reification
In Marxist theory, reification denotes the reversal of the relationship between people who produce for one another in a division of labor into an objectified (reified) relationship between goods. Under capitalist relations of production, the products of labor take the form of commodities, money and capital, and as such become independent from their actual producers. This process is also known as the alienation of the producer from the product and of the producers from one another.
The term goes back to Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach . According to them, it refers to the process of alienating a subject who objectifies his ideas in the ideas and things he produces . This is how Feuerbach explains the concept of God as the objectification of human being.
In the case of reification, according to the Marxist approach, social conditions will appear in the form of things that have their own laws that can no longer be shaped by humans. According to Marx, reification finds its prototypical expression in “ commodity fetishism ”. Living work reifies itself into a commodity.
Reification is the tendency inherent in capitalist societies to make everything and everyone an object of exchange, that is, a commodity .
For Georg Lukács , the opposite of reification is class consciousness .
Theorists of reification are among others
- Karl Marx ( Capital , Volume 1)
- Georg Lukács ( history and class consciousness )
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Axel Honneth ( Reification. A study of recognition theory )
The criticism of values around Robert Kurz as a younger variant of Marxist theory ( post- Marxism ) also places reification and alienation at the center of its investigations.