reification (Marxism)

In Marxist philosophy, reification (''Verdinglichung'', "making into a thing") is the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.

As a practice of economics, reification transforms objects into subjects and subjects into objects, with the result that subjects (people) are rendered passive (of determined identity), whilst objects (commodities) are rendered as the active factor that determines the nature of a social relation. Analogously, the term hypostatization describes an effect of reification that results from presuming the existence of any object that can be named and presuming the existence of an abstractly conceived object, which is a fallacy of reification of ontological and epistemological interpretation.

Reification is conceptually related to, but different from Marx's theory of alienation and theory of commodity fetishism; ''alienation'' is the general condition of human estrangement; ''reification'' is a specific form of alienation; and ''commodity fetishism'' is a specific form of reification. Gajo Petrović. 2005 983
Reification
" '' Marxists Internet Archive'', transcribed by R. Dumain from T. Bottomore, L. Harris, V. G. Kiernan, and R. Miliband (eds.). 1983. ''A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.'' Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 411–413.

György Lukács

The concept of reification arose through the work of Lukács in his essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", collected in his book '' History and Class Consciousness'' (1923). Lukács treats reification as a problem of capitalist society that is related to the prevalence of the commodity form, through a close reading of "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret" in the first volume of '' Capital'' (1867).

Those who have written about this concept include Max Stirner, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Timothy Bewes, and Slavoj Žižek.

Marxist humanist Gajo Petrović (1965), drawing from Lukács, defines reification as:

Andrew Feenberg (1981) reinterprets Lukács's central category of "consciousness" as similar to anthropological notions of culture as a set of practices. The reification of consciousness in particular, therefore, is more than just an act of misrecognition; it affects the everyday social practice at a fundamental level beyond the individual subject.

Frankfurt School

Lukács's account was influential for the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer's and Adorno's '' Dialectic of Enlightenment'', and in the works of Herbert Marcuse, and Axel Honneth.

Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth (2008) reformulates this " Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power. Instead of being an effect of the structural character of social systems such as capitalism, as Karl Marx and György Lukács argued, Honneth contends that all forms of reification are due to pathologies of intersubjectively based struggles for recognition.

Social construction

Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will." However, some scholarship on Lukács's (1923) use of the term "reification" in ''History and Class Consciousness'' has challenged this interpretation of the concept, according to which reification implies that a pre-existing subject creates an objective social world from which it is then alienated.

Phenomenology

Other scholarship has suggested that Lukács's use of the term may have been strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology to understand his preoccupation with the reification of consciousness in particular. On this reading, reification entails a stance that separates the subject from the objective world, creating a mistaken relation between subject and object that is reduced to disengaged knowing. Applied to the social world, this leaves individual subjects feeling that society is something they can only know as an alien power, rather than interact with. In this respect, Lukács's use of the term could be seen as prefiguring some of the themes Martin Heidegger (1927) touches on in ''Being and Time'', supporting the suggestion of Lucien Goldman (2009) that Lukács and Heidegger were much closer in their philosophical concerns than typically thought.

Louis Althusser

French philosopher Louis Althusser criticized what he called the "ideology of reification" that sees things' everywhere in human relations." Althusser, Louis. 1969 965 ''For Marx'', translated by B. Brewster. p. 230,
Marxism and Humanism
" Retrieved via
From Marx to Mao
'', transcribed by D. J. Romagnolo (2002). Web. Althusser's critique derives from his understanding that Marx underwent significant theoretical and methodological change or an " epistemological break" between his early and his mature work.

Though the concept of reification is used in ''Das Kapital'' by Marx, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in the early '' The German Ideology'' and in the '' Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844''.

See also

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References

Further reading

* Arato, Andrew. 1972. "Lukács’s Theory of Reification" ''Telos''.
* Bewes, Timothy. 2002. "Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism" (illustrated ed.). Verso''.'' . Retrieved vi
Google Books

* Burris, Val. 1988
"Reification: A marxist perspective
" ''California Sociologist'' 10(1). Pp. 22–43.
* Dabrowski, Tomash. 2014
"Reification
" ''Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought.'' Blackwell. .
* Dahms, Harry. 1998. "Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas." ''Current Perspectives in Social Theory'' 18(1):3–62.
* Duarte, German A. 2011. ''Reificación Mediática'' (Sic Editorial)
* Dunayevskaya, Raya
"Reification of People and the Fetishism of Commodities
" Pp. 167–91 in ''The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection''.
* Floyd, Kevin: "Introduction: On Capital, Sexuality, and the Situations of Knowledge," in ''The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism''. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
* Gabel, Joseph. 1975. ''False Consciousness: An Essay On Reification''. New York: Harper & Row.
* Goldmann, Lucien. 1959 "Réification." ''Recherches Dialectiques.'' Paris: Gallimard.
* Honneth, Axel. 2005 March 14–16
"Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View
" '' The Tanner Lectures on Human Values'', delivered at University of California-Berkeley.
* Kangrga, Milan. 1968. ''Was ist Verdinglichung?''
* Larsen, Neil. 2011. "Lukács sans Proletariat, or Can ''History and Class Consciousness'' be Rehistoricized?." Pp. 81–100 in ''Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence,'' edited by T. Bewes and T. Hall. London: Continuum.
* Löwith, Karl. 1982 932 ''Max Weber and Karl Marx''.
* Lukács, György. 167 923 '' History & Class Consciousness.'' Merlin Press.
Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat
"
*Rubin, I. I. 1972 928 "Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value."
* Schaff, Adam. 1980. ''Alienation as a Social Phenomenon''.
* Tadić, Ljubomir. 1969. "Bureaucracy—Reified Organization," edited by M. Marković and G. Petrović. Praxis.
* Vandenberghe, Frederic. 2009. ''A Philosophical History of German Sociology''. London: Routledge.
* Westerman, Richard. 2018. ''Lukács' Phenomenology of Capitalism: Reification Revalued''. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Marxist theory
György Lukács

fr:Réification