Reification concerns social relations appearing as properties of independent things or immutable natural laws even though people produce and sustain them. Lukács’s 1923 analysis investigates the commodity form’s effects beyond production, including consciousness and organization.
When labour becomes measurable, divisible, saleable time, its social character can disappear behind calculable properties. The issue is not using objects but experiencing collectively sustained relations as an alien order beyond effective action.
Lukács does not reduce this experience to a mistaken idea. Division of labour, markets, and institutional calculability produce forms of perception and conduct. Merely urging people to think differently cannot explain these social foundations.
Marx’s commodity fetishism is a central reference, but Verdinglichung extends its analysis across social life. Its closeness to alienation does not make the terms interchangeable. Honneth’s later account of forgotten recognition introduces a different explanatory framework.