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Concept of Reification

The concept of reification is explained by Lukacs in his essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," and he also expands on the issue and explains some of the background in his essay "Class Consciousness." The conception of reification will be considered as it is explained by Lukacs, and the concept will then be evaluated in terms of Herbert Marcuse's discussion of Freud's Reality Principle. Lukacs delineates the issue of reification as it relates to the work of Karl Marx and to conceptions of class consciousness as developed by Marx. Marcuse's discussion of the reality principle derives from his assessment of psychoanalytic theory and the class consciousness that infuses that view of human thought and interaction.

In the perspective of Karl Marx, the bourgeois society in which he lived and which persists to this day in the developed West was a system of class conflict and the domination of the bourgeois class over the proletarian class. Marx described the nature of this society not as an aberration but as a stage in social evolution, succeeding the feudal period and preceding the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. His view was based on the idea that these stages were inevitable and that the only way for the proletariat to gain a better position in life was through revolution, through the violent overthrow of bourgeois society. Yet, as we have seen in subsequent history, this is not the case, and while we have not produced a classless society, the classes are not in conflict to the degree Marx saw as inevitable and inescapable. Marx ascribed the social inequalities of society to class differences based on material inequalities separating the working class from the mode of production and from the product of their work in a form of social alienation.

For Karl Marx, the force that determines social relations is economic and is identified by the relationship of the human being to labor. Marx has ...

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Concept of Reification. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:52, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701704.html