Few comedies depict the banal, Kafkaesque day-to-day of working life as well as Mike Judge’s 1999 film Office Space. When teaching Marx on the concept of alienation, either in a political philosophy or ethics course, Office Space’s bureaucratic and dull depiction of advanced capitalist working life is an excellent compendium for classroom discussion.
Having read for class selections from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, I begin by asking students to discuss, in small groups, about the worst job that they have had: What were the hours? What made it bad? How long did you work at the job? What was your relationship with your boss?
If students have not had a bad job (and these students are usually rare), I ask them to answer the same questions, but with respect to the best job that they have had.
If students have never worked, I ask them to describe their dream job and the conditions of such a job, and then describe what kinds of conditions would have to arise to make them quit their dream job. In doing so, this provides students a chance to contextualize their background experiences, understand the lives of their fellow students, and examine the variety of working experiences and environments that students have been exposed to.
After a report back to the class about their group findings, I have students return to their groups to examine and critically analyze two short sections from “Estranged Labor” from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, wherein he describes four dimensions of alienation among the working class: alienation from (1) the product of one’s labor, (2) the labor process, (3) one’s species-being, and (4) other humans.
After talking about Marx’s dimensions of alienation their groups and the class as a whole, we then turn to a series of short clips from Office Space.
In this clip, the protagonist of the film, Peter Gibbons, a programmer at a firm called Initech, is approached by one of his many bosses, Bill Lumbergh. Peter is told that he has failed to put a new cover sheet on the most recent round of TPS reports (test procedure specification). After a trite and frustrating “conversation” with his boss, Peter then turns to his fellow co-worker, Milton, whose music is preventing him from getting work done. After some push back, Peter sets back to work when he is approached by another one of his bosses who asks if he has received the memo about putting new cover sheets on the TPS reports.
The frustrating triviality of his bosses request highlights Peter’s alienation at work – he lacks meaningful control over his own working environment, where he is chastised for inconsequential mistakes.
Students are then shown a second clip where Peter, having abandoned any pretense of care for his job, attends a meeting with two men who are tasked with downsizing the company.
In this scene, Peter openly describes his dissatisfaction with his work, his lack of care for the work he does, and his complete alienation from his working life. He also comes to a key Marxian insight, that if he works harder to produce more economic value for Initech, he doesn’t see any of that economic value for himself.
After watching each of the clips, students are asked to explain, apply, and unpack each of Marx’s four dimensions of alienation in relation to the scenes from Office Space.
They try to find examples of each of the four dimensions of alienation present in the above clips.
In this discussion, it is helpful for students to consider both the psychological and structural aspects of Peter’s alienation. What do the day to day conditions of working life mean for how these characters understand themselves and their purpose? What are some of the structural reasons as to why these characters might feel this way? What alternatives do they realistically have? What could be done to ameliorate their sense of alienation?
Finally, I end this discussion with a broader discussion of the difference between work and play (or leisure). Groups of students are tasked with coming up with a pros and cons lists of both work and play. Out of this, students are then asked to describe a “perfect” work-life balance for themselves, followed by comparing their answers to their fellow group mates. I then have groups work together to create a list of conditions that would be needed at work to collapse the distinction between work and play, i.e., what would work need to look like for it to feel like play? These conversations are valuable for a variety of pedagogical reasons related to the course content, but they are equally as important for helping students consider their career own paths. Student are able to conceptualize a working life that is inherently valuable rather than one that is rife with alienation as in Office Space.
And finally, we discuss as a class whether or not work ought to feel like play, if the distinction can be collapsed at all, or, even if we could collapse the distinction, if it is better for us to keep those two worlds separate – work as work, and play as play.
These clips could also be used in a variety of other contexts, including as an addition to Camus’ The Myth of Myth of Sisyphus and his exploration of the absurd:
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins”—this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening (2018 [1942], 12).
Camus’ notion of the absurd as feeling the “stage sets collapse” is similar to the realization that Peter has in the clip where he meets the downsizers. One’s working life becomes acutely absurd once one begins to contend with questions of meaning, purpose, and death. Work from Camus or Kafka would be a welcome supplement to a course, or even class periods, on work, alienation, meaning, and the good life.
The Teaching and Learning Video Series is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using humorous video clips for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurw@gvsu.edu
Alec Stubbs
Alec Stubbs is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston & The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). His work focuses on economic democracy, post-capitalist alternatives, emerging technologies, as well as prefigurative social change and its relation to meaning, joy, hope, and absurdity.
