TOWARDS A CLARIFICATION OF THE

CONCEPT OF REIFICATION

Margery A. Barnes

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1980

Approved by Doctoral Committee:

Department of SociologyAdvisor

n

ABSTRACT

The concept of reification has been a subject of debate and con­

troversy among social scientists ever since 1923 when Georg Lukács

first presented it in theoretical form. The purpose of this study

was to clarify the meaning of the concept and determine its utility

for contemporary sociological analysis.

Clarification was achieved by investigating the historical roots

of the concept in the works of Hegel and Marx, as well as the more

contemporary usages found in the theoretical schemes of Lukács, Peter

Berger and Stanley Pullberg, and Joachim Israel. The basic criterion

of scientific realism, that if concepts are to be of scientific util­

ity they must have referents which exist in the real world, was em­

ployed to determine the research utility of the concept.

Analysis indicated that Marx's 1844 concept of alienation, Marx's

concept of the fetishism of commodities, and the concepts of reifica­

tion developed by Lukacs, Berger and Pullberg, and Israel were all

formulated in an effort to explain why man is not in control of social

and historical forces. However, the study also found that only two of

these concepts, Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities and

Israel's concept of reification, have empirical referents which are

amenable to research.

It was concluded that the other concepts developed to explain

man's lack of control are of no scientific utility because their

referents are rooted in anthropological assumptions about the nature

of man. It was also concluded that Marx's concept of the fetishism of

111

commodities and Israel's concept of reification are of potential use

in sociological research because they both have referents which exist

in the real world. However, further analysis is required to determine

which, if either, of these concepts facilitates a valid explanation of

man's lack of control, and, if necessary, from which direction reform­

ulation should proceed.

TV

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Arthur G. Neal, my

dissertation advisor. Dr. Neal first suggested that I continue my in­

vestigation of the concept of reification in 1976. His patience and

assistance over the past four years have contributed greatly to the

completion of this study. I would also like to thank Dr. Donald McQuarie

who broadened my understanding of Marxist thought and offered an invalu­

able amount of insight and unfailing support throughout the entire study.

Many thanks are also extended to Drs. Edward G. Stockwell, Joseph B.

Perry and William Reichert for serving on my committee.

My colleagues in the Division of Social Sciences at Alfred University

have also provided constant support, encouragement, and guidance. I would

like to thank Drs. Robert A. Heineman, Arthur L. Greil, Thomas A. Leitko,

Steven A. Peterson, and Thomas Rasmussen for their contributions.

Finally, I extend my appreciation to Ellen Baker, who worked hard

typing drafts of the manuscript, and Barbara Asmus, whose kind consider­

ation and typing skills allowed me to make August graduation.

V

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................

Overview.................................. 1

Objectives............................................................................................ 22

Methods.......... .................................................. 25

ISSUES ON HEGEL................. 30

MARX: DIALECTICS, ALIENATION AND THE FETISHISMOF COMMODITIES............................................................ 41

The Early Works: 1840-1844.............................. 42

1845-1856............................................................................................. 62

Grundrisse to Capital: 1857-1883...................................................... 71

Summary.................................................................................................... 90

CLARIFICATION OF THE THEORIES AND CONCEPTS OFREIFICATION: LUKÁCS, BERGER AND PULLBERG, AND ISRAEL...................... 95

Lukács...................................................................................................... 95

Berger and Pull berg................... ........ ............. ................................... 112

Israel........................... ........................................................... . ............. 120

Summary.................................................................................................... 130

CONCLUSION: THE MEANING AND UTILITY OF THECONCEPT OF REIFICATION................. 134

Summary..................................................... 134

Comparison of Central Concepts: Reification,Alienation, Fetishism.................................................................. 140

Reification and Alienation....................... 141

Reification and the Fetishism of Commodities.................. 142

Utility of the Concept of Reification forSociological Research......................................................................... 149

Suggestions for Future Research..................................................... 155

FOOTNOTES................................................... ............. ....................................... 156

BIBLIOGRAPHY 161

I

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Overview

Georg Lukács formulated the first systematic theory, of reification

in 1923.1 The theory addressed itself to an explanation of the cultural

decadence of the day and the chances for escape. However, despite the

passing of fifty-seven years, the exact meaning and significance of the

concept of reification as well as its theoretical explanation remain

unclear. Lukács is partly to blame for this. His writing style is 2

dense if not obscure. More important, however, is the fact that his

conceptual formulations were not precise. Andrew Arato (1972b: 25),

one of the foremost scholars on Lukács and his work, has pointed out,

for example, that Lukács used the concept of reification "as a synonym

for alienation, rationalization, atomization, and deactivation." This

list can be further expanded. Lukács also equates reification with

Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities. "Marx," he states,

"describes the basic phenomenon of reification as follows:" (1971: 86).

What follows is a lengthy quote from the first section of Capital I,

where Marx discusses the fetishism of commodities.

In addition to using different terms to refer to the same phenomenon,

Lukács also uses the term reification in several different grammatical

forms. This makes it difficult to grasp exactly what is and what is not

essential to the basic concept. The noun form, reification, is gener­

ally used to refer to a social structural phenomenon which he contends

has the following characteristic features:

2

. . .man in capitalist society confronts a.reality "made" by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its "laws", his activity is confined to the exploitation of the inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws of his own (egoistic) interests. But even while "acting" he remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events. The field of his activity thus becomes wholly internalized: it consists on the one hand of the awareness of the laws which he uses and, on the other, of his awareness of his inner reactions to the course taken by events (1971: 135).

However, he also frequently uses the term in adjective form. He speaks

of "reifying effects" (1971: 84), a "reifying process" (1971: 100),

"reified mind" (1971: 93), "reified consciousness" (1971: 93), and

"reified thought" (1971: 184). He also contends that there are objec­

tive and subjective sides to reification (1971: 87).

A final source of confusion in Lukács1 theory of reification is

his contention that reification is an illusion, a contention which

appears totally at odds with his contention that reification is a

social .structural phenomenon. In suggesting the phenomenon is an

illusion, Lukács uses such terms as "veil of reification" (1971: 86),

and contends that true reality is "hidden," "neither recognized nor

even perceived" (1971: 93) because of reification itself.

Because Lukács1 concept of reification is so unclear, the sig­

nificance of the concept and theory has been the source of a long

lasting debate among Marxists insofar as Lukács formulated the theory

as a Marxist. On one side are those who suggest that Lukács' theory

proves that Marx was a humanist and alienation or reification consti­

tuted the singular problematic throughout all his work. On the other

3

side are those who argue that alienation or reification are concepts

rooted in idealistic assumptions and are only characteristic of Marx's

early Hegelian writings. The mature Marx, they continue, was scientific

and not concerned with alienation or reification at all. A review of

the major positions within the debate highlights the nature of the cur­

rent confusion over the meaning and significance of the concept of re­

ification.

Those who maintain that the concept of alienation is central to

Marx's work can be referred to as Humanistic Marxists. This title is

simply a reflection of their insistence that Marx was a humanist rather

than a scientist or positivist, two philosophies often equated by these

thinkers. The mentors of this school of Marxism were Lukacs, Karl

Korsch and Antonio Gramsci. In the 1920's all three of these men

independently challenged what they considered to be the mechanical and

deterministic stance of the Third International.Lukacs' challenge

came in his theory of reification and other articles which appeared

together in History and Class Consciousness. The party, these men

argued, lacked revolutionary zeal because it neglected the role of the

subjective element in revolution. The human subject and the obstacles

ideology placed on the emergence of class consciousness thus became

the focus of their attention (see Lukacs, 1971; Gramsci, 1957; Korsch,

1970).

The basis for the contention that alienation is Marx's central

concern and that Marx was a humanist is rooted in the interpretation

these thinkers offer on the relationship of Marx's dialectic to Hegel's.

4

Generally speaking, they view Marx's dialectic as an inverted extension

of Hegel's. Hegel, they suggest, discovered a revolutionary method for

comprehending social reality. Social reality, they argued against the

positivists, is an ongoing, fluid, non-fixed process founded on in­

herent contradiction. They argue that Hegel's dialectical method dis­

covered this and allowed for true comprehension of the nature of social

reality. However, they continue, Hegel, was politically conservative

and therefore this revolutionary method became enshrouded in the

"mystical shell" of idealism. Marx, being both scholar and revolutionary,

was able to perceive the "rational kernel" of the dialectic within the

mystical shell and salvaged it by "standing it on its feet."

Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci interpret the dialectic and the

similarities and differences between Hegel's and Marx's use of it as

follows. In Hegel's scheme, the Idea or Mind creates all material

objects. After the creation is complete, however, it is automatically

separate and distinct from the creator. The result is that the subjec­

tive Idea and the created material object become alienated. Aliena­

tion is a necessary stage in the process of objectification of the4

Idea. However, alienation is also inevitably overcome. The aliena­

tion is overcome by the subject realizing that what is perceived as an

alien object is simply an extension of itself. With this realization

also comes the realization that the unalienated state, the true state

of affairs, is comprised of two united dimensions, subject and object.

When alienation is overcome the essential unity of subject and object

is realized and the totality of being, the totality of subject and

5

object, is achieved. This is the process which is reflected in the

negation of the negation. The Idea or Mind is at first negated because

its objects usurp its subjectivity, but this negation is again negated

by the reunification of subject and object. Every negation of the nega­

tion results in a higher stage of progress, culminating, for Hegel, in

the realization of World History.

What Marx did, these Humanist Marxists claim, was substitute the

concrete, material world in place of Hegel's Idea. He thus substituted

real corporeal man for the abstract Idea as the subject of history.

Therefore, they suggest, Marx's dialectic works as follows. Man,

through his human labor and activity creates a material world which

appears autonomous and assumes the subjective role in history. As a

result, people experience alienation from the products of labor, pro­

ductive activity itself, the species-being, and other people. However,

once the proletariat realizes (i.e. gains class consciousness) that

the society is nothing but a human creation, it will overthrow it and

set up a communist society in which there will be no alienation between 5

subject and object.

Contemporary representatives of this Marxist orientation are

Sholomo Avineri (1969), Istvan Meszaros (1970) and Bertell Oilman (1971).

While their humanistic concerns are the same as those of Lukács,

Korsch, and Gramsci, these contemporary theorists devote less time than

their predecessors to the issue of ideology and its relation to the

emergence of class consciousness. Rather, their major concern seems to

be documenting the centrality of the concept of alienation throughout

6

Marx's work, including what others have considered his scientific

Capital (cf. Meszaros, 1970: 217-27, 233; Avineri, 1969: 96; Oilman,

1971). While Meszaros (1970: 221) substantiates this contention by

pointing out that the term alienation as well as the concept developed

in the 1844 Manuscripts remains in parts of Capital and Theories of

Surplus Value, Avineri (1969: 118) and Oilman (1971: 146-47) argue that

Marx's discussion of the fetishism of commodities and inversion of

subject and object in Capital clearly indicate that Marx never abandoned

his early conceptualization of alienation.

Opposed to this interpretation of the meaning and significance of

alienation and reification in Marx is that offered by those who are

called Scientific Marxists. These Marxists contend that Marx was

scientific in his approach and indeed left us a science of history

which has yet to be implemented. While an understanding and recogni­

tion of Marx's scientific method is central to these theorists, they

still remain committed at least to the ideas of revolution and communist

society.6

The two most prominant representatives of this orientation are

Lucio Colletti and Louis Althusser. Both have spent a considerable

amount of energy explaining what they see as the faulty assumptions

which underlie the major premises of the Humanist Marxists. The crux

of their argument is that the Humanist Marxists make a fundamental

error with far reaching implications in interpreting Marx's dialectic

as a simple inversion of Hegel's. According to them, this is not the

nature of Marx's dialectic. Rather Marx's dialectic is inherently

7

different from Hegel's. According to Colletti and Althusser, it is

impossible to make the Hegelian dialectic applicable to the material

world. Using what is believed to be an inverted Hegelian dialectic,

they argue, leaves one unknowingly but firmly within the clenches of

its idealism. Both theorists maintain that Hegel's dialectic cannot

be inverted to explain the material world because it is not a revolu­

tionary method within a mystical shell. Rather, it is said to be a

fully coherent and consistent scheme. Application of the Hegelian

dialectic in the manner used by the Humanist Marxists is said to be

exactly what is responsible for their faulty, because idealistic,

contention that socialism will result when class consciousness makes

possible the unification of the alienated subject and object.

Althusser is most straightforward in this contention but it is

also clearly central to Colletti's thought (1973, 1974a). In

Althusser's words:

Thus the Marxist "inversion" of the Hegelian dialec­tic is something quite different from an extraction pure and simple. If we clearly perceive the inti­mate and close relation that the Hegelian structure of the dialectic has with Hegel's "world outlook", that is, with his speculative philosophy, this "world outlook" cannot really be cast aside without our being obiiged to transform profoundly the struc­tures of that dialectic. If not, whether we will or no, we shall drag along with us, one hundred and fifty years after Hegel's death and one hundred years after Marx, the shreds of the famous "mystical wrapping" (1977: 104).

Even when they {theories of inversion} do contain a certain degree of truth, taken literally these formu­lations remain prisoner to the illusion that the Young Marx's evolution was fought out and decided in

8

the sphere of ideas, and that it was achieved by vir­tue of a reflection on ideas put forward by Hegel,Feuerbach, etc. It is as if there was agreement that the ideas inherited from Hegel by the young German intellectuals of 1840 contained in themselves, con­trary to appearances, a certain tacit, veiled, masked, refracted truth which Marx's critical abilities fi­nally succeeded in tearing from them, and forcing them to admit and recognize, after years of intellec­tual effort. This is the basic logic implied by the famous theme of the "inversion", the "setting back to its feet" of the Hegelian philosophy (dialectic), for if it were really a matter merely of an inver­sion, a restoration of what had been upside down, it is clear that to turn an object right round changes neither its nature nor its content by virtue merely of a rotation. . . .And a philosophy inverted in this way cannot be regarded as anything more than the philosophy reversed except in theoretical metaphore: in fact, its structure, its problems and the meaning of these problems are still haunted by the same prob­lematic. This is the logic that most often seems to be at work in the Young Marx's writings and which is most apt to be attributed to him (1977: 72-73).

While Colletti and Althusser share the contention that Marx's

dialectic is not the Hegelian dialectic "turned right side up,"

there are also fundamental differences between their views. The root

of these differences lies in their interpretations of when Marx ceased

being Hegelian. While Althusser (1970: 309-10) argues that an "epistemo­

logical break" with Hegelianism occurred in 1845 with the writing of

The German Ideology, Colletti (1973, 1974a) contends that Marx's

earliest works from 1843 are already critiques of the Hegelian method.

The implications/.of this difference are far reaching, as Althusser

(1977: 38) himself has recognized:

Their {della Volpe's and Colletti’s) work certainly presupposes the existence of a break between Marx and Hegel, and between Marx and Feuerbach, but they

9

locate it in 1843, at the level of the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel1s Philosophy of Right! Such a simple displacement of the break profoundly affects all the theoretical conclusions drawn from it, and not only their conception of Marx's philosophy, but also,. . .their reading and interpretation of Capital.

The primary implication of these differing views regarding the

date of Marx's break with Hegel centers directly on the meaning and

significance of the concepts of alienation and fetishism in Marx's

work. Because he locates the date of the break in 1843, Colletti

ascribes scientific significance to the concept of alienation which

is clearly characteristic of the early works. He further contends,

however, that the early concept of alienation informs the scientific

content and method developed in Capital. This is the case, Colletti

argues, because the concept of the fetishism of commodities developed

in Capital is a refinement of the concept of alienation discussed in

the 1844 Manuscripts. Therefore, according to Colletti (1974a: 47),

although Marx does definitely break with Hegelianism, the break occurred

at an early enough time so that Marx never changed his problematic:

His discussion of subject-predicate inversion in Hegel's logic, his analysis of estrangement and alien­ation, and (finally) his critique of the fetishism of commodities and capital can all be seen as the pro­gressive unfolding, as the ever-deepening grasp of a single problematic.

As implied in this statement, Colletti contends that the central prob­

lematic in Marx is one of scientific method. As Colletti sees it,

Marx's primary concern from beginning to end was to illustrate how the

Hegelian method and, later the method of political economy, resulted

in erroneous conclusions regarding social reality, the former because

10

it deduced the concrete from the abstract Idea, the latter because it

induced abstract concepts from the concrete.

According to Colletti, Marx's break with Hegel was based on Marx's

view that since Hegel's method begins with the abstract Idea and con­

tends that matter is only the realization of the Idea, it makes the

human actor the "predicate" of the process or the object of an external

idea. For Marx this clearly inverted the real process since according

to him, society is nothing but a conglomeration of social relations

which emerge from the necessity of production and the actions of con­

crete people, not some abstract Idea. Similarly, Colletti takes the

view that Marx criticized the method of political economy because it

too assumed a pre-existing necessity, but this time grounded in the

laws of nature and arrived at inductively. Both methods are said to

have ideological consequences.because they offer scientific justifica­

tion for the status quo. Colletti describes this singular methodological

concern in Marx as follows:

The process is always the same. Whether the argu­ment deals with fetishism and alienation, or with Hegel's mystifying logic, it hinges upon the hypo- statizing, the reifying, of abstractions and the consequent inversion of subject and predicate (1974a: 39).

. . .the unifying theme at the basis of his {Marx's} entire work {is} the theme of "reifica­tion" or "estrangement" or--what is really the same thing--the theme of hypostatization or sub­stantif.ication of the abstract (1973: 195).

Thus for Colletti, Marx was a scientist who used the concepts of alien­

ation and fetishism to describe the limitations and consequences of

Hegelian idealism and classical economy. The success of his own

11

scientific method was to comprehend the actual workings of capitalism.

According to Colletti, Marx's method uncovered the hidden realities of

capitalism and resulted in the discovery of objective causal relation­

ships (1972a: 229). However, for Colletti (1972a: 229-36; 1972b) Marx

was also a revolutionary. Given that his scientific method has allowed

an understanding of the workings of capital, the next task is to change

it so that alienation and the fetishism of commodities no longer exist.

In contrast to Colletti's claim that alienation and the fetishism

of commodities constitute a singular scientific problematic in the

entirety of Marx's work, Althusser, claiming an epistemological break

occurred in Marx in 1845, views these concepts as idealistic and

clearly not central to Marx's scientific method and study of capital.

Althusser's (1977: 223; 1971: 94) major argument is that three stages

characterize Marx's intellectual and theoretical development. The

first stage is the idealistic Hegelian stage and the second his

idealistic Feuerbachian stage which dated from 1842-45. According to

Althusser (1977: 41-48) Feuerbach, while parading as a materialist,

remained entrapped within Hegel's idealism because he only inverted

his dialectic, i.e. he did not change it fundamentally. The primary

proof of Feuerbach's idealism, Althusser argues, is contained in his

anthropological conception of human nature, or his conception of an

essential human nature which should be realized by man. This idealism,

Althusser argues, forms the basis for the entire discussion of aliena­

tion in the 1844 Manuscripts. Support for this argument is offered by

pointing to Marx's discussion in these manuscripts of human essence and

what non-alienated man and society would be like.

12

This third stage in Marx's development constitutes his "break"

and marks his rejection of idealism and his formation of a science of

history. In Althusser's words (1977: 227):

In 1845, Marx broke radically with every theory that based history and politics on an essence of man. This unique rupture contained three indissociable elements.

(1) The formation of a theory of history and politics based on radically new concepts: the concepts of social formation, productive forces, relations of pro­duction, superstructure, ideologies, determinationin the last instance by the economy, specific determi­nation of other levels, etc.

(2) A radical critique of the theoretical preten­sions of every philosophical humanism.

(3) The definition of humanism as an ideology.

While Althusser (1971: 93) has since acknowledged that he at first

presented the nature of the "break" as "much too abrupt" he still

adheres to his basic position that "Something decisive really does

begin in 1845." However, he qualifies himself significantly by

adding:

But Marx needed a very long period of revolutionarywork before he managed to register the rupture hehad made with Hegel's thought in really new concepts. . . .

When Capital Volume One appears (1867), traces of the Hegelian influence still remained (emphasis added}?

That the discussion of the fetishism of commodities is what Althusser

(1971: 95) considers the traces of Hegelian influence is clear:

13

A last trace of Hegelian influence, this time a flagrant and extremely harmful one (since all the theoreticians of "reification" and "alienation" have found in it the "foundation" for their idealist interpretations of Marx's thought): the theory of fetishism (The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, Part I Chapter I, Section

While Althusser (1970: 190-91) was sympathetic to the enormity of Marx'

radical and revolutionary theoretical task and therefore can appreciate

Marx's slipping back to Hegelian formulations with his fetishism of com

modifies, he is equally adamant about the insignificance and misleading

character of the concept for that which is truly Marxian. In his

advice on how to read Capital Althusser (1971: 81) states:

The greatest difficulties, theoretical or otherwise, which are obstacles to an easy reading of Capital Volume One are unfortunately (or fortunately) con­centrated at the very beginning of Volume One. . . {where the discussion of fetishism appears}

I therefore give the following advice: put THE WHOLE OF PART ONE ASIDE FOR THE TIME BEING and BEGIN YOUR READING WITH PART TWO. . . .

In my opinion it is impossible to begin (even to begin) to understand Part I until you have read and re-read the whole of Volume One, starting with Part II-

This is more than advice: it is a recommendation that, notwithstanding all the respect I owe my readers, I am prepared to present as an imperative.

If you begin Volume One at the beginning, i.e. with Part I, either you do not understand it, and give up; or you think you understand it, but that is even more serious, for there is every chance that you will have understood something quite different from what there was to be understood.

14

It is therefore clear that the meaning and significance assigned

to the concepts of alienation and fetishism in Marx differs signifi­

cantly in the work of Althusser and Colletti and that the difference

is rooted in their different interpretations of the date of Marx's

break with Hegel. Colletti argues that these concepts are rooted in

a scientific methodological concern while Althusser holds firm that

they are wholly idealistic in nature. However, these differences of

interpretation also have implications for the scientific validity of

Soviet Marxism or Marxism-Leninism.

As discussed above, both Colletti and Althusser are equally

critical of the Humanist Marxists because of their idealism which

results from their belief that it is possible to invert the Hegelian

dialectic and their anthropological conception of human nature, the

unification of subject and object. However, while Althusser maintains

that this "inversion" of the dialectic and human nature is unique to

the Humanist Marxists, Colletti (1973) resolutely argues, as paradox­

ical as it might sound, that this orientation is also characteristic

of the Soviet position initially formulated during the Second Inter­

national. In other words, Colletti (1973) argues that the so-called

scientific stance of Marxism-Leninsim with its emphasis on the laws of

capitalism discovered by Marx, is really no more than another applica­

tion of the inverted Hegelian dialectic and therefore, like the

Humanist Marxists, remains in the clenchs of idealism.

As Colletti (1973, 1974a) has pointed out, Engels' Anti-Duhring

is the only systematic treatment of dialectics offered in Marx's and

15

Engel's work. It had a great deal of influence on Lenin, Plekanov and

Bernstein and thus helped shape the orientation of the Communist Inter­

national (Colletti, 1974). In Anti-Duhring, Engels makes two points of

central importance, (1) the dialectic denies the existence of "things;"'

which the positivists claim exist, and instead focuses on continuous

process and movement and (2) the dialectic applies to nature as well

as social history. For Engels there are three laws of dialectics:

The law of the transformation of quantity into quality, the law of

the interpenetration of opposites, and the law of the negation of the

negation (Jordan, 1967: 168). Colletti (1973: 192) claims it is pre­

cisely this sole concern with process and contradiction and consequent

neglect of opposition, of real material things that boxes Engels in the

camp, of idealists and influenced the mechanical and deterministic

position of the Soviet Marxists--socialism as the negation of the nega­

tion. In comparing the Humanist Marxists (what he calls Western Marx­

ism) to the Soviets (what he calls dialectical materialism) Colletti

(1973: 194-95) concludes:

. . .the difference between "dialectical materialism" and "Western Marxism" shows itself in a novel light; i.e. not so much as a difference between Marxism of a materialist cast and Marxism qua "philosophy of praxis", but rather as the difference between two opposing and greatly adulterated offshoots of the same Hegelian tradition.

Colletti's position with regard to the Humanist Marxists and the

Soviet Marxists can be summed up as follows. The Humanist Marxists,

because they contend Marx's dialectic was a simple inversion and

extension of the Hegelian dialectic, understand that alienation and

16

fetishism are important concepts in Marx but misinterpret their meaning

and significance because they are, according to Colletti, concepts

which developed out of methodological and scientific concerns and not,

as the Humanist Marxists suggest, a concern with human nature. On the

other hand, the Soviet Marxists, because they assume that Anti-Duhring

is consistent with Marx's method, have failed to recognize any scien­

tific significance in Marx's concepts of alienation and fetishism.

Colletti (1973: 195) clearly states his point:

The extent to which both of these lines of inter­pretation {Humanistic and Soviet Marxism} appear aberrant in relation to the core of Marx's thought can be seen in the fate of what, in my view, is the unifying theme at the basis of his entire work: the theme of "reification" or "estrangement" or—what is really the same thing—the theme of the hypostatization or substantification of the abstract. This theme of Marx's is the basis of his critique of both Hegel's speculative logic and political economy in general, as well as of his critique of the hypostatization in reality of the State and Capital.

Althusser (1971: 45), while being critical of "deviations" of the

Second International, claims that Engels and Lenin actually denounced

those deviations which Colletti claims they initiated. While Althusser

(1971: 58) does suggest that a weakness for positivism always existed

in Engels because of his insistence that philosophy should disappear,

he holds nothing but the highest regard for him when it comes to the

merits of Anti-Duhring (Althusser, 1971: 104).

With regard to the inversion issue, Althusser (Althusser and

Balibar, 1970: 153) claims that far from simply turning the Hegelian

17

dialectic upside down, Engels explains the true nature of Marx's rela­

tion to the Hegelian dialectic, i.e. one of change and transformation

He {Engels} gives us in so many words the first theoretical outline of the concept of the break: the mutation by which a new science is estab­lished in a new problematic, separated from the old ideological problematic. But the most aston­ishing point is this: Engels thinks this theory of the mutation of the problematic, i.e. of the break, in terms of the "inversion" which "places squarely on its feet" a discipline which "had stood on its head". Here we have a familiar idea1 the very terms in which Marx, in the Afterword to the Second Edition of Capital, de­fined the treatment he applied to the Hegelian dialectic in order to change it from the idealist state to the materialist state. Here we find the very terms in which Marx defined the relationship between himself and Hegel in a phrase that still weighs very heavily on Marxism. But what a dif­ference! Instead of Marx's enigmatic phrase,Engels gives us a luminous one--and in Engel's phrase, at last, for the first and perhaps the only time in all the classical texts, we find a clear explanation of Marx's phrase. "To put chemistry which had stood on its head squarely on its feet”? means, without any possible ambiguity, in Engel's text: to change the theoretical base, to change the theoretical problematic of chemistry, replacing the old problematic with a new one. This is the meaning of the famous "inversion": in this image, which is no more than an image and has neither the meaning nor the rigor of a concept,Marx was trying to indicate for his part the existence of the mutation of the problematic which inaugurates every scientific foundation.

Qn this same issue, Althusser (1971: 114-15, 118-19, 123-24) is

equally insistent that Lenin did not interpret Marx's method as an

inversion of Hegel's. Rather than reading Hegel "according to the

method of 'inversion'." Althusser claims that Lenin read him by the

method of "laying bare" (1971: 114) and "pealing, . . .refining"

(1971: 119) what was there:

18

Lenin takes what interests him from his point of view from the discourse which Hegel is pursuing from a quite different point of view. What deter­mines the principle of the choice is the dif­ference in viewpoints: the primacy of science and its material object, for Lenin; whereas, as we know, for Hegel, science, meaning the science of scientists. . ., has no primacy. . .(1971: 119).

It is clear then that Althusser does not find Engels and Lenin

responsible for any vulgar revisionism. According to him they are

scientists and carriers of Marx's thought par excellence. Their

work is said to help clarify the nature of Marx's break with Hegel

and the relation of Marx's dialectic to Hegel's. The position among

the Soviets that any serious exegesis on the concept of alienation

constitutes heresy is found scientifically justifiable by Althusser.

This review of the literature indicates that the Marxists who

view Marx as a humanist contend that the concepts of alienation and

fetishism of commodities in Marx are central concepts which refer to

man's self-estrangement from the subject-object dichotomy inherent

in capitalism. The Soviet Marxists and Althusser on the other hand

contend that these concepts are Hegelian and are unrelated to the

science of history developed by Marx in Capital. Finally, Colletti,

who also views Marx as a scientist has contended that the concepts

are central to Marx's thought and indeed are even primarily concerned

with issues of scientific method. Before concluding this discussion

of the meaning and significance of the concepts of alienation and the

fetishism of commodities in Marx, it is important to take note of one

additional position set forth by Colletti.

19

In 1975, Colletti voiced a significant change of view which resulted

in his concluding that the concepts of alienation and fetishism are not

scientific concepts after all because they are based on Hegel's concept

of contradiction (every positive has a negative and every negation has

its negation which results in a new starting point at a higher level),

rather than real material opposition or contrariety which he contends is

a fundamental criterion for scientific analysis? (not -A being a contra­

diction of A, but A opposed to B which results in C). The overall

implication of Colletti's latest position is that there are two Marx's:

Marx the scientist who discovered the objective causal laws of capital­

ism and Marx the philosophical revolutionary who advocates that man's

essence is alienated in capitalism. This position has also been advo­

cated by Easton (1978) and Jordan (1967). While this latest position

of Colletti tends towards an Althusserian position because it denies

that alienation, fetishism, and reification are concepts rooted in the

scientific study of society, their thought remains distinct since

Althusser views Marxism as revolutionary without the concepts whileo

Colletti does not.

It is clear from the nature of this debate that the meaning and

significance of the concept of reification have far reaching implica­

tions for Marxist thought. If the Humanist Marxists are right, then

there will be evidence that Marxian thought is of no scientific value

or use. If Althusser and the Soviet Marxists are right, then there

will be evidence that socialism will emerge out of the contradictions

of capitalism and that alienation and class consciousness have nothing

20

to do with this. If pre 1975 Colletti is right, then there will be

evidence that Marx's central concern was one of developing a scientific

method which overcomes the limitations of Hegel's method and the method

of political economy and that the concepts of alienation and reifica­

tion in Marx are central to this scientific endeavor. If post 1975

Colletti is right, then there will be evidence that there are two sides

to Marx: ,a scientific side which focuses on causality and a non

scientific side which deals with human efforts towards revolution. The

non scientific side includes his work on alienation and fetishism of

commodities.

However, concern with the concept of reification is not unique

to Marxists. The result is even more confusion about the meaning and

significance of the concept. In 1965, Peter Berger and Stanley Pull­

berg wrote an article called "Reification and the Sociological Critique

of Consciousness." In this article, their goal was to use the concept

of reification in a "general sociological critique of consciousness,

without the polemic and utopian trappings that have often accompanied

it" (1965: 199), referring, of course, to the Marxist usages. Berger

and Pullberg contend that the concept of reification holds the promise

of overcoming the dichotomy in sociological theory represented by

Durkheim's one-sided structuralism and Weber's one-sided voluntarism.

In brief, they argue that the concept of reification can explain how

it is that while society is nothing more than a social construction,

it influences the action, thought and behavior of the individuals who

live in it. Reification is explicitly defined by Berger and Pullberg

21

(1965: 200) as follows: "By reification we mean the moment in the pro­

cess of alienation in which the characteristic of thing-hood becomes

the standard of objective reality." In this we can see that, as with

Lukács, the concept of alienation is of central importance to the con­

cept of reification, except with Berger and Pull berg, reification is

conceptualized as the result of alienation rather than a synonym for

the same process. Berger and Pull berg are also like Lukács in that

they use the concept in various grammatical forms—they are unlike

Lukács insofar as the forms are different. They speak of "reifying

consciousness," "Reifications," and "de-reification." A major point

of difference between Lukács1 theory and that of Berger and Pull berg's

is that while Lukács, as a Marxist, contends that reification is unique

to capitalist society, Berger and Pullberg argue it is a common char­

acteristic of all societies throughout all of history and must continue

to be so because it serves a "de facto" positive and necessary function

Another revision of Lukács' theory is offered by Joachim Israel

(1971). Similarly to Lukács and Berger and Pullberg, Israel (1971:

257) conceptualizes reification as the "process of transformation of

man into objects or things." He also contends that this process of

reification is rooted in the same process Marx referred to in his con­

cept of the fetishism of commodities and therefore indirectly seems to

associate reification with alienation because the concept of commodity

fetishism is generally believed to be synonomous with alienation. In

Israel's (1971: 287) view, reification is a process which occurs with

the transformation of "activities and products into commodities, i.e.

exchange values," because with this transformation our technological

22

innovations come to dictate how we live. Israel (1971: 257) differs

from Lukács and Berger and Pullberg in his contention that reification

is characteristic of only modern society, but all modern society,

capitalist and socialist alike. Reification, Israel (1971: 346)

further argues, should not be accepted as a social necessity but neither

can it be overcome by a proletarian revolution. Rather, the only hope

for modern people is said to be critical sociology and the consequent

establishment of freedom and democracy.

Just as the meaning and significance of Lukács1 concept of reifi­

cation has unmistakable and far reaching implications for Marxist

thought, so does the meaning and significance of Berger and Pull berg's

and Israel's concepts have the same far reaching implications for

sociology in general. If Berger and Pullberg are right, then there will

be evidence that people's lack of control and the existence of hierar-

chial organization of social control in society are necessary and

inevitable features of society. Further, sociology would necessarily

have to accept that it is incapable of discovering ways to improve

society or overcoming alienation. If Israel is right, then there will

be evidence that modern society can and should be improved but that

socialism offers no panacea. If he is right our future destiny lies

in the hands of the intellectuals.

Objectives

It is apparent from the preceeding discussion that the concept of

reification remains obscure in contemporary sociology. This obscurity

encompasses two major interrelated dimensions: (1) the meaning of the

23

concept and (2) its utility for contemporary sociology. The purpose of

this study is to clarify the concept of reification along these dimen­

sions.

In clarifying the meaning of the concept, the primary effort will

focus on answering the question of what, if anything, is unique to the

concept of reification as formulated by Lukacs, Berger and Pullberg, and

Israel. That is, is this concept different from the concepts of alien­

ation and the fetishism of commodities with which it has primarily been

associated, and if so, how? What, in other words, is referent of this

concept?

Clarification of meaning will facilitate conclusions regarding the

utility of the concept for contemporary sociology. As previously indi­

cated, Marxists are in sharp disagreement over the meaning and utility

of the concept. Some Avineri, 1969; Oilman, 1971; Meszaros, 1970) con­

tend that the concept is synonymous with Marx's concepts of alienation

and commodity fetishism and is useful in explaining why people in modern

capitalist society are dehumanized and powerless, why they have not

stood up and issued in a socialist society. Others (Colletti, 1973,

1974a) have argued that the concept of reification is synonymous with

Marx!s concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism and is useful

for epistemological and methodological reasons—i.e. as a critique

of the methods of political economy or "bourgeois science," and the

misleading and erroneous conclusions about social reality they conse­

quently arrive at. Still others (Althusser, 1971, 1977; Colletti,

1975) have argued that its meaning is synonymous with alienation and

24

commodity fetishism but that these are all concepts couched in humanist

ideology and therefore are of no utility to sociological research be­

cause they assume an ideal state of society and humanity which we have

deviated from and must return to if social problems are to be overcome.

That is, they make anthropological assumptions which are not of scien­

tific relevance because they focus on ideals rather than the empirical

reality.

Beyond the Marxist camp we find others suggesting that the con­

cept of reification can be useful only if it is freed from Marxist

trappings. Here stand Berger and Pullberg arguing reification is a

useful concept for explaining why people are controlled by social

forces when society is in reality no more than an extension of them­

selves. Israel, on the other hand, suggests the utility of the con­

cept lies in its capacity for explaining the basis of dehumanization

in modern industrial society.

The fundamental question this study aims to answer with regard

to the utility of the concept is whether or not its referent is empir­

ical. In other words, does the concept of reification have an identi­

fiable referrent in the real world which is amenable to empirical study

and investigation? If it is found that the referent is not empirical,

focus will shift to the question of whether or not the concept can be

reformulated to be of use to contemporary sociology and, if so, the

direction in which such reformulation should proceed. If, on the

other hand, it is found that the referent is empirical, the specific

nature of the utility will become the focus of attention.

25

Methods

The objectives of this study require methods for both clarifying

the meaning of the concept and determining its utility for sociological

research. The methods employed in this study towards these ends are

interdependent, as explained below.

Clarification of the meaning and utility of the concept of reifi­

cation is first of all contingent upon clarification of Marx's rela­

tion to Hegel. This is the case because the concepts and theories of

reification developed by Lukács, Berger and Pullberg, and Israel de­

pend heavily on the Marxian concepts of alienation and the fetishism

of commodities in defining what reification is. However, as pointed

out above, the meaning and significance of these concepts in Marx's

thought is an issue of immense controversey among Marxists. Some

(Althusser, 1970, 1971, 1977; Avineri, 1969; Meszaros, 1970; Oilman,

1971; Colletti, 1975) claim they are idealistic Hëgelian concepts

which reflect ideological concerns of humanism rather than anything of-

relevance to the scientific study of capitalist society. Others

(Colletti, 1973, 1974a) argue to the contrary that Marx's concepts

of alienation and the fetishism of commodities developed out of Marx's

critique of Hegel's idealism and the scientific method of political

economy and refer to the consequences of faulty scientific method for

society at large. In addition to the controversy over the meaning

of these concepts among Marxists, another important question is raised

by the theorists of reification who adhere to other theoretical per­

spectives. Both Berger and Pullberg and Israel suggest that the concept

26

of reification can only be of sociological utility if it is transposed

into what they consider a more valid theoretical perspective. In other

words, they find significance in the concept of reification itself

which cannot be realized within the Marxian theoretical framework.

Therefore, in addition to determining the meaning of Marx's concepts

of alienation and the fetishism of commodities, it must also be de­

termined if these concepts can be lifted from their original theoreti­

cal framework without dragging along assumptions and implications

generally characteristic of that theoretical framework.

The first step towards clarifying Marx's relation to Hegel neces­

sitates a clear understanding of Hegel's idealism and the nature of

the relationship between his idealism, dialectical method and concept

of alienation. This is the subject of chapter two. Clarification on

these issues is an essential starting point for clarification of the

concept of reification because it is only after these questions have

been answered that one can address the fundamental question of whether

Hegel's dialectical method is separable from the idealism of his overall

theoretical scheme and then whether or not Marx extended Hegel's

dialectic for use within a materialist framework. This information

will in turn facilitate determination of whether Marx's concepts of

alienation and the fetishism of commodities are Hegelian and idealistic.

An extended analysis of Marx's intellectual development, however,

is also required for the clarification of the meaning and significance

of his concepts of alienation and the fetishism of commodities and

whether they are reflective of Hegelian idealism or rooted in his

27

scientific study of capitalist society. Marx's development is the topic

of chapter three. The assumptions of materialism and the Marxian

critique of idealism are also important topics of this chapter.

Having clarified the nature and extent of the Hegelian idealist

influence on Marx, the similarities and differences between Hegel's and

Marx's dialectical methods and concepts of alienation, and whether

Marx's concepts of alienation and the fetishism of commodities have

the same referent and meaning, the stage will finally be set for a

discussion and analysis of the meaning of Lukács', Berger and Pull-

berg's and Israel's concepts and theories of reification. Clarifica­

tion of these concepts and theories of reification is the topic of

chapter four. In this chapter these three concepts and theories of

reification will be compared and analyzed to determine whether their

identification of the concept with the concepts of alienation and

fetishism of commodities is valid.

The fifth and final chapter offers an analysis of the utility of

the concept of reification for sociological research. Chapter four

will specify the referent or referents of the concepts of reification

in Lukács, Berger and Pullberg and Israel. The final chapter will

offer an interpretation of the existing and potential utility of the

concept. As indicated previously, the basic question this study aims

to answer with regard to the utility of the concept is whether or not

its referent is empirical. A basic assumption guiding the interpreta­

tion of the utility of the concept of reification in this study is

that if concepts are to be of use in the scientific study of society,

28

their referents must be things, phenomena, or processes which have an

actual material existence. That concepts must be rooted in materialist

assumptions in order to be of use in the scientific study of society O

is the contention of a growing number of social scientists who advocate

a realist theory of science (cf. Bhaskar, 1975; Timpanaro, 1975;

Colletti, 1975; Ruben, 1979; see also Stinchcombe, 1978 for a similar

variation of this theme)^ The basic premise of this scientific

realism is that "there could not be knowledge without antecedents"

(Bhaskar, 1975: 250). The basic argument is that while concepts rooted

in materialist assumptions are not always valid or accurate (note

Feuerbach), concepts rooted in idealism cannot be of any scientific

utility because they deny the existence or concrete empirical nature

of social reality by suggesting that knowledge or thought is the basis

of all reality. In other words, idealism denies concrete reality

because it suggests that social reality can be changed simply through

knowledge or thought itself. Therefore, for example, if it is argued

that there is an uderlying reality which is somehow hidden because of

some sort of illusion and that if the veil concealing true reality is

snatched away everyone will comprehend and understand the true nature

of things and therefore things will change, this is a position rooted

in idealism because it suggests that knowledge itself will lead to

change. This position denies that there is a real, empirical, struc­

tural, external basis for the "illusion." Instead, the problems of

the real world are viewed as a matter of misperception. According to

scientific realism, scientific knowledge and social change are not

necessarily interrelated processes. As Bhaskar explains:

29

Thought has a reality not to be confused or identi­fied with the reality of its objects: knowledge may change without objects and objects may change without knowledge (1975: 250).

Dogs do not lose their power to bark when we understand how they do so, just as glass does not cease to be brittle when we know its molecule structure (1975: 177).

In brief then, the position of scientific realism is that the scien­

tist must assume that the real world exists and construct concepts

which grasp this reality. In the words of Bhaskar (1975: 62):

Scientists try to discover the reason for things and events, patterns and processes, sequences and structures. To understand how they do so one needs both a concept of the transitive process of knowledge-production and a concept of the intransi­tive objects of the knowledge they produce: the real mechanisms that generate the actual phenomena of the world, including as a special case our per­ceptions of them.

It should be made clear that the position of the scientific

realists is not at odds with Weber's work on the role of ideas of

real corporeal people in influencing change in social structure, for

in Weber's study of Thè Protestant Ethic and the Spiri t of Capi tai ism,

the ideas were the ideas of concrete, materially existing people and

the religious belief system of Calvinsim was not consciously geared

towards the development of capitalism.

To sum up, the clarification of the meaning of the concept of

reification and its utility will be accomplished in this study through

clarification of Marx's relation to Hegel and implementation of the

basic criterion of scientific realism.

3o

CHAPTER TWO

ISSUES ON HEGEL

As pointed out in the previous chapter, there is considerable de­

bate as to whether Hegel's philosophy is a coherent system or an incon­

sistent system characterized by both a radical method and a conserva­

tive ideology. Clarification of this issue is essential to clarifica­

tion of the concept of reification because Lukcas'.¿early formulation

emerged from his unorthodox Marxist contention that Marx's dialectic

is in fact an inversion of Hegel's, i.e. the application of materi­

alistic concepts to an already radical method. Viewing Hegel's philos-

phy as one rooted in subjectivism and voluntarism, Lukács contended

that recognition of the relation between Hegel's and Marx's dialectic

would justify a change in the official Communist Party tactics and

position from one of determinism and mechanism to recognition of the

necessity for voluntarism and subjectivism in revolutionary endeavor

(cf. Arato, 1972a). Given this, it needs to be determined whether

Lukács' interpretation of Marx's relation to Hegel is valid. That

is, does Hegel's philosophy contain a subjectivism and revolutionary

method which were employed by Marx in a materialist revolutionary

manner.

Hegel's philosphy is a direct critique of both empiricism and

all previous idealism. The problem with empiricism, according to

Hegel, is that it does not comprehend that history is an unfolding

process and therefore erroneously postulates that the nature and

essence of social phenomena can be ascertained from their immediate

31

appearance as fixed things. In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel

(1965:. 48) has this to say about the empiricists:

What, is familiar is not known simply because it is familiar. It is the most common self-deception and deception of others to presuppose something as famil­iar when it comes to knowledge, and to accept this; but with all its talking back and forth such knowl­edge, without knowing what is happening to it, never gets anywhere. The subject and object, etc., God, nature, the understanding, the sensibility, etc., are presupposed as familiar and valid foundations without having been scrutinized, and they are accepted as fixed points of both departure and return. They remain unmoved as one moves back and forth between them--and thus only in their surfaces.

While empiricism fails on the matter of process, idealism has until

now, Hegel tells us, failed to transcend the dichotomy between thought

and matter, as illustrated, for example, in Kant's residue of the

thing-in-itself. The following excerpt from the Phenomenology (1965:

78) indicates Hegel's attitude towards Kant's formalism:

The trick of such wisdom {schematizing formalism} is learned as quickly as it is easy to master it; its repetition, once it is known, becomes as in­sufferable as the repetition of a sleight of hand one sees through. The instrument of this monot­onous formalism is no more difficult to handle than a painter's palette on which there are only two colors, say, red and green,one if an histor­ical piece is wanted, the other for landscapes.

. . .The product of this method of labeling every­thing in heaven and earth, all natural and spirit­ual forms, with a few determinations of the general schema, and thus pigeonholing everything, is nothing less than a sun-clear report* on the organism of the universe--namely a tabulation that is like a skele­ton with little pieces of paper stuck all over it, or like the rows of closed, labeled jars in a spicer's stall. While it is an explicit as both of

32

these, it is like them in other ways too: here, flesh and blood are removed from the bones; there, the also not living matter is concealed in jars; and in the report, the living essence of matter is left out.

What distinguishes Hegel's philosophy from other philosophies is

the integration of two basic assumptions: (1) ". . .the structure of

the universe is ultimately rational and thus can be known as such. . ."

(Avineri, 1972: 118); and (2) ". . .truth is not a minted coin which

can be given and pocketed ready made" (Hegel, 1965: 58). Thus Hegel's

philosophy employs reason to understand the fluid nature of the uni­

verse. As Hegel explains (1965: 52, 54):

This movement of pure entities constitutes the nature of what is scientific. As far as the co­herence of the contents is concerned, it means the necessity and elaboration of the contents into an organic whole. The way in which the Concept^ of knowledge is reached thus also be­comes a necessary and complete becoming. Hence, this preparation ceases to be a fortuitous bit of philosophizing that takes off from these or those objects, relationships, and thoughts of the imperfect consciousness, depending on fortuituous circumstances, nor does it seek to establish what is true by reasoning back and forth, inferring and drawing consequences from determinate thoughts. Rather this way will encompass, by virtue of the movement of the Concept, the complete worldliness of consciousness in its necessity.

While this excerpt clearly illustrates Hegel's concern with the dynamics

of movement and becoming, his conception of reason remains obscure.

Since reason is a central concept in Hegel's thought, it is necessary

to investigate the precise meaning and significance he assigns to it.

33

According to Hegel, reason is the unfolding of history (Avineri,

1972: 65, 90, 118). Such a conception seems to suggest that reason is

therefore not something which exists a priori. Further, Hegel (1967:

10) considers ". . .rationality. . .synonymous with the Idea. . ."

These conceptualizations, taken by themselves, and not within their

intended framework of idealism, tend to suggest that the Idea or Reason

are products of individual will or consciousness. Indeed, the follow­

ing isolated excerpts tend to confirm such an interpretation:

To explain history means to reveal the passions of men, their genius, their active powers (Hegel,1953: 15).

In contemplating world history we must thus con­sider its ultimate purpose. This ultimate purpose is what is willed in the world itself (Hegel, 1953:21).

Man is his own action, the sequence of his actions, that into which he has been making himself (Hegel,1953: 51).

. . .World history is not the verdict of mere might, i.e. the abstract and non-rational inevi­tability of a blind destiny (Hegel, 1967: para­graph 342).

The history of mind is its own act (Hegel, 1967: paragraph 343).

Such an interpretation of these concepts of Idea, Reason, will, mind,

or consciousness in Hegel as characteristics of real living people is,

however, clearly untenable. On the contrary, if we examine Hegel's

philosophy in toto, we find that individual and material reality are

nothing more than manifestations of these concepts. Thus, Hegel's

concepts of Idea, Reason, mind, and will have a meaning quite dif­

ferent from that which common sense suggests. What surfaces here as

34

Hegel's philosophy is not a subjectivism, as Lukács believed, but rather

a history dictated by external necessity. In a word, Hegel's philosophy

is deterministic. The following excerpts couch the apparently subjec­

tive concepts in the Hegelian idealism for which they were intended and

illustrate their external nature and thus the determinism of the phi­

losophy:

. . .it {World Spirit} is the activity of the sub­jects in whom Reason is present as their substan­tial essence in itself, but still obscure and con­cealed from them (Hegel, 1953: 48).

Individuals are the manifestation of Spirit:

. . .in regard to Spirit one cannot set aside its manifestations. The manifestation of Spirit is its actual self-determination, and this is the element of its concrete nature. Spirit which does not determine itself is an abstraction of the intellect. The manifestation of Spirit is its self-determination,.and it is this manifes­tation that we have to investigate in the form of states and individuals (Hegel, 1953: 51).

Man is the manifestation of the will of God or the Idea:

God and the nature of his will are one and the same; these we call philosophically, the Idea. Hence it is the Idea in general, in its manifes­tation as human spirit, which we have to contem­plate (Hegel, 1953: 21-22).

Human will is imported from external sources:

. . .If you stop at the consideration that, having an arbitrary will, a man can will this or that, then of course his freedom consists in that ability. But if you keep firmly in view that the content of his willining is a given one, then he is deter­mined thereby and in that respect at all events is no longer free (Hegel, 1967: addition to paragraph 15).

35

While these excerpts do suggest determinism in Hegel, the argument

is not dependent on this particular interpretation based on just another

set of selected excerpts. The following excerpt from Reason in History

(1953: 11) explicitly states what has been argued up to this point:

The sole thought which philosophy brings to the treatment of history is the simple concept of Reason: that Reason is the law of the world and that, therefore, in world history, things have come about rationally. This conviction and in­sight is a presupposition of history as such; in philosophy itself it is not presupposed. Through its speculative reflection philosophy has demon­strated that Reason--and this term may be accepted here without closer examination of its relation to God—is both substance and infinite power, in it­self the infinite material of all natural and spiritual life as well as the infinite form, the actualization of itself in content. It is sub­stance, that is to say, that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence. It is infinite power, for Reason is not so impotent as to bring about only the ideal, the ought, and to remain in an existence outside of reality—who knows where—as something peculiar in the heads of a few people. It is the infinite content of all essence and truth, for it does not require, as does the finite activity, the condition of external materials, of given data from which to draw nour­ishment and objects of its activity; it supplies its own nourishment and its own reference. And it is infinite form, for only in its image and by its fiat do phenomena arise and begin to live. It is its own exclusive presupposition and absolutely final purpose, and itself works out this purpose from potentiality into actuality, from inward source to outward appearance, not only in the natural but also in the spiritual universe, in world history. That this Idea or Reason is the True, Eternal, the Absolute Power and that it is nothing but it, its glory and majesty, manifests itself in the world—this, as we said before, has been proved in philosophy and is being presupposed here as proved.

36

Here we find a clear statement that Reason is external to man and pre­

supposes history. This further provides for a clearer interpretation

of the meaning behind Hegel1s fanous Owl of Minerva passage (1967: 13).

The teaching of the coicept, which is also his­tory's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against tie real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. Wien philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.By philosophy's grey oi grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.

According to Hegel, then, philosiphy can only understand history, it

cannot change or create it. Reason and philosophy are thus no way in

synch. This is necessarily the ;ase since Reason or Idea is said to

presuppose history; individuals sr collectivities have nothing to do

with history in Hegel's scheme. History, being determined by external

forces, can only be comprehended.

The above has illustrated tiat Lukács was wrong in believeing that

Hegel's philosophy is rooted in subjectivism and voluntarism. What

needs to be established now is whether he was right in contending that

the philosophy contained a revolutionary method within a conservative

system. This is an enormously difficult issue to come to grips with--

the bulk of the literature addressed to it is clear testimony to that.

However, if we keep one key prem se in mind, pieces start' falling into

place which suggest that Hegel's philosophy is indeed a unified and

coherent system. This premise, as stated by Hegel himself, is: "The

idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else but the recognition

37

that the finite has no veritable being" (Hegel in Colletti, 1973: 14).

In other words, Hegel's goal was to prove that the material world has

no reality. The method he uses to accomplish this goal is what sug­

gests that the philosophy is coherent. The method is his dialectic

itself. That is, his dialectical method is the method through which

Hegel abolishes matter and proves thought absolute. Further, the method

is posited as the method of historical change which culuminates in the

freedom of self-knowledge with the establishment of the State. The

realization of idealism and historical change are therefore the result

of one method in Hegel's philosophy--the idealism and the method cannot

be separated.

Let us examine the presuppositions and mechanisms of this dialec­

tical method in Hegel. In Hegel's dialectic the basic assumption is

that only Reason exists. However, Reason in itself is unreflective,

ije. it does not know itself, it is not conscious of itself. The

self-knowledge must be accomplished through the process of history-

history is the unfolding of Reason and the history of the dialectical

movement. In the second moment of the dialectic, Reason manifests or

objectifies itself in matter. As a result, Reason is both alienated

from itself and negated. Objective matter has no "true or veritable

being" because it is only an alienation of the only thing which does

have true being, Reason.. Thus alienation is on the one hand a neces­

sary element of the dialectic and on the other hand non-being, something

which must be overcome if true or real being is to exist. In this con­

text Hegel's equation of objectification and alienation becomes clear—

all objectifications reflect the state of alienation. -

38

In the next moment of the dialectic alienation is overcome through

the self-knowledge of Reason. That is, Reason becomes conscious that

all the alien matter which it does not feel comfortable with is nothing

but an extension of itself. This understanding yields realization of

the totality or unity between Reason and its alienation, or in more

familiar terms, subject and object. This solution to the phenomenon

of alienation both denies the reality of matter and brings history to

a higher stage of development. Reason does not unfold itself in one

fell swoop. Rather, it requires three stages of history before its

fourth and final stage, where freedom is finally realized through full

self-consciousness,:is.achieved. The concluding paragraphs of Philosophy

of Right clearly convey the essence of Hegel's philosophy as Reason

coming into being through the dialectical method in the historical

process:

The concrete Ideas, the minds of the nations, have their truth and their destiny in the concrete Idea which is absolute universality, i.e. in the world mind. Around its throne they stand as the execu­tors of its actualization and as signs and orna­ments of its grandeur. As mind, it is nothing but its active movement towards absolute knowledge of itself and therefore towards freeing its conscious­ness from the form of natural immediacy and so coming to itself. Therefore the principles of the formations of this self-consciousness in the course of its 1iberation--the world historical realms--are four in number (Hegel, 1967: paragraph 352).

In its first and immediate revelation, mind has as its principle the shape of the substantial mind, i.e., the shape of the identity in which individu­ality is absorbed in its essence..and its claims are not explicitly recognized.

39

The second principle is this substantial mind endowed with knowledge so that mind is both the positive content and filling of mind and also the individual self-awareness which is the living form of mind. This principle is ethical individu­ality as beauty.

The third principle is the inward deepening of this individual self-awareness and knowledge until it reaches abstract universality and therefore infinite opposition to the objective world which in the same process has become mind-forsaken.

The principle of the fourth formation is the con­version of this opposition so that mind receives in its inner life its truth and concrete essence, while in objectivity it is at home and reconciled with itself. The mind which has thus reverted to the substantiality with which it began is the mind which has returned out of the infinite opposition, and which consequently engenders and knows this its truth as thought and as a world of actual laws (Hegel, 1967: paragraph 353).

In accordance with these four principles, the world-historical realms are the following: (1) the Oriental, (2) the Greek, (3) the Roman, (4) the Germanic (Hegel, 1967: paragraph 354).

Hegel's philosophy of history thus assumes a definite beginning and end

point. History must necessarily end according to his philosophy be­

cause its only motor force is the dialectic and the only reason why

the dialectic exists is to allow Reason to become aware of itself. Once

self-consciousness is achieved, Reason will have come into itself and

thus simply will be. Utopianism is not absent from Hegel's thought.

What is most important to understand about Hegel's philosophy,

therefore, is that his dialectic is the method used to prove that matter

has no real existence, since it is only an alienation, the negation of

the Idea, and therefore that Thought is the only true reality. Alien­

ation is a necessary element of the dialectic, for it is only through

40

alienation that the Idea or Thought can "realize" itself or gain "self-

knowledge," since the Idea itself is inherently unreflective. But

alienation has no meaning beyond the role it plays in the dialectic--

it cannot be separated from the dialectic, that is, and have any

meaning or significance as a concept. Alienation is only non-being.

From this it is clear that Hegel's philosophy presupposes a given,

absolute essence--what he calls the totality or oneness of Reason (or

Idea or Thought) and matter. This inextricable unity of the dialecti­

cal method and system of idealism in Hegel's philosophy means that any­

one who uses this dialectic for other purposes will inevitably,

though probably unwittingly, wind up with conclusions of an idealistic

and deterministic nature.

This analysis of Hegel suggests that the Humanist Marxists, in­

cluding Lukács, are wrong in their interpretation of Hegel (see also

Arato, 1971, 1972a). Hegel's philosophy contains neither a subjec­

tivist premise nor an inconsistent radical method and conservative

ideology. What needs to be determined now is whether or not Marx

actually did use the Hegelian dialectic, as Lukács suggests he did,

and therefore unbeknownst to himself, as well as Lukács and others,

remained within the parameters of idealism. This question, along

with others germane to the nature of Hegel's and Marx's relationship

are the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER THREE

MARX: DIALECTICS, ALIENATION AND THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES

There are two clearly different conceptualizations of alienation,

dialectic and totality in Marx's work. The conceptualizations vary

according to whether the theorizing springs from an idealistic or ma­

terialistic framework. While it is true that 1845 and the writing of

the German Ideology mark an "epistemological break" (Althusser, 1977)

in Marx's work and signify Marx's awareness of idealism in his own

thought as well as Feuerbach's, and the limitations thereof, this does

not mean that all works subsequent to this date are necessarily

scientific and materialistic (cf. Nicolaus, 1978). Neither does it

mean, as Althusser (1970: 193; 1971: 120)1 has contended, that all

references to the concepts of alienation and totality in the post

1845 work reflect an idealistic aberration just because they are

reminiscent of the earlier idéaliste concern with them. However, this

in turn does not indicate that one singular conception of alienation

is the central problematic and scientific concern throughout all

Marx's work, as Colletti (1974a: 39; 1973: 178, 195) has argued. The

goal of this chapter is to illustrate that: (1) Marx's pre 1845 work

is idealistic because it is grounded on the assumption that an inverted

Hegelian philosophy can accommodate a material explanation of reality

and historical process; (2) Marx did not find full theoretical expres­

sion for his materialism until 1857; (3) the concept of the fetishism

of commodities is central to Marx's materialism; and (4) the concepts

of alienation, totality and dialectic, while indispensable to Marx's

42

mature materialism are radically different from those included in Hegel's

philosophy.

The Early Works: 1840-1844

What Marx and Engels (1947: 64) said of Feuerbach in the German

Ideology is equally applicable to Marx's early works:

As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him mate­rialism and history diverge completely. . . .

Marx's materialism is evident from the very beginning. His first pub­

lication, Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, is singularly con­

cerned with a critique of Hegel's idealism. That his critique is not

just one idealist criticizing the philosophy of another is clear. Marx

undeniably rejects the legitimacy of idealistic philosophy and posits

that philosophy should root itself in the real, empirical, material

world. What Hegel does, Marx argues, is deduce the empirical from an

abstract concept, the Idea. The result of this method, according to

Marx, is a "mysticism" or a "mystical" explanation of the material

world. It is mystical, Marx suggests, because in Hegel, "The ordinary

empirical world is not governed by its own mind but by a mind alien to

it. . ." (Marx, 1974a: 62) and ". . .because the empirical fact in its

empirical existence has a meaning other than itself" (Marx, 1974a: 63).

Thus real living human beings and the social institutions which exist

are explained as being the expression of external forces in a manner

similar to, if not rooted in (cf. Colletti, 1973), the Christian ex­

planation of the world as God's will.

43

Marx vehemently argues that this idealism is unsound methodologi­

cally and that the implications are inherently conservative. Marx's

position on method is the best indication of his materialism. Here he

clearly assumes the necessity of beginning with corporeal man and ex­

plaining everything else as an extension of him rather than the abstract

Idea. Thus Marx posits that Hegel's idealism inverts the actual sub­

ject-object relationship in history. In Hegel the abstract Idea is

subject and man is its predicate, i.e. object. In reality, man is the

subject and his creations are the objects. The following excerpts from

Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State clearly illustrate Marx's

materiali sm:

The crux of the matter is that Hegel everywhere makes the Idea into the subject, while the genuine, real subject. . .is turned into the predicate (1974a: 65).

{With Hegel,}. . .the Idea is made into the sub­ject, the distinct members and their reality are understood as its development, its result. . . (1974a: 66).

The fact which serves as a starting point is not seen as such but as a mystical result (1974a: 63).

In appearance and in his own opinion. . .he {Hegel} has derived the particular from the "uni­versal Idea". He has converted into a product, a predicate of the Idea, what was properly its subject. He does not develop his thought from the object, but instead the object is constructed according to a system of thought perfected in the abstract sphere of logic (1974a: 69).

The existence of the predicates is the subject: thus the subject is the existence of subjectivity etc. Hegel makes the predicates, the objects, autonomous, but he does this by separating them from their real autonomy, viz. their subject. The real subject subsequently appears as a result,

44

whereas the correct approach would be to start with the real subject and then consider its objectification. The mystical substance there­fore becomes the real subject, while the actual subject appears as something else, namely as a moment of the mystical substance (1974a: 80);

Hegel's purpose is to narrate the life-history of abstract substance, of the Idea, and in such a history human activity etc. necessarily appears as the activity and product of something other than itself; he therefore represents the essence of man as an imaginary detail instead of allow­ing it to function in terms of its real human existence. This leads him to convert the sub­jective into the objective and the objective into the subjective with the inevitable result that an empirical person is uncritically en­throned as the real truth of the idea (1974a:98).

Rather than make.the subjects objectify them­selves in "matters of universal concern", Hegel causes the "matters of universal concern" to extend into the "subject." The "subjects" do not require "matters of universal concern" for their own true concern, but matters of universal concern stand in need of the subjects for their formal existence (1974a: 125).

{In Hegel} The subject is the thing and the predicate is the human being (1974a: 175).

It is self evident that the true way is turned upside down. The most simple thing becomes the most complicated and the most complicated be­comes the most simple. What should be a start­ing point becomes a mystical result and what should be a rational result becomes a mystical starting point (1974a: 99-100).

Implicit in these excerpts is the further concern that a clear

justification of the status quo results from this inversion of subject

and object. More explicitly, Marx states:

45

Thus empirical reality is accepted as it is; it is even declared to be rational. However, it is not rational by virtue of its own reason, but be­cause the empirical fact in its empirical exis­tence, has a meaning other than itself. The fact which serves as a starting-point is not seen as such but as a mystical result (1974a: 63).

A further consequence of this mystical speculation is that a particular empirical existent, a single empirical existent distinct from all others, is deemed the Idea in empirical form (1974a: 99).

While Marx is critical of Hegel in the early writings because his

idealism simply deduces.what should be explained, he is equally criti­

cal of Political Economy. Political Economy, while it is materialist

insofar as it begins its analysis with the real world, is ahistorical

and for this reason arrives at conclusions which are as erroneous and

disturbing to Marx as Hegel's are. For example, Marx begins his

Excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy (1974e: 259-

60) as follows:

Both on the question of the relations of money to the value of metal and in his demonstration that the cost of production is the sole factor in the deter­mination of value Mill succumbs to the error, made by the entire Ricardo school, of defining an ab­stract law without mentioning the fluctuations or the continual suspension through which it comes into being. If e.g. it is an invariable law that in the last analysis--or rather in the sporadic? coincidence of supply and demand—the cost of production determines price,3 then it is no less an invariable law that these relations do not obtain, i.e. that the value and the cost of production do not stand in any necessary relation. Indeed, supply and demand only ever coincide momentarily thanks to a previous fluctuation in supply and demand, to the disparity between the cost of production and the exchange value. And

46

in like fashion, the momentary coincidence is succeeded by the same fluctuations and the same disparity. This is the real movement, then, and the above-mentioned law is no more than an ab­stract, contingent, and one-sided moment in it. Yet recent economists dismiss it as accidental, as inessential. Why? Because if the economists were.to attempt to fix this movement in the sharp and precise terms to which they reduce the whole of economics this would produce the follow­ing basic formula: laws in economics are deter­mined by their opposite, lawlessness. The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

Marx's critique of Hegel and Political Economy indicates the two

primary assumptions which underlie his early works: (1) the starting

point of philosophy must be the real, empirical, world (materialism);

and (2) the material world must be comprehended as an historical pro­

cess. Given this, Marx initially believed that the proper method could

be achieved with an inversion of Hegel's philosophy. Marx comprehended

Hegel's philosophy as the coherent philosophy it is, but one that was

"upside-down" because of its idealistic presuppositions. In turning

the philosophy "on its feet," i.e.. recognizing corporeal man as the

subject of history, Marx assumed that Hegel's dialectic, Hegel's ex­

planation of social change, had also been stood right side up and that

the "kernel" could be used to explain the dynamics of the material

world.

That Marx's materialism is plugged into the Hegelian dialectic

and therefore bears idealist conclusions is clear from-On the Jewish

Question. Marx's major position in this manuscript is that problems

of state cannot be solved politically because the basis of the state

47

is civil society. If the state is to be changed, it is necessary first

to change the economic structure in which it is rooted. This was his

response to the Young Hegelians, especially Bruno Bauer, who were

pressing for political reform so that Hegel's ideal state, the realiza­

tion of the universal principles of freedom and happiness, could be

attained. For them social problems were of a political nature. For

example, Bauer argued that Jews should not seek religious freedom in

the existing corrupt state, but rather renounce their religion alto­

gether and work for the creation of a totally free state. Marx begins

his attack on Bauer by arguing that political emancipation does not

preclude religion and that to understand religion we must ground it in

the material world:

What is the relationship between complete political emancipation and religion? If in the land of com­plete political emancipation {U.S.} we find not only that religion exists but that it exists in a fresh and vigorous form, that proves that the existence of religion does not contradict the perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence of a defect, the source of this de­fect must be looked for in the nature of the state itself. We no longer see religion as the basis but simply as a phenomenon of secular narrowness.We therefore explain the religious restriction on the free citizens from the secular restriction they experience. . .We do not turn secular ques­tions into theological questions. We turn theo­logical questions into secular questions. History has been resolved into superstition for long enough (1974c: 217).

However, in further developing his arguments regarding the

material basis of the state and religion, Marx employs several

idealistic concepts which are couched in a Hegelian dialectical

48

framework. First he contends that political emancipation is not synon­

ymous with human emancipation:

Political emancipation from religion is not com­plete and consistent emancipation from religion, because political emancipation is not the complete and consistent form of human emancipation (1974c:218).

Here Marx suggests that there is some sort of absolute human freedom

which should be achieved. That this position reflects an attempt to

invert Hegel, i.e. substitute human freedom for the self-consciousness

of Reason, is not difficult to see. That this anthropological abstrac­

tion of human nature is hooked into the framework of the Hegelian dia­

lectic is clear from Marx's contention that religion emerges from an

artificial rift between the individual economic person and the public

political person:

The members of the political state are religious because of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious inasmuch as man considers political life, which is far removed from his actual individuality, to be his true life and inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society and the expression of the separation and distance of man from man (1974c: 225).

The solution coincides exactly with the solution of the Hegelian dia­

lectic, realization of totality or unity:

Only when real, individual man resumes the ab­stract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social forces is no longer separated from

49

him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed (1974c:234).

Marx's position in On the Jewish Question therefore illustrates

that his materialism employs the Hegelian concepts of alienation and

totality within the Hegelian dialectical method to explain historical

change. Thus, his use of the Hegelian dialectic, even though he

substitutes what he believes to be materialist concepts (species­

being, human essence, rather than abstract Idea; man being alienated

from himself and others rather than Reason being alienated from it­

self), inevitably results in a definite idealism in his thought with

regard to historical focus or social change. Thus the ironic concern

with material reality and the idealistic explanation of its change.

This dualism in Marx's early work becomes even more evident in

his publications as they lead up to the 1845 recognition of its exis­

tence. In Critique of Hegel1s Philosophy of Right, Marx focuses on

the task of philosophy, the relationship between theory and practice,

and for the first time posits the proletariat as mediator of human

emancipation. The,mysterious.nature of civil society, the same

"mysterious" reality deduced in Hegel's philosophy, is central to

Marx's early position on the task of philosophy. The nature of the

reality of civil society is mysterious because it presents itself as

something it is not. Things appear one way but their actual reality

is different. This is because civil society is a state of alienation.

True human essence, being detached from itself, cannot comprehend

its true reality, its unalienated total self. Because of this it

50

necessarily becomes the task of philosophy "to unmask self-estrangement

in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has

been unmasked" and thus to turn the criticism of "heaven" to the criti­

cism of "earth" (1974d: 244-45).

There are three key passages in this manuscript which illustrate

how Marx is idealistic in his explanation of historical change. The

first concerns the relationship between theory and practice:

Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons, and material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also be­comes a material force once it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad homenem, and it demonstrates ad homenem as soon as it becomes radical. To be

.radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. Clear proof of the radicalism of German theory and its practical en­ergy is the fact that it takes as its point of departure a decisive and positive transcendence of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that for man the supreme being is man, and thus with the categorical imperative to .overthrow all conditions in which man is a.debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being. . . (1974d: 251).

The second one concerns the role of the proletariat:

So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation? This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society a class which is the dissolution of all

- classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in gen­eral; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to historical title, but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided

51

opposition to the consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German politi­cal system; and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from--and thereby emancipating-all other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem it­self only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat (1974d:256).

The third key contention of this manuscript is the conclusion:

The head of the emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat and the proletariat cannot transcend itself with­out the realization of philosophy.

When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock (T974d: 257).

These three passages indicate that Marx's initial premise is

materialist, "material force must be overthrown by material force."

His description of reality is materialist. However, when he goes on

to explain how material force will overthrow material force, he is

clearly idealistic. When Marx claims that "theory. . .becomes a

material force once it has gripped the masses," and that this happens

automatically once theory has become radical, he is suggesting that

radical theory yields true self-knowledge, knowledge of the unalienated

human essence, the unmasking of illusory appearance and that this self-

knowledge, in and of itself, necessarily results in revolutionary

change. Knowledge or consciousness is therefore relegated the position

of ultimate reality. Material reality is given second billing since in

this explanation it simply reflects knowledge, and is nothing in itself.

52

This is the case, it should be noted, despite Marx's substitution

of new concepts into the Hegelian dialectic. For example, he casts out

criticism of religion, which he finds idealistic, and replaces it with

the concept of human essence and further introduces what he considers

a concrete mediator, the proletariat, to replace Hegel's automatic,

non-mediated self-knowledge of Reason. Substitution of these concepts

is, however, inconsequential since the concept of human essence is it­

self idealistic, and while the working class is a material reality,

the characteristics applied to it are idealistic. The concept of human

essence is nothing more than a "mist enveloped" abstract concept which

Marx here uses to deduce what real, empirical humans should be like,

and the proletariat is conceptualized as the alienation of this

essence, NOT-human essence, because of its degradation. When the

proletarians "real ize-," ‘through the help of radical theory, that they

are not really what they are because they are only alienations of it,

they realize their human essence and therefore necessarily change the

world. It would therefore hardly be surprising for anyone to conclude

from this manuscript that Marx's theory of revolution is religious,

messianic, and fanatic, especially if certain key terms are taken into

account, the "redemption of humanity" and the German "resurrection."

This manuscript therefore illustrates that no matter how much Marx's

materialism is screaming for theoretical expression, it is quieted and

even ignored when it comes to explaining historical change.

This materialist-idealist dualism in Marx's early work is further

pronounced in the two major manuscripts written in 1844, Excerpts from

53

James Mill' s Elements of Political Economy and Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts. It is in these manuscripts that Marx begins his analysis of

capitalism. This exploration of the capitalist system again signifies

his materialist effort or premise. But, even though he is formulating

concepts to facilitate a materialist comprehension of capital, he views

that which is specific to capitalist production not as concrete material

reality in itself, but rather as historical forms of human alienation.

As pointed out above, Marx's basic criticism of Political Economy is

its ahistorical premise. Political Economy takes the existing reality

and abstracts absolute universal laws from it. This leads to a faulty

conception of reality and thus erroneous conclusions. The politcal

economists are wrong, Marx argues, insofar as they take the existing

alienated state as given and immutable. Thus here we find Marx on the

one hand arguing we must understand the nature of the real material

world and on the other hand denying its existence by claiming it is no

more than an alienated form of human essence. For example, in Excerpts

from.James Mill, Marx develops the concepts of money, wage-labour, credit

and banking as social relations, a materialist position, but then brings

them into an idealist framework by claiming they are human relations

which are forms of human alienation: "We see then how economics estab­

lishes the estranged form of social commerce as the essential and

fundamental form appropriate to the vocation of man" (1974e: 266).

The important point to recognize in this stage of Marx's work is

that while he contends that there is no Absolute Being or Truth because

reality is no more than a formation of social relations of people en­

gaged in economic production and therefore continues to change, he also

54

assumes that the reality of capital is an estranged or alienated form

of the human essence. This assumption is clearly reflected in Marx's

discussion of non-alienated labor in this manuscript (1974e: 277-78).

The analysis of capital in Excerpts from James Mill appears in

expanded form in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It also

continues to be couched in a Hegelian framework, since self-knowledge

continues to be the only mechanism of historical change in Marx's

theory at this point. In the first sections of these manuscripts Marx

presents his views on capital as stored up labour (1974f: 295), the

relation of wages and profit (1974f: 282-95), the nature of profit in

capitalism (1974f: 296-98) the nature and effects of competition among

capitalists (1974f: 299-302), immiseration of the proletariat (1974f:

286), and the problem of overproduction (1974f: 286, 287, 308). While

these concepts are refined in Capital, Marx's concern with them in the

early works is testimony to his materialist effort. As in Excerpts

from James Mill, discussion of alienation in the Economic and Philo­

sophical Manuscripts is grounded in Marx's critique of the ahistorical

assumptions of Political Economy:

Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property. It does not explain it. It grasps the material process of private property, the process through which it actually passes, in general and abstract formulae which it then takes as laws. It does not comprehend these laws, i.e. it does not show how they arise from the nature of private property. Political economy fails to explain the reason for the diversion between labour and capital, between capital and land (1974f: 322).

55

Here, as before, it can be observed that it is precisely when Marx

attempts to explain the historical nature of reality that he becomes

idealistic. Indeed when he says political economy "grasps the mate­

rial process of private property, the process through which it actually

passes, in general and abstract formulae which it then takes as laws"

it sounds as if the ghost of Hegel had found expression through Marx's

pen. It is important then to keep in mind that this is the problematic,

historical process, which informs the discussion of alienation in the

1844 Manuscripts. In other words, he is attempting to illustrate that

the economic and social relations of capitalism are not the laws of

economic production in general rand the only way he knows of doing this

at this point is to contend they are reflections of human estrangement

or alienation.

As is well known, in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx claims that aliena-

ation in capitalism has four major aspects. First, man is alienated

from the product of his labour. Here Marx (1974f: 327) argues that the

worker perceives the product of his labour "as an alien object that has

power over him." Marx (1974f: 327) continues to explain that "This

relationship is at the same time’the relationship to the sensuous ex­

ternal world, to natural objects, as an alien world confronting him in

hostile opposition," thereby indicating that the alienation is a state

of comprehension, knowledge, or understanding rather than a real

material state of society. Secondly, man is alienated from productive

activity itself, his life activity, because it does not belong for him

(1974f: 327). The third aspect of alienation is alienation from species-

56

life and results from the first two forms (1974f: 327-29). Colletti

(1974a: 431-32) has offered the following definition of Marx's concep­

tion of species-being:

The notion of "species-being". . .was first developed by Ludwig Feuerbach. . . .Feuerbach saw the "essen­tial difference between man and the brute" in the fact that man is not only "conscious of himself as an individual" (as animals are) but also aware of him­self as a member of a species, i.e. a species-being."Man is in fact at once I and Thou; he can put him­self in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature,.and not merely his individuality, is an object of thought"(Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity). For this reason, an atomized and competitive society in which the individual and the universal are in conflict is at odds with what is specifically human in man.

Finally, the "immediate consequence of man's estrangement from the pro­

duct of his labour, his life activity, his species-being, is the es­

trangement of man from man" (1974f: 329-30). Marx's discussion of

this estrangement of man from man clearly establishes his continued

conceptualization of an absolute, abstract essence man:

When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man's relationship to his labour, to the product of his labour and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labour and the object of other men.

In general, the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means that each man is es­tranged from the others and that all are estranged from man's essence (1974f: 330).

It was argued above that Marx's concept of alienation in the early

works must be understood from the problematic in which it is rooted,

demonstration of the historical nature of reality. While, as indicated

57

from the preceeding excerpt, Marx clearly does assume an idealistic

conception of human essence, the following passage is equally clear

in demonstrating that Marx's idealism does spring from his concern

with historical change:

It is above all necessary to avoid once more estab­lishing "society" as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being.His vital expression-even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, con­ceived in association with other men--is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life.Man's individual and species-life are not two dis­tinct things, however much—and this is necessarily so—the mode of existence of' individual life is a more particular or a more general mode of the species-life , or species-life a more particular or more general individual life.

As species-consciousness man confirms his real social life and merely repeats in thought his actual exis­tence; conversely, species-being confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinking being.

Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual—and it is just this particularity which makes him an individual and a real individual com­munal being—is just as much the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective existence of thought and experienced society for itself; he also exists in reality as the contemplation and true enjoyment of social existence and as a totality of vital human expression (1974f: 350-51).

In beginning with the premise that society is not a fixed abstraction

which stands "over against the individual," Marx concludes in a matter

of a few paragraphs that the individual is an expression of abstract

humanity. However, Marx soon becomes even more explicit in his

appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic to explain the historical

process:

58

Just as private property is only the sensuous ex­pression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes an alien and inhuman object for himself, that his expres­sion of 1ife is his alienation of life, and that his realization is a loss of reality, as an alien reality, so the positive supersession of private property^ i.e. of objective man and of human works by and for man, should not be understood only in the sense of direct, onesided consumption, of pos­session, of having. Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man. All his human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving—in short all the organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in their objec­tive approach or in their approach to the object the appropriation of that object. This appropri­ation of human reality, their approach to the ob­ject, is the confirmation of human reality. 11 is human effectiveness and human suffering, for suffering, humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self for man (1974f: 351 emphasis added).

Here we find a clear indication of Marx's early view that private prop­

erty only exists because as man objectifies5 himself he also alienates

himself and creates a "loss of reality" or an "alien reality." Further,

Marx speaks of a "supersession" of private property or alienation through

a cognitive appropriation of the absolute human essence and contends

that this appropriation affirms the existence of human reality as opposed

to alien reality.

Despite these glaringly idealistic excerpts, Marx himself did not

recognize them as such at the time. This is the case because, as pointed

out before, Marx assumed that his inversion of Hegelian philosophy in

general (i.e. beginning analysis from real corporeal man rather than

explaining concrete material from the Abstract Idea) encompassed an

59

inversion of Hegel's dialectic. In other words, he believed that Hegel's

dialectic could be inverted to explain the process of material change.

Interestingly enough, Marx ends the 1844 Manuscripts with a section

entitled "Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy." In

this section Marx makes it clear that his major criticism of Hegel is

that he attributes to external abstractions what are rightly charact­

eristic of real corporeal man. It is not the process of realization

through alienation and supersession of alienation by appropriation of

self which Marx criticizes, but rather that Hegel attributes the pro­

cess to the realm of thought or knowledge rather concrete people. Marx

thus simply calls for a replacement of Hegel's concept of Idea with the

"materialist" concept of human essence, which results, Marx thinks, in

a change of method which in turn allows for a valid comprehension of

the world and thus revolutionary change. Hegel's method, Marx claimed,

is conservative because if you start with the abstract concept and de­

duce material reality as alienations of it in its process of realization,

then the supersession of the alienation results in the continued exis­

tence of the phenomenon because that supersession is only comprised of

the knowledge that the alienation is the realization or materialization

of Reason--everything remains the same except Reason now feels comfortable

in itself. For example, (1974f: 393) Marx says of Hegel: ". . .having

superseded religion and recognized it as the product of self-alienation,

he still finds himself confirmed in religion as religion." But for

Marx, if we understand that we create the world, then we will overcome

alienation only by superseding it rather than identifying it as a neces­

sary part of the historical process:

60

If I know religion as alienated human self- consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. Thus I know that the self-consciousness which belongs to the essence of my own self is confirmed not in religion but in the destruction and supersession of religion (1974f: 393).

This general argument is echoed in Marx and Engels' first joint

effort, The Holy Family (published 1844). While here the target of

criticism is the "critical criticism" of their contempories, the brunt

of the criticism is that these critics are Hegelian and thus do not

go beyond the realm of thought (Marx and Engels, 1975: 166). That

both Marx and Engels (1975: 44) were themselves dancing to "Hegelian

Choreography" (See Nicolaus, 1978) at the onset of their intellectual

corroboration is clear from the following passage:

When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Crit­ical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the con­trary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need-- the practical expression of necessity is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emanci­pate itself (emphasis added).

This review of the early works reveals the following important

points which bear on the concept of reification. During the early

years Marx was highly critical of Hegel's idealism because it inverted

61

the actual subject-object relationship. At the same time, he recognized

that Hegel's philosophy assumed reality as moving process and encompassed

a scheme for explaining historical change, the major limitation of

political economy. Therefore in grounding the heaven bound concepts of

Hegel's philosophy, Marx assumed he had also developed a method for ex­

plaining historical change in a materialist manner. However, since sys­

tem (idealism)and method (dialectic) are inextricable in Hegel's phil­

osophy, every time Marx used this method to explain historical change,

he wound up integrating idealistic concepts into this theory and drawing

idealistic conclusions. That is, efforts rooted in a materialist orien­

tation resulted in idealism.

It is in this context that Marx's early concepts of dialectic,

alienation and.totality must be understood. The dialectic was the

Hegelian dialectic with new concepts plugged into it. While Marx

assumed, he was substituting idealistic concepts with materialist con­

cepts, he was really only replacing Hegelian idealistic concepts with

Marxian idealistic concepts. This was necessarily the case because

the Hegelian dialectic cannot in any way accommodate materialism since

its basic premise is to deny the reality of matter. Thus, when Marx

substituted the concept of human essence for the Idea, he simply

substituted one abstract concept with another. Because he used the

Hegelian dialectic he necessarily also had to integrate the Hegelian

concepts of alienation and totality, since they are the conditions

which inform the dialectic. Without them the dialectic could not be.

Thus Marx's early concepts of alienation and totality are therefore

idealistic. They do not even contain a hint of anything approaching

scientific relevance. But neither are they born from humanistic or

62

ideological motives. Rather they were ironically spawned from a mate­

rialist effort to explain the historical nature of reality.

The last point of significance regarding the early works is that

in them, as a result of his use of the Hegelian dialectic, Marx's

method is at one and the same time a method of explaining material

reality and revolution. This is indicative of Marx's philosophical

as opposed to scientific orientation in the early years. In the next

section we will discuss how scientific materialism necessitates that

scientific method and revolutionary theory be kept independent of each

other even though the findings of scientific research inform the

revolutionary theory. In other words, scientific knowledge cannot

necessitate revolution.

1845 to 1856

If it is accepted that the idealism in the early works results

from Marx's effort to explain historical process and change within the

framework of an inverted Hegelian dialectic, then it follows that a

coherent scientific materialism is contingent upon his rejection of

the Hegelian explanation and derivation of a new, fully materialist

explanation. This would necessarily require a complete reassessment

of his concepts of dialectic, alienation, and totality as formulated

and utilized in the early works. Such an effort to purge idealistic

assumptions and conclusions from his theory is the major characteristic

of the 1845-56 works. However the closure of a fully scientific

materialist theory was not accomplished until the 1857 Grundrisse and

the development of the concept of the fetishism of commodities.

63

As Althusser (1977) has pointed out, an "epistemological break"

can be observed in the German Ideology. In 1845 Marx comes to the

realization that his materialist hero, Feuerbach, cannot explain his­

torical change materialistically (1947: 64). The reason why Feuerbach's

materialism is incomplete and idealistic in its explanation of histori­

cal change is that it assumes a change in consciousness itself is

tantamount to revolutionary change. This must necessarily be the case

with Feuerbach because he assumes a static human essence which is and

exists as real, true humanity but is not realized because it is

alienated and cannot be realized until self-knowledge or self conscious­

ness is acquired. That is, it is assumed that human essence equals

reality and that once true reality is comprehended, i.e. when the

alienated veil is snatched away, when man gains proper consciousness,

man will recognize himself and therefore become himself. That Marx

and Engels recognize that philosophy underlies idealism and science

underlies materialism and that they do evidence an epistemological break

is indicated in the following passages on Feuerbach in the German

Ideology:

We thoroughly appreciate. . .that Feuerbach, in endeavoring to produce consciousness of just this fact {human essence} is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher. ...

We shall, of course, not take the trouble to en­lighten our wise philosophers by explaining to them that the "liberation" of "man" is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, sub­stance and all the trash to "self-consciousness" and by liberating man from the domination of these

64

phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means. . . ."Liberation" is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions. . . .

In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things (1947a: 60-62).

The Theses on Feuerbach suggest that Marx was able to formulate

his new scientific orientation because he had come to understand the

idealism inherent in the Hegelian dialectic, inverted or not, and had

begun to develop at least the framework for a new conception of dia­

lectics. A theme which recurs in the theses is that real, corporeal

man, which is also social man, is engaged in real practical activity

with nature, that this activity does indeed have an effect on the real

world (Thesis III 1947a: 121) and that the nature of this effect must

be comprehended (Thesis VIII 1947a: 122). In these theses Marx evi­

dences that he has come to the position that if historical change is

to be understood materialistically, then it is necessary to examine man

in his relationship with nature and other men, i.e. human activity in

the real world, rather than assume that this world is an alienation of

some "true" human essence. This suggests that Marx rejects the valid­

ity of Hegel's dialectical method, i.e. the idealistic method of

explaining historical change, and proceeds to formulate independent

concepts of dialectical movement and scientific method. In other words

Marx conceptualizes scientific method, i.e. the method used to under­

65

stand the nature of capitalist material reality* the method of succes­

sive approximations, as a method which is necessarily independent from

his concept of dialectical movement, i.e. the process of historical

change. Marx's dialectic conceptualizes historical change as the re­

sult of man's interaction with man and nature in the process of produc

tion and the effect the consequent social structure has back upon con­

sciousness. That Marx had reformulated his concept of dialectics be­

fore his epistomological break from idealism is also suggested by

Marx's own account of his shift from philosophy to science in the 1859

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarized as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropri­ate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on,which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their exis­tence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of develop­ment, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of produc- tion--or this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. This be­gins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.In studying such transformations it is always

66

necessary to distinguish between the material trans­formation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natu­ral science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical--in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an in­dividual by what he thinks about himself, so one can­not judge a period of transformation by its conscious­ness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.(1974h: 425-26 emphasis added).

Certain important key changes in Marx's concepts can be observed

in this lengthy and well known passage. First, when Marx refers to

"totality" he is referring to the whole of a real existing society,

and not the Hegelian conception of the unity of subject and object or

real essence coming into itself through appropriation of its objecti­

fication or alienation. Secondly, when Marx refers to consciousness

in this passage he is referring to how people think and approach life

in a particular socio-historical formation. This is a dramatically

different concept from that so central to the Hegelian dialectic, i.e.

consciousness of Absolute, Given, Immutable self, whether that self be

Man, Reason, or Idea,. In fact when Marx claims "It is not the conscious

ness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence

which determines their consciousness," it appears that he is not only

rejecting the assumption of Hegelian idealism but also the Hegelian

dialectic, for in Hegel's dialectic, even in "inverted" form, all

existence or reality is contingent upon consciousness or thought alone.

Lack of consciousness necessarily means lack of reality or only the

existence of alienated existence or reality.

67

However, even though the above suggests that Marx did break away

from an idealistic epistemology to assume a materialist epistemology

in 1845 (See Althusser, 1977, 1971, 1970) and therefore recognized the

need for a materialist explanation of historical change as well as an

empirical study of capitalism as a specific form of social reality, he

did not formulate a systematic theoretical expression of this until 51857 an the Grundrisse. As a result of this; Marx's works between

1846 and 1857 (the year the Grundrisse was written, in which Marx be­

gins his first systematic theory of capital and therefore begins to

formulate the appropriate method of scientific research), tend to lapse

back into an idealistic framework whenever an attempt is made to explain

the historical nature of empirical or material reality. This argument

was impressively developed by Martin Nicolaus (1978) for the explicit

purpose of illustrating that the Manifesto of the Communist Party

(published 1848) is a philosophical rather than a scientific work and

that the failure of the classes to polarize, the rise of the middle

class, and the complacency of the industrial proletariat are all

features of advanced capitalist society which were predicted by Marx

with the theory he began developing in 1857 (Grundrisse). As Nicolaus

(1978: 231) explains:

In the German Ideology Marx was quite unambiguous about the necessity for empirical investigation.The general theory is that "given individuals who are active in production in a given way, enter into certain social and political relationships."However, "The connection between production and the social and political structure must in every case be uncovered by empirical observation,

68

without mystification or speculation." But Marx himself did not carry out a program of thorough empirical investigation of capitalist production until several years after the Manifesto, and it was the resulting weakness in his understanding of the capitalist social structure which permitted the Hegelian choreography to exercise so strong a hold over him.

Nicolaus' major argument is that in the Manifesto Marx assumed that there

was a dialectic in capital which conformed to Hegel's dialectic of ideas

and that this assumption resulted in the contention that labor and capi­

tal are in fundamental contradiction. This premise, Nicolaus continues,

resulted in Marx's formulation of the concepts of pauperization and

polarization of the proletariat.

This Hegelian or idealistic "relapse" in the 1846-1856 works can

also be explained as follows. After Marx rejected idealistic epistemology

and moved into the sphere of scientific analysis, he realized that from

a scientific point of view it would be necessary to develop a theory of

material reality before he could explain historical change in a scientific

manner. The explanation of philosophers is simply spun out of ideas.

Rejecting the primacy of ideas or thought meant replacing them with

empirical explanations. Marx's first step towards this end, as sug­

gested earlier, was to reformulate his concept of the dialectic which

necessarily required separating it from any conception of scientific

method because the integration of both in the Hegelian system was based

on an idealistic presupposition, the epistemology of idealism. The con­

cept of dialectic that Marx arrived at was social man's interaction

with nature in the process of production and the effect this result,

69

the social structure, has back on man in a never ending process (See

Swingwood 1975; Avineri, 1969: 72, 75).

As a result of this materialistic conception of the dialectic,

Marx formulated the concept of the mode of production which is comprised

of the means of production and relations of production. The means of

production are the material means by which man produces economically,

be they hands or machines. The means of production necessarily encom­

passes man's relation to nature because the basic raw material of pro­

duction is nature itself. Now, Marx claims in the 1846-56 works that

the means of production, or man's interaction with natural forces,*

shapes the superstructure or the legal and political spheres of society

and further that this superstructure corresponds to "definite forms of

social consciousness" (Marx 1974h: 224, See also Marx and Engels,

1947b: 125). Since the dialectical interaction of man with nature is

always in process, innovation of the means of production is also a

normal characteristic of the historical process. This innovation of

the means of production continues until it reaches a point where it is

incompatable with the superstructure. That is, the legal and political

relations cannot accommodate further changes.in the means of production.

An unconscious consciousness (Marx 1974h: 224) of the conflict by a

particular economic class, i.e. that which is the innovator of the new

economic means of production, finally results in revolutionary change.

Here again we find the meaning of revolutionary practice as expressed

in the Third Thesis on Feuerbach. Revolutionary practice is the normal

result of man's interaction with the environment. The revolutionary

70

change builds up to a point where drastic changes in other sectors of

society are necessitated, therefore “revolution" as normally concep­

tual ized--quick rapid change. For Marx, however, it is a process which

simply ends in this manner.

This explanation of historical change seems scientifically sound

with regard to the previous changes in the mode of production which

Marx contended characterize past history. For example the French

Revolution is viewed as the political counterpart of the Industrial

Revolution, the revolution which brought about changes in the means of

production. But if it were possible to have asked a revolutionary

member of the bourgeoisie why he favored overthrow of the feudal system,

it is doubtful that he would have responded that it was because people

in interaction with nature are always in the process of innovating new

means of production and it has finally gotten to the point where the

existing political system is no longer compatable with the means of

production. And certainly no one had to "raise" the "class conscious­

ness" of the bourgeoisie. Rather the revolution seemed to occur quite

naturally as a result of people producing more efficient means of pro­

duction. But to take this analysis of feudal soceity and the capital­

ist revolution, formulate an abstract generalization from it, and claim

that it also applies to capitalist society and the socialist revolution

without scientifically studying the nature of capitalist reality, is

clearly unscientific, a show of philosophical speculation.

Since Marx did not begin his scientific analysis of capital until

1857, he had no command or comprehension of its mechanism and unique­

ness before that time. In using his scientific analysis of the

71

capitalist revolution to explain the mechanism of the socialist revolu­

tion he inadvertently but necessarily plunges right back into philosophy

That is, he arrives at a philosophy of history because he uses knowledge

from a feudal reality to explain capitalism. This philosophical relapse

calls the Hegelian dialectic to its side, for without it explaining

historical change becomes difficult.

Thus what was a material reality in feudal society becomes philo­

sophical speculation in capitalist society. What was a materialist

dialectic in comprehending the capitalist revolution becomes a dialec­

tic enshrouded in the larger Hegelian dialectic in predicting and ex­

plaining the socialist revolution. The proletariat is forced to play

the same revolutionary role that had before been played by the

bourgeoisie. The stage is set a priori. Since we are philosophizing

about the future we merely need ideas to substantiate our case. These

ideas are best borrowed from the Hegelian dialectic since it is based

on the presumption of revolutionary change. This philosophical specu­

lation is that of the Communist Manifesto.

Grundrisse to Capital 1857-1883

The Grundrisse (written in 1857-58) is the work which first laid

the theoretical foundations for a scientific study of capitalism. That

Marx was still searching for a method which was fully scientific is

clear from the Grundrisse (See Nicolaus, 1973). In other words, he

was searching for a method which was materialist and historical at the

same time. It must be materialist because the result of idealism is

to deduce the concrete from the abstract Absolute and therefore invert

72

the subject-object relation in history. It must be historical because

if historical process is ignored the result is to abstract from the

concrete and formulate constant abstract laws of society from the

existing concrete reality which is really only a temporal form of human

relations. In other words, the point of departure for Marx proved

quite vexing because starting with the concrete precluded history and

starting with abstract concepts precluded materialism. Marx found the

solution to this problem in the concept of the commodity. With this

concept he found a starting point of analysis which is concrete,

material and historically specific at the same time (cf. Nicolaus,

1973: 38). It is for this reason that Marx's Critique of Political

Economy (written 1859) and Capital Volume I (published 1867) begin

with consideration and analysis of the commodity.

In this context Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities

can finally be recognized as having an empirical referent. This con­

cept is not indicative of an "idealist throwback" (Althusser, 1977)

or "philosophy of revolution" (Colletti, 1975). Rather, it marks the

final step in Marx's transition to scientific materialism. That is,

with the introduction of the concept of the fetishism of commodities,

Marx casts out all elements of idealism from his thought. That the

concept of the fetishism of commodities is central to Marx's scien­

tific materialism and that it is not interchangeable with the concept

of alienation as formulated in the early works is the focus of this

consideration of Marx's mature work.

In order to understand the meaning and significance of the con­

cepts of fetishism of commodities, alienation, and totality in Marx's

73

mature scientific work it is necessary to keep in mind, as pointed out

earlier, that a scientific approach to reality presupposes that the

method of science, the method of historical change, and the method of

planned revolution be conceptualized as independent processes. In

Hegel's philosophy they are all inextricable processes. The dialectical

method comprises all these processes. It is a method which claims to

explain the nature of reality (the abstract Absolute manifests itself

in the concrete, the concrete is an object or objectification of the

abstract absolute), and the method of historical or revolutionary change

(supersession of alienation or objectification through self-conscious­

ness). Recognizing that material changes cannot be accomplished through

an act of self-consciousness (Marx and Engels, 1947a), Marx first set

out to ground a theory of dialectics. Marx, of course, believed it

necessary to build a theory of dialectics because he was as much

opposed to the ahistorical premises of political economy as he was to

the idealism of Hegel. The result was Marx's conceptualization of

dialectics as the interacting effects of man and nature in the process

of men producing economically. This dialectic explains historical

change--history changes as man goes about the business of economic

production. At certain points the other speheres of society must be

changed to accommodate progressive changes in the economic sector.

This is when revolution has occurred historically. This dialectic is

both a method of understanding reality in general (to survive men enter

into economic production with one another which gives rise to corre^

sponding legal and political structures and consciousness) and

74

revolutionary change in general (revolution occurs when infrastructure

and superstructure become incompatible).

But to understand the general mechanism of dialectics does not

automatically yield a scientific understanding of any particular his­

torical formation. Neither does it yield an automatic understanding of

what the specific nature of the revolution will be like. To speculate

or draw anologies from the past is of course necessarily philosophical.

Thus in addition to a materialist dialectic, a scientific method of

studying the existing social formation is necessary. Further, any

activist theory of revolution, i.e. any revolutionary change which is

consciously sought by people, must, if it cares to be successful, rest

on the scientific comprehension of society. This type of theorizing,

i.e. theory of revolutionary change, would usher in a new science, a

science of history—scientific because it would for the first time

allow for the conscious mastery of man over the future course of

history.6

The scientific method employed by Marx in his Study of capitalism

is the method of successive approximations (See Sweezy, 1942; McQuarie,

1978b). This is a method specifically geared towards yielding empirical

knowledge of a social reality which is assumed to be one particular

social formation of the basic abstract dialectical relationship between

people and nature. It is a method which moves back and forth from

concrete and abstract concepts in an effort to escape the perceived

limitations of Hegelianism and political economy. That is, it seeks to

identify what is common to all social formation (the abstract) and what

is unique to the particular form of capitalism.

75

As pointed out above, Marx begins his analysis of capitalism by

investigating commodities, things which are concrete but are also

thought to be historically specific to capitalism. What Marx sets out

to determine is what makes commodities different from the products of

labor in previous social formations. To this end he formulates the

concept of abstract labor. Abstract labor is the "expenditure of human

labor power," which is basic to any type of economic production (Marx

1967a: 44). The next step is to note that abstract labor assumes

different social forms throughout history. For example, the feudal

and capitalist form of abstract labor can be compared. In feudalism

the role of human labor in social relations is clear and apparent

(Marx 1967a: 77): ". . .every serf knows that what he expends in the

services of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal

labour-power. . . .The social relations between individuals in the

performance of their labour appear at all events as their own mutual

personal relations. . . ." In capitalism things are different. In

commodity production the products of labor take a form different from

their reality insofar as the individual producers do not recognize

that products do not have independent inherent value, that value is

nothing more than a social relation which reflects the amount of labor

time necessary for production (Marx, 1967a: 51, 77). That commodities

appear to have an inherent, natural, and independent value is the

source of the inversion of subject and object in capitalist society.

This inversion, this autonomy attributed to commodities and the conse­

quent subservience of people to them in the production, circulation,

76

and consumption processes, Marx calls the fetishism of commodities.

Marx's clearest statement of the fetishism of commodities reads as

follows:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of the labour: because the rela­tion of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social rela­tion, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of see­ing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from an external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities (1967a: 72).

77

Marx's explanation of the origin and evolution of commodity pro­

duction is the subject matter of Capital itself and is therefore beyond

the scope of this study. What is relevant to this study is that the

referent exists in the real world and its relation to Marx's concepts

of alienation and totality in Capitai.

The most puzzling aspect of the fetishism of commodities is that

Marx seems to imply two interpretations of the phenomenon he is refer­

ring to. On the one hand he seems to suggest that the fetishism is

solely a matter of appearance. That is, commodities appear to be

autonomous and to have natural values which man must conform to but in

reality this is not the case. The implication of this interpretation

is that the correct scientific method unmasks this false appearance of

fetishism, i.e. inversion of subject and object, and thus scientific

analysis seems to replace the idealism of the early works where it

is contended that man is alienated from his real human essence which

must be-resumed by some mystical supersession of this alienated state.

The following excerpts suggest this type of interpretation:

Thus everything appears reversed in competition.The final pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface, in their real existence and con­sequently in the conceptions by which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to understand them, is very much different from,,and indeed quite the reverse of, their inner but concealed essential pattern and the conception corresponding to it (1967c: 209).

. . .everything appears reversed in competition. . . .(1967c: 225)

. . .all things appear distorted, namely reversed in competition. . . .(1967c: 23)

78

In the course of scientific analysis, the formation of a general rate of profit appears to result from industrial capitals and their competition, and is only later corrected, supplemented, and modified by the intervention of merchant's capital. In the course of its historical development, however, the process is really reversed (1967c: 287).

. . .the analysis of the actual intrinsic relations of the capitalist process of production is a very complicated matter and very extensive, it is the work of science to resolve the visible, merely ex­ternal movement into the true intrinsic movement, it is self-evident that conceptions which arise about the laws of production in the minds of agents of capitalist production and circulation will diverge drastically from these real laws and will merely be the conscious expression of the visible movements. The conceptions of the merchant, stock broker, and banker are necessarily quite dis­torted (1967c: 313).

Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematize and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations.It should not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and perfect contradictions appear and that these relations seem the more self- evident the more their internal relationships are concealed from it, although they are understandable to the popular mind. But all science would be superfluous if outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided (1967c: 817).

From the common view point these distribution rela­tions appear as natural relations, as relations arising directly from the nature of all social production, from the laws of human production in general (1967c: 877).

. . .Political Economy sees only what is apparent. . . . It clings the more tightly to this appearance since it seems to furnish proof that capital possesses a mystic source of self-expansion independent of its process of production and hence of the exploitation of labour, a spring which flows to it from the sphere of circula­tion. We shall see later that even scientific Political Economy has been deceived by this appearance of things (1967b: 125).

79

The very nature of the circulation of commodities begets the opposite appearance (1967a: 115).

That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy (1967a:537).

The relation of exchange subsisting between cap­italist and labourer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of the transaction, and only mystifying it (1967a: 583).

However, while Marx does contend that the surface appearance of

the mechanisms of capital does not revel its "hidden" underlying pro­

cesses, he does not conclude from this that scientific comprehension

of hidden processes and outward appearances in and of itself can change

or even predict socialist revolution in capitalism. Rather, he con­

tends that the reality of the capitalist system is that its process

remains hidden and therefore gives rise to a corresponding conscious­

ness which contributes to its perpetuation. That is, the reality of

capitalism is that it casts forth illusion and false appearance. In­

sofar as this is the case, reality in capitalismes inverted and upside

down because man in capitalism does subject himself to the tendencies

of capitalist production, circulation and consumption. Although

history is nothing but the dialectical interaction between man and

nature, in capitalism man is in a social form in which he really is

not in control as the result of the nature of commodity production:

. . .the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange estab­lishes directly between the products, and indi­rectly, through them, between the producers. To

80

the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one indivdual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material rela­tions between persons and social relations between things (1967a: 73 emphasis added).

. . .it is different as soon as we deal with the process of production from the point of view of the process of creation of surplus-value. The means of production are at once changed into means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is now no longer the labourer that employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the labourer. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment neces­sary to their own life-process, and the life- process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly expanding, constantly multi­plying itself (1967a: 310).

Every kind of capitalist production, insofar as it is not only a labour process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality (1967a: 423).

Even from the standpoint of this purely formal relation--the general form of capitalist production, which is common both to its less developed stage and to its more developed stage--the means of production, the material conditions of labour-material of labour, instruments of labour (and means of subsistence)— do not appear as subsumed to them. He does not make use of them, but they make use of- him. And it is this that makes them capital. Capital employs labour (Marx, 1963: 390).

The economists ascribe a false importance to the material factors of labour compared with labour itself in order to have also a technological justi­fication for the specific social form, i.e., the capitalist form, in which the relationship of labour to the conditions of labour is turned up­side-down, so that it is not the worker who makes use of the conditions of labour, but the conditions of labour which makes use of the worker (Marx,1971: 276).

81

In arguing that the inversion is real, Marx is not, however, sug­

gesting that the reality of capitalism is only an alienation from some

absolute and ontological state of human essence (see Colletti, 1975).

Alienation from some abstract state is how the inversion was explained

in the early works, but it is not the explanation or implication of the

mature works. All throughout Theories of Surplus Value and Capital,

Marx argues that the reality of capitalism is not that it appears to

be what it is not, but rather, that the reality of capitalism is to

disperse illusion and false appearance. This is fundamental to its

functioning as a system. Just to the reality of magic is based on

illusion, so is that of capitalism. In other words, this inversion

is a real, true, state of affairs. It is not Not-Reality. It is a

reality which appears to operate in one way and this appearance, which

springs from its underlying mechanism and is part of the system as a

whole, gives rise to a form of consciousness which corresponds to it.

Thus the fetishism is not simply a matter of subjective misperception,

it is a fundamental characteristic of the reality of capitalism (see

also Godelier, 1978).

Therefore far from indicating a Hegelian throwback (see Althusser,

1977), Marx's concept of fetishism illustrates that he has finally

developed a scientific method and theory which does not depend on

idealistic concepts and assumptions to explain historical process.

The concept of fetishism has an empirical referent. It denies that

consciousness independently creates the world and shapes history.

With this concept Marx can explain social phenomena as historically

82

variable objectifications of real corporeal man in interaction with

nature for economic production and at the same time explain that

capitalism is a real social form in which man is subservient to his

products. Capitalism is not just an illusion which science can

comprehend, unmask, and thereby automatically transform. Capital

gives rise to a certain consciousness and it is only the structure

and the superstructure which science can comprehend. Science can

comprehend the reality, it cannot in and of itself change it. Thus

Marx clearly adheres to materialist assumptions and does not leap

heaven bound by claiming that science changes consciousness and

consciousness changes reality. Two excerpts from the first chapter

of the first volume of Capital are clear on this point:

The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of pri­vate labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value—this fact appears to the producers, not­withstanding the discovery referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered (1967a: 74).

83

The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place (1967a: 75).

This position, rooted in the concept of the fetishism of commodi­

ties, that scientific discovery alone does not change reality, recog­

nizes the real, material existence of that reality and the material role

that man plays in shaping history at the same time. It suggests that

if revolutionary change is desired, it is not enough to be conscious

of what is causing the given state of affairs. In addition to knowing,

people must act in accordance with the knowledge to bring about change

if some desired end is desired. That is, change resulting from the

dialectic will occur, but this is unspecified, unconscious change. It

is not heading in some pre-planned direction. If we want to engage in

a "science of history" we have to understand the nature of social

reality and then act.

Analogous situations in any of the other scientific disciplines

illustrate exactly how idealistic the*notion that scientific under­

standing yields change is, and how the assumption of capitalism as an

inverted reality does not presuppose idealism. In the science of

medicine, individuals who are ill or injured are not assumed to be

the antithesis of some concept "human being," i.e. they are not con­

sidered to be an alienation or a negation of their true being even

though they are not able to function in every capacity that a healthy

human being can. Rather, they are considered individuals whose ill

84

health or injury is real, and therefore must be treated as such if a

change from that state of affairs is desired. • Therefore, it is not

enough for doctors to research and find out what causes a certain

disease and how the patient can be cured. This will not have any

effect on the patient. In addition to learning about causes and cures,

the doctor must apply treatment. He must treat the real situation

with real action. Similarly, broken bones will not properly mend

themselves by the medical profession's knowledge of setting them in

casts. The knowledge must be applied. Science cannot accommodate

idealism. For this one must visit the faith healer. Another of any

number of endless examples can be found with regard to land irrigation.

Land in need of irrigation is not considered an alienation of land or

the negation of land. It is dry land. The assumption of independent

material reality is essential to the scientific approach. Only the

mystical knowledge of the rainmaker is expected to irrigate the land

independently of human action. If we are scientific we know that we

must not only discover methods of irrigation but also apply they.

This is what makes Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities

a concept of scientific significance and utility--it assumes the

primacy of materialism over pure consciousness. It contends that

although man creates history in the process of production, in capital­

ism the reality of the situation is that he is no longer in any sort

of control. Science can explain how this came to be but cannot change

the reality automatically because part of the nature of this reality

is to cast forth false appearances which influence people's consciousness

85

If change is desired, efforts must cross beyond the realm of conscious­

ness. Somehow the material reality must be acted upon. That there is

no coherent political theory in the whole of Marx's work (see Anderson,

1976; Blackburn, 1977) is testimony to the idealism that colored his

thought until 1857. The concept of the fetishism indicates that polit­

ical theory is an improtant aspect of scientific Marxism since it sug­

gests that revolutionary change towards some socialist or communist or

humanist state will not ensue automatically.

The above suggests that the concept of the fetishism is in no

way related to the concept of alienation in the early works. The former

is central to scientific method, the latter is rooted in humanist

ideology. What remains to be discussed is the conceptualization of

alienation and totality in the mature works. While the meaning of

alienation in the early works is estrangement from "true being," in

the mature works the meaning of the concept is alienated labor, not

alienation from some presumed state of being or absolute abstraction.

The concept of alienated labor is brought into the picture when

Marx is explaining the process of converting money into capital. This

conversion, he argues, requires the creation of surplus value (Marx,

1967a: 161). In attempting to explain the creation of surplus value,

Marx (1967a: 167-68) introduces the concept of labour power as a com­

modity, but as a commodity which differs from all other commodities

insofar as it becomes'a reality only by its exercise (Marx, 1967a:

171). This difference is important insofar as it allows for the

possibility of the seller of this unique commodity to be exploited

by the buyer (Marx, 1967: 193). When the laborer's labor power is

86

exploited, i.e. when he is not paid the equivalent of the value he pro­

duced for the buyer or-capitalist,Marx says that labor is alienated labor:

It is precisely accumulation which reveals clearly that everything--i.e. revenue, variable capital and constant capital — is nothing but appropriated alien labour, and that both the means of labour with which the worker works, and the equivalent he re­ceives for his labour, consist of labour performed by the worker and appropriated by the capitalist, who has not given any equivalent for it (Marx,1971: 251).

Thus interest in itself expresses precisely the existence of the conditions of labour as .capital in their social contradiction and in their trans­formation into personal forces which confront labour and dominate labour. It sums up the alienated character of the conditions of labour in relation to the activity of the subject. It represents the ownership of capital or mere capital property as the means of appropriating the products of other people's labour, as the control over other people's labour (Marx, 1971:494).

Why is capital regarded not as the result of, but as the prerequisite for, the process of production? What makes it capital before it enters the process so that the latter merely develops its immanent character? The social framework in which it exists. The fact that living labour is confronted by past labour, activity is confronted by the product, man is confronted by things, labour is confronted by its own materialized conditions as alien, independent, self-contained subjects, personifications, in short, as someone else's property and, in this form, as "employers" and "commanders" of labour itself which they appro­priate instead of being appropriated by it (Marx, 1971: 475-76).

Capital itself is divided. Insofar as it is a prerequisite of capitalist production, insofar, therefore, as it expresses a. specific social relation, the alienated form of the conditions of labour, it is realized in interest (Marx,1971: 493).

87

The concept of alienation in the mature works can therefore be recog­

nized as relevant only to the exploitation of the laborer's labor power

and as central to explaining the origin of the surplus value necessary

for the conversion of money into capital. It is a concept with an

empirical referent and has no similarity whatsoever with the idealistic

conception of the early works.

The same is true for Marx's conception of totality or unity in the

mature works. Just as some have assumed that the meaning of alienation

is the same in the early and mature works, so also have some suggested

that Marx's concept of unity indicates a presupposition of the Hegelian

concept of totality, the unification of divine subject and its earthy

manifestation through self-consciousness which, in turn, also presup­

poses an ontological state of being which must be returned to. The

obvious implication of such an interpretation of the concept of totality

in the mature works is that there is still an idealistic dimension in

Marx's mature works on the issue of revolution. For example, Colletti

(.1975: 23) concludes:

Where Marxism is a scientific theory of social development, it is for the most part a "theory o/ collapse", but not a theory of revolution; where on the other hand, it is a theory of revolution, i.e. is exclusively a "critique of political economy", it runs the risk of becom­ing a utopian subjectivism.

To substantiate this conclusion, Colletti (1975: 24-25) presents a

lengthy quote from the first Volume of Capital (1967a: 113-14) which

deals with the circulation of commodities and the relationship between

sale and purchase:

88

No one can sell unless some one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase, because he has just sold. Circulation bursts through all re­strictions as to time, place, and individuals, im­posed by direct barter, and this it effects by splitting up, into the antithesis of a sale and purchase, the direct identity that in barter does exist between the alienation of one's own and the acquisition of some other man's product. To say that these two independent and antithetical acts have an Intrinsic unity, are essentially one, is the same as to say that this intrinsic oneness ex­presses itself in an external antithesis. If ‘the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity becomes too great, if the split between sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their oneness, asserts it­self by producing—a crisis. The antithesis, use- value and value; the contradictions that private labour is bound to manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularized concrete kind of labour has to press for abstract human labour; the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent in commodities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion, in the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of a commodity. .. These modes therefore imply the possibility, and no more than the possibility, of crisis. The conversion of this mere possibility into a reality is the result of a long series of relations, that, from our present standpoint of simple circulation, have as yet no existence (emphasis added).

While it is clear that Marx did conceptualize sale and purchase as

a "unity" or "oneness" and that their separation in capitalist produc­

tion results in a crisis which resumes their unity, and while this does

sound reminiscent of the Hegelian assumption of unity between the sub­

ject and object, Colletti (1975) and others like him make the mistake

of overlooking the overall context and framework from which this concep

tion arises.? The entirety of the mature works is couched in the

89

assumption that capitalism is a historically specific form of social

reality. While it shares some conformity with previous forms (e.g.

abstract labour, people interacting with each other and nature in

economic production, economic production influences intellectual and

political spheres, a particular consciousness corresponds to the form

of economic production), it also evidences particularity, uniqueness.

This is the purpose and goal of the method of successive approximations,

to sort out or abstract what is general to social formation and what

is unique to capitalism, a specific social form.

One of the things Marx finds characteristic of capitalism in

comparison to other social forms is that the separation of use-value

and exchange-value results in people producing primarily to sell (Marx,

1967a: Chapter 1). "Direct production for personal needs does not take

place" (Marx, 1968: 509). As a result, crisis may arise from any

impossibility to sell. That is, if, with the creation of money, we

make it possible to separate sale and purchase, and if at the same

time we are producing with exchange itself more in mind than the needs

of others, then we face the possibility of a crisis situation within

the cap1ta11st system. The premises and goals or aim of capitalism as

a real, existing social form are in contradiction because the goal of

the accumulation of value or capital is based on exploitation of labor

power and since the laborers are not paid the equivalent of their pro­

duction, they are not able to buy what they have produced and what the

capitalist must sell to realize the goal of capitalism. Thus, Marx's

conception of unity or totality in the mature works must be interpreted

within the framework it is couched in. Lifting it out of the context

90

can only result in misinterpretation or vulgarization of Marx's meaning.

Because in the mature works Marx limits the meaning of unity to a com­

prehension of the totality of capitalism as specific, a social form, a

social system, it in no way indicates use of Hegelian assumptions and 8dialectics. Marx's usage of the term totality is illustrated in the

following passage:

The general form of value, C, results from the joint action of the whole world of commodities, and from that alone. A commodity can acquire a general expression of its value only by all other commodities, simultaneously with it, ex­pressing their values in the same equivalent; and every new commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that, since the existence of commodities as values is purely social, this social existence can be expressed by the totality of their social relations alone, and consequently that the form of their value must be a socially recognized form (Marx, 1967a: 66 emphasis added).

Summary

The entirety of Marx's works is marked by a historical materialism

striving towards theoretical coherence. The early works (1840-44) assume

the position that Hegel's philosophy, which proceeds from the abstract

to the concrete and explains the latter through deductive analysis, can

be "inverted" to yield a materialist philosophy, a philosophy which ex­

plains reality and historical process as the manifestation or objectifi­

cation of corporeal man. In assuming this position, the young Marx also

assumed that the Hegelian dialectic could be inverted. That is, if

"Man" is substituted for "Idea" or "Reason" in the Hegelian dialectic,

then the process conceptualized in this dialectic can explain how

91

change occurs in the material world. However, since the Hegelian dia­

lectic was conceived with the destruction of matter by its supersession

into consciousness as its goal, the conclusion is always idealistic

because only concepts which are idealistic can be plugged into it in

the first place. That is, just because Marx substituted the concept

"Man"for "Idea" or "Reason" does not mean that the concept "Man" is any

less idealistic than "Idea" or "Reason." That concept "Man" which is

substituted is nothing more than an ideal abstraction, an idealistic

notion, of what corporeal man is and thus this abstraction has nothing

to do with the real materialist nature of man. It was because of this

that Marx's explanation of historical change in the early works is

idealistic, e.g., philosophy realizes itself in the proletariat, the

proletariat is the negation of humanity, in communist society man will

finally "realize" his true nature. Because Marx does use the Hegelian

dialectic to explain the historical nature of material reality, his

concepts of alienation and totality in the early works are also ideal­

istic because they are the mechanisms of this dialectic. Even though

Marx conceptualizes alienation as an historical phenomenon, the meaning

he attributes to it in the capitalist form is the same as Hegel's uni­

versal form since it assumes some Absolute or ontological state of

being. While the concept of totality in Hegel refers to reunification

of subject and object, the self-consciousness of Reason, in Marx it is

similarly man's realization what he is assumed to be, his species­

being.

In 1845 the "epistemological break" (Althusser) occurs. This is

the juncture in Marx's development where he reaches the position that

92

materialism can only be explained scientifically. Philosophical explan­

ation presupposes idealism. Idealism explains all change as a result of

changes in consciousness. Changes in consciousness alone cannot change

the real world. Real action must accompany real change. But the

effectiveness of real action depends on scientific knowledge of the

particular social form to be dealt with. Thus capitalism must be

studied empirically.

However, this empirical study and scientific theoretical formulation

did not begin until 1857. Therefore the works in between, especially

the well known Manifesto of the Communist Party, do not reflect a

scientific orientation even though they chronologically follow the

position stated in the German Ideology. The position of the Manifesto,

that the proletariat will necessarily acquire class consciousness and

the proletarian revolution will necessarily ensue and be followed by

Communism after a brief period of the dictatorship of the proletarit,

is still tinged by the same idealism of the pre 1845 works (see Nicolaus,

1978) because it draws conclusions and makes predictions about a social

reality of which it has no scientific understanding.

It was not until Marx located a methodological starting point which

was neither idealistic nor ahistorical that he began his research and

scientific theory building of capitalism through the method of successive

approximations. That starting point which is at once concrete and

historically specific is the concept of the commodity. The concept of

the fetishism of commodities is a logical extension of the methodological

significance of the concept of commodity in capitalism. It is a concept

93

with an empirical referent and marks the point at which Marx finally

achieves closure of his historical materialism, i.e. it rids his theory

of all idealism. This is the case because in the concept of the fetis-

ism of commodities, Marx for the first time finds theoretical expres­

sion for the position that knowledge or consciousness is not enough to

change material reality. Capitalism, he says, is a reality which is

upside-down insofar as man really is subservient to his objectifications.

If there is desire to set it right side up, material action must be

taken. The nature of this action has yet to be developed from a scien­

tific Marxist position (see Anderson, 1976; Blackburn, 1977).

That the concept of the fetishism of commodities is not idealistic

just because it claims that capitalism is an inverted reality is made

clear by an understanding of Marx's mature conception of the dialectic.

For the mature Marx, the dialectic is conceptualized only as an historical

process, not an historical process and scientific method as it is in

Hegel. It is the nature of the process of historical change from a

materialist point of departure. Starting from the assumption that man

is corporeal man, that-corporeal man is social man, that man must inter­

act with nature to produce economically in order to survive, Marx con­

ceptualizes his materialist dialectic as man's interaction with man and

nature in economic production and the effect this mode of economic

production has back on other spheres of society and consciousness.

Being a materialist, Marx necessarily has to assume a conditional

subjective role of man in shaping history. When in capitalism he finds

people subservient to the commodities they produce because of that mode

94

of production, he terms this reality inverted or upside down. Such

contentions therefore do not assume an idealistic absolute or abstract

concept whose alienated state is capitalist society. On the contrary,

it assumes that man is real and not a manifestation or some other ex­

ternal form.

It is therefore important to recognize the concept of alienation

in the early works and the concept of fetishism in the mature works as

distinct concepts. It is also important to recognize that the concept

of alienation in the mature works refers only to alienated labor and

just like the concept of fetishism, does not presume some idealist

abstraction. Similarly, the concept of totality in the mature works

refers to the totality of relations and processes in the capitalist

system and not the system of the idealistic Absolute. The differenceIbetween the idealistic conceptions of dialectic, alienation, and

totality and the scientifically relevant concepts of dialectic, aliena­

tion, totality and fetishism in Marx is of central importance in

critically analyzing the concept of reification and determining whether

it has any scientific relevance for contemporary sociology.

9s

CHAPTER FOUR

CLARIFICATION OF THE THEORIES AND CONCEPTS OF REIFICATION:LUKÁCS, BERGER AND PULLBERG, AND ISRAEL

Having clarified Hegel's idealism, the nature of his dialectic and

meaning of alienation, as well as the chronologically variable meaning

of dialectics, alienatidn, and the fetishism of commodities in Marx's

thought, we are finally in a position to clarify the meaning of reifi­

cation in Lukács, Berger and Pullberg, and Israel.

Lukács

Lukács formulated his concept of reification to explain what he

saw as human degradation and powerlessness in modern society. He believed

that this degradation and powerlessness reflected an inversion of the

subject and object in history. Man is assumed to be the real or true

subjective force in history and everything else is considered a manifes­

tation or objectification of his being. The loss of this subjectivity,

the objectification of people, is what Lukács means by reification.

Reification is said to result in peoples' loss of control. Lukács con­

ceptualizes reification as synonymous with alienation and Marx's con­

cept of the fetishism of commodities (cf. Lukács, 1971: xxiv-xxv, 86,

170). What is of- crucial importance in understanding Lukács' concept

of reification, however, is that his conception of alienation was in­

fluenced by his studies with Simmel and Weber, and is therefore in­

formed by the assumption that the alienation of man from his products

or objectifications and an ensuing lack of human control is an inevi­

table human condition (cf. Arato, 1972b; Lichtheim, 1970). In coming

96

to equate this concept of alienation with Marx's concept of the fetish­

ism of commodities, Lukács believed he had identified the historicity

of this human condition, namely, capitalist society.y

For Lukács (1971: 87) reification has both an objective and sub­

jective side. The objective side refers to the social situation of

inversion of subject and object. In Lukács' (1971: 87) words, "Objec­

tively a world of objects and relations between things springs into

being." As a result of Weber's influence, Lukács came to think of

this objective side of reification as total in modern capitalist

society. All spheres of modern capitalist society are marked, according

to Lukács, with the inversion of subject and object, the alienation,

objectification, atomization, dehumanization of man. Man is nowhere in

control in any capacity.

Because reification in capitalist society is total, the mind and

consciousness are also reified. Reified mind or consciousness consti­

tutes the subjective side of reification. The mind or consciousness is

reified, Lukács argues, because it can only perceive what exists in the

objective world and everything there is inverted. These things which

appear independent of man and autonomous are called reifications or

fetishisms. A reified consciousness is therefore one that perceives

the reifications or fetishisms or alienated state as true. Lukács

offers no explicit examples of what he means, but what he clearly

seems to be arguing here is that economic production is a human crea-

tion--it has no independence from human actors. Therefore in capital­

ism the unequal distribution of wealth, unemployment and infaltion are

97

also nothing but social relations created by people and therefore sub­

ject to change by people. But, in capitalist society, because of the

inversion of subject and object, people perceive and therefore believe

that inequality, unemployment, and inflation are laws of nature--that

they are necessary and inevitable in the process of economic production

They therefore accept these things much as they accept the law of

gravity.

In brief, with Lukacs we find three basic premises underlying his

theory of reification: (1) human objectifications have acquired

autonomy in capitalism, (2) this inversion does not reflect the true

relation between man and his objectifications, or the true subject-

object relationship in history; (3) the mind is reified because it can

only perceive what it confronts immediately and what it confronts in

capitalist reality is the immediacy of inverted relationships rather

than the true relationship between subject and object.

As indicated above, Lukacs identifies capitalism as the cause of

reification. Therefore, to solve the problem of reification, objec­

tively and subjectively, the capitalist system must be overthrown.

Lukacs' theory of revolution is therefore central to his theory of

reification. As suggested in his definition of reified consciousness,

Lukacs (1971: 93) argues that the heart of the problem of reification

lies in the limited capacity of the reified mind to perceive only

immediate phenomena which in turn are reifications. Therefore,

according to Lukacs, what is needed to overcome the problem of reifi­

cation is an acting mediator between subject and object. The needed

98

mediator must be able to perceive true reality, reality as it exists

beyond the illusion of capitalist society. This reality which it must

comprehend is the totality of subject and object. In Lukács' theory,

reality or the true essence of totality can only be realized through

self-knowledge. That is, the human subject must come to realize that

those apparently alien, external, and autonomous objectifications are

nothing more than expressions or manifestations of itself and there­

fore both subject and object comprise one totality. Once this reali­

zation occurs, the true subject is no longer fooled by the illusion

of the independent quality of his objects and alienation and reifica­

tion cease to be. Man will have achieved his totality, i.e., his

human essence. Lukács here is clearly suggesting true reality is con­

cealed in capitalist relations. That is why we need a mediator:

The methodological function of the categories of meditation consists in the fact that with their aid those immanent meanings that necessarily inhere in the objects of bourgeois society but which are ab­sent from the immediate manifestation of those ob­jects as well as from their mental reflection in bourgeois thought. . .now become objectively effec­tive and can therefore enter. . .consciousness. . . .(1971: 163).

Who or what could perform the role of mediator always remained

problematic in Lukács' thought (cf. Arato, 1972a). In the essay in

History and Class Consciousness which specifically addresses reifica­

tion, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," Lukács

suggests that the proletariat is the mediator of the revolution.

However, another essay in History and Class Consciousness, "Towards a

Methodology of the Problem of Organization," which was written at

99

approximately the same time as the reification article, suggests that

the Communist Party must play the role of mediator. It has been sug­

gested (cf. Arato, 1972a) that Lukacs turned to the Party when it be­

came apparent to him that class consciousness was not developing among

the proletariat by itself. Lukacs' explanation of the role of the

proletariat in overcoming reification and the role of the Party in

raising class consciousness among the proletariat follows.

The primary reason why Lukacs has so much difficulty in finding

a mediator, something which can bring the true nature of social real­

ity, the unity or totality of subject and object, to consciousness,

is because he conceptualizes reification, the inversion of subject and

object, as total. In his concept there is no sphere in society which

has not been affected by reification. The sphere which intellectuals

traditionally rely on in pursuit of the nature of reality, science,

provides no exception to the rule in Lukacs' scheme. As Lukacs ex­

plains:

The specialization of skills leads to the destruc­tion of every image of the whole. And as, despite this, the need to grasp the whole--at least cog- nitively--cannot die out, we find that science, which is likewise based on specialization and thus caught up in the same immediacy, is criticized for having torn the real world into shreds and having lost its vision of the whole (1971: 103-04).

. . .Intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis. We have fol­lowed the course of the history of ideas which, as bourgeois thought has developed, has tended more and more to wrench these two principles a- part. We are able to show that as a result of this duality in method, reality disintegrates into a multitude of irrational facts and over these a network of purely formal "laws" emptied

100

of content is then cast. And by devising an "epistemology" that can go beyond the abstract form of the immediately given world (and its conceiv- ability) the structure is made permanent and ac­quires a justification--not inconsistently--as being the necessary "precondition of the possibility" of this world view. But unable to turn this "critical" movement in the direction of a true creation of the object--in this case of the thinking subject--and indeed by taking the very opposite direction, this "critical" attempt to bring the analysis of reality to its logical conclusion ends by returning to the same immediacy that faces the ordinary man of bourgeois society in his everyday 1ife. It has been conceptualized, but only immediately”Tl971:1557-

Lukács (1971: 169) specifically defines the goal of mediation as

"the knowledge of society as a historical totality." Another way of

stating this would be recognition of the dialectical nature of social

reality. In the reification essay, Lukács (1971: 205) suggests that

the proletariat, as a class, has the potential of accomplishing this

goal: "only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat

possesses this ability to transform‘■things." The specific issue he

must address at this point is how the proletariat is going to gain

class consciousness, or the self-consciousness or self-knowledge of

man's true essence, if its consciousness is just as reified as any

other class in capitalist society. Lukács' position here is that while

proletarian consciousness is just as reified as that of the bourgeoisie,

the proletariat has the potential for transcending immediacy while the

bourgeoisie does not because the social existence of the proletariat

differs fundamentally from that of the bourgeoisie (1971: 168-69, 172,

181, 185, 197, 199, 205).

101

The nature and logic of Lukács* thought on the role of the prole­

tariat in overcoming reification can be summarized as follows. First

he suggests that in reality subject and object are always interacting

dialectically but in capitalist society this true unity of subject and

object is obscured because the subject and object appear in "twofold

form," independent of each other (1971: 165). Members of the bour­

geoisie, he continues, because of their privileged position in

capitalist society, sometimes feel as though they are in subjective

control even though they are not. But the proletariat, because of

its social position, always view themselves as the object of events:

"In every aspect of daily life in which the worker imagines himself

to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that

is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence" (1971: 165). But it

is exactly this situation of the proletariat which makes it the revolu­

tionary vanguard. This is the case, Lukács (1971: 168) argues, because

since he cannot escape from being and feeling like an object, his con­

sciousness becomes the self-consciousness of the commodity, and when

the worker recognizes himself as a commodity he will in doing so also

grasp the true essence of man--the unity of human subject and object-

through this achieved self-knowledge. Once he has grasped the true

relationship of man and commodity, he will also be able to grasp the

true relationship between man and all the other social or cultural

objects (1971: 169). In other words, Lukács suggests that the pro­

letariat can serve as mediator and solve the problem of reification

because, unlike the bourgeoisie or bourgeois science, the worker,

102

due to his position within the social relations, can never experience

himself as subject. Self-consciousness automatically emerges in the

proletariat at the moment it .realizes its being is one and the same

with the commodity, i.e., when it perceives its labor power as a com­

modity. Since self-consciousness is considered to denote unification

of subject and object (the proletariat becomes conscious of itsel as

an object), Lukacs contends that the requirements for solving the

problem of reification will be met once this situation arises because

the self-consciousness of the proletariat which first emerges in the

economic realm will also be able to perceive the true relation of sub­

ject and object in all spheres of society. As Lukacs (1971: 185)

states:

. . .Bourgeois thought remains fixated on these forms which it believes to be immediate and original and from there it attempts to seek an understanding of economics, blithely unaware that the only phenomenon that has been formulated is its own inability to comprehend its own social foundations. Whereas for the proletariat the way is opened to a complete penetration of the forms of reification. It achieves this by starting with what is dialectically the clearest form (the immediate relation of capital and labor).It then relates this to those forms that are more remote from the production process and so includes and comprehends them, too, in the dialectical totality.

While Lukacs contends that the proletariat is the mediator of the

revolution because it has the capacity to achieve consciousness of it­

self as an object in capitalist society, another important aspect of

his theory is that this self-consciousness is neither psychological in

nature nor inevitable in its emergence. These two contentions form

103

the basic of a contradiction which characterizes the entirety of

History and Class Consciousness. As pointed out in chapter one, Lukács'

intention in History and Class Consciousness was to challenge what he

perceived as the deterministic stance of the Communist International.

He contended that the so-called scientific position of the Party line

which advocated the "theory of the crash" neglected an essential di­

mension of revolution--the subjective dimension. To retrieve the sub­

jective element he viewed as central to a Marxist theory of revolution,✓

Lukács turned to Hegel. However, as indicated in chapter two, the

Hegelian dialectic is both inherently idealistic and deterministic

because its goal is to deny the independent existence of matter. Be­

cause of this, Lukács' use of the Hegelian dialectic resulted in a

striking contradiction of determinism and subjectivism as well as an

overriding idealism throughout the essays of History and Class Con­

sciousness. We will first consider the contradiction of determinism

and subjectivism.

In the essay entitled "Class Consciousness," Lukács unmistakably

conceptualizes class consciousness as an abstract, external process

which must penetrate the consciousness of the proletarian class if

true reality is to be realized. In conceptualizing class consciousness

in this manner, Lukács confounds his effort of subjectivism with deter­

minism. With regard to the external nature of consciousness Lukács

states:

Consciousness approaches society from another world and leads it from the false path it has followed back to the right one (1971: 78).

104

The essence of scientific Marxism consists, then, in the realization that the real motor forces of history are independent of man's (psychological) consciousness of them (1971: 47).

This analysis establishes right from the start the distance that separates class consciousness from the empirically given, and from the psychologically describable and explicable ideas which men form about their situation in life (1971: 51).

. . .class consciousness is concerned neither with the thoughts of individuals, however advanced, nor with the state of scientific knowledge (1971: 53).

To say that class consciousness has no psychologi­cal reality does not imply that it is a mere fic­tion. Its reality is vouched for by its ability to explain the infinitely painful path^of the pro­letarian revolution. . .(1971: 75-76).

. . .class consciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual mem­bers of the proletariat, nor with the (mass-psych­ological) consciousness of the proletariat as a whole; but it is, on the contrary, the sense, be- come conscious, of the historical role of the class TÌ97Ì7'73).

. . .class consciousness implies a class-condi­tioned unconsciousness of ones own socio-histori- cal and economic position (1971: 52).

. . .class consciousness consists in the fact of appropriate and rational reactions "imputed" to a particular typical position in the process of pro­duction. This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual--and these actions can be understood only by reference to this con­sciousness (1971: 51 emphasis added).

These external, deterministic characteristics of Lukács' concept of

class consciousness can also be observed in the reification article:

105

. . .the proletariat represents the true reality, namely the tendencies of history awakening to con­sciousness (1971: 199).

The unique element in its {proletariat's} situa­tion is that its surpassing of immediacy represents an aspiration towards society in its totality re­gardless of whether this aspiration remains con­scious or whether it remains unconscious for the moment (1971: 174).

While these excerpts indicate a determinism stemming from the con

ceptualization of class consciousness as external and independent of

human consciousness, there are also excerpts which indicate that

Lukacs does not adhere to deterministic explanations of social reality

and social change. In these excerpts he suggests that people must be

involved in bringing about soical change for they are the creators,

the true subjects of social reality:

. . .when the final economic crisis of capital­ism develops, the fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of mankind) will depend on the ideo­logical maturity of the proletariat, i.e. ,on its class consciousness (1971: 70).

. . .the proletarit has been entrusted by history with the task of transforming society consciously. . . (1971: 71).

History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at issue.The truth that the old intuitive, mechanistic ma­terialism could not grasp turns out to be doubly true for the^proletariat, namely that it can be transformed and liberated only by its own actions, and that "the educator must himself be educated."The objective economic evolution could do no more than create the position of the proletariat in the production process. It was this position that determined its point of view. But the objective

106

evolution could only give the proletarit the opportunity and the necessity to change society.Any transformation can only come about as the product of the—free--actio'n of the proletariat (1971: 208-09).

In the essay "Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,

Lukács (1971: 306) suggests, contrary to any theory of determinism, that

barbarism is a real future possibility:

For capitalism, then, expedients can certainly be thought of in and for themselves. Whether they can be put into practice depends, however, on the proletariat. The proletariat, the ac­tions of the proletariat, block capitalism's way out of the crisis. Admittedly, the fact that the proletariat obtains power at the moment is due to the "natural laws" governing the economic process. But these "natural laws" only deter­mine the crisis itself, giving it dimensions which frustrate the "peaceful" advance of capi­talism. However, if left to develop (along capitalist lines) they would not lead to the simple downfall of capitalism or to a smooth transition to socialism. They would lead over a 1 long period of crisis, civil wars and imperial­ist world wars on an ever-increasing scale to "the mutual destruction of the opposing classes" and to a new barbarism (1971: 306).

All of the above quotes indicate that Lukács contends that there

is a predetermined historical role for the proletariat to carry out

but at the same time that the proletariat may not be prepared to carry

it through. The nature of this contradiction is apparent in the fol­

lowing statement from "Class Consciousness" (Lukács, 1971: 76):

Only the consciousness of the proletariat can point the way that leads out of the impasse of capitalism. As long as this consciousness is lacking, the crisis remains permanent, it goes back to its starting-point, repeats the cycle until after infinite sufferings and terrible

107

detours the school of history completes the educa­tion of the proletariat and confers upon it the leadership of mankind. But the proletariat' is not given any choice. As Marx says, it must be­come a class not only "as against capital" but also "for itself"; that is to say, the class struggle must be raised from the level of economic necessity to the level of conscious aim and effective class consciousness. The pacifists and humanitarians of the class struggle whose efforts tend whether they will or not to retard this lengthy, painful and crisis-ridden process would be horrified if they could but see what suffer­ings they inflict on the proletariat by extending this course of education. But the proletariat cannot abdicate its mission. The only question at issue is how much it has to suffer before it achieves ideological maturity, before it ac­quires a true understanding of its class situa­tion and a true class consciousness.

As pointed out earlier, Lukacs does not hold fast to the position

that the proletariat will acquire class consciousness on its own. In

the History and Class Consciousness essay, "Towards a Methodology of

the Problem of Organization," Lukacs contends that the Party has an

essential role to play in helping the proletariat achieve class con­

sciousness. Here Lukacs shifts position on who is the mediator: in

the reification essay it was the proletariat alone whereas in the

organization article it is the Party. Arato (1972a: 92) explains this

shift as follows:

It must be stressed that his turning to the Party as the revolutionary subject was the result of his theoretical and practical inability to con­cretely work out the relationship of the revolu­tionary subjectivity of the proletariat and the objective historical process.

zLukacs* position with regard to the role of the Party is essentially

that while it is true that the proletariat is the only possible

108

revolutionary vanguard, it cannot develop class consciousness by it­

self. The role of the Party as mediator is most clearly discussed in

the following passage:

The party as a whole transcends the reified divi­sions according to nation, profession, etc., and according to modes of life (economics and poli­tics) by virtue of its action. For this is oriented towards revolutionary unity and collabor­ation and aims to establish the true unity of the proletarian class. And what it does as a whole it performs likewise for its individual members.Its closely-knit organization with its resulting iron discipline and its demand for total commit­ment tears aways the reified veils that cloud the consciousness of the individual in capital1st society (1971: 339)emphasis added).

The only significant difference between the two positions with regard

to the mediator of revolution is that Lukács' turn to the Party makes

the determinism in his thought more apparent. Lukács did not, as Arato

(1972a) has claimed, sacrifice his concern with subjectivism by turning

to the Party as a mediator. The subjectivism had been sacrificed from

the moment he employed use of the Hegelian dialectic.

To summarize, Lukács conceptualizes reification as the alienation

of subject and object in all spheres of society and the consequent in­

ability of man to perceive the true nature of reality--the totality of

subject and object. The referent of the concept is the alienation of

subject and object. Because the subject and object are alienated, the

subject perceives the objects as things independent of himself or which

have an autonomous law-like existence. Consciousness or the self-

knowledge of the true subject (people) is said to be reified because,

since it is alienated from its objects, it cannot see what its true

109

essence is--totality of subject and object. That is, that objects are

really a part of the human essence and should not be considered inde­

pendent or alien to it and therefore in reality people should not be

playing a subservient role. In the reification essay the proletariat

is explained as the necessary mediator of revolutionary change because

its existence in capitalist society allows for the possiblity of it to

recognize its labor power as a commodity which in turn is said to give

rise to the emergence of class consciousness (self-consciousness, self-

knowledge) which is capable of understanding the true nature of social

reality. In other essays contained in History and Class Consciousness,

Lukács argues that the Communist Party is the mediator of the revolu­

tion because it educates the proletariat and thereby helps it achieve

the class consciousness necessary to overcome reification. Regardless

of whether the mediator between reality and the illusion of capitalism

is the proletariat or the Party, Lukács' explanation of overcoming reif­

ication (his theory of revolution) is marked by a distinct determinism

despite his rejection of the determinism of the International and goal

of identifying a "revolutionary subject" (Arato, 1972a). This is the

case because in his search for a revolutionary subject, he turned to

Hegel and the Hegelian dialectic. Like the young Marx, Lukács thought

he had found a method for explaining the historical, ever changing

nature of social reality in the Hegelian dialectic. What he really

found,as illustrated in chapter two, was a method which deterministically

denies the existence of concrete matter. With these things in mind,

it is necessary to investigate the; nature of the idealism his use of

the Hegelian dialectic necessarily had to result in.

no

In conceptualizing reification as the alienation of subject and

object, Lukacs is employing an Hegelian usage of alienation. But as

was pointed out in our consideration of Hegel, his concept of alienation

has no meaning or relevance beyond its function within the dialectic.

That is, alienation is that part of the dialectical method which allows

history to realize itself. But the idea is also unreflective and can

only come to know itself or attain self-consciousness or self-knowledge

with the unfolding of history. The unfolding of history is achieved

through the dialectical method. In order to know or realize itself,

the Idea must objectify itself, i.e., produce itself in material form.

But these objects, within the framework of the Hegelian dialectic, are

alien to and negations of the Idea, the only reality. Therefore what

alienation means in Hegel's dialectic is alienation from reality. The

alien form or the state of alienation has no reality, for it is simply

a negation or contradiction of reality. In other words, since the Idea

is defined.as the only reality, anything which is not the Idea itself

has no reality in itself because it has no independent existence. Now

because Lukacs uses the Hegelian concept of alienation, he necessarily

assumes that capitalist society is not a concrete reality. This is

why he suggests that in capitalism things appear different from what

they really are. In other words, like Hegel, he assumes that there is

an abstract, given reality and capitalism is a negation of it, or an

unreal in itself alienation of it. Therefore, and also necessarily

like Hegel, Lukacs (1971: 178) argues that to overcome this state of

affairs consciousness of true essence, the oneness of subject and object

must be realized:

Ill

. . .as the mere contradiction {of capitalism} is raised to a consciously dialectical contradiction, as the act of becoming conscious turns into a^ point of transition in practice, we see once more in greater concreteness the character of prole­tarian dialectics as we have often described it: namely, since consciousness here is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self- consciousness of the object the act of conscious­ness overthrows the objective form of its object (emphasis original).

The underlying idealism in Lukaes' thought, the primacy of mind over

matter, of ideas over material reality, could not be stated more clearly

or straightforwardly than in this passage. The difference between the

idealism of this position and the materialism underlying Marx's concept

of the fetishism of commodities should be noted. The referent of Marx's

concept of the fetishism of commodities is the inversion of the human

subject and the commodity he has produced as an objectification of him­

self. What exists is relations among things, commodities, rather than

people. People's lives therefore-become governed by the commodities,

the economic production system they have created. However, even though

Marx speaks of the inversion familiar to Lukács' concept of reification,

Marx (1967a: 74) unlike Lukaes contends that knowledge of this state of

affairs will not automatically change it or lead to its change anymore

than knowledge of the component gases of air resulted or eventually

will result in a change in the atmosphere. In taking this position

Marx recognizes the empirical, material existence of this state of

affairs, and therefore, while not suggesting that it cannot be altered,

he does recognize that thought or knowledge itself cannot automatically

112

change it. Because Lukács does suggest knowledge will automatically

result in change, his thought on reification is clearly marked by ideal

ism.

In sum, when Lukács speaks of reification he is necessarily assum­

ing that there is an absolute, given human essence from which people in

capitalist society are alienated. That is, we are really something

which we do not realize in capitalism. Capitalism has dehumanized us.

Since an absolute essence is assumed and held to be hidden or veiled

in capitalism, the only way to overcome this situation is through con­

sciousness, i.e., through understanding that things are really dif­

ferent from what they appear to be. Nothing has to be done, just

realized. Thus Lukács' theory of reification is clearly idealistic as

it necessarily had to be since he used the Hegelian dialectic to ex­

plain social change. All in all, the basic weakness in Lukács' theory

is the same as that which characterized Marx's early work—the assump­

tion that the Hegelian dialectic can be used to explain material

reality.

Berger and Pullberg

The preceeding discussion of Lukács illustrated that there are

several problems with Lukács' Marxist attempt to explain why people

are not shaping or controlling social and historical forces. Berger

and Pullberg (1965: 199) have attempted to answer this question by

using the concept of reification "in a general sociological critique

of consciousness, without the polemic and utopian trappings that have

often accompanied it." Their concept of reification is rooted in-a

113

sociology of knowledge framework. Positing a dialectical relationship

between man and society, Berger and Pullberg suggest that the concept

of reification can explain why this dialectical process escapes the

consciousness of people.

Berger and Pull berg's conception of the dialectic is founded upon 2

a contended one-sidedness of all sociological theory. As they explain

(1965: 197), either theories present us "with a view of society as a

network of human meanings and embodiments of human activity" (Weberian

tradition), or they present us "with society conceived as a thing-

like facticity, standing over and against its individual members with

coercive controls and molding them in its socializing processes"

(Durkheimian tradition). Berger and Pullberg contend that social

reality involves an "inextricable interrelatedness" of both processes

which can only be theoretically formulated through use of a dialectic

which explains that while people produce society, they are also in turn

produced by it.

Berger and Pullberg attempt to explain the nature of social real­

ity by synthesizing certain theoretical assumptions and concepts from

the phenomenological, Marxist, and functionalist perspectives. Drawing

from phenomenology, they (1965: 201) pose a question related to the

first moment of their dialectic. "What does it mean that man produces

a world?" In answering this question, the following assumptions are

made (1965: 201-02): (1) man as man is acting and object directed;

(2) man, as an acting, object directed being, is engaged in a never

ending process of structuring the world as a meaningful totality since

114

meaningful action would otherwise be impossible; (3) the process of

structuring the world as a meaningful totality is a social process, i.e.

"men together engage in constructing a world, which then becomes their

common dwelling"; (4) since this world is a social process, its reality

is "neither given in itself nor once and for all." Rather, it must

continuously be constructed and reconstructed as a social process be­

cause it only remains real as long as people believe it is real; (5)

because the world is a social product, "it manifests the intentionality

of those who produced it," and thus it is possible for all people to

understand the constructed world. These contentions clearly suggest

that according to Berger and Pullberg, in the first moment of the dia­

lectic society has no existence independent of man--man makes or con­

structs all social reality.

In discussing the nature of the second moment of the dialectic,

Berger and Pullberg suggest that the major question which needs to be

answered next is how can the social structure be explained if we ad­

here to the position that reality is nothing more than a social con­

struction? Berger and Pullberg (1965: 202) answer that explaining the

social structure is not nearly so problematic as explaining people's

perception of it. The social structure is explained simply as a part of

the socially constructed, or objectivated world and therefore as some­

thing which "has no reality except a human one" (1965: 202). However,

they (1965: 202) are quick to point out that while this is the case

a priori, it is also the case de facto that "Social structure is en­

countered by the individual as an external facticity" which is perceived

115

on the one hand as coercive insofar as it;"constrains," "controls," and

sometimes even "destroys" the individual, and on the other as automatic

insofar as individuals are taught to be unreflective through the pro­

cess of socialization. The process whereby people view the social

structure as independent of themselves and thing-like is conceptualized

by Berger and Pullberg (1965: 200) as the process of alienation:

"alienation is the process by which man forgets that the world he lives

in has been produced by himself." However, this process of alienation

is suggested to be inevitable because "alienation and sociation are de

facto linked processes" (1965: 203). Berger and Pullberg (1965: 203)

explain this link as follows: "Founded on this process {sociation}

there emerges a world that is taken for granted and that is lived

through as a necessary fate." Thus, according to Berger and Pullberg,

while the social structure is nothing more than a social construction,

people tend to forget this and let it dictate their existence because

they think of it as an external thing. When this happens alienation

exists. Alienation is viewed by Berger and Pullberg as inevitable

because of theiri.assumption that there can be no reality unless people

believe it to be real, i.e. concrete and thing-like.

According to Berger and Pullberg (1965: 200), alienation (as

conceptualized above) is a precondition for reification: "By reifica­

tion we mean the moment in the process of alienation in which the

characteristic of thing-hood becomes the standard of objective reality.

. . .{R}eification is objectification in an alienated mode." This

reification is said to give rise to reifying consciousness which in

116

turn sees all objects as reifications. As Berger and Pullberg (1965:

204) put it:

Alienation. . .is a rupture between producer and produced. It prevents his recognition of himself in a world he has created. This world now exists in estranged externality and he himself exists in estranged externality from himself. These exis­tential circumstances found a consciousness of both world and self wherein the two are perceived as atomistically closed and mutually exclusive.Thus, in producing an alienated world, the human is devalued and a humanity is produced that is characterized by inert objectivity. This con­sciousness is reifying consciousness and its ob­jects are reifications.

Thus, according to Berger and Pullberg, since reified consciousness can

only perceive reifications, it is reified consciousness which is respon­

sible for people's failure to recognize the dialectical process in its

totality.

Berger and Pullberg contend that reification is neither an anthro­

pological necessity (1965: 208) nor a necessary condition of human exis­

tence a priori (1965: 203) but do suggest that it does constitute "the

de facto reality of most socio-historical situations" (1965: 203).

This is the case, they argue, because ". . .reification operates in

society by bestowing ontological status on social roles and institutions"

(1965: 206). This is said to be the case because "reification minimizes

the range of reflection and choice, automizes conduct in the socially

prescribed channels and fixates the taken-for-granted perception of

the world" (1965: 208). Thus Berger and Pullberg (1965: 208) conclude,

"Reification in this way comes close to being a functional imperative."

117

It is noteworthy that functional imperativism is worked into their

sociology of knowledge orientation. This point will be retuned to

later.

While Berger and Pullberg contend that reification has existed

throughout most human history, they also contend that de-reification,

the disintegration of the taken-for-granted world, has also been an

historical phenomenon. They (1965: 209-10) suggest that there are

three socio-historical constellations conducive to de-reification:

(1) the disintegration of social structures; (2) culture contact; (3)

the effect of marginal individuals in a social system. It is inter­

esting to note that within Berger and Pullberg's scheme, just as man

assumes an objective status in the process of reification, so too does

he maintain that status in the de-reification process. In other words,

man plays no consciously subjective role in Berger and Pullberg's con­

ception of de-reification. This view follows from their phenomenological

view that reality is nothing more than collective consciousness and

therefore in order for reality to exist people must believe in some

construction which they automatically make themselves subservient to.

To summarize, Berger and Pullberg find utility in the concept of

reification because according to them, it explains why people cannot

perceive the world as it really is, i.e. as the result of a dialecti­

cal process between man and society. Reification is said to be a

matter of consciousness which has no a priori necessity but which

occurs in most societies regardless of structure. The explanation

of this de facto occurrence is that it serves important social functions

118

related to order and stability. De-reification is also recognized as

an historical phenomenon but one that is independent of conscious

volition. The implication of Berger and Pullberg's theory is that

reification is inevitable because of the necessary social functions

it serves but that we can expect changes in what we reify since what

we reify is a mental construction and it is possible for one construc­

tion to lose legitimacy and be replaced by another.

The referent in Berger and Pullberg's concept of reification,

therefore, is the appearance of thing-hood of human objectifications.

While the major flaw in Lukaes' theory was the idealism and determinism

which resulted from his use of the Hegelian dialectic, the major flaw

of Berger and Pullberg's theory is theoretical incoherence. Their con­

cept of dialectic is. comprised of idealistic as well as rigid structural

ist premises—that is, the first part of their dialectic is Hegelian

and the second part is based on structuralist assumptions.

Berger and Pullberg's concept of alienation, which they theorize

as the initial cause of reification, is clearly idealistic. Like

Lukaes, they assume an original state of unity between human subject

and his creations: "By alienation we mean the process by which the

unity of the producer and product is broken" (1965: 200). Also like

Lukaes they suggest that this state of alienation has no concrete

reality. Rather, it is something that appears to be something it is

not: "The product now appears to the producer as an alien facticity

standing in itself and over against him, no longer recognizable as a

process" (1965: 200 emphasis added). These statements suggest an

119

assumption of absolute human essence, a subject-object unity which is

not visible in the alienated state. Finally, their contention that

"alienation is the process by which man forgets that the world he lives

in has been produced by himself" (1965: 200}, clearly reflects their

idealistic underpinnings insofar as it is suggested that if people

could be reminded that they created the world, if they could realize

or understand the way things really are, or become conscious of the

true reality, then alienation and the consequent reification could be

overcome (cf. Geras, 1971). This unmistakably evidences the primacy

of thought and the non-material, non-concrete conception of social

reality in their thinking.

These contentions on alienation comprise Berger and Pullberg's

initial assumptions about social reality. This process of alienation

is then said to eventually culminate in reification: "Reification

. . .is the moment in the process of alienation in which the charact­

eristic of thing-hood becomes the standard objective reality" (1965:

200). The sentence immediately following this definition is highly

informative: "That is, nothing can be conceived of as real that does

not have the character of a thing" (1965: 200). It is here that

theoretical assumptions become clearly contradictory. In contending

that nothing can be conceived of as real that does not have the

character of a thing, Berger and Pullberg suggest again that there

is no real, independent social reality--that there really are no

"things" in social reality. Here their idealism is clear. However,

in explaining why nothing can be conceived of as real unless it has

120

the character of a thing, they suggest that it is because it is neces­

sary for social survival: "Reification. . .comes close to being a

functional imperative" (1965: 208). In claiming that reification

serves a necessary function, Berger and Pullberg are necessarily

assuming some "thing" called society which does have independent,

autonomous existence. Therefore,on the one hand they suggest that

alienation and reification is clearly a matter of misperceiving

reality because society has no existence independent of people-

society is a social construction—and on the other hand they suggest

that the reason we think it is independent is because of some need

society has which people have no control over. Because of this,

Berger and Pullberg's theory of reification is characterized by the

same kind of overriding idealism we observed in Lukacs1 theory. The

major difference between the two is that Berger and Pullberg attempt,

unsuccessfully, to balance this idealism with materialism.

Israel

Israel's theory of reification is couched in a critical theoret­

ical framework. He conceptualizes reification as the "process of

transformation of man into objects or things" (Israel, 1971: 257).

Drawing from Marx's discussion of commodities, Israel (1971: 287)

theorizes that the basis of the process of reification is the trans­

formation of "activities and products into commodities, i.e., exchange

values," because with this transformation "individuals feel that they

are no longer affected by or subjugated to personal, human influences

but to impersonal, objective, thing-like conditions, which they cannot

121

change." However, Israel (1971: 288) does not think that the fetishism

of commodities is "both a necessary and sufficient condition for the

process of reification to occur." His theory of reification therefore

attempts to identify the other necessary conditions:

. . .one of Marx's central themes holds that the transformation of use-values into exchange-values is a central determining factor for the process of reification. Our analysis. . .aims at an attempt to place this hypothesis within a wider sociological content (Israel, 1971: 297).

In addition to the fetishism of commodities, the conditions which

give rise to the process of reification are the nature of power rela­

tions and bureaucracy in modern industrial society. Although commodity

production is central to Israel's theory of reification, he does not

theorize that reification is unique to capitalist production. Using

the Soviet experience as an example Israel (1971: 257) argues that

abolition of private ownership of the means of production does not re­

solve the problem of reification. In a manner reminiscent of Weber and

Dahrendorf, Israel argues that differential power relations rather than

capitalist economic relations are the root cause of the specific

character of the modern industrial world. Israel's (1971: 300) specific

arguement is "that the base of power is not necessarily the ownership

of means of production, but that being in position to dispose of these

means is the base of power." According to Israel (1971: 300) a techno­

logical elite has the means of production at its disposal and therefore

wields power because: (1) they have the skill and technical expertise

needed in the decision-making process of production which makes them

122

"unsubstitutab.le"; (2) their technical knowledge makes it necessary for

them to control recruitment; (3) they have the resources to control

"channels of information" and thus can legitimize their power; and (4)

they have goals and interests which coincide with those of the military

and political elites. The nature of the "cooperative interdependence"

of these elites is said to be central to the process of reification.

Like others (cf. Mills, 1959), Israel (1971: 300) contends that industry

needs the military for contracts of low economic risk and the military

needs industry to supply them with the weaponry it needs to preserve

its power. With regard to the political elite, Israel (1971: 300)

argues that in addition to maintaining power through monopolization of

force and indoctrination, it may do so by "satisfying the basic needs

of the ruled and by making available larger amounts of consumer goods

not needed for basic need satisfaction." Therefore, the point at which

the interests of all three elites converge is the "continuous attempt

to achieve more perfect technological, processes" (Israel, 1971: 301).

The overall result is said to be the subordination of human concerns

to those of technological development which result in economic growth:

"The goal of the technocratic elite becomes economic growth. . .(1971:

312).

This system necessity of economic growth which emerged from the

goals defined by those possessing power (the technocratic elite, the

political elite, and the military elite) due to their disposal of the

means of production, is identified as one essential cause of the pro­

cess of reification. Pointing out that in order for the system goals

123

to be accomplished it is necessary to produce more and more at maximum

efficiency and then sell what is produced, Israel contends that this

requires that the worker be transformed into a "means for creating

surplus value" (1971: 306) or, in other words, "objects," "labor power"

(1971: 309). Then, because of the necessity of consumption, the worker

is also turned into a consuming object, or one who consumes not what he

needs (use value) but things which have been produced only for the pur­

pose of economic growth (exchange value) (1971: 307).

Continuing his analysis of the consequences of differential power,

Israel (1971: 305-06) also suggests that the distance and invisibility

of the decision-making bodies from those affected by the decision also

contributes to the transformation of people into objects because of the

impersonal relations which result from the distance and invisibility:

"The consequences of impersonal and asymmetric relations are that human

beings are transformed into objects."

While Israel conceptualizes unequal power and the system needs of

technological and economic expansion as conditions necessary for the

process of reification to occur, bureaucratization is identified as

another condition of the reification process (Israel, 1971: 322).

Israel's treatment of bureaucratization is brief and addresses itself

more to a review of the different usages of the term rather than the

exact nature of the relation between bureaucratization and the process

of reification. That which he does focus on echos his argument pre­

sented earlier on unequal power relations as a cause:

124

The dominance of the bureaucratic social struc­ture, the dominance of those'values coined as bureaucratic, and the dominance of a bureau­cratic class—these three factors taken together constitute what may be termed the "bureaucrati­zation of society"—having the effect that bureaucratic organizations develop their own ways of functioning, independent of, and often in opposition to, the goals created for them, and leading to the rule of the bureaucratic class's holding in its hands the concentration of power with corresponding powerlessness among the rest of the population. Thus we have the main basis for one of the main reifying pro­cesses in modern society (Israel, 1971: 324).

The system values of bureaucratization can be depicted by mentioning a few terms: efficiency, formalization of rules, impersonal social rela­tions, and the acceptance of asymmetric personal relations, usually in a more or less authori­tarian manner defined in terms of dominance and submission. Thus the value system of bureau­cratic organizations, being detrimental to a democratic and equalitarian value-system, may be considered to be a sufficient condition for the establishment of the dehumanized social re­lations characterizing a reified system.

Stated briefly, according to Israel there are two major reifying

processes in modern industrial society, the goal of technological and

economic growth and expansion, which stems from the desire of those

who have power to maintain it, and bureaucratization. As a result of

these processes, the processes of production, consumption, and decision­

making all "lead to the domination of things over human beings" (1971:

313). However, Israel (1971: 287) also identifies a "cognitive" or

psychological counterpart which focuses on the perception and experi­

ence of reification. Drawing from the interactionism of Cooley and

Mead, and the Marxist notion that in capitalist society the central

125

relation between people occurs in the process of production and distri­

bution,^ Israel (1971: 314) draws the following conclusion:

If man perceives himself as powerless in his rela­tions to others, if he perceives himself as an ob­ject, then this perception will make him experience reification as the "normal state of affairs"--his consciousness will be a reified one.

As with Lukács and Berger and Pullberg, Israel's conceptualization of

cognitive reification or reified consciousness, makes a solution to

the process of reification appear problematic. Yet, Israel suggests

that democracy and equality can overcome reification:

In order to overcome reification it is necessary that by means of democratic decision-making pro­cesses man defines his own goals and consciously directs the ways of achieving these goals, thus becoming master of his own fate. As an ethical .’ and political point of departure this demand must become central, even if its realization appears difficult as all other alternatives appear to be worse (Israel, 1971: 313).

. . .relations built upon equality are at the opposite pole to reified social relations (Israel,1971: 322).

In the final analysis, however, Israel (1971: 346) contends that it is

really a critical sociology which has the potential for "counteracting

reifying tendencies by revealing them." In explaining the task of a

critical sociology, Israel (1971: 346) turns to Habermas' explanation

offered in Theorie und Praxis:

It studies society as a totality and in its his­torical setting from the viewpoint of criticism and socio-political practice, i.e. not merely with a view to making visible what in any case

126

happens, but rather with a view to making us aware of, and keeping us aware of, what we must do, viz. the planning and shaping of the future, which we cannot avoid being engaged in. For instance, if critical sociology shows us that, say, social emancipation bought at a price of increasing regimentation is not freedom, that prosperity bought at a price of objectification of enjoy­ment is not affluence, etc., then such a check upon the results of social planning is its con­tribution to preventing the society from becoming a closed society. Such a control has the expli­cit political aim of keeping our society an open society.

In summary, Israel defines reifying processes.as those processes

which contribute to the leveling of man to the status of object and

which subordinate him to things. These processes are said to be

characteristic of modern industrial society, socialist and capitalist

alike, because of the systemic nature of modern industry. Because a

continuous increase in productivity is essential to the perpetuation

of this system, people are converted into objects in the spheres of

production and consumption. The impersonal nature of bureaucratic

organization and the distance and invisibility of the decision-makers

from the people ruled and vice versa intensifies the powerlessness and

hence objectification of man. Since the self is conceptualized as a

social self, man cannot help but perceive of himself as a powerless

object, because this is all he is in the existing modern industrial

world. As a result, his consciousness becomes reified and he thinks

of the existing state of affairs as "normal." Critical sociology is

said to offer hope for overcoming reification by revealing that reifica­

tion exists. Structurally, democracy and equality are suggested as

requisites for a non-reified society.

127> /

Unlike Lukaes and Berger and Pullberg, Israel's concept and theory

of reification do not rest on the premise of a subject-object dichotomy

or alienation of man from his true absolute being. Rather, according

to Israel, reification or the "transformation of man into objects or

things" (1971: 257) is a function of the system needs of modern indus­

trial society, socialist as well as capitalist. While this position

statement with regard to cause suggests a structuralist orientation in

Israel, his theoretical approach contain elements of idealism. In

this manner his theory parallels Lukaes'. Lukaes begins with the con­

tention that reification is rooted in and unique to capitalism and winds

up with the contention that overcoming reification in the final analy­

sis is contingent upon a transformation of consciousness alone. While

Israel suggests that features of modern industrial society in general,

and not capitalism in particular, cause reification, he draws the simi­

lar conclusion that a consciousness or understanding of the underlying

mechanisms of modern industrial society is the only way reification can

be dealt with as a social problem. Where he differs from Lukaes is in

his subjectivism. Even though Lukaes' 1967 self-criticism points to an

"overriding subjectivism" as one of the major limitations of History

and Class Consciousness, this subjectivism, as pointed out earlier, is

a predetermined subjectivism and therefore not really a subjectivism

at all. This is the case because, for Lukaes, class consciousness is

external rather than psychological in nature. In order for the pro­

letarian revolution to occur this external consciousness, which con­

tains the truth, must enter the consciousness of the proletariat. The

128

proletarian will fulfill their historical role or mission even though

they have no individual or psychological comprehension of what they are

doing. Israel, on the other hand, suggests that people must be made

aware of the true mechanisms of industrial society so they may preserve

and safeguard their subjective role over the system needs. This is

the basis for his contention that critical sociology can play an impor­

tant role in overcoming reification by helping to make people aware:

"A critical sociology may thus be seen as a necessity in order to

counteract reifying tendencies in society by revealing them" (1971:

346). But despite the subjectivism, it is his position here which

highlights the idealism in Israel's thought. If it is assumed that

knowledge or consciousness itself is enough to change social reality,

this type of thinking is idealistic insofar as it assumes the prece­

dence of mind or consciousness in determining the nature of material

reality. This approach, as Marx suggests in his concept of the fetish­

ism of commodities, presumes that material reality has no concrete

independence from thought. Thus, presumably, according to Israel's

Tine of thought, if critical sociology determined that the political

institutions in modern, industrial, bureaucratic society must be made

more democratic so we can become the master of our own fate (Israel,

1971: 313), people in modern society would take heed and thus we would

begin to overcome alienation and reification. Why democratic decision­

making is not characteristic of bureaucratic processes loses signifi­

cance at this point of Israel's analysis, for it is assumed that

thought decisively influences social reality, Israel (1971: 333) states

129

this position point blank: ". . .a social system exists only as long

as man sees it as a part of his world." In this respect, it appears

that Israel's critical sociology is not much different from the approach

of the Young Hegelians which Marx criticized in The Jewish Question

(See also Swingewood, 1975: 226). Just as Bruno Bauer suggested that

the Jews forget about religious reform and work for the realization of

the state described by Hegel without questioning how the material

social structure gives rise to religious thought, Israel similarly

suggests that people in modern industrial society should start defin­

ing their own goals without at this point in his analysis considering

the structural determinants for man's loss of control. Freedom of

consciousness is held to be a prerequisite for social change. Thought

supercedes matter. Here Israel seems to echo Hegel.

What is unique to Israel's concept and theory of reification then

is: (1) the equation of the concept of reification with dehumanization;

(2) the system needs of industrial society are theorized as the cause

of reification; and (3) the solution to the problem of reification is

theorized as inherent in the scientific understanding of the mechanisms

of modern industry and the relation of this structure to consciousness.

It is not Israel's equation of reification and dehumanization which

indicates an idealistic framework, for his thought implies no abstract

anthropological concept of human nature. Man is perceived as dehuman­

ized only because he is out of control. Rather, Israel's theory is

idealistic because it assumes the primacy of thought over matter.

130

Summary

Comparison of these three theories of reification reveals similar­

ities as well as differences. In all three theories, reification is

conceptualized as a social process in which man, the creator of social

institutions, social relations and material objects, and therefore the

subject of history, becomes the object of his objectifications because

they gain an autonomous movement and thereby replace man as the sub­

jective force. All three theories also include a conception of reified

consciousness which refers to the mental perception of the process of

reification as natural and law-like. But this basic conceptualization

is where the similarity ends. Some very fundamental differences with

regard to the nature, cause, historical prevalence, and solution to

reification can be observed in these theories.

First, while all three theories conceptualize the process of reifi

cation as the inversion of subject and object, their conceptualization

of the nature of this inversion differs significantly. Berger and

Pullberg assume that objectification and alienation are synonymous on

the grounds that when man objectifies himself he creates something of

himself, or externalizes himself, which upon completion is a thing

external or alien to himself. Therefore alienation is considered

normal and necessary insofar as man must create a social world and

certain material products for survival. Reification is theorized to

exist because the alienation of subject and object, which was initially

necessary, has not been overcome, i.e. the subject has not comprehended

that the objects are simply an extension of himself and therefore that

131

subject and object are really one totality. Unlike Berger and Pullberg,

Lukaes suggests that reification, rather than being a normal and neces­

sary phenomenon, is unique to capitalism. Finally, Israel contends

that the nature of the inversion is not symptomatic of man's loss of

totality because of the subject-object dichotomy but rather the system

goals of ever expanding production in modern .industrial society taking

precedence over human considerations. Man becomes objectified and sub­

servient to things because modern industrial society requires maximum

production and full consumption. Therefore, Israel argues that the

nature of reification is not a deviation from a normal state of totality

but a dehumanization springing from the structure of society.

Secondly, while all three theories include the notion of reified

consciousness, differentiation exists with regard to its nature also.

Lukaes contends the mind or consciousness is reified in capitalist

society because reification is total, i.e., the subject has become

alienated from its objectifications in all spheres of life. Because

of this, consciousness cannot comprehend things being different.

Berger and Pullberg's conception of reified consciousness is similar

to Lukaes' but differs from it in one essential aspect. For them

reified consciousness is one that perceives reality as a "thing" inde­

pendent of man. Their conception is therefore like Lukaes' insofar as

it suggests that consciousness can only interpret what appears before

it, alienation, hut differs from Lukaes because it does not suggest

that reification can be overcome through the help of a mediator.

Israel, on the other hand, argues that a reified consciousness results

132

from the social nature of self. Because man's self concept emerges

through social interaction and because the central interaction in modern

society occurs in the process of production and distribution, he comes

to perceive himself as a powerless object which in turn results in his

perception of reification as normal. When one perceives reification as

normal, Israel says he has a reified consciousness.

Another important point of divergence in these theories is the

postulated cause of reification. According to Lukacs, capitalism

causes reification. This is said to be the cause because the produc­

tion of commodities in capitalism necessarily gives rise to the inver­

sion of the true subject-object relation. Defining the crucial char­

acteristic of capitalism as private ownership of the means of production.

Israel rejects capitalism as a cause in favor of industrialism and the

characteristic power differentials and bureaucratic organization found

in it. Berger and Pullberg are not at all explicit on the actual cause

of reification. Their explanation tends towards teleology. Reification

is more or less a functional imperative because, they argue, if people

did not define the social world they constructed as real and thing-like,

society could not exist since it is nothing more than a social construc­

tion.

Following from these contrary positions on the cause of reification,

we can observe three logically consistent positions with regard to the

issue of relative prevalence of reification throughout history. Citing

capitalism as the cause, Lukacs contends that reification is unique to

capitalist society. Israel conceptualizes it as unique to the modern

133

industrial world. Berger and Pullberg, on the other hand, contend it

has nothing to do with either capitalism or industrialism, since they

theorize it as a functional imperative.

All these differences with regard to the nature, cause, and his­

torical prevalence of reification naturally add up to different theo­

rized solutions. Lukács suggests the only way the problem can be

solved is through reunification of subject and object, i.e. attainment

of totality through self-consciousness. Berger and Pullberg contend

that reification is necessary and therefore cannot be abolished but

also point out that de-reification occurs with the disintegration of

social structures, culture contact, and as a result of marginal people

in any society. Israel suggests that while reification is not inevi­

table, it can only be overcome if we are aware of it. Critical soci­

ology is held as at least one way to keep us aware of the process of

reification and the effects it can have on our consciousness.

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION: THE MEANING AND UTILITY OF THE CONCEPT OF REIFICATION

Summary

The concept of reification has been a subject of debate and con­

troversy since 1923 when Georg Lukaes first presented his theoretical

statement. Formulating his theory of reification as a Marxist criti­

cal of the determinism issued 'in by the Second International, and sug­

gesting that the concept of reification is synonymous with Marx's con­

cepts of alienation and the fetishism of commodities, Lukaes first

drew criticism and accusations of heresy from the Third International

or Comintern. The Comintern denounced the theory primarily because it

resurrected Marx's 1844 concept of alienation and argued that class

consciousness is a necessary ingredient in socialist revolution. The

position of the Comintern was that Marx's 1844 concept of alienation

and 1867 concept of the fetishism of commodities were both influenced

by Hegel's idealism and therefore were of no relevance to the scien­

tific stance of Soviet Marxism. The position which the Soviets held

then and still maintain today is often referred to as the theory of

the crash. The basic premise is that Marx's scientific study of

capitalism indicates that there are internal contradictions within

the industrial system which will ultimately lead to its own destruc­

tion and the rise of socialism.

Today the parameters of the debate have expanded considerably

both within and beyond the Marxist camp. Within the Marxist camp

135

there still remain those loyal to the official Party position (cf.

Althusser, 1971; 1977) and agree with its stance on the significance

of the concepts of alienation and the fetishism of commodities in

Marx's work (cf. Colletti, 1975). But there are also those following

Lukacs who contend that Marx's concepts of alienation, the fetishism

of commodities, and the concept of reification are synonyms and that

the continued appearance of these terms in Marx's latest works sug­

gests that rather than being the positivist the Soviets claim he iVas,

Marx was always a humanist motivated by concerns for the condition of

'alienation in capitalist society (cf. Avineri, 1969; Meszaros, 1970;

Oilman, 1971). Finally, there are some (cf. Colletti, 1973, 1974a)

who contend that while it is true that Marx's concepts of alienation,

the fetishism of commodities and reification are synonyms, Marx's usage

of them was not couched in humanism but rather a refinement of scien­

tific method in the social sciences. Those who adhere to this position

therefore also suggest that the concept of reification is relevant to

the scientific study of society.

Beyond the Marxist camp are those who maintain that in order for

the concept of reification to be of scientific utility it must be re­

formulated. Berger and Pullberg reformulated the concept from within

a sociology of knowledge framework and in doing so also significantly

reformulated the theoretical explanation of its cause and continued

existence. They hold that the concept of reification, as they have

reformulated it, is useful in explaining why it is that people view

society and social institutions as "things" or "facticities" when

136

society is really nothing more than a social construction of reality.

Also beyond the Marxist camp is Israel, who reformulated the concept

within the perspective of critical sociology. Israel conceptualizes

reification as common to industrial societies, regardless of their

economic ideologies. He views the concept as relevant and useful to

sociological research insofar as it yields an understanding of the

predicament of modern man and as a result can therefore help us deter­

mine ways to change and improve social conditions.

Given this debate and controversy, the purpose of this study was

twofold. The first objective was to determine the referent of the

concepts of reification developed by Lukács, Berger and Pullberg, and

Israel and thereby determine the similarities and differences among

them. Precision in this regard was deemed essential because of the

tendency in the literature to define the concept of reification by

some other ambiguous or variously used concepts, such as alienation

and the fetishism of commodities. The second objective was to deter­

mine utility of the concept for a contemporary sociological research,

i.e. can it contribute to a viable understanding of social reality or

not?

Clarification of the meaning of the concept was accomplished

through specifying Marx's relation to Hegel, comparing their dialec­

tics and concepts of alienation, and determining whether or not

Marx's concept of fetishism of commodities is rooted in idealistic

Hegelian assumptions. Clarification of the utility of the concept

for contemporary sociological research was accomplished by employing

137

the basic criterion of scientific realism set forth by Bhaskar (1975),

Timpanaro (1975), Ruben (1979), and Colletti (1975). This basic cri­

terion of scientific realism is whether or not the referent of the

concept has an empirical, material existence. A positive finding was

deemed essential for relevance and utility to scientific investigation.

The principle findings of this study are as follows. The three

systematic theories of reification, those formulated by Lukaes, Berger

and Pullberg, and Israel, originated in an effort to answer the ques­

tion of why people are not in control of historical and social forces.

All three theories also share the common referent of inversion of sub­

ject and object in their concepts of reification. That is, all sug­

gest that people are not in control because people, the real subjects

of history, have become the objects in the process while their products,

objectifications, the objects of historical movement, have assumed the

role of subject.

The theoretical explanations of the concept of reification offered

by Lukaes, Berger and Pullberg and Israel were found to be rooted in

idealistic assumptions, but for reasons which differ in each of the

theoretical schemes. The basic assumption underlying idealism is that

thought is the basis of all reality and therefore matter has no veri­

table being. The idealism in Lukaes1 theory of reification stems from

his use of the Hegelian dialectic. Analysis of Hegel's philosophy

indicated that his dialectical method is an inextricable part of his

idealism. This is the case because in Hegel's scheme the dialectic

is the very method he developed to prove that thought is the sole basis

of reality and that matter has no independent existence.

138

The basic premises of Hegel's thought relevant to this study can

be summarized as follows. Thought or the Idea is true reality itself.

Thought or the Idea is conceptualized as external. It is not conceptu­

alized as the thought or ideas of people because people constitute a

part of the material reality which Hegel contends has no independent

existence. This external, independent concept of Thought or Idea is,

however, initially unreflective. That is, it cannot from the start

automatically realize itself. It.initially has no self-consciousness

or self-knowledge. This self-consciousness or self-knowledge can only

be attained gradually through the course of the historical process.

The mechanism of historical process is the dialectical method. The

dialectical method is therefore the method of historical change and

mechanism of self-consciousness of Thought or the Idea.

Hegel's dialectical method is conceptualized as follows. Because

thought is initially non-reflective, it must objectify itself in order

to become self-conscious. The objectifications of Thought are con­

ceptualized as alienations of Thought itself or True Reality. These

objectifications or alienations are conceptualized as the basis of all

matter-matter has no independent reality, it is only an alienation of

Reality, Thought, or the Idea. The objectification or alienation of

Thought is the first moment of the dialectic. After this objectifi­

cation or alienation, however, there is no self-knowledge or comprehen­

sion of the unity of subject and object (alienation), or, in other

words, Thought and matter. It is during the second moment of the dia­

lectic that Thought realizes itself. The unity of subject and object

139

is realized and as a result Thought has gained some self-consciousness.

In Hegel's scheme there are four major historical epochs which finally

culminate in World History and absolute self-knowledge of Thought or

the Idea. However, the most essential points in Hegel's thought for

this study are: (1) his dialectic is a method used to deny independent

existence or reality to matter; and (2) his concept of alienation,

which is an inherent part of the dialectic, refers to lack of conscious­

ness of true essence or being, or more specifically a lack of compre­

hension regarding the nature of true-being or reality--the unity of

subject and object.

Because Hegel's dialectic was designed to prove the primacy of

thought, Lukács' use of it necessarily resulted in idealistic assump­

tions and conclusions. This is the case despite the fact that Lukács

incorporated Hegel's dialectic into his Marxist-analysis because he

believed that it contained the premise of subjectivism he held as

essential to revolutionary change in the material world. Lukács'

theory of reification parallels Hegel's idealism in assuming an

anthropological human essence of the totality of subject and object

and in contending that reification will only be overcome when the

proletariat realizes its true being as the totality of subject and

object. This realization according to Lukács' theory of reification

is rooted in the assumption that there is a true and ideal state of

being which is not realized in capitalist society and can only be

realized with the development of a valid awareness of reality.

Knowledge of truth is therefore conceptualized as revolutionary change.

140

Berger and Pullberg's theory of reification was found to contain

elements of idealism because they also assume the anthropological con­

cept of human essence as totality of subject and object. While the

idealism of their theory does not permeate its entirety because it

does not incorporate the entire Hegelian dialectic, it does clearly

contend that reification results from the alienation of man from his

products--the dichotomy of his essential being.

Finally, Israel's theory of reification was found to be idealistic

not because it theorized reification as the result of a subject-object

dichotomy or alienation of man from his true being, but because of his

theorized solutions to the problem of reification. Israel suggests

that if we become aware of reification, if we gain an understanding or

consciousness of its existence, then we can begin to overcome it and

build an egalitarian, democratic society in which man resumes his sub­

jective role. While the idealism in Israel's theory is comparatively

minor, it is significant since it suggests that knowledge of material

reality is a sufficient condition for bringing about a consciously de­

sired change in that reality. The nature and significance of the

idealism in Israel's treatment of reification will be highlighted in

the following discussion of Marx's concept of the fetishism of commod­

ities and the relation of this concept to reification.

Comparison of Central Concepts: Reification, Alienation, Fetishism

It was pointed out in the introduction that a major source of con­

fusion regarding the meaning of the concept of reification is rooted

in the fact that it has been used synonymously with other concepts.

141

The most prevalent among these concepts are alienation and the fetishism

of commodities. Similarities and differences between these concepts can

now be specified. .

Reification and Alienation

While the concepts of reification formulated by Lukacs and Berger

and Pul 1 berg • evidence clear similarities to Hegel's concept of alien­

ation and Marx's concept of alienation presented in the 1844 Manuscripts,

it is important not to confuse these concepts with Marx's concept of

alienated labor which is developed in Capital. While reification in

Lukacs and Berger and Pullberg presupposes an absolute reality in the

same way that Hegel and the early Marx did in their concepts of aliena­

tion, Marx's concept of alienated labor does not. In Capital, the con­

cept of alienated labor is developed not to contend that people in

capitalism are detached from their true human essence, but rather to

explain the process by which money is converted into capital. As pointed

out earlier, Marx (1967a: 167-68) claims that the conversion of money

into capital requires the creation of surplus value.

In attempting to explain the creation of surplus value, Marx

(1967a: 167-68) introduces the concept of labor power as a commodity,

but as a commodity which differs from all other commodities insofar

as it becomes a reality only by its exercise (Marx, 1967a: 171).

This difference, he continues, is important insofar as it allows for

the possibility of the seller of this commodity to be exploited by the

buyer (Marx, 1967: 193). When the laborer's labor power is exploited,

142

i.e. when he is not paid in wages the equivalent of the value he pro­

duced for the buyer or capitalist, Marx says that this labor is alien­

ated labor (Marx, 1967a: 251, 494, 475-76, 493). The concept of

alienation in Marx's mature works therefore should be recognized as

relevant only to the exploitation of the laborer's labor power and as

central to explaining the origin of surplus value which is held to be

necessary for the conversion of money into capital. The referent of

the concept is the unpaid labor of the laborer in the workplace. The

concept therefore has a referent which exists in the real world. It

shares no similarity with the idealistic concepts of alienation in

Hegel, alienation in Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, or reification in Lukács

and Berger and Pullberg, all of which assume an unknowable, absolute

state of truth or reality which man is detached from.

Reification and the Fetishism of Commodities

The difference between the concepts of reification and the fetish­

ism of commodities is much more subtle but every bit as significant as

the difference between reification and alienated labor. It was argued

in the chapter on Marx that Marx's formulation of the fetishism of

commodities, far from suggesting an Hegelian throwback (Althusser, 1970;

1971), marks the beginning of a fully coherent scheme. This is the

case because for the first time in his work he does not suggest an

idealist solution to what is conceptualized as an actual concrete

phenomenon. This he succeeded in accomplishing only after he mate­

rial ized his dialectic, separated the dialectical method of historical

change from the method of scientific investigation of capitalism, and

143

conceptualized conscious efforts towards some desired end as different

from dialectial movement and independent from knowledge of the existing

historical material reality.

Previous discussion of Marx's concept of the fetishism of com­

modities pointed out that the major reason it is so difficult to under­

stand the meaning of the concept is because Marx seems to use the con­

cept in two contradictory manners. At times he seems to suggest that

with the fetishism of commodities things appear upside-down, inverted,

opposite from the way they really are. At other times he seems to sug­

gest that he is not talking about false appearance but rather an actual

real situation. The truth is, both contentions are consistent within

the theoretical framework of Marx's Capital.

Marx's concept of the fetishism'of commodities was developed to

refer to what is specific to the capitalist mode of production in rela­

tion to the most abstract dialectics which characterize all social

formations. According to Marx, in all past and present social forma-

tions, it has been the relations of people with other people and nature

which formed the real motor force of history. However, people have not

been aware of this. Instead, they explain events and change as the

result of some external force. What is unique to the capitalist social

formation is the nature in which the dialectic is obscured. Marx

developed the concept of the fetishism of commodities to explain how

it is in commodity production (production of exchange value) that

relations between people appear as relations between things (commodities)

which are independent of them and endowed with value from nature.

144

This is the basis for Marx's usage of the concept as one of false

appearance.

However, even though Marx contends that man is subjugating him­

self unnecessarily in capitalist society since the laws of capitalism

are not independent of his actions, social relations, and interaction

with nature, i.e. they are not laws of nature, he further contends

that the subjugation of man to his creations, objectifications, or

products is what is actually happening in capitalist society—it is a

reality characteristic of the particular social formation of capitalism.

In contending that the inversion is real and not simply an instance of

mistaken identity, Marx's materialism becomes a coherent, total system.

Because he maintains a fully materialist position, he argues that in­

version cannot be overturned simply through knowledge of its existence.

The crux of what Marx is suggesting in his concept of the fetishism

of commodities is that things do not have to be the way they are in

capitalism but nevertheless the way things are in capitalism is a real

form of material reality and therefore knowledge that things do not

have to be this way will not change the existing reality because the

structure of this social formation of capitalism is what gave rise to

people's perception of its mechanisms as reflective of the laws of

nature. Change therefore requires change in the material structure

through concrete action.

There are situations which exist on a more concrete level which

in some ways parallel the apparently contradictory meaning of Marx's

concept of the fetishism of commodities. If the analogies are not

145

pushed too far or taken literally, they can help clarify Marx's concept.

One analogy can be made with reference to alcoholism. If a person is

an active alcoholic, the subject-object relation between this person and

alcohol can be said to be reversed. Instead of him deciding when and

how much he will drink, the alcohol■controls him because he is addicted.

This is the case, moreover, even though it is the alcoholic's own hand

which brings the drink to his mouth. Even though he pours the drink,

the drink controls him. Alcoholism, then, can be considered one form

of human existence. It is not the only form in which a person can live

his life, but it is a real form nevertheless. As corporeal man, the

alcoholic always maintains his potential for subjective action even

though there are other material things which are now really overpower­

ing him. While he is out of control in relation to alcohol, he is the

only one who can take action to change things because he alone, not

the alcohol or the material conditions which give rise to the stress

which are related to the condition, has the potential to change the

material situation. Knowledge that he is an alcoholic or what stressful

situations are related to his alcoholism alone will not contribute to

his cure or freedom from alcohol dependence. He must put this knowledge

into action to change the material conditions of his alcoholism. But

this is not an easy task either. Recent government statistics on the

number of alcoholics in America today are testimony to the difficulty

of changing the reality even though the nature and cause of alcoholism

has been subject to considerable scientific study.

146

A similar analogy can be offered with regard to people who are

overweight. Many people who are overweight do not have to be over­

weight. However, despite the fact that they do not have to be over­

weight, their condition of being overweight is real. There is scien­

tific knowledge that being overweight is in.many cases caused by

overeating. However, telling a person who is fat and does not want

to be that he can become thin by curbing his food intake will not

automatically result in that person going on a diet, staying on a

diet and becoming thin, even though the only way he can lose weight

is through his own effort. Becoming thin is a possibility but does not

necessarily result from knowledge that overeating is responsible for

being overweight. The underlying reasons for overeating may have to

be established before action (eating less) towards the desired end

state (being thin) which is possible can be achieved.

These examples are similar to the phenomenon Marx is referring

to in his concept of the fetishism of commodities insofar as he is

suggesting that although people are the subjects of history, in

capitalism they are objects because of the nature of commodity pro­

duction, and knowledge that the relations in economic production are

social relations and not relations dictated by independent, external,

natural forces will not automatically result in their resumption of

the subjective role. Implicit in Marx's unfunished study of capitalism

is the contention that if man's resumption of the subjective role is

desired, a theory of how to actuate this change is necessary. With

147

this we find that Marx's concept of planned revolutionary change is

distinct from his dialectic and scientific method although the formula-A

tion of revolutionary theory would necessarily be contingent upon knowl­

edge of the dialectical process and the specific mechanisms of capital­

ism derived from scientific analysis. Because this is the case, it

could be argued that Marx presented us with a sketchy framework for

the development of a science of history.While the changes of all

past history have resulted from the process of dialectics, the science

of history would allow us for the first time to consciously control

the future of history.

The differences between the concepts of reification and the con­

cept of the fetishism of commodities can therefore be specified as

follows. The referent of the concept of reification in the schemes of

Lukacs, Berger and Pullberg, and Israel is the inversion of subject

and object. The referent of the fetishism of commodities is also the

inversion of subject and object and therefore on the surface appears

to be the same as that of the concept of reification but is not for

the following reasons. First of all, as pointed out earlier, both

Lukacs and Berger and Pullberg further conceptualize the inversion as

the result of the alienation of man from his total essence or the dichotomy

of the essential unity of his subjective and objective spheres. The

inversion conceptualized in the fetishism of commodities is an actual

inversion of subject and object, not in terms of an assumed anthropo­

logical human essence of subject and object, but rather in terms of

the dialectics of history. In other words, the concept of the fetishism

of commodities refers to the actual, material subservience of people

148

to the relations among commodities while the concept of reification in

Lukács and Berger and Pullberg refers man's alienation from some assumed

given or ideal state. These two concepts of reification and the concept

of the fetishism of commodities are therefore distinct. The terms are

not synonyms for the same phenomenon.

Israel's concept of reification shares similarities as well as

difference with the concept of the fetishism of commodities. The

similarity of the two concepts is that the referent of inversion in

both concepts is a real material phenomenon. Just as Marx's concept

of the inversion of subject and object refers to an actual state of

inversion, so does Israel's concept of reification. However, while

Marx roots the inversion in commodity production, Israel suggests that

the unequal distribution of power in modern industrial society and the

desire of the "power elite" (in his scheme the technocratic elite,

political elite and military) to maintain the existing structure results

in unleashed efforts towards technological and economic production and

expansion which result in the dehumanization or objectification of man.

Bureaucratization further results in this end. There is an inversion

of subject and object because man is not in control—he is simply a

cog in the overall mechanism of modern industrial society, or a pro­

ducing and consuming object. Therefore while Marx's concept of the

fetishism of commodities refers to the inversion of subject and object

in the sphere of economic production, specifically the production of

commodities characteristic of capitalism, Israel's concept of reifica­

tion refers to the inversion of subject and object in a more comprehen-

149

sive sense. In other words, Israel conceptualizes the inversion as

characteristic of more social spheres than Marx does in his fetishism

of commodities.

Another important difference between Israel's concept of reifi­

cation and Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities is that

Israel offers an idealistic solution to the phenomenon while Marx does

not. Israel suggests that knowledge of the phenomenon gained through

the research of critical sociology will enable us to overcome reifica­

tion by creating democratic, egalitarian societies. Marx, on the other

hand suggests that knowledge of the mechanisms of the concrete social

formation neither automatically brings about change in it nor concrete

action to alter its form.

Utility of the Concept of Reification for Sociological Research

So far this study has clarified the meaning of the concepts of

reification in the schemes of Lukaes, Berger and Pullberg, and Israel

and pointed out the similarities and differences between each of these

concepts and Hegel's concept of alienation and Marx's concepts of

alienation, alienated labor and the fetishism of commodities. What

needs to be clarified now is the utility of the concept for sociologi­

cal research.

In addressing the issue of utility the first thing to be kept in

mind is that all three concepts of reification as well as Marx's con­

cepts of alienation and fetishism of commodities were developed to ex­

plain man's objectification, his loss of subjectivism in the real

world. The basic assumption this contended phenomenon of the inversion

150

of subject and object rests on is the assumption of materialism that

man is a real, independent, corporeal being and that he, through his

actions and interactions, creates society. Or stated differently,

society did not exist before man and man was not put here on earth

simply to carry out the will of some external force on which he is

dependent for existence. Only if it is assumed that man is his own

subject can the contention that he has lost his subjectivism make

any sense. If, then, this objectification of man is accepted as a

phenomenon which actually does exist in the real world, the next step

is to determine which, if any, of the concepts discussed in this study,

contains in it the relevant and essential features of social reality

which give rise to the inversion.

The basic criterion this study established for determining the

utility of the concept for sociological investigation is that its

referent must be empirical —i.e. exist in the real world. Let us run

each of these concepts through this first test. The referent of

Marx's concept of alienation and Lukacs' concept of reification is

the unnatural, abnormal, separation of man from his essential being

of the totality of subject and object in capitalist society. While

Marx never conceptualized all objects as abnormal alienations, both

the young Marx and Lukacs argue that capitalist society is an alienated

form of society because in this society man is cut off from his

essence or species-being. Therefore the objectification they set out

to explain through these concepts is explained as the result of man

being detached from his real human nature in capitalist society.

151'x

Unlike the early Marx and Lukács, who contend the objectification

of man is unique to capitalist society, Berger and Pullberg contend

that if we examine history we can observe that man's loss of subjec­

tivism is not only a modern phenomenon which emerged with capitalism,

but rather one which is characteristic of man throughout all history in

all types of society. Therefore, rather than arguing that capitalism

usurps human subjectivity by prohibiting man to realize the totality of

his human essence, Berger and Pullberg contend that the objectification

of man is a requisite for social existence. This is the case, Berger

and Pullberg argue, because in the social construction of reality,

people must necessarily objectify themselves because if they did not,

there would not be any society since society is not a thing and has no

existence independent of the interaction of people. Therefore, Berger

and Pullberg argue that the objects of the social world are nothing more

than part of the people who create them. They go on to argue, however,

that people forget this on the basis that nothing can be considered

real unless it is thought of as a "thing." Once people start thinking

of the social reality as a thing, they themselves become objectified

because they do not realize that they were the subjective creators

of society.

What is common to the early Marx's concept of alienation, Lukács'

concept of reification, and Berger and Pullberg's concept of reifica­

tion is that what is conceptualized as the cause or causes of man's

objectification in the real world is something external to the existing

material reality. In Marx and Lukacs it is some, abstract, anthropol­

ogical concept of human nature. In Berger and Pullberg it is the same

152

anthropological concept of human nature augmented with an abstract con­

cept of social necessity. Therefore what the early Marx, Lukaes, and

Berger and Pullberg are doing is attempting to explain a phenomenon

characteristic of the real world by developing concepts whose validity

cannot be known scientifically. When they explain the inversion of

subject and object in society, they invoke an abstract absolute concept

of man and reality. Their explanations are analogous to religious

explanations of world conditions and world events. These concepts of

reification developed by Lukaes and Berger and Pullberg do not yield

scientific knowledge of social reality and are therefore of no scien­

tific utility. That their concepts of reification are not useful does

not deny the reality of the phenomenon they set out to explain nor the

need to develop a concept to help us understand it.

Three of the concepts formulated to explain the objectification

of man in the real world, the early Marx's concept of alienation,

Lukaes' concept of reification and Berger and Pullberg's concept of

reification, do not meet the basic criteria of scientific utility--a

referent with a material existence in the real world. This leads us

to a consideration of the utility of the other two concepts developed

for this purpose, Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities and

Israel's concept of reification. Both of these concepts meet the basic

criterion of utility insofar as both contain aspects of the real

material world as their referents. Both are therefore of potential

utility in explaining the objectification of man in the real world.

However before we can further determine which, if either, of these

153

concepts is more in tune with reality and therefore of more utility,

the validity of their assumptions about society on which their con­

cepts rest will have to be tested.

For example, Marx, through his concept of the fetishism of commod­

ities suggests that when commodity production in society becomes large-

scale, i.e. when people produce products for exchange rather than for

direct use (use value), and exchange value in fact becomes a use value

insofar as it facilitates profit, the sociaT relations upon which this

mode of production are contingent are not apparent and therefore

people think and act as if each commodity has a natural value indepen­

dent of the amount of human labor it took to produce it. As a result,

people become the objects of the commodities because they don't recog­

nize that they do not have an independent value determined by nature

but rather only a social value rooted in relations between people.

This fetishism of commodities, the appearance that social relations

occur only between commodities and not people, is what Marx identifies

as the unique cause of inversion in capitalist society. He does not

suggest, as Berger and Pullberg might believe, that people were never

the objects of their own products before capitalism. Rather he sug­

gests that in capitalism, unlike any previous form of society, people

do not understand that economic relations are relations among men rather

than objects of nature. Marx's position on the explanation of the

inversion of subject and object is that it has occurred throughout

history but the unique source of the inversion in advanced commodity

producing society is the fetishism of commodities. Scientific knowledge

154'

of the relation of man to man and man to nature allows for the possi­

bility of man becoming both active creator and conscious planner of

social organization.

Israel formulated his concept of reification on the grounds that

Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities was too narrow to fully

explain the nature of inversion in society. While the production of

commodities or transformation of use value into exchange value is con­

sidered an important determinant of the inversion, it is not the exclu­

sive or even primary determinant. Israel, assuming a rather Dahren-

dorfian position, argues that both modern capitalist and socialist

society have as their most characteristic feature, an unequal power .

structure and bureaucratization. Identifying asymmetrical power rela­

tions and bureaucratization as the most characteristic feature of modern

society, Israel suggests that the fetishism of commodities results

from these features and, then, as a result of the fetishism the inver­

sion occurs. Therefore the nature of causality is signficantly dif­

ferent from that posited by Marx. While Marx suggests that commodity

production causes the fetishism of commodities or inversion of subject

and object, Israel suggests that asymmetrical power and bureaucratiza­

tion give rise to ever increasing technological expansion and economic

growth so the power elites (technocratic, political, military) can

maintain their power and this causes the objectification of man by

turning him into an object of production and an object of consumption.

Therefore before we can further specify the utility of Israel's con­

cept of reification for sociological investigation, the concept and

155

the premises of social reality upon which it rests will have to be

further analyzed and tested.

Suggestions for Future Research

This study has accomplished three things towards clarification of

the concept of reification: (1) it has specified the meaning of the

concepts of reification developed by Lukaes, Berger and Pullberg, and

Israel; (2) it has specified the similarities and differences between

these concepts of reification and Hegel's concept of alienation, and

Marx's concepts of alienation, alienated labor, and the fetishism of

commodities; and (3) it has specified which of these concepts have

referents which exist in the real world and are therefore of potential

use in sociological investigation. From here future research needs to

go on to test Israel's theory of reification and Marx's theory of the

fetishism of commodities to determine which, if either, scientifically

explains the inversion of subject and object in social reality.

An important finding of this study is that Marx's concept of the

fetishism of commodities is neither Hegelian nor rooted in an anthro­

pological, abstract, idealistic concept of human nature. Rather, it

is a concept developed by Marx to explain the nature of commodity

production and the effects it has on people in the real material world.

The significance of this concept for Marxist thought is that it indi­

cates that in his mature works Marx no longer theorized that socialism

was the necessary outcome of capitalist contradictions. It is there­

fore recommended that Marxists focus more attention on this concept.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

It is unclear who coined the term reification. There is evidence that Bruno Bauer offered an early formulation of the idea of reification (MtLellan, 1969:64) and that Moses Hess actually used the term (McLellan, 1969:157). Henri Bergson also offered an early usage. Bergson used the term as a critique of science (Colletti, 1973:163). Lukacs was the first to offer a systematic theory of the concept. Unlike Bergson, Lukacs used the term to criticize not only science but culture as well.

2 zThis is not unique to Lukacs. Rather this form of presentation is

generally characteristic of all Western Marxism. See Anderson, 1976.3

z For the response of the Communist International to Korsch and Lukacs see Colletti, 1973, 1974a.

4In Hegel, objectification and alienation are conceptualized as

identical processes. The assumption that this was also the case in Marx's work is held by Lukacs as one of the fundamental errors he made in History and Class Consciousness. See Lukacs, 1971:xxxvi. When Lukacs wrote History and Class Consciousness he was not aware of the distinction between Hegel's and Marx's concepts of alienation since the 1844 Manuscripts were not published until some ten years later.

5It should be recognized that this is only a crude generalization

of the central orientation of Lukacs, Gramsci, and Korsch. All three vary in specifics which are not discussed here.

6 See Anderson (1976) for a discussion of how Western Marxism in general has remained detached from the public and politics despite its call for revolution.

7For similar views on epistemology see Timpanaro (1975), Bhaskar

(1975) and Ruben (1979).8This change in Colletti's position is not as abrupt or out of the

blue as it may seem. The issues of incompatability between Marxism as a science and theory of revolution had been of considerable concern to him before. This is especially apparent in his essays contained in Rousseau to Lenin (1972a). In these earlier works he reconciled science and revo­lution in Marx by arguing that revolutionary activity follows from the knowledge gained through science.

gThese theorists are not in total agreement on issues of a more

specific nature. Neither is this writer in total agreement with any one of their positions.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

Critique of Fichte's approach in his Sun-Clear Report to the Public at Large. See Kaufmann, 1965:79nl5.

2Kaufmann (1965:9n3) has emphasized that Hegel's use of the term

Concept in the preface to the Phenomenology means conceptual analysis.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

This is a theme which permeates all of Althusser's work. The citations offered in the text are simply explicit examples of Althusser's view on this issue.

2In the manuscript "accident" was written above "sporadic." See

Marx 1974e:260.3In the manuscript "value" was written above "price." See Marx

1974e:260.4That an inverted Hegelian dialectic can explain the historical

process of the material world was a view shared by both Marx and Engels may be useful in explaining Engels' use of the Hegelian dialectic in Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature.

5This basic position has also been expanded by Althusser (1977)

and Nicholaus (1978). However, some important differences must be noted with regard to Althusser. Althusser (1977:33-35) has classified Marx's works as follows: 1840-44:the early years; 1845:the works of the break; 1846-56:the transitional works; 1857-83:the mature works.While this study agrees with Althusser's classification, it disagrees with Althusser's interpretation of the mature works.

^Both Althusser (1970, 1977) and Colletti (1972a) claim in different contexts with different implications that Marx offers a science of history. The meaning discussed here diverges from both of them. It is of course beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the validity of such a possibility or the ethics involved in it.

?Colletti (1972a, 1972b, 1973, 1974a) has always equated alienation and fetishism in Marx's work. This appears to be why, in the 1975 article referred to, he finally was forced to draw the conclusion that the concept of fetishism is idealistic and therefore also that the con­cept of totality in the mature works is idealistic.

gOther similar statements relevant to the mature Marx's conception

of unity occur in Marx, 1971:409; 1968:502-17.gFor more on Marx's contention of the historicity of the circula­

tion process and buyer-seller relation, see Marx, 1967a:169; 1967b:35; 1971:130.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

^An indepth treatment of the same contentions is offered in Berger and Luckmann, 1966.

2All references in this section, unless otherwise indicated, are

to Berger and Pullberg, 1965.3Berger and Pullberg (1965:201-02) define objectivation as "that

process whereby human subjectivity embodies itself in products that are available to oneself and one's fellow men as elements of a common world" and objectification as "the moment in the process of objectivation in which man establishes distance from his producing and his product, such that he can take cognizance of it and make it an object of his conscious­ness."

4It should be kept in mind that Israel does not believe the relation

ships Marx discussed with regard to capitalism are unique to capitalism. Rather, he contends they are characteristic of modern industrial society.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

Both Colletti (1974a) and Althusser (1970, 1977) have argued that Marx bequeathed us with a science of history. The basis for their con­tentions is different from the one presented here.

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