Beyond the Fog: Reframing Power, Consciousness, and the Working Class

In debates about capitalism, social transformation, and what makes people docile or rebellious, we often hear two main stories. One comes from the Marxist tradition: that it’s the economic system—who owns what, who works for whom—that explains how societies are shaped. The other perspective, critical of Marxism, says we can’t just look at economics—we have to look at culture, ideology, and how people come to accept the world as it is.

This latter perspective is often associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of mid-20th century thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. They argued that capitalism had become smarter: it didn’t just exploit people at work, it shaped how people thought, what they desired, and even what they could imagine. Through mass media, consumer culture, and what they called the "culture industry," capitalism, they claimed, had trained people to love their chains. Capitalism has conditioned people to not only accept their oppression, but to find comfort and even pleasure in it.

Critics of the Frankfurt School—like the author of this article by Daniel Morley—say this is a defeatist attitude. Morley argues that these Frankfurt thinkers abandoned the working class, saw people as too brainwashed to ever rise up, and gave up on revolution altogether. Instead, critics of the Frankfurt school of thought defend a more traditional Marxist view: the material conditions—wages, working hours, ownership of production—are still what matter most. No matter how much people watch TV or scroll social media, when capitalism goes into crisis, people will fight back.

So, who’s right?

The truth, I believe, is that both sides illustrate valid dynamics—but both are incomplete. We need a new way to diagnose our current situation, one that doesn’t dismiss either material conditions or cultural manipulation, and one that refuses to give up on people while still taking seriously how deeply trapped all of us are, albeit to varying degrees.

Let’s try to reframe.

It’s Not Just About Money—It’s About Attention

Under capitalism, labor isn’t just exploited at the point of production—it’s systematically undervalued because wages only reflect what’s necessary to keep workers coming back, not the full value of what they create. This pressure isn’t a personal failing of owners; it’s baked into the system. If businesses don’t extract more surplus value—by increasing productivity, cutting wages, or automating labor—they risk being outcompeted.

And that hasn’t changed. But it has expanded. Capitalism’s reach is no longer limited to the hours we spend working. Now, it extends into our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—even our rest. The attention economy monetizes our focus, social media extracts value from our interactions, and productivity culture erodes any space for true leisure. We don’t just work—we’re conditioned to always be on, feeding a system that demands every moment be optimized for profit.

Under today’s economic structure, your attention itself has become a site of extraction. What you look at, how long you look, what makes you pause, what you type, what you click—these are all converted into data points. Not because of a single evil actor pulling strings, but because this is what the system demands: constant growth, continuous profit, efficiency in prediction and influence. Corporations compete to meet those demands, and that competition drives them to develop increasingly sophisticated methods of capturing and monetizing attention.

This isn’t just a side effect—it’s built into the structure. When human behavior can be turned into data, and data can be used to predict and influence spending, it becomes profitable to design apps, platforms, and environments that capture more of our mental space. Addiction isn’t an accident; it’s an optimization problem. The more time you spend scrolling, the more advertising slots are sold. The more anxious you are, the more products can be pitched. The more isolated you feel, the more you’re likely to seek stimulation or relief through things that generate profit for someone else.

But none of this happens through coercion. That’s part of what thinkers like the Frankfurt School were warning about. Capitalism has conditioned us to not just tolerate these conditions, but to interpret them as normal, even enjoyable. Entertainment, convenience, personalization—these are the rewards that reinforce the system’s grip. People participate not because they’re being directly forced to, but because the surrounding social world has made alternative forms of life hard to even imagine. The system persists not only through material deprivation but through internalized habits, desires, and routines shaped by culture, media, and economic pressure.

The result is that people are being used—systemically, impersonally—as inputs in a vast feedback loop. The system doesn’t care about anyone’s well-being. It doesn’t need to. It only requires that attention can be captured, behavior can be nudged, and data can be sold. We’re not just exploited at work anymore—we’re woven into the machinery of profit during our downtime, in our social interactions, in the way we process the world. It’s not that we’ve been tricked or duped by some mastermind; it’s that the structure itself rewards participation and punishes deviation. And because we’ve been raised inside it, it feels natural.

There’s no single villain. Just an accelerating system powered by millions of individual choices, habits, and adaptations—each one understandable on its own, but together, reinforcing a world where the boundaries between life and labor, self and product, are increasingly hard to draw.

More insidiously, social media platforms, advertisers, entertainment companies, and even “news” channels don’t just want us to consume—they want to train us how to think. Not because of some conspiracy, but because attention leads to profits. If you're glued to a screen, you're not organizing with your neighbors, asking deep questions, or building alternative ways of living. You're feeding a machine.

This isn’t just a cultural issue—it’s a material strategy. Capitalism now depends on both workers’ physical labor and their psychic submission. This is what the Frankfurt School saw. They weren’t saying people are too stupid to revolt—they were saying the system had grown more sophisticated in containing our capacity to think differently.

The Enlightenment Gave Us Tools—And Taught Us to Worship Control

The Frankfurt School’s most famous critique was of the Enlightenment—the 18th-century movement that championed reason, science, and human progress. The Enlightenment helped free people from religious dogma and monarchy, but it also introduced a new kind of domination: the belief that everything can be measured, managed, and controlled.

This sounds harmless until you realize that the same mindset that led to modern medicine also led to factories, prisons, and bureaucracies that manage people like objects. When reason is cut off from compassion, it becomes a tool of domination.

Aldous Huxley, in his novel Brave New World, warned us about this too. In that world, no one was oppressed by force—they were numbed with pleasure, distracted by entertainment, and trained to love their place in the system. It wasn’t a dictatorship of fear. It was a dictatorship of comfort and distraction. Sound familiar?

But Huxley didn’t just critique—he imagined an alternative. In Island, he pictured a society rooted in cooperation, mindfulness, education of the heart, and collective joy. For him, liberation was not just economic—it was spiritual and emotional. People needed to be free inside as well as outside.

The Working Class Is Fragmented—But Not Hopeless

The classic Marxist idea is that the working class—the people who produce value but don’t own the means of production—has revolutionary potential. But the working class has never been and still isn’t a single, unified group. It's fragmented across race, nationality, gender, job type, geography, and ideology. Many workers are struggling just to survive, and are often overwhelmed by anxiety, debt, or shame.

It’s easy to say, “the working class has been bought off,” or “they’re too passive.” But that’s a misunderstanding. Most people aren’t apathetic by choice. They’re exhausted, distracted, overworked, or deeply disillusioned. Others are trying to survive inside systems that punish any resistance—whether through job insecurity, police violence, or mental burnout.

This doesn't mean there's no hope. It means the conditions for social trasnformation have changed. This isn’t just about adapting tactics to new conditions—it’s about rejecting an outdated worldview. The textbook model of revolution rests on Enlightenment assumptions: that society is a system of knowable parts, that linear progress and centralized control can steer it toward justice. But reality isn’t mechanical—it’s quantum, relational, unpredictable. Capitalism has evolved alongside this complexity, integrating itself into our emotions, relationships, and attention. The old model hasn’t failed because we did it wrong. It’s failed because it was based on the wrong map. Transformation now means attuning to complexity—building change through embedded presence, mutual interdependence, and the slow rewiring of how we live and relate.

Instead of sitting in a party headquarters issuing decrees, change agents embed themselves within movements, worker assemblies, mutual aid networks, and radical unions. A worker can also be a theorist, and a theorist must also be an active participant in labor and community organizing. The spread of transformative ideas happens through ongoing dialogue, shared struggles, and lived relationships, not top-down declarations.

Consciousness Is the Battleground—And It’s Contested Every Day

Social transformation isn’t just about changing who owns the factories. It’s about changing how people see themselves, each other, and the world. And that takes more than slogans or economic struggle. It requires a shift in awareness—a breaking of the spell.

The Frankfurt School saw how capitalism trains people to internalize their own lack of freedom. Huxley saw how pleasure and comfort could be used to contain rebellion. But both missed something vital: how people break free. Not in mass all at once, but in waves, in cracks, in quiet moments of realization. One person teaches another. Someone has a breakdown, then a breakthrough. A community starts growing food together. A worker realizes they’ve been lied to. A teenager refuses to obey. A friend shares a book that changes someone’s life.

These are small, human, powerful acts of rebellion. They don’t always look like change. But they are part of it.

The people hit hardest by this system—the ones evicted, incarcerated, stuck in underfunded schools, pushed out of hospitals, or trapped in jobs that wear down the body before forty—aren’t just victims. They’re the ones who know, through lived experience, what’s wrong with the world in their bones.

When healing starts for them, it doesn’t mean returning to some earlier version of themselves. It means building something sturdier—like someone who grew up in a house where yelling was normal learning and for the first time, to sit in a room where no one raises their voice. Or a person used to being told what to do at every job finally taking part in a meeting where their voice carries real weight. This kind of growth doesn’t happen in clinics or institutions that treat people like problems to be managed. It happens in community kitchens where food is cooked and decisions are made together. In converted warehouses where people run childcare cooperatives and resolve conflict without police. In work crews that fix roofs or distribute medicine, not because someone’s in charge, but because they’ve built trust. These spaces run differently: no bosses, no landlords, no centralized control. Just people organizing themselves in small, tight-knit groups—affinity groups—rooted in mutual aid, shared responsibility, and the freedom to choose how they live and work together. Healing happens here not because people are left alone, but because they’re no longer isolated. It’s not about escaping pain—it’s about rebuilding life on a new foundation, one that was never allowed under the old system.

A New Diagnosis for a New Era

So how do we understand our current world?

We have to understand and interpret our capitalist society as not just as an economic system, but as something that’s expanded far beyond the workplace. It still controls who gets paid and who doesn’t, who owns and who rents—but now it reaches deeper. It shapes what we see, how we feel, and even what we think is possible. Our attention, our emotions, and our sense of reality itself have become points of extraction.

That didn’t happen by accident. The Enlightenment—often remembered for bringing reason and progress—also laid the groundwork for this. It taught us to measure, sort, and control. Over time, this way of thinking turned into systems that organize people like data, treat nature like a machine, and define success by who commands the most.

And yet, even now, the working class isn’t gone—it’s just been divided, distracted, and stretched thin. It includes gig workers, caretakers, warehouse crews, teachers, cashiers, delivery drivers—the people who make daily life run but are rarely allowed to shape it. They’re not a mythic revolutionary class, and they’re not passive sheep either. They’re stuck in worlds that make resistance hard and isolation easy.

Mass culture plays its part too. It doesn’t just feed us false narratives—it conditions us to accept things we don’t agree with, because we’ve been taught there’s no other way. But cracks are forming. The future won’t come from trying to revive old blueprints for revolution. It’ll come from what people are already doing—building new forms of life together, in the gaps left by a system that’s falling apart.

Genuine transformation isn’t just about who owns what. It’s about how we direct our attention, how we treat one another, how we organize our time, care, and labor. And while the process is long and uneven, it’s already begun.

We’re not as free as we’d like to believe—but we’re not as trapped as we’re told.

Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com)  is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.