In the preceding chapters I have outlined that alienation exerts a toll on wellbeing and health. Human lives are stunted and damaged and, stepping into a more normative register, they are not what they could be. The capacities and capabilities that social agents possess lack the freedom to be fully actualized, and when those capacities and capabilities are enacted, it is within a set of estranged relations for the purposes of capitalist accumulation.

So, what can we do? What can we do to move to a social formation where this does not occur, where social agents can realize and enact their potential?

One theme that runs throughout this book is that alienation emerges out of multiple social relationships particular to capitalism. It is not a given, a fixed natural state of affairs that we must simply endure without complaint as that is the natural order. Alienation like so many other social constructed inequalities is not an inevitable or natural part of existence. On a very high level of abstraction, it is an instance of social construction, albeit one with a very powerful weight of material force behind it. That means the relations and circumstances that produce alienation can be changed. New relations can be created that could either dramatically reduce alienation or dispense with it altogether.

Time for a new society?

In sociological parlance the causes of alienation are structural. A host of research and theorization has attested that how social structures have come into being leads to highly deleterious effects on health and wellbeing. The relationship between ethnicity and wellbeing provides a useful example. One common experience for racialized minority groups living in majority White countries is worse health and wellbeing in comparison with the majority population. Older research in this area lapsed into victim blaming, holding people of colour to account for shorter life expectancy and poorer health during life. Everything from the deficits of traditional food culture to genetics were mobilized to place the blame. However, a new wave of research in this area found that the reasons why racialized minority groups experience worse health are located in the racist structures of society. Racism affects the lives of racialized groups in multiple ways.