Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
people’s heads, fill their minds, and mist their brains. La Conscience
Mystifiée shattered the prevailing Marxist idea that working-class
consciousness had transparent access to reality, that it somehow
reflected in its collective head what was really out there. The
thinly disguised target here was comrade Georg Lukács, whose
influential History and Class Consciousness (1923) became a
staple for Third Internationalist Marxists. 13 Crucial for Lukács
had been the concept of “reification”—of how, in capitalist society,
relations between people take on a “phantom objectivity” as
relations between “things.” Lukács located this “thingification” in
the “commodity-structure” and suggested it was no accident that
Marx began Capital with an analysis of commodities. The “fetish”
commodity, said Lukács, became decisive “for the subjugation of
men’s consciousness … and for their attempts to comprehend the
process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves
from servitude of the ‘second nature’ so created.” 14
Marx’s concept of fetishism illustrated how the human world
becomes a fuzzy reality concealed by a material object, by a thing
exchanged for another thing, money for money, money for labor
power. 15 People, as labor power, as peculiar commodities, are separated
from their activity, from the product of that activity, from
their fellow workers, and ultimately from themselves. Isolation,
fragmentation, and reification ensue. Needless to say, the ruling
class prospers from all this, while the proletariat becomes
submissive, unable to grasp their real conditions of life. Lukács
reckoned reification could be punctured, exposed by the knowing
mind acting on full knowledge of itself, acting in a “unified manner,”
understanding the “totality of history.” Thus, in the climax
to “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” the central
pillar of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács concluded,
“Reification is, then, the necessary immediate reality of every living
person in capitalist society. It can be overcome by constant
and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of
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