ABSTRACT
In the opening pages of History and Class Consciousness 1 Lukács formulates a distinctive view of Marxism: '[Marxist theory] ... is essentially nothing more than the intellectual expression of the revo lutionary process itself.' This fundamental idea is restated in a variety of forms throughout the book. For example, Lukacs characterizes historical materialism as 'the self-consciousness of capitalist society', and else where he argues, in the course of an analysis of the theory of knowledge in bourgeois philosophy, that the problems which arise from the separation of subject and object can only be resolved when a historical being appears which is at the same time both subject and object; which expresses in thought (as subject) its own historical practice (as object). This subject-object is, of course, the proletariat in capitalist society.
