Capitalism has made our bodies into zones of conflict and competition between different hostile forces. On one hand, capitalism depends on relatively strong, healthy, disciplined, and capable laborers whose bodies and minds can be put to work producing profit or being commodified themselves. On the other hand, the same system subjects our bodies and minds to overwork, precarity, isolation, stress, and alienation, while creating enormous markets around the habits and commodities that promise relief from them.

The consequences are the present working class cultural landscape. Addiction, anxiety, loneliness, eating disorders, compulsive self-optimization, violent gender and racial resentments, and declining physical health have become basic features of working-class life. Even the desire to become stronger and healthier is increasingly captured by the market, transformed into an endless project of purchasing, optimizing, and comparing ourselves against others. You are told that your body is your individual responsibility alone while the social conditions that shape your body remain outside of your control.

You should reject both sides of this trap. The answer is neither capitalist self-optimization nor the faux rebellion of self-destruction. Communists need to build a culture of the working class that takes the development of human beings seriously: physically, mentally, socially, and politically. We should become stronger not so that we can better endure exploitation, but so that we can better fight it.

We need to develop a militant working class culture in which health, discipline, physical strength, intellectual development, and collective life are cultivated not as commodities or part of individual advancement, but as sources of working-class power and happiness.

The body under capitalism

Under capitalism, the value of our bodies is measured against the needs and priorities of capital. Strength, health, endurance, intelligence, and even physical appearance can and often are commodified and exploited. A strong body can mean a worker who can work longer, produce more, and generally tolerate a more hostile physical environment. A healthy and disciplined mind can mean a worker who can concentrate, solve problems, delegate well, stay cool under the pressures of production.

We can spend years building a stronger body, developing our skills, or cultivating our minds, only to have those qualities turned into greater productivity for someone else until we are used up. Under capitalism what we create in ourselves is separated from us and put to work for purposes we do not control.

At the same time, capitalism profits from our deterioration

Capitalism does not only exploit healthy, capable bodies. It also produces the conditions under which those bodies deteriorate, and then finds ways to make money from this situation. Long hours, the stress of precarious employment, of isolation, of poor food, of financial insecurity, and the general exhaustion of working for a living leaves people looking for some way to escape or feel in control. This is where we see the proliferation of everything from alcohol and drugs to compulsive internet use, junk food, gambling, and increasingly elaborate forms of pharmaceutical “shortcuts” to health. People reach for these things because they provide relief, however temporary, from lives that are frequently unpleasant, insecure, and alienating.

There is another, somewhat tragic expression of this contradiction: self-destruction can begin to function as a kind of faux-rebellion. When people feel powerless over the conditions of their lives, destroying or degrading themselves can take on the appearance of exercising power over something. Drinking excessively, getting high, starving yourself, destroying your health, or deliberately cultivating an attitude of nihilism can feel like a refusal of the expectations imposed upon you. The problem is that this “rebellion” is perfectly compatible with capitalism. The market is more than happy to sell you the means of your own destruction. What begins as a rejection of bourgeois expectations becomes another profitable consumer identity.

People are being told simultaneously to destroy themselves and to optimize themselves, to consume without limits and then feel guilty about their bodies, to “work hard and play harder.” The same social arrangement that gives a sixteen-year-old access to increasingly powerful GLP-(1,2,3) drugs in pursuit of an “optimal” body gives that young person an Instagram reels feed full of content encouraging them to hate their own body. There is no contradiction from the standpoint of capital. Both can be turned into markets, both keep us focused on fixing ourselves or escaping ourselves rather than on the social relations that produce this tension in ourselves in the first place.

Consumption as relief

Workers are not being tricked into making bad choices. People do not need to be “educated” or shamed into better consumption habits. People consume these things because a drink between 12 hour shifts can make life tolerable. Getting high can provide a few hours in which a person does not have to think about their job, their rent, or whatever else is weighing on them. Scrolling can fill the silence of an otherwise lonely evening. Fast food is cheap, convenient, and enjoyable in a society where most have very little energy to spare. These things can provide people real relief from the pressures of their everyday lives, everybody knows it is bad for them. You make some of these choices knowing this, so do I. The individual does make choices, but those choices are being made within a hostile environment that constantly produces the desire to make destructive choices.

The capitalist cultural environment produces a demand in many billions of individuals for relief. Capital produces commodities that provide that relief. Those commodities then worsen the social conditions we all live in and therefore increase demand for these avenues for escape. The worker is left trying to manage the symptoms of a world historic problem privately, often without ever having the opportunity to confront its causes. 

Capitalist culture and self-development

The response capitalism offers to our deterioration is not limited to benign consumption and self destructive escape. It also offers us the promise that we can solve these problems individually by transforming ourselves; If you are lonely, become more attractive. If you are tired, optimize your hormones and pay for my sleep app and fitness watch. If you are overweight, find the right drug. If you lack confidence, build the right body. 

Capitalism is remarkably good at simulating agency through consumer choices and this is no exception. There are whole industries dedicated to convincing people that while they don’t have the lives they want, it is only because they don’t deserve them yet. The result of this culture is a working class more ready to turn their anger and frustration inward than towards external struggle and to consider shortcomings in their own lives as private and often embarrassing.

Instead of asking why so many people are exhausted, unhealthy, lonely, and alienated, capitalist culture encourages you to ask why you personally have failed to become who you need to be to get what you deserve as a human being. The result is an endless cycle of self scrutiny in which the individual takes responsibility and compensates for conditions over which they have little control.

A Culture of Alienation and Self-Hatred

The consequences of this do not remain confined to individuals. These dynamics shape the culture of the working class generally. We live in a society that produces enormous amounts of anxiety, loneliness, resentment, and physical as well as mental exhaustion, and then treats these conditions as ordinary facts of life. People who are overworked, underpaid, lonely, and uncertain about their future are expected to carry on as though these conditions are their independent personal problems that everybody must accept and cope with. Struggle against these conditions occurs constantly, but that struggle is individualized. People are struggling against themselves because they believe they don’t have the life they want because they are lazy, undisciplined, unhealthy, weak, or simply failing to cope.

The person doing better becomes evidence that anyone could succeed if they simply tried hard enough and becomes a subject of envy. The person doing worse becomes evidence that they deserve their circumstances because they failed to measure up and becomes an object of contempt. The individual is brought to market every day in search of validation, status, and self-worth. We are constantly being pressed to assess, improve, and sell ourselves.

When people cannot see the material causes of their problems, they are often left looking for individual explanations and enemies. Frustration that should be directed at the social relations that create our conditions of overwork, poverty, insecurity, and loneliness are instead directed at people who appear to have something we lack but want. Capitalism provides the conditions in which resentment flourishes, and then happily turns that resentment into a market, and capitalist politics turns that resentment into convenient political material to be harnessed. Whole industries, political parties, and online cultures are built around profitably channeling this resentment into consumer and political identities.

This destructive but profitable dynamic is at play all over our culture. Looksmaxxing and pickup artistry, eating disorders and compulsive dieting, performance-enhancing drugs and pharmaceutical weight-loss products, etc., are pursued in order for many to be able to find basic human worth in themselves. 

We find in capitalist culture the constant creeping of capital’s logic of endless growth into our very personal and private thoughts and ambitions. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to pursue an inner vision of ourselves. We should however be aware and critical of what forces are shaping our desires. Under capitalism, there is no natural endpoint to this self-pursuit. Every improvement creates another comparison, and every standard can be pushed further. A person can become healthier and still be told they are not lean enough. A person can become stronger and still be told they are not muscular enough. A person can lose weight and immediately be presented with another defect to correct. The body becomes an endless project, and the market is always prepared with the next solution. At this point self-improvement often becomes indistinguishable from self-destruction.

The measure ceases being about some self-informed pursuit of health, or even aesthetic. Capitalist cultural narrative turns this into a question of whether you are valuable enough, attractive enough, disciplined enough, and optimized enough to deserve the life you want. If you do not yet have that life then the answer is “no, you are not there yet, keep grinding.”

None of this means that we should reject the desire to become stronger, healthier, more disciplined, or more capable. Quite the opposite. These are good things. The problem is that under capitalism, even genuine personal development, like all labor under capitalism, has its fruits separated from us and put to use for the benefit of the capitalist class. We can spend years building stronger bodies, developing useful skills, or cultivating discipline, but those qualities are turned toward the enrichment of the ruling class, and reproducing a capitalist cultural environment hostile to these qualities on both a social and individual level. A stronger human simply becomes a more productive worker, is worked harder, and worn down until that strength is exhausted.

Towards a Militant Working-Class Culture

We can become stronger, healthier, more disciplined, and more capable, but capitalism is always waiting to give those qualities a use: a stronger worker, a more productive employee, etc. The problem is not that people want to improve themselves. The problem is that our efforts at self-development are constantly pulled back toward the reproduction of the very conditions that alienate us.

Communists need to take on the work necessary to build the organizational and cultural contexts for self-pursuit to find meaning. This means building a culture in which self-pursuit is consciously connected to organization, solidarity, and militant struggle. A communist party, collective, and other serious working-class organizations like unions can provide a social context in which people can develop themselves not simply as individuals, but as participants in a common project. In this context developing ourselves becomes fulfilling because those qualities become useful to something that is for us as working people.

Self pursuit should be seen as a way to make ourselves into people who can be relied upon, who can keep their head under pressure, who can organize others, who can endure setbacks without giving up, and who understand that our own development is bound up with the development of everyone around us. Communists must take the building of a culture that builds up working-class people capable of exercising power together seriously. 

A hypothesis on where to start.

The body is the fundamental material condition of human life, so improving that condition must be treated as a legitimate collective political concern. Building a culture that enhances the fitness and health of the people needs to be understood as part of serving the people and improving the working class’s collective capacity to live and struggle. But this requires recognizing that there is a real political fight over the material conditions of our health. Employers impose exhausting schedules, inadequate breaks, unsafe conditions, and constant pressure to remain productive. Corporations make unhealthy food cheap and abundant while healthy alternatives are often expensive and inaccessible. Public recreation is neglected while corporate gyms rake in millions. A serious attempt to build a healthier culture and a healthier working class therefore demands a counterattack.

That counterattack means building the capacity of working people to provide for one another while fighting to force employers, government, and capital to provide what people are owed. Workers fighting for adequate breaks, reasonable schedules, safe conditions, and time to recover are fighting for health, and we should politicize accordingly. Groups organizing free gyms, sports, shared meals, recreation, health education, and other spaces for collective development are fighting for health. While most communists already take the building of workplace organization seriously, we also need to take the construction of projects related to culture and fitness seriously, not as charitable side projects or lifestyle initiatives, but as part of the construction of a whole militant working-class movement.

Militancy here is not aggression, constant confrontation, or the willingness to suffer. It is the deliberate cultivation of ourselves and each other for the purpose of struggle. We train our bodies so that they are capable of enduring hardship. We discipline our minds so that they can remain clear under pressure. We study so that we can understand the world well enough to change it. We develop confidence, courage, health, and competence in ourselves to be used in the  struggles of working people for a better life. Internal development must be oriented toward external struggle to find meaning beyond the capitalist cultural and economic context.

This is the basic shape of a functional militant culture. This comes in the way of people coming from this culture to the struggle in order to meaningfully pursue their own humanity. This also comes from the creation of art, music, poetry, and other cultural expressions that extol the virtues of things like tenant, worker, and other liberation struggles. On the other side, things like tenant, worker, and other liberation struggles offer the context through which culture can be expressed and grounded in work that speaks to, and can navigate the logic of capital consciously and confrontationally.

Things like economism, or the reduction of working class struggles to incremental quantitative improvements in pay, rent, staffing, etc, are a constant danger in this work. Communists instead aim to contextualize basic struggles in workplaces and communities as part of a broader struggle against the capitalist ruling class. Economism cannot address or overcome the demands of a culture and people who have come to understand their lack of control over the social output of our social labor as an immediate, deeply human grievance with serious implications for their lives. 

Communists should understand one goal of this work to be the contextualization of people’s “personal problems” within a political struggle. Cultural work should aim to pull the millions of private trickles of anxiety, anger, and self hatred out of dark corners and into a public, political fight to overcome the social conditions that create these private miseries. 

Very practically speaking, tenant, worker, and other liberation struggles offer immediate opportunities for recruitment to various fitness, art, and other cultural projects that reach beyond the typical subculture that most communist projects exist in. Further, they create a broader environment where communists active in the labor movement can build relationships with people outside their immediate, formal union contexts such as shop floor committees, leadership committees, etc. Building these organizations around fitness and culture allows for a militant working class culture to trickle into and influence union, tenant, and other liberation struggles.

Cultural and fitness work is also very complimentary to the function and stability of mass organizations. Building cultural and fitness work within and around these mass organizations creates another layer of complimentary connection between mass organization members, between struggles, workplaces, etc that often would otherwise never meet. These projects keep people engaged in low-stress, fulfilling, and often rejuvenating organizational activity during slow periods and offer immediate and definite bonds across these divisions that can be drawn upon for the struggle.

You Are Not Raw Material

Capital wants our bodies, our minds, our time, and our capacities for itself. It wants the strongest parts of us at work, and the rest of us consuming. It profits when we destroy ourselves and profits again when we purchase our way towards trying to feel whole again. It turns our desire to become stronger into a market and then appropriates that strength as labor. Against this, we need to build a culture in which working people can consciously decide what their lives and their development will serve. The health of our bodies, our knowledge, courage, confidence, and time should become things we consciously place at the service of the struggles of working people like ourselves. Under capitalism this is the only context in which this kind of self development is not ultimately alienated from us.

Our task, then, is to build the organizational and cultural conditions in which that choice becomes clear and meaningful. We should create fitness collectives, study groups, sports clubs, and other spaces where working people can develop themselves with and for one another. This culture must be built through organizations that teach people not how to become individually “better,” but what their newfound and hard won qualities can be used for. A culture must be built in which a person can look at their own development and knowingly decide: I will give this to capital, or I will give it to my class. The growth of a whole, militant working class culture and movement should make the second choice increasingly possible, increasingly compelling, and with time irresistible.