We live in a capitalist system founded upon economic relations, where the commodity structure has “penetrated society in all its aspects and remolded it in its own image”. The essence of this condition is that our actions, rather than appearing as our authentic, creative presence in the world, become labor – an alienated thing. Losing all of its organic dynamicism, human activity is reified – given a ‘phantom objectivity’ disconnected from the individual – and man’s social relations are perverted into the sterile relations of commodities. This reification transforms society into a system of economic production and consumption, and man into a sum of exchange-value and capital. Human social existence becomes necessarily alienated from its true nature.
As Georg Lukács writes –
There is both an objective and a subjective side to this phenomenon. Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market). The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power. The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own activity. Subjectively – where the market economy has been fully developed – a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article
It is clearly demonstrated how the concept of reification is not only useful for students of Marxist political economy, but is of value for any serious critique of modern society. The reification of social relations under capitalism perverts our very experience of the world. In man’s estrangement from authentic being through the objectification of his activity, he comes to view the interactions of these reified objects as the true nature of social existence. He becomes subjugated to the quantitative calculability of the commodity structure, and seeks to understand himself solely through this rational, ‘scientific’ system. “Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man”. Capitalism thus produces a false consciousness that constantly reasserts its own self-alienation. Lived, authentic experience is lost to the rational mechanization of reified forms, governed by laws and systems we believe to be objective.
Thus, the pervasive alienation of modern existence exhibits itself not only in the ostensibly economic sphere. Capitalism has perverted every aspect of society, as well as modern man’s very consciousness. The modern role of science is a clear example of the distorted nature of bourgeois consciousness. We live in an age of sterile positivism, where the majority of the educated population holds faith in the ability of science to understand human activity as a rational, logically approachable system. Science, however, does not hold the privileged position that it so often claims. Rather than engaging objective existence, our modern quasi-positivism is in fact concerned only with reified forms. This is especially evident in the social sciences. False bourgeois consciousness has historically reproduced the structure of economic reification in the practice of psychology and sociology. By objectifying man’s thoughts and activities into scientifically interpretable things, these disciplines have further alienated modern man from his experience of the world. Lukács would regard these false relations, these structures of modern consciousness, as symptoms of capitalist commodification. In regarding man as a psychological and sociological construct, we have further distanced ourselves from the organic, creative free play of human existence.
Exploring the reified structures of distorted consciousness calls us to reexamine the nature of our own presence in the world. While the institution of liberal arts education professes an ideal of lofty personal striving and emancipation from unreflective, self-imposed immaturity, here among the self-satisfied sons of wealth and comfort we seem far more content to constantly reproduce reified social relations, rather than transcend self-alienated bourgeois values towards fullness and authenticity of being.
Modernity is an age of estrangement, where man’s objectified activity has been given alien autonomy and power over him. Fullness of meaning, strength of voice and authentic being-towards-death – these values have no place in the false bourgeois consciousness of modern capitalism, where humanity is governed by rational, deterministic laws concerned only with the reified form of man. It is clear that we must attempt to rise above this false consciousness to the phenomenological standpoint – and accordingly strive to recover our being from capitalism’s self-imposed alienation.
TYH
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