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

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nts the worker as a fixed and established reality. In the modern era, this has involved a psychological analysis of the work process so that the rational mechanism has bene extended into the worker's soul. Even the worker's psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it, a means of facilitating their integration into specialized rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts. The principle at work here is that of rationalization, and it is based on what can be calculated. The subject and object of the economic process undergo changes in this process: 1) The mathematical analysis of work-processes denotes a break with the organic, irrational, and qualitatively determined unity of the product. Rationalization is able here to predict with greater and greater precision all the results to be achieved, and this can only be achieved through the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements and by the study of the special laws governing production. Rationalization requires specialization, and Lukacs says indeed that it is unthinkable without specialization: The finished article ceases to be the object of the work-process. the latter turns into the obj

Category: Psychology - C