> The phrase, "fix the economy" is utterly absurd:
I respectfully disagree. Of course we can fix our social relations. We are human beings. If we find something important to us broken (e.g. our social relations), then we feel compelled to fix it. Our social relations are objective and, in the case of capitalist relations, they are also alienated. One thing is objectification and another thing is alienation. If we fix our social relations and make them function for us, then they are no longer alienated. They remain objective though. Society is objective.
* Reflecting a bit on this, I don't think I like the term "reification" to refer to alienation. Because the literal meaning of "reified" is "thingified," and our society is, has been, and will be thingified regardless. Even a perfect communist society will be a thing. But then, if communist, it'll be a thing in which its individual members will be free and in control of it.
^^^^ CB: The mature or developed Marxist critique of reification or "thingification" is in Marx's famous Section of _Capital_ on the Fetishism of Commodities. That fetish is treating relationships between people ( relationships between producers) as relationships between "things", commodities ( as relationships between the products of the producers, instead of relationships between the producers).
"The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.
Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally_ the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products_ (emphasis added CB) .
_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 that 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._ (emphasis added -CB_.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 the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ 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.
This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4