History and Class Consciousness

A collection of essays on Marxist dialectics written by the Hungarian philosopher between 1919 and 1922, during and after the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, in which he served. The opening essay argues that orthodoxy in Marxism refers only to method, the dialectical view of society as a historical totality, not to belief in particular theses. The essay on class consciousness distinguishes the actual thoughts of workers from the consciousness that would fit their objective position in society. The central and longest essay, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, extends Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism: under capitalism, relations between people take on the form of relations between things, and this reification shapes work, law, bureaucracy and even philosophy, whose unsolved antinomies Lukács traces through Kant and his idealist successors. Only the proletariat, he argues, can see society as a whole and become the subject and object of history. Communist authorities condemned the book soon after it appeared, and Lukács himself later criticised it.

Its theory of reification shaped the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism, and it remains a powerful account of how market society makes human relations look like natural facts.