Every year, millions of workers board early morning trains, performing a routine dictated by the demands of global capital. Karl Marx famously diagnosed this mechanical existence as the tragedy of material alienation, a state where our labor owns us rather than the other way around. Yet, as the train doors open, each commuter faces a purely personal choice: to step out onto the platform and endure another day within this framework. It is precisely in this quiet, anxious pocket of individual decision that Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of subjective freedom gets its chance and breathes within.
Historically, placing Marx and Kierkegaard in conversation was often regarded as philosophically unnatural, as influential Marxist and existentialist thinkers alike frequently dismissed the other’s project as fundamentally incomplete. To the Marxist, existentialism was a self-indulgent, bourgeois luxury, a philosophy for coffee shops and university elites who possessed the financial privilege to intellectualize “anxiety” while ignoring the brutal reality of the factory floor. To the existentialist, Marxism was a cold, and highly bureaucratic prison that reduced human free will to a mere footnote of collective and systematized economic determinism. Yet, this long-standing hostility misses a deeper synthesis. By pairing Kierkegaard’s concept of the “leap” with Marxist praxis, internal choice and external revolution emerge not as enemies, but in fact as two sides of the same coin.
At first glance, the commuter on the platform seems like a casualty of purely material forces. For Marx, capitalism does a profound violence to our humanity by turning personal creativity into a salable commodity. The worker becomes alienated (Entfremdung) not just from what they make, but from their very self. They move through life with the mechanical passivity of a machine. On the morning commute, this alienation manifests as a collective hypnosis as the crowd moves to the beat of the clock and the market, stripped of agency and reduced to mere instruments of production. To look at the platform through a strictly Marxist lens is to see a structural prison where economic necessity completely crushes human subjectivity.
To understand the absolute scope of this prison, one must look to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he unspools alienation into four precise and crushing vectors. The commuter on the platform is not merely underpaid, instead they are systematically disassembled. First, they are alienated from the product of their labor, as the spreadsheets, code, or physical goods they create do not belong to them, as they did much more in a pre-industrial sense, standing instead as an alien power owned by the capitalist. Second, this estrangement poisons the very act of production. Labor is no longer a fulfilling expression of human capability, but a forced, miserable chore where the worker feels at home only when they are, in fact, not working. This leads directly to the third, most broadly devastating vector, alienation from our Gattungswesen, or species-essence. Capitalism strips us of our inherent human drive to create freely and purposefully, reducing our life-activity to a mere means of physical survival, making us feel more like animals than humans. Finally, this total systemic rot causes our alienation from other workers. On the crowded platform, fellow commuters are not seen as comrades or equals. Under the pressure of a competitive market, they are viewed as threats, obstacles, or background noise. The packed train car becomes a paradox of modern life: a space of forced, hyper-dense proximity that is completely devoid of genuine human connection.
Yet, this structural diagnosis captures only half of the respective commuter’s despair. Kierkegaard reminds us that alienation is also an internal, existential condition. In Two Ages he warns against losing oneself to “the public,” that faceless, unreflective crowd that dictates how we should think and live. To Kierkegaard, the ultimate danger is letting your life slide by as a passive spectator, comfortably numb within the group’s expectations. This passivity leads directly to what he later diagnoses in The Sickness Unto Death as the despair of not willing to be oneself. The worker on the train is not just trapped by the corporate office, they are trapped by their own surrender to the very routine itself. By viewing the train platform through both thinkers simultaneously, we see that material alienation and existential despair feed on each other. The economic system demands that the worker become an object, and our own existential dread tempts us to accept that objecthood rather than face the terrifying responsibility of freedom.
The engine driving this collective numbness is what Kierkegaard terms “leveling” (Nivelleringen) in Two Ages. Leveling is the insidious process by which a hyper-reflective, passionless society systematically flattens the unique, sharp edges of individual identity into a uniform, compliant average. It operates like a form of cultural gravity, pulling down anyone who dares to express a type of genuine subjective passion or dissent, reducing public life to an absolutely abstract, uncommitted game of mere observation. For Kierkegaard, the primary tool of this flattening is the bourgeois mass press, or what we would likely traditionally recognize today as various forms of corporate algorithmic media. This apparatus feeds the crowd a steady diet of superficial talkativeness, outrage, and detached commentary, ensuring that the public remains fundamentally passive as a whole. It encourages people to merely talk about reality rather than actively participate in it or change it. On the train platform, leveling is fully actualized. The commuter is not just financially coerced by capital, more so they are culturally and technologically conditioned to insidiously lose their internal spark, adapting their behavior to match the quiet, unassertive mediocrity of the crowd.
This paralyzing surrender to routine is what Albert Camus dramatizes in his final novel, The Fall. The novel’s narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a highly publicly performative Parisian lawyer, who lives a life of hollow bourgeois respectability until he chooses not to jump into the Seine to save a drowning woman. Lacking faith in any higher meaning, Clamence cannot find redemption. Instead, he retreats into a cynical, self-loathing internal exile. He becomes the exact archetype of the worn-down individual who populates Kierkegaard’s conceptual mass, a passive creature fueled by the gossip, abstractions, and moralizing of the bourgeois press, the very culturally entrenched entity and arm of the ruling class that, in fact, laid the seeds for his own internally contradictory, petty bourgeois morality, leading to his existential fall in the first place. But he doesn’t just brood, he weaponizes his despair against all who have the misfortune to sit down and strike up a seemingly cordial conversation with him, as his internalized self-loathing drives him to escalating levels of thinly veiled viciousness toward his fellow men, masked as a type of cynical enlightenment or learnedness. He invents the role of the “judge-penitent,” broadcasting his own guilt to everyone around him as a subtle tool of psychological control, dragging others down into his roiling and turbulent pool of self-hatred and self-inflicted emotional battery. The commuter standing at the train doors faces a remarkably similar trap. When we lose faith in the possibility of a better world, we often become like Clamence. We don’t just endure our alienation, but often and inevitably grow immensely cynical, and weaponize our subjective cynicism in the process. We complain about the grind of our existence over coffee, using our shared exhaustion as a twisted, suicidal badge of honor to slyly mock anyone who still hopes for revolutionary and dynamic systemic change. It is a daily reenactment of Clamence’s failure, an act of existential bad faith where we choose a comfortable, cynical despair over the terrifying risk of freedom, where our own self-hatred is turned outward to police the conformity of the crowd.
To break out of Clamence’s cynical trap, we have to bridge the gap that historically divided the existentialist from the Marxist. For over a century, the debate has been stuck in a dialectical deadlock. The traditional Marxist argues that systemic change comes from objective historical laws and collective economic forces, often dismissively viewing the individual’s inner life as a bourgeois distraction in the process. But this structural determinism hits a wall at the train doors, because if the machine of history moves on its own, why should any individual worker risk their livelihood to fight it? Conversely, the traditional existentialist isolates the individual in a vacuum of idealized pure choice and romanticized self-expression, ignoring the often brutal material realities that limit what a person can actually do, and what new ruptures in our collective subjectivities would actually necessitate and drive the emergence of new, real authentic choices. Marx without Kierkegaard lacks a psychological engine, and Kierkegaard without Marx lacks a material stage.
The resolution to this deadlock lies in realizing that Marxist praxis is, at its core, a Kierkegaardian leap. When Marx calls for praxis, the revolutionary unity of theory and action, he is not describing a calculated or guaranteed corporate strategy. He is asking workers to disrupt the status quo without any absolute or idealized proof that a better world is possible. This is where the religious structure of Kierkegaard’s leap becomes a kind of secular weapon for the working class. A leap of faith is a passionate commitment made in the face of objective uncertainty. Joining a strike, organizing a union, or explicitly standing against the machinery of global capital requires exactly this kind of subjective, highly inward passion. The worker cannot wait for historical inevitability, rather they must make a personal, existential decision to act as if their choices matter. Praxis is not a passive surrender to history, in actuality it is a leap of faith into a future that has yet to be built.
However, this intersection of the internal choice and the external movement introduces a glaring contradiction. Kierkegaard’s knight of faith is a radically isolated figure who acts in absolute solitude, hidden from the understanding of the crowd. Marxist praxis, by contrast, demands solidarity, shared consciousness, and mass mobilization. How can a philosophy built on the absolute loneliness of individual salvation ever serve a revolution that requires us to march together?
The answer lies in re-evaluating the nature of solidarity itself. Genuine Marxist solidarity cannot be built out of the unreflective conformity of the crowd; that is merely the collective hypnosis of the train platform, where people are pushed together by economic coercion rather than shared conviction. To truly stand in solidarity with others, an individual must first break away from the mindless drift of the “public.” They must experience that terrifying Kierkegaardian moment of personal responsibility, the realization that they, and they alone, must choose whether to remain a cog or to resist. True collective action is not the erasure of the individual. It is a gathering of individuals who have each made a lonely, terrifying decision to leap into the same uncertainty. When workers organize, they are not acting as a mindless mob. They are an assembly of independent subjects who have looked into the abyss of their own alienation, rejected it, and chosen to bind their fates together. The Kierkegaardian leap is the necessary catalyst that transforms a passive mass of employees into an active, revolutionary collective.
Ultimately, we must return to the train platform where our day began. The doors glide open, presenting the same monotonous world dictated by the terms of capital. We can step through them like Clamence, hiding our terror behind a mask of workplace sarcasm, bitter compliance, and moral vacuity, using our shared defeatism to police anyone who dares to truly dream of something better gradually materializing. Or, we can recognize the opening of those doors as a moment of existential crisis. To transform the world, we must first choose to inhabit our own freedom. When the commuter steps onto the platform not to endure the routine, but to break it, the internal leap and the external revolution become one. History does not move on its own, rather it waits for us to step out of the crowd, look into the uncertainty, and take a highly decisive, inward leap.
Further Reading:
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan, Prometheus Books, 1988.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto.
Camus, Albert. The Fall. Translated by Justin O’Brien, Vintage Books, 1991.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Two Ages: A Literary Review. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1978.
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Alastair Hannay, Penguin Books, 1989.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay, Penguin Books, 1985.