Reification (Marxism)

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In Marxist philosophy, reification (Verdinglichung, "making into a thing") is the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.

As a practice of economics, reification transforms objects into subjects and subjects into objects, with the result that subjects (people) are rendered passive (of determined identity), whilst objects (commodities) are rendered as the active factor that determines the nature of a social relation. Analogously, the term hypostatization describes an effect of reification that results from presuming the existence of any object that can be named and presuming the existence of an abstractly conceived object, which is a fallacy of reification of ontological and epistemological interpretation.

Reification is conceptually related to, but different from Marx's theory of alienation and theory of commodity fetishism; alienation is the general condition of human estrangement; reification is a specific form of alienation; and commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.^[1]