For Lukács, proletarian class consciousness would bring social development to self-consciousness

Evidence

His cultural criticism of bourgeois-capitalist society evolved into a cultural-revolutionary interpretation of radical communist change. In earlier references to the proletariat and to socialism, the latest of which had appeared in Bolshevism as a Moral Problem', Lukács had criticized both the lack of a religious power capable of suffusing the whole soul’ and the merely ideological character of the objectives which the socialist world order had in ethics and in the philosophy of history. He now declared that a cultural, intellectual revolution was at the heart of the proletarian class struggle. The awakening of the proletariat to self-consciousness, to class consciousness, in his view, would bring the process of social development as a whole to consciousness; everyday life would be suffused with essential life, human beings would become active agents in true reality. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 315

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Lukács’s distinctive conflation of class consciousness with cultural revolution and the suffusing of everyday life with ‘essential life’ — a core concept for understanding his divergence from orthodox Marxism.
• SEED: Article angle: how the Frankfurt School’s early project inherited Lukács’s cultural-revolutionary reading of Marxism versus the Second International’s economic-determinist one — a schism that shaped Critical Theory’s identity.
• XREF: connects to: Narrative, for Lukács, is the formal sign of access to social totality. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 406; Proletarian self-knowledge as commodity is already practical, not merely theoretical — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 75; Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 66 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities #expands (0.82) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 66
• Proletarian self-knowledge as commodity is already practical, not merely theoretical #expands (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 75
• Classes-in-themselves become forces-for-themselves through conscious organization. #exemplifies (0.75)
• Proletarian integration into capitalism proceeded through organization rather than revolutionary consciousness #contradicts (0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 673
• Class solidarity, not individual self-interest, structures ideological thinking #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 375