I managed to take the entire month to finish this one book. It was only 265 pages, but it was a trudge to get through it. 

History and Class Consciousness- Georg Lukács  (1923) 
This book consists of seven different writings covering questions of the time concerning the state of Marxism.

1) What is Orthodox Marxism? 
Lukács asserts that orthodox Marxism isn’t a fixed set of conclusions, it refers exclusively to the method, and particularly of concern is that dialectical materialism is the road to truth. Dialectics always considers the historical picture and alone is able to get to the totality of the picture and uncover truth. Dialectics reveals that economics is really relations between persons. 

2) The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg 
Here the focus is on the totality of Marxist analysis. Where bourgeois analysis attempts to isolate phenomena to discover abstract principles, dialectics considers things in their historical perspective. 

3) Class Consciousness 
The class consciousness of the proletariat alone has the power to transform society from the unavoidable contradictions of capitalism. But the relation is not between individuals, but between worker and capitalist- it must be considered in terms of class. Only in this sense will one arrive at the essential characteristics of society. One must also consider the consciousness to the class, where it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings of individuals. Class consciousness consists of the “appropriate and rational” reactions imputed to a particular typical position in the process of production. Lukács spends a lot of time explaining how this consciousness can be derailed, resulting in a false consciousness.  

4) The Reification and Consciousness of the Proletariat 
In Lukács’ essay on the reification and consciousness of the proletariat, the stated goal is to portray capitalist society in its totality and lay out its fundamental nature. All its problems and all the solutions lead back to solving the riddle of the commodity structure. The commodity structure is the central structural problem of capitalist society in every aspect. 

He breaks the essay into three parts: the phenomenon of reification, the antinomies of bourgeois thought, and the standpoint of the proletariat. 

The essence of the commodity structure is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing. This happens primarily at a level of market production where 1) use value is superseded by exchange value, and 2) the division of labor turns the workers’ labor into a commodity itself. At this point, the essentially human  nature of labor is turned into a quantifiable commodity operating according to laws. Human labor loses its essentially human quality as an expression of what separates humans from the other animals. 

The reification leads to fundamentally unresolvable conflicts, antinomies, that both seem reasonable when considered independently. Modern philosophy, trying to understand man, was stymied by the bourgeois tendency to see society as driven by universal laws. Those universal laws were derived by a mindset that was itself a product of commodification. The way out of this was to see subject and object as historical process, not in timeless epistemology. 

While both bourgeois and proletariat experience the same alienation of capitalism, the bourgeois benefits from it, so it has no impetus to change. The proletariat experiences the exploitation of capitalism, feels its own impotence within the system, and therefore it alone contains the seeds of change. 

5) The Changing Function of Historical Materialism 
Lukács asks what historical materialism is, and the answer is essentially the Marxist view of history that would justify Marxism. He acknowledges that while calling itself scientific, its primary objective is to critique capitalism and act as a tool of intellectual cover for the proletariat revolution. The changing function assumes that the proletariat has already seized the means of production and is no longer under domination. He provides little information in how exactly historical materialism’s function will change, other than to say that its principles are historically located, so not iron laws, and that it will have to be developed. For context, this was written in 1919, only a few years after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. 

6) Legality and Illegality 
The basic gist is that when the proletariat gains class consciousness and properly rises up against their exploitation, the bourgeois laws will hold that revolution as illegal.  

But Bourgeois law has no inherent right to determine our actions. The state is nothing more than a power factor. Breaking the law should be considered no differently than missing a train connection on an important journey. 

Both legal and illegal means will be necessary to fight the bourgeoisie effectively, and in fact, the proletariat can only be liberated from capitalist life-forms when it has learned to act without these life-forms inwardly influencing its actions. Only this will set up a truly revolutionary attitude towards the law and the state- when they are exposed as the brutal instrument of capitalist oppression. 

The bourgeois in the new soviet state will not accept their new position quietly, it must be broken ideologically.  

7) Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s “Critique of the Russian Revolution” 
Rosa Luxemburg had written a short treatise criticizing the Bolsheviks’ Decree on Land.  

The Russian’s had passed emancipation of the serfs back in 1861, but the peasants were still tied to the land and indebted. After the Bolshevik revolution, peasants were seizing land. Lukács notes that the Bolsheviks could either recognize it, attempt to guide it, or oppose it and lose the peasantry. So Lenin’s Decree on Land abolished landlord property without compensation and placed the land’s disposal with the peasants that worked it.  

Luxemburg’s critique was that in socialist theory, the government should have created collectivized farms for the people’s use, rather than simply allow the passage of private property from bourgeois owners to peasant owners, which would strengthen private property rights, rather than moving towards socialist agriculture. 

Lukács grants that her principles were correct, but that she overestimated how much power the Bolsheviks had at the time. Socialism would need time to truly overcome the generations of capitalism, so in the meantime society would need communist guidance, and some temporary alliances with unlikely allies in order to consolidate resistance to bourgeois influences. 

8) Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization 
This essay forthrightly addresses the problems with attempting to radically reorganize society towards communism. He emphasizes the need for strict doctrinal purity in the revolutionary vanguard. He also reiterates that “freedom” would not be the individual freedom of the liberal order, but the freedom of solidarity with the communist order. This will require discipline, but he assures us that this type of freedom is the true freedom. He also explains that the Communist Party is the will of the proletariat, and even though it must maintain a separation from the proletariat, this is in order to help the proletariat fully attain class consciousness.