Gyorgy Lukacs

Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic — author of History and Class Consciousness (1923), the foundational text of Western Marxism, and one of the most significant Marxist thinkers outside of Marx himself.

Reification theory: Lukács's central contribution is the concept of reification (Verdinglichung) — the process by which social relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things (commodities, money, markets). Reification produces false consciousness: workers experience the social world as natural and inevitable rather than as historically produced and therefore changeable. His recovery of Hegel's dialectics for Marxism and his concept of 'class consciousness' (the proletariat's potential to see through reification and act as a historical subject) became foundational for Western Marxism. History and Class Consciousness was disowned by Lukács himself under Stalinist pressure but remained enormously influential.