The primacy of the social totality not only affects the Marxist method, but also the conception of practice and the underlying social ontology: by insisting on a foundational role of practice in the social totality, Lukács makes political action rather than labor into the foundation for overcoming reification (Feenberg 1998). In his 1967 preface to the new edition of History and Class-Consciousness, Lukács acknowledges (next to a number of exercises in self-criticism, which appear both unjustified and externally motivated) that his insistence on this point meant a departure from Marx’s concept of practice (1967: xviii), at least as interpreted by orthodox Marxists: while Marx had understood practice primarily as the conscious engagement of humans with non-human nature, the self-sufficiency of the social for the very essence of reality had led Lukács to a different understanding of practice which privileges the theoretical and the political (see also Jay 1984; for a different view Feenberg 2014).