change. If the working class figures as such an agent, it is for structural, material reasons -- the fact that it is the only body so located within the productive process of capitalism, so trained and organized by that process and utterly indispensable to it, as to be capable of taking it over. In this sense it is capitalism, not Marxism, which 'selects' the instruments of revolutionary overthrow, patiently nurturing its own potential gravedigger. When Lukács observes that the strength of a social formation is always in the last resort a 'spiritual' one, or when he writes that 'the fate of the revolution . . . will depend on the ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e. on its class consciousness', ¹³ he is arguably in danger of displacing these material issues into questions of pure consciousness -- and a consciousness which, as Gareth Stedman Jones has pointed out, remains curiously disembodied and ethereal, a matter of 'ideas' rather than practices or institutions.

If Lukács is residually idealist in the high priority he assigns to consciousness, so is he also in his Romantic hostility to science, logic and technology. ¹⁴ Formal and analytic discourses are simply modes of bourgeois reification, just as all forms of mechanization and rationalization would seem inherently alienating. The progressive, emancipatory side of these processes in the history of capitalism is merely ignored, in an elegiac nostalgia typical of Romantic conservative thought. Lukács does not wish to deny that Marxism is a science; but this science is the 'ideological expression of the proletariat', not some set of timeless analytic propositions. This certainly offers a powerful challenge to the 'scientism' of the Second International -- the belief that historical materialism is a purely objective knowledge of the immanent laws of historical development. But to react against such metaphysical fantasies by reducing Marxist theory to revolutionary ideology is hardly more adequate. Are the complex equations of Capital no more than a theoretical 'expression' of socialist consciousness? Is not that consciousness partly constituted by such theoretical labour? And if only proletarian self-consciousness will deliver us the truth, how do we come to accept this truth as true in the first place, if not by a certain theoretical understanding which must be relatively independent of it?

I have already argued that it is mistaken to see Lukács as equating ideology with false consciousness tout court. Working-class socialist ideology is not, of course, in his view false; and even bourgeois ideology is illusory only in a complex sense of the term. Indeed, we might claim that whereas for the early Marx and Engels, ideology is thought false to the true situation, for Lukács it is thought true to a false situation. Bourgeois ideas do indeed accurately mirror the state of things in bourgeois society; but it is this very state of affairs which is somehow twisted out of true. Such consciousness is faithful to the reified nature

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