Abstract

In his 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs' admission of a crucial confusion concerning the Marxian concepts of reification and objectification and his consequent failure to provide a concrete foundation for the notion of “imputed” class consciousness simply confirmed a problem whose broad outlines had been diagnosed and were already forming the critical backbone of ‘Western Marxism’. In the attempt to reformulate Marxist theory to oppose to the ossified dogmas of official “orthodox” Marxism, critical Marxists were generally agreed on Lukacs' ‘abstract dialectics’, ‘subjectivistic voluntarism’ and ‘objectivistic idealism'. Consequently, as Laura Boella's references amply demonstrate, there is a wealth of literature focusing on the principal lacunae associated with Lukacs' concept of reification and its relation to aesthetics, his theories of labor, alienation, totality, consciousness and of the dialectic.