Introduction
Reification (from Latin res, “thing”) describes the process by which social relations between people appear as relations between things, and human activity appears as property of objects independent of human agency. Under capitalism, relationships, processes, and qualities produced through human action come to seem like natural facts, objective properties of the world itself. Workers confront the market, commodities, capital, and even their own labor as alien forces with independent existence and power, forgetting these are products of human social practice.
The concept was systematically developed by Georg Lukács in his 1923 masterwork History and Class Consciousness
(Lukács 1923)
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971
Full text available
, though it builds on Marx’s concepts of commodity fetishism Commodity Fetishism intermediate German: Warenfetischismus The process by which commodities appear to have inherent value as natural properties, obscuring the social relationships and human labor that actually produce their value. 1 other meaning
3 other meanings
Reification became central to Western Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory. It illuminates how capitalism reproduces itself not just through economic coercion but through forms of consciousness that make capitalist social relations appear natural, inevitable, and beyond transformation. Understanding reification is essential for grasping how ideology Ideology basic German: Ideologie A system of ideas, beliefs, and values that shapes how people understand the world, often serving to justify or naturalize existing power relations. 3 other meanings
Key Figures
Related Thinkers:
- Georg Lukács (1885-1971) - Foundational theorist, History and Class Consciousness (1923)
- Karl Marx (1818-1883) - Commodity fetishism, alienation
- Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) - Negative dialectics, identity thinking
- Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) - Frankfurt School, instrumental reason
- Axel Honneth (1949-present) - Contemporary reification theory
📖 Essential Reading: Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923), essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”
Conceptual Foundations
Marx: Commodity Fetishism
While Marx didn’t use the term “reification,” his analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital Volume 1 provides its foundation. Under capitalism, Marx argued, commodities appear to have value as natural properties—gold seems inherently valuable, prices seem to reflect objects’ essential worth. Yet value isn’t natural property but expression of social labor. Commodities’ value represents congealed human labor; their exchange represents social relationships between producers.
Commodity fetishism Commodity Fetishism intermediate German: Warenfetischismus The process by which commodities appear to have inherent value as natural properties, obscuring the social relationships and human labor that actually produce their value. 1 other meaning
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.
Core statement on commodity mystification
The commodity form systematically mystifies. Workers don’t directly experience social relations with other workers; they experience relationships mediated by commodities. Person A produces shoes; Person B produces bread. They don’t directly relate as producers but exchange commodities in market. Their social relationship takes the form of relationship between things—shoes exchange for bread. The thing-form becomes primary; social relations become invisible.
This isn’t subjective illusion but objective appearance. Under capitalism, social relations really do take thing-form. The market really does operate as impersonal force beyond individual control. Commodity fetishism is reality, not error—though it’s mystified reality requiring critical analysis to penetrate.
Marx: Alienation and Objectification
Reification connects to Marx’s earlier concept of alienation Alienation basic German: Entfremdung German: Entäußerung A condition in which people experience estrangement from their work, their products, other people, or their own human potential, typically resulting from oppressive social structures. 3 other meanings
Marx distinguished two concepts often conflated:
- Objectification (Vergegenständlichung): Humans necessarily externalize themselves in objects through labor. This is trans-historical feature of human existence—we create ourselves by transforming nature, producing objects embodying our intentions and capacities. This relates to Marx’s concept of species-being Species-Being intermediate German: Gattungswesen The distinctive human capacity for conscious, creative, and free productive activity that distinguishes humans from other animals; the essence of humanity realized through transforming nature according to conscious purposes. Read full article .
1 other meaning
Marx: Humans are species-beings because they treat themselves as universal, free beings capable of making the species (humanity) their object of consciousness and action. Under capitalism, workers are alienated from their species-being, reduced to animal functions. - Alienation (Entfremdung): Under capitalism specifically, objectification becomes alienation. Products escape creators’ control; labor becomes coerced necessity rather than free activity; human powers crystallize in capital opposing workers.
Reification synthesizes these insights: objectification under capitalism produces appearances where human products seem to be independent things with their own powers, and social processes appear as natural laws beyond human intervention.
Marx: “Social Relations Appearing as Relations Between Things”
Throughout Capital, Marx repeatedly invokes formula that reification theory systematizes: social relations appear as relations between things. Examples:
Value: “Value” seems to be property of commodities—this coat is worth $100. Actually, value expresses social labor embodied in commodity and social relations of production. The thing (coat) appears to have property (value) that actually represents social relationship.
Capital: Capital appears as money or machinery that somehow generates profit through its own power—“money makes money.” Actually, capital is social relation: workers’ labor-power purchased and exploited by capitalists. The dead labor (machinery, raw materials) appears productive; living labor’s productivity appears as capital’s power.
Labor market: Appears as impersonal market where labor-power’s price (wage) reflects supply and demand. Actually, reflects power relations: workers forced to sell labor-power; capitalists appropriate surplus value. Social domination appears as neutral market mechanism.
In each case, social relations produced by specific historical organization of production appear as properties of things or impersonal mechanisms. Human agency disappears; social forms seem natural.
Lukács: Reification as Total Social Phenomenon
History and Class Consciousness (1923)
Georg Lukács’s essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (Lukács 1923: 83-222) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971 Full text available transformed Marx’s insights into comprehensive theory:
Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.
Opening definition of reification
For Lukács, reification isn’t limited to economic sphere but permeates all aspects of capitalist society—law, state, science, culture, consciousness itself.
Reification’s defining features:
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Commodity form becomes universal: Under capitalism, ever more spheres of life become commodified. Not just material products but labor-power, land, ideas, art, and eventually affects, attention, and data become commodities. As commodification extends, reification intensifies.
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Human activity fragments into isolated facts: Organic totality of human practice fractures into disconnected tasks, specialized functions, abstract quantities. Workers perform isolated operations without comprehending overall production process; scientists study isolated variables without grasping social totality; life fragments into compartmentalized spheres.
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Contemplative attitude replaces praxis: Subjects experience themselves as passive observers of objective processes beyond their control. Workers confront production as external mechanism; economists treat economic “laws” as natural facts; everyone adopts contemplative stance toward reified world appearing as unchangeable given.
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Rational calculation dominates: Everything becomes calculable, quantifiable, subject to rational administration. Time becomes abstract, divisible units; labor becomes measurable quantities; efficiency and optimization replace qualitative evaluation. Max Weber’s “rationalization” is reification’s cultural form.
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Consciousness itself becomes reified: Not just external reality but thought takes reified form. Philosophy becomes specialized academic discipline disconnected from life; science fragments into isolated fields; consciousness experiences itself as passive receptor of sense-data rather than active, world-constituting praxis.
Reification and Rationalization
Lukács connected reification to Max Weber’s concept of rationalization—modernity’s increasing subjection of life to calculability, efficiency, and bureaucratic organization. For Weber, rationalization was ambivalent modernization process combining formal rationality (efficiency) with substantive irrationality (meaninglessness, disenchantment, iron cage).
Lukács argued reification is rationalization’s material basis. Capitalism’s commodity form requires quantification—labor-time must be measured, outputs calculated, values compared. This quantifying rationality extends from economy to administration, law, and culture. Bureaucracy, scientific management (Taylorism), and standardization all represent reification’s spread.
Yet where Weber saw tragic but inevitable rationalization, Lukács saw contradictory process containing revolutionary potential. Reification reaches a limit; its contradictions generate crisis; the proletariat’s unique position as simultaneously subject and object of history enables overcoming reification through revolutionary praxis.
The Proletariat’s Standpoint
Lukács’s most controversial claim: the proletariat can overcome reification because it is simultaneously subject and object of capitalist production. Workers are:
- Objects: commodities (labor-power) bought and sold
- Subjects: producers whose activity creates value
This dual position generates potential to penetrate reification. Experiencing themselves as commodities while knowing they’re human subjects, workers can recognize the social character of apparently objective forms. Capitalists simply own capital; workers are the living activity mystified as capital’s power. Class consciousness—recognizing themselves as creators of value appropriated by capital—dialectically negates reification.
This argument faces criticism. Why would objective position automatically generate consciousness? Historical experience shows most workers don’t develop revolutionary class consciousness. Lukács seems to conflate objective possibility (workers could overcome reification) with necessity (they will).
Totality Against Fragmentation
For Lukács, overcoming reification requires grasping capitalism as totality Totality advanced German: Totalität The interconnected whole of social relations that constitutes a society; understanding phenomena in their systematic connections rather than as isolated facts. 2 other meanings
Dialectical method Dialectic intermediate German: Dialektik Greek: dialektikē A method of reasoning and argument that proceeds through the tension and resolution of opposing concepts or forces, typically moving through contradiction toward higher synthesis or understanding. 3 other meanings
Only from perspective of totality can reification be recognized as such. If you accept fragmentation, studying isolated domains without seeing their interconnection, reification remains invisible—everything seems to be just what it appears. Comprehending totality reveals how apparently independent things are actually moments of single social process: capital’s self-valorization.
Frankfurt School Developments
Adorno and Horkheimer: Reification and Enlightenment
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) (Adorno 1947) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 Full text available extended reification theory to modernity itself. Enlightenment promised liberation through reason but produced new domination—instrumental rationality treating everything (nature, humans, culture) as objects to be mastered, calculated, administered.
Key themes:
Instrumental reason Instrumental Reason intermediate German: Zweckrationalität A form of rationality concerned solely with the most efficient means to achieve predetermined ends, without critical examination of the ends themselves or their human consequences. 2 other meanings
Culture industry: Mass culture (film, radio, popular music) produces reified consciousness through standardization, pseudo-individualization, and integration. Culture itself becomes commodity following industrial logic. Consumers experience prefabricated meanings, standardized affects, administered leisure. Spontaneity and critical thought atrophy; reified culture produces reified subjects.
Identity thinking: Philosophy traditionally seeks identity—reducing particular to universal, object to concept, reality to thought. This is cognitive reification: treating concepts as primary, forcing particular into pregiven categories, denying non-identity. Adorno’s negative dialectics Dialectic intermediate German: Dialektik Greek: dialektikē (Adorno) (per theodor-adorno) Negative dialectics: a dialectical thinking that refuses final synthesis, maintaining the non-identity between concept and object, and resisting the totalizing violence of systematic thought. 3 other meanings
Antisemitism and reification: Adorno and Horkheimer controversially argued that antisemitism involves reification—projecting abstract, threatening social forces onto Jewish people treated as concrete embodiment of abstraction. Finance capital’s abstract domination becomes “Jewish conspiracy”; social contradiction becomes racial essence. This reifying projection enables violence against real people blamed for systemic problems.
Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man
Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) diagnosed total reification—society achieving near-complete integration, closing space for critical thought and oppositional practice. Advanced capitalism offers material comfort and consumer choice while foreclosing genuine alternatives. “The goods” produce reified consciousness—subjects identify with commodities, experiencing consumption as freedom while actual freedom diminishes.
One-dimensionality describes flattening of critical dimension. Where classical capitalism’s overt exploitation generated revolutionary consciousness, administered capitalism integrates opposition through affluence and ideology. Workers become loyal consumers; revolutionary potential is neutralized; even apparent diversity masks underlying conformity.
Marcuse emphasized technological dimension. Modern technology isn’t neutral but embodies reified rationality—treating nature and humans as raw material for domination. The very structure of technological thought forecloses alternatives, creating “technological rationality” as new ideology naturalizing domination.
Yet Marcuse didn’t counsel despair. He identified remaining utopian potentials: aesthetic dimension (art’s refusal of reification), marginal groups (those excluded from affluence), and Great Refusal (negation of entire system). Critique must maintain negativity even when reification seems total.
Honneth: Reification as Failed Recognition
Axel Honneth’s contemporary reinterpretation (2008) reformulates reification through recognition theory. Reification is primarily ethical problem: forgetting the recognition we necessarily already accord others as persons. Before treating others as things, we must have recognized them as subjects. Reification is secondary—blocking, denying, or forgetting prior recognition.
This shifts emphasis from Marx’s political economy to intersubjective ethics. Reification damages recognition relations—treating others instrumentally, ignoring their subjectivity, relating to them as mere means. Overcoming reification means recovering genuine recognition.
Critics argue Honneth’s ethical turn de-politicizes reification, losing Marx’s and Lukács’s insights about capitalism’s structural production of reification. Recognition theory may critique individual failings but doesn’t address systemic organization producing reified consciousness. Nevertheless, Honneth illuminates reification’s interpersonal dimensions. Rahel Jaeggi’s work on alienation Alienation basic German: Entfremdung German: Entäußerung A condition in which people experience estrangement from their work, their products, other people, or their own human potential, typically resulting from oppressive social structures. 3 other meanings
Reification in Contemporary Capitalism
Mark Fisher’s analysis of capitalist realism (Fisher 2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009 Full text available shows how reification operates in our era: the widespread sense that capitalism is the only viable system makes alternatives literally unthinkable. This represents reification at the level of political imagination itself.
Financialization and Spectral Reification
Contemporary finance capital exhibits heightened reification. Derivatives, credit default swaps, high-frequency trading, and cryptocurrency trade abstractions of abstractions—not commodities but bets on commodity price movements, not currencies but speculative positions. Yet these spectral forms have devastating real effects: crashes destroy jobs, foreclosures displace families, currency speculation impoverishes nations.
This represents spectral reification: increasingly abstract, virtualized, fast-moving financial forms that seem utterly disconnected from material production yet dominate it. The social relations underlying financial instruments become more opaque; mystification intensifies; human agency seems more impossible.
Algorithmic Reification
Platform capitalism and algorithmic systems produce new reification forms. Recommendation algorithms, content curation, predictive analytics, and automated decision-making operate as black-boxed processes beyond understanding or control. People experience algorithmic outputs—search results, news feeds, hiring decisions, credit scores—as objective facts rather than products of designed systems encoding social values and power relations.
Key features:
- Opacity: Algorithms’ operations are technically complex, proprietary secrets, and often unexplainable (neural networks’ “black box” problem). This intensifies reification—not just mystification but systematic incomprehensibility.
- Naturalization: Algorithmic decisions appear neutral, objective, data-driven. “The algorithm says…” becomes irrefutable authority. Social values encoded in training data, optimization functions, and design choices disappear.
- Automation: Human judgment is displaced by automated systems. Discretion, context-sensitivity, and political contestation give way to mechanical application of opaque rules.
- Scale: Algorithms operate at massive scale, processing billions of data points, affecting millions of people. Individual challenge becomes impossible; collective resistance requires coordinating across algorithmic fragmentation.
Understanding algorithmic systems requires de-reifying them—recognizing they encode specific social choices, reflect existing power relations, optimize for particular values (usually profit), and could be designed differently. Algorithmic accountability movements seek to penetrate algorithmic reification through transparency requirements, auditing, and collective governance.
Data Reification
Big data and quantification produce data reification: reducing complex social phenomena to quantified metrics that then become primary reality. School “performance” becomes test scores; research “impact” becomes citation counts; individual “worth” becomes credit score; social relationships become network metrics; life itself becomes lifelogging data.
Originally, metrics were proxies for complex, unquantifiable realities. Through reification, proxies become primary—what can’t be quantified doesn’t count; gaming metrics replaces pursuing substantive goals; dashboard indicators become reality itself. This exemplifies reification: qualitative social reality becomes quantified thing; meaning collapses into measurement.
Emotional and Affective Reification
Neoliberal capitalism commodifies affects and emotions, producing new reification forms. Happiness becomes human capital to optimize; resilience becomes individual responsibility; wellness becomes consumer product; authenticity becomes brand. Internal subjective states—once considered private, ineffable, resistant to commodification—become things to be measured, managed, marketed, and monetized.
Platforms like Facebook explicitly trade on reified emotions—likes, reactions, engagement metrics. Complex affective responses become standardized options (angry, love, haha). Emotional labor in service work requires producing specific affects as commodity outputs. Therapeutic culture treats emotions as technical problems requiring expert intervention and pharmaceutical management.
This represents reification’s penetration into previously protected intimate spheres. When emotions become things, human subjectivity itself is reified.
Environmental Reification
Capitalism treats nature as standing reserve of resources—raw material for exploitation. This exemplifies reification: living, complex ecosystems with their own dynamics become inert inputs for production. Rivers become water resources; forests become timber; atmosphere becomes carbon sink. Nature’s agency, systemic properties, and independent value disappear; only instrumentality remains.
Climate change reveals this reification’s catastrophic consequences. By treating nature as passive thing rather than dynamic system, capitalism disrupts planetary cycles threatening its own conditions of existence. De-reifying nature—recognizing it as active system requiring respect rather than mere resource—is prerequisite for ecological sustainability.
Temporal Reification
Capitalism reifies time—treating it as abstract, homogeneous, quantifiable medium. “Time is money” condenses this reification: temporal experience becomes exchangeable commodity. Clock time, scheduling, efficiency, and productivity metrics impose abstract temporal grid on lived experience.
This contrasts with qualitative temporal experiences—durations varying with activity, rhythms specific to processes, temporal unfolding irreducible to units. Reified time enables exploitation (measuring labor-time for wage calculation) while destroying experiential richness.
Contemporary acceleration—speed-up of communication, production, consumption—intensifies temporal reification. Everything must happen faster; contemplation becomes impossible; life becomes continuous processing of stimuli. Hartmut Rosa’s “social acceleration” describes reification of temporal experience itself.
Overcoming Reification
Praxis: Unity of Theory and Practice
For Lukács and classical Marxism, overcoming reification requires praxis Praxis intermediate Greek: πρᾶξις (praxis) The unity of theory and practice; action informed by critical reflection and oriented toward social transformation, as opposed to mere contemplation or unreflective activity. 2 other meanings
2 other meanings
Revolutionary praxis involves:
- Consciousness: Recognizing reified forms as historically specific social products
- Organization: Collective action capable of confronting capital systematically
- Transformation: Actually changing social relations, not just understanding them differently
Class struggle is key—not moral choice but historical process through which subjects recognize themselves as producers of reified world and collectively transform it. Strikes, occupations, revolutionary organizations create spaces where reified relations are suspended, alternative forms practiced, transformation glimpsed.
De-reification Through Critique
Critical theory emphasizes ideology critique—theoretical work penetrating reified appearances to reveal underlying social relations. By showing how apparently natural phenomena are socially produced, historically specific, and potentially transformable, critique enables recognizing contingency where necessity seemed absolute.
This involves:
- Historical analysis: Showing current arrangements emerged historically, thus can change
- Social analysis: Revealing human agency behind apparently objective processes
- Dialectical analysis: Grasping contradictions within reified forms pointing beyond them
- Negative thinking: Refusing affirmative reconciliation, maintaining critical distance
Yet critique alone is insufficient. Without connection to transformative practice, it becomes academic exercise—reified theory disconnected from life. Critical theory’s political impotence after the 1960s exemplifies this: sophisticated critique coexisting with political defeat.
Art and Aesthetic Experience
Frankfurt School theorists, especially Adorno and Marcuse, emphasized art’s potential to resist reification. Authentic art doesn’t simply mirror reified reality but presents alternatives, maintains utopian dimension, and resists integration into culture industry.
Aesthetic experience differs from reified cognition:
- Non-instrumental: Art is experienced for itself, not as means to external end
- Qualitative: Aesthetic meaning can’t be quantified or exchanged
- Particular: Art resists subsumption under abstract concepts
- Critical: Genuine art challenges rather than confirms reified consciousness
This grants art privileged role in reification’s cultural critique. Yet critics question whether art can maintain autonomy under total commodification or whether aesthetic resistance becomes impotent as art itself is fully commodified.
Everyday Resistance
Less totalizing approaches identify everyday practices resisting reification:
- Direct relationships: Friendship, love, community bonds irreducible to exchange
- Gift economy: Sharing without calculation
- Commons: Resources managed collectively, refusing privatization
- Care work: Activities valuing persons rather than producing commodities
- Play: Activities valued for themselves, not outcomes
- Contemplation: Experiences of duration resisting temporal reification
While valuable, critics worry this romanticizes private refuges while leaving systemic reification intact. Personal resistance may be psychologically necessary but politically insufficient.
Democratic Control
Contemporary approaches emphasize democratic control over institutions generating reification. Rather than awaiting revolution or cultivating private resistance, incrementally democratize economy, technology, and institutions:
- Economic democracy: Worker cooperatives, participatory budgeting, collective ownership
- Algorithmic accountability: Transparency, auditing, democratic governance of automated systems
- Data sovereignty: Collective control over data rather than private appropriation
- Commons: Expanding collectively managed resources (knowledge, nature, infrastructure)
This seeks de-reification through changed power relations: from markets and bureaucracies (reified coordination) toward democratic participation (conscious collective decision-making). Yet skeptics question whether partial democratization can overcome reification rooted in commodity production itself.
Critiques and Limitations
Is Reification Universal or Historical?
Does reification describe universal human tendency (treating persons as things) or specifically capitalist phenomenon? Lukács emphasized capitalism’s specificity—commodity form’s universalization produces uniquely comprehensive reification. Others see reification as trans-historical, taking specific forms under capitalism.
This matters politically. If reification is universal, overcoming it may be impossible or require transcending social organization entirely (mysticism, primitivism). If specifically capitalist, it can be overcome through transforming capitalist social relations.
Totality and Totalitarianism
Lukács’s emphasis on totality faces criticism. Doesn’t totalizing thought risk authoritarianism—imposing systematic unity, dismissing recalcitrant particulars, asserting comprehensive knowledge? Postmodern critics argue that total critique mirrors capitalist totalization rather than opposing it.
Defenders distinguish between:
- Capitalist totality: Actual systematic integration under capital’s logic
- Critical totality: Theoretical comprehension of systemic interconnection
Grasping capitalism as totality isn’t imposing unity but recognizing existing integration. Yet tension remains: how can critique totalize without reproducing domination?
Proletariat as Revolutionary Subject
Lukács’s claim that proletariat’s objective position enables overcoming reification faced empirical falsification. Workers mostly didn’t develop revolutionary class consciousness; communist parties became bureaucratic; socialist states reproduced alienation and reification.
This generated multiple responses:
- Frankfurt School pessimism: Perhaps reification is total; revolutionary subject doesn’t exist
- New social movements: Look beyond traditional working class to other potential subjects
- Post-Marxism: Abandon class-centered revolutionary politics entirely
- Contemporary Marxism: Reanalyze class composition under contemporary capitalism
Cultural Pessimism
Adorno and Horkheimer’s later work exhibits cultural pessimism—reification seems total, resistance futile, enlightenment dialectically produces new barbarism. Critics argue this abandons Marxism’s emancipatory project for elitist cultural criticism mourning high culture’s decline.
Yet defenders argue pessimism reflects historical experience (fascism, Stalinism, consumer capitalism’s integration). Maintaining negativity against false optimism is politically necessary. The task isn’t guaranteeing happy endings but refusing to surrender critical thought even when transformation seems impossible.
Reification and Technology
Is reification inherent to technology or specific to capitalism’s technological forms? Frankfurt School often treats technology itself as reifying. Critics argue this technological determinism ignores how technologies embody social relations and could be organized differently.
Ecosocialists, cybernetic communists, and technological optimists argue that technology could enable overcoming reification through democratic planning, automation freeing humans from toil, and information systems making social relations transparent. Technology’s problem isn’t essence but capitalist deployment.
Further Reading
Foundational Texts
- Lukács, Georg. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In History and Class Consciousness. 1923. MIT Press, 1971. 83-222.
- Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1. 1867. Penguin Classics, 1990. [Chapter 1, Section 4: “The Fetishism of the Commodity”]
- Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Early Writings. Penguin, 1992.
Frankfurt School
- Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947. Stanford University Press, 2002.
- Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. 1966. Continuum, 1973.
- Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. 1964. Beacon Press, 1991.
- Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. In Illuminations. Schocken, 1969.
Contemporary Analysis
- Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Bewes, Timothy. Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism. Verso, 2002.
- Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press, 2013.
- Jaeggi, Rahel. Alienation. Columbia University Press, 2014.
Applications
- Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018.
- Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press, 2015.
- Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
- Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity, 2007.
Critical Perspectives
- Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. Routledge, 1999.
- Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell, 1990.
See Also
- Alienation Alienation basic German: Entfremdung German: Entäußerung A condition in which people experience estrangement from their work, their products, other people, or their own human potential, typically resulting from oppressive social structures. — Full article
3 other meanings
Marx: The fourfold estrangement of workers under capitalism: from the products of their labor, from the labor process itself, from their species-being (human essence), and from other human beings.Hegel: A necessary moment in the development of Spirit (Geist), wherein consciousness externalizes itself into the world before returning to itself at a higher level of self-understanding.existentialist: The fundamental condition of human existence in an indifferent universe, experienced as meaninglessness, absurdity, or disconnection from authentic selfhood. -
Commodity Fetishism Commodity Fetishism intermediate German: Warenfetischismus The process by which commodities appear to have inherent value as natural properties, obscuring the social relationships and human labor that actually produce their value.
1 other meaning
Marx: The mystification whereby social relations between producers take the form of relations between things (commodities), making the products of labor appear to govern human beings rather than the reverse. - Dialectics Dialectic intermediate German: Dialektik Greek: dialektikē A method of reasoning and argument that proceeds through the tension and resolution of opposing concepts or forces, typically moving through contradiction toward higher synthesis or understanding. — Full article
3 other meanings
Hegel: The self-movement of thought through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, wherein contradictions drive the development of concepts, history, and Spirit toward absolute knowledge.Marx: The materialist inversion of Hegel's dialectic: contradictions exist not in thought but in material reality, driving historical change through class struggle and economic transformation.Adorno: Negative dialectics: a dialectical thinking that refuses final synthesis, maintaining the non-identity between concept and object, and resisting the totalizing violence of systematic thought. -
Totality Totality advanced German: Totalität The interconnected whole of social relations that constitutes a society; understanding phenomena in their systematic connections rather than as isolated facts.
2 other meanings
Lukács: The category of totality is what distinguishes Marxism from bourgeois thought; it is the recognition that society forms an interconnected whole where each part can only be understood in relation to the entire system.Adorno: The false totality of administered society that appears to integrate all particulars but actually does violence to them; negative dialectics resists totality's claim to comprehend everything. - Ideology Ideology basic German: Ideologie A system of ideas, beliefs, and values that shapes how people understand the world, often serving to justify or naturalize existing power relations. — Full article
3 other meanings
Marx: False consciousness: ideas that represent the interests of the ruling class as universal truths, inverting reality like a camera obscura to make historically contingent arrangements appear natural and inevitable.Althusser: The imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, materially embodied in ideological state apparatuses (schools, churches, media) that interpellate subjects and reproduce social relations.Žižek: Not simply false belief but the fantasmatic structure that coordinates social reality itself. We know very well that things are not as they appear, yet we act as if we don't know—ideology operates through disavowed belief. -
Instrumental Reason Instrumental Reason intermediate German: Zweckrationalität A form of rationality concerned solely with the most efficient means to achieve predetermined ends, without critical examination of the ends themselves or their human consequences.
2 other meanings
Frankfurt School: The dominant form of reason in modernity that treats everything—nature, human beings, culture—as objects to be manipulated, controlled, and exploited for efficiency. The Dialectic of Enlightenment argues this reduces reason to a tool of domination.Weber: Goal-oriented rational action (Zweckrationalität) that calculates the most effective means to achieve given ends, contrasted with value-rational action oriented by intrinsic values. - Culture Industry — Full article
- Hegemony Hegemony intermediate Italian: egemonia Greek: hēgemonia The dominance of one group over others, achieved not merely through coercion but through the consent of the dominated, who accept the dominant group's worldview as common sense. — Full article
2 other meanings
Gramsci: Cultural and intellectual leadership exercised by a dominant class through civil society institutions (schools, media, churches). The ruling class maintains power by making its particular interests appear universal, its values appear as common sense.Laclau & Mouffe: A discursive practice of articulation whereby political identities and social formations are constructed through chains of equivalence, always contingent and contestable rather than determined by economic base. -
Praxis Praxis intermediate Greek: πρᾶξις (praxis) The unity of theory and practice; action informed by critical reflection and oriented toward social transformation, as opposed to mere contemplation or unreflective activity.
2 other meanings
Marx: Revolutionary activity that transforms both the world and the subject engaging in it; the realization of philosophy through material action rather than abstract thought alone.Gramsci: The philosophy of praxis—Gramsci's term for Marxism—emphasizing that ideas become material forces when they grip the masses and inform collective political action. - Georg Lukács
- Frankfurt School
- Karl Marx
- Theodor W. Adorno