Reification (Marxism)

In Marxism, reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "making into a thing" (cf. Latin res meaning "thing") or Versachlichung, literally "objectification"; regarding something impersonally) is the thingification of social relations or of those involved in them, to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects (see commodity fetishism and value-form).

This implies that 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 is distinct from, Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.

Reification was not a particular prominent term or concept in Marx's own works, nor in that of his immediate successors. It rose to prominence chiefly through the work of Georg Lukács, in his essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", part of his book History and Class Consciousness; this is the locus classicus for defining the term in its current sense. Here, Lukács treats it as a problem of capitalist society related to the prevalence of the commodity form, through a close reading of Marx's chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital. Lukács's account was influential for the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse. Others who have written about this point include Max Stirner, Guy Debord, Gajo Petrović, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Timothy Bewes, Axel Honneth, John Zerzan, and Slavoj Žižek.

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