The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immediacy together with the bourgeoisie. With the growth of social democracy this threat acquired a real political organization which artificially cancels out the mediations so laboriously won and forces the proletariat back into its immediate existence where it is merely a component of capitalist society and not at the same time the motor tat drives it to its own doom and destruction. Thus the proletariat submits to the ‘laws’ of bourgeois society either in a spirit of supine fatalism (e.g. towards the natural laws of production) or else in a spirit of ‘moral’ affirmation (the state as an ideal, cultural positive).…

On this territory, social democracy must inevitably remain in the weaker position. This is not just because it renounces of its own free will the historical mission of the proletariat to point the way out of the problems of capitalism that the bourgeoisie cannot solve, nor is it because it looks on fatalistically as the ‘laws’ of capitalism drift towards the abyss. But social democracy must concede defeat on every particular issue also. For when confronted by the overwhelming resources of knowledge, culture and routine which the bourgeoisie undoubtedly possesses and will continue to possess as long as it remains the ruling class, the only effective superiority of the proletariat, its only decisive weapon is its ability to see social totality as a concrete historical totality; to see the reified forms as processes between men… With the ideology of social democracy the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification that we have hitherto analyzed in such detail.

And here’s a little tidbit from a recent story in Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

I think that I would be departing from the truth if I were to attempt to iron out the glaring contradictions of that period by artificially constructing an organic development and fitting into the correct pigeon-hole in the ‘history of ideas’. If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing from one class to another in the middle of a world crisis?

Contingency is as it were the inner blind spot of bourgeois consciousness, or of the existential experience of capitalism. In the twin forms of chance and of “crisis” or “catastrophe,” it marks the moment at which events that are meaningful socially or historically turn incomprehensible, absurd, or meaningless faces to individuals, who can henceforth only ratify their bewilderment with the name of “accident” or of well-nigh “natural” convulsion and upheaval. That in bourgeois science these “irrationals” or unthinkables become themselves the object of new forms of scientific inquiry and specialization—in probability theory and statistics, for example, or in crisis theory or catastrophe theory—is perhaps a rather different development from the second feature of Lukács’s analysis, which designates the blind spot of the system itself, and the incapacity to grasp totality as a meaningful whole.

Well, now I’m tempted to read Studies in European Realism (lest we remind our readers, not of the object-oriented variety).