Lukacs explores problems of consciousness and organization, drawing on Luxemburg and Lenin. "When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing social order," Marx declares, "it does no more than disclose the secret of its own existence, for it is the effective dissolution of that order." ..theory is essentially the intellectual expression of the revolutionary process itself. In it every stage of the process becomes fixed so that it may be generalised, communicated, utilised and developed. Because the theory does nothing but arrest and make conscious each necessary step, it becomes at the same time the necessary premise of the following one -
Contents: Preface (1967): What is Orthodox Marxism: The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg: Class Consciousness, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat: The Changing Function of Historical Materialism: Legality and Illegality: Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg's "Critique of the Russian Revolution": Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation, Notes: Index.
"one of the indispensable works of the twentieth century." Raymond Williams, Guardian. "It is unquestionably, a work of extraordinary intellectual power. A central feature is the importance Luka?s attached to ideology as a weapon in the class struggle." Tribune