Reification

What is reification, and why “becoming a thing”?

Reification renders the German Verdinglichung: Ding is “thing” and ver-…-ung “making into”, so literally “making into a thing”. In Marxist theory it names the inversion by which the relations between people who produce for one another under the division of labour appear as material relations between commodities. Under capitalist relations of production the products of labour take the form of commodities, money and capital and seem to move independently of the people who made them.

A simple example: when the price of rice rises we say “the market decided”. The price feels like a property attached to the rice, or like a force as impersonal as the weather. Yet a price is really a relation among countless people working for one another and exchanging the results, appearing in the shape of a thing. Reification is exactly this: the social appearing as the natural. People themselves share the fate. The worker is reduced to the commodity labour-power and treated as interchangeable, while the individual qualities that make him a human being drop out of view.

Reification is sometimes used as a synonym for alienation, but there is also a practice of distinguishing them. In the Marxist humanist Gajo Petrović’s formulation, alienation is the general condition of human estrangement; reification is the most radical and widespread form of alienation, characteristic of modern capitalist society; and commodity fetishism is in turn a specific form of reification. A further distinction is from objectification: producing something and putting it into the world is not in itself reification. As we shall see, this distinction became a central issue in Lukács’s own self-criticism.

How is it connected with Marx’s commodity fetishism?

Marx himself used the word only in passing; he developed the idea above all in the section of Capital, volume 1, chapter 1, on “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret”. In commodity exchange, he wrote, the relations between private labours appear “not as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things.” And he added that it is “nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves” which assumes for them “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Marx compared the phenomenon to religion: just as the products of the human brain there appear as independent beings endowed with a life of their own, so in the world of commodities do the products of the human hand. He called this “fetishism” and held it to be inseparable from the production of commodities. Value turns every product of labour into a “social hieroglyphic”. The veil of mystery, Marx wrote, is stripped away only when the process of social production becomes “the product of freely associated men” under “their conscious and planned control”. Fetishism, in other words, is not a mistake in people’s heads but an objective appearance generated by the reality of commodity production.

What did Lukács add in History and Class Consciousness?

György Lukács had served in 1919 as deputy people’s commissar for education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the essays he wrote after that experience were collected in 1923 as History and Class Consciousness. Its longest essay is “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, counted as a founding text of “Western Marxism” and as the statement of what became the paradigmatic “central problem” of critical theory. It appeared nine years before the 1844 manuscripts were published.

Starting from Marx’s analysis of fetishism, Lukács made a far more radical claim: the commodity form had gradually become the universal category governing society as a whole, and in capitalist society it determines the very way things are given to us, the “form of objectivity” (Gegenständlichkeitsform). He combined this with Max Weber’s theory of rationalisation. Once labour processes are rationalised under the dominance of commodity exchange, work is broken down into calculable parts, the worker’s personality becomes a means to an end, and commodities become interchangeable things. People come to treat even their own qualities and abilities as things they own and dispose of like objects in the external world.

The process does not stop at the economy. Politics and law, too, are reshaped into modes of rational calculability to meet the demands of capitalist exchange, giving rise to the bureaucratic state and formal positive law, before whose objectified, mechanical rules individuals adapt passively. Lukács called this attitude “contemplation”: society, though made by people, rules over them as a law-like “second nature”. He went on to argue that the unsolved problems of modern philosophy, the “antinomies of bourgeois thought” epitomised by Kant’s thing-in-itself, stem from the failure to break through reification.

Where, then, is the way beyond reification? Lukács saw the proletariat as the “identical subject-object” of history. Bourgeoisie and workers face the same reified reality, but the worker experiences himself as an object rather than as the active part of the social labour process. This divided consciousness makes it impossible for him simply to accept reality as immediately given and drives him towards grasping society as a totality; when that insight becomes practice, that is, revolution, reification is overcome. For Lukács the opposite of reification was therefore class consciousness. The argument is now also read as a forerunner of the standpoint theory later developed in feminist epistemology.

Why did Lukács repudiate the book?

On publication, party intellectuals in Germany and Hungary objected to its idealist tendencies, and Grigory Zinoviev condemned it in his opening address to the Fifth World Congress of the Communist International in June 1924. Abram Deborin attacked it the same year in “Lukács and His Critique of Marxism”. The gist of the criticism was that, leaning on Hegel, Lukács had given the consciousness of the subject too much weight.

From the 1930s Lukács criticised the book himself; after 1945 he no longer counted it among his real works and refused new editions, and he criticised an unauthorised French edition of 1960. When a German reissue finally appeared in 1968 as volume 2 of his collected works, he added a new preface written in 1967. In it he conceded that his earlier arguments had confused objectification, externalisation and alienation. That the products of our labour and the institutions of society exist independently of our consciousness (objectification) is not a problem in itself; what calls for critique is the point at which objectified forms come to set the human essence in conflict with human existence, that is, alienation.

How to judge this self-criticism is disputed. Lukács himself presented it as the correction of a real error. The authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry find several of the self-criticisms in the preface unjustified and externally motivated, yet regard the distinction between objectification and alienation as making the critique of reification more precise: it allows a critique of reification that does not require a collective subject to reappropriate every objective social form. Rüdiger Dannemann, who studied Lukács’s annotated working copy, concludes that late in life Lukács reread the book in a spirit of self-correction.

How did the Frankfurt School take it up?

Lukács’s account of reification had a great influence on the Frankfurt School, as in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and in the work of Herbert Marcuse; Adorno had already taken up the theme in his book on Kierkegaard. For them reification became a matter not only of factory labour but of an instrumental rationality pervading culture and thought as a whole, and so a central concept of critical theory, while Lukács’s confidence that a revolutionary class would see through reification and reclaim history largely fell away. Later generations, from Jürgen Habermas on, continued to engage with Lukács.

The concept also echoed beyond Marxism. Lucien Goldmann suggested that Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time should be read as an answer to Lukács, and Guy Debord, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek all wrote on reification. Louis Althusser, by contrast, criticised an “ideology of reification” that sees “things” everywhere in human relations.

How did Honneth redefine reification?

Axel Honneth, a leading figure of the Frankfurt School’s third generation, gave the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2005 and published them the same year as Verdinglichung (in English, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea). He reformulated this key Marxist concept in terms of the theory of recognition. His central thesis is that reification occurs whenever our relation to the world loses the component of prior recognition that underlies all our cognition. Before we know anything coolly, we engage with the world and with others affectively and recognise them; reification is the forgetting of this prior recognition.

This changes the cause of reification. For Marx and Lukács reification arose from the structure of a social system, capitalism. For Honneth all forms of reification stem from pathologies of intersubjective relations of recognition. The reviewer Michael Schefczyk summarised that Honneth dismisses Lukács’s thesis that capitalism is to blame, yet takes up Lukács’s notion of a “true practice” to be rediscovered and develops it into a theory of recognition.

The criticism was sharp. The reviewers Ralf Konersmann and Wolfgang Kersting argued that by extending the concept to interaction as a whole Honneth turned recognition into a radiant positive term, and so fell back into a “social romanticism” longing for an origin not yet spoiled by reification. Schefczyk too noted that Honneth largely leaves aside the political implications of the critique of reification. Earlier, in their debate, Nancy Fraser had criticised Honneth for giving ethical categories such as recognition priority over structural social and political categories such as redistribution.

How can the strands be told apart?

Set side by side, the three strands yield clear criteria. First, where is the cause of reification located? Marx points to the objective reality of commodity production, Lukács to a capitalism in which the commodity form has spread to society as a whole, Honneth to an intersubjective pathology, the forgetting of recognition. Second, what is the way out? For Marx, placing production under the conscious control of freely associated producers; for Lukács, proletarian class consciousness and revolution; for Honneth, restoring forgotten relations of recognition. Third, is objectification itself treated as the problem? The early Lukács has been criticised for rejecting the very objectivity of social relations; the Lukács of 1967 and Honneth do not.

The political consequences differ accordingly. If reification is rooted in the structure of capitalism, its critique is a critique of capitalism and calls for transforming the relations of production. If it is rooted in pathologies of recognition, the critique can reach widely into everyday personal relations and institutional reform, but, as its critics say, its edge against capitalism may be blunted.