Thought to have been destroyed until recently discovered in Moscow's CPSU archives, this polemic by the 'philosopher of the October Revolution' was written in 1923 in response to Stalin's onslaught on his earlier History and Class Consciousness.

Georg Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.