Lukács frames his basic argument as an extension of Marx’s analysis of the “fetishism of the commodity form” in Capital I, whereby Marx refers to the phenomenon that social relations between producers of commodities appear in capitalism under the guise of objective, calculable, properties of things (“value”). The form which commodities acquire due to this fetishism (i.e. a form which furnishes them with features that make an instrumental, quantifying attitude towards the commodity appropriate) has gradually become, Lukács claims, the “universal category of society as a whole” (1923a: 86). In capitalist societies, the commodity form even becomes the dominant form of objectivity itself (Gegenständlichkeitsform, a Neo-Kantian term, see also Feenberg 2017: 113). This process has both an objective and a subjective dimension: objectively, the qualitative homogeneity and continuity of human work is destroyed when industrial work processes become rationalized in a way that is appropriate to understanding them as commodity exchanges. Their mechanization and specialization leads not only to a fragmentation of human life but also to the destruction of the “organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product” (1923a: 88). On the subjective side, reification entails a fragmentation of human experience, leading to an attitude of “contemplation” where one passively adapts to a law-like system of social “second nature” and to an objectifying stance towards one’s own mental states and capacities.