Compared with History and Class Consciousness, the normative ideal of the Ontology points to a radically different conception of political action. In the Ontology, it is not the self-realization of the collective subject-object in history that is the defining moment of revolutionary politics, but rather the gradual realization of the universal nature of humans in their interaction with society and nature. This suggests a conception of political praxis which amounts to a form of humanist, democratic communism and which respects the insight that Lukács had derived from his re-interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy: politics must be understood as a collective coming to terms with a dialectics between subjective and objective elements within a social totality rather than as the becoming conscious of the identical subject-object of history.