Overview
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics is a collection of essays rather than a single continuous treatise. Its unifying problem is stated in the question of what it means for a theory of history to be true in practice: how Marxist theory relates to the revolutionary activity of the working class, and what the dialectical method actually consists in once it is distinguished from a mechanistic or economistic “science.” The essays are written in the aftermath of the First World War and the revolutionary upheavals in Europe, and they are addressed to problems within the workers’ movement of that period — above all to the determinism and evolutionary passivity the author attributes to the tradition of the Second International, and to the organizational and tactical debates between reformism, spontaneism, and Bolshevism. Throughout, the argument is conducted through a sustained engagement with Hegel’s dialectic, Marx’s critique of political economy (especially the analysis of the commodity in Capital), and the classical problems of German idealism from Kant through Fichte and Hegel.
What Is Orthodox Marxism?
The opening essay argues that orthodoxy in Marxism concerns method alone, not the acceptance of any particular set of conclusions or “theses.” The decisive element of the method is the category of totality: the understanding of society as a concrete historical whole in which every partial phenomenon is mediated by the whole and by all the others. This category is presented as the bearer of the revolutionary principle in Marx’s thought, because it dissolves the isolation of facts into “laws” and refuses to treat social phenomena as instances of an eternal, transhistorical regularity. The essay attacks both vulgar economic determinism — which reduces consciousness and politics to a mechanical reflex of the economy — and reformist empiricism, which restricts itself to the piecemeal manipulation of isolated facts. It also develops the idea of “objective possibility”: the situation of a class can be understood in terms of the possibilities latent in its objective position, which may or may not be actualized in the consciousness of its members.
The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg
This essay takes Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital and her writings on mass action and revolution as the occasion for a methodological discussion. It emphasizes the primacy of the spontaneous action of the masses over the bureaucratic calculations of the party leadership, and it attacks the passive, “organizational” fatalism that expects the collapse of capitalism to arrive as a purely economic event to be waited for. The essay also registers a critique of Luxemburg’s own conception of the relation between economic necessity and revolutionary activity.
Class Consciousness
This essay distinguishes sharply between the empirical, psychological consciousness of individual workers and the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat — the consciousness that corresponds to its objective class situation, whether or not it is actually attained. Class consciousness is thus defined as an “objective possibility” rather than a psychological average or a sociological description. The bourgeoisie is analyzed as a class whose standpoint cannot exceed a form of false consciousness: because its interest is particular while its self-representation is universal, it cannot grasp the social totality that determines its own position, and its thought remains bound to the present moment, codified and made static. The proletariat, by contrast, occupies a position in which self-interest and knowledge of the whole coincide. The theoretical articulation of this standpoint is presented as the “objective theory of class consciousness” — the theory of its objective possibility — and the essay connects this to the problem of how the class can be brought to the self-awareness of its historical role.
Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat
The longest and most famous essay of the volume, divided into three parts.
The phenomenon of reification. Starting from Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, the essay argues that in capitalist society the commodity form becomes the general form of objectivity of social life. Human relations and human activity take on the character of things; the worker confronts the products of his own labour, and eventually his own capacities, as alien, calculable objects. The argument is extended from the economy to rationalized production and mechanization, and to the wider forms of bureaucratic and legal administration in which formal calculability and a contemplative attitude toward the world prevail.
The antinomies of bourgeois thought. Here the book turns to classical German philosophy. The author argues that Kant’s thing-in-itself, and the division between formal, rational form and irrational, given content, express at the level of thought the real structure of a reified world. Fichte’s attempt to overcome the duality through the activity of the subject, and Hegel’s resolution of the antinomy in the dialectical identification of subject and object, are each examined; Hegel’s solution is praised for its dialectic but criticized for its ultimately contemplative character, in which the subject of the process is not the class but a philosophical subject standing above history.
The standpoint of the proletariat. The essay’s resolution is that the proletariat, because it is itself a commodity and is compelled to become aware of itself in that capacity, possesses a unique ability to break through reification: its self-knowledge can become knowledge of the whole social process, and it can therefore function as the identical subject–object of history, that is, as the historical agent whose consciousness and reality are not externally opposed. This is presented as an “objective possibility” that must be actualized in practice, and the essay closes by relating the standpoint to the problem of organization.
The Changing Function of Historical Materialism
This essay asks whether historical materialism is itself a historical product, and examines how its method must vary according to the structure of the society to which it is applied. Pre-capitalist societies are analyzed as those in which the economic and the political-legal are not yet separated as distinct spheres, and in which the economy is therefore invisible as an autonomous domain; in capitalism this separation does occur, and the method of historical materialism acquires its characteristic form. The essay thus attempts to show that historical materialism is not an eternal, universally applicable law of social development but the method of a specific epoch, whose application to what precedes it is itself a historical problem.
Legality and Illegality
A methodological study of political action, written in response to debates within the communist movement. The essay distinguishes different attitudes toward the legal framework of bourgeois states and the tactical question of whether the workers’ movement should operate legally or illegally. It argues against the “realist” or pragmatic view that treats legality as an end in itself and thereby surrenders the revolutionary perspective, and it examines the presuppositions and consequences of each position, insisting that questions of tactic cannot be decided by a general formula but only in the concrete historical situation.
Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s “Critique of the Russian Revolution”
This essay defends the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s strategy against Luxemburg’s criticisms, particularly concerning the agrarian question and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. It argues that Luxemburg’s objections presuppose a schematic application of principles to a situation that demanded concrete revolutionary decision. At the same time, the essay does not simply reject her perspective, and it discusses the relation between proletarian dictatorship and the forms of democratic procedure.
Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization
The final essay develops the book’s central practical theme: the party as the form of mediation between theory and the class. The organization is not treated as a mere technical instrument but as a form of objectivity of the class’s consciousness, the concrete medium through which the “objective possibility” of class consciousness becomes an actual historical force. The essay criticizes both the bureaucratic-centralist conception of organization and the spontaneist belief that the mass movement requires no organized mediation, and it develops the distinction between the consciousness of the class and the consciousness of the party, with a discussion of the debate between Bolshevism and Menshevism.
Taken as a whole, the volume works out a single conceptual apparatus — totality, mediation, commodity form, reification, imputed consciousness, objective possibility, identical subject–object, and organization — in order to argue that Marxism is a method of grasping history as a process whose truth is tested in the practice it makes possible.
The Dialectical Method as the Volume’s Unifying Thread
The book’s unity lies less in a system than in a repeated operation: it treats every category — the economy, the state, law, science, philosophy, the party — as a moment of a social totality rather than as an isolated object. This is why the volume insists that orthodoxy in Marxism concerns method, not the repetition of results. Dialectics is presented as the mode of thought able to grasp the genesis of social forms, whereas bourgeois thought remains contemplative: it can analyze the finished facts of capitalism but cannot explain why those facts have the form they do. The critique of political economy is therefore also a critique of the categories through which bourgeois society knows itself.
Class Consciousness as Objective Possibility
The book’s treatment of class consciousness is not a psychological or sociological description of workers’ opinions. It distinguishes the actual, empirical consciousness of the class from the consciousness that would correspond to its objective position in the process of production. The latter is a category of possibility: it is neither simply given nor arbitrarily imported from outside. The proletariat’s standpoint is privileged because the commodity form is embodied in labor power itself, so that the worker’s self-knowledge becomes a knowledge of the society that produces and reifies her. This is the book’s version of the identical subject–object: the proletariat is both an object of capitalist development and the possible subject that can recognize and transform it.
Reification and the Limits of Bourgeois Reason
The book extends reification beyond the factory: it appears in the rationalized legal order, in formal science, and in philosophy’s recurring antinomies. Bourgeois thought can grasp the world as a system of laws but cannot reconcile form and content, freedom and necessity, subject and object; its rationality is formal and contemplative, leaving the given world intact. The proletarian standpoint is not a moral alternative to this reason but a practical break with the contemplative attitude, because the worker experiences the commodity form as the form of his or her own activity.
Significance
The book’s significance lies in its attempt to renew Marxism as a critical theory of consciousness and totality rather than a doctrine of inevitable economic laws. It made reification a central problem for later Marxist thought and insisted that the question of organization is inseparable from the question of consciousness. Its essays do not offer a finished political program; they work out the conceptual conditions under which Marxist theory can become practical.
