Reification: a Marxist Perspective

The concept of reification is used by Marx to describe a form of social consciousness in which human relations come to be identified with the physical properties of things, thereby acquiring an appearance of naturalness and inevitability. This essay presents a systematic reconstruction of Marx's theory of reification, with an emphasis on the social-structural dimensions of the concept. This reconstruction differs both from the conceptions of reification that are found in non-Marxist sociology and from the interpretations of some of Marx's followers. Marx's concept of reification is then taken as the model for a more general theory of ideology. In the final section of the essay, I show how this theory can be used to analyze the emergence of new forms of reification in capitalist society, including those that are based on the growth of technology, the spread of bureaucracy, and the rationalization of occupational selection. Sociology has been aptly described as a graveyard of critical concepts. Nowhere is this more true than in its appropriation and "operationalization" of concepts deriving from the Marxist theoretical tradition. Several critics have noted, for example, the emasculation which the concept of alienation has suffered at the hands of empirically oriented sociologists (Horton, 1964; Blackburn, 1969). In this instance, it is precisely the most crucial and distinguishing features of Marx's theory that are lost in the translation to mainstream sociology: the multi-dimensionality of the concept of alienation, the insight it provides into the inner structure of capitalist work relations, and the unity it forges between empirical analysis and radical critique. For Marx, the concept of alienation describes the situation of the individual worker, but also implies a theoretical conception of capitalist society as a whole. It offers an analysis of objective social relations which is also a critique of the false or "inverted" nature of those relations (Meszaros, 1970; Ollman, 1971; Colletti, 1972; Geras, 1973). By contrast, as appropriated by mainstream sociology, the descriptive elements of the concept of alienation have been separated from Marx's critique of capitalism, and the focus has been narrowed from an analysis of capitalist production relations to the study of individual attitudes (Seeman, 1957; Dean, 1961). The result is a dehistoricized and psychologized concept which, in becoming grist for interview questionnaires and statistical correlations, has been stripped of its capacity to illuminate the hidden structure of capitalist society and