XvIll HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION( 1967) 'although this evolution of the species Man is accomplished at employers". Hence, what I had inten objectively, and what first at the expense of the majority of individual human beings Lenin had arrived at as the result of an authentic Marxist and of certain human classes, it finally overcomes this antagonism of a practical movement, was transformed in my account into a and coincides with the evolution of the particular individual. purely intellectual result and thus into something contemplative. Thus the higher development of individuality is only purchased In my presentation it would indeed be a miracle if this imputed by a historical process in which individuals are sacrificed. 4Ir consciousness could turn into revolutionary praxis. consequence,my account of the contradictions of capitalism his transformation into its opposite of what was in itself a cor as well as of the revolutionisation of the proletariat is uninten- ect intention follows from the abstract and idealistic conception tionally coloured by an overriding subjectivism. of praxis already referred to. This is seen clearly in the-once This has a narrowing and distorting effect on the book's again not wholly misguided--polemic against Engels who had central concept of praxis. with regard to this problem, too, my looked to experiment and industry for the typical cases in which tention was to base myself on Marx and to free his concepts oves to be a criterion of theory. i have since come to from every subsequent bourgeois distortion and to adapt them to at Engels'thesis is theoretically incomplete in that it the requirements of the great revolutionary upsurge of the present. the fact that the terrain of praxis while remaining un changed in its basic structure has become much more extensive, purely contemplative nature of bourgeois thought had to be more complex and more mediated than in the case of work. For this reason the mere act of producing an object may indeed Axis in this book takes on extravagant overtones that are more become the foundation of the immediately correct realisation of a theoretical assumption. To this extent it can serve as a criterion ist left than with authentic Marxist doctrine. Comprehensibly of its truth or falsity However, the task that Engels imposes here enough in the context of the period, I attacked the bourgeoi ate praxis of putting an er and opportunistic currents in the workers'movement that glori- the 'intangible thing-in-itself"is far from being solved. For work fied a conception of knowledge which was ostensibly objective tself can easily remain a matter of pure manipulation, spontane- but was in fact isolated from any sort of praa over-extension and usly or consciously by-passing the solution to the problem of the justice I directed my polemics against th over-valuation of contemplation. Marxs critique of Feuerbach thing-in-itself and ignoring it either wholly or in part. History only reinforced my convictions. What I failed to realise, however, aken on the basis of false theories and in Engels' sense these was that in the absence of a basis in real praxis, in labour as its cases imply a failure to understand the thing-in-itself. Indeed the riginal form and model, the over-extension of the concept of Kantian theory itself in no way denies that experiments of this would lead to its oppo kind are objective and provide valuable knowledge. He only templation. My intention, then, was to chart the correct and relegates them to the realm of mere appearances in which things authentic class consciousness of the proletariat, distinguishing in-themselves remain unknown, And the neo-positivism of our it from public opinion surveys'(a term not yet in currency wn day aims at removing every question about reality (the and to confer upon it an indisputably practical objectivity. I was ng-in-itself) from the purview of science, it rejects every question unable, however, to progress beyond the notion of an imputed about the thing-in-itself as 'unscientific' and at the [zugerechnet] class ce this I it acknowledges the validity of all the conclusions of technology thing as Lenin in What is to be do hen he maintained that nd science. Ifpraxis is to fulfI the function Engels rightly assigned socialist class consciousness would differ from the spontaneously to i, it must go beyond this immediacy while remaining praxis emerging trade-union consciousness in that it would be implanted and developing into a cor in the workers 'from outside, i.e. "from outside the economic My objections to Engels'solution were not without found: truggle and the sphere of the orkers All the more mistaken was my chain of argument. It was