From these ontological commitments, it follows that the existence of the social totality depends on the intentionality which guides individual acts of labor and vice versa (see Tertullian 1988). Lukács therefore describes social phenomena—as language and institutions—as modifications and “mediations” of the relations of the labor process. That is, they are media of “indirect” teleological positing because they enable forms of action which do not directly modify nature but which indirectly aspire to bring other persons to do so (GW 14: 172; 1968: 142). Even though he remains committed to the primacy of labor, Lukács allows for these linguistic and institutional mediations to acquire a dynamic of their own over time, becoming independent of the goal of dominating nature, in particular because they allow for a generalization of the cognitive grasp of particular phenomena (see GW 13: 47; GW 14: 165ff, 342–357) and an increase of distance between subject and objects (1971c: 100). This understanding of institutions entails that politics, as a form of action directed towards the social totality as a whole, must treat this totality, on the one hand, as being dependent on natural and biological facts that limit its potential transformations and, on the other hand, as increasingly being determined by laws of its own (GW 14: 432).