Does identity politics commodify us?
The Prime Minister has recently denounced ‘the growing tendency to commodify human beings through identity politics‘. In doing so, he raises a number of important questions. The claim of ‘commodification’ of human beings and their relations is a powerful one.
The idea that humans or their essential relationships risk reduction to being treated as things (‘reification’, from German
Verdinglichung) and thereby alienated from others was, indeed, one of Marxism’s central critiques of capitalism. In support of this thesis, Marxists could point to such charmless commercial terms as ‘human resources’ (assets on the company books) and, in contemporary discourse, to the claims that we should ‘open up’ our economies and suffer the consequent loss of lives to the coronavirus in order to avoid economic damage.
Disability RC hears how criminal justice system fails people with disabilities
Content warning: Descriptions of abuse Melanie at that stage was dressed in a safety smock. She had a big lump on her forehead. There was blood on her forehead, which seemed like fresh blood. There was dried blood down the front of her smock. And her room was bare. There was sort of sofa without a back or ottoman that was long, perhaps a little bit longer than this table, maybe a little more narrow, that was covered in a brown vinyl. The thing that stood out to me the most about that room is that Melanie had graffitied the room with her own blood. The smell of dried blood mixed with body odour and the sight of that graffiti is something that will be with me until the day that I die.