The reification of the political: Critical theory and postcapitalist politics

Although understanding the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the present is a central concern of social justice activists worldwide, contemporary democratic theorists, by contrast, have tended to deemphasize the relationship between the economy and the political. In the context of recent socio-economic transformations in the structure of capitalism that have shifted the boundaries between the economy and the political, the reconnection of radical democratic theory with a robust critique of capitalism proves to be an urgent task for understanding emergent forms of democratic practice. This dissertation rises to this task by reconstructing the concept of reification that was central to Karl Marx's, Georg Lukacs's, and the Frankfurt School's work. "Reification" refers to the process by which human beings come to experience structures of social domination under capitalism as objectively given, and thus immutable, rather than as historically constituted products of human practice. As such, reification is a form of consciousness that is depoliticizing, insofar as it fosters a relation of passivity between the individual and social structures, thereby limiting political possibilities to the institutional arrangements that prevail in the present. My reconstruction of the critique of reification within the terms of contemporary democratic theory generates new criteria for evaluating existing institutions, and, perhaps most crucially, invigorates the political imagination, providing new tools for imagining alternative forms that democracy---understood explicitly in contrast to liberal democracy---could assume. Through studies of Marx, Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, and third-generation Frankfurt School thinkers, as well as through case studies of contemporary democratic social movements, I develop a critique of reification that responds to fundamental transformations in the relationship between the economy and politics that have occurred in the context of neoliberal globalization. I argue that what is most timely and compelling about the critique of reification is the way in which it crosscuts stratified distinctions between the economy and politics, thereby allowing for a holistic understanding of capitalism as a mode of production as well as illuminating the constitutive activity of subjects in creating their social world as the basis of a new understanding of a postcapitalist democratic politics.