For Lukács, this is to say that human history is distinct from natural history. Our history is ideologically affected by our position in the present; geological history — foregoing presently contentious debates around the so-called “anthropocene” — is not. The events of human history — our wars, our elections, our culture — are not fossils embedded within the earth’s geological strata — although capitalism certainly implores us to think this is the case. On the contrary, history is not that which lies behind us in the past but rather that which occurs here with us in the present. History is the story of our own becoming, and in order to maintain that position, history must engage in its own process of becoming as well. Lukács writes: “It is only in history, in the historical process, in the uninterrupted outpouring of what is qualitatively new that the requisite paradigmatic order can be found in the realm of things.” History only happens, he argues, when things change. And who has the true capacity to change things? Only the proletariat. History, he writes — that is, true history — is “the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man”; history is “the product (albeit the unconscious one) of man’s own activity … the succession of those processes in which the forms taken by this activity and the relations of man to himself (to nature, to other men) are overthrown.”