Reification re-specified: The power of commodity-mediated societalisation

Though ‘illuminating’ may verge on banality, it remains a useful metaphor for what concepts do in social theory: they allow us to see things we could hardly see without them. Reification is one such concept. Mostly associated with the tradition of Critical Theory, it has been taken up time and again since Lukács (1971) canonised it in History and Class Consciousness (HCC), with Habermas and Honneth being among the best-known examples. The revitalisation pursued here shares with them the ambition of moving beyond purely theoretical reinterpretation in order to demonstrate the concept's relevance for analysing the social world today. Yet it remains on the same tracks that Lukács laid down in the first place: a Marxist reading of capitalist production and exchange. By contrast, Habermas (1984a, 1984b) confined reification to a phenomenon that becomes problematic only once it spills beyond the economic sphere into the lifeworld, where money and power begin to ‘colonise’ everyday interactions. While not denying its presence in the economic sphere, he stripped it of critical force there. Honneth (2008) went even further: he erased reification altogether as a defining feature of the capitalist economy and reconceptualised it as a lack of recognition.

By developing a stricter understanding of reification, in some respects even against Lukács's more holistic usage, I argue that limiting the concept to the specific form of power generated by commodity-mediated societalisation in the economic sphere gives it the precision needed to grasp aspects of social life that other concepts leave indistinct. Broad interpretations that extend reification across multiple social spheres make it difficult to pinpoint the specific mechanisms through which capitalist social relations exert constraints that appear unchangeable, as well as the distinctive social phenomena that arise from them. By contrast, restricting the concept to commodity-mediated relations allows reification to capture a determinate form of impersonal economic power and its immanent ideological naturalisation. This delimitation does not preclude tracing how forms of rational objectivity rooted in the economic sphere migrate into other domains, where they produce analogous ossifications. The approach also clarifies the distinction between reification and capitalist rationalisation: the dispersed and uncoordinated calculations of economic actors both presuppose and reproduce an irrational social totality governed by impersonal power. It further offers non-essentialist tools for analysing how subjects align with, or come into friction with, this form of power, and for grasping a specifically capitalist form of alienation experienced as generalised powerlessness in the face of impersonal social dynamics.

Building on Lukács and existing interpretations of his work (Feenberg, 2011, 2014; Kavoulakos, 2019a, 2019b, 2023; López, 2020; Löwy, 1979; Teixeira, 2024; Westerman, 2019), the article develops this account of reification and shows how it can be applied to contemporary capitalism. I begin with a working definition of reification, elaborating it by contrasting it with neighbouring concepts and addressing the chief controversies: whether it collapses into objectification, extends beyond the economic sphere, equates with rationalisation, refers to ideology, relies on idealist or essentialist assumptions, or differs from alienation.

Commodity-mediated societalisation

In what follows, I treat reification as arising from the commodity-mediated character of capitalist societalisation (Vergesellschaftung), without equating the two terms. Reification refers to a double form of power: first, the impersonal power generated by commodity mediation itself; and second, the ideological power through which this historically specific order appears as natural and unchangeable. By stressing the constitutive role of the commodity form in Lukács's theory, I develop a more restricted concept of reification, which is anchored in the economic fabric of society.

In HCC, the term Vergesellschaftung has been translated as ‘socialisation’, which is rather misleading. What is at stake is not the internalisation of norms, values and customs by individuals in a given society. A more general Marxist reading of the term refers broadly to the ways individuals come together and cooperate, and the integrative relations they establish to organise the production and distribution of goods and services. Marx (1981: 647) thus argued that, once humans leave their ‘animal condition’, their labour becomes vergesellschaftet (translated as ‘socialised’), in the sense that individual labour is related to the labour of others and integrated into a wider social whole. This is why societalisation offers a more accurate translation of the term (Schmidt, 2020). This building of connections and interdependencies between individuals and social groups to carry out the (re)production of human life can be understood as a form of cooperation. Yet cooperation is not the opposite of power; rather, power is intertwined with, relies upon, and even organises cooperative connections (Kößler and Wienold, 2002).

One of the crucial media driving societalisation in capitalist societies is the commodity. What distinguishes capitalism is, as Marx (1981: 125) famously put it, the ‘immense collection of commodities’. Private property, class relations, and money all predate capitalism. In capitalism, private property rights secure the commodity form by enabling ownership and sale for profit, class relations are reconfigured through the commodification of labour-power, and money acts as the general equivalent that enables commodity exchange and capital accumulation.

In contrast to commodification, which designates the process by which something becomes a commodity (whether a natural resource such as water or an activity such as care), reification arises out of the very mediation of human relations by commodities. For reification to exist, commodification must already have taken place. The more domains of life are drawn into commodity production and exchange, the more human relations are mediated by the commodity form – that is, the more society, understood as the aggregate of such relations, becomes societalised through the commodity form. The ‘commodity exchange’ form thus becomes the ‘dominant form’ regulating the ‘metabolism’ of human society (Lukács, 1971: 85). Through the exchange of commodities, humans come to relate to one another, build interdependencies, and enter into cooperative relations.

The second, more specific meaning of the term as Lukács uses it in HCC concerns the way modern social interdependencies progressively loosen human life from natural constraints, so that the barriers once imposed by nature recede and social–historical existence becomes increasingly structured by human relations. It is in this sense that Lukács wrote of the ‘mounting capitalist societalisation of society’ (1971: 198) and in another place ‘the societalisation of all relations’ (1971: 237) under capitalism. ¹ The societalisation of society by a single principle, the commodity principle, has reached a degree of intensity and breadth unmatched in any previous social order. Yet, at the same time, commodity relations bind society more tightly to the necessities and constraints that they themselves generate. This double movement – at once progressive liberation and the creation of new dependencies – led him to describe reification as a ‘second nature’:

The purest, indeed one might say the only pure form of the control of society by its natural laws is found in capitalist production. For is it not the world-historical mission of the process of civilization that culminates in capitalism, to achieve control over nature? These ‘natural laws’ of society which rule the lives of men like ‘blind forces’ (even when their ‘rationality’ is recognised and indeed all the more powerfully when that is the case) have the task of subordinating the categories of nature to the process of societalisation. (Lukács, 1971: 233)

In this sense, reification emerges from a distinctive form of capitalist societalisation: one in which the cooperative interdependencies between individuals are governed by commodity relations that possess an objectivity beyond the reach of societal influence. These relations impose necessities and constraints to which individual actors and society as a whole must adapt.

Not objectivity but impersonal power

One could argue that reification is a poor word choice for what is at stake, and that classifying immaterial commodities and services as rēs (from ‘thing’ in Latin) is confusing. Referring to the activity of cutting someone's hair as a ‘thing’, for instance, can be counterintuitive. The term, nevertheless, concerns the existence of all types of commodities on the market, whether material or immaterial, tangible or intangible.

‘Thing’, as the root of the word ‘reification’, can be confusing for a second and more important reason. Both Lukács and Marx focused specifically on commodities, not on general objects or forms of objectivity. Their approach contrasts with interpretations of reification that emphasise broader forms of objectivity, such as cultural products, material objects, or social institutions (Arendt, 1987; Quadflieg, 2019). Such interpretations traverse a distinct conceptual path and, therefore, hold little relevance for the discussion here.

While some authors conflate reification with objectification, others argue that they are distinct concepts, contending that Lukács himself failed to make this crucial distinction. Critics of HCC, notably Adorno (2004) and the later Lukács himself, argued that reification was wrongly equated with objectification. Adorno (2004: 374) criticised reification as being ‘inspired by the wishful image of unbroken subjective immediacy’, a state of ‘total liquefaction of everything thing-like regressed to the subjectivism of the pure act’. Adorno's well-accepted reading posited that Lukács saw in the proletariat the ultimate subject–object, capable of overthrowing all forms of objectivity.

Certain passages in HCC do indeed point to a rejection of pure objectivity, for example, where Lukács (1971: 234) discards the objectivity of nature. This is also one of the points criticised by the older Lukács (1971: xvii). ² However, suggesting that he conflated reification with objectification throughout the whole of HCC is misleading. I align with the interpretations of Feenberg (2011, 2017), Kavoulakos (2019a, 2019b, 2023), Westerman (2019), Löwy (1979) and Teixeira (2024), who, though arguing from different angles, claimed that Lukács was not targeting objectivity in general, but a specific form of thinghood within modern capitalism. In HCC, reification is treated as a phenomenon unique to capitalist societies, which is evident in describing its causes and characteristics within ‘the world of commodities and their movements on the market’ (Lukács, 1971: 87).

The related charges of idealism also require critical scrutiny. It is undeniable that Lukács's idea of the proletariat as the subject–object of history has Hegelian roots, and that he regarded proletarian class consciousness as a window of opportunity to transform reality through a new understanding. In this sense, Lukács assigned ideas and consciousness a decisive role in structuring social life (Eagleton, 1991). Out of this, two accusations of idealism are often raised: one concerns the means of changing reality, and the other concerns the goal that is being pursued.

The first charge holds that, in Lukács’s account, reification dissolves once the proletariat attains the correct understanding of its situation. HCC does indeed present class consciousness as the necessary condition for de-reification to begin. Importantly, however, it is through the practices of class struggle that the proletariat comes not only to grasp the contingency of social life but also to begin de-reifying reality in an objective way (López, 2020).

Second, the accusation that Lukács’s goal is idealist, in the sense that he envisioned subjects living in a permanent state of subject–object unity, is misplaced. Lukács's vision of socialism presupposed modern institutions organised so that individuals could exercise conscious control over their present and future (Feenberg, 2011). Chari (2010: 599) brings this to the point: ‘One need not reduce this model of agency to a pseudo-Hegelian caricature … to take the insight that de-reified practice will have something to do with making social institutions more reflective of human self-determination.’ The underlying idea, then, is not to dissolve institutions but to ensure that economic and social arrangements remain traceable to collective, and conscious decision-making rooted in human agency.

The central point that I want to make here is that Lukács's theory is particularly potent in theorising the impersonal economic power of commodity relations. It is a theory of how a commodity-driven societalisation produces a distinctive kind of power: impersonal and undemocratic. In the passage where Lukács (1971: 87, emphasis added) defined reification as an ‘objective’ phenomenon, he wrote that ‘the laws governing these objects’ confront individuals ‘as invisible forces that generate their own power’. The power of commodity relations resides in their capacity to shape the social conditions under which actors, capitalists and workers alike carry out their economic activity. Through commodity exchange, society decides which commodities receive investment, how much is produced, and how output is distributed (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018); it also regulates the price of labour-power as a commodity (wages) and the social conditions under which work is performed. As Löwy (1979: 179) argued, the distinctive core of Lukács's idea of reification lies in the ‘subjection’ of individuals to a world of commodities that functions independently of the will of those subjected to it.

This power, then, is not reducible to other forms but constitutes a distinctive modality. Lukács (1971: 229) underscored this by insisting that ‘the laws of economics’ can function ‘as pure “laws of nature” by virtue of their purely economic power, i.e., without the aid of non-economic factors’. One such non-economic factor is violence. Immediately after this, Lukács reinforced the point by citing Marx's famous reference to the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’.

The critique of the impersonal power of commodity relations does not target their impersonality. The issue is not a supposed loss of human intimacy or personal connection. Honneth (2008: 76) and Jaeggi (1999: 991), for example, argued that, like Simmel, Lukács saw reification as the ‘depersonalization of social relationships’. However, unlike Simmel, he allegedly overlooked its positive sides: enhanced individual negative freedom and the potential for mutual recognition.

However, it is difficult to find in HCC any condemnation of indifference or loss of genuine personal connection. Lukács (1971: 90) did write that capitalism fragments production and ‘destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still “organic”’, turning individuals into ‘isolated atoms’. Yet, he described the earlier ‘community’ as also marked by ‘oppression and an exploitation’, especially in the context of enslavement and feudalism (Lukács, 1971: 90, 91, 168). Lukács (1971: 86, 168) recognised that the depersonalisation of power under capitalism severs the direct ‘relations of dominion and servitude’ characteristic of pre-capitalist societies, in which the personality of the dominated individual remained ‘undivided’ and bound to their social role. Under capitalism, a splitting of the self occurs because while the worker's labour-power is sold as an objectified ‘thing’, their ‘humanity’ and ‘soul’ are not turned into commodities (Lukács, 1971: 172). This internal division provides the vantage point from which class consciousness can arise (see also López, 2020).

Moreover, Lukács (1971: 91) argued that the isolation and fragmentation of society into separate commodity exchangers is ‘only apparent’: beneath this appearance lies a ‘strict ordering of all that happens’, with a unified economic process driving capitalist profit accumulation. This process imposes unified laws on society that operate behind our backs, like a natural force. The issue is not depersonalisation itself, as impersonal forms of social mediation could still operate under collective conscious control (Löwy, 1979: 180–183).

The argument advanced here is that the theory has untapped potential to expound the impersonal power of commodity relations and to historicise that power, which is enabled by legal regulation and political institutions, and enacted by concrete economic actors pursuing profit under specific market conditions. Rather than staying with an abstract account of reification in general, scholars can examine its differentiated workings and effects. Goldmann (1966: 114–115) pursued precisely this line, arguing that post-war Keynesian politics in the global North brought about a ‘progressive weakening’ of reification insofar as the state restrained commodity compulsions. By contrast, the neoliberal period can be taken to exemplify a phase of massive expansion: in exchange, as market logics were loosened from state constraints and extended into domains once less commodified (education, care, housing); and in capital–labour relations, as labour-power as a commodity was more fully subsumed under capital through globalisation and the erosion of welfare protections.

The trouble with reifications

The theorisation developed here departs, to some extent, from Lukács's more comprehensive account, particularly where he extends reification beyond commodity-mediated relations. Arato and Breines (1979: 121) argued that Lukács treated reification as present across multiple domains such as science, the state, and law, while overlooking their distinctions and granting undue primacy to the economic sphere. An alternative reading by Kavoulakos (2019a: 47) suggested that Lukács saw the commodity form as a ‘prototype’ of objectivity in bourgeois society: while it structures the economic sphere, other domains follow different forms. Rather than asserting the primacy of the economic base, Lukács sought homologies across social fields. Indeed, Lukács (1971: 83) described the ‘structure of commodity relations’ as the ‘model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society’, using the German word Urbild (translated as ‘model’). This suggests he regarded commodity relations as exemplary rather than as the sole or determining form of objectivity. There is a scarcity of evidence in HCC suggesting that Lukács thought of ‘reification in the legal and administrative or the cultural sphere’ as ‘determined by reification in the economic’ (Hall, 2011b: 66).

While the question of whether other forms of objectivity are derived from, and thus subordinate to, the economic sphere may be easier to resolve, Hall's quotation raises a more difficult issue: can we speak of reification where the commodity form is not the primary form of objectivity? If so, does this imply multiple forms of reification? This interpretation is not entirely unfounded, given Lukács's (1971: 99) description of the ‘individual bureaucrat's inevitable total subjection to a system of relations between the things to which he is exposed’. In this case, however, the ‘system of relations between things’ involves rules and regulations rather than commodities. Lukács (1971: 171) did not explicitly apply the term ‘reification’ to describe the bureaucratic system, but rather indicated that the ‘basic structure’ of reification could be observed there. Nevertheless, his writings on law, the state, and even marriage are suggestive of an understanding of reification as extending to multiple spheres of social life.

I argue that interpreting the legal, administrative, and cultural spheres as reified worlds risks undermining the theory's sharpness. These spheres can indeed be reified where they are governed by commodity relations – for example, in commodified cultural production. Yet where this is not the case, the concept loses strength if applied indiscriminately. Lukács (1971: 86) explicitly stated that the reification is ‘produced by commodity relations’. However, the forms of objectivity that emerge in other domains (that are not merely derivatives of, or subordinated to, the economic sphere) clearly cannot in every case be explained as products of commodity relations, and cannot therefore meaningfully be grasped as leading to reification. This puzzle can be resolved by positing multiple kinds of reification: one generated directly by commodity mediation, others arising from different sources. What unites them, then, is the analogous form of modern calculability. Yet this would turn reification into a rather nebulous concept that carries less pointed analytical power. Restricting the term to commodity-mediated relations is analytically preferable, because it allows reification to identify the specific impersonal economic power generated by commodity mediation and the dynamics arising from it, such as crisis, inflation, unemployment, and the systemic pressure to adapt to market imperatives, which do not exist in other spheres such as law.

This does not mean restricting the analytical field of vision to the economy alone, since scholars can trace how market logics originating in economic relations migrate into and come to govern other spheres. Recent decades have offered no shortage of such cases. To the extent that state services are privatised or subcontracted and thereby assume a commodity character, they become reified in the strict sense. Yet even where such full-scale reification does not occur, market-like logics can produce analogous ossifications. The neoliberal remodelling of political power on market principles depoliticises governance by recasting political decisions, including the organisation of education and culture through techniques such as New Public Management, as technical, apolitical responses to market forces (Chari, 2015). As a result, public services and culture come to be organized through ossified arrangements and quasi-immutable laws that mirror the economic sphere, along with corresponding forms of impersonal power.

Rationalisation and the irrationality of the whole

A further conceptual refinement is to distinguish reification not only from calculative forms of objectivity in other spheres, but also from formal rationality within capitalist production and exchange itself. Some, such as Colletti (1973), interpreted HCC as being preoccupied with issues of quantification, mechanisation, and modern science rather than focusing on the unique characteristics of the capitalist system. In addition, HCC has been viewed as containing romantic anti-capitalist critique that blends an aversion to modern rationality with a critique of capitalism.

As already noted, HCC advances a critique of technological, large-scale industrial production that goes beyond a mere indictment of class exploitation. Lukács (1971: 88) conceived of Taylorism as eliminating from the labour process ‘the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker’. However, this critique did not stem from a rejection of technological progress or a nostalgic longing for the past. Instead, it targeted the specific form of technological development in industrial capitalism whereby work becomes uncreative, monotonous, and repetitive. As Márkus (1982: 155) highlighted, Lukács's conception of praxis demanded not a rejection of technology but a call for ‘new technology’ analogous to ‘artistic creation’.

Charges of hostility to modern development and science are belied by the passage already cited, where Lukács (1971: 233) depicts capitalism as the first truly ‘social’ society, one that has fulfilled the ‘world-historical mission of the process of civilisation’ by removing the ‘natural limits’ that once constrained human life. This ‘progressive’ reading of capitalism is open to criticism on other grounds, but the point here is that Lukács expressed no negative sentiment. Instead, drawing on Marx and Engels, he praised the progressive dimensions of capitalist modernity. The problem with modern production, then, lies in how scientific and technological advancements are used to perpetuate inequality, exploitation and suppression of workers’ qualitative attributes.

Nevertheless, HCC does at times conflate capitalist rationality in the labour process with reification, thereby creating conceptual confusion by linking them too closely, if not equating them. This is evident in Lukács's (1971: 89–90) claim that under Taylorism workers’ activity becomes ‘reified, mechanically objectified’, as it is absorbed in ‘a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man's consciousness and impervious to human intervention’. Thus, the concept begins to lose its coherence when it no longer designates the mediation of human relations through the commodity form but instead through autonomous rational and technological logics. To the extent that these technological logics embody the process by which capital consumes labour-power as a commodity, one could argue that the reified relation between capital and labour is realised through the formally rational systems employed in the production process. Yet, as I maintain below, such systems are better understood not as reification itself, but as formally rational arrangements that both (re)produce the irrationality characteristic of reified social relations and presuppose it insofar as they seek to manage it.

I do not argue for discarding the ‘rationalisation part’ of reification theory, but for keeping reification and rationalisation analytically distinct so that their relationship can be properly understood. Although Lukács sometimes linked the two closely, there are passages in which their distinction becomes more visible.

This is evident, for example, in the striking paragraph where Lukács (1971: 102) explains that commodity relations, taken as a totality, are ‘ruled by chance’ and escape collective control; this is what he understood as the ‘irrationality of the total process’. The formally rational, calculative actions of individual commodity owners, oriented towards profit and governed by laws at the level of isolated processes, generate systems of action that remain uncoordinated with one another and thus constitute an irrational totality. In this sense, the power generated by commodity relations is characterised by an irrationality at the level of the social whole, even as it depends on rational calculation at the level of individual actors. In Lukács's terms, capitalist rationalisation ‘results in a basic unpredictability’ (Plotke, 1976: 208). At the same time, in order to make social reality intelligible and actionable, capitalists deploy rationalisation as a tool. In the market, they attempt to render the ‘second nature’ of competition calculable through probabilistic laws, today for instance through demand forecasting, risk modelling, pricing algorithms, and market analytics; in production, they abstract and measure labour according to socially necessary time to maximise surplus extraction (Lukács, 1971: 87–88, 102).

Two processes are at stake here: an isolated rationalisation, which fosters increased overall irrationality, and the irrationality of the whole, which in turn necessitates sporadic rationalisation. It thus becomes clear that the formal rationality of individual actors and the irrationality of the whole are not only interdependent but also mutually reinforcing. In this sense, Lukács (1971: 102, emphasis added) writes that ‘the capitalist process of rationalization based on private economic calculation’ simultaneously ‘presupposes’, ‘produces’ and ‘reproduces’ a society in which the totality is ‘ruled by chance’.

This insight is especially pertinent for analysing economic crises. Financial collapses, debt booms, and supply-chain ruptures show that social reproduction is subordinated to commodity dynamics outside collective control, exposing the irrational societalisation of a society obsessed and saturated with scattered rationality. Crisis arises from the contradiction between the strictly rationalised, formal calculation of isolated social subsystems and the irrational, uncoordinated nature of the overall process, specifically when this formal system's disregard for concrete material content leads to a breakdown (Feenberg, 2014: 78, 85–86). Furthermore, these insights can be brought into theoretical and empirical dialogue with contemporary economic sociology, which emphasises the ‘impossibility’ of rational action under capitalism (Beckert, 2002: 37). What Lukács's framework adds is an account of one mechanism contributing to this impossibility: the scatteredness of rational actions themselves, and the way the irrationality thereby produced in turn prompts further dispersed rationalisation.

The immanent ideology of reified relations

A widespread usage in the social sciences defines reification as forgetting an entity's socially constructed character and/or attributing to it generative powers that properly belong to the people who created it (Berger and Luckmann, 1991). The result is ‘a dehumanized world’ over which people no longer appear to have control (Berger and Luckmann, 1991: 106). In this sense, reification becomes an epiphenomenon, a false understanding of reality, that falls under the broader category of ‘ideology’.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using the term in this sense. After all, Lukács himself argued that the impersonal power of commodity relations leads to a perception of social reality as frozen and immutable. As the events and necessities of economic life arise from the immanent logic of impersonal and uncontrollable relations, the possibility of conceiving economic life as controllable correspondingly recedes. He described the resulting ‘fatalistic stance’, in which actors no longer see themselves as capable of shaping the conditions of their lives or steering the course of history (Lukács, 1971: 38). The future, therefore, does not appear as an open horizon of collective action, but unfolds according to quasi-natural laws, which are largely beyond human influence. It is then unsurprising that Lukács’s ideas have been framed in terms of capitalist ideology (Eagleton, 1991).

Where misinterpretations arise, however, is in assuming that reification can be reduced to ideology. For instance, in his otherwise brilliant analysis of the mute compulsion of economic relations, Mau (2023: 61) stated that ‘Lukács was, unfortunately, not particularly interested in power; in so far as he discusses it, he is primarily interested in “reified consciousness,” that is, ideology’. Mau distinguished between three modes of power in capitalism – violence, ideology, and the mute compulsion of social relations – and concludes that Lukács was concerned primarily with the second. As noted earlier, reification is a theory of social ontology (Feenberg, 2015): it analyses how the commodity form structures social life and how this mode of societalisation generates a distinct impersonal power.

Yet reification theory is not only a theory of abstract, impersonal economic power but also an explanation for how that power nurtures a distinct ideology deriving directly from economic relations. This does not mean that all ideological formations can be traced back to economic structures. One need not conjure up the Marxist ‘base–superstructure bogeyman’ to recognise that certain ideological formations (not all) do in fact arise from the logic of capitalist relations.

What makes this ideology distinctive is that it does not primarily concern moral judgement, but rather configures subjects’ ‘sense of possibility’ (Schauer, 2024) by presenting capitalist relations as necessary and inevitable. Ideology can be understood as operating on three levels: our sense of reality (what we believe exists in the world), our sense of morality (what we believe is right and just) and our sense of possibility (what we believe can be changed) (Therborn, 1988). From this perspective, the reified outlook acts above all on the latter dimension: social reality comes to appear as not humanly made and therefore as unalterable.

Its specificity lies, moreover, in its immanence: it arises from the ordinary functioning of commodity-mediated societalisation itself, rather than being introduced from ‘outside’ through cultural consumption, education, or normative socialisation. In this way, it reinforces bourgeois class power by narrowing the horizon of the imaginable without requiring any overt justificatory discourse about what is right or wrong. It is captured in what Gunderson (2021) described as the refrain that ‘things are the way they are’: the conviction that there is no alternative, that outcomes could not be otherwise, and that the economic future will simply arrive of its own accord. Hence social relationships cast as a ‘second nature’ depoliticise subjects by fostering fatalism. As Hartle (2017: 22) notes, Lukács's relevance lies in showing the structural absence of politics.

Extending the term ‘reified’ to all ideological inversions that naturalise or ‘thingify’ social entities dilutes the specificity of reification theory, whose force lies in linking such formations to capitalist relations themselves. Building on Mau's (2023) distinction, reification can be understood as comprising two interconnected forms of power: the impersonal and abstract power of commodity relations, and the ideological power of economic fatalism that arises from those relations. On this view, the intensification of the former also tends to intensify the latter.

The concept is especially promising for future theoretical and empirical work on how the intensified economic power of reified relations under decades-long neoliberalism has deepened fatalism and futurelessness. Scholars from diverse perspectives have observed that the neoliberal epoch is marked by resignation, a pervasive sense of inevitability, the inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism, and the feeling that the future itself is foreclosed (Brown, 2019; Chibber, 2022; Fisher, 2009; Tutton, 2023). What the logic of reification adds is an account of why such resigned orientations take hold: the more extensively commodity-mediated relations structure social life, and the more forcefully their impersonal necessities impose themselves on individuals, the more capitalist constraints come to appear as natural and immutable facts of life.

Beyond essentialism: the alignment and frictions of subjectivity

The emphasis in HCC on capitalist rationalisation as tearing apart what is described as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ invites caution, as it may suggest an essentialist argument, namely the violation of a qualitatively human core that transcends history. Yet, when the relevant passages are read in context and checked against the German original, this essentialist reading dissolves. In the claim that ‘the capitalist division of labour’ disrupts ‘every organically unified process of work and life’ (Lukács, 1971: 103), ‘organic’ refers to the coherence of a practice rather than to a natural essence; it concerns the disintegration of a previously integrated activity. A further key passage is translated as the claim that the division of labour is ‘alien to the nature of man’ (Lukács, 1971: 335). In the German text, however, the word ‘nature’ does not appear; instead, Lukács (1977: 513) uses ‘menschliche Eigenart’ (‘human individuality’). This notion of individuality can be defended without recourse to an essentialist account of human nature. ³ This interpretation is further supported by Lukács's (1971: 186–187) explicit opposition to essentialist readings of subjectivity, which he critiqued as a ‘humanism or anthropological point of view’ that causes humanity to ‘become frozen in a fixed objectivity’, sidelining ‘dialectics and history’.

The normative foundations of his theory do not rest on essentialist claims. Although he did not systematically articulate these foundations, they are nonetheless reconstructable. First, reification exposes the injustice of capitalism's class structure, which perpetuates exploitation and inequality. Here I follow Grondin's (1988: 99) view that Lukács saw no need for a detailed normative justification, since exploitation and inequality were evident effects of capitalism in his time and sufficiently recognisable as problems. Second, the reification of production and exchange relations precludes any form of collective democratic control over the economic fabric of society. As a result, social structure is not ‘fluid, subject to revision in response to the demands of those whose lives it structures’ (Feenberg, 2017: 118).

Critics contend that Lukács's emphasis on the industrial worker's role in overcoming reification implies an inherent, almost transcendent human essence left untouched by it (Habermas, 1984b: 368). However, the potential for the proletariat to rebel against capitalism is tied to their standpoint within the capitalist social structure and the experiences that arise from it (Feenberg, 2014: 125). For workers, the encounter with reification manifests in suffering, where reified structures intersect with everyday life and produce concrete hardships. These include subordination to capital within the labour process and vulnerability as sellers of labour-power on the market:

Thus the purely abstract negativity in the life of the worker is objectively the most typical manifestation of reification, it is the constitutive type of capitalist societalisation. But for this very reason it is also subjectively the point at which this structure is raised to consciousness and where it can be breached in practice. (Lukács, 1971: 172)

The contradiction at stake does not hinge on some essentialist notion of a human nature violated by capitalism, but rather on the bourgeois ideal of the self-determining and autonomous individual, an ideal that capitalism itself undermines. Lukács (1971: 62) described this ‘contradiction in the fact that the bourgeoisie endowed the individual with an unprecedented importance, but at the same time that same individuality was annihilated by the economic conditions to which it was subjected, by the reification created by commodity production’. This contradiction is felt most sharply by the worker, where a conflictual encounter between capitalism and human experience comes to the forefront. As Hall (2011a: 132) emphasises, ‘society's concept of the subject is everywhere contradicted by the reality – by the proletariat's existence as pure object, rather than the subject, of social events’. By contrast, capitalists find themselves affirmed by reification, inhabiting the role of history's agents: managers, thinkers, innovators, strategists (Arato, 1972).

A particularly relevant development in the contemporary world of work concerns management models that responsibilise employees for dealing with the imponderables of the market, described in the sociology of work as ‘inner marketisation’ of the firm (Menz and Nies, 2024). This raises the question of whether such arrangements foster among employees the kind of agentic self-understanding that Lukács attributes to the capitalist, namely that of a strategist who manages uncertainty, and whether they naturalise managerial control by presenting workplace demands as mere ‘market necessities’. Conversely, such arrangements may produce not agentic alignment, but a heightened sense of powerlessness and alienation in the face of commodity relations that workers are made responsible for navigating in the interest of the firm. Such questions also require a differentiated analysis of contemporary forms of workers’ subjectivity, including their wishes, expectations, moral commitments, and desires for self-realisation, while avoiding any assumption that these crystallise into a single, homogeneous subjective form.

Capitalist alienation

Since reification concerns the mediation of human relations by the commodity form in production and exchange, it is intrinsically capitalist; ‘capitalist reification’ is tautological. Alienation, however, is a broader concept applicable to various historical social arrangements (Sayers, 2011: 88). In Marx's late works, capitalist alienation refers to society's inability to consciously shape its own self-reproduction, including production, exchange, technological development, and its relation to nature. ⁴ What becomes alienated is the interdependence or interconnections that society's members create (Llaguno, 2023; Øversveen, 2022). Thus, alienation reflects how ‘capitalism subjects humanity to economic imperatives that grow more independent of us the more dependent we become on them’ (Øversveen, 2022: 450).

The distinction between reification and capitalist alienation can be understood as reification being one of the causes of capitalist alienation. This is because capitalist alienation is caused by the logic of capital and ‘institutionalized second-order mediations’ (Mészáros, 1970: 83) such as commodity form, private property and money. The power generated by the mediation of human relations through commodity form, that is, reification, gives capitalist institutions an autonomous dynamic, thereby depriving society of the capacity to consciously regulate its own reproduction, that is, alienation. While reification is certainly not the sole driving force behind society's loss of control over its own reproduction, it can nonetheless be understood as one of its central drivers.

Without claiming to offer a single-cause explanation, I suggest that the alienation generated by intensified reification under neoliberalism provides one angle for understanding the appeal of strong-state figures who promise to restore control over market relations. As Øversveen (2022) notes, capitalist alienation is experienced as a diffuse sense of powerlessness and loss of agency over the conditions of social reproduction. In recent decades, the intensified power of market imperatives has been lived through pressures in labour and housing markets, as well as outsourcing, inflation and insecurity. When individuals experience themselves as governed by the impersonal ‘laws’ of global commodity and labour markets, they may become receptive to leaders who promise to ‘grip the wheel’, whether through tariffs, industrial protection, or attempts to override economic constraints. In this sense, authoritarian appeals trade on the promise to master the market's ‘second nature’. Drawing on Lukács, Westerman (2020) connects such appeals to the naturalisation of neoliberal market structures, though further empirical work is needed to substantiate this connection.

Conclusion

This article has argued that reification names something that no other concept in the social sciences captures with the same precision: the impersonal power of commodity mediation and the naturalisation of that power through its own operation. As such, it offers critical social theory and empirical research a way to historicise and analyse this dual form of power, which, I have suggested, has intensified under neoliberalism. By restricting the concept to the economic fabric of society and distinguishing it from capitalist rationalisation and alienation, the article has also shown that reification is particularly well suited to analysing how contemporary forms of subjectivity align with, or come into tension with, commodity power, especially in the world of work; how fragmented rationality and an irrational, crisis-prone totality mutually reinforce one another; and how intensified commodity relations may help explain the appeal of authoritarian leaders under conditions of felt alienation.