(BTW I am not sure if I am using the search engine properly on the otherwise excellent marxists.org web site but I could not get it through this. Possibly someone could review whether there is an easy fix?)
This passage from Marx to Ruge in 1843 may be dismissed by people who regard themselves as more orthodox Marxists, as being from his very early writings. Certainly it is work in progress. It is in the context of the struggle among the left Hegelians to distance themselves from idealism and religion.
A struggle for the reform of consciousness by no means inevitably implies a revolutionary vanguard party. But in that respect Marx, in his later writings too, was a pre-Leninist.
A goal of the reform of consciousness does not go well with a centralised party. However for our purposes it may go better with the network principle of organisation in which a shared culture can spread relatively rapidly among wide numbers of people, once they catch on.
Interestingly Marx's letter to Ruge also does nothing to emphasise the connection with the economic base.
However Walter Benjamin, who was influenced by the Frankfurt school, sometimes accused of vague social philosophising about the dilemmas of bourgeois society, was specifically trying to make the connection with commodities.
The review article in the Guardian of this last work, which he was clutching when he was turned away trying to escape from France in the war, shortly before his suicide, did not seem to me to be very insightful. But it did suggest to me that Benjamin in his method and focus on the experience of commodity-dominated life under capitalism, was a precursor of post modernist responses to the same problem.
Perhaps others have been able to see the longer New York Review of Books article on "The Arcades Project"
Chris Burford
London