Reification in the Strait of Hormuz

In February the United States in consort with Israel decided to launch an air war on Iran which prompted the Iranians to close the strait of Hormuz; a vital world trade passage. The effects have been steep rises in the price of oil and falling stocks reminiscent of disastrous oil shocks related to middle east politics (including American Iranian relations) at the beginning and end of the 1970s respectively. Donald Trump has refused to strike any real deal with the Iranians who are perfectly content using their blockade of the strait to bleed the world-economy and thus the United States dry for leverage. The upshot is the potential for a global financial meltdown that produces human suffering on a scale not seen since the Great Recession, or even the Great Depression.

The crisis is a perfect exhibition of a concept developed by Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georgy Lukacs. Marx's capital analyzes how in capitalist society the commodification of all social wealth makes the social relations between people take the form of relations between things. People do not determine collectively what level of social wealth they have access to and thus how they want to organize their producing and consuming lives for themselves but are instead governed by the abstract forces of market supply and demand. Lukacs' concept of reification builds on Marx's notion of commodity fetishism by considering the way in which social wealth is made into an objective limitation on human life by relations of commodity production. Reification for Lukacs is thus the transformation of the creations of human thought and activity into forces above human beings which limit their possibilities for self-determination.

Reification is at play in the crisis around the strait of Hormuz because none of its calamitous elements are causally attributable to forces beyond the activity of human agents. We human beings have created a globally integrated commodity producing society as a result of our cumulative social and political activities. It is ultimately we who decided that our very access to subsistence, never mind fulfillment, should be made dependent on the prices of key commodities like oil on the world market. If we collectively determined the generation and consumption of social wealth at the global level through networks of free agreement according to our collective needs as individuals there would be no threat of catastrophic price shocks. Yet, this is not the way we do things within the capitalist world-system.

Clearly the commodification of social wealth is not the only issue. The crisis was not brought on in the first place by the mere fact that social wealth is commodified, but by the foreign policy of the United States and Israel. However, reification plays an important part here to. Immanuel Wallerstein points out that charging prices for goods requires partial monopolization of production processes. Either through intellectual property, subsidies, corruption, or war political power has to exist to allow some producers to control lucrative industries for some amount of time to some significant and exclusive degree, otherwise competition would bid prices down to zero.

Thus, the same mode of human activity which commodifies social wealth must produce centers of political power which are hooked up the competitive forces of the market. Political competition in the form of wars which create economic shocks is thereby made an ever-present threat by the basic political-economic mechanisms of the capitalist world-economy. In this way the process whereby the products of human labor become objective social forces limiting human self-determination requires the deployment of political power as the jackboot of the market's invisible hand. No doubt the immediate political solution to the crisis would be for Trump and Israel to back off and conclude a deal with Iran on its terms. This is not in the cards.

The United States and Israel view Iran (to a not insignificant degree correctly) as an obstacle to their geopolitical power. If Iran could develop its own nuclear arsenal, it would be able to command much more brute force to counter that of the United States and Israel who are desperately seeking broad geopolitical supremacy in the region to profit from oil and defense technologies. Thus, the United States and Israel are impelled by Adam Smith's invisible hand into an irrational seeming course of action likely to only hurt them in the short run. In a world of reification what seems irrational is made rational as human beings do not rationally organize their relationship to social wealth and administration.

Instead, the ins and outs of this relationship are molded to the needs of inanimate objects in possession of market value. It is in these moments when the brunt of reification is felt the worst that the central question of the ultimate desirability of such an order of things from the human point of view comes into focus. Why exactly should we continue to live in a world whose basic principles operate as existential threats to our collective needs and desires? What is the rationality in being denied a roof over our heads, or food to eat in service of the global power ambitions of Donald Trump and Netanyahu?

Why exactly should we accept a situation in which disruptions to the supply chains that keep billions of people alive are funneled back into high profit postings for multinational oil companies? After all, it is we who allow for the existence of reification so it is not in any way inconceivable that changing how we live would put a stop to it. A very interesting feature of reification is that it conceals itself from us. By turning human creations into forces controlling humanity reification lulls humanity into the belief that said forces are not human creations at all.

No doubt, many everyday people are dismayed by Trump's war and its crisis, but all the same have accepted that there is simply nothing they can do about it. This is just the way the world is and will likely always be. The best they can do is try to survive in it. As such human institutions such as the market and the nation-state become like the God of Moses; an extra-human force whom human beings have no power to seriously resist, who imposes stringent laws of conduct on his people, and then abandons them to their conquerors when they break it. The best that the ancient Hebrews could do was to construct theologies which explained the seeming cruelty of Yahweh while promising to abide by his demands so that he may bring them salvation.

The simple fact is that Donald Trump and Netanyahu are mortal men who only have the power they do because others agree to obey them. Our access to grocery store essentials only depends on oil prices because the former's supply is dictated by demand for the latter such that they both exist in a world market that runs on the exchange of otherwise meaningless scraps of paper for all other goods. The invisible hand is not a hand of God. Oil corporations are not Moses. The power in a lesson on reification is then that we must only live with it as long as we don't realize it's our creation.

Sources and Further Reading
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lukacs/
Understanding Marxism, Boucher
https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-china-trump-iran-e7b781e8e2394be6486fa5f006e5e06e
https://theconversation.com/what-happens-next-in-us-iran-relations-will-be-informed-by-the-two-countries-shared-history-259607
https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-strait-of-hormuz-and-why-does-its-closure-matter-so-much-to-the-global-economy-277364
https://theintercept.com/2026/02/28/us-attack-iran-iraq-war/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2p6lUw7Bx0
World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Wallerstein