This work is commonly held to be the foundational text for Western Marxism. As Stalinism took over in Russia, Lukacs was subjected to attacks for "deviation". In the 1920s he wrote a response to this, which remained unpublished at the time. The manuscript was later found in Moscow and published.

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.

“Lukács’s polemic tells of a dogmatic, corrupt, ultimately murderous period in the transition from Stalinism ... it tells also of the passion, so vividly Judaic and Central European, for the life and clash of ideas.”—George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement

“We almost hear Lenin himself murmuring, it happens that for eighty years no Marxist has ever properly understood History and Class Consciousness! Splendidly translated here by Esther Leslie and contextualized by an introduction by John Rees and a conclusion by Slavoj Žižek (both of them stimulating and suggestive).”—Fredric Jameson, Radical Philosophy