Removing the muck

This is a piece by French artist Olivier de Sagazan from the movie Samsara. Olivier's scene is preceded by footage of highways, cityscapes, and office cubicle workers. This piece speaks to me as a commentary on the nature of labor and the general human condition under capitalism. Labor is, to use Marx's term, alienated. Alienated labor is not natural to humans, and it makes us sick in many different ways. We labor not because it is our human essence to change our world and in the process change ourselves, but only to acquire the bare minimum. Our life activity, and to that extent life itself, is profaned once it becomes a simple means of survival.

Here, Olivier fights to rid himself of this filth, the pollution of a meaningless job and a inhuman existence that people try to escape (consciously and unconsciously) in all kinds of different ways. But first he applies the muck to himself. After all, the majority of us must 'choose' to labor in meaningless jobs in order to purchase the things we need to survive.

I'm reminded of something Marx said in The German Ideology: "Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."