ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with contemporary accounts of social reproduction, reification and poverty. It argues that thinking picks up on a theme within the philosophy of alienation: the reification of consciousness. The chapter concerns reification to direct attention to the way in which historical, cultural and economic norms are bound up with the social reproduction of capital. It discusses that reification directs our analysis to the way in which a feeling of worthlessness becomes what one "is". The chapter shows how law and rights talk provided critical terms to articulate the reification of self that poverty and welfare dependency produced. It addresses the ways in which the NWRO confronted social alienation and the reification of consciousness. The chapter offers a way of understanding how radical lawyers might grasp their engagement in social struggles. It uses the work of the ClassCrits to bring together elements of Marx's thinking with intersectional analysis.
