HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION (1967) theoretical tendencies brought into being by these events. How- The very names of the representatives of this tendency indicate ever, they did not yet gain the upper hand at this stage despite that it is not a clearly definable trend. I myself knew of Lunachar the fact that Lenin,s criticism had undermined my analysis of sky only by name and I always rejected Max Adler as a Kantian he March Action. and a Social Democrat. Despite this a close examination reveals History and Class Consciousness was born in the midst of the that they have a number of features in common. On the one hand crises of this transitional period. It was written in 1922. It con- it is demonstrable that it is the materialist view of nature that isted in part of earlier texts in a revised form; in addition to brings about the really radical separation of the bourgeois and those already mentioned there was the essay on Class Consciousness socialist outlooks. The failure to grasp this blurs philosophical of 1920. The two essays on Rosa Luxemburg and Legality and debate and e.g. prevents the clear elaboration of the Marxist illegality were included in the new collection without sigmificant concept of praxis. On the other hand, this apparent methodo- alterations. Only two studies, the most important ones, were logical upgrading of societal categories distorts their true epis- wholly new: Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat and temological functions. Their specific Marxist quality is weakened Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation, (The latter nd their real advance on bourgeois thought is often retracted was based on Organisational Problems of the Revolutionary Movement, an essay that had appeared in the magazine The International I must confine myself here to a critique of History and Class in 1921 immediately after the March Action. )History and Class Consciousness, but this is not to imply that this deviation from Consciousness is, then, the final synthesis of the period of my devel- Marxism was less pronounced in the case of other writers with opment that began with the last years of the war. However, it is a similar outlook. In my book this deviation has immediate also in part the start of a transitional stage leading to a greater consequences for the view of economics i give there and funda clarity, even though these tendencies could not mature properl mental confusions result, as in the nature of the case econonIcs This unresolved conflict between opposed intellectual trends must be crucial. It is true that the attempt is made to explain all which cannot always be easily labelled victorious or defeated ideological phenomena by reference to their basis in economics makes it difficult even now to give a coherent critique of the book. but, despite this, the purview of economics is narrowed down However, the attempt must be made to isolate at least the domi because its basic Marxist category, labour as the mediator of nant motifs. The book's most striking feature is that, contrary to the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing. the subjective intentions of its author, objectively it falls in with Given my basic approach, such a consequence is quite natural. a tendency in the history of Marxism that has taken many view of the world disappear and the attempt to deduce th they like it or not and irrespective of their philosophical origins fashion as possible is deprived of a genuinely economic founda- to view Marxism exclusively as ion. It is self-evident that this means the disappearance of a theory of society, as social philosophy, and hence to ignore or the ontological objectivity of nature upon which this process of repudiate it as a theory of nature Even before World War I change is based. But it also means the disappearance of the inter- Marxists as far apart as Max Adler and Lunacharsky defended action between labour as seen from a genuinely materialist iews of this kind. In our day we find them emerging once more, standpoint and the evolution of the men who labour. Marxs above all in French Existentialism and its intellectual ambience- great insight that"even production for the sake of production probably due in part to the influence of History and Class Conscious means nothing more than the development of the productive energi ness. My book takes up a very definite stand on this issue. I argue elopment of the wealth of human nature as an end in a number of places that nature is a societal category and the the terrain which History and Class Conscious- whole drift of the book tends to show that only a knowledge of ole to Capitalist exploitation thus loses its objective ociety and the men who live in it is of relevance to philosophy revolutionary aspect and there is a failure to grasp the fact that