PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). 378-9. The slaves subjected to this exploitation, therefore, stood outside what was thought of as human society and even the greatest and noblest thinkers of the time were unable to consider their fate as that of human beings. In the central and longest chapter of History and Class Consciousness on Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, Lukcs starts from the viewpoint that commodity fetishism is a specific problem of our age, the age of modem capitalism (p. 84), and also that it is not a marginal problem but the central structural problem of capitalist society (p. 83). But also it would be essential really to penetrate the nature of a legal system which serves purely as a means of calculating the effects of actions and of rationally imposing modes of action relevant to a particular class.
If only because the question of whether the qualitative content can be understood by means of a rational, calculating approach is no longer seen in terms of a rivalry between two principles within the same sphere (as was the case with use-value and exchange value in economics), but rather, right from the start, as a question of form versus content. Likewise with the machine. [16], Thus even the individual object which man confronts directly, either as producer or consumer, is distorted in its objectivity by its commodity character. On the other hand, the period of time necessary for work to be accomplished (which forms the basis of rational calculation) is converted, as mechanisation and rationalisation are intensified, from a merely empirical average figure to an objectively calculable work-stint that confronts the worker as a fixed and established reality. Thus he speaks about this personification of things and reification of the relations of production. 22 If we do not emphasise the class character of the state in this context, this is because our aim is to understand reification as a general phenomenon constitutive of the whole of bourgeois society.
JSTOR provides a digital archive of the print version of History and The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own activity. The chances of exploitation, the laws of the market must likewise be rational in the sense that they must be calculable according to the laws of probability. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself.
It is not only a question of the completely mechanical, mindless work of the lower echelons of the bureaucracy which bears such an extraordinarily close resemblance to operating a machine and which indeed often surpasses it in sterility and uniformity. Written: 1923; There arises a rational systematisation of all statutes regulating life, which represents, or at least tends towards a closed system applicable to all possible and imaginable cases. Request Permissions, Access everything in the JPASS collection, Download up to 10 article PDFs to save and keep, Download up to 120 article PDFs to save and keep. It is important to understand why things happen in order to control outcomes or prevent future undesirable occurrences. The conflict revolving around natural law, and the whole revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie was based on the assumption that the formal equality and universality of the law (and hence its rationality) was able at the same time to determine its content. Reification is a special case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modem capitalist society. If that can happen then it is evident that this process will be intensified in proportion as the relations which man establishes with objects as objects of the life process are mediated in the course of his social activity. They overlook the fact that there are qualitative conditions attached to these quantitative relations, that it is not merely a question of units of value which can easily be compared with each other but also use-values of a definite kind which must fulfil a definite function in production and consumption. The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly.
25126. See all related overviews in Oxford Reference Therefore, we should not say that one mans hour is worth another mans hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically. [27] Thus there exists an accidental rather than a necessary connection between the total amount of social labour applied to a social article and the volume whereby society seeks to satisfy the want gratified by the article in question. [28], These are no more than random instances. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Home, Citation reference: Harvey, L., 2012-22, Social Research Glossary, Quality Research International, http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/. It requires no further explanation to realise that the need to systematise and to abandon empiricism, tradition and material dependence was the need for exact calculations However, this same need requires that the legal system should confront the individual events of social existence as something permanently established and exactly defined, i.e. (On the other hand, this universality becomes historically possible because this process of abstraction has been completed.) For that very reason the reified mind has come to regard them as the true representatives of his societal existence. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of mens 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 so created. The commodity form, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. Nor is it a matter of fixed or circulating capital, but rather of machines, raw materials, labour-power of a quite definite (technically defined) sort, if disruptions are to be avoided. [33]. Of course the problem can only be discussed with this degree of generality if it achieves the depth and breadth to be found in Marxs own analyses. Here, the domination of the producers by the conditions of production is concealed by the relations of dominion and servitude which appear and are evident as the direct motive power of the process of production. [3]. But in the minds of people in bourgeois society they constitute the pure, authentic, unadulterated forms of capital.
But with the difference that not every mental faculty is suppressed by mechanisation; only one faculty (or complex of faculties) is detached from the whole personality and placed in opposition to it, becoming a thing, a commodity.
At every single stage of its development, the ceaselessly revolutionary techniques of modern production turn a rigid and immobile face towards the individual producer. But at first not for the producer and consumer, but for their go-between, the merchant, who compares money-prices and pockets the difference. Accordingly it must declare war on the organic manufacture of whole products based on the traditional amalgam of empirical experiences of work: rationalisation is unthinkable without specialisation. Thus the production of surplus-value, and with it the individual consumption of the capitalist, may increase, the entire process of reproduction may be in a flourishing condition, and yet a large part of the commodities may have entered into consumption only in appearance, while in reality they may still remain unsold in the hands of dealers, may in fact still be lying in the market. [34]. He insists that reification exists to a certain extent in all social forms insofar as they reach the level of commodity production and money circulation, but that in the capitalist mode of production and in capital which is its dominating category this enchanted and perverted world develops still further. This goes hand in hand with the union in time and space of special operations that are related to a set of heterogeneous use-values. In this respect, too, mechanisation makes of them isolated abstract atoms whose work no longer brings them together directly and organically; it becomes mediated to an increasing extent exclusively by the abstract laws of the mechanism which imprisons them. A Dictionary of Media and Communication , Subjects: And if this process is expanded-which includes increased productive consumption of the means of production-this reproduction of capital may be accompanied by increased individual consumption (hence demand) on the part of the labourers, since this process is initiated and effected by productive consumption. The distinction between a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology, is purely quantitative; it does not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness. It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. [4], What is of central importance here is that because of this situation a mans own activity, his own labour becomes something objective and independent of him. At such times we can see how the immediate continuity between two partial systems is disrupted and their independence from and adventitious connection with each other is suddenly forced into the consciousness of everyone. Similarly, the hierarchic dependence of the worker, the clerk, the technical assistant,, the assistant in an academic institute and the civil servant and. On this antagonism cf. But this only results in new codifications; and despite these the new system is forced to preserve the fixed, change-resistant structure of the old system. 7 This whole process is described systematically and historically in Capital I. 2002. 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. Or rather: these laws fail to function and the reified mind is unable to perceive a pattern in this chaos. Thus Marx points out - and the cases referred to here are intended only as an indication of the methodological factors involved, not as a substantive treatment of the problems themselves - that the conditions of direct exploitation [of the labourer], and those of realising surplus-value, are not identical. Marx acutely summed up this situation with reference to economics when he declared that use-value as such lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. [32] It would be a mistake to suppose that certain analytical devices - such as find in the Theory of Marginal Utility-might show the way out of this impasse. natural and social sciences, the humanities, and psychology. All these things do join together into what seems to the superficial observer to constitute a unified system of general laws. 20 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 491. The two most concentrated discussions of reification are to be found in Capital I, ch. They offer no more than a description of this enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur Le Capital and Madame La Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time as mere things. [18] But they do not go further than a description and their deepening of the problem runs in circles around the eternal manifestations of reification. speculative philosophy of history, comparative and global history; historiography, In them 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. But the basic phenomenon remains the same even though both the means by which society instills such abilities and their material and moral exchange value are fundamentally different from labour-power (not forgetting, of course, the many connecting links and nuances). The incomprehensibility and irrationality of crises is indeed a consequence of the class situation and interests of the bourgeoisie but it follows equally from their approach to economics. McGraw-Hill, 2004, Sociological Theory: Glossary , available at http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072817186/student_view0/glossary.html, accessed 15 May 2013, 'not found' 14 June 2019. II, No. It is at the same time the product of the capitalist division of labour. ", The process we see here is closely related both in its motivation and in its effects to the economic process outlined above. Marx has often demonstrated convincingly how inadequate the claws of bourgeois economics are to the task of explaining the true movement of economic activity in toto. 2011. It is possible to set aside objective laws governing the production and movement of commodities which regulate the market and subjective modes of behaviour on it and to make the attempt to start from subjective behaviour on the market. [37]. Founded in 1960, History and Theory The commodity can only he understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. In that event the real, material substratum of the law would at one stroke become visible and comprehensible. Clearly, it cannot be our aim here to describe even in outline the growth of the modern process of labour, of the isolated, free labourer and of the division of labour. Here, once again, we can clearly observe. Only then does it become a category of society influencing decisively the objective form of things and people in the society thus emerging, their relation to nature and the possible relations of men to each other. That is where barter begins, and from here it strikes back into the interior of the community, decomposing it. [1] We note that the observation about the disintegrating effect of a commodity exchange directed in upon itself clearly shows the qualitative change engendered by the dominance of commodities. If a rational calculation is to be possible the commodity owner must be in possession of the laws regulating every detail of his production. Although the idea of reification is implicit already in the early works of Marx (e.g., in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), an explicit analysis and use of reification begins in his later writings and reaches its peak in the Grundrisse, and Capital. 41113. a form in which the source of profit is no longer discernible, and in which the result of the capitalist process of production - divorced from the process - acquires an independent existence. [17].
Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. "Lukcs sans Proletariat, or Can, Rubin, I. I. As emphasised above, the worker, too, must present himself as the owner of his labour-power, as if it were a commodity. This enables the artificially isolated partial functions to be performed in the most rational manner by specialists who are specially adapted mentally and physically for the purpose. It 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. 1983, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. [26]. of theory and philosophy of history.
We need only think of marriage, and without troubling to point to the developments of the nineteenth century we can remind ourselves of the way in which Kant, for example, described the situation with the naively cynical frankness peculiar to great thinkers. Commodity exchange an the corresponding subjective and objective commodity relations existed, as we know, when society was still very primitive. What is at issue here, however, is the question: how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society? Others who have written about this point include Max Stirner, Guy Debord, Gajo Petrovi, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Timothy Bewes, and Slavoj iek. Here, Lukcs treats it as a problem of capitalist society related to the prevalence of the commodity form, through a close reading of Marx's chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital. Its essence can be summarised as the belief that the content of law is something purely factual and hence not to be comprehended by the formal categories of jurisprudence. The divorce of the phenomena of reification from their economic bases and from the vantage point from which alone they can be understood, is facilitated by the fact that the [capitalist] process of transformation must embrace every manifestation of the life of society if the preconditions for the complete self-realisation of capitalist production are to be fulfilled. Publisher: Merlin Press, 1967; hegemony penjajah shtiggy steemit pikiran bernama gramsci explanation hegemoni Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
On the contrary, it is concerned to make it permanent by scientifically deepening the laws at work. [1] Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement; reification is a specific form of alienation; commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification. Nevertheless, the cohesion of these laws is purely formal: what they express, the content of legal institutions is never of a legal character, but always political and economic. [38] With this the primitive, cynically sceptical campaign against natural law that was launched by the Kantian Hugo at the end of the eighteenth century, acquired scientific status. But such a law would have to be the unconscious product of the activity of the different commodity owners acting independently of one another, i.e. The true structure of society appears rather in the independent, rationalised and formal partial laws whose links with each other are of necessity purely formal (i.e. Despite the fact that the problem of reification was discussed by Marx in Capital, published partly during his life time, and partly soon after his death, which was generally recognized as his master work, his analysis was very much neglected for a long time. the economic practice of commodity owners at the stage where the exchange of commodities has become universal. But the disregard of the concrete aspects of the subject matter of these laws, upon which disregard their authority as laws is based, makes itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact. The facts themselves can also be found in the writings of bourgeois economists like Bcher, Sombart, A. Weber and Gottl among others - although for the most part they are not seen in connection with the problem of reification. The revolutionary bourgeois class refused to admit that a legal relationship had a valid foundation merely because it existed in fact. (As in insurance schemes, etc.). It presupposes a society so structured. the necessary conclusions from a century of crises by excluding consumption from economics entirely and founding a pure economics based only on production. ute v. / tribyot/ [tr.] It must be emphasised that this inability to penetrate to the real material substratum of science is not the fault of individuals. Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man (p. 93). A variant on Petrovic's account can be found in the Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms, including comments on Althusser's critique. In Marxism, reification (German: Verdinglichung, lit. On the other hand, there is an even more monstrous intensification of the one-sided specialisation which represents such a violation of mans humanity. publishes articles, review essays, and summaries of books principally in these
able The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ghostly objectivity cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. from a vantage point other than that of a reified consciousness, at the activity of modern science which is both sociologically and methodologically necessary and for that reason comprehensible. On the other hand it is only at this moment that the commodity form of the products of labour becomes general. [5]. "Essays on Marxs Theory of Value. This was expressed in the assault on the varied and picturesque medley of privileges dating back to the Middle Ages and also in the attack on the Divine Right of Kings. and practice of past historians and philosophers of history; historical methodology, A greater interest in the problem developed only after Lukcs drew attention to it and discussed it in a creative way, combining influences coming from Marx with those from Max Weber (who elucidated important aspects of the problem in his analyses of bureaucracy and rationalization; see Lowith 1932) and from Simmel (who discussed the problem in The Philosophy of Money). [8]. What is characteristic of the capitalist age, says Marx, is that in the eyes of the labourer himself labour-power assumes the form of a commodity belonging to him. Our core businesses produce scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journals, reference works, books, database services, and advertising; professional books, subscription products, certification and training services and online applications; and education content and services including integrated online teaching and learning resources for undergraduate and graduate students and lifelong learners. From Reason! [36], The war waged against the revolutionary bourgeoisie, say, at the time of the French Revolution, was dominated to such an extent by this idea that it was inevitable that the natural law of the bourgeoisie could only be opposed by yet another natural law (see Burke and also Stahl). This is a dynamic glossary and the author would welcome any, http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/socialresearch/, Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms, http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/r/e.htm#reification, http://www.marxists.org/archive/petrovic/1965/reification.htm, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reification. It has already been pointed out that the division of labour disrupts every organically unified process of work and life and breaks it down into its components. It is not enough merely to establish an external link with independent processes concerned with the production of exchange values. Very often it will confine itself to working out the probable effects of such laws without making the attempt to intervene in the process by bringing other laws to bear. However, reification is often considered a sign that someone is thinking illogically. Thus the basic principle of capitalist commodity production, the principle of rationalization based on what is and can be calculated (p. 88) extends to all fields, including the workers soul, and more broadly, human consciousness. It produces and reproduces this structure in so far as it takes possession of society. Thus the subject of the exchange is just as abstract, formal and reified as its object. In its unthinking, mundane reality that life seems firmly held together by natural laws; yet it can experience a sudden dislocation because the bonds uniting its various elements and partial systems are a chance affair even at their most normal. All Rights Reserved. On the one hand, the objectification of their labour-power into something opposed to their total personality (a process already accomplished with the sale of that labour-power as a commodity) is now made into the permanent ineluctable reality of their daily life. So that the pretence that society is regulated by eternal, iron laws which branch off into the different special laws applying to particular areas is finally revealed for what it is: a pretence. With the modern psychological analysis of the work-process (in Taylorism) this rational mechanisation extends right into the workers 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. Viewed sociologically, a business-concern is the modern state; the same holds good for a factory: and this, precisely, is what is specific to it historically. Consumer articles no longer appear as the products of an organic process within a community (as for example in a village community). This is the source of the - apparently - paradoxical situation whereby the law of primitive societies, which has scarcely altered in hundreds or sometimes even thousands of years, can be flexible and irrational in character, renewing itself with every new legal decision, while modern law, caught up in the continuous turmoil of change, should appear rigid, static and fixed. as a rigid system. Wiley is a global provider of content and content-enabled workflow solutions in areas of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly research; professional development; and education. Where the commodity is universal it manifests itself differently from the commodity as a particular, isolated, non-dominant phenomenon. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day . [12]. For example, if you think of justice as something physical, you're confusing ideas and things, which can lead to problems. Marx sees the matter in this way: In preceding forms of society this economic mystification arose principally with respect to money and interest-bearing capital. sociology alienation bbb reification [13] In this environment where time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space, an environment at once the cause and effect of the scientifically and mechanically fragmented and specialised production of the object of labour, the subjects of labour must likewise be rationally fragmented. [9] Instead of being an effect of the structural character of social systems such as capitalism, as Karl Marx and Gyrgy Lukcs argued, Honneth contends that all forms of reification are due to pathologies of intersubjectively based struggles for recognition. This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Here we need only establish that labour, abstract, equal. His specific situation is defined by the fact that his labour-power is his only possession. He regards as the ideological counterparts of reification and personification, crude materialism and crude idealism or fetishism: The crude materialism of the economists who regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people, and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations, is at the same time just as crude an idealism, even fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them. (Grundrisse, p. 687). 
