Lukács

You are paid $22 an hour. That number feels like a fact about the world, the way the price of bread or the temperature outside is a fact. It sits there. You can plan around it, complain about it, try to get a better one, but you cannot argue with it, because it does not seem to be the kind of thing that has a position you could argue with.

Now ask what the number actually is. It is not a property of you, and it is not a property of the work. It is the outcome of a relationship between you and an employer, and behind that, of relationships among a great many other people: what other employers pay, what other workers will accept, what a union negotiated or failed to negotiate decades ago, what the law requires. Every one of those is a relation between human beings. None of them is a fact about the universe.

So a relation between people is showing up in your life as a thing. It arrives with a number attached, it obeys what look like laws, and it presents itself as something to be dealt with rather than something to be disputed. The fact that it is made of other people has become invisible, and not because anyone hid it.

Lukács’s word for this is reification, from the Latin res, meaning thing. Turning something into a thing.

His definition, and the sentence to be able to reproduce: the essence of commodity-structure is that “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”

Take “phantom objectivity” apart, because the two words pull against each other and both are meant. Objectivity: it really does confront you as an external fact, it is not a mistake you are making, and you cannot escape it by seeing through it. Phantom: there is nothing underneath it but human relations, so the solidity is not the solidity of a rock.

And notice the last clause. The concealment works because the thing seems rational. A wage that behaved erratically would invite the question of who set it. A wage that follows visible laws looks like it needs no author.

1. Where the argument comes from

Lukács is extending Marx, and he says so. The essay opens by insisting it is no accident that Marx began Capital with an analysis of commodities.

Marx’s version, quoted by Lukács: a commodity is 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,” so that “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.” Marx calls that commodity fetishism. It is a definite social relation between people that “assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Two things enter this course’s vocabulary here.

Use-value is what a thing is good for. A coat keeps you warm, bread feeds you, a chair holds you up. Use-values are qualitative and incomparable: there is no sense in which a coat is 3.7 times a loaf of bread, because warmth and food are not the same kind of good.

Exchange-value is what a thing trades for. Here the coat and the bread are comparable, because both are priced, and price is one dimension. Exchange-value is quantitative and it makes everything commensurable.

The move Lukács cares about is that exchange-value comes to dominate use-value, until the qualitative side drops out of view. A thing’s reality becomes its price.

2. Why it matters that the commodity is universal

Commodity exchange is ancient. People have traded things for other things for as long as there have been things. So if reification were simply a consequence of exchange, it would be as old as history and there would be nothing specifically modern to explain.

Lukács’s answer is that the difference is not how much exchange there is but whether exchange is the universal form:

“The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it.”

He is explicit that the difference is one of quality, not quantity. A society where the commodity form appears occasionally, at the borders, in trade between communities, is a different kind of society from one where it structures everything. And in the second, subjective phenomena are “objectified in qualitatively different ways.” It is not that people in a market society do more trading. It is that their inner life has a different shape.

The historical comparison he uses makes this concrete, and it is worth having because it stops the argument from sounding like a complaint about hierarchy in general:

“Oppression and exploitation that knows no bounds and scorns every human dignity were known even to pre-capitalist ages. So too was mass production with mechanical, standardized labor, as we can see for instance, with the canal construction in Egypt and Asia Minor. But mass projects of this type could never be rationally mechanized; they remained isolated phenomena within a community that organized its production on a different (‘natural’) basis and which therefore lived a different life.”

Slavery in antiquity was more brutal than wage labour. Lukács concedes this immediately. His claim is not that capitalism is crueller. It is that in a slave society the domination is visible as domination, a relation between a master and a slave that nobody could mistake for a law of nature, and it applies to a group standing outside what was considered human society at all. Under capitalism the domination is universal, applies to everyone, and appears in the form of impersonal law.

He also names the condition that makes universality possible: the emergence of the “free” worker, someone able to take his labour-power to market and sell it as a commodity “belonging to him, a thing that he possesses.” The worker’s freedom is what allows his labour to become a commodity, and his labour becoming a commodity is what makes the commodity form universal. That is not a contradiction Lukács is pointing out as a paradox for effect; it is the mechanism.

Once that happens, “the fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole.”

3. What rationalization does to the object

Reification is not only about how things look. It reorganizes production, and Lukács traces the reorganization step by step.

The principle he identifies is “rationalization based on what is and can be calculated.” Everything is restructured so it can be measured and predicted.

That produces three consequences, and the third is the one that surprises.

Work is broken into calculable pieces. “The mathematical analysis of work-processes denotes a break with the organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product. Rationalisation in the sense of being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved is only to be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements and by the study of the special laws governing production.” A craftsman making a whole chair works from an “amalgam of empirical experiences.” That knowledge cannot be measured or transferred, so it is replaced by specialized operations that can be. Lukács’s line: rationalisation is unthinkable without specialisation.

The product stops being a unity. “This destroys the organic necessity with which inter-related special operations are unified in the end-product. The unity of a product as a commodity no longer coincides with its unity as a use-value.” The chair as a thing-you-sit-on is one whole object. The chair as a commodity is an assembly of separately produced, separately priced components, and those two ways of being a unity come apart. Production of a use-value can then be “separated forcibly in time and space.”

Time turns into space. This is the strangest claim in the essay and it is not decoration. Time as you live it is qualitative and uneven: an hour of interesting work and an hour of boredom are not the same hour. Rationalized production cannot use that time, because it cannot be calculated with. So time is reduced to a uniform measure, and Lukács quotes Marx: “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the incarnation of time.” What is left “freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’,” and Lukács finishes the sentence: “in short, it becomes space.”

4. What rationalization does to the worker

The object is fragmented. Lukács’s next move is that this does not stop at the object.

“This fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of the subject. In consequence of the rationalization of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions.”

Sit with “mere sources of error.” In a system built to be predictable, whatever is particular about a person is not a contribution. It is noise. Their judgment, their pace, their way of doing it: all deviation from specification.

The conclusion: “Neither objectively nor in relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system.” The system is found already existing, self-sufficient, functioning independently of him, and he conforms to its laws whether he likes it or not.

Lukács adds that with Taylorism the analysis “extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’,” so that even psychological attributes are separated from the personality and reduced to “statistically viable concepts.” The measuring does not stop at the body.

The contemplative stance

This is the term the essay is built toward and the one most useful in a paper.

As labour is rationalized, the worker’s activity “becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.”

Contemplative here does not mean thoughtful. It means watching a process you cannot alter. The worker is present at production, is a component of it, and does not act on it. He observes his own activity as an external event.

Lukács makes the same point about knowledge generally. The laws governing the world of commodities “are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power.” You can learn them. You can use them to your advantage, timing a purchase or choosing a career. What you cannot do is modify the process by your activity. Knowing the law and being able to change it come apart, and the contemplative stance is the attitude that results.

The other half is isolation. Mechanization “destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still organic,” making of individuals “isolated abstract atoms whose work no longer brings them together directly and organically.”

And then a qualification worth keeping, because it stops the argument being simply that people are deceived:

“The atomization of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society… if this atomization is only an illusion it is a necessary one.”

A necessary illusion. People are not wrong to experience themselves as isolated units facing an impersonal system, because within the system that is what they are. The illusion is accurate at the level where it operates and false about the whole. You cannot dispel it by explaining it to someone.

5. Ideology

Drusda’s handout puts three senses of ideology side by side, and they are worth separating because the word does different work in each.

Pejorative. Ideology as false consciousness: a distorted picture that serves someone’s interest, and would be dispelled by seeing clearly. “That’s just ideology.”

Legitimating. Ideology as what makes an existing arrangement seem justified. Not necessarily false, but functioning to secure consent.

Descriptive. Ideology as any total framework through which a group makes sense of the world, without a judgment about truth. In this sense everyone has one.

Reification does not sit cleanly in the first. It is not a mistake, and knowing about it does not remove it, which is what the necessary-illusion line is doing. It is closer to the second and third: a structure that both organizes experience and makes the arrangement look natural.

The formalism problem

Lukács then argues that rationalization has a limit built into it.

“This rationalization of the world appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature. It is limited, however, by its own formalism. That is to say, the rationalization of isolated aspects of life results in the creation of formal laws. All these things do join together into what seems to the superficial observer to constitute a unified system of general ‘laws’. But the disregard of the concrete aspects of the subject matter of these laws, upon which disregard their authority as laws is based, makes itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact.”

The structure of that argument: a formal law gets its authority by ignoring the particular content it applies to. That is what makes it general. But the content it ignored does not disappear, and the ignored remainder shows up as incoherence when you try to put the separately rationalized pieces together.

The sharpest version is the contradiction between the part and the whole:

“The capitalist process of rationalization based on private economic calculation requires that every manifestation of life shall exhibit this very interaction between details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance… [Yet] competition between owners would not be feasible if there were an exact, rational, systematic mode of functioning for the whole of society to correspond to the rationality of isolated phenomena.”

Every firm is internally rational and the economy as a whole is not. Each factory is planned to the second. What all the factories together produce is a crisis nobody planned. And this is not a defect to be fixed by better planning, because competition between owners requires that the whole be unplanned. The irrationality of the totality is a condition of the rationality of the parts.

Two examples Drusda gives for formal rationality producing something strange when applied to concrete life:

• Kantian marriage. Kant analyses marriage as a contract for the reciprocal use of another’s sexual attributes. Formally consistent, and it produces a description of marriage that has lost whatever made it marriage.
• The theory of marginal utility. Value explained by the calculating preferences of an individual at the margin. Rigorous within itself, and it takes the given individual with given preferences as its starting point, so it cannot ask where preferences come from or how the system reproduces them.

Both are rational treatments of a domain, and both purchase their rigour by discarding the content that would make the answer meaningful.

6. Reification and recognition

The course runs on recognition, so it is worth saying where Lukács sits on it.

Hegel’s account requires mutuality: I become a self-consciousness by being recognized by another self-consciousness whom I recognize in turn, and the master’s arrangement fails precisely because recognition from someone he counts as nothing is worth nothing.

Marx locates the failure in labour. Under the wage relation my labour confronts me as something alien, and the relation to other people that labour should be is broken.

Lukács’s addition is that the broken relation stops looking like a relation. Under reification I do not experience a failure of recognition, because I do not experience the other person at all. What I encounter is a wage, a price, a market, a law. The other people are still there, since every one of those is made of them, and the form conceals them completely.

That is a distinct and worse position than Marx’s. A relation that is going badly can be repaired, or at least identified as needing repair. A relation that has taken on “the character of a thing” presents nothing to repair, because there is nothing there that looks like a relation.

It also sets up the confrontation with Sartre. For Sartre the problem of the Other is that another consciousness looks at me and fixes me as an object, and the encounter is immediate, personal, and inescapable. For Lukács the problem is that under capitalism the Other never shows up as a consciousness at all, only as a market force. One says the Other is unbearably present. The other says the Other has been made invisible. Any passage setting these two against each other is standing on that difference.

7. Reading a passage for the argument it is making

A short exercise, since the paper will hand you a passage you have not seen.

Take this line from the essay:

“The finished article ceases to be the object of the work-process.”

What is being claimed?

Start with what the sentence denies. It says the finished article is not the object of the work-process. A craftsman making a chair has the chair as the object of his work: it is what he is aiming at and what governs how he proceeds.

So under rationalized production, what has replaced it? Lukács’s next clause answers: the work-process “turns into the objective synthesis of rationalised special systems whose unity is determined by pure calculation and which must therefore seem to be arbitrarily connected with each other.” The object of the process is now the process itself, organized to be calculable. The chair is an output rather than an aim.

And what follows? If nobody in the process is aiming at the whole product, then the product’s unity is not present anywhere in the making of it. That is why the unity as a commodity and the unity as a use-value come apart, which is the claim in the following paragraph.

The method: find what the sentence denies, find what has replaced the thing denied, then find what the replacement makes possible or impossible. That works on most sentences in this essay, because Lukács writes in a sequence of displacements: qualitative by quantitative, use-value by exchange-value, active by contemplative, time by space.

Vocabulary to deploy

• Reification — “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”
• Phantom objectivity — genuinely confronts you as external and has nothing underneath it but human relations.
• Commodity fetishism — Marx’s term, which Lukács is extending: a social relation between people takes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”
• Use-value against exchange-value — what a thing is good for, qualitative and incomparable, against what it trades for, quantitative and commensurable.
• The universality claim — the commodity is understood “in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole.” The difference from pre-capitalist exchange is one of quality, not quantity.
• The “free” worker — able to sell his labour-power as “a commodity ‘belonging’ to him,” which is the condition for the commodity form becoming universal. “The fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole.”
• Rationalization — “the principle of rationalisation based on what is and can be calculated.” Requires specialization, since “rationalisation is unthinkable without specialisation.”
• Fragmentation of object and subject — the product’s unity as commodity no longer coincides with its unity as use-value, and the worker’s “human qualities and idiosyncrasies appear increasingly as mere sources of error.”
• The mechanical part — “he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system.”
• The contemplative stance — activity becomes “less and less active and more and more contemplative.” You can know the laws and use them, and you cannot “modify the process by his own activity.”
• Time becomes space — time “freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’… in short, it becomes space.”
• Necessary illusion — atomization is “only the reflex in consciousness” of laws genuinely extended over all of life, and “if this atomization is only an illusion it is a necessary one.”
• Ideology, three senses — pejorative (false consciousness), legitimating (secures consent), descriptive (any total framework).
• The limit of formalism — rationalization “is limited by its own formalism,” and disregarding the concrete content “makes itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact.”
• Rational parts, irrational whole — “details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance.” Competition requires that no rational plan govern the whole.
• Second nature — the reified world confronts people as though it were nature, and they must “liberate themselves from servitude to the ‘second nature’ so created.”