History and Class Consciousness

Georg Lukács's seminal contribution to Western Marxism developing the concept of reification and arguing that the proletariat occupies a privileged epistemological position as the subject-object of history.

Reification is the dominant feature of capitalist society; the proletariat can achieve class consciousness that sees through reification because its own condition embodies the objective contradictions of capitalism; totality is the methodological key to Marxist social theory.