JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
>
>They make us things as they enter into relations like people, is >the
>may Marx puts it.
AS I understand it, reification is a process of "objectification" or "materialisation" of social relations and is linked to the fetishism of commodities and alienation as well as value theory. IN the case of FoC, relations between people or social relations come to appear as relations between things. Relations of production are expressed as relations of market exchange, hiding the nature of the commodity as a bundle of social relations. The cause of reification is in the unique nature of the capitalist economy where direct, authentic expression of a persons creative ability cannot take place in the capitalist production process because of the barrier of the production process itself. That creative ability is what is sold to the capitalist and is in turn expropriated by the capitalist in the production process.
One of the important things is that reification and fetishism are not created by the mind or habits of thinking but by the normal operations of capitalism.
kind of obscure, yes.
Sam Pawlett