Reification as a sociological category

For Lukács the crisis of reason encompasses the dominant paradigm of rationality in all its manifestations, from science and technology to the market and the bureaucracy, and even the socialist opposition itself. The concept of reification that Lukács applies in all these domains is based on multiple sources: Marx’s critique of machine industry and his concept of commodity fetishism; Simmel’s and Weber’s concepts of the exchange society, bureaucracy, and rationalization; and Hegel’s dialectical concept of appearance. To these overt influences, I would add the subtler impact of neo-Kantian philosophy, especially Emil Lask’s concept of meaning. Lukács’s theory can best be understood as a generalization of Marxian theory in two dimensions, in sociological breadth through Weber, and in ontological depth through neo-Kantianism and Hegel. So generalized, the concept of reification becomes the basis for a critique of capitalist rationality as a worldview and a system logic threatened by its inability to grasp the material substratum of its own formalistic categories and institutional structures.

According to Lukács, commodity exchange is the basis of all forms of reification. He seeks the “Seinsgrund” of reified thought even in its highest philosophical manifestations in the structure of the market.²⁴ In Capital Marx explains the market in terms of the fetishism of commodities. By this peculiar expression he means the substitution of exchange value for use value, relations between social objects for relations between the human beings who produce them, both in everyday life and in the scientific representation of the economy. Fetishism characterizes a society in which the economic relations between the individuals are governed by the forces they unleash through their unplanned market interactions. In such a society, the “law” of the market takes on an independence and power, a “material character,” the individuals themselves increasingly lose. This is due to the fact that production and exchange are splintered and fragmented. Marx writes,

In the form of society now under consideration, the behavior of men in the social process of production is purely atomic. Hence their relations to each other in production assume a material character independent of their control and conscious individual action. These facts manifest themselves at first by products as a general rule taking the form of commodities.²⁵

Marx calls the result “fetishism” because the human relations of producers and consumers appear not as such, but as relations between economic goods and categories, which latter seem to have an effective dynamism independent of the individuals. The myriad interactions of individuals on the market, which none can chart although all contribute their share, appear as specifically economic “properties” attached to the goods in circulation. Thus goods “have” a price that seems to belong to them much as do their physical and chemical properties. Indeed, so real is their price that it effectively governs the movement of the goods. Similarly, some goods “are” capital, while others take the form of profit or wages or savings, and so on. Yet it is clear that while these categories are in no sense imaginary, neither are they “real” attributes of the things to which they are applied. They are, says Marx, social relations become things, or “reified.”

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.²⁶

Although Lukács initially grounds his account of reification in these considerations on the market, amplified by reference to Simmel’s sociology of money, in the course of his discussion he adds an additional explanation in terms of the capitalist transformation of the work process.²⁷ Capitalism everywhere divorces workers from their means of production and organizes them in factories. The reification of labor becomes the model of reification throughout the society. “The destiny of the worker becomes the general destiny of the entire society.”²⁸ Labor thus has new social and ideological functions in capitalist society, different in principle from those it possessed in earlier times. It is no longer a special concern of a particular estate as in slave and feudal society. Labor is not seen as a degraded, subhuman activity, but as the source of all social utility, as an eminently human occupation. Not only do ordinary people labor, the capitalist class itself justifies its right to possess the means of production by claiming that they are the fruit of its labor. This is not merely ideology; the key traits of reification workers experience also affect the upper classes. “The problems of consciousness arising from wage labor are repeated in the ruling class in a refined and spiritualized, but for that very reason, more intensified form.”²⁹

Under capitalism, the means of production face the worker as an independent system that imposes its own rhythm and order. The more advanced the mechanization, the more the expenditure of labor power becomes the simple control of the autonomous productive activity of the machines themselves. Here work becomes “the contemplative stance adopted toward a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws, enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e., a perfectly closed system.”³⁰

The capitalist too confronts reified reality. His much vaunted entrepreneurial “creativity,” says Lukács, consists entirely in calculating as exactly as possible what will happen despite his own intervention. The capitalist then attempts to so position himself with respect to this predetermined outcome that he can profit from the objective evolution. Like the worker confronted with the autonomous machine, the capitalist confronts the autonomous market.

The machines’ reified appearance of autonomy and rationality obscures the fact that they are products of human labor, that their essence is not to be found merely in the structure of their operations, but also in the human activity that first created them and gave them that structure. What is true of the machine is also true of the market and, at a higher level of generality, of society as a whole. In short, obscured behind the rational structure of the productive system is the collective activity underlying social reality.

The activity of the individual subject in capitalist society cannot transform that reality in Lukács’s ontological sense of the term, but rather conforms to it, and especially to its laws, in order to realize its potential benefits. The intervention of the subject is exhausted in taking up an orientation with respect to an ultimately unchangeable reality. Where this orienting activity is multiplied many times over, massive regularities of behavior appear that may indeed have a significant effect on the real world. But the subjects do not assume this effect as their common creation, but rather relate to it as the presupposition of an individual calculus of losses and gains. Thus, “the attitude of the subject … becomes purely contemplative in the philosophical sense.”³¹

Bureaucratization is a further consequence of the capitalist organization of labor.³² The division of labor disrupts the unity of every social process, not just those associated with industrial production. Specializations emerge that each address one or another fragment of social life. These specializations gain a certain autonomy and as a result their objects too become increasingly independent of each other. This “centrifugal movement” results in a disjunction between the bureaucracies and the reality of the society.³³

Lukács follows in Weber’s footsteps in treating these aspects of reification as results of rationalization. The theory of rationalization has to do with the extension of formalistic, quantifying reason to social life. Weber links this process to Protestantism, which presided over the emergence of capitalism, and the scientific quantification of nature that contributes to the secularization of modern culture. The capitalist orientation toward economic gain and the scientific spirit are joined in the idea of society as an object of technical control. This idea is fully realized in the bureaucratic system.³⁴ Lukács incorporates Weber’s theory wholesale into his own: wherever quality appears as quantity, or human interaction appears as the interaction between social things, or the course of social events appears to be determined by quasi-natural laws, he finds evidence of reification.

Lukács’s originality with respect to Weber lies in his emphasis on the tension between the formal structure of rationalization and the actual human “content” of social life on which it is imposed. Lukács thus borrows ideas from Weber, but treats them in the general framework of Marx’s critique of fetishism, as a formal-rational “appearance” in dialectical conflict with an underlying reality. One might almost say that Weber’s theory is recast by Lukács in the mold of Marx’s, so that its general tendency is reversed: no longer an account of the inexorable progress of rationalization’s “iron cage,” Lukács’s refurbished Weberianism sets this trend off against a dialectical counter-trend that promises eventual release from rationalization. In Lukács, social reality escapes from the net of reified rationality: the increasing rationality of the parts is tied, he claims, to the invincible “irrationality of the total process,” to economic crisis and violent resistance from below.³⁵ With this approach, he has the basis of a specifically Marxist theory of the culture and crisis of capitalism, developed later in many dimensions by other Marxists, especially by the Frankfurt School.