You appear to share the dehumanising fantasies of Marxist dramaturgs, which one could categorise as the Metropolis fantasy, after Fritz Lang's nonsensical film. Contesting this kind of stupidity, Nabokov once invited his readers to imagine a typical "faceless" clerk, sitting in an office all day alongside a roomful of other clerks, all dressed alike, lunching in a row at a sandwich-bar, perhaps, and then travelling home in cattletruck-like conditions to his little identical box of a home; but then, after his takeaway dinner, he sits down and writes fine poetry. How do you know what the "faceless masses" do in their private lives? To judge people solely by their social face is perhaps not the worst kind of dehumanisation (I indicated a much worse kind above), but it's a kind to which the Left is unfortunately addicted in its holier-than-thou way.
You totally misunderstand what I'm saying. The 'faceless masses' only exist in that form in the minds of aesthetes (and, yes, there are some on the left, especially the Stalinist left, who think in a similar manner). They are a construction required to create the aesthete's sense of superiority. To judge people en masse at all is dehumanising. Where there
is a real distinction in society is between those who are wage-slaves and those who, by their ownership of capital, are not.
Metropolis is certainly not a nonsensical film, it is a portrait of an extreme form of social division based upon this distinction. Marxists and other socialists do not necessarily dehumanise the working classes, rather they point to their clearly inferior status in society as a result of an economic situation. The working classes are purely a product of capitalism, 'class' itself is purely about social and economic status and function.
