The world we live in was not built all at once.
It was built piece by piece,
task by task,
job by job,
until the making of a shoe required a hundred hands,
and no one could say: I made this.
This is the story of the division of labour—
the great promise of efficiency,
the architecture of modern production,
the logic that made factories hum and economies swell.
But what we rarely say aloud is this:
what was gained in speed was lost in self.
What was made visible in goods
became mirrored in silence inside the people who made them.
In that silence, two of the most haunting ideas in modern thought took root—
alienation and commodity fetishism.
Together, they form a critique not of labor itself,
but of what labor becomes
when the person behind it disappears.
The Division of Labour: From Wholeness to Fragments
Once, to work meant to shape something from beginning to end.
To touch every part of the process.
To know that the bowl, the bread, the garment in your hands
carried your signature—not in name,
but in meaning.
But as societies grew,
tasks were divided.
This was not evil.
It was practical.
The weaver became a spinner.
The spinner became a thread-puller.
The thread-puller became one hand in a line of hundreds.
What was once craft became function.
And in that shift,
the worker became a stranger to the thing they helped create.
Alienation: The Self Lost in the System
It was Karl Marx who gave this fracture a name:
Alienation.
He saw that in capitalist production,
the worker is not only separated from the product,
but also from:
– The process of labor (they don’t choose how to work)
– The product of labor (they don’t own what they make)
– Their own nature (they don’t express themselves through work)
– Other people (they compete, rather than cooperate)
Alienation is not sadness.
It is disconnection.
It is when your labor no longer feels like part of your life—
but something rented out,
something you endure so you can live outside of it.
You clock in. You endure. You clock out.
You go home tired, and still empty.
Because what you gave all day didn’t come back to you in meaning.
Alienation is not rare.
It is the unspoken condition of countless modern lives.
Commodity Fetishism: When Things Hide the People
But Marx went further.
He saw that in a capitalist economy,
the object becomes more visible than the labor behind it.
The shoes on the shelf don’t speak of the factory.
The phone in your hand doesn’t tell the story of the miner.
The meal doesn’t mention the hands that picked, packed, prepared.
Instead, the commodity appears as if it has life of its own—
value that seems to come from nowhere.
This is commodity fetishism:
when we forget that all value is human,
and begin to treat things as magic,
as if they simply appear, priced and perfect, in a store.
We learn to love the product,
but remain blind to the social relations that made it.
In this way, our entire economy becomes a hall of mirrors:
things glowing with importance,
people disappearing behind them.
Why It Still Hurts
Today, the division of labour has reached places even Marx could not have imagined.
– Algorithms assign tasks.
– Gig workers never meet their employers.
– Global supply chains mean a sweater passes through ten countries before your hands.
We are surrounded by things.
And often, we feel more disconnected than ever.
We scroll past sweatshops.
We joke about burnout.
We decorate the surfaces of our lives
and feel hollow underneath.
Because deep down,
we know what’s missing:
Connection. Ownership. Meaning. Presence.
Toward Another Way
This critique is not an argument against working.
It is a call to reimagine the terms.
What if we organized work
so that the whole human remained present?
– So that craft was valued again
– So that the worker saw themselves in what they made
– So that consumption carried a memory of creation
– So that products told stories—not just of luxury, but of labor
What if the economy wasn’t a machine of separation,
but a field of shared becoming?
This is not naïve.
It is necessary.
Because no society can stay whole
if its workers are not.
The division of labour made us faster.
But it also scattered us.
Alienation named the cost.
Fetishism named the illusion.
To move forward is not to undo the modern world—
but to rebuild its heartbeat,
to bring the worker back into the picture,
to make the making visible again,
and to remember:
every product is a person’s echo.
And every economy is a reflection of what we dare to value.