REIFICATION (MARXISM)

'Reification' (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "thing-ification") is the consideration of an abstraction or an object as if it had human (pathetic fallacy) or living (reification fallacy) existence and abilities; at the same time it implies the ''thingification'' of social relations.
Typically it involves separating out something from the original context in which it occurs, and placing it in another context, in which it lacks some or all of its original connections and seems to have powers or attributes which in truth it does not have. Thus reification involves a distortion of consciousness.
Reification in thought occurs when an abstract concept describing a relationship or context is treated as a concrete "thing", or if something is treated as if it were a separate object when this is inappropriate because it is not an object.
Marx argues reification is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value such as it manifests itself in market trade, i.e. the inversion in thought between object and subject, or between means and ends, reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features, powers) which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people are treated as if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things, or vice versa, attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects.
This implies objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.
The concept is related to, but differs from, Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism.

Contents

Five quotes from Marx showing the use of the concept

Development and significance of the concept

Criticism

References

Further reading

Five quotes from Marx showing the use of the concept

Development and significance of the concept

Marx did not use the phrase "reification" much^[1], in fact the concept was developed mostly by Georg Lukács in "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", part of his book ''History and Class Consciousness''. The concept of reification has also been present in the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer and Adorno's, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse. Others that have written about this point include Gajo Petrović, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Axel Honneth and Slavoj Žižek.
Petrović, in ''A Dictionary of Marxist Thought'', defines it as:

The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man‑produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.

^[2]
Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as “facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will”. ^[3]
Examples include the creation of false desires by the real labor of advertising. This is the construction of nouns naming parts of reality as intrinsically desirable "products", where the legal system of the capitalist country provides in "fit for use" presumptions and legislation allows the entrepreneur to create, for example, a reified and indeed fetishised noun, from "Hula Hoop" to "Windows Vista".

Criticism

French philosopher Louis Althusser criticized in his 1965 article ''Marxism and Humanism'', what he called "An ideology of reification that sees 'things' everywhere in human relations"^[4] . Althusser's critique derives from his theory of the epistemological break, which finds that Marx had a big theoretical and methodological change between his early writings and his mature ones.
The concept of reification is used in Das Kapital, Marx's most mature work; however, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in The German Ideology and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth reformulates this key "Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power in his recent work ''Reification'' (Oxford, 2007). 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.

References

1. See this search at the Marxists Internet Archive
2. Gajo Petrović, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 411-413; [6]
3. Berger, Peter, & Luckmann, Thomas. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor/Doubleday.
4. Althusser, Louis; "Marxism and Humanism" in '''For Marx''', p. 230 - endnote 7, [7]

Further reading

★ Althusser, Louis: "Humanism and Marxism" in ''For Marx'', The Penguin Press, 1969.

★ Arato, Andrew: ''Lukács’s Theory of Reification'', Telos, 1972.

★ Bewes, Timothy 2002: Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Verso, 2002, ISBN 1859846858.

★ Burris, Val: "Reification: A marxist perspective", ''California Sociologist'', Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 22-43.

★ Dahms, Harry: "Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas." ''Current Perspectives in Social Theory'' 18 (1998): 3-62.

★ Dunayevskaya, Raya: "Reification of People and the Fetishism of Commodities", in ''The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection'', pp. 167-191.

★ Gabel, Joseph : ''False consciousness : an essay on reification''. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

★ Goldmann, Lucien 1959: "Réification", in ''Recherches dialectiques'', Gallimard, 1959, Paris.

★ Honneth, Axel: "Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View", ''The Tanner Lectures on Human Values'', delivered at University of California-Berkeley, march 14–16, 2005.

★ Kangrga, Milan 1968: ‘Was ist Verdinglichung?’

★ Löwith, Karl 1932 (1982): Max Weber and Karl Marx.

★ Lukács, Georg 1923: "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in ''History & Class Consciousness'', Merlin Press, 1967.

★ Petrović, Gajo:"Reification" in ''A Dictionary of Marxist Thought'', edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 411-413.

★ Rubin, I. I. 1928 (1972): Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.

★ Schaff, Adam 1980: Alienation as a Social Phenomenon.

★ Tadić, Ljubomir 1969: ‘Bureaucracy—Reified Organization’. In M. Marković and G. Petrović eds. Praxis.