It is in the very DNA of capital to turn life itself into a means for generating more capital (professional, academic, cultural, financial, industrial, etc.). The global journalist visits the conflict zone like a gold prospector—this is his cultural capital, where he has discovered, like Columbus, the native, whom he calls his “fixer.” Using “fixers” as his “eyes” and “ears,” the journalist's entrepreneurial spirit goes on to acquire more cultural capital, that is, titles, bylines and awards. This objectification process, that turns the local knowledge worker into an embodied instrument of global media capital, reduces the “fixer” to a status not different from the nineteenth-century native colonial soldier. While the latter was compelled to fight in British imperial wars, the former is enlisted as a faceless gatherer of war stories. As history continues to bleed into the present, the local reporter, like a colonial soldier, literally carries in his body (as women are precluded from this role under patriarchy) the very conflict that births him. The reporter's precarity, a result of—and reason for—the low exchange value of his labor in the global marketplace reveals the commodification of life itself.

Marx had identified this script in the early days of expansion of the capitalist mode of production. He cautioned us that capital works like an objective force, extracting labor from a worker's body, turning “life itself “ into drudgery. His work is still relevant today, if not more so, due to the expanding reach of global capitalism into every corner of the world and the living labor's transformation, like other elements of life, into just a commodity to be bought and sold to maximize profits. Marx ([1867] 1976) not only describes how capital profits by turning living labor—the innate capacity to work—into commodities on the market, but he also explains that capitalism creates unequal conditions for the individual worker to appear in the market ready to sell their labor in order to subsist. These conditions are twofold. First, the individuals must be free to sell their labor. Second, they must sell their labor for a short while (because a permanent alienation of labor is slavery): they must temporarily alienate their labor and also retain ownership over it.