The final step in Lukács’ argument is to show that it is only the proletariat that can understand itself as the producer of the totality of society and which is thereby able to overcome reification. Initially, both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie face the same immediate reality of an alienated world. Bourgeois thought, however, endorses this facticity and sees every possible normative stance only as a subjective projection onto a world of immediate facts. In contrast, the proletariat is unable to remain within bourgeois ideology. Lukács gives two reasons for this claim: in the 1920 essay, titled “Class Consciousness”, he distinguishes between “empirical” and rational, “imputed” class consciousness (1920a: 51 and 74) that only constitutes an “objective possibility” given the interests of the proletariat. In contrast, in the “Reification” essay, he argues that there is an intrinsic dialectics within the class consciousness of the proletariat (Arato and Breines 1979: 131–136; for an epistemological reading see Jameson 2009, 65ff.), arising from its objective position as mere object of the social process. In capitalism, the activity of workers is reduced to a completely quantifiable process. But, at the same time, workers cannot have any immediate self-consciousness of their work other than of a qualitatively determined activity. Lukács argues that this intrinsic tension in the consciousness of the worker constitutes the objective possibility of the proletariat’s grasping three important things: first, the proletariat’s own reified existence as a product of social mediation, second, the social totality and, third, the proletariat as the subject-object of that totality.