The Sickness is the System 🧵⬇️
https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1960708130175627752
1/ Fortune reports: “Half of workers are at breaking point, costing companies $438B in productivity loss.”
2/ Notice the framing. Workers’ collapse isn’t a human crisis, it’s a financial one. Suffering is only legible once it dents profits.
3/ Marx called this alienation: labor stripped of meaning, turned against the worker. Human vitality is drained, yet it shows up as a “loss” in capital’s ledger.
4/ Here lies the contradiction: capital demands infinite productivity from finite bodies. In wringing out every drop of surplus value, it devours the very labor power it relies upon.
5/ Workers at “breaking point” isn’t a bug—it’s the logical outcome of a system where human needs are subordinated to accumulation.
6/ Fortune measures the cost in billions. The real cost is borne in broken bodies, frayed communities, lives bent around the grind.
7/ Burnout isn’t mismanagement. It’s the architecture of capitalism laid bare.
8/ If half the working class is at the edge, then the question isn’t “how can capital recover productivity?” but “why should this system continue at all?”
9/ Marx was right: the system carries the seeds of its own undoing. Capital can’t sustain the very labor it exploits.
10/ What’s at stake isn’t productivity—it’s the possibility of life beyond exploitation.
🔥 If this resonated: share, discuss, organize. The sickness is systemic. Healing requires more than reform.
📚 For more:
• Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
• Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital
• Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework
• Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
• Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital
• Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework
🔎 "Half of workers are at breaking point, costing companies $438B in productivity loss." fortune.com/2025/08/18/qui…
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