ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century, Georg Lukacs proposed the idea of reification in order to describe a particular kind of perspective promoted in capitalist societies. Under reification, people begin to see the products of their labour as ‘thing-like’, independent of the social processes that created them, and as having an autonomous existence outside of society. The process of reification spreads to social relations, where people come to see each other as means to ends, rather than as free, conscious actors, in breach of key principles of modern ethical thought. Finally, reification extends to workers’ own views of themselves, such that they begin to consider their own traits, attitudes, capacities and skills as ‘human capital’, bundles of resources that can be traded for material benefit. To Lukacs, the process of reification was a false view of society and social relations that was promoted by contemporary capitalist relations in the workplace and in consumer markets.
