in an interview published in guernica magazine, kashmiri writer mirza waheed asks: “what makes brutality banal? how do we come to accept violence as an everyday thing? … how do we come to a point where killing as many people as possible is a job?” i was thinking of this when i read this article on capitalism: Commodification shapes the physical process of work itself and our understanding of it. Work becomes dominated by rationalisation, a high division of labour, repetition and obsession with quantity rather than quality. The finished article no longer appears as the object of a process at all. The fragmented process of production of the object ends up producing a fragmented subject: ‘The personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle fed into an alien system.’… So way beyond the profit-making workplace, in institutions across society, tasks are reduced to quantifiable functions, to ‘unit throughput’, in processes that acquire autonomy from the personality and therefore from human judgement. Even for those dealing directly with other human beings the sense of overall purpose is lost, all sense of cause and effect obscured. Lukács gives the example of the journalist whose powers of empathy, judgement, knowledge and expression are divorced from personality, and who is placed in an unnatural isolation when confronting the facts or events he or she ‘reports’ on. ‘The journalist’s “lack of convictions,” the prostitution of experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’
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