"The things the worker buys with his wages are first of all consumer goods which enable him to survive, to reproduce his labor-power so as to be able to continue selling it; & they are spectacles, objects for passive admiration. He consumes & admires the products of human activity passively.
He does not exist in the world as an active agent who transforms it, but as a helpless, impotent spectator; he may call this state of powerless admiration "happiness," & since labor is painful, he may desire to be "happy," namely inactive, all his life (a condition similar to being born dead).
The commodities, the spectacles, consume him; he uses up living energy in passive admiration; he is consumed by things.
In this sense, the more he has, the less he is."
- Fredy Perlman, The Reproduction of Daily Life
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