ABSTRACT
One token of the relative lack of attention to questions of ontology amongst those interested in the high theory of Karl Marx is the lack of attention paid to the work of Georg Lukacs on the subject. Lukacs argues, in the opening sentence of ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’ that: It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought but the point of view of the totality. The orthodox Marxists of the Second International are critiqued for the importation of undialectical rigidity into Marxism. Similarly after dispensing with Marx’s ontology, Jon Elster also reduces Marxism in the end to a tiny portion that he finds intellectually respectable: its values. The Ontology as a whole offers an account of Marx’s social ontology and its roots in Hegel and Aristotle.
