The transformation of intangible human qualities, such as thoughts, ideas, and values, into physical objects. According to Marx, Karl all of the key elements of capitalism involve a greater or lesser degree of reification. For instance, capitalist production subordinates the lives of millions of people to its regime of making and selling things. This fact is obscured by what Marx called commodity fetishism, the process whereby the socially produced value of things is mistaken for natural value. Reification is a crucial concept for Hungarian Marxist literary critic Lukåcs, György, particularly in his 1923 book History and Class Consciousness. Lukåcs argues that the priority given to the needs of business (an outlook Max Weber usefully termed economic rationalism) is a form of reification because it obscures the social origins of production and privileges the needs of the system.