First I must apologize for my long absence, I have been tangled up in real life. This time I will let some quotes speak almost by themselves. They are basically about reification:
1. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik:
Everywhere it is put to stand to availability. To stand as a standing-reserve for being available further. What is so set to be available has its own stance. We will call it the standing-reserve.
2. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (The working man: dominion and form):
The task of total mobilization is the transformation of life into energy, as it is unveiled in the economy, technology and traffic in the whirring of wheels or on the battlefield as fire and movement.
3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Futurist Manifesto
We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
4. Karl Marx and Friederich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter one: Bourgeois and Proletarians
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
You will notice that the first three quotes are from fascist ideologues or sympathizers (Heidegger's text was written later, it records a lecture held in 1949). M&E's prediction that the new state of affairs will enable people to see the true nature of productive forces is refuted by the eagerness with which fascism engaged in total mobilisation of society as a standing-reserve: the capitalist model in which raw materials and people are reified in the productive process is let loose upon the whole of society: sports, education, culture, procreation, friendship, everything is bound into the demand to produce a standing-reserve for the needs of the totalitarian state (its needs were quite basic: production and warfare). The humanity, with which the bourgeois era tried to soothe its guilty conscience, was abolished, the productive process made to truly dominate the whole of social totality. Besides proving that capitalism is by far more persistent and far less progressive than M&E believed, able to mobilise seemingly outlived modes of subjectivity (Like the identification with a race or folk) to come to its defence in a time of crisis it makes a point about the affinity between capitalism and fascism that members of the Frankfurt school have stressed. Not only does fascism utilize a certain type of personality that is bred under the conditions of liberal democracy - the Authoritarian personality, as Adorno et al. called it in their seminal study, it can also be seen as totalizing in the sense that it subjects the whole of society to the reification inherent in the productive process.
