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virtualmima's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
3.75
Determinism is a bourgeois ideology.
conorak's review against another edition
3.0
CAVEAT EMPTOR: The edition published by Indo-European Publishing (2018) is--and there is truly no other word for this--horrific. I urge you--beg you even--to avoid purchasing this edition at all costs. I don't think there was even a single page that did not contain an error. This ranges from absolutely absurd punctuation (periods placed haphazardly throughout the middle of sentences) to typos to the complete replacement of individual words with complete gibberish. The publishers have added a disclaimer (which was not apparent prior to purchasing the book) that they have retained spelling, punctuation, and capitalization from the original text for an "authentic reading experience". Not only is this ridiculous (no amount of authenticity can compensate for comprehension), but I suspect is also a patent lie. The disclaimer itself is written in broken English, the text on the dusk cover is lifted from Wikipedia, and at least half of the typographical errors are clearly the result of lazy OCR scanning without a single effort to correct glaring errors.
That said, the content was intermittently enjoyable, if only for its attention to concrete analyses in some places. Unfortunately, whatever "authenticity" has been preserved is presented in the form of stinted, stale writing that appears to aspire to the blandness and pedantry of German ideology (already insufferable the half century prior to the time that this was penned) that made this otherwise fair book a headache to slog through.
That said, the content was intermittently enjoyable, if only for its attention to concrete analyses in some places. Unfortunately, whatever "authenticity" has been preserved is presented in the form of stinted, stale writing that appears to aspire to the blandness and pedantry of German ideology (already insufferable the half century prior to the time that this was penned) that made this otherwise fair book a headache to slog through.
ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
i still haven't finished thinking about lukacs and his ideas. the marxist-hegelian theory whereby the world becomes things is actually an incredibly big notion, and i thought it was just about making shit to buy. fantasies, like charlie gross' berkin. no, it's actually way fucking bigger and i wasn't fully prepared. at one point it occurred to me "У"У"У and this is just me, mind you "У"У"У that it seems we could just as easily be referring to language, or our consensus agreement on what the facts are, on objectivity. what we can then mean is the basis for disinterest "У"У always a lie according to derrida's early essay on husserl, whereby the objective world of geometry is necessarily preconditioned by the subject. that "just the facts please"ќ may have wholly only ever been brought about in service of the capitalist really fucked me up. i'm still trying to figure out what to do with this. this leaves open and available the potential future thoroughly deterritorialized commodification of all aspects of life and its processes, of "social relations"ќ. i'm of course further obsessed with an out to this, of the world prior to and beyond this violent and deplorable capitalist predicament. what is this lively world of ""чhuman' relations"ќ? also, how much of the proletariat's historical preeminence founded upon their humanity for marx (i had an unproductive stumble through kornel mundruczo's *white god*, hoping for insight into lukacs' hungary, which i need to remember not to bring up here)? ha, maybe you should read marx. getting to it. also: lukacs out of dialectical materialism sired the philosophy of totalitarianism. this throws all my previous statements into disarray. is the obsession with the production of objecthood the fiat of one who must make a bondsman of the unceasingly vagarious planet ("alt-facts")?
danieleales's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting and engaging. The discussions of class consciousness remain some of the most theoretically insightful on the topic, whereas the rest of the text is lacking in some major areas. There is a necessity to use Lukács' understanding of class consciousness as a foundation - rather than as an end point, but that is a discussion for now and not an indictment of Lukács' own contributions.
georglowinger's review against another edition
4.0
A pleasure to reread, a book which is as relevant then as it is now
alexlanz's review against another edition
A philosophical extrapolation out of Marx's economic manuscripts; reductive to class standpoint without accounting for political determination, a lot of existential and class liquidationist ideas, and while most of it was a good read, other parts really dragged; still insightful.
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