5.4.4. Reification
Reification is the process in which classes and elites separate humans and society from their essence. It brings ‘the essence of man into conflict with his existence, only when man’s nature is subjugated, deformed and crippled can we speak of an objective societal condition of alienation’ (Lukács 1971, xxiv). Whereas reification is the process that implements domination, alienation is the condition that results from reification. If humans appropriate their own essence in social struggles, then they do not return to a historical origin that once existed and was lost, but they struggle for social conditions that enable a humane existence and correspond to the immanent co-operative standards of sociality itself. Social struggles in class-based societies are struggles with potential results that lie on a spectrum between alienated and appropriated social conditions.
Tables 5.1 and 5.2 give an overview of processes of reification and appropriation in society’s three realms. The general distinction is the one between social systems that are alienated and that are under common control. Alienation means that humans do not control basic social structures in a way that advances the common good so that a particular class or elite is in control and takes advantage of others.
5.4.5. Three Subsystems of Society – Three Dimensions of Reification
Honneth (2008) distinguished three forms of reification: reification in our relationship to others, the world, and ourselves. So for him there are intersubjective, objective and subjective forms of alienation. This distinction points towards the dialectic of subject and object in social processes: human subjects have their own identities and personalities, based on which they encounter each other in the social world and in processes of social activity create, reproduce and transform the objective world. They co-produce the social world in processes of teleological co-positing. Human subjects interact in the social world and thereby co-produce objects.
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