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Justin PaulsonUneven Reification

The "globalized" capitalist world of the twenty-first century is universal-ly but unevenly pervaded by reification. Reification here, as throughout theWestern Marxist tradition, refers to the processes by which sodai relation-ships and activities are objectified and, most importantly, instrumentalizedand refashioned after the needs of capital. To understand what is meant bythis concept, one needs to try to think outside of capital for a minutenotnecessarily back in time, but of anything that is not organized principallyaround commodity production. Jameson usefully draws the distinction asbetween "traditional" activity, in which "the value of the activity is imma-nent to it, and qualitatively distinct from other ends or values articulated inother forms of human work or play," and activity in a sodety diaracterizedby the "universal commodification of labor power," in which

all forms of human labor can be . . . separated out from their unique qualitativedifferentiation as distinct types of activity. . . and all universally ranged under thecommon denominator of the quantitative, that is, under the universal exchangevalue of money. At this point, then, the quality of the various forms of humanactivity, their unique and distinct "ends" or values, has effectively been bracket-ted or suspended by the market system, leaving all these activities free to be ruth-lessly reorganized in efficiency terms, as sheer means or instrumentality. (130-31)

The alienation of activity from any immanent qualitative value is a univer-sal characteristic of the capitalist mode of production; for this reason, GeorgLukcs and most of those following him treated reification as an all-encom-passing, objective condition of life under capitalism. Reification does notexist only where capitalist sodai relations don't existand in the currentexpansive phase of global capitalism, there really are no such locations anylonger.

Yet for this term to be at all meaningful today, in the wake of decades ofboth Western Marxist and poststructuralist critiques of classical Marxism,we must first emphasize reification's social character. The historical confla-tion of reification with "false consciousness" is something of a categoryerror: individual consdousness might be ossified, "dumbed-down," orfragmented by reification, but reification itself cannot be understood assome sort of individual, subjective ailment. Rather, it must be understoodin terms of the soczaZ processes set in motion by the dominance of commod-ity production. As with commodity fetishism more generally, at issue isnot an individual's perception: if a table (to use Marx's famous example inCapital) appears to have been cut loose from the relationship that would tieits creator to its user, if its use-value seems to have been supplanted by itsexchange-value, such that it "stands on its head" and takes on an existence

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all its own, these appearances aren't illusory deceptions but are instead realresults of the place of the table itself in the processes of production and thealienation 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 forovercoming reification is that the alienations and contradictions arising inand from capitalism bemade consdous, the universality of reificationmeansthat the transformation out of it must be a practical, sodai one. Lukcs re-minds us that a "purely cognitive stance," no matter how enlightened, canby no means overcome reification (205). Every individual in a dass or anentire sodety could be conscious of commodity fetishism or of the contra-dictions in capitalism but still do nothing about them (as Horkheimer andAdorno famously pointed out in Dialectic ofEnlightenment). Certainly, alongwith the objectification of sodai relationships comes their mystificationtheappearance of the hardened, reified forms as natural and inevitable. But weought not to be shouting "false consdousness" at anyone who thinks thatcapitalism or neoliberalism, let alone one's own job, television consump-tion, or shopping trips, are naturaleadi an inevitable consequence of theway the world works. The biggest hurdle reification presents for us is thatits products are not illusions perpetrated upon the individual that can justbe cleared up, but are instead actual, real appearances of social relationshipsthat are themselves askew.1

Because reification is a central feature of capitalist social relations, ananalysis of reification's relationship to agency can help us better understandboth the continued growth of capitalism and questions of where and howresistance to capital (and the creation of alternate modes of thought andeconomic structure) might be possible. The objectification of human rela-tionships and activitiesin Frankfurt School terms, the wholesale instru-mentalization of societyrenders the end of all human activity to be foundin the market; in requiring "that a society should learn to satisfy all its needsin terms of commodity exchange" (Lukcs 91), reification even transformsthe concept of need itself in order to make this satisfaction possible. Suchan organization of society reinforces positivism and factidtythe maxim ofself-evidence, that things are what they areand repeats it over and overas the only rational assertion that can be made. Yet, although possibilitiesfor rsistance would appear to be heavily foredosed under such conditions,I would suggest that reification does not occur with the same magnitudeeverywhere, and that reification is in fact only as homogeneous as capital-ismwhich is to say, very uneven. I will begin with a closer look at theproblem of reification for the Frankfurt School (where it received its mostthorough 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 concludewith some of the implications of a "revaluation" of reification for sodaimovement theory and strategy.

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Dialectics Against ReificationThe Frankfurt School theorists took up the problem of reification after

the revolutionary moment of the early 1920s, during which Lukcs wrotehis seminal essay, had long since faded. They were centrally concerned withreification as an encumbrance on critical thought, the unfettering of whichthey insisted was a precondition for any effective social change. Adornowrote in one of his late essays:

Whatever is universally accepted by people living under false social conditionsalready contains ideological monstrosity prior to any particular content, becauseit reinforces the belief that these conditions are supposedly their own. A crust ofreified opinions, banality shields the status quo and its law. To defend oneselfagainst it is not yet the truth and may easily enough deteriorate into abstract nega-tion, but it is the agent of the process without which there is no truth. . . . Criticalthought alone, not thought's complacent agreement with itself, may help bringabout change. (Critical Models 122)

Thus Adorno and his colleagues, most notably Horkheimer and Marcuse,2warned extensively of the apparent "dumbing-down" of culture, and of thedangers of "public opinion" and "common sense" amid the instrumental-ization of reason. Adorno and Marcuse both turned their attentions late inlife to the possibility of finding in the "aesthetic dimension" an autonomyand critical truth content they believed were no longer possible in a heav-ily commodified social sphere. The concern with reification was also whythe Frankfurt theorists clung so tightly to the dialectic throughout theirwork; Marcuse stressed that the function of dialectical thought (which inthe Hegelian-Marxist tradition is always essentially negative) "is to breakdown the self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense, to under-mine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts" (Reasonand Revolution 9). Although dialectics does not constitute some protectedsphere outside of reification, it nevertheless offers a unique way for thoughtto remain negative, rational, and uncompromisingly critical of a false socialorder.

For Adorno, the socially-acceptable "common sense," which inheres inthe various disciplines of thought as well as in society at large, is a funda-mental product of reification"the worldly eye schooled by the market"(Minima Moralia 72); it is perpetually trying to beat back critical thoughtwith the grand tautology linking what is sensible to what is, and what ispossible to what is sensible. Indeed common sense has always been the re-flection and the instrument of the status quo; even Thomas Paine's rabble-rousing pamphlet was radical precisely because it did not reflect the com-mon sense of the time. Critical thought and common sense can never be insync with each other: although they both tend to develop organically out ofexisting conditions, common sense is the reified form of reflection on thoseconditions, and criticism the dialectical one.

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Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the "culture industry" in Dialecticof Enlightenment offers in a nutshell the Frankfurt School's critique of con-temporary sodety: that cultural activity in late capitalism has been reducedto a profiteering industry that gives the individualwho is always nowa consumerneither human dignity nor real freedom, but merely the"freedom to choose what is always the same" (167). While it is well andgood to think that sudi a totalitarian image was a produd of the time, itwas not overt fasdsm that worried Horkheimer and Adorno so mudi aswhat they perceived to be the totalitarian trends within capitalism itself,most notably an engineered complacency and consent with the establishedordera complacency so complete that it signalled to them the possibilityof absolute reification. While overt fascism ruled by stifling any expressionof dissent, capitalism maintained its hegemony by preventing dissentingthoughts from occuring in the first place, andas both Marx and Lukcshad suggestedby transforming the individual subjed into an instrumentof commodity production, consumption, and exchange, such that subjec-tivity itself was displaced by its illusion. "The most intimate reactions ofhuman beings," Horkheimer and Adorno wrote, "have been so thoroughlyreified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only asan utterly abstrad notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more thanshining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions" (167).

The infusion of psychoanalysis into the repertoire of critical theoryes-pedally what BenAgger summarized as "the distinctly Freudian rationalityof gratification" (140)greatly aidedAdorno, 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 performanceprindple" went beyond even Adorno's "authoritarian personality" to ex-plore the more intricate ways in which the vast majority of people could bein an objectively antagonistic relationship to capital and at the same timeconform to its ideological framework and normative standards. Marcuseoffered a contrast between common sense, or what he termed "HappyConsdousnessthe belief that the real is rational and that the system de-livers the goods" (One Dimensional Man 84)and a critical consdousnessthat was not subjed to the "tedinological rationality" that acuninistered thepopular world-view. ForMarcuse, it wasn't somuch that most people livingin industrialized societies were duped into complacency without any agencyon their part, but that capitalism (and its instrumental Reason) actually of-fered them something appealing, assuaging, and desirable.

The fact that this sense of gratification existed, however, was seen byMarcuse as simply making active change more difficult. Despite the out-ward appearance of agency on the parts of the consumers of culture, thisagency is restrided to acting as consumers (or producers, distributors, etc.);the more satisfied they are with this role, the less they feel dominated orsubjugated. Even while individuals may not be duped into complacency,their consent is nevertheless conditioned by capitalism before they have

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a say in the matter. Reification, for Marcuse, is thus a mediating groundthat links a fragmented individual subject with the "one-dimensionality"of social thought and activity. Even when idle, "happy consciousness" issafe from the uncomfortable possibilities opened up by negation and criticalreflection.

As a whole, the Frankfurt theorists' examination of reification in theUnited States and western Europe put them in a position of ruthlessly criti-cizing existing society, while seeing fewer and fewer possibilities for radicalchange (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 retreatinto thought and aesthetics (a route he travelled in parallel with Adorno)was still perhaps, in the last instance, a hopeful precursor to making sodaiaction possible, but that last instance seemed to be getting farther and far-ther away. Marcuse saw the counterculture and sodai upheaval of the late1960s turned into a "misplaced radicalism," a "revolt against Reasonnotonly against the Reason of capitalism, bourgeois society, and so on, butagainst Reason per se" (Counterrevolution 129); he watched what he termedthe "counterrevolution" of capitalism unleash all the repressive powerof the state on what little real insurgency existed throughout the world.However, Counterrevolution and Revoltlike many of his works of his lasttwenty years, largely a treatise on late capitalist reificationalso suggestedthe possibility of a greater, much more profound revolution than the mis-guided upheavals contemporaneously taking place in the First World.Marcuse wrote:

As the commodity form becomes universal and integrates branches of the mate-rial and "higher" culture which previously retained a relative independence, itreveals 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 needswhich it cannot meet; it even breaks down class barriers just enough tomake wealth appear attainable, but then frustrates attempts to reach it.

But while Marcuse and Adorno theorized the possibilities of extremereification, they remained focused on the most instrumentalizing examplesof the Culture Industry. Marcuse was interested in the liberatory potentialsof the Third World, but never developed in any detail a conception of un-evenness vis--vis reification. The Frankfurt School did presage many latercritiques of classical Marxism by problematizing notions of teleologicalprogress, but they (along with many sodai theorists after them) stoppedshort of any serious engagement with theories and teleologies of economicdevelopment. Similarly, Marxist economists after 1929 generally stoppedbeing concerned with revolutionary consdousness, and what has trans-pired in the interim has been a situation in whidi critical social theory and

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radical economics grew to be quite independent of each other, when theyought to have been informing each other all along.

Development Theory and ReificationLukcs's theory of reification, like Marx's explication of commodity fe-

tishism before it, was of course developed in a specific region of Europeat a specific historical time. If the development of capitalism there was notperfectly homogeneous, neither was it so heterogeneous as to prevent theappearance of objective, universal sodai conditions concurrent with thedominance of a capitalist mode of production. Capitalism throughout theworld in fact looked quite different in each place (even in different parts ofEurope, not to mention feudal Russia), but while the leading Marxist schol-ars in the first half of the century were well aware of this, their work wasalso characterized by the assumption that each region of the world wouldgo through identical processes of industrialization, class consciousness, andrevolution.Trotsky's analysis of uneven development was one of the more compli-

cated of the early twentieth-century Marxists (and led to a century of quiteinteresting radical historiography, particularly in Latin America), but never-theless it presumed distinctions based on national units, and assumed thateach nation would eventually have to follow the same path. He even sug-gested that there may be benefits to being underdeveloped ("badeward")inso far as foreign investment provides all the necessary tedinology to jump-start an economy without centuries of indigenous development. The notionof necessary stages of development is circumvented but also reinscribedin the notion of "skipping" (as a step can be skipped only because anotherwent through it):

A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of theadvanced countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, re-produces all the stages of their past. . . . [Capitalism] prepares and in a certainsense realizes the universality and permanence of man's development. By this arepetition of the forms of development by different nations is ruled out. Althoughcompelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does nottake things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardnessand sucha privilege existspermits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is readyin 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 travelingthe 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 theculture 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 ofdevelopment 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

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only to a point. Certainly capitalism causes all people to be reduced to wagelaborers, all work to be reducible towage labor, and all things to have an ex-change value mediated by a universal equivalent (money). But how it doesthis is a matter of considerable variability. While Trotsky recognized thatsome "peculiarities" may remain intact, ultimately his notion of unevenness(the existence of which he quite acutely considered to be "the most generallaw of the historic process" [5] was that it led to convergence. This allowedfor a theory of "combined development" which saw the unity of "progres-sive" and "archaic" social relationshipsbut such a unity always occurredunder the rubric of a homogenizing proletarianization. (Thus we see thedevelopment of the soviets in Tsarist Russia as "a product of combineddevelopment," and the figurative unity of the hammer with the sickle.) Theteleology of capitalist development remains in place; although some na-tions may skip stages on their ways to advanced capitalism and sorializedcommodity production, they all end up "there"which looks remarkablylike industrialized Europe. Thus, while the starting point of critical sodaitheory is the homogenization of humanity by capital, analyses of unevendevelopment frequently start with apparent unevenness, and work to showthat such unevenness is intrinsically capitalist rather than an indication thata less-developed region is feudal or otherwise not "ready" for socialism orrevolution.3 For revolutionary theory, this is an important insight, but theimplication for reification is that it, too, follows a teleological path.

In this regard, dependency theory added a fruitful complication to thedevelopment model by suggesting that unevenness does not lead to con-vergence, but to permanent states of dependency (even if all parts of theequation are dominated by capitalist production). In 1966, the historian LuisVitale arguedvoicing a position common in Latin American marxism bythenthat the agrarian regions of South America were not some "mechani-cal copy of eighteenth-century Europe," but that the region

passed directly from primitive indigenous communities to an incipient capitalismintroduced by the Spanish colonization. After its independence from Spain, LatinAmerica was not governed by an imaginary feudal oligarchy, but by a bourgeoisiethat produced raw materials, conditioning our continenfs backwardness throughits dependence on the world capitalist market. (255)

The main point is a good oneyet it is the notion of "backwardness" thatcontinues to allow unilinear development models to persist. In most depen-dency theory of the 1960s and 1970s we still find a teleology of developmentfrom "primitive" to "advanced" civilization (in the singular), and the un-evenness is about capitalism holding societies back from that same develop-ment through the extraction of surplus value from the peripheries to thecenters. Despite the significant analytical benefits that may come out of sucha conception of capitalism, focus should also be placed on the ways in whichthe imposition of capitalism interrupts an indigenous process of sodai and

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economic development (rather than encountering a static sodety), and in sodoing must appropriate or eradicate existing value systems. This gives usa model of multiple trajedories of development being forced into multiplekinds of hybrid capitalisms, each working toward appropriating or eradi-cating pre-existing sodai and economic forms but always in various stagesof completion (and conflict).

But to suggest then that uneven qualities of development are present inany two manifestations of capitalism without a sense of convergence (ac-tive or thwarted) poses a problem for a key conclusion of Lukcs's theoryof reificationthat it is only and necessarily the proletariat, as the mostreified class, that has the requisite class consdousness for revolution. Ofcourse it is precisely this point which repelled the Frankfurt School and thetradition of Western Marxism generally from any notion of necessary classconsdousness, as they watdied the German proletariat support the NSDAPjust as readily as they would the KPD. But my critique comes from a differ-ent angle, even while recognizing the obviousness of the Frankfurt Schoolone. The latter suggests that the classical Marxist notion of class conscious-ness is empirically false, but I would insist it also comes out of a theoreti-cal blind spot, as it assumes uniform conditions of reification in differentclasseswhich the marxian theory of reification itself cannot support if thesodalization of commodity production occurs differently, under differentconditions, at different speeds, etc. in different regions or at different times.Even if many elements of Lukcs's analysis may well have been accurate ata particular geographical and historical moment, they are not universallyapplicable. Lukcs's concept of reification then does not need to be thrownaway (as has been done throughout the Left after the Frankfurt School),4but it can be updated. Reification ought to be understood as an uneven phe-nomenon, as universal as is capitalism, but also just as differently manifested,with strengths and weaknesses, and having implications for agency with-out those implications being uniform.

Unevenness and PossibilityIn other words, despite the apparent "one-dimensionality" of the world

decried by Marcuse as early as the 1950s and the unipolarity of geopoliticsand economics in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union (made yetmore acute during the current Bush administration), it is indeed possibleto locate areas where reification is more or less dominant. These are mostfrequently correlated with economic geography and areas of more or lessintensive capitalist development, but also vary with the historical locationrelative to capitalist development, and the existence and influence of tradi-tional economic or cultural structures that may be in conflict with capitalistmodes of production and reproduction.5

I will focus my examples on two extremes, analyzed in a binary fashionfor their explanatory benefitsnot because there are only two kinds of

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development nor just two kinds of reification. The first is represented bythe "culture industry" of the United States, which, as the Frankfurt Schoolwas so fond of noting, seems to suffer from reification run amok. Yet somesort of extreme reification is to be expected in the capitalist centers, sincemodern capitalism developed relatively organically out of (and alongside)EuroAmerican culture and tradition. In the United States, there are no pre-capitalist traditions left to speak of that carry any weight, since Europebrought to the Americas a genocide that effaced most existing culturesbefore they even had the opportunity to integrate with capitalism. NorthAmerican capitalism also delivers on many of its promises, or at leastappears to: the postwar economic boom, combined with a rudimentaryextension of civil rights, ensured that the Horatio Alger myth of finandalsuccess for all who work hard enough would stay embedded in the popularcommon sense for decades to come. Further, the commodified masqueradeof popular culture which so antagonized Adorno frequently succeeds in ap-pearing authentic, choice-driven, even revolutionary, and, even when itdoesn't, as Horkheimer and Adorno lamented, "consumers feel compelledto buy and use its products even though they see through them" (167).

Yet reification in the centers, no matter how well-developed, is notcompleteand it can't be, since capitalism itself is always changing anddeveloping. Adorno's analysis of late capitalist culture was penetrating,but ultimately too pessimistic. Certainly there is much to be pessimisticabout, but there are nevertheless at least two ways in which reification inthe mtropoles ought to be understood as truly oircr-developed, rather thanjust "extreme." First, there may be limits to how much a human being, asa sodai individual, is able to be instrumentalized. In a dialectical twist, toomuch reification squeezes out some sort of resistance, which can be dis-ruptive regardless of the target.6 Reification can also lag behind changesin capitalismwhich is increasingly a problem as the changes occur withincreasing speed. Thus reification of particular forms of capitalism can beoverdeveloped compared to the needs of capital to shift its strategy in onedirection or another (such as the current shift away from Fordism and to-ward flexible accumulation).

These openings are then the spaces in which counterhegemonic socialmovements can form. Sodai protest, when it arises, is initially reactionary;only rarely does it begin attached to a coherent theoretical framework forchange, and, particularly in conditions of extreme or overdeveloped reifica-tion, this is not likely to be one that calls for a radical restructuring of eco-nomic and social existence. Despite having become something of a mantraon the Left, it is no less true that "we make our own history, but not underconditions 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 somewhatspontaneously out of a situation that has become intolerable for the socialactors involved, usually against something, though in rare cases for a par-ticular change as well. But such a change has to be a possibility rendered out

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of actual material conditions. Many possibilities might actually fit this bill,but much too frequently reification leads our conceptions ofwhat is realisticand possible to be merely linked to what is already apparent.

Social actors come to activity, to agency, with what Gramsci called "con-tradictory consdousness" implicitly or explicitly present in our discourseand behavior; in one sense, this is Marcuse's "Happy Consciousness" anda 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, inheritedfrom the past and from all the sodai processes and apparatuses around us.What is possible is what is possible under capitalism, because there isn'tanything else. Freedom and democracy are tautologically defined by "themarket" and vice-versa. Competition, fragmentation, and commodifica-tion make their way into our cognitive maps of the world as paradigms orparamount 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 noth-ing that can't be made right by better competition, better choices, or a slightfme-tuning of the market or political structure. Nothing that might call intoquestion 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 eithercelebrated as "decentered" or derided as "fragmented" (depending onwhether one liked the strategy). Yet this form was only partially a matter ofconsdous strategy, and indeed it could have been expected. The openingswere there, but minimal; the rapid adjustments toward flexible accumula-tion and finandal consolidation in the 1990s left reification a step behind,as what had been previously perceived to be a "natural" form of capitalismwas being superceded. This is significant, but not enough to suggest theemergence of a broad counterhegemony; many of the movements involvedin the Seattle protests were in the streets because the comforts of capitalismthey thought should be guaranteed were appearing more ephemeral. Yet ifthe movements are able to stay a step ahead of the retrenchment of reifica-tion, the form (and function) of whatever coalitions come together in thefuture will be much more a matter of their own choosing.On the other hand, in any sodety in whidi the dominant mode of pro-

duction has until recently been one of subsistence, reification has a muchweaker footing; capital must stamp out or somehow appropriate traditionsand histories that have a trajectory of development all their own. What thismeans today is that where neoliberalism is externally imposed, it necessar-ily 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 tosolidify, and when a universal market has to be created through the liquida-tion or appropriation of pre-existing social and cultural forms, it suddenlyseems less free, and reification necessarily becomes a process of forgetting.

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of asserting an ahistorical primacy to wage labor, efficiency, and commodityproduction. It is here that the neoliberal project (and capital itself) is perhapsmost insecure, for the market is offered as the only choice for "developingnations," and yet, the way reification functions, it only becomes the "onlyalternative" after thefact, when social relationships are already firmly instru-mentalized by and for commodity production.7

Part and parcel with the recognition of uneven development is the recog-nition that while globalization appears to be modernizing the world in anAmerican 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 NorthAmerican genoddal model was more the exception than the norm, at leastin the degree of its success. The national liberation struggles of the mid-twentieth century brought the indigenous populations back into powerin Africa and southeast Asia and forced a reconciliation with the poor inmuch of Latin America; although the new ruling classes inherited capitalistbaggage from the colonizersin terms of both economic and state institu-tions^they've had to contend with their own histories, and must find waysto make the inherited institutions relevant to the population. This has beenperhaps most dramatic in Africa, but is seen in Latin America as well, as the"indigenous question" gains more attention at the national level through-out the continent. The result is that while wage-labor may be the norm inall these areas, the social systems in which it exists still have local flavor.8Capitalism, no matter how westernized, almost always ends up being im-posed on fop of existing systems, institutions, values, and structures, andwhile many of these may be able to be subsumed wholly into commodityproduction, many others may be unreconcilable with capital and would beperpetually in conflict.

Thus counterhegemonic movements in areas of the Third and FourthWorlds that have recently suffered from a rapid onset of capitalism standto a certain extent displaced by it (sometimes quite literally). The sodaiactors in these areas are the inheritors of centuries of anticolonial struggleand frequently revolutionary struggle as well, such that reification cannoteasily (and certainly not transparently) force a "forgetting." The contradic-tory consciousness is still thereand people are plied with consumer goodsin an effort to placate one side of it, but the range of possibilities for sodaimovement formation is mudi broader. (One might consider the formal dif-ferences between the autonomous collectives in Argentina, the WorkersParty and Lula's election in Brazil, and the multiple guerrilla movements ofMexico.) To take just one example, Zapatismo is facing down a capitalism insouthern Mexico which arrived in the form of slave labor and, later, latifun-diosthough these were interspersed with subsistence farming whereverthe indigenous farmers had access to land. The exploitation of the laborforce was stark and unmediated, but it wasn't necessarily the same peopleworking year after year; large numbers were "surplus," and not immedi-ately involved in the reproduction or even circulation of capital. Reification

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in the mountains of southeast Mexico is thus relatively weak; traditions,though always changing, are still viable, and there is a vibrant historicalmemoryof histories of struggle, of autonomy, even of myth that can quitetransgressively 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 thatmovements arising out of certain conditions are necessarily better or moreeffective than others; nor would I suggest that reification is the ultimate de-terrnining factor in social movement development (and its influence likelyweakens as movements grow over time). But its role is not inconsequential,and in recent decades has been overlooked. Its unevenness means it hascracks, and these can be exploited. Especially in the capitalist centers, therange of possibilities for resistance needs to be opened up, and this alsomeans taking seriously the need for some kind of process of de-reification.Historical remembrance must become possible socially (this includes mak-ing common sense a site of struggle), and we can also make efforts to re-valorize activity on a community- or sodety-wide scale. The contradictionsof the capitalist mode of production, including alienation itself, are alwayshidden so long as it is the only significant form of economic activity. Lessreification however can lead to more resistance, more imagination, andmore hope.

Notes

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

1 See Marx and Engels's discussion of the relationship of appearance to existence inThe 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 workto that of Adorno.As Jos Mariategui, a Peruvian contemporary of Lukcs and Trotsky, put it, social-

ism was "not particularly European"not because it was necessarily applicable tocultures without bourgeois ideals or industrial development, but rather because"Europe" was no longer particular to itself. All countries were already in the "orbitofWestern civilization," Mariategui noted in 1929, which "moves toward universal-ity 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 perfectlyfeasible, but, after the Frankfurt School the concept itself seems to have fallen intodisfavor, because of both its conflation with false consciousness and the pessimisticoutlook involved in asserting the prevalence of reification without the class con-sciousness to overcome it.

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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 "cen-ters," vertical and horizontal: the United States, for example, can be regarded as acenter by virtue of being a global hegemon (regardless of how temporary such an ar-rangement may be), the top of a vertical dynamic, and the "global cities" researchedmost notably by Saskia Sassen also act as centers in a "networked" fashion. (Neithercategory is necessarily more or less "central" than the other.) Other geographicalquestions to be asked include what barriers exist to the use of that space for com-modity production and capital accumulation, and whether or not the population isexclusively "variable capital." In terms of historical location, it should go withoutsaying that capitalism, as an entire mode of social organization, can appear as analien structure when rapidly forced (e.g., in one or two generations) on a particularsociety, where it may even take some kind of hybrid form; whereas if it developedslowly over hundreds of years, its appearance as "natural" would simply be com-mon sense. The existence of non-capitalist traditional cultural activity can lessen theimportance of the historical element, for it points to the immediate possibility ofalternative modes of social organization and development. Is there an existing eco-nomic 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 tra-ditional markets that are non- or less-capitalist? Are residual cultures and economieseasily absorbed into capitalist structures? How transparent is such assimilation, andwhat 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 reificationcould just as easily rally behind the Le Pens and Buchanans of the world as behind ananti-capitalist or socialist struggle. "Epidemics" of violence and anti-social behaviormight also be expected.I do not wish to romanticize indigenous poverty here; it is, however, worth point-

ing 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 progressand a hypothetical people whose way of life has remained simple and unchangedfor centuries. Traditional life, as anthropologists have recently taken notice, has justas much history as any other and is, in fact, no less modern (unless one essentializesindigenous identity as intrinsically premodern or some such nonsense).8 Even in the colonial era, as Charles Piot notes in his recent study of Kabre culturein Togo, cultural and economic interactions were not wholly defined by Europe,though the Europeans tended to think they were. Indigenous populations have longadopted "western culture" when it suited them, and not at other times.

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