June 29, 2025
The Blur: Amazon and the alienation of labor
By Raya Dee
Trans socialist feminist and Amazon workplace organizer with Logistics Workers League in Kentucky
The secret to working at Amazon during Prime Week is to shut down. Stop consciously seeing each package, just automatically register the information you need to process it. Stop noting the passage of time, just let go and let thought give way to the endless blur of movement. Hundreds or thousands of packages go by, your body moves automatically and ceaselessly, and some time later you come back to awareness to realize that hours have passed.
Unloading, sorting, stowing, picking… just different kinds of movements that can be reduced to a series of steps run repeatedly on automatic. It’s a lot like sleeping in a way, save that you desperately need sleep at the end of it. It’s fueled by an endless stream of caffeine — artificially pushing the body beyond its ordinary limits. The caffeine does nothing to wake you up though. It doesn’t change the blur at all, it just makes it possible for you to keep moving. In this sense the blur is the cumulation of the process of alienation described by Marx. You are totally alienated from the product and process of your labor, barely aware of them for the most part. You are for all intents and purposes a cog in the machine. But the cogs can get organized and jam up the machine, the workers can form a union and fight for better. That thought simmers beneath the blur and sometimes pulls you out of it for a conversation with a sympathetic co-worker.
The blur is not so easily cast aside, however. It expands and consumes you: a twelve-hour day, plus an unpaid break, plus a commute, plus time to sleep, and then doing it all again the next day and you can easily live for days at time with the blur. Capital, Marx said, is vampiric. It is dead labor that grows the more it sucks the blood of living workers. You are drawn into the blur and then cast out of it when a poorly stacked box crashes down on the side of your head or your muscles give out. Injury statistics, and capital, accumulate.
The alienation of labor is the process by which workers are removed from control of our work, disconnected from things we produce, and separated from each other. Labor is alienated when it happens under the direction of a boss rather than the person actually doing the work. This happens in every class society, but the nature of capitalism as a global mass production system means that it is particularly pervasive in capitalist society. Workers are assigned places on an assembly line, performing relative actions to meet standards of work designed by multinational corporations in headquarters far away from the workplace, and denied any real creativity or control over our time at work. Even when workers retain some control over our workspaces, this is always within sharply defined limits and constantly under siege by the boss. More and more all types of work take on the character of the factory and the assembly line, and the rest of society shifts to match.
All of society steadily takes on the gray tone of factory life, and the constant whir of the assembly line can be heard in the background. This process of alienation has dramatic negative consequences for democracy and individual liberty. Even if it were confined only to the workplace it would mean that workers spend much of our time under the authoritarian control of the boss and stripped of any liberty or individual rights. The shaping of society around the model of the factory suggests that as Lenin wrote, “democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners…. Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich–that is the democracy of capitalist society.” It is this background of alienation that makes transphobic and patriarchal oppression even thinkable. When the capitalist class is so used to controlling workers’ lives, controlling our bodies becomes a second nature for them. Misogyny, transphobia, racism, and class exploitation are inextricably bound together.
In addition to being subject to authoritarian control in the process of labor, workers are also alienated from the products of our labor. Commodities are produced in bulk, shipped around the world, and sold online without the workers involved in making or shipping them ever having any real connection to the thing that’s being made, the customer buying it, or what it’s going to be used for. This sort of alienation existed prior to capitalism, of course, but the development of mass industrial production and world trade in capitalist society greatly intensified it. One effect of this alienation is commodity fetishism on the part of the consumer. Commodity fetishism is the substitution of relations between things for relations between people, perceiving commodities as merely isolated objects not embodiments of a vast network of interpersonal relationships and human labor. In practice this enables the full extent of the oppression and exploitation of the working class to be somewhat concealed from the public — workers know how bad our jobs are, but not about everyone else’s — and the role of workers is devalued in capitalist cultural productions. The alienation of workers from the products of our labor also has significant moral consequences as we are deprived of the opportunity to decide if we want to engage in certain transactions. Amazon and Google employees didn’t sign up to support the genocide being carried out in Palestine, yet our employers are using the proceeds of our labor to do so. The actions of our bosses are anathema to many anti-Zionist workers, but under the capitalist dictatorship workers get neither a voice nor a vote.
The Workers Have No Country
Back to the line, unloading 1000 packages an hour. Checking one reveals it to be a laptop, shipping off to some office building. Take a closer look and it’s not a laptop anymore. It’s a cobalt mine in the Congo, a factory in China, a massive cargo ship making its way across the ocean, a storefront in the United States, power plants producing the electricity necessary to charge it, politicians debating energy policy, and more, so much more. The laptop, the concrete use-value, is still sitting here but that is merely the surface, the transitory embodiment of abstract value. It is the product of a global economic system, of overlapping and interlocking networks that encompass every sphere of human interaction, and of historical processes millennia in the making. It is connected to everything and everyone. And so is everything else.
I tug at my shirt; with a little effort I can see the tag — made in Vietnam. That’s only a tiny part of the story, of course. Multinational corporations set global supply chains to minimize the cost of labor and raw materials, meaning the shirt (more precisely the material and labor embodied in it) could easily have spent time in Turkey, Pakistan, and El Salvador before making it to Vietnam.
I take a sip of coffee — don’t even get me started on where that came from — but the point is that the workers who produced and shipped it are just as much deserving of dignity and high quality of life as the consumers who purchase it, and both are considerably more deserving than the parasitic bosses and landlords making a profit of their backs.
Perhaps this connection produces a feeling of solidarity and internationalism. It certainly should. Nationalism or patriotism within the imperial core is laughable once the superficial appearance of things has been left behind and the underlying world systems recognized. Workers in every country form a single international class and stand in harmony with each other.
But it should also produce a feeling of horror, of sorrow and of rage. The laptop is dripping with blood — child labor, poverty, overwork, suicide nets, ecological breakdown. The capitalist system in which it was produced is one of oppression and exploitation, one that cannot exist without constantly applying massive amounts of violence, dividing the population by fostering bigotry, and building a hegemony of ideas to drown out dissent. Capitalism is an imperialist system, oppressing and super-exploiting workers outside the imperial core to sustain itself. Think about what’s going on in Palestine, in Congo, everywhere outside the imperial core. And even within the heart of empire — as Malcolm X famously pointed out — you can’t have capitalism without racism, transphobia, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry. Every commodity embodies all of this, is woven into a global system of terror, exploitation, and oppression.
Socialism is the People
Yet the oppressing class, the capitalist class, is fundamentally limited in its power. For all their wealth, for all the violence they inspire, the capitalists are in a hopeless position — dancing on the edge of Vesuvius waiting for the eruption that will consume them all. Power, true power, is in the hands of the oppressed and exploited. We are the ones that mine the cobalt, that operate the factories, and guide the cargo ships into port. Without our cooperation nothing is produced, nothing can be transported, and the entire system grinds to a halt. All that is necessary is for the oppressed and exploited to recognize our power and organize to wield it and the world will give way. As the song says, “without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” Let the violence of the oppressor be met by the resistance of the oppressed and it will shatter into pieces. Every commodity embodies this also. Every commodity is a signpost pointing towards a better world. And so every commodity should give rise to a revolutionary hatred for the existing world order and an irrepressible optimism for the socialist world that will emerge from its overthrow.
After work I need to buy a few more commodities — food, mainly — and that means I have to sell my labor power working for someone else. It’s nothing too exciting, I’ll be unloading boxes from one truck, scanning them, and making sure they’re ready to go on a different truck. It can be a tough job physically speaking, often fast-paced and in a warehouse that can get pretty hot, but it covers rent and groceries. I do wonder though, do the people receiving the commodities I handle ever think of the labor it took to transport them? I hope so. That is how solidarity is built.
After work, I think I’ll sit down with some Marx. There’s a stereotype that workers don’t read much, that education is just for the well to do, but that’s nonsense. Reading and studying Marx is absolutely essential for working-class people. I didn’t read Marx’s Capital because I needed help realizing that I’m oppressed and exploited. Seeing the marks of capital all over my body is enough for that. I read Capital because bringing that exploitation to an end means learning something about how it works.
Workers study theory not to learn about the experience of exploitation but how it came to exist, how it operates, and how it can be overthrown. That knowledge isn’t automatic, you don’t wake up knowing how to crush capitalism because you went to bed hungry or slept on a street, just as you don’t know how to set a bone because you’ve broken one. You have to learn and study, and the determination of the oppressed people of the world to understand our oppression in order to fight it most effectively is one of the most inspiring things there is. Workers reading to each other at work, people denied a formal education studying political economy, people learning to read so they can understand what’s happening to them and how to fight back, that is how the revolution is built.
And there’s a revolution coming. I can hear it in the mornings, in the steady beat of hundreds of feet moving in unison, in the muffled curses of angry workers speaking loud enough to make their displeasure known but quietly enough not to get fired, in the whispered word “union” slipped into a conversation with a trusted friend. I can see it in tired eyes on laughing faces, workers rejoicing in our strength and solidarity, even as we struggle.
Only in the unity of the workers is there any salvation. No one is coming to save us, the emancipation of the working class is a task for the workers alone. We must build a union at Amazon, we must build a socialist party to generalize our fight to take power across the whole capitalist society, we must take this marvelous and terrible machine we have built at Amazon and place it under the democratic control of our class. We must organize and fight for our freedom. We have nothing to lose but our chains, we have a world to win.