Ideas and objects which have been invested with human power are reified. Reified thinking projects the social world, camera obscura, upside down. It is the leitmotif of modern day language construction which affects the way we see how the world works, as opposed to how it actually works.
Examples of reified thinking abound: Ford makes good cars; but Mercedes does a better job. It was God's will. Channel no.5 makes me sexy. You can trust Bank of America with your details.
What's really going on is that the subject-object relationship has been turned upside-down in one's head. Ford and even Mercedes is actually the product of many workers' labour. God is an idea, created by humans. Ideas do not have will outside of the humans who create them. Channel no. 5 is the product of many peoples' labour which is sold. A commodity has no sexuality. The brand name, Bank of America, is really just the work of many people working within a financial division of labour. It is also a company which is owned by a few people. Can you trust an abstraction?
As Lukacs pointed out, this mode of reified thinking has profound consequences for the class consciousness of workers who tend to think that they have little or no connection with the creation of wealth in society.
