Reification is inescapable, so the left should pursue anti-capitalist reification

Evidence

MF: Reification isn’t a problem per se; in fact, it’s something we should hope for. Evan Calder Williams, whose book Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is coming out on Zer0, talks of an “anti-capitalist reification”, and I think that’s what we need to develop. It’s capitalism that poses as being anti-reification; it’s capitalism that presents itself as having dissolved all illusions and exposed the underlying reality of things. Part of what I’m arguing in Capitalist Realism is that this is an ideological sleight of hand; it’s precisely neoliberal capitalism’s ostensible demystifications (its reduction of everything to the supposedly self-evident category of the free individual) that allow all kinds of strange, quasi-theological entities to rule our lives. But I don’t think the aim should be to replace capitalism’s fake anti-reification with a “real” anti-reification. Reification can’t be entirely eliminated. I take this to be one of the important lessons that Lacanian psychoanalysis has to teach. Being a speaking subject at all involves a minimal reification; the big Other is coterminous with language itself. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2077

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Reification is not negative but rooted in commodity economy and irremediable — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 270; The populist left sought to re-democratize democracy, not abolish capitalism — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 122; The left should invent institutions standing for a leftist big Other — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2077 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Reification is not negative but rooted in commodity economy and irremediable #corroborates (0.92) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 270