16 DOI 10.1163/1569206X-12341550 | LOPEZ the pracess of development of proletarian class consciousness’ and that this necessitates a type of knowledge that has become concrete; that has become ‘flesh and blood’ and has risen to ‘practical critical activity’ (p. 230). Feenberg summarises this idea, writing: Dereification is not of course a pure thought process, still less a quasi- philosophical transcendence of opinion in knowledge. It is a situated knowledge, a transformation according to quite specific determinations, very different from the activity of a scientific cogito. Nor does the pos- sibility of such a dereification imply that the workers are spontaneously ionary. The point is rather to explain how workers can demystify reification sufficiently to act autonomously on their own behalf and in their own interests as a collective social subject. (p. 238.) revalut is reading, as Feenberg acknowledges, is Merleau-Ponty who remains one of the best interpreters of Lukacs (p. 239). Unfortunately, Rehmann is ignorant of this reading and follows Ketakawski in re-asserting the myth that, for Lukes, there is no possible bridge between empirical class- consciousness and the consciousness imputed to the class by theory. With all the predictability of scripted orthodoxy, he alleges that, in light of this insur- mountable gap, Lukacs substituted the intellectual, and ultimately, the Leninist ‘vanguard party’ for the class, The party would bring the truth ‘from outside, substituting for the class, and imposing its will on history.*° Yet, Lukacs is ex- plicit about the abstraction and impotence to which a party is doomed if it fails, to connect its thought to the concrete situation and experience of the class (p. 240). Feenberg concludes this excellent defence, noting a parallel between ikacs and Gramsci, writing: In Gramsci, as in Lukéies, the party does not have the proletariat at its disposal, but rather vice versa. When Lukéics writes that the party is the ‘visible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness; he does not mean that the party is the true subject of the revolution, but on the con- trary, that it is the privileged object of the working class as subject, the object through which the class ‘sees’ its own situation and potentialities most clearly... the party is thus not a mechanism of social control in service of the revolution — an impossible contradiction: it is there to be ‘seen, and the sight of it is a moment in the constitution of a subject of history. (p. 243.) go Rehman 2013, p.83. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM (2018) 1~26