Definition: Reification

Okay, so I'll start with our attempted definitions.

Reification is a term that doesn't figure prominently in this piece, but it will become more important as we go along. Lukacs devotes an essay to the concept in History and Class Consciousness entitled "Reification and the Consciousness of the Poletariat." He ties it back to Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, but the idea echoes the Kantian notion of heteronomy as well. Basically, reification occurs when we relate to others in the same way that we relate to things. Kant says that this happens when we treat others as means rather than as ends, and Marx extends this idea to the conditions of relations between people under capitalism. Labor has a fixed value, and it is this value that comes to define the human being, and nothing besides. Here is Lukacs quoting Marx: "A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between them but between the products of their labor. This is the reason why the products of labor become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses...It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things" (Lukacs, p. 86).