Lukács fused Weber’s rationalization with Marx’s fetishism to make practical knowledge revolutionary.

Evidence

Habermas follows Weber in conceiving ‘the modernization of Euro­ pean society as a result of a universal-historical process of rationaliza­ tion*. In starting from Weber’s account of modernization as the differentiation of autonomous subsystems — above all the market and the state - regulated by instrumental rationality, Habermas takes the same course as Lukâcs and the early Frankfurt school. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukâcs interpreted rationalization as reification, as the consequence of the penetration of all the spheres of social life by commodity fetishism, the reduction, produced by capitalist econo­ mic mechanisms, of all relationships between people to relations between things regulated by the market. The obverse to this process of reification was, Lukâcs believed, the proletariat, conceived in highly Hegelian terms as the ‘identical subject-object of history’ whose inevitable assumption of revolutionary consciousness would shatter the reified structures of capitalist society. … Horkheimer and Adorno took over, and indeed considerably enriched Lukâcs’s analy­ sis of reification but gave up any expectations of proletarian revolu­ tion. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 379 (#expands, via linked claim)

For Lukács, the decisive element was not a process of radical change directed by knowledge and motivated by indignation. It was a kind of knowledge which was, as knowledge, practical, and an act of achieving consciousness which was in itself an action. The combination of Weber’s theory of rationalization and Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism with an idealistic class-struggle philosophy of history made the essay on Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat' the most effective in the whole book. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 322</cite> (#expands`, via linked claim)

With the pathos of a ‘freshly-baked Marxist’, Lukács contrasts this objectivistic approach against his own theory, according to which the worker ‘becomes aware of himself as a commodity’ insofar as he ‘recognises himself and his own relations with capital’, and in doing so becomes capable of overcoming the prevailing order. ‘The telos of world history, the redemption of humanity, is for Lukács doubtless identical with the emancipation of the proletariat in the successful world revolution’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 66 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Lukács fused Weber’s rationalization and Marx’s fetishism with idealist class struggle — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 322; Lukács saw rationalization as reification caused by commodity fetishism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 379; Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 66

Related

• Lukács fused Weber’s rationalization and Marx’s fetishism with idealist class struggle (similarity 0.93)
• Lukács saw rationalization as reification caused by commodity fetishism (similarity 0.93)
• Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities (similarity 0.86)
• For Lukács, proletarian class consciousness would bring social development to self-consciousness (similarity 0.86)
• History is the ceaseless dissolution of reified social forms for Lukács (similarity 0.85)
• Lukács reframed his cultural critique as a cultural-revolutionary reading of communism (similarity 0.83)
• Lukács conflated the commodity of labour with the commodity of labour-power. (similarity 0.83)
• Kracauer saw Lukács’s Marxism as exhausted idealism rather than genuine innovation (similarity 0.82)
• Habermas read Marx as a theory of reification, not a critique of capitalism (similarity 0.81)
• Proletarian self-knowledge as commodity is already practical, not merely theoretical (similarity 0.81)
• Lukács’s radical negation of bourgeois culture attracted Max Weber’s interest. (similarity 0.80)
• Lukács framed Nietzsche as founder of imperialist-era irrationalism (similarity 0.79)
• Adorno read Husserl’s paradoxes as evidence for materialist dialectics (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Lukács saw rationalization as reification caused by commodity fetishism #expands (0.90) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 379
• Lukács fused Weber’s rationalization and Marx’s fetishism with idealist class struggle #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 322
• Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities #expands (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 66