What is Reification in Georg Lukács’s early Marxist Work?

Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2021

This paper studies the relationship between consciousness and social existence in Georg Lukács’ early Marxist works through a consideration of his concept of reification. Understanding reification as the process underlying capitalist society’s immediate form of objectivity, I designate dereification as the cultivation of a mediated form of consciousness. In order to better understand the experiential aspects of this cultivation, I supplement my reading of Lukács’ theory of reification with attention to Walter Benjamin’s treatment of experience in capitalist society. I argue that Benjamin’s distinction between experience as the shock of isolated events [Erlebnis] and experience as a long-term practice [Erfahrung] helpfully illuminates Lukács’ conception of dereification, allowing us to see the latter as a long process of cultivation. This account ultimately leads to a consideration of the formal role played by the party—as the facilitator of the working class’s self-education—in Lukács’ philosophy of social praxis.

Thesis Eleven, 2020

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where humans take on the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced.

In current debates on critical theory the concept of reification is experiencing a kind of revival, thanks to the theoretical efforts of two prominent thinkers of this tradition, Axel Honneth and Andrew Feenberg. However, although they both share the insight that its classical formulation in Georg Lukács’s early Marxist theory can be appropriately updated in order to analyze contemporary social pathologies, their respective interpretations of it differ substantially. Honneth repeats the classical critique of Lukács (formulated by theorists such as Adorno and Habermas), according to which his concept of reification is deeply rooted in an outdated, idealist way of thinking. Therefore he attempts to work out an “unofficial version” of it, understood as a lack of existential involvement of the individuals in their social interactions with other individuals. He describes this distanced ethical attitude as “recognition-oblivion”, which is supposedly at odds with a fundamental anthropological presupposition of man’s existence. In Feenberg’s more “orthodox” (but still rather heretical) reading, reification has to be thought of as a socio-ontological concept, which denotes the historically determined “form of objectivity” of capitalist societies, in which a historically specific, one-sided notion of calculative and technical rationality prevails. Reified forms of the mediation between subject and object permeate the social totality and therefore can’t be confined to the field of ethical relations, as Honneth suggests. Defending Lukács’s “philosophy of praxis”, Feenberg argues against the classical critique of it: In fact Lukács’s approach is based on a dialectical notion of historical change, which respects the repressed otherness of the life-content. In face of the eruption of the global economic crisis in 2008 and the imminent ecological catastrophe due to global warming, Feenberg’s reconstruction of reification can offer more adequate theoretical means to explain crisis and to think of possible alternatives to contemporary society.

Lukács's theory of reification, explained in his 1923 work History and Class Consciousness , is often interpreted as a theory of ideology, however it is also a theory of social practice and a social ontology. Reification and dereification describe different types of social practice , individual technical practices aimed at adaptation, survival, and success, and collective transforming practices with the potential for establishing a solidary socialist society. Although many aspects of Lukács's early work are no longer applicable , this distinction is relevant to struggles around technology today, such as environmental struggles or struggles over medical practices.

This article attempts to provide a new look at an old idea within Marxist discourse. Reification, as first imagined by Marx and later Lukacs, describes a process by which capitalism transforms human beings and social relations into things. Although the concept has been subjected to much abstraction and reinvention over the years, this article attempts to address a foundational problem that has remained unsolved since its inception: Close analysis reveals that the concept of reification has never been developed to include an example of an alternative or non-reified state of being. To solve this foundational problem, I look beyond Marxism and to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is our primary vehicle for being-in-the-world, but what makes his philosophy unique is his emphasis on embodied subjectivity, as well as his dialectical conception of corporeality and being-in-theworld. From this view, the social and material worlds can best be understood as dynamic realms of intersubjectivity, while sentient beings always exist as subjects prior to the reifying effects of capitalism. Building upon an ongoing dialectic between the ideas of Marx, Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty and others, I will ultimately reframe the concept of reification as a objectifying tendency, precipitating from capitalism's ability to obscure the lived experience of the phenomenal body.

The following essay tracks a basic intellectual-historical trajectory running from Marx to Lukács to Adorno—from the section on commodity fetishism in Capital Vol. I, to the inauguration of the category of ‘reification’ in History and Class Consciousness, to Adorno’s critique of the critique of the concept in Negative Dialectics. The argument that follows will claim that Lukács’s emphasis on the overcoming of the ‘basic phenomenon of reification’ and the self-objectification of labour power in the realm of capitalist production leads to an emphasis on the category of alienation. He fails, however, to appreciate the implications of his own insight regarding its potentiation in the form of a ‘relation of a thing, of money, to itself.’ Moreover, he neglects the way in which, for Marx, when money and the commodity—both of which are merely two modes of appearance of the value-form—are considered together, value cannot be grasped as a static thing. “Those who consider the autonomization of value as a mere abstraction,” Marx writes, “forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in action.” Since Kant’s subjective constitution of objectivity the concept ‘objectivity’ has been double coded. On the one hand, there is its objective side—the knowable side able to be synthesized in a relationship of identity with the subject because it has been constituted by it. On the other, is its thingly non-identical side—the object’s irreducible particularity unknowable by the subject. Adorno’s essential charge is that Lukacs philosophically conflates objectification (the former) and reification (the latter). This philosophical conflation informs his reading of Capital. “It is not only due to the economic themes of Das Kapital,” Adorno writes, “that the concept of self-alienation plays no part in it any more; it makes philosophical sense.” It is the potentiation of reification in the form of a single thing that is always already beyond the activity of individuals that Adorno emphasizes in his own formulation of the concept; or rather, that determines his critique of Lukacs’s critique of the concept. The essay that follows is concerned with the fundamental philosophical arguments determining Adorno’s critique.

Symposium. Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2013

This paper addresses the question of the extent to which the process of reification is identical with domination and thus opposed to freedom. While this is clearly the case in Lukács's famous essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," the first generation of the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, rejects such a criticism of reification as still too closely tied to a false understanding of subjective freedom. Rather, as Adorno suggests in his later works, one has to take into account that any relation to oneself is fundamentally dependent upon a relation to the object. Unfortunately , this insight into the dialectic of subject and object, freedom and reification, is overlooked in Habermas and Honneth's redefini-tion of reification in terms of intersubjectivity. To bring out the importance of Adorno's thesis, I refer to the notion of "making oneself into a thing" (Sich-zum-Ding-Machen), as developed in Hegel's early Jena Writings, and argue that a fundamental form of reifica-tion is a condition for a specific kind of social freedom.

Heidegger’s claim that the being of beings has been reduced to standing reserve through modern technology seems to be the best expression of Marx’s concept of reification as a result of the commodity form. In my paper, after briefly criticizing Honneth’s recent reconceptualization of reification as [1] psychological and [b] non-economic, I will outline the problem of reification from the perspective of Marx, which will prepare the confrontation that I shall present between Heidegger and Marx, for the real issue is whether reification is the result of technology (which I will call “causality form”) or the result of the “commodity form.” Though I am unable to present a “final” solution for this confrontation, I claim, against Heidegger, that Marx’s concept of the commodity form is not based on subjectivity and, in addition, that Heideggerian ontology is unable to explain the connection between “enframing” and the capitalist structures that Heidegger implies in his descriptions of modern phenomena. Accordingly, this essay tries to open up a new path towards what has recently been called “Heideggerian Marxism.”