Reification in the age of climate catastrophe: After Gillian Rose's critique of Marxism

Abstract

In The Melancholy Science and the lecture series Marxist Modernism, Gillian Rose reconstructs Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory of society through the exposition of his theory of reification. Strikingly, Rose argues that it is Nietzsche and not the Hegelian Marxism of Georg Lukács that is the engine of Adorno's theory. Although she argues that Adorno's critical theory is an advance beyond what preceded it, she contends in Hegel Contra Sociology that it finally collapses into a form of abstract neo-Kantianism, a propounding of what ought to be in isolation from what is. This forces her to abandon reification theory and hence Marxism as the essence of a critical theory of society and turn to Hegel's speculative philosophy. In the age of climate catastrophe as the constituting crisis of our time, the abandonment of reification theory must be contestable. This paper argues that Lukács’ fellow Galileo Circle comrade, Karl Polanyi, propounds a theory of reification in which the account of the meaning of the commodification of land, labor, and money precisely answers to the need for a critical theory in the age of climate catastrophe.