Lukács sought to resolve the scientism and mechanicism of the social democrats of the second international, as well as the reductionism of the superstructure to the economic infrastructure (into which many Marxists had fallen). The essence of “orthodox Marxism” is essentially about the Marxist method, and in order to liberate the Marxist dialectic from the deformations it has suffered, it is necessary to return to Hegel.
Thus he recovers the category of “totality” which he considers neglected by Engels, who only listened to interaction and denial: “concrete totality is the actual category of reality”. Of course, it is a concrete, not abstract, as in Hegel, and historical totality in which contradictions do not disappear. The dialectical method involves not keeping things in their abstract isolation or explaining them through abstract laws but finding out their dialectical interaction and “their function in the concrete totality in which they work.”
Returning to Hegel, Lukács reassesses the importance of the subject as a basic element of historical totality. In this sense, he criticizes Engels for not alluding to the dialectical relationship between the subject and the object in the historical process. In fact, Engels considers only the pure objectivity of the dialectical laws of Nature... but if the totality obeys a historical character, then it is necessary to include the dialectical unity of the subject and the object, thus recognizing the fundamental role that the subject has as long as he possesses consciousness of reality. In this sense, the idea of class consciousness of the proletariat is inserted as the engine of history:
“ The unity of theory and practice is therefore not, but the other side of the historical-social situation of the proletariat, the fact that from their point of view self-knowledge and knowledge of the whole coincide, the fact of which the proletariat is itself subject and object of its own knowledge.” class