet you became one. The subject is a construct that only exists within this network of meaning, a point famously captured by Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author.

Seen this way, alienation feels unbearable only if we believe there should be an authentic, unified doer above it all. Once we recognize that the subject itself is an effect of division, alienation becomes intelligible rather than a conundrum. It does not disappear, but it loses its moral sting.

How Internal Antagonism Is Projected Onto Political Economy

To be clear, capitalism has its share of problems. My goal here is not to defend it. In fact, given the accelerating existential threat of AI, capitalism as we know it may not survive much longer. The danger of blaming capitalism for everything is that it makes the problem impossible to specify. If some of the tensions we experience are constitutive of human subjectivity, then trying to eliminate them will be not only futile but potentially destructive. History offers no shortage of examples (Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, North Korea) where attempts to eradicate alienation produced far worse outcomes. Proper diagnosis matters.

Marx framed the central antagonism of capitalism as labour versus capital, or more precisely, as useful (concrete) labour versus abstract labour. Holloway peels back another layer by arguing that labour itself is already the problem. What Marx treated as the protagonist becomes, in Holloway’s account, part of the antagonistic structure. To make this move, Holloway introduces the concept of “doing” to distinguish it from labour. In the cake-baking example from the opening section, “doing” would mean refusing to submit entirely to market demands and continuing to bake cakes in a way that feels meaningful to the baker. When practiced at scale, Holloway argues, this refusal-and-creation would undermine capitalism itself.

I do not entirely disagree with this framework. However, if we keep peeling the onion, we eventually discover that there is nothing at the core, not because nothing exists, but because the origin of the constraints is being sought in the wrong place. As argued earlier, not all external constraints come from capitalism. Most come from the much larger structure of civilization itself, of which capitalism is only one historical form. Since alienation was the original problem Marx set out to address, we must ask which aspects of alienation capitalism actually produces, and which precede it. Marx did not live long enough to analyze the outcomes of large-scale attempts to replace capitalism. What we do know is that in nearly every such attempt, alienation intensified rather than disappeared. There is no society composed entirely of enlightened individuals who only do what they love, not even at a small scale.

The first step, then, is not simply refusal. It is discernment: distinguishing between antagonisms that arise from capitalism and those that arise from being human in a civilized world. The latter cannot be abolished without abolishing civilization itself. To participate in social life, we must accept certain demands and constraints. If we mistake the fiction of a unified self for something real, we suffer unnecessarily. Any resolution of an internal conflict will always benefit one part of us at the expense of another.

If you repay money you borrowed, it is a victory for the responsible, civilized self, and a loss for the part of you that wants to do something else with that money. If you bake the cake you love, it is a victory for the doer, and a loss for the part of you that worries about paying rent. You scroll through Instagram, lose an hour, and feel ashamed, not because scrolling was meaningless to the part of you that enjoyed it, but because another part measures life in terms of productivity. To complicate matters further, the injunction to “do what you love” often comes from the very same civilized voice that later condemns you for failing to turn passion into income.

As a unified subject, “you” cannot win. Every gain for one internal position is experienced as a loss by another. This feels intolerable only because we insist on holding a fictional unified self responsible for all of it. No economic system can resolve this contradiction. Any system that promises to do so will inevitably deepen guilt rather than relieve it.

Yet these irresolvable contradictions are not merely sources of suffering. They are also sources of creativity, ambition, and thought. They push us to attempt what cannot quite be achieved: perfect communication, flawless logic, complete coherence. When we encounter an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, we feel compelled to finish it. This restless drive is what moves life forward. Alienation names the discomfort produced by this condition, but it is not evidence of personal failure or political betrayal.

Why Every System Disappoints Eventually

Given that these antagonisms within us are what make us human, every system of any kind will eventually disappoint us. If we observe how computer applications have evolved over time, we see that every system creates new problems, which then require new applications to solve them. This dynamic applies just as much to economic systems. Holloway, for instance, describes how capitalism repeatedly “reabsorbs” whatever solutions anti‑capitalists throw at it.

What looks like reabsorption follows the same mechanism as identity reification. A diffuse, unnamed tension within the subject is articulated publicly in an attempt to resolve it. Society then names it, packages it, and stabilizes it. This naming reifies what was initially fluid, and the rigidity of the newly stabilized concept eventually becomes oppressive, generating the need for yet another solution. This process is not unique to capitalism.

A clear example comes from psychoanalysis itself. Freud identified previously diffuse and unnamed patterns of behavior and called them “defense mechanisms,” such as projection. Once named and popularized, these concepts entered everyday language. Today, “stop projecting onto me” is often used as a rhetorical shield, even when the criticism being deflected is valid. Psychoanalysis then has to develop new tools to address this second‑order problem.

In other words, solutions to internal antagonisms never dissolve tension permanently; they reorganize it at a higher level. Recurring disappointment does not mean resistance has been uniquely co‑opted by capitalism. It means an internal tension has been mistaken for an external enemy. The same constitutive tension reappears under new names regardless of the system that frames it.

This also helps explain why protests and activism so often feel impotent. Greta Thunberg, for example, has already been absorbed into the system she opposes. When she was younger, her message resonated widely, but repeated negation of the negative tends to fan the flame (to borrow John Cage’s phrase). Within Holloway’s own framework, she rejects but does not follow rejection with creation. As a result, she fails to inspire her opponents and instead embolden them.

What Comes After Refusing

So far, I have explained why the Marxist diagnosis of alienation is incomplete. This observation is not new. Other psychoanalytically oriented political philosophers, such as Slavoj Žižek, are well aware of the constitutive nature of alienation. In Lacanian terms, this condition is called castration: the process through which an infant is separated from primordial wholeness in order to become a civilized, speaking being.

Although Holloway shares this blind spot, much of his framework remains valuable. In particular, he forces us to ask a crucial question: once we accept which forms of alienation are constitutive of being human, and which demands we should refuse from capitalism, what should we create?

Holloway’s answer is experimentation. Rather than negating an existing totalizing structure in order to replace it with another totalizing structure, we should iterate through practice. This logic will feel familiar if you have experience with UI/UX (user interface and user experience) design, or if you have read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

UI/UX designers do not assume that they already know what is best for users. They begin with a workable starting point, often inspired by existing applications, and observe how people actually use it. Features that work well are reinforced; features that fail are revised or removed. Insight emerges from user behavior, not from theoretical certainty. Jane Jacobs applied the same logic to urban planning. She famously opposed Robert Moses’ totalizing vision of the city, which assumed that a planner could know in advance how people ought to live. Instead, she argued for incremental change based on observing how people were already using urban spaces.

If no economic system can resolve our fundamental contradictions, then a revolution aimed at replacing one totalizing system with another is bound to fail. What we need instead is continuous adjustment of the systems we already inhabit, and this adjustment will necessarily differ from place to place. The goal should not be to eliminate alienation. That is neither possible nor desirable. The goal is to keep antagonism at a tolerable level for the majority of people.

To understand what this means, consider the relationship between anxiety and desire. They are not opposites; they exist on the same spectrum. Think of a roller coaster. It is designed to scare you, yet people pay to ride it. If it were too frightening, no one would board. If it merely rolled slowly on flat ground, it would also be unappealing. Enjoyment lies somewhere between these extremes. Anxiety and desire are two sides of the same experience, and pleasure emerges at an optimal level of tension.

Video game designers understand this principle well. A game that is too difficult will frustrate players; a game that is too easy will bore them. Designers rely on extensive testing to find a difficulty level that feels challenging but fair for most players. They are appealing to two internal forces at once: the part of the player that wants to master the challenge, and the part that resists imposed rules and constraints. Remove all constraints and the game ceases to exist.

Even Minecraft, when played in “creative” mode, remains compelling because of its constraints. Everything must fit within a predefined grid. Objects have fixed shapes and sizes. Gravity, collision rules, and terrain limits still apply. Mountains and oceans cannot be arbitrarily relocated. If all rules were removed, there would be no game at all. Constraints are not the enemy of enjoyment; they are its condition.

If we think about economic systems in the same way, capitalism in the United States begins to look like a game set at an intolerable difficulty level for most people. It is a roller coaster they are forced to ride. This is what makes capitalism feel unbearable. But the optimal point cannot be determined in advance. It can only be discovered through experimentation and adjustment.

Most of us, however, are not in a position to design policy, run institutions, or test large-scale systems. So what can we do individually?

The first step is to experiment within your own life. Where is your personal optimal point? Instead of surrendering completely to financial and social pressure, or rejecting them entirely, adjust incrementally. Tune the degree to which you refuse certain demands and create alternatives, and observe how it feels. This is likely what Holloway is gesturing toward, even if he does not articulate it explicitly.

The next step is to scale this process beyond yourself. This is difficult as an employee, but more feasible through partnership. By working with others, you can collectively explore where a sustainable balance lies. Through discussion, negotiation, and revision, you can develop agreements that reflect shared priorities and constraints.

One concrete example is Pentagram, the design firm founded in 1972. It operates as a partnership with a carefully structured agreement that balances creative autonomy with financial viability. The firm has published its partnership model, and its longevity suggests that it has found a workable equilibrium. I have applied similar principles in my own partnership.

This, in practical terms, is the kind of “doing” Holloway advocates: experimenting, learning, and adjusting in collaboration with others. It does not require becoming a powerful politician or imposing change from above. Nor does it require heroic self-sacrifice for the less fortunate. It begins locally, with what you can influence directly.

Focusing on solutions rather than negation changes the nature of political engagement. Negation produces enemies; solutions require collaborators. When your goal is to build something workable, you quickly realize that opposition must be engaged rather than eliminated. Attempts to eradicate an opponent often reproduce the same desire for totalization that underlies fascist impulses.

Attacking capitalism as a reified villain is therefore counterproductive. It inflames what it seeks to destroy. Accepting that no system can make us whole is not resignation; it is realism. Our divided condition is not a flaw to be corrected but a feature of human life. Any politics that forgets this will ultimately turn against the very people it claims to liberate.