Reification

Can somebody please explain reification to me? I've tried understanding it but can't tell how it is different from fetishism.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(Marxism)
libcom.org/library/commodity-fetishism-and-reification-mike-rooke
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4
twitter.com/AnonBabble

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(Marxism)

What's this supposed to mean?

Hungarian Revisionism.

its the process of becoming real

fuck off tankie

Rather than creating commodities for use, we create commodities to create commodities and personal commodity abundance is the soul and only goal. In this case, what is valuable is not the human but the commodity, in every instance. Thus, the commodities are the subjects and the humans are the objects, we are there to create commodities, not the other way around.

Reification is the process and effect of this relationship "becoming real", that is, being emulated in culture and structures

in simple English, to be reified is to be made into a thing and made concrete what was abstract.

to move this idea further In Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle," The effects of Alienation and Reification are elaborated on to the extent where late capitalist society is fully reified, every single one of our social relations are mediate through commodities and, crucially, the commodities now mediate and produce each other, we are cut form the entire equation, mere spectators, this is the ultimate end of capitalism, fully automated commodity production from which we are withheld, we may only watch and starve.

Suicide or Revolution.

Fetishism in a regular sense simply refers to putting a special value to objects, like ooga-boogas believing a totem pole has magical powers or that your dead grandpa's watch is special because it belonged to him.

Reification as thought by Lukacs is the objectification of social relationships: artificial, man-made things and concepts are treated as if they were actual and naturally occurring things with certain inherent value, in such cases the subject(humans) and object(the reified thing) switch places between each other: the object becomes the subject and subject becomes an object. To paraphrase it, the reified thing becomes "independent" of humans who created it and starts influencing our actions and behaviors.
Commodity fetishism is a subtype of reification, with commodities becoming said independent subjects influencing our social relationships, eg. clothes from certain brands, which are not necessarily better, but we perceive them as better.

With commodity fetishism with one move two things happen in the opposite directions: commodities (objects) are made to be seen as the real "carriers" of social relationships (those of political subjects, people…) and on the other side the social relationship (of subjects) is deprived of its subjective character, making them look object-like:

Give me a practical example of this.

libcom.org/library/commodity-fetishism-and-reification-mike-rooke
Maybe this will help?

everyone you see walking around outside

Car from a well-known brand vs a car from some shit brand, the prestige associated with both commodities determines our relationships with the environment.

This is a good example. Lets say that the prestige represented by those two cars are just stand-ins for our class positions. A spectator could think, "Damn, I don't want to end up like that loser, gotta work hard to buy me a Ferrari."

What happens here is that the spectator measures himself through those objects, completely desubjectified, since the real social relations are hidden behind them. Political (re)subjectification would happen if said spectator would organize with fellow socialists for a classless society where objects are rendered to serve the producers of said objects and not the other way around (e.g. a post-market environment, where public transportation is the standard).


And yeah, this. If you stand outside, see how people dress, interact with each other, move around the city, it's quite apparent.

People basing their conceptions of what humans should look like and behave on advertising rather than their actual social relations with other humans.

I thought fetishism meant mistaking relations between humans for relations between objects, and commodity fetishism is when this happens to exchange-value: it is seen as a relation among commodities, independent of human action, a "law of nature."

How does this fit into the Ferrari example?

Isn't the first thing you described more of reification than your typical fetishism?

Marx calls it Fetishism:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4

I'm still unsure what reification actually is.

And the student was Enlightened.

Explain.

Sorry, but that's begging the question.

reification is inverting the subject-object relationship between people and commodities.
Commodity fetishism is how the social relations between people which take on value-relations between people, then turn into value-relations between things(commodities) which transform into social relations between commodities. An assembly line worker and a journeyman are two different workers who relate to each other differently with the labor they provide to society, their labor power is sold to a capitalist in order to assure their sustenance. Their labor-power is transformed into a commodity whose value is obscured from the worker due to the atomization of workers under capitalist society, which results in not only of the exploitation of their labor, but subsequently the alienation of their labor in relation to society. The commodities then confront each other in the market with a price, and the value that we place on these commodities comes from the relationship each commodity has with one another in the marketplace because of the alienation of not only our labor, but all societal labor.

forgot pic related.

I'll read this tomorrow morning, thanks.

"they sold out"

I came to the conclusion that reification is the process of everything becoming fetishistic and now Lukács actually started making sense.

Thanks for the help everyone!