The capitalist will say (and do) anything that justifies the endless accumulation of profit. To this end, the emphasis of individualism is vital – as it is through this loss of collective identity that humanity learns to routinely brutalise its own existence and being. Inflicting pain and harvesting gain is the only permitted exchange which locks out all other modes of possible interaction. Love becomes a limited commodity which can be bought for a short time period before the clock runs out and its flow dries up.

UK: A Working Class Experience of Alien Abduction! (18.11.2025)

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There’s much to be said about this piece, but I hesitate between Marx and Parenti. The smartass in me wants to echo Parenti’s line—“Apathy’s a problem, but who cares”—because the essay shows how bourgeois delusion thrives on indifference, the very terrain where apathy becomes useful to power. But Marx is the sharper fit here. As he wrote, “To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” Marx insisted that illusions are not simply false ideas but necessary compensations for a condition that itself demands them. Alien abduction becomes the metaphor for alienation: the worker’s body and mind seized, estranged, and commodified from birth onward, as if taken by forces beyond their control. What looks like fantasy is the lived reality of exploitation. Engels and Marx reminded us that “Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property.” This piece makes clear: alienation is not illusion but the condition that generates illusions, with apathy serving as its ideological shield.

The sections that struck me most are those that expose how capitalism commodifies even the most intimate aspects of life. “Love becomes a limited commodity which can be bought for a short time period before the clock runs out and its flow dries up.” This is not simply commodification but also commercialization: love and friendship reduced to exchange value, then packaged and sold through industries that profit from our most intimate connections.

The body itself is treated as property—an objective vehicle to be exploited by partners, employers, and the state. Marx described alienation as the estrangement of the worker from their own labor, but here we see estrangement from the body itself. The individual becomes a vessel for others’ profit and control.

The essay’s point about cognitive and physical dissonance is crucial. Alienated being and living person are split, and in that gap the bourgeois imagination thrives. Illusion is not accidental; it is systemic. Capitalism sustains entire industries of false imagination—entertainment, advertising, even relationships—where the line between fact and thought collapses. As long as one can pay, one can indulge delusion, even to the point of abuse or death.

And really, who can blame someone for retreating into fantasy under capitalism? Escapism is not a moral failing but the symptom of a condition that demands illusions. Disconnection is the logical outcome of a system that commodifies love, objectifies the body, and monetizes imagination. Alienation itself produces the need for disconnection, and the industries of false imagination profit from it.