Interrogating inequality Book

It is incredible that a book as important as this one could be ignored for so long. It is a work that, while often highly schematic and at times inchoate, one that offers a historical materialist's perspective on the origin of science as "timeless," or as science as this almost magical power in society. While his "ladder" connecting base and superstructure is often shows incomplete scaffolding, his work offers the first critique ("kritik") of intellectual labor as separate from manual labor, and how this came to be historically. His book should have spawned an entire field of research for the last forty or so years but it did not, for some reason. It is likely that his historical materialist method in the cold war was shrugged off both by bourgeois scientists and Soviet positivists. Ilyenkov, after all, did not find a place for his work on dialectics in the USSR. Sohn-Rethel's work interestingly enough, aside from Lukacs, is maybe one of the only works of the Frankfurt school still consciously tied to class struggle. It is as if a book that was meant to be published in the 20s came out decades later due to the loss of the German revolution. After all, it does at times seem that German theory seemed totally disconnected from its source as Adorno and Marcuse wrote in the United States.


This book should be a starting point for anyone trying to make sense of science, historical materialism, Marxism's claims to reality, etc. It is "Kritik" in its best German sense. It completely ignores questions of objectivity because it critiques the very notion of timeless truth. After this book I only have too many questions. 

I am happy to see Verso is working to republish his materials.