In Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote: "All reification is a forgetting." Reification is the belief that an abstraction, relation, or object has human quantities. In German, verdinglichung, literally meaning "thing-ification." Reification also refers to the objectification of social relations. 

Karl Marx was the first to write about reification, which is related to alienation and commodity fetishism. The following quotes illustrate Marx's use of the term.

• "Commodities, which exist as use-values, must first of all assume a form in which they appear to one another nominally as exchange-values, as definite quantities of materialised universal labour-time. The first necessary move in this process is, as we have seen, that the commodities set apart a specific commodity, say, gold, which becomes the direct reification of universal labour-time or the universal equivalent." (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

• "[B]ecause as a result of their alienation as use-values all commodities are converted into linen, linen becomes the converted form of all other commodities, and only as a result of this transformation of all other commodities into linen does it become the direct reification of universal labour-time, i.e., the product of universal alienation and of the supersession of all individual labour." (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

   

• "[B]ecause as a result of their alienation as use-values all commodities are converted into linen, linen becomes the converted form of all other commodities, and only as a result of this transformation of all other commodities into linen does it become the direct reification of universal labour-time, i.e., the product of universal alienation and of the supersession of all individual labour." (The Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863)