Lukács located revolutionary agency in workers’ self-awareness as commodities

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures the core of Lukács’s reification/class-consciousness thesis as the book’s framing theoretical reference point.
• XREF: connects to: Lukács conflated the commodity of labour with the commodity of labour-power. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 108; Collective worker consciousness extends from the factory to national and international division of labour — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 814; Capitalism’s own productive development raised worker living standards and defused revolutionary hunger — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 662 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Lukács conflated the commodity of labour with the commodity of labour-power. #qualifies (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 108
• Collective worker consciousness extends from the factory to national and international division of labour #expands (0.82) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 814
• Capitalism’s own productive development raised worker living standards and defused revolutionary hunger #complicates (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 662
• Third World masses revive the revolutionary role the industrial proletariat lost #contradicts (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2217
• Working-class consciousness requires spiritual and cultural self-reproduction that Marxian theory overlooked #expands (0.78) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1372
• Lukács defended universal historical identity over particularity #expands (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 120