TLDR:

Reification is when capitalism makes social relationships look like natural laws. It starts with Marx’s commodity fetishism, where the value of a product seems like a property of the thing itself, hiding the labor behind it.

Lukács expanded this. He showed how this logic spreads to everything. Under reification, the system we built starts to rule us. We become objects to economic forces. Our lives get reduced to numbers like wages and prices. Capitalism starts to feel like the weather, an unchangeable fact of life instead of something people made.

This messes with our heads. It makes us passive. We see society as a bunch of disconnected facts we can’t change, which stops us from seeing our own power as a class. Alienation is about feeling disconnected. Reification is about that disconnected world hardening into a fake reality that controls us.

The point is we forget we built this. Overcoming it means achieving class consciousness, seeing through the illusion that capitalism is permanent, and realizing we can change it.