Reification

Reification is the treatment of human relations or processes as fixed, thing-like objects. It makes historically created arrangements appear natural, independent, or inevitable.

Commodity fetishism: The appearance of relations among producers as relations among commodities in capitalist exchange. Marx’s account shows reification in the everyday form of commodities seeming to have social power of their own.
Karl Marx: A nineteenth-century philosopher and political economist whose critique of capitalism shaped socialist thought. Marx developed the analysis of commodity relations that became central to reification.
Social relation: A patterned connection between people, groups, or institutions that shapes their interactions. Reification begins with relations among people that come to appear as relations among things.
Bureaucracy: An organizational system governed by formal rules, offices, and defined responsibilities. Its rules can seem to operate independently of the people who created and maintain them.
Hypostatization: The treatment of an abstraction or idea as if it were a concrete, independently existing entity. It overlaps with reification but focuses more narrowly on mistaking an abstraction for an entity.
Objectification: The process of treating people or their capacities as objects, often for instrumental use. It clarifies how reification can turn human capacities and relations into object-like things.
Georg Lukács: A Hungarian Marxist philosopher who developed a major account of reification in modern society. His 1923 essay made reification a broad theory of capitalist social experience.
Praxis: Reflective human activity that joins thought with action to change social conditions. Praxis emphasizes the active human making that reified forms conceal.
Social stratification: The structured ranking of people into social groups with unequal access to resources and status. Reified accounts can present historically produced inequalities as fixed properties of groups.
Personification: The attribution of human traits or actions to nonhuman things or abstractions. Personification gives things human qualities, while reification gives human relations thing-like form.

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