Development and Significance of The Concept
After Marx, the concept was developed extensively 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 who have written about this point include Gajo Petrović, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Timothy Bewes, Axel Honneth, John Zerzan, and Slavoj Žižek.
Petrović, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, defines reification 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.
Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will".
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 "fit for use" presumptions, and legislation allows the entrepreneur to create, for example, a reified and indeed fetishised noun, from “intellectual property” to “Hula Hoop” and “Windows Vista”.
Read more about this topic: Reification (Marxism)
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