It is thus that Lukács can write of bourgeois ideology as 'something which is subjectively justified in the social and historical situation, as something which can and should be understood, i.e. as "right". At the same time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint and express it adequately.' ¹⁶ Ideology is now a long way from being some mere illusion; and the same is true if one reverses these terms 'objective' and 'subjective'. For one might equally claim, so Lukács remarks, that bourgeois ideology fails 'subjectively' to achieve its self-appointed goals (freedom, justice, and so on), but exactly in so failing helps to further certain objective aims of which it is ignorant. By which he means, presumably, helping to promote the historical conditions which will finally bring socialism to power. Such class consciousness involves an unconsciousness of one's true social conditions, and is thus a kind of self-deception; but whereas Engels, as we have seen, tended to dismiss the conscious motivation involved here as sheer illusion, Lukács is prepared to accord it a certain limited truth. 'Despite all its objective falseness,' he writes, 'the self-deceiving "false" consciousness that we find in the bourgeoisie is at least in accord with its class situation.' ¹⁷ Bourgeois ideology may be false from the standpoint of some putative social totality, but this does not mean that it is false to the situation as it currently is.

This way of putting the point may perhaps help to make some sense of the otherwise puzzling notion of ideology as thought true to a false situation. For what seems spurious about this formulation is the very idea that a situation might be said to be false. Statements about deep-sea diving may be true or false, but not deep-sea diving itself. As a Marxist humanist, however, Lukács himself has a kind of answer to this problem. A 'false' situation for him is one in which the human 'essence' -- the full potential of those powers which humanity has historically developed -- is being unnecessarily blocked and estranged; and such judgements are thus always made from the standpoint of some possible and desirable future. A false situation can be identified only subjunctively or retrospectively, from the vantage point of what might be possible were these thwarting, alienating forces to be abolished. But this does not mean taking one's stand in the empty space of some speculative future, in the manner of 'bad' utopianism; for in Lukács's view, and indeed in the view of Marxism in general, the outline of that desirable future can already be detected in certain potentialities stirring within the present. The present is thus not identical with itself: there is that within it which points beyond it, as indeed the shape of every historical present is structured by its anticipation of a possible future.

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