Reification

Reification is the process whereby one makes things appear as fixed or objective, as if they had a real nature and were governed by laws like physical objects. Commodification describes the effect of this in terms of how we value reified things. Reification focuses on the way human qualities become transformed into qualities of things, which then take on a life of their own and eclipse their origins in human processes. This is most obvious in the context of the products of human labor, which from the point of view of the marketplace have a more important reality than the person who made the effort to produce them.

More generally, reification describes the process whereby abstractions become thought of as things—for [Page 1283]example, labor, which can ...