Reification

Theories of Reification

Theorists from a range of disciplines have offered different explanations of reification. These include its origins and location, why it occurs, and whether or not it is unavoidable or even undesirable.

Nineteenth-century theorist and author of Capital, Karl Marx, saw human labor as the essential root of human social relations. He associated reification with the macroeconomic sphere of capitalist production and the social relations of labor. He observed that private ownership and exchange under capitalism created an unprecedented amount of commodities (something of use made by human labor that can be traded). It also transformed labor into a commodity, which workers (the proletariat) were forced to sell to capitalists for a wage. The separation of human labor from laborer's use (use value) and the selling of it for a wage had caused people to become separated from their work and the objects they created. Furthermore, the proletariat's labor was effectively hidden in the production process; the products they created were separated from them and seen as more valuable than their labor itself. Marx described this process overall as alienation and commodity fetishism. Alienation is a three-part process begun in the workplace whereby workers under capitalism are separated from the end result of their own creative labor, their coworkers, and, subsequently, their own humanity. Commodity fetishism describes the marketplace transformation of direct interpersonal social relations into moneyed relationships around the exchange of products that hides the real class relations that produce these products. Here people fail to see that human labor creates objects (and their value). Marx thought these processes distorted both workers' and owners' view of how the world actually worked. He believed that this would eventually produce a revolutionized proletariat who would overthrow private ownership, establishing a collective system where people would together control economic production and realize their common humanity in labor. Dereification would occur when people clearly saw the entire process of production, realizing themselves and their worlds as a mutual creation (Bewes 2002).

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