My sense is that both Marx and Lukács are after something a bit more historically and socially specified with the concepts of “reification” or “commodity fetishism” than, at least as you’ve phrased it above, it sounds as though you are suggesting? I suspect both, for example, would suggest that, if we start by “using phenomenology” (phrased in this unqualified way), we might be missing an interesting possibility to investigate how phenomenological experience comes to be structured or given in a particular way.

Both authors are trying to say something about how a particular kind of “given” phenomenological experience comes to be given in a particular form – and both invoke a kind of “practice theoretic” framework to do so. This would require both authors to make a much more historically and socially specified argument than the one involved in talking about humans as things who create other things: on one level, the terms you use here seem tacitly transhistorical – you speak of “all things” being “socially constructed”, and of humans as “things that create other things” – and then suggest that it is some aspect of this state of being things that create other things, which causes what you describe as a “feeling” of something mysterious.

But both Marx and Lukács believe they are describing something that is not a transhistorical property of human subjectivity. And both also suggest that there is some relationship (perhaps not the same relationship, for the two authors) between these new forms of subjectivity and “forms of objectivity” or forms of collective practice. If there is something mysterious in this, then that mystery will presumably need to be something as historically specific as the experience itself.

At the same time, neither Marx nor Lukács is actually speaking about something that social actors themselves perceive as “mysterious”: Marx and Lukács, trying to “denaturalise” a particular form of subjectivity, are trying to shock their readers into realising how very “unnatural” and “mysterious” a certain way of being-in-the-world ought to seem – again, this line of argument doesn’t lend itself to explanation with reference to something that presents itself as a general or transhistorical property, like recognising our own shadow in things we have created.

On another level, I suspect both Marx and Lukács would ask you: why has it suddenly become intuitive to conceptualise ourselves as “things” – and as “things that create other things”? Would this have been a common form of phenomenological experience in all human communities?

Of course, you could come back and reply that Marx and Lukács are wrong – that they have mistaken the basis for the phenomenological experience they are analysing – that they have taken something to be historically specific, when in reality (according to the argument you suggest above), it actually just boils down to a quite general experience that derives from the productive practice of humans in general. This debate would then come down to seeing what Marx and Lukács might be able to explain by using historically-specific categories, and seeing whether you can explain as much with transhistorical ones.

As it happens, I wasn’t trying to ask these sorts of questions in this post – although it’s fair enough to discuss them. I also wasn’t specifically trying to decide whether Marx or Lukács were “right” although, again, this is a fair question to investigate.

What interested me here, though, was more that Lukács was trying, with his concept of reification, to express what Lukács takes to be Marx’s argument about the “fetish”. Lukács quotes the same passage from Marx that I quote above, as well as other closely-related passages – but he also draws a number of other quotations from Marx, taken from other moments in Marx’s texts. Lukács takes these various passages to be talking about the same phenomenon – and therefore takes “commodity fetishism” to be about something very similar to what Weber discusses when he speaks about capitalism as a process of instrumentally rational accumulation.

Marx definitely offers an extended analysis of these sorts of “Weberian” phenomena. I was curious, though, whether, in focussing very strongly on these dimensions of Marx’s argument, and by assimilating the concept of “commodity fetishism” to this particular notion, Lukács might perhaps be overlooking something else to which Marx also wanted to draw attention – something that might draw our attention to a slightly different aspect of the collective practical constitution of capitalism.

This is an open-ended question for me: I suspect I can make an argument along these lines, and I suspect that I can then explain why Lukács might have run into certain theoretical and practical problems with the approach he outlines in this work. But I would need to work through Lukács much more carefully before I would feel comfortable pushing this kind of claim. So I thought I would toss it out, and see whether others familiar with Lukács and Marx might also feel that there is a tension here, or whether it looks like I’m just reading something in.

None of this is intended to close down the lines of questioning that you raise, but just to indicate that my mind was wandering in a different direction when I originally wrote this post…