In an essay of prophetic vision, Lukacs defines a critical realism: 'anyone who wants to become more intimately acquainted with the prehistory of the important ideologies of the nineteen-] twenties and thirties ...will be helped by a critical reading of this book.'

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...

Out of the chaos following Lenin's death and the mounting fury against Lukacs and his freshly penned History and Class Consciousness (1923), this book bears an assessment of Lenin as "the only theoretical equal to Marx." Lukacs shows, with unprecedented clarity, how Lenin's historical interventions--from his vanguard politics and repurposing of the state to his detection of a new, imperialist stage of capitalism--advanced the conjunction of theory and practice, class consciousness and class struggle. A postscript from 1967 reflects on how this picture of Lenin, which both shattered...