It is gratifying to receive comment on one’s ideas as thoughtful and sympathetic as this. Responding to it is but a way of expressing appreciation. Before I do this, however, I must emphasize that I speak for myself only and not also for the co-author of the article, who, I daresay, would react quite differently.
Brewster makes a number of very helpful criticisms of the article that I readily concede. He is right in pointing out that alienation somehow gets lost in the argument on reification, which may then be misunderstood as an ‘autonomous’ phenomenon. It was certainly not the intention of the article to suggest this. Apart from the obvious limitations of space, the de-emphasis of alienation is due to the fact that, with its focus on reification, the article had to concentrate on consciousness rather than praxis, that is, on super-structure rather than sub-structure phenomena in Marxian terms. The relationship between reification and alienation is assumed throughout to be a dialectical one, thus precluding the ‘autonomy’ of either moment of this dialectic. Brewster criticizes the article for giving individual rather than institutional examples. This point is well taken, particularly since the conceptual framework of the argument stresses the collective character of reification. Brewster is also quite right in saying that the term ‘paradigmatic’, applied to reification in the economic sphere, is ambivalent. In the context this is intended to mean that the analysis of this category of reifications may serve as a guide to the analysis of other categories, and not to impute a simple economic determinism to Marx, but this should have been made clearer.