For Critical Theorists, reification meant ‘thingification’, but it had other

connotations too deriving from the work of Georg Lukacs, who had melded

ideas from both MARX and Weber. The main context for the idea of reification

was to be found in Marx’s ACCOUNT of commodity fetishism in Volume 1 of

Capital (1961). Marx made a distinction between goods or commodities that

are produced for their ‘use-value’ as against those being produced for their

‘exchange value’. ‘Use value’ refers to the way we directly EXPERIENCE the value

of a good as something useful to us. Under capitalism ‘use-value’ has been

largely undermined by the production of goods for their ‘exchange-value’.

Superficially the ‘exchange value’ of a good is its price in the market place, but

this price is determined by the nature of capitalist economic relations, more

specifically something Marx explains via his ‘labour theory of value’. The detail

of this matters less than the fact that concealed behind the cost of exchanging goods are relations of economic EXPLOITATION: class relations. Goods appear

to have a price that naturally adheres to them, when in fact it is the outcome

of wider economic processes. Indeed, so well concealed are these wider

processes, and so natural does the price of a commodity seem that we even

come to value the commodity because it is so priced. Marx points out that in

spite of being humanly produced, commodities ‘assume the fantastic form of

a relation between things’. What he means is that the quality a commodity has

appears to us as something intrinsic to it, almost like an objective property

rather than the outcome of human activity. He likens this fetishisation of commodities to religious belief

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