The Emergence of Class Consciousness: Lukacs on ‘Objective Possibility’

The current historical juncture where, on the one hand, we are witnessing the re-emergence of an atavistic fascism, and on the other, pockets of mostly fragmented progressive resistance, within a context conditioned by the phenomenon of ‘globalisation’ in its various dimensions, lends the question of political ‘praxis’ a particular urgency and complexity. The forces at  play in the current situation, and therefore ‘politics’ itself, open/s once again, the problematics conditioned by the entire nexus of interconnected binaries of empirical and rational history, contingency and necessity, freedom and determinism, individual and collective agency, etc.; yet in a manner that seems to resist their theorisations, not only in the liberal tradition, which Marx had already critiqued based on its manifold modes of reification (for instance, in the form of the reified conception of the ‘rational’, autonomous, individual subject), but in the Marxist tradition as well, at least in its standardised, dominant interpretation.