“The essence of commodity-structure” 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” (Lukács 1971, 83; henceforth referred to as HCC). Lukács here refers to a passage in Marx’s Capital Volume 1 (chapter 1, section 1.1), where Marx describes commodities as having a “phantom-like objectivity” (Marx 1867, 128). With the metaphor of the commodity as a ghost, Marx expresses that the commodity’s value appears in the money form and the commodity’s price, but its substance – the average labour-time that workers have to expend in class relations for the production of the commodity – remains hidden.
Lukács’ notion of reification and Marx’s concept of alienation have in recent debates featured prominently within philosophy and critical social theory. For example, Rosa (2013) interprets acceleration as a process of alienation. Jaeggi (2014) argues that reification means that human subjects are prevented from appropriating the world and the self. Honneth (2007) is one of the critical theorists who have in recent times worked most directly on actualising Lukács’ concept of reification. He argues that reification means society’s disrespect and lack of giving recognition to human beings. Building on Lukács and Honneth, Fuchs (2020) has identified exploitation, political oppression, and ideology as economic, political and cultural forms of oppression. This argument is in line with recent works by Harvey (2018), who points out that alienation is a universal process that takes not just place in class relations but in many realms of society. Taken together, these authors show that reification means humans face conditions under which they cannot control these conditions, humans’ and society’s potentials cannot be realised, and where certain groups instrumentalise others in order to realise partial interests. This understanding of reification is in line with Lukács’ outline of reification in HCC. His theory remains an important point of reference in 21st-century critical theories of society.
Ideology as Reified Class Consciousness
Class consciousness is “the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production” (HCC, 51). Imputed/ascribed/attributed class consciousness (zugerechnetes Klassenbewußtsein) is objective class consciousness (HCC, 323). Objective class consciousness is defined by the subject’s role in the production process, it is not simply empirical consciousness, but an “objective possibility” of consciousness – the “thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society” (HCC, 51). False consciousness is consciousness that “by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately” (HCC, 50).
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Theorists