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Justin Paulson

Minnesota Review, Numbers 58-60, Spring & Fall 2002/Spring 2003

(New Series), pp. 251-264 (Article)
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mnr/summary/v058/58.paulson.html

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Justin Paulson
Uneven Reification
The "globalized" capitalist world of the twenty-first century is universal-

ly but unevenly pervaded by reification. Reification here, as throughout the

Western Marxist tradition, refers to the processes by which sodai relation-

ships and activities are objectified and, most importantly, instrumentalized

and refashioned after the needs of capital. To understand what is meant by
this concept, one needs to try to think outside of capital for a minutenot
necessarily back in time, but of anything that is not organized principally
around commodity production. Jameson usefully draws the distinction as
between "traditional" activity, in which "the value of the activity is immanent to it, and qualitatively distinct from other ends or values articulated in
other forms of human work or play," and activity in a sodety diaracterized
by the "universal commodification of labor power," in which
all forms of human labor can be . . . separated out from their unique qualitative
differentiation as distinct types of activity. . . and all universally ranged under the
common denominator of the quantitative, that is, under the universal exchange
value of money. At this point, then, the quality of the various forms of human
activity, their unique and distinct "ends" or values, has effectively been bracketted or suspended by the market system, leaving all these activities free to be ruthlessly reorganized in efficiency terms, as sheer means or instrumentality. (130-31)

The alienation of activity from any immanent qualitative value is a universal characteristic of the capitalist mode of production; for this reason, Georg
Lukcs and most of those following him treated reification as an all-encompassing, objective condition of life under capitalism. Reification does not
exist only where capitalist sodai relations don't existand in the current
expansive phase of global capitalism, there really are no such locations any
longer.
Yet for this term to be at all meaningful today, in the wake of decades of
both Western Marxist and poststructuralist critiques of classical Marxism,
we must first emphasize reification's social character. The historical conflation of reification with "false consciousness" is something of a category
error: individual consdousness might be ossified, "dumbed-down," or
fragmented by reification, but reification itself cannot be understood as
some sort of individual, subjective ailment. Rather, it must be understood
in terms of the soczaZ processes set in motion by the dominance of commodity production. As with commodity fetishism more generally, at issue is
not an individual's perception: if a table (to use Marx's famous example in
Capital) appears to have been cut loose from the relationship that would tie
its creator to its user, if its use-value seems to have been supplanted by its
exchange-value, such that it "stands on its head" and takes on an existence

252 the minnesota review

all its own, these appearances aren't illusory deceptions but are instead real
results of the place of the table itself in the processes of production and the
alienation of its creator(s) from those processes.
Thus reification is not something that can be lifted from an individual,
like a blindfold or an oversized hat. Although, per Lukcs, a precondition for
overcoming reification is that the alienations and contradictions arising in
and from capitalism be made consdous, the universality of reification means
that the transformation out of it must be a practical, sodai one. Lukcs reminds us that a "purely cognitive stance," no matter how enlightened, can
by no means overcome reification (205). Every individual in a dass or an

entire sodety could be conscious of commodity fetishism or of the contra-

dictions in capitalism but still do nothing about them (as Horkheimer and
Adorno famously pointed out in Dialectic ofEnlightenment). Certainly, along
with the objectification of sodai relationships comes their mystificationthe

appearance of the hardened, reified forms as natural and inevitable. But we

ought not to be shouting "false consdousness" at anyone who thinks that

capitalism or neoliberalism, let alone one's own job, television consumption, or shopping trips, are naturaleadi an inevitable consequence of the

way the world works. The biggest hurdle reification presents for us is that

its products are not illusions perpetrated upon the individual that can just
be cleared up, but are instead actual, real appearances of social relationships
that are themselves askew.1

Because reification is a central feature of capitalist social relations, an

analysis of reification's relationship to agency can help us better understand
both the continued growth of capitalism and questions of where and how
resistance to capital (and the creation of alternate modes of thought and
economic structure) might be possible. The objectification of human relationships and activitiesin Frankfurt School terms, the wholesale instru-

mentalization of societyrenders the end of all human activity to be found

in the market; in requiring "that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs
in terms of commodity exchange" (Lukcs 91), reification even transforms
the concept of need itself in order to make this satisfaction possible. Such

an organization of society reinforces positivism and factidtythe maxim of

self-evidence, that things are what they areand repeats it over and over
as the only rational assertion that can be made. Yet, although possibilities
for rsistance would appear to be heavily foredosed under such conditions,
I would suggest that reification does not occur with the same magnitude
everywhere, and that reification is in fact only as homogeneous as capitalismwhich is to say, very uneven. I will begin with a closer look at the
problem of reification for the Frankfurt School (where it received its most
thorough treatment with regard to capitalist Europe and the United States),

before proceeding to models of uneven development as part of the frame-

work through which reification ought to be understood. I will conclude

with some of the implications of a "revaluation" of reification for sodai

movement theory and strategy.

Paulson 253

Dialectics Against Reification

The Frankfurt School theorists took up the problem of reification after
the revolutionary moment of the early 1920s, during which Lukcs wrote
his seminal essay, had long since faded. They were centrally concerned with
reification as an encumbrance on critical thought, the unfettering of which
they insisted was a precondition for any effective social change. Adorno
wrote in one of his late essays:
Whatever is universally accepted by people living under false social conditions
already contains ideological monstrosity prior to any particular content, because
it reinforces the belief that these conditions are supposedly their own. A crust of
reified opinions, banality shields the status quo and its law. To defend oneself
against it is not yet the truth and may easily enough deteriorate into abstract negation, but it is the agent of the process without which there is no truth. . . . Critical
thought alone, not thought's complacent agreement with itself, may help bring
about change. (Critical Models 122)

Thus Adorno and his colleagues, most notably Horkheimer and Marcuse,2
warned extensively of the apparent "dumbing-down" of culture, and of the
dangers of "public opinion" and "common sense" amid the instrumental-

ization of reason. Adorno and Marcuse both turned their attentions late in

life to the possibility of finding in the "aesthetic dimension" an autonomy

and critical truth content they believed were no longer possible in a heav-

ily commodified social sphere. The concern with reification was also why

the Frankfurt theorists clung so tightly to the dialectic throughout their

work; Marcuse stressed that the function of dialectical thought (which in
the Hegelian-Marxist tradition is always essentially negative) "is to break
down the self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense, to under-

mine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts" (Reason
and Revolution 9). Although dialectics does not constitute some protected
sphere outside of reification, it nevertheless offers a unique way for thought

to remain negative, rational, and uncompromisingly critical of a false social

order.

For Adorno, the socially-acceptable "common sense," which inheres in

the various disciplines of thought as well as in society at large, is a fundamental product of reification"the worldly eye schooled by the market"

(Minima Moralia 72); it is perpetually trying to beat back critical thought

with the grand tautology linking what is sensible to what is, and what is
possible to what is sensible. Indeed common sense has always been the reflection and the instrument of the status quo; even Thomas Paine's rabblerousing pamphlet was radical precisely because it did not reflect the common sense of the time. Critical thought and common sense can never be in

sync with each other: although they both tend to develop organically out of

existing conditions, common sense is the reified form of reflection on those

conditions, and criticism the dialectical one.

254 the minnesota review

Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the "culture industry" in Dialectic

of Enlightenment offers in a nutshell the Frankfurt School's critique of contemporary sodety: that cultural activity in late capitalism has been reduced
to a profiteering industry that gives the individualwho is always now
a consumerneither human dignity nor real freedom, but merely the
"freedom to choose what is always the same" (167). While it is well and
good to think that sudi a totalitarian image was a produd of the time, it
was not overt fasdsm that worried Horkheimer and Adorno so mudi as

what they perceived to be the totalitarian trends within capitalism itself,

most notably an engineered complacency and consent with the established
ordera complacency so complete that it signalled to them the possibility
of absolute reification. While overt fascism ruled by stifling any expression
of dissent, capitalism maintained its hegemony by preventing dissenting
thoughts from occuring in the first place, andas both Marx and Lukcs
had suggestedby transforming the individual subjed into an instrument

of commodity production, consumption, and exchange, such that subjec-

tivity itself was displaced by its illusion. "The most intimate reactions of

human beings," Horkheimer and Adorno wrote, "have been so thoroughly

reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as
an utterly abstrad notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than
shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions" (167).

The infusion of psychoanalysis into the repertoire of critical theoryes-

pedally what Ben Agger summarized as "the distinctly Freudian rationality

of gratification" (140)greatly aided Adorno, Horkheimer, and, most of all,

Marcuse in their efforts to describe the effects of reification on the social con-

sdousness. Sudi concepts as "the mimetic prindple" and "the performance

prindple" went beyond even Adorno's "authoritarian personality" to explore the more intricate ways in which the vast majority of people could be

in an objectively antagonistic relationship to capital and at the same time

conform to its ideological framework and normative standards. Marcuse

offered a contrast between common sense, or what he termed "Happy

Consdousnessthe belief that the real is rational and that the system de-

livers the goods" (One Dimensional Man 84)and a critical consdousness

that was not subjed to the "tedinological rationality" that acuninistered the

popular world-view. For Marcuse, it wasn't so much that most people living
in industrialized societies were duped into complacency without any agency
on their part, but that capitalism (and its instrumental Reason) actually offered them something appealing, assuaging, and desirable.
The fact that this sense of gratification existed, however, was seen by

Marcuse as simply making active change more difficult. Despite the out-

ward appearance of agency on the parts of the consumers of culture, this

agency is restrided to acting as consumers (or producers, distributors, etc.);

the more satisfied they are with this role, the less they feel dominated or
subjugated. Even while individuals may not be duped into complacency,
their consent is nevertheless conditioned by capitalism before they have

Paulson 255

a say in the matter. Reification, for Marcuse, is thus a mediating ground

that links a fragmented individual subject with the "one-dimensionality"
of social thought and activity. Even when idle, "happy consciousness" is
safe from the uncomfortable possibilities opened up by negation and critical
reflection.
As a whole, the Frankfurt theorists' examination of reification in the

United States and western Europe put them in a position of ruthlessly criti-

cizing existing society, while seeing fewer and fewer possibilities for radical
change (at least in the mtropoles where they were writing). Even Marcuse,
often considered to be the most optimistic member of the Frankfurt School,
saw his optimism toward sodai movements wane by the 1970s. The retreat
into thought and aesthetics (a route he travelled in parallel with Adorno)
was still perhaps, in the last instance, a hopeful precursor to making sodai
action possible, but that last instance seemed to be getting farther and farther away. Marcuse saw the counterculture and sodai upheaval of the late
1960s turned into a "misplaced radicalism," a "revolt against Reasonnot
only against the Reason of capitalism, bourgeois society, and so on, but
against Reason per se" (Counterrevolution 129); he watched what he termed
the "counterrevolution" of capitalism unleash all the repressive power
of the state on what little real insurgency existed throughout the world.
However, Counterrevolution and Revoltlike many of his works of his last
twenty years, largely a treatise on late capitalist reificationalso suggested
the possibility of a greater, much more profound revolution than the misguided upheavals contemporaneously taking place in the First World.
Marcuse wrote:

As the commodity form becomes universal and integrates branches of the material and "higher" culture which previously retained a relative independence, it
reveals the essential contradiction of capitalism in its most extreme concentration:
capital versus the mass of the working population as a whole. (15)

Capitalism, Marcuse continued, creates more and more material needs

which it cannot meet; it even breaks down class barriers just enough to
make wealth appear attainable, but then frustrates attempts to reach it.
But while Marcuse and Adorno theorized the possibilities of extreme
reification, they remained focused on the most instrumentalizing examples
of the Culture Industry. Marcuse was interested in the liberatory potentials
of the Third World, but never developed in any detail a conception of unevenness vis--vis reification. The Frankfurt School did presage many later
critiques of classical Marxism by problematizing notions of teleological
progress, but they (along with many sodai theorists after them) stopped
short of any serious engagement with theories and teleologies of economic
development. Similarly, Marxist economists after 1929 generally stopped
being concerned with revolutionary consdousness, and what has transpired in the interim has been a situation in whidi critical social theory and

256 the minnesota review

radical economics grew to be quite independent of each other, when they

ought to have been informing each other all along.
Development Theory and Reification
Lukcs's theory of reification, like Marx's explication of commodity fetishism before it, was of course developed in a specific region of Europe
at a specific historical time. If the development of capitalism there was not
perfectly homogeneous, neither was it so heterogeneous as to prevent the
appearance of objective, universal sodai conditions concurrent with the
dominance of a capitalist mode of production. Capitalism throughout the
world in fact looked quite different in each place (even in different parts of
Europe, not to mention feudal Russia), but while the leading Marxist scholars in the first half of the century were well aware of this, their work was
also characterized by the assumption that each region of the world would
go through identical processes of industrialization, class consciousness, and
revolution.

Trotsky's analysis of uneven development was one of the more complicated of the early twentieth-century Marxists (and led to a century of quite
interesting radical historiography, particularly in Latin America), but nevertheless it presumed distinctions based on national units, and assumed that

each nation would eventually have to follow the same path. He even sug-

gested that there may be benefits to being underdeveloped ("badeward")in

so far as foreign investment provides all the necessary tedinology to jumpstart an economy without centuries of indigenous development. The notion

of necessary stages of development is circumvented but also reinscribed

in the notion of "skipping" (as a step can be skipped only because another
went through it):

A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the

advanced countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past. . . . [Capitalism] prepares and in a certain

sense realizes the universality and permanence of man's development. By this a

repetition of the forms of development by different nations is ruled out. Although
compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not
take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardnessand such
a privilege existspermits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready

in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages.

Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without traveling

the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. (4-5)

Trotsky here is at least ahead of the British: he doesn't suggest that the
culture of the "savage" is static, needing to be given progress by the West.
But he does suggest that the bow indicates savagery, and that the path of
development for all cultures is indeed the same path, all the way to the rifle.
Of course, Trotsky's point that capitalism levels out differences is truebut

Paulson 257

only to a point. Certainly capitalism causes all people to be reduced to wage

laborers, all work to be reducible to wage labor, and all things to have an exchange value mediated by a universal equivalent (money). But how it does
this is a matter of considerable variability. While Trotsky recognized that
some "peculiarities" may remain intact, ultimately his notion of unevenness
(the existence of which he quite acutely considered to be "the most general
law of the historic process" [5] was that it led to convergence. This allowed
for a theory of "combined development" which saw the unity of "progressive" and "archaic" social relationshipsbut such a unity always occurred
under the rubric of a homogenizing proletarianization. (Thus we see the
development of the soviets in Tsarist Russia as "a product of combined
development," and the figurative unity of the hammer with the sickle.) The
teleology of capitalist development remains in place; although some nations may skip stages on their ways to advanced capitalism and sorialized
commodity production, they all end up "there"which looks remarkably
like industrialized Europe. Thus, while the starting point of critical sodai
theory is the homogenization of humanity by capital, analyses of uneven
development frequently start with apparent unevenness, and work to show
that such unevenness is intrinsically capitalist rather than an indication that
a less-developed region is feudal or otherwise not "ready" for socialism or
revolution.3 For revolutionary theory, this is an important insight, but the
implication for reification is that it, too, follows a teleological path.
In this regard, dependency theory added a fruitful complication to the
development model by suggesting that unevenness does not lead to convergence, but to permanent states of dependency (even if all parts of the
equation are dominated by capitalist production). In 1966, the historian Luis
Vitale arguedvoicing a position common in Latin American marxism by
thenthat the agrarian regions of South America were not some "mechanical copy of eighteenth-century Europe," but that the region
passed directly from primitive indigenous communities to an incipient capitalism
introduced by the Spanish colonization. After its independence from Spain, Latin
America was not governed by an imaginary feudal oligarchy, but by a bourgeoisie
that produced raw materials, conditioning our continenfs backwardness through
its dependence on the world capitalist market. (255)

The main point is a good oneyet it is the notion of "backwardness" that

continues to allow unilinear development models to persist. In most dependency theory of the 1960s and 1970s we still find a teleology of development
from "primitive" to "advanced" civilization (in the singular), and the unevenness is about capitalism holding societies back from that same development through the extraction of surplus value from the peripheries to the
centers. Despite the significant analytical benefits that may come out of such

a conception of capitalism, focus should also be placed on the ways in which

the imposition of capitalism interrupts an indigenous process of sodai and

258 the minnesota review

economic development (rather than encountering a static sodety), and in so

doing must appropriate or eradicate existing value systems. This gives us
a model of multiple trajedories of development being forced into multiple
kinds of hybrid capitalisms, each working toward appropriating or eradicating pre-existing sodai and economic forms but always in various stages
of completion (and conflict).
But to suggest then that uneven qualities of development are present in
any two manifestations of capitalism without a sense of convergence (active or thwarted) poses a problem for a key conclusion of Lukcs's theory
of reificationthat it is only and necessarily the proletariat, as the most
reified class, that has the requisite class consdousness for revolution. Of
course it is precisely this point which repelled the Frankfurt School and the
tradition of Western Marxism generally from any notion of necessary class
consdousness, as they watdied the German proletariat support the NSDAP
just as readily as they would the KPD. But my critique comes from a different angle, even while recognizing the obviousness of the Frankfurt School
one. The latter suggests that the classical Marxist notion of class consciousness is empirically false, but I would insist it also comes out of a theoretical blind spot, as it assumes uniform conditions of reification in different
classeswhich the marxian theory of reification itself cannot support if the
sodalization of commodity production occurs differently, under different
conditions, at different speeds, etc. in different regions or at different times.
Even if many elements of Lukcs's analysis may well have been accurate at
a particular geographical and historical moment, they are not universally
applicable. Lukcs's concept of reification then does not need to be thrown
away (as has been done throughout the Left after the Frankfurt School),4
but it can be updated. Reification ought to be understood as an uneven phenomenon, as universal as is capitalism, but also just as differently manifested,
with strengths and weaknesses, and having implications for agency without those implications being uniform.
Unevenness and Possibility
In other words, despite the apparent "one-dimensionality" of the world

decried by Marcuse as early as the 1950s and the unipolarity of geopolitics

and economics in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union (made yet
more acute during the current Bush administration), it is indeed possible

to locate areas where reification is more or less dominant. These are most

frequently correlated with economic geography and areas of more or less

intensive capitalist development, but also vary with the historical location
relative to capitalist development, and the existence and influence of tradi-

tional economic or cultural structures that may be in conflict with capitalist

modes of production and reproduction.5

I will focus my examples on two extremes, analyzed in a binary fashion

for their explanatory benefitsnot because there are only two kinds of

Paulson 259

development nor just two kinds of reification. The first is represented by

the "culture industry" of the United States, which, as the Frankfurt School
was so fond of noting, seems to suffer from reification run amok. Yet some
sort of extreme reification is to be expected in the capitalist centers, since
modern capitalism developed relatively organically out of (and alongside)
EuroAmerican culture and tradition. In the United States, there are no precapitalist traditions left to speak of that carry any weight, since Europe
brought to the Americas a genocide that effaced most existing cultures
before they even had the opportunity to integrate with capitalism. North
American capitalism also delivers on many of its promises, or at least
appears to: the postwar economic boom, combined with a rudimentary
extension of civil rights, ensured that the Horatio Alger myth of finandal
success for all who work hard enough would stay embedded in the popular
common sense for decades to come. Further, the commodified masquerade
of popular culture which so antagonized Adorno frequently succeeds in appearing authentic, choice-driven, even revolutionary, and, even when it
doesn't, as Horkheimer and Adorno lamented, "consumers feel compelled
to buy and use its products even though they see through them" (167).
Yet reification in the centers, no matter how well-developed, is not
completeand it can't be, since capitalism itself is always changing and
developing. Adorno's analysis of late capitalist culture was penetrating,
but ultimately too pessimistic. Certainly there is much to be pessimistic
about, but there are nevertheless at least two ways in which reification in
the mtropoles ought to be understood as truly oircr-developed, rather than
just "extreme." First, there may be limits to how much a human being, as
a sodai individual, is able to be instrumentalized. In a dialectical twist, too

much reification squeezes out some sort of resistance, which can be disruptive regardless of the target.6 Reification can also lag behind changes
in capitalismwhich is increasingly a problem as the changes occur with
increasing speed. Thus reification of particular forms of capitalism can be
overdeveloped compared to the needs of capital to shift its strategy in one
direction or another (such as the current shift away from Fordism and toward flexible accumulation).

These openings are then the spaces in which counterhegemonic social

movements can form. Sodai protest, when it arises, is initially reactionary;
only rarely does it begin attached to a coherent theoretical framework for
change, and, particularly in conditions of extreme or overdeveloped reification, this is not likely to be one that calls for a radical restructuring of economic and social existence. Despite having become something of a mantra
on the Left, it is no less true that "we make our own history, but not under
conditions of our own making"; the theory comes out of the existing world,
not down from on high. The tendency is for a movement to arise somewhat
spontaneously out of a situation that has become intolerable for the social
actors involved, usually against something, though in rare cases for a particular change as well. But such a change has to be a possibility rendered out

260 the minnesota review

of actual material conditions. Many possibilities might actually fit this bill,
but much too frequently reification leads our conceptions of what is realistic
and possible to be merely linked to what is already apparent.
Social actors come to activity, to agency, with what Gramsci called "contradictory consdousness" implicitly or explicitly present in our discourse
and behavior; in one sense, this is Marcuse's "Happy Consciousness" and
a liberatory consdousness (derived from sodai production) rolled into one.
The internalized sense of realism and the possible is the reified sodai order;
it is that part of the consdousness that is uncritically absorbed, inherited
from the past and from all the sodai processes and apparatuses around us.
What is possible is what is possible under capitalism, because there isn't
anything else. Freedom and democracy are tautologically defined by "the
market" and vice-versa. Competition, fragmentation, and commodification make their way into our cognitive maps of the world as paradigms or
paramount logics unto themselves. Under conditions of greatest reification,
sodai problems might be perceived to be caused by other groups of people,
one's own poor choices, or perhaps even a specific area of policybut nothing that can't be made right by better competition, better choices, or a slight
fme-tuning of the market or political structure. Nothing that might call into
question the economy or the sodai structure as such.
Thus when the "Battle of Seattle" heralded the rise of sodai movements

against neoliberalism in the United States, the movements were either

celebrated as "decentered" or derided as "fragmented" (depending on
whether one liked the strategy). Yet this form was only partially a matter of
consdous strategy, and indeed it could have been expected. The openings
were there, but minimal; the rapid adjustments toward flexible accumulation and finandal consolidation in the 1990s left reification a step behind,
as what had been previously perceived to be a "natural" form of capitalism
was being superceded. This is significant, but not enough to suggest the
emergence of a broad counterhegemony; many of the movements involved
in the Seattle protests were in the streets because the comforts of capitalism
they thought should be guaranteed were appearing more ephemeral. Yet if
the movements are able to stay a step ahead of the retrenchment of reifica-

tion, the form (and function) of whatever coalitions come together in the

future will be much more a matter of their own choosing.

On the other hand, in any sodety in whidi the dominant mode of production has until recently been one of subsistence, reification has a much

weaker footing; capital must stamp out or somehow appropriate traditions

and histories that have a trajectory of development all their own. What this
means today is that where neoliberalism is externally imposed, it necessarily takes on a much more assertive character than it does in the First World.
In regions still peripheral to capital, reification doesn't have centuries to

solidify, and when a universal market has to be created through the liquida-

tion or appropriation of pre-existing social and cultural forms, it suddenly

seems less free, and reification necessarily becomes a process of forgetting.

Paulson 261

of asserting an ahistorical primacy to wage labor, efficiency, and commodity

production. It is here that the neoliberal project (and capital itself) is perhaps

most insecure, for the market is offered as the only choice for "developing
nations," and yet, the way reification functions, it only becomes the "only
alternative" after thefact, when social relationships are already firmly instrumentalized by and for commodity production.7
Part and parcel with the recognition of uneven development is the recognition that while globalization appears to be modernizing the world in an
American image, any such image is not likely to be more than skin-deep.
In most of the world, capitalism has been violently imposed, but the North
American genoddal model was more the exception than the norm, at least
in the degree of its success. The national liberation struggles of the midtwentieth century brought the indigenous populations back into power
in Africa and southeast Asia and forced a reconciliation with the poor in
much of Latin America; although the new ruling classes inherited capitalist
baggage from the colonizersin terms of both economic and state institutions^they've had to contend with their own histories, and must find ways
to make the inherited institutions relevant to the population. This has been
perhaps most dramatic in Africa, but is seen in Latin America as well, as the
"indigenous question" gains more attention at the national level throughout the continent. The result is that while wage-labor may be the norm in

all these areas, the social systems in which it exists still have local flavor.8

Capitalism, no matter how westernized, almost always ends up being imposed on fop of existing systems, institutions, values, and structures, and
while many of these may be able to be subsumed wholly into commodity
production, many others may be unreconcilable with capital and would be
perpetually in conflict.
Thus counterhegemonic movements in areas of the Third and Fourth

Worlds that have recently suffered from a rapid onset of capitalism stand

to a certain extent displaced by it (sometimes quite literally). The sodai

actors in these areas are the inheritors of centuries of anticolonial struggle
and frequently revolutionary struggle as well, such that reification cannot
easily (and certainly not transparently) force a "forgetting." The contradic-

tory consciousness is still thereand people are plied with consumer goods

in an effort to placate one side of it, but the range of possibilities for sodai
movement formation is mudi broader. (One might consider the formal differences between the autonomous collectives in Argentina, the Workers

Party and Lula's election in Brazil, and the multiple guerrilla movements of

Mexico.) To take just one example, Zapatismo is facing down a capitalism in

southern Mexico which arrived in the form of slave labor and, later, latifundiosthough these were interspersed with subsistence farming wherever
the indigenous farmers had access to land. The exploitation of the labor
force was stark and unmediated, but it wasn't necessarily the same people

working year after year; large numbers were "surplus," and not immediately involved in the reproduction or even circulation of capital. Reification

262 the minnesota review

in the mountains of southeast Mexico is thus relatively weak; traditions,

though always changing, are still viable, and there is a vibrant historical
memoryof histories of struggle, of autonomy, even of myth that can quite
transgressively permeate "common sense."

Ultimately, the quality of reification, and the subsequent bounds of pos-

sibility, are different in any given instance. Yet I would not suggest that
movements arising out of certain conditions are necessarily better or more
effective than others; nor would I suggest that reification is the ultimate de-

terrnining factor in social movement development (and its influence likely

weakens as movements grow over time). But its role is not inconsequential,

and in recent decades has been overlooked. Its unevenness means it has

cracks, and these can be exploited. Especially in the capitalist centers, the
range of possibilities for resistance needs to be opened up, and this also

means taking seriously the need for some kind of process of de-reification.

Historical remembrance must become possible socially (this includes making common sense a site of struggle), and we can also make efforts to revalorize activity on a community- or sodety-wide scale. The contradictions
of the capitalist mode of production, including alienation itself, are always
hidden so long as it is the only significant form of economic activity. Less
reification however can lead to more resistance, more imagination, and
more hope.
Notes

I would like to thank the Marxist Literary Group for the Sprinker Prize awarded a
longer version of this paper. I'd also like to thank in particular Rich Daniels, Barbara
Epstein, Fred Pfeil, Modhumita Roy, and Jeffrey Williams for their verbal and/or
written comments.

1 See Marx and Engels's discussion of the relationship of appearance to existence in

The German Ideology.
I include Marcuse as a Frankfurt School figure, despite his decision not to return to
the Institute in the postwar period, because of the close relationship in his late work
to that of Adorno.

As Jos Mariategui, a Peruvian contemporary of Lukcs and Trotsky, put it, socialism was "not particularly European"not because it was necessarily applicable to
cultures without bourgeois ideals or industrial development, but rather because
"Europe" was no longer particular to itself. All countries were already in the "orbit
of Western civilization," Mariategui noted in 1929, which "moves toward universality with a force and with means that no other civilization has ever possessed" (38).
The Frankfurt School was rather unique in that they retained Lukcs's theorization
of reification without his conclusions about class consciousness. This is perfectly
feasible, but, after the Frankfurt School the concept itself seems to have fallen into
disfavor, because of both its conflation with false consciousness and the pessimistic
outlook involved in asserting the prevalence of reification without the class consciousness to overcome it.

Paulson 263

One of the most obvious determining factors is whether a space is in a capitalist

"center" or periphery. But it should be noted that there are at least two kinds of "centers," vertical and horizontal: the United States, for example, can be regarded as a
center by virtue of being a global hegemon (regardless of how temporary such an arrangement may be), the top of a vertical dynamic, and the "global cities" researched
most notably by Saskia Sassen also act as centers in a "networked" fashion. (Neither

category is necessarily more or less "central" than the other.) Other geographical
questions to be asked include what barriers exist to the use of that space for commodity production and capital accumulation, and whether or not the population is
exclusively "variable capital." In terms of historical location, it should go without
saying that capitalism, as an entire mode of social organization, can appear as an
alien structure when rapidly forced (e.g., in one or two generations) on a particular
society, where it may even take some kind of hybrid form; whereas if it developed
slowly over hundreds of years, its appearance as "natural" would simply be common sense. The existence of non-capitalist traditional cultural activity can lessen the
importance of the historical element, for it points to the immediate possibility of
alternative modes of social organization and development. Is there an existing economic culture that capitalism is in conflict with? If there are "surplus populations,"
do they have their own economies, and are they disruptive to capital? Are there traditional markets that are non- or less-capitalist? Are residual cultures and economies
easily absorbed into capitalist structures? How transparent is such assimilation, and
what kind of resistance is engendered by it?
That is, the resistance can manifest itself as displaced aggression as easily as a
progressive social movement. Movements arising out of overdeveloped reification
could just as easily rally behind the Le Pens and Buchanans of the world as behind an
anti-capitalist or socialist struggle. "Epidemics" of violence and anti-social behavior
might also be expected.
I do not wish to romanticize indigenous poverty here; it is, however, worth pointing out that as globalization brings more and more capitalism to the Third World,
the conflict between capital and tradition is not a clash between modern progress
and a hypothetical people whose way of life has remained simple and unchanged
for centuries. Traditional life, as anthropologists have recently taken notice, has just
as much history as any other and is, in fact, no less modern (unless one essentializes
indigenous identity as intrinsically premodern or some such nonsense).

8 Even in the colonial era, as Charles Piot notes in his recent study of Kabre culture
in Togo, cultural and economic interactions were not wholly defined by Europe,
though the Europeans tended to think they were. Indigenous populations have long
adopted "western culture" when it suited them, and not at other times.
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