Perhaps the most important theoretical response to that theory was written by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács1 in the central chapter of his book History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). This influential and controversial work is a collection of essays; the one that concerns us here is the centrepiece, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. In this essay Lukács extends the theory of commodification into what he calls, using Marx’s term, reification (Verdinglichung). The Latin res means ‘thing’,2 thus ‘reification’ means ‘thing-ification’.
Reification as such is not a big theme in Marx or his immediate successors, but it became prominent through Lukács, for whom the commodity form has consequences for every corner of society. While History and Class Consciousness (HCC) makes occasional passing references to art, its only substantive discussion is the short, though significant, section referring to Schiller on pages 137-40. But reification was taken up and applied to art by other thinkers, in particular the Frankfurt School, so anyone interested in art theory should be acquainted with this idea (whether or not one agrees with it). Here I will simply outline Lukács’s theory and we can study its specific implications for art another time.
As Lukács himself explains while reconsidering the book in his 1967 preface, he wrote HCC during a transitional period when he was moving from an early idealism, ultra-leftism and sectarianism towards Leninism. This shift had not yet matured, leaving ‘unresolved conflict between opposed intellectual trends’ (p xvi).
The book’s political philosophy (flawed in my view) received criticism from various directions, in response to which Lukács wrote a defence called Tailism and the Dialectic (written in around 1925-6 and unpublished until 1996); but we’re not concerned with any of that here.
I read the 1971 Merlin Press edition (pictured above), a translation by Rodney Livingstone from the original German. My page numbers refer to this edition; the relevant chapter/essay is on pages 83-222. You can also read HCC online at marxists.org. Gendered language in quotes is the fault of the translator. If you can read German, the original (Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik) can be found online too. As always, I recommend you read the book yourself. Be warned: parts of Lukács’s essay are demanding if you are new to philosophy, and its abstract language makes it more inaccessible than it needs to be. (Yes, I share your exasperation.)
Context and purpose
Lukács wrote HCC at a time in the late 1910s and early 1920s when, following uprisings in Russia, Germany and Hungary, widespread socialist revolution seemed imminent. The book was partly a critique of fatalism – the determinism fashionable in the Second International3 that the laws of history made revolution inevitable. But as well as trying to lay out a philosophy for revolution, Lukács was commenting on the alienation of human beings in the modern social world.
He divides his essay into three parts.
- I. The Phenomenon of Reification:
Explains his general theory of reification, as an extension of Marx’s commodity theory. - II. The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought:
Analyses the effect of reification on bourgeois philosophy. - III. The Standpoint of the Proletariat:
Proposes how the proletariat can overcome reification.
Across these three sections Lukács extends Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to explain the conditions of social and psychological life in the modern world, and the nature of bourgeois philosophy. His theory is about more than revolutionary practice, as he also asks how reification affects the way we think, and how it might be overcome.
I. The phenomenon of reification
Lukács begins by making clear how important he thinks the commodity is:
At this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. (p83)
The ‘problem of commodities’ is the ‘central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects.’ He summarises Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, a problem specific to the capitalist age:
Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people. (p83)
Lukács accepts Marx’s theory as a basis, then poses his main question:
how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society? (p84)
Lukács introduces us to Marx’s account of commodity fetishism. There is a qualitative difference between a society in which commodity exchange appears only episodically, as one form among many (e.g. prehistoric barter economies), and one in which it is dominant, ‘permeating every expression of life’ (i.e. modern capitalist societies). In a society where the commodity is the ‘universal structuring principle’, it can ‘penetrate society in all its aspects’ and ‘remould it in its own image.’ As long as the commodity was not the dominant form of wealth, it was still possible to understand the interpersonal nature of economic relations; but under capitalism,
as the process advanced and forms became more complex and less direct, it became increasingly difficult and rare to find anyone penetrating the veil of reification. (p86)
Marx calls this ‘economic mystification’.4 Commodity relations produce a reification that assumes
decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servitude to the ‘second nature’5 so created. (p86)
The basic concept behind reification is commodity fetishism, whereby a relation between people takes on the appearance of a relation between things. Commodities are made by human beings, but they create the illusion that they have lives and relations of their own. Lukács says this phenomenon has both an objective and a subjective side (p87):
- Objective: Our labour creates a world of seemingly independent objects, and relations between them, whose laws we can discover but cannot modify by our actions.
- Subjective: Our own labour becomes a commodity independent of us that must obey the laws of commodity production; our actions therefore become estranged from us.
When commodity production is universal rather than merely episodic, i.e. under capitalism, both subjectively and objectively human labour becomes abstracted, equal and comparable, measured by socially necessary labour time. This is part of a long-term historical trend towards the rationalisation6 of labour (e.g. Taylorism):
- The qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker are gradually eliminated.
- The labour process is broken down into abstract, rational, specialised operations. The worker loses touch with the finished product, his/her work reduced to a series of mechanically repeated actions that need to be completed in a fixed period of time.
Lukács is drawing heavily upon the work of the sociologist Max Weber, who explored this notion in his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Weber associated capitalism with a larger process of labour organisation and bureaucracy based on efficiency and calculation, which he called ‘rationalisation’ (Rationalisierung). For Weber, this was impelled by Protestantism, and the workers submitted to it to prove they were worthy of heaven; but, to Weber’s regret, the process left us in a godless, ‘disenchanted’ world with no concern for human values. He memorably described the phenomenon as a stahlhartes Gehäuse, which could be precisely translated as a ‘casing as hard as steel’ but is better known in English as the ‘iron cage’:
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt. In [Richard] Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p181, Parsons translation)
This is a grim image. Back to Lukács, who adopts the concept and claims that rationalisation is even applied to the worker’s consciousness:
this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts. (p88)
Modern humans are governed by time-keeping, the rise and fall of stocks and shares, and other processes that seem to have an independent life of their own. This conditions human consciousness and the way we understand ourselves in the world. Lukács draws two main conclusions:
1) The object is fragmented: Rationalisation ‘declares war’ on the organic, irrational, qualitative unity of the products of labour based on ‘the traditional amalgam of empirical experiences of work.’ The object of our work process loses its organic necessity; it is no longer a unified product but the ‘objective synthesis’ of a set of rationalised systems that each have a more limited, immediate end, so that the actual end product seems almost like an arbitrary outcome.
2) The subject is fragmented: The human being becomes ‘a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system’. His/her creativity and idiosyncrasy is unwelcome as it could lead to deviation from the fixed path demanded by the rationalised work-process. He/she is not in command of the process he/she is a part of and must conform to an already existing system, becoming merely contemplative instead of active.
Lukács cites Marx:
Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.7
In the work-process, even those basic categories of humankind’s orientation to the world, space and time, are rethought. Stripped of quality, they are reduced to a common denominator.
Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space. (p90)
Why does this fragment the human subject?
- Workers are forced to commodify their labour-power (i.e. to sell their labour to a capitalist in return for a wage) in order to live. Our labour is our personal, human, world-transforming activity, and one of the most basic properties of being human, yet it is taken out of our own control. It becomes something external to us, even opposed to us. Not only do we make commodities, in a sense we become commodities ourselves (under slavery this happens literally).
- Instead of enjoying direct, natural, organic relations with one another, we are mediated and imprisoned by abstract laws and our communities become atomised.
Lukács creates his own grim image of dehumanisation:
The personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system. (p90)
Lukács is touching on aspects of the Marxist concept of alienation, which I won’t get into here, but as Marx’s early writings on the subject (the draft 1844 Manuscripts) weren’t published until 1932, Lukács does well to anticipate them. He says the factory becomes a microcosm of capitalist society: exploitation and oppression existed in all ages, but under industrial capitalism, mass production became rationalised and mechanised, and formed the whole structure of society. ‘The fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole’ (p91). A society has to ‘learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange’.
This implies that the principle of rational mechanisation and calculability must embrace every aspect of life... Only when the whole life of society is thus fragmented into the isolated acts of commodity exchange can the ‘free’ worker come into being; at the same time his fate becomes the typical fate of the whole society. (p91)
For the first time, every member of society is subject to a set of unified laws that apply across the board. The laws of capitalist production extend into ‘every manifestation of life in society’, such as law, the state, economics, journalism, etc. Thus Lukács takes the influence of commodity exchange further than Marx: it is all-pervasive.
Lukács points out that this atomisation is ‘only an illusion’, a ‘reflex in consciousness’. Modern society is of course law-governed and ordered. Despite this, atomisation (albeit illusory) is necessary in society built on commodity exchange.
This transformation of a human function into a commodity reveals in all its starkness the dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation. (p92)
We can’t even understand things as things any more. The authentic, immediate, qualitative character of things is replaced by a reified one. As Marx put it, ‘the ground and the earth have nothing to do with ground-rent.’ Such reified relations become normalised:
The relations between men that lie hidden in the immediate commodity relation, as well as the relations between men and the objects that should really gratify their needs, have faded to the point where they can be neither recognised nor even perceived. (p93)
We start to live through the commodity, and see this as normal. As capitalism spreads, consolidates and develops, ‘the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man’ (p93). Even the bourgeois thinkers who recognise reification have no deep analysis of it and only describe its surface; separating this surface from its historical roots in capitalism lets them claim it is an inevitable, timeless aspect of human life.
The capitalist economy is based upon exact calculation, so the bourgeoisie structures society in this image, with predictable legal rulings, readymade laws, a bureaucracy, and the standardisation of social life. The unity of this rationalised society is in fact illusory, because its formal laws and concrete reality don’t always match up. The details are governed by laws, the totality by chance (p101-2).
Human activity is constrained by having to fit into a fixed system. Lukács quotes Marx’s observation on factory work that the worker is ‘crippled to the point of abnormality’. Capitalism brings into being ‘a unified economic structure, and hence a formally-unified structure of consciousness’ (p100):
The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly objectivity’... stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process. (p100)
With ever greater division of labour and specialisation, we lose sight of the whole. Lukács takes examples from science and from bourgeois economics, where the failure of formal laws to grasp the whole leads to failure to penetrate to the underlying material reality. The reified world appears
as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed to us humans. (p110)
Notes
Penguin Classics edition of Marx’s Capital, 3 vols, translated in 1976 by Ben Fowkes.
1. The Hungarian ‘György’ is sometimes Germanised as ‘Georg’: Lukács published under both names.
2. The German word Verdinglichung (‘making into a thing’) is more immediately understandable to Germans than ‘reification’ is for English speakers.
3. The Second International was a loose international federation of socialist parties, created in 1889, which broke up after most of its forces backed their respective national ruling classes in supporting the First World War. I will discuss its determinism more in part 3.
4. Marx, Capital Vol. 3, ch.48, p970.
5. ‘Second nature’ is the Aristotelian idea, discernible in Kant, that there is a species of animal in nature (human beings) who transform themselves into rational beings capable of reflecting and acting upon the world according to reason. So if first nature is the natural world, ‘second nature’ is the world built by self-aware human beings.
6. Not to be confused with rationalism.
7. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Part 2: Constituted Value of Synthetic Value (1847).
