Auschwitz, Marx and the twentieth century

Abstract

This article examines the internal relationship between modernity and forms of total destructive violence, taking the Nazi extermination of Jews at Auschwitz as its reflective axis. It argues that instrumental rationality and the homogenization and serialization of bureaucracy and the factory are aspects of capitalist modernity present in the elaboration of “reified death” as a specifically modern subjectivity, whose most extreme and brutal expression was the Nazi extermination camps, although its reality is not limited to that experience.