Part of a series on Marxism

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The Communist Manifesto

Das Kapital

Sociology and Anthropology

Alienation

Bourgeoisie

Class consciousness

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Cultural hegemony

Exploitation

Human nature

Ideology

Proletariat

Reification

Relations of production

Socialism

Economics

Marxian economics

Labour power

Law of value

Means of production

Mode of production

Productive forces

Surplus labour

Surplus value

Transformation problem

Wage labour

History

Anarchism and Marxism

Capitalist mode of production

Class struggle

Dictatorship of the proletariat

Primitive accumulation of capital

Proletarian revolution

Proletarian internationalism

World Revolution

Philosophy

Marxist philosophy

Historical materialism

Dialectical materialism

Analytical Marxism

Marxist autonomism

Marxist feminism

Marxist humanism

Structural Marxism

Western Marxism

Libertarian Marxism

Young Marx

Important Marxists

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels

Karl Kautsky

Georgi Plekhanov

Vladimir Lenin

Leon Trotsky

Rosa Luxemburg

Mao Zedong

Georg Lukács

Antonio Gramsci

Karl Korsch

Che Guevara

Frankfurt School

Jean-Paul Sartre

Louis Althusser

Criticisms

Criticisms of Marxism

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Reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "thing-ification") is the consideration of an abstraction or an object as if it had human (pathetic fallacy) or living (reification fallacy) existence and abilities; at the same time it implies the thingification of social relations. Marxism takes its name from the praxis (the synthesis of philosophy and political action) of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ... Image File history File links Karl_Marx. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Das Kapital (Capital, in the English translation) is an extensive treatise on political economy written by Karl Marx in German. ... Marxs theory of alienation (Entfremdung in German), as expressed in the writings of young Karl Marx, refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to antagonism between things that are properly in harmony. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Class consciousness is a category of Marxist theory, referring to the self-awareness of a social class, its capacity to act in its own rational interests, or measuring the extent to which an individual is conscious of the historical tasks their class (or class allegiance) sets for them. ... In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is a state of social relations, said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, in which social relationships center around the values placed on commodities. ... Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. ... Cultural hegemony is a concept coined by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. ... The rate of exploitation is a concept in Marxian political economy. ... Marxs theory of human nature occupies an important place in his critique of capitalism, his conception of communism, and his materialist conception of history. Marx, however, does not refer to human nature as such, but to Gattungswesen, which is generally translated as species-being or species-essence. What Marx... Political Ideologies Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box:      An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ... The proletariat (from Latin proles, offspring) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. ... Relations of production (German: Produktionsverhaltnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx in his theory of historical materialism and in Das Kapital. ... Socialism refers to a broad array of ideologies and movements which aim to improve society through collective and egalitarian action; and to a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community. ... Note: Marxian is not restricted to Marxian economics, as it includes those inspired by Marxs works who do not identify with Marxism as a political ideology. ... Labor power (in German: Arbeitskraft, or labor force) is a crucial concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. ... The law of value is a concept in Karl Marxs critique of political economy. ... Means of production (abbreviated MoP; German: Produktionsmittel), also called means of labour are the materials, tools and other instruments used by workers to make products. ... In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning the way of producing) is a specific combination of: productive forces: these include human labor-power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land social and technical relations... For the specific theoretical justifications behind the Great Leap Forward and the Five Year Plans, see Theory of Productive Forces. ... Surplus labour is a concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. ... Surplus value, according to Marxism, is unpaid labour that is extracted from the worker by the capitalist, and serves as the basis for capitalist accumulation. ... In Karl Marxs economics the transformation problem is the problem of finding a general rule to transform the values of commodities (based on labour according to his labour theory of value) into the competitive prices of the marketplace. ... Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer in which the worker sells their labour under a contract (employment), and the employer buys it, often in a labour market. ... While anarchism and Marxism are two different political philosophies, there is some similarity between the methodology and ideology of groups of anarchists and Marxists, and the history of the two have often been intertwined. ... The capitalist mode of production is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. ... Class struggle is the active expression of class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. ... The dictatorship of the proletariat is a term employed by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program that refers to a transition period between capitalist and communist society in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The term refers to a... Primitive accumulation of capital is a concept introduced by Karl Marx in part 8 of the first volume of Das Kapital (in German: ursprüngliche Akkumulation, literally original accumulation or primeval accumulation). Its purpose is to help explain how the capitalist mode of production can come into being. ... A communist revolution is a social revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism, normally with socialism (public ownership over the means of production) as an intermediate stage. ... International Socialism redirects here. ... World revolution is a Marxist concept of a violent overthrow of capitalism that would take place in all countries, although not necessarily simultaneously. ... Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are terms which cover work in philosophy which is strongly influenced by Karl Marxs materialist approach to theory or which is written by Marxists. ... Historical materialism is the methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history which was first articulated by Karl Marx (1818-1883), although Marx himself never used the term (he referred it as philosophical materialism, a term he used to distinguish it from what he called popular materialism). Historical... According to many followers of the theories of Karl Marx (or Marxists), dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism. ... Analytical Marxism refers to a style of thinking about Marxism that was prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists during the 1980s. ... For other meanings of autonomism, see autonomism (disambiguation) page Raised fist, stenciled protest symbol of Autonome at the Ernst-Kirchweger-Haus in Vienna, Austria Autonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. ... Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of capitalism as a way to liberate women. ... The term Marxist humanism has as its foundation Marxs conception of the alienation of the labourer as he advances it in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844--an alienation that is born of a capitalist system in which the worker no longer functions as (what Marx terms) a... Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. ... Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union. ... Libertarian Marxism is a school of Marxism that takes a less authoritarian view of Marxist theory than conventional currents such as Stalinism, Trotskyism, and other forms of Marxism-Leninism, as well as a generally less reformist view than do Social Democrats. ... ‘Young Marx’ is one half of the concept in Marxology that Karl Marx’s intellectual development can be broken into two board categories, the other being ‘Mature Marx’. There is disagreement though as to when Marx thought began to mature, Lenin claimed Marxs first mature work as “The Poverty... Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a 19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ... Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820 – August 5, 1895) was a German social scientist and philosopher, who developed communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator, Karl Marx, co-authoring The Communist Manifesto (1848). ... Karl Kautsky (October 18, 1854 - October 17, 1938) was a leading theoretician of social democracy. ... G. V. Plekhanov Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (Георгий Валентинович Плеханов) (December 11, 1856 – May 30, 1918; Old Style: November 29, 1856 – May 17, 1918) was a Russian revolutionary and a Marxist theoretician. ... Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: , IPA: , better known by the alias   () (April 22, 1870 – January 21, 1924), was a Russian revolutionary, a communist politician, the main leader of the October Revolution, the first head of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, until 1922 (or Bolshevist Russia), and the primary theorist of Leninism...   (Russian: Лeв Давидович Трóцкий, Lyev Davidovich Trotsky, also transliterated Leo, Lev, Trotskii, Trotski, Trotskij, Trockij and Trotzky) (November 7 [O.S. October 26] 1879 – August 21, 1940), born Leon Davidovich Bronstein (Лeв Давидович Бронштéйн), was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. ... Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg (March 5, 1870 or 1871 – January 15, 1919, in Polish Róża Luksemburg) was a Jewish Polish-born Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. ... “Mao” redirects here. ... Georg Lukács (April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic in the tradition of Western Marxism. ... Antonio Gramsci (IPA: ) (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was an Italian writer, politician and political theorist. ... Karl Korsch (August 15, 1886 - October 21, 1961) was a German Marxist theorist. ... Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (June 14,[1] 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che or just Che was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, medical doctor , political figure, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas. ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory (which is more akin to anarchism than communism), social research, and philosophy. ... Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced: ), was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. ... Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuË¡seʁ) (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. ... This article is on criticisms of Marxism, a branch of socialism. ... The pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic fallacy is the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human feelings, thoughts and sensations. ... Reification (also known as hypostatization or concretism) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it represented a concrete, real event or physical entity. ... Although Harvard University has featured a Department of Social Relations (in which Talcott Parsons played a prominent role), and although the term social relations is frequently used in social sciences, there is no commonly agreed meaning for this concept (see also the entry social). ...

Typically it involves separating out something from the original context in which it occurs, and placing it in another context, in which it lacks some or all of its original connections and seems to have powers or attributes which in truth it does not have. Thus reification involves a distortion of consciousness.

Reification in thought occurs when an abstract concept describing a relationship or context is treated as a concrete "thing", or if something is treated as if it were a separate object when this is inappropriate because it is not an object.

Marx argues reification is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value such as it manifests itself in market trade, i.e. the inversion in thought between object and subject, or between means and ends, reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features, powers) which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people are treated as if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things, or vice versa, attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects.

This implies objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy. Reification, also called hypostatisation, is treating an abstract concept as if it were a real, concrete thing. ...

The concept is related to, but differs from, Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism. Marxs theory of alienation (Entfremdung in German), as expressed in the writings of young Karl Marx, refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to antagonism between things that are properly in harmony. ... In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is a state of social relations, said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, in which social relationships center around the values placed on commodities. ...

Five quotes from Marx showing the use of the concept

"Commodities, which exist as use-values, must first of all assume a form in which they appear to one another nominally as exchange-values, as definite quantities of materialised universal labour-time. The first necessary move in this process is, as we have seen, that the commodities set apart a specific commodity, say, gold, which becomes the direct reification of universal labour-time or the universal equivalent." [3]

"Capital employs labour. The means of production are not means by which he can produce products, whether in the form of direct means of subsistence, or as means of exchange, as commodities. He is rather a means for them, partly to preserve their value, partly to valorise it, i.e. to increase it, to absorb surplus labour. Even this relation in its simplicity is an inversion, a personification of the thing and a reification of the person, for what distinguishes this form from all previous ones is that the capitalist does not rule the worker in any kind of personal capacity, but only in so far as he is "capital"; his rule is only that of objectified labour over living labour; the rule of the worker's product over the worker himself." [4]

"because as a result of their alienation as use-values all commodities are converted into linen, linen becomes the converted form of all other commodities, and only as a result of this transformation of all other commodities into linen does it become the direct reification of universal labour-time, i.e., the product of universal alienation and of the supersession of all individual labour." [5]

"The production of capitalists and wage-laborers is therefore a major product of the process by which capital turns itself into values. Ordinary political economy, which concentrates only on the objects produced, forgets this entirely. Inasmuch as this process establishes reified labor as what is simultaneously the non-reification of the laborer, as the reification of a subjectivity opposed to the laborer, as the property of someone else's will, capital is necessarily also a capitalist. The idea of some socialists, that we need capital but not capitalists, is completely false. The concept of capital implies that the objective conditions of labor - and these are its own product - acquire a personality as against labor, or what amounts to the same thing, that they are established as the property of a personality other than the worker's. The concept of capital implies the capitalist. However, this error is certainly no greater than that of, e.g., all philologists who speak of the existence of capital in classical antiquity, and of Roman or Greek capitalists. This is merely another way of saying that in Rome and Greece labor was free, an assertion which these gentlemen would hardly make. If we now talk of plantation-owners in America as capitalists, if they are capitalists, this is due to the fact that they exist as anomalies within a world market based upon free labor. Were the term capital to be applicable to classical antiquity - though the word does not actually occur among the ancients (but among the Greeks the word arkhais is used for what the Roman's called the principalis summa reicreditae, the principal of a loan) - then the nomadic hordes with their flocks on the steppes of Central Asia would be the greatest capitalists, for the original meaning of the word capital is cattle." [6]

"Capital employs labour. Even this relation in its simplicity is a personification of things and a reification of persons. But the relation becomes still more complex - and apparently more mysterious - in that, with the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production, not only do these things - these products of labour, both as use values and as exchange values - stand on their hind legs vis-à-vis the worker and confront him as "capital" - but also the social forms of labour appear as forms of the development of capital, and therefore the productive powers of social labour, thus developed, appear as productive powers of capital. As such social forces they are "capitalised" vis-à-vis labour. In fact, communal unity in cooperation, combination in the division of labour, the application of the forces of nature and science, as well as the products of labour in the shape of machinery, are all things which confront the individual workers as alien, objective, and present in advance, without their assistance, and often against them, independent of them, as mere forms of existence of the means of labour which are independent of them and rule over them, in so far as they are objective; while the intelligence and volition of the total workshop, incarnated in the capitalist or his understrappers (representatives), in so far as the workshop is formed by the combination of the means of labour, confront the workers as functions of capital, which lives in the person of the capitalist. The social forms of their own labour - the subjective as well as the objective forms - or the form of their own social labour, are relations constituted quite independently of the individual workers; the workers as subsumed under capital become elements of these social constructions, but these social constructions do not belong to them. They therefore confront the workers as shapes of capital itself, as combinations which, unlike their isolated labour capacities, belong to capital, originate from it and are incorporated within it. And this assumes a form which is the more real the more, on the one hand, their labour capacity is itself modified by these forms, so that it becomes powerless when it stands alone, i.e. outside this context of capitalism, and its capacity for independent production is destroyed, while on the other hand the development of machinery causes the conditions of labour to appear as ruling labour technologically too, and at the same time to replace it, suppress it, and render it superfluous in its independent forms. In this process, in which the social characteristics of their labour confront them as capitalised, to a certain extent - in the way that e.g. in machinery the visible products of labour appear as ruling over labour - the same thing of course takes place for the forces of nature and science, the product of general historical development in its abstract quintessence: they confront the workers as powers of capital." [7]

Development and significance of the concept

Marx did not use the phrase "reification" much^[1], in fact the concept was developed mostly by Georg Lukács in "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", part of his book History and Class Consciousness. The concept of reification has also been present in the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer and Adorno's, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse. Others that have written about this point include Gajo Petrović, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Axel Honneth and Slavoj Žižek. Marx is a common German surname. ... Georg Lukács (April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic in the tradition of Western Marxism. ... Class consciousness is a category of Marxist theory, referring to the self-awareness of a social class, its capacity to act in its own rational interests, or measuring the extent to which an individual is conscious of the historical tasks their class (or class allegiance) sets for them. ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg Max Horkheimer (February 14, 1895 – July 7, 1973) was a Jewish-German philosopher and sociologist, known especially as the founder and guiding thinker of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg. ... Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno made its first appearance in 1944 under the title Dialektik der Aufklärung by Social Studies Association, Inc. ... Gajo Petrović (1927-1993) was one of the main theorists in the Praxis school of Marxist interpretation. ... Raya Dunayevskaya (1910 – 1987) was a Ukrainian born immigrant to the United States of America who was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). ... Raymond Williams (31 August 1921 - 26 January 1988) was a highly influential Welsh academic, novelist and critic. ... Axel Honneth (1949-) is a professor at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany (the so-called Frankfurt School. ... Slavoj Žižek (pronounced: ) (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian sociologist, postmodern philosopher, and cultural critic. ...

Petrović, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, defines it as:

The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man‑produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.

^[2]

Ordinary examples of Reification

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Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as “facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will”. ^[3] Image File history File links Circle-question. ...

Reification is very visible in advertising when the advertiser or designer deliberately tries to associate a commercial product with all kinds of desirable qualities or contexts, with the suggestion that if you buy the product, that you will have access to or experience those desirable qualities. The product thus acquires a deliberately contrived imaginary status in addition to its real status. Commercialism redirects here. ...

A very graphic visual example of reification is pornography in which sexual acts are separated out from the total human context in which they occur. Porn redirects here. ...

Reification also frequently occurs in language and any form of communication which involves the representation of things or relationships by symbols. For example, the sentence "Make your money work for you" contains a reification, because money does not do any work at all, people do. The power to do work is "falsely" attributed to money by means of a useful metaphor, echoing Nietzche's observation that much of our language consist of self-forgetful metaphors.

"Making money work for you" although unfamiliar to Marx, of course, would appear to him as "petty bourgeois fetishism" where for psychic survival the lower middle class holds reified illusions about the world which replace the "true" relations they have, typically alienated, with the means of production.

A characteristic of mental illness can be that the mentally-ill person reifies himself or parts of the world around him, misplacing the true context of things, or attributing powers to himself and to objects in the world which they do not really have. A mental illness or mental disorder refers to one of many mental health conditions characterized by distress, impaired cognitive functioning, atypical behavior, emotional dysregulation, and/or maladaptive behavior. ...

The language used everyday to speak about computer software is probably an example of reification. If narrated at the lowest level, it is merely a set of physical (electronic) events embedded in a human community. However, programmers and their managers are forced to speak as if a software program, not a physical object, is a thing, only to find that most software cannot be easily "ported" and moved to a new computer or a new organizational context. The most "portable" software is thus that which can be most conveniently reified.

For example, at all but the most crude levels of representation, "Microsoft Windows" represents an extraordinarily large number of completely different packagings of software intended to be regarded as an operating system. The reification obscures its uses and meanings as a strategic system meant to occupy most personal computers and thus generate high exchange value for its maker. A narrower definition of operating system would exclude much of the functionality of Windows OSes, since it has functionality not concerned with kernel resource management, which is all that an OS should do according to the narrower "kernel" definition of an OS.

Criticism

French philosopher Louis Althusser criticized in his 1965 article Marxism and Humanism, what he called "An ideology of reification that sees 'things' everywhere in human relations"^[4] . Althusser's critique derives from his theory of the epistemological break, which finds that Marx had a big theoretical and methodological change between his early writings and his mature ones. The philosopher Socrates about to take poison hemlock as ordered by the court. ... Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuË¡seʁ) (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. ... Political Ideologies Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box:      An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ... Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuË¡seʁ) (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. ... The word theory has a number of distinct meanings in different fields of knowledge, depending on their methodologies and the context of discussion. ... Methodology is defined as the analysis of the // == Headline text == principles of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline or the development of methods, to be applied within a discipline a particular procedure or set of procedures. [1]. It should be noted that methodology is frequently used when method... ‘Young Marx’ is one half of the concept in Marxology that Karl Marx’s intellectual development can be broken into two board categories, the other being ‘Mature Marx’. There is disagreement though as to when Marx thought began to mature, Lenin claimed Marxs first mature work as “The Poverty...

The concept of reification is used in Das Kapital, Marx's most mature work; however, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in The German Ideology and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Das Kapital (Capital, in the English translation) is an extensive treatise on political economy written by Karl Marx in German. ... Look up alienation, alienate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The German Ideology (1845) was a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1845. ... Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (also referred to as The Paris Manuscripts) are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. ...

References

1. ^ See this search at the Marxists Internet Archive
2. ^ Gajo Petrović, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 411-413; [1]
3. ^ Berger, Peter, & Luckmann, Thomas. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor/Doubleday.
4. ^ Althusser, Louis; "Marxism and Humanism" in For Marx, p. 230 - endnote 7, [2]

The Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists. ...

Further reading

• Althusser, Louis: "Humanism and Marxism" in For Marx, The Penguin Press, 1969.
• Arato, Andrew: Lukács’s Theory of Reification, Telos, 1972.
• Bewes, Timothy 2002: Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Verso, 2002, ISBN 1859846858.
• Burris, Val: "Reification: A marxist perspective", California Sociologist, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 22-43.
• Dahms, Harry: "Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas." Current Perspectives in Social Theory 18 (1998): 3-62.
• Dunayevskaya, Raya: "Reification of People and the Fetishism of Commodities", in The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 167-191.
• Gabel, Joseph : False consciousness : an essay on reification. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
• Goldmann, Lucien 1959: "Réification", in Recherches dialectiques, Gallimard, 1959, Paris.
• Honneth, Axel: "Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View", The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at University of California-Berkeley, march 14–16, 2005.
• Kangrga, Milan 1968: ‘Was ist Verdinglichung?’
• Löwith, Karl 1932 (1982): Max Weber and Karl Marx.
• Lukács, Georg 1923: "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in History & Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, 1967.
• Petrović, Gajo:"Reification" in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 411-413.
• Rubin, I. I. 1928 (1972): Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.
• Schaff, Adam 1980: Alienation as a Social Phenomenon.
• Tadić, Ljubomir 1969: ‘Bureaucracy—Reified Organization’. In M. Marković and G. Petrović eds. Praxis.