• HEALTH
• SOCIAL CLASS
• SOCIAL SCIENCES

As I write this, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is a member of President Donald Trump’s administration. Musk often wears an ‘Occupy Mars’ shirt as publicity for his company SpaceX’s ‘Mars colonization’ programme. Meanwhile, his Department of Government Efficiency offered redundancy to 2 million federal workers. Before Musk was born, the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre produced a critique of everyday life. Here he argued that life under capitalism, with its repetitive processes of work, home, identical cities, consumption and the brief respite of leisure was an experience of ‘alienation’. He used alienation in the Marxist sense of, to simplify, not being able to access our creative abilities, experiencing work as out of our control and seeing others as economic competitors/contractual relations. Yet, Lefebvre also argued we can potentially critique alienation through our everyday experiences. For example:

Small farmers would continue to work the land by hand and go hungry while an ‘elite’ of technicians and managers would be exploring outer space, but also where a backward everyday life would coexist with a highly developed technology, in a way which would be difficult to bear1

At a time when space exploration had only the Moon in its sight, Lefebvre argued the contrast between the lives of many on Earth and those lucky astronauts was enough to make individuals critical of the capitalist society that allows this. One wonders if the federal workers informed by Musk that the budget needs tightening experienced something similar.

These examples speak to Baum et al’s intriguing ‘Twenty-First Century Alienation and Health: A Research Agenda’. I write as a sociologist and one struck …