Affinities and differences

Marx himself was aware of the discrepancy – resulting, in his view, from the division of labour, and bound to last until ‘the reign of reason’ – between the historically adequate and effective consciousness that fitted the class position and historical mission of the proletariat and its actual inadequate and, in the long run, ineffective consciousness. He was contradictory on the importance of the point, since apparently it also seemed to him important to demonstrate the attainability of adequate class consciousness; hence his singling out as exemplary, the stage of consciousness already reached, as it were, by the English and French workers. He was justified in attaching no decisive importance to such progress in so far as he believed that ultimately consciousness must follow economic and social developments.

Lukács kept closer to that position than Kautsky, with whom Bernstein and Lenin agreed about the importance of the issue and the necessity of laying greater stress on the conscious element. The young Lukács abided much more than his elders by the masters' conception and kept his concessions to the conscious element within the limits of merely repeating Marx and Engels's deviations (without in any way intimating that they were deviations) from the primacy of economic determination and their constant return to it.