Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute 9004417672, 9789004417670

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Lukács

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Sébastien Budgen (Paris) David Broder (Rome) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London)

volume 203

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

Lukács Praxis and the Absolute

By

Daniel Andrés López

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The author acknowledges that this book was completed with the assistance of a La Trobe University Social Research Platform Grant. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ló pez, Daniel Andrés, author. Title: Lukács : praxis and the absolute / by Daniel Andrés Ló pez. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Historical materialism book series, 1570-1522 ; volume 203 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019034125 (print) | LCCN 2019034126 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004417670 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004417687 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Lukács, Gyö rgy, 1885–1971. | Communism and philosophy. | Philosophy, Marxist. Classification: LCC HX260.5.A8 L8336 2019 (print) | LCC HX260.5.A8 (ebook) | DDC 335.4/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034125 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034126

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978-90-04-41767-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41768-7 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

I dedicate this book to my wife and love Viktoria Ivanova

∵

Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction 1 1 Prophet of Praxis: Lukács between 1918 and 1929 2 Lukács and Marxian Philosophy of Praxis 18 3 Reading Lukács Speculatively 30

1

Part 1 Towards a Theory of Praxis Introduction to Part One

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1 From Immediacy to Commodity Fetishism 53 1 Immediacy and Method 53 2 Form and Content, Quantity and Quality, the Commodity

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2 Reification and Totality 83 1 Subjective and Objective Reification; Society as Second Nature 2 The Controversy over Reification 95 3 Fragmentation and Crisis 109 3 The Standpoint of the Proletariat 121 1 The Principle of Labour and the Proletariat as Subject-Object of History 121 2 In Defence of the Standpoint of the Proletariat 139 3 The Self-Consciousness of the Commodity 161 Conclusion to Part One

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Part 2 From Theory to Praxis 4 Theory in Itself and for the Proletariat 1 The Contemplative Stance 187 2 The Ethical Idea of Praxis 198 3 The Critique of Naturalism 217

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viii 5 The Critique of Ideology 234 1 The Standpoint of the Bourgeoisie 234 2 Sectarianism, Reformism and Vulgar Marxism 3 The Actuality of Revolution 269

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6 The Party 285 1 The Party as Bearer of Imputed Class Consciousness 2 The Controversy over Lukács’s Leninism 300 3 Party and Class 328 7 Praxis 346 1 The Concept of the Proletariat in and for Itself 2 The Actuality of Praxis 362

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Part 3 Praxis and Philosophy Introduction to Part Three 387 8 Lukács’s Critique of Philosophy 399 1 The Antinomies of Bourgeois Philosophy 399 2 Lukács on Hegel and the Absolute 423 3 Once More on Hegel, via the Young Hegelians 449 9 Praxis, the Absolute and Philosophy 472 1 The Philosophical Critiques of Lukács 472 1.1 Endless Mediation: Andrew Feenberg 475 1.2 Liberal Empiricism: Tom Rockmore 485 1.3 Shallow Immanent Critique: Richard Kilminster 490 1.4 Adorno as an Alternative to Lukács: Timothy Hall (with Support from Gillian Rose) 495 2 The Critique from History 499 2.1 Praxis as Mediation: Trotsky and the New Left 504 2.2 Praxis as Logic: The Elder Lukács 510 2.3 Praxis as Genesis: The Baroque Melancholia of Walter Benjamin 520 2.4 Praxis as Tragic Theology 540

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The Critique from Philosophy 564 3.1 The Occluded Political Truth of Praxis 566 3.2 With what Should Philosophy of Praxis End?

Conclusion – Nihilism or the Virtuous Republic Bibliography Index 616

603

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Acknowledgements In the first place, I should like to thank my PhD supervisors, Dr George Vassilacopoulos and Dr Toula Nicolacopoulos. I am honoured to consider them friends, colleagues and collaborators. As this book is a considerably revised and expanded version of my doctoral dissertation, they deserve special thanks for the many hours they spent poring over my early drafts, helping me to clarify my argument. Their generosity and support allowed me to graduate from my PhD with the best part of a manuscript already completed. Indeed, George often understood the argument I wished to make better than I did. As I was preparing this book, I found myself often thinking back to his quietly spoken insights. I have lost count of the number of times that I have remembered an idea or reflection of his, sometimes weeks or months after he shared it with me. Suffice to say, many of these ideas have found their way into this book – and for this, I am profoundly grateful. Secondly, I would like to acknowledge Professor Konstantinos Kavoulakos and Dr Michael Löwy. I have benefited greatly from their work on Lukács and in particular, I am still in their debt for their remarkably generous and perceptive comments on my PhD thesis. I would like to also thank La Trobe University for its institutional support during and after my candidacy. Specific thanks are due to the La Trobe University Social Research Platform Grant, who made funds available to me to support this publication. This book is the product of over six years’ work. At the beginning of this journey, I was encouraged to explore my interest in Georg Lukács’s philosophy by my friend Sandra Bloodworth and my honours supervisor, Associate Professor John Rundell. I should like to thank them both for suggesting and facilitating this path. Sandra deserves special thanks for her role in creating a critical, open minded and politically radical intellectual culture around the far left at the University of Melbourne, where I studied as an undergraduate. John, for his part, remains one of the teachers from whom I have learned most. His emphasis on Lukács’s radical democratic politics assured me initially that space existed for the interpretation I wished to put forward. Additionally, I should like to thank my friends Michael Lazarus, Jesse Lambourn, Róbert Nárai, Conall Cash, Sadia Schneider, Gene Flenady, Lawrence Bradford, Emma Black and James Plested, as well as others. Reading Hegel with such a committed and intelligent group of thinkers is utterly invaluable. A philosophical community like this is a rare thing. I thank Michael and Jesse, in particular, for their comments on a number of draft chapters. Thanks

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also go to Aaron Jaffe, with whom I have enjoyed a rare and valuable correspondence regarding Lukács. I would also like to thank Andrew Gilbert, Tim Andrews and Julian Potter as well as my other friends who are associated with the journal Thesis Eleven. Although they took place some years ago, our discussions of Hegel’s first masterpiece opened my eyes to a beautiful and rich intellectual world capable of sustaining such vast insight and life. It would be amiss to neglect mentioning my friends and comrades in Socialist Alternative. Although we have parted company politically and the philosophy developed in this book differs from the interpretation of Marxism they generally favour, their intellectual seriousness and ethical conviction were crucial to helping me cultivate my own. I should also like to thank Sebastian Budgen and Historical Materialism. Attending Historical Materialism conferences in New York, London and Sydney has been an important part of refining the arguments I develop here. Additionally, I am grateful to the Historical Materialism Book Series for contracting this work to be published with Brill. Shifting to a more personal register, I would first like to acknowledge the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis in facilitating my journey towards selfunderstanding and reconciliation. Second from last, I would like to acknowledge my mother, Nicole Prunster and my father Daniel Lopez Sabat. In different ways, my parents both instilled in me an early respect for learning and ideas. This is one of the most valuable gifts a person can receive in a lifetime. I am very grateful to my mother for her encouragement and support with this project, as well as for her experience in academia and her always level-headed advice. Finally, I should like to acknowledge my wife and love, Viktoria Ivanova. We met at the very beginning of my PhD candidacy. She was a model of humanity, empathy and patience during what was, at times, a difficult journey. I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I say that without her love, this work would not have been possible. This is not just because I have relied on her, although I undoubtedly have. It is also because with Viktoria, I have found that rare kind of love which is built on respect, passion and deep mutual understanding. Speculative philosophy, as I understand it, is built on the foundation of love like this. Thanks to Viktoria, I feel that I have some experience of what it is like to be at home with another.

Introduction 1

Prophet of Praxis: Lukács between 1918 and 1929 … all those socialists – the anarchists, atheists and revolutionaries – are not the ones who give us the headaches; we keep an eye on them, and their movements are well known to us. There are among them, however, though they are not many, a number of peculiar characters: these are people who believe in God and are Christians, yet are at the same time socialists. Now they are the ones who give us the worst headaches, they are a fearsome bunch! The socialist who is a Christian is more worthy of fear than the socialist who is an atheist. Dostoyevsky1 Calvin brought the underworld to consciousness by means of the doctrine of predestination; Lukács, as a theoretician of constitutive praxis, achieves the same thing by means of a quite unique combination of innerworldly asceticism and Hegel’s pure concretional dialectic. Ernst Bloch2

Between 1914 and 1915, Georg Lukács suffered a deep spiritual sickness, brought on by the suicide of his former lover, Irma Seidler, and the outbreak of world war. In these years, he was also engaged in writing a major study of literature, subsequently published as The Theory of the Novel. While acquainted with Marx, Lukács was no social democrat. Although he prayed for proletarian barbarians capable of destroying the overgrowth of culture he found around him, he viewed the existing workers’ movement as institutionalised beyond hope.3 And yet, he concluded his first draft of The Theory of the Novel by prophesising a new world to come. Counterposing the new era to his own – which he named, following Fichte, as one of ‘absolute sinfulness’ – Lukács wrote: This [new] world is the sphere of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as social being nor as an isolated, unique, pure and therefore abstract interiority. If ever this world should come into being as 1 A speech by a French police spy, recounted by Miusov in The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky 2003, p. 91). 2 Bloch 2019. 3 Lukács 1998.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004417687_002

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something natural and simply experienced, as the only true reality, a new complete totality could be built out of all its substances and relationships. It would be a world to which our divided reality would be a mere backdrop, a world which would have outstripped our dual world of social reality by as much as we have outstripped the world of nature.4 This new world, in Lukács’s view, would end the tragic separation between individual and society and in so doing, replace tragedy (as a literary form) with the epic, reborn. The day would break first in the east: Lukács suggested its outline might be discerned in the work of Dostoyevsky. In 1917, he was proven right. The new world burst forth.5 One year later, Lukács dedicated himself to its service. The anecdotes, both documented and apocryphal, surrounding Lukács’s conversion to communism and his activities between 1918 and 1923 are both famous and coloured by his ethical, tragic and messianic romanticism. They speak not only to the world in which Lukács found himself but even more to the remarkable intellectual spirit he brought to it. His friend, Anna Lezsnai, a former participant in the Sunday Circle, a radical intellectual discussion group led by Lukács, described his conversion as follows: ‘… [it] took place in the interval between two Sundays: from Saul became Paul’.6 Lukács himself announced his leap of faith in terms equally redolent of the Old Testament, with a revised version of his essay ‘Bolshevism as a Moral Problem’. In the early version, he had criticised Bolshevism from an ethical standpoint, as being incapable of facing up to the evil of murder. In the later version, now titled ‘Tactics and Ethics’, Lukács concluded, quoting the ‘… incomparably beautiful words of Hebbel’s Judith: “Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me – who am I to be able to escape it?”’7 With these words, Lukács announced his membership of the Hungarian Communist Party to a literary public hardly prepared to witness such a salvific leap. History did not ask that Lukács confine his revolutionary romantic streak to the page or lecture theatre for long. In a recent work discussing culture and the arts during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bob Dent cites an account of the outbreak of revolution in Hungary, in March 1919, by József Nádass, a young

4 Lukács 1971c, p. 152. 5 Michael Löwy deserves credit for drawing attention to Lukács’s remarkable prophesy, in a paper given to the Historical Materialism conference in London, in 2017. 6 Kettler 1971, p. 69. For a wonderful biography of Lukács’s pre-Marxist period, see Gluck 1985. 7 Lukács 1972k, p. 11.

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Hungarian poet.8 According to Nádass, Lukács was delivering a lecture entitled ‘Old Culture and New Culture’ to a packed hall when the Hungarian Soviet Revolution was declared. In this lecture, Lukács declared: Liberation from capitalism means liberation from the dominance of economics … The Communist society, as the destruction of capitalism, formulates its positioning precisely here. It endeavours to create such a social order in which everyone shares in the life-style that belonged to the oppressor classes …9 While news of the revolution disrupted Lukács’s lecture, he was able to complete the presentation some weeks later, speaking at the Marx-Engels Workers’ University that he helped to establish. This was just one of the initiatives he pioneered as Deputy Commissar for Cultural and Educational Affairs in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.10 Indeed, the words cited above that he spoke to a packed audience on the eve of revolution served as his cultural and educational programme during those short, beautiful red months in Budapest. Despite his political naivety, Lukács was responsible for a number of remarkably radical and far sighted initiatives. The first meeting of the governing council of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, under advice from Lukács and his comrades, declared the socialisation of all private theatres. On the third morning of the Republic, a decree was issued requisitioning weapons, closing retail stores and ordering the redistribution of all pre-sold theatre tickets among workers. Special box offices were set up, selling cut price tickets to workers. Insofar as performances were endorsed or supported by the Soviet Republic, they were to be of either a revolutionary or ‘classical’ character. In championing the classics, as many have observed, Lukács prefigured the aesthetic opinions he would defend later in his career. To regulate pay and working conditions, an actors’ union was established (in which Bela Lugosi became a prominent activist, precipitating his flight to the USA and subsequent stardom). Similarly, Lukács’s Commissariat drew up a list of published and publishing authors, in order to guarantee them an income. The only criteria for

8 9 10

Dent 2018, p. 149. Lukács 1970. According to most accounts, despite holding subordinate status as a Deputy Commissar, Lukács exerted more influence over the cultural and educational policies of the Hungarian Soviet Republic than his superiors, Zsigmond Kunfi and Joseph Pogány (Kettler 1971, p. 77). Dent and Kettler serve as the main sources for the summary of Lukács’s activities given here.

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selection was evidence of having produced writing: the Commissariat wished only to weed out dilettantes; it consciously refrained from imposing political or critical criteria on writers. At the same time, Lukács’s department organised the first Hungarian translation of Capital, among other classics which included the complete works of Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. Not oblivious to the visual arts, Lukács’s Commissariat, with the active collaboration of art historians, drew up a list of privately owned significant artworks in Hungary – including masterpieces by El Greco, Goya, Delacroix, Millet, Manet, Courbet, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Constable, Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin, Rossetti, Renoir, van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Degas and Jan Steen, not to mention a number of Hungarian artists. In the course of this massive nationalisation programme, Lukács’s men had to search the property of one of the Counts Batthyány. When a painting by Brueghel that was known to be in his collection couldn’t be found, it was necessary to knock down the walls of his mansion until the walled-up painting had been recovered. Lukács’s Commissariat then made these hitherto coveted artworks available to the people by staging a magnificent and unprecedented ‘First Exhibition of Art Treasures Taken Into Public Ownership’.11 In further initiatives, university faculties were reorganised for the training of school teachers. Plans were drawn up for adult educational institutions – including the Marx Engels Workers’ University – whose purpose was to make tertiary education available to workers. Civic training was reformed to exclude religious education and to include in the curriculum such Marxist classics as The Civil War in France and Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, among others. Lukács interceded specifically to ensure the appointment of radical intellectuals in the humanities (including Karl Mannheim) and to attempt to win partial exemption from military duties for scholars. Many of the reforms associated with Lukács’s tenure were radical: for instance, he ordered the introduction of sex education for school children and organised the distribution of literature to working class areas, via janitors. Other reforms were somewhat more prosaic: his Commissariat issued posters bearing the message: ‘The baths belong to you! Bathe!’ Other reforms exuded Lukács’s radical romanticism. As Kettler recounts, Anna Lesznai once asked Lukács what would become, under communism, of the fairy tales that they had loved throughout their friendship. He is supposed to have replied that they would become true; that the stones and the trees would speak. So, his Commissariat issued a decree bearing Lukács’s signature to the effect that children at all levels of education under the age

11

Dent 2018, pp. 63–6.

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of fourteen should have ‘beautiful and instructive’ fairy tales recited to them for their ‘edification and amusement’.12 Lesznai, alongside Lukács’s long term friend Béla Balázs, was put in charge of a Fables Division within the Commissariat. Accompanied by a visual artist, they organised travelling puppet shows and afternoons of fairy tales for children. These constitute just a few of the policies and initiatives associated with Lukács’s tenure as Deputy Commissar for Cultural and Educational Affairs. His attitude in these years can be summed up in the words of a decree bearing his signature: ‘… politics is merely instrumental: culture is the goal’.13 Despite these flashes of beauty, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was tragically fated. Lukács, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, embodied its tragic-messianic mood. Jóseph Lengyel, a social democratic participant in the revolution, relates a characteristic Lukács legend from this period: Then I learned what sorts of problems were being raised in several rooms of the Soviet House [the hotel where high government officials, including Lukács, were housed] and my jaw literally dropped. One of the problems: we Communists are like Judas. It is our bloody work to crucify Christ. But this sinful work is at the same time our calling: only through death on the cross does Christ become God, and this is necessary to be able to save the world. We Communists then take the sins of the world upon us, in order to be able thereby to save the world.14 The provenance of this story – as Kettler explains – is disputable. However, accounts of other such deeds also abound, ranging from the more to the less credible. Lukács himself gave voice to the tragic-messianic mood many times. In a speech in 1919 to the Young Workers’ Congress, he told the assembled delegates: ‘We all who struggle for the victory of the Proletariat are poisoned victims of Capitalism without exception’.15 Elsewhere, he declared love and solidarity to be the central ethics of Communism.16 One can see clearly from language and activities such as this why Lukács is often cited as the inspiration for Thomas Mann’s Leo Naphtha, in The Magic Mountain.17

12 13 14 15 16 17

Kettler 1971, pp. 77–85. Quoted in Kettler 1971, p. 84. Quoted in Kettler 1971, p. 75. Lukács 1991c, p. 112. Lukács 1991a, p. 77. This said, as Michael Löwy notes, the inspiration for this character may well also be Ernst Bloch, whom Simmel had earlier introduced to Lukács (Löwy 1979, p. 56). Lukács, at least

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The messianic optimism with which Lukács’s political apprenticeship began collapsed together with the Hungarian Soviet Republic. After travelling to the front lines to serve as a Political Commissar in the Red Army, it is said that Lukács was given to walking above the trenches, exposing himself to enemy fire. His reasoning was that if he wished to take life, he had a duty to give his enemy the same opportunity. Whether the legend is true or not, such nobility is rarely long for the world. So, when Lukács left the front, his abstract ethicism remained, lying among the fallen. Lukács himself was not innocent of this loss. In the interviews which comprise his autobiography, Lukács recalled that during the defence of Tiszafüred, the Budapest sections of the Red Army fled, leaving two other battalions isolated and exposed. After retreating to Poroszló, Lukács organised a court-martial which publicly executed eight men for desertion, with the aim of restoring order.18 Similarly, the pressure of events forced Lukács to mature politically. His relationship with Béla Kun, talks with whom had secured Lukács’s commitment to the party, became strained. He came to see Kun as a cynical and manipulative careerist and disagreed with him constantly.19 Nevertheless, as credit to his personal bravery, Lukács remained in the country (alongside Ottó Korvin) to organise the underground work of the Hungarian Communist Party well after the other leaders had left for exile in Vienna or Germany. Later, Lukács stated his belief that this assignment, doomed to failure, had been given to him by Béla Kun in conscious preparation of his martyrdom. After all, Lukács was among the most well-known and easily recognised communists in the country. In fact, as Lukács recounted, he narrowly escaped arrest and certain execution by hiding in the loft of the flat in which he was staying, concealed by a large chest.20 When he finally did flee, he was nonetheless arrested by Austrian authorities and threatened with extradition to Hungary. Only the intercession of a number of eminent writers persuaded the Austrian government to allow him to stay.21 This was not the only time such an intercession would save Lukács.22

18 19 20 21 22

prior to the 1920s, held Bloch in high esteem, at one point writing: ‘Dr. Bloch … was the first inspiring intellectual after a long hiatus; he is a real philosopher in the Hegelian mold. [sic]’ (Lukács 1986, p. 146). For further discussion of the relationship between Lukács and Bloch, see the essay by Sándor Radnóti, ‘Lukács and Bloch’ (Heller 1983). Lukács 1983c, p. 65. Lukács 1983c, p. 68. Lukács 1983c, p. 68. Arato and Breines 1979, p. 97. In 1928, following Béla Kun’s expulsion from Austria, Thomas Mann once more interceded on Lukács’s behalf to avoid his suffering the same fate (Lukács 1983c, p. 71).

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In exile, Lukács continued his political development, both through practical politics and study. As he would later recount: As for myself, I can only say that I joined the party completely unprepared and that in this respect I also failed to learn anything in the party. My real, enforced years of apprenticeship began under the dictatorship and after its collapse, when a number of Communists set about studying and trying to appropriate the teachings of Marxism as understood by Communists.23 Intellectually, the years between 1919 and 1923 saw Lukács devote himself to teaching, writing and to study, focusing on the classics of Marxism, Hegel and Lenin’s writings. In his works published prior to authoring History and Class Consciousness, he confined himself to essays and reviews. Many of these articles were devoted to day-to-day strategic questions facing the European – and specifically, German – communist movement. His most important political articles from this period were published in the German communist journal Kommunismus.24 As has been widely noted, in these years Lukács contributed to the Europe-wide left-communist current. For instance, Lukács published articles opposing Communist participation in parliaments and trade unions, albeit often in more qualified and nuanced ways than other theorists associated with left communism such as Amadeo Bordiga or Anton Pannekoek.25 Moreover, Lukács’s position evolved over time: Michael Löwy has discerned

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Lukács 1983c, p. 56. A number of articles by Lukács, published in 1922 in Die rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party, have also been reprinted. These are generally confined to literary and occasionally philosophical themes (see Lukács 1983d). Much more journalistic material in both German and Hungarian exists from Lukács’s very early Marxist period. Most of these articles have not yet been collected, translated or reproduced. See, for example, ‘The Question of Parliamentarianism’ in which Lukács characterises an electoral strategy as an essentially defensive strategy for the working class, incompatible with the exigencies of a revolutionary era. Nevertheless, despite its one sidedness, Lukács’s emphasis on the proletariat’s active criticism of bourgeois society, via the soviets, indicates an aspect of mature Marxist politics, which would take finished form in History and Class Consciousness (cf. Lukács 1972i). Also, see ‘Spontaneity of the masses, activity of the party’ and ‘Organisation and Revolutionary Initiative’, in which he opposes the ‘Openletter’ strategy (i.e., the policy of a united front) and extensively defends the theory of the offensive and the disastrous March Action of 1921, in which the German Communist Party sought to force an insurrection despite leading only a minority of the proletariat. Even so, in this article and in others, Lukács is at (rather unsuccessful) pains to draw a distinction between such left-communist strategies and putschism (Lukács 1972j, g).

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three periods of development in Lukács’s thought in this period: he moved from ethical ultra-leftism to political leftism and finally, to left-bolshevism.26 Each step thus brought Lukács closer to the vision of revolutionary realpolitik he would defend in History and Class Consciousness and Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought. In these years, Lenin himself was aware of the distance between Lukács’s left-communism and his own politics. While the anecdote that Lenin explicitly censured Lukács in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder is widespread, it is in fact slightly inaccurate. Although no doubt the critique within Lenin’s monograph is applicable to many of the positions Lukács held prior to 1923, the relevant remark appears in a short article submitted to Kommunismus. Nevertheless, it is true that Lenin delivered such a censure, writing: G.L.’s article [presumably, given the context, ‘The Question of Parliamentarianism’] is very left-wing, and very poor. Its Marxism is purely verbal; its distinction between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ tactics is artificial; it gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical situations; it takes no account of what is most essential (the need to take over and to learn to take over, all fields of work and all institutions in which the bourgeoisie exerts its influence over the masses, etc.).27 This censure did not fall on entirely deaf ears. Lukács’s position in the years 1919–23, as has been stated, was shifting.28 Although this transformation was at least partly precipitated by research, it was at least in equal part motivated by practical concerns. In his autobiographical interviews and notes, Lukács gives a detailed account of disputes within the exiled leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party. While initially reluctant to be drawn into the debate over Béla Kun’s leadership, by 1921 at the latest he had decisively split with Kun. He sided instead with Jenő Landler, former leader of the Hungarian railway-

26 27 28

Löwy 1979, Ch. 3. Lenin 1966, p. 165. Perhaps the most thorough documentation of this shift is contained in James Robinson’s 1983 thesis ‘Reification and Hegemony: The Politics of Culture in the Writings of Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci’ (Robinson 1983). Many commentators – particularly those with little acquaintance with the communist tradition – are insensitive to these shifts. This is compounded by Lukács’s turn of phrase: he expresses himself through the language characteristic of debates within the European Communist movement of his day. To someone unversed or uninterested in these debates, the difference between Lukács’s messianic sectarian period (to employ his later self-description) and his more mature Leninist period must seem non-existent (Lukács 1983c, p. 76).

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men’s union and People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and member of the Central Committee of the HCP since 1919. While the issues at stake were complex, Lukács would later recount a number of controversies and affairs which were decisive and which serve as good illustrations of his changing mindset. Essentially, he came to view Kun as a bureaucratic, sectarian careerist whose policies had little to do with Hungarian realities. Lukács described him as follows: In this context [exile and a divide in the party between Kun’s faction and an opposition led by Jenő Landler and Józef Pogány] the question of Béla Kun’s methods became very important, for they reveal, as I can now see, how terribly little Kun had in common with Lenin, even though he met him once or twice. Basically he had been brought up in Zinoviev’s school. He was a typical Zinoviev disciple and set about creating a party and a reputation by demagogy, violence and, if need be, bribery.29 Lukács continued, adding detail to the charge of bribery. He recounts how, upon developing a suspicion that Kun was paying his supporters, he interrogated László Rudas. Rudas, who was in Lukács’s opinion ‘… one of the greatest cowards imaginable’, was so terrified by Lukács’s threat to expose him that he confessed fully, going so far as to surrender to Lukács his share of the Russian gold he had received from Kun. Lukács made an official complaint, but recalls that the affair was hushed up by a Comintern committee of inquiry. These and other events cemented Lukács’s personal opinion of Kun. Politically, the differences were, if anything, starker. This became clear in the course of strategic debates. Lukács recounts one debate in particular that raged over the question of union dues. As was custom at the time, the union dues paid by Hungarian workers also contributed to the Social Democratic Party. Kun argued that this was unprincipled, proposing that Hungarian communists be required to opt out of such political contributions. As Lukács argued, this would have placed Hungarian communists in an impossible position: it would have forced them to admit to being communists and to be imprisoned as a consequence, or else it would simply have excluded them from the Social Democratic Party, one of the only arenas open to political work. When Józef Pogány (who had, by now, joined Kun’s faction) tried to push this policy through, it precipitated a split in the party. Jenő Landler led the opposed faction and Lukács

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Lukács 1983c, p. 73.

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joined him in walking out of the Central Committee meeting in question.30 Other debates repeated similar themes. For example, at another point, Kun developed a plan to manufacture a mass base for a Hungarian Communist Party by repatriating Hungarian prisoners of war living in Russia. Again, Lukács and Landler opposed this plot as a ‘… stupid bureaucratic idea, based on the premise that a mass party could be brought into being at a stroke, instead of step by step’.31 So, as Lukács explains, despite Kun’s influence with the Comintern, his ‘bureaucratic dogmatism’ gave way to Landler’s far superior grasp of Hungarian realities. This endowed Lukács and Landler’s work, in these years, with a curiously split character. As he described it: ‘The Hungarian work was determined by Landler’s realism on actual Hungarian questions. This produced a dualism. Internationally we were messianic sectarians, in Hungarian affairs we were practitioners of Realpolitik’.32 It would thus appear that, in the years between 1919 and 1923, Lukács’s deep commitment to the concrete and the particular was a powerful driving force in the development of a more dialectical and grounded approach to politics. The essay ‘The Politics of Illusion – Yet Again’, published in 1922, stands not only as a ringing condemnation of Kun, but also of the bureaucratic leftist approach, characteristic of the Comintern in the early 1920s, which foreshadowed the disastrous ‘third period’ which emerged after 1928. In it, Lukács wrote: In such an atmosphere, charged as it is with mutual (and, I repeat, wholly justified) mistrust, the authority of the central committee can only be asserted – even superficially – on the basis of blind and slavish submissiveness. The more so since membership of the central committee was granted as a reward for services rendered in the faction fighting, with the result that most of its members do not occupy a position in the working class movement, either as theoreticians or as organisers, which would allow them to maintain their authority in any other way … There can be no doubt that such artificial and illegitimate cultivation of authority serves only to make the party bureaucracy even more hollow and soulless; it turns it into an office, with bosses and subalterns, not a communist organisation which is centralised but based on comradely cooperation … And since the excessive expectations which they [the bureaucratic leadership] have fostered cannot always be satisfied by promises and accusations, 30 31 32

Lukács 1983c, pp. 74–5. Lukács 1983c, pp. 76–7. Lukács 1983c, p. 77.

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sham results are necessary. And herein lies the greatest danger of the central committee’s organisational principles. Such an organisation is by its very nature susceptible to corruption.33 These lines are a testament to Lukács’s commitment to both realism and democracy. They also testify to Lukács’s nuanced approach to the party: far from seeing it as a saviour, he viewed it as an organisation marked by its birth in a reified and bureaucratic society. These lines clearly anticipate Lukács’s critique of bureaucracies and sects, which appeared in a more finished form in History and Class Consciousness. The approach that Lukács developed – in part in response to the practical questions facing the communist movement – flowed into his philosophy of praxis. Notwithstanding the evolution of his position, it is worth noting that in his ‘Gelebtes Denken – notes towards an autobiography’, Lukács repeats these themes, connecting them explicitly with his philosophical journey. He writes (in shorthand): Landler: the other stroke of luck in this transition. His personality. Its political impact on me. Once again, the living interaction between the individual and the general. Reality as principle (form Landler, the slogan of the Republic). Both together: in philosophy – search for totality; a generality which includes elements of particularity – historically (hence: in reality.)34 It is also worth noting that in these pages, Lukács explains his extraordinary debt to Gertrúd Bortstieber, his second wife, to whom History and Class Consciousness was dedicated. This acknowledgement, as well as Gertrúd’s positive influence on Lukács, are habitually overlooked. He describes the ‘spiritual bond’ that developed between them, suggesting that with her he had found genuine love for the first time in his life. Perhaps the key to this was Lukács’s deep admiration for Gertrúd: Ever since I first met G. the need to be approved of by her has been the central question of my personal life … My relationship with her differed from earlier ones in that I found these periods [of occasional estrangement] unbearable. (Previously such differences of opinion, even

33 34

Lukács 1972h, pp. 120–122. Lukács 1983b, p. 161.

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on humanly important issues, belonged to the charm of the relationship: the fact was that we were different people and differences of opinion were simply part of the attraction.) With G., too, I did not really think in terms of a total identification. It did not exist and could not be achieved without a distortion of the facts of the relationship. Rather, what was at stake was my need to fuse my intellectual and practical aspirations with the contemporary world situation in such a way as to make my efforts bear fruit (not just objectively and practically right, but also favourable to my personal development.)35 Later in the same notes, he describes Gertrúd as ‘… a synthesis of patience and impatience; great human tolerance combined with hatred of everything base’.36 Living with Gertrúd and her sister in Vienna gave Lukács a new appreciation for concrete ethics: ‘New attitude: hostile to ethics on Kantian lines; now, the alternatives no less rigorously formulated, but my inhuman tendency to an abstractly motivated inhumanity overcome …’37 Later, in the same notes, Lukács extensively praises Gertrúd’s intellect, noting her … irrepressible development in Vienna, … her study of Marx, never a beginner, at the heart of economic problems from the outset. Amazingly quick: accumulation (Luxemburg – Bauer – Bukharin). Even at that stage: an intimate knowledge of the most important problems of theory … Whereas I was often a bungling dilettante – she in fact achieved a grasp of the most crucial matters …38 Lukács thus credits Gertrúd’s love and intellectual partnership with allowing him to develop, both intellectually and with regards to his practical life, towards a concept of totality that preserved the particular in the universal. Or, as he wrote: ‘… the more the ontological element in my thought came to the fore, the more important it became to achieve a wholly authentic starting-point and attitude (mimesis never photographic): if a thing has true being, the authenticity of the subjective impulse must be present …’39 While this may appear a mere

35 36 37 38 39

Lukács 1983b, pp. 157–8. Lukács 1983b, p. 160. Lukács 1983b, p. 160. Lukács 1983b, p. 160. Lukács 1983b, p. 161. While these comments bear resemblance to Congdon’s analysis of Lukács life, they are not intended as a repetition of his argument. In fact, Congdon presents Lukács’s relationship with Gertrúd Bortstieber with a very different and, in my

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biographical note, there is more to it than that. As will be brought to light later, love plays a subterranean role in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, granting him personal (albeit unacknowledged and surely unconscious) access to the infinite, the new and thus to the shape of speculative thought which, after all, forms a circle. Lukács’s period of apprenticeship came to a definite close in 1923.40 This year was witness to two events which both announced Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to the world and which were to have enduring intellectual consequences. These were the First Marxist Work Week, held in Ilmenau, Thuringia and the publication of History and Class Consciousness.41 The former event will be commented

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view, mistaken emphasis. He asserts that in this relationship, Lukács found the ‘… identification with another that Lukács had been unable to effect with his mother, Irma or Ljena …’ (Congdon 1983, pp. 147–9). Congdon subsequently argues that on the basis of having overcome the alienation between a man and a woman, Lukács expected that the other antinomies, between life and work or between ought and is, might equally be transcended. Firstly, this mistakes a flat identity with the sublation of an antinomy. In fact, the achievement of a flat identity with the other is no overcoming of estrangement, but an extreme and unfree manifestation of it. Beyond this, however, Congdon’s reading asserts far too direct a link between Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and his romantic life. After all, one may well find reconciliation with an other in the personal sphere while living in an alienated world. Congdon’s reading, although occasionally insightful, is thus psychologically reductionist. Moreover, as has been quoted above, Lukács denied that any such flat identification took place; part of the basis for his love for Gertrúd was his respect for her independent intellectual, moral and romantic disposition. Similarly, he notes that during the 1920s, due to the demands placed on them by life, they experienced periods of time apart. So I propose that, following Hegel’s definition of love in The Philosophy of Right, Lukács’s love did not consist in a flat identification with the other (cf. Hegel 1991a, §. 7). Such a love would constitute, at any rate, a projection of one’s self onto the other and, therefore, a negation of both the self and the other. If anything, this tragic form of romantic love seems more characteristic of Lukács’s earlier relationships. In the 1920s, Lukács’s love (if his account is to be credited) involved the voluntary acceptance of the limitation of the other on his own subjective freedom. This gave him the gift of a greater and more concrete freedom; namely, the reconciliation between universality and particularity, experienced on a personal level. This is contested, not least of all, by the elder Lukács. A discussion on the debate over periodising Lukács’s career will follow shortly. For now, however, the assumption here is that by 1923, Lukács had developed a mature political and philosophical position. A number of commentators, including Löwy and Le Blanc, share this view (see Löwy 1979, Le Blanc 2013). It is often noted that History and Class Consciousness included a number of essays written prior to 1922. While this is true, the most dated of these were thoroughly revised. Moreover, the most important essays were written in 1922. Amongst these are ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ and ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisa-

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upon briefly below. For now, however, if the establishment of the Frankfurt School were the only achievement to Lukács’s name, he would still deserve celebration, notwithstanding his own dismal evaluation of the guests at the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’.42 History and Class Consciousness was, however, rather less successful. At the outset, Lukács was met with harsh censure and opprobrium. A broad and disreputable popular front formed. Its members included Karl Kautsky, in the name of Social Democratic orthodoxy, Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev representing the official Communist position and László Rudas (perhaps still bitter over the bribery affair) alongside his patron Béla Kun, representing the Hungarian incarnation of the communist orthodoxy. This popular front was bolstered by articles in Die Rote Fahne and even Pravda and was later given academic credibility by the ex-Menshevik Soviet philosopher Abram Deborin.43 The sordid tenor for this exercise in heresy hunting was set by Zinoviev in a June 1924 session of the 5th Congress of the Communist International when he introduced a session entitled ‘The Struggle against the “Ultra-Lefts” and Theoretical Revisionism’. Therein, he characterised Lukács (as well as Korsch and Fogarasi) as ‘an extreme left tendency growing into theoretical revisionism’, announcing that ‘This theoretical revisionism cannot be allowed to pass with impunity … If we get a few more of these professors spinning out their Marxist theories we shall be lost’.44 Although modesty confined Zinoviev’s goal to the political defeat of Lukács, his introduction set the tone for the reception of Lukács’s ideas in the communist movement. In fact, the themes that emerged in the 1920s critique of Lukács have resonated for almost a century.45 This debate was of very low quality. It speaks more to the hubris of offended orthodoxy and creeping bureaucratisation than to genuine philosophical issues.46 The twin criticisms of Lukács that emerged here were philosophical

42 43 44 45

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tion’. So, following Löwy, it is quite reasonable to say that History and Class Consciousness represented a new stage in Lukács’s thought, quite apart from his ultra-left years (Löwy 1979, pp. 172–3). Lukács 1971b, p. 22. Löwy 1979, pp. 168–9. Quoted in Arato and Breines 1979, p. 180. See, for example, Burkett or Fracchia who, although engaged in very different projects, repeat nevertheless familiar refrains (cf. Burkett 2013, Fracchia 2013). Andrew Feenberg has responded to these articles well and the debate need not be replayed here (see Feenberg 2015). Similarly, as John Rees points out, 1924 was the year in which Trotsky’s Left Opposition first came under open and sustained attack from the leadership of the Communist International (then led by Stalin and Zinoviev). The political climate, while not yet totalitarian, was rapidly degenerating into bureaucratic authoritarianism (Rees 2002, p. 17).

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and political. Philosophically, Lukács was accused of denying the dialectics of nature, of reducing nature to society, and of reducing society to knowledge and the idea. So, he was charged with idealism and of reversion to Hegel’s (alleged) position. Politically, Lukács was charged with subjectivism, voluntarism and ultra-leftism.47 Insofar as these criticisms of Lukács were articulated with more sophistication and less dogmatism in the decades following the 1920s, they will be discussed where relevant. History and Class Consciousness is, amongst other things, an attempted synthesis of philosophy and politics. The immediate goal of the work was to intervene in the political theory and practice of the European communist movement. Of course, theory and philosophy underpinned this intervention, but they were subordinated to the real, practical questions faced by the workers’ movement and the communist parties. Nevertheless, Lukács’s intervention failed. In no instance did a party – or even significant sections of a party – take up Lukács’s theory. Moreover, as Zinoviev was keen to ensure, this philosophy did him no favours in the inner-party struggle. Thus, for most of the twentieth century it appeared that following 1923 Lukács fell silent, leaving History and Class Consciousness to the proverbial gnawing criticism of mice. There is some truth in this: his only other published articles exploring philosophy in any depth in these years were a critique of Bukharin’s Historical Materialism, a review of a new edition of Ferdinand Lassalle’s letters and his essay ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics’.48 However, in 1996, the manuscript entitled Chvostismus und Dialektik (Tailism and the Dialectic) was discovered in the joint archive of the Comintern and the Central Party Archive of the CPSU. According to its references, László Illés (in an introduction to the Hungarian republication) infers that it was written between 1925 and 1926, and was most likely sent from Vienna to a department or editorial team in the

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Löwy’s discussion of the response to History and Class Consciousness in the 1920s is still the best summary of the controversy. This is in good part because he points out many of the connections between positions expressed in the 1920s and their more modern incarnations. Moreover, his treatment of the quite starkly contradictory criticisms that emerged is excellent. For example, on the one hand, ‘empiricist’ critics of Lukács, often social democratic in complexion, accused him of undervaluing the empirical consciousness of the proletariat, in the name of the party. On the other hand, ‘theoreticist’ critics, among whom Löwy sees Althusser as the most important, criticised Lukács for an approach to Marxism which took it to be an ‘expression’ of the working class (see Löwy 1979, pp. 176–7). Translations of the key documents in the 1920s Lukács debate are forthcoming in Historical Materialism, in 2020. These essays are collected in Lukács 1972k.

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Lenin Institute.49 This manuscript – which will be referred to by its published name, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness – was marked for possible destruction. We will never know whether the survival of the manuscript can be attributed to covert sympathy, malign preparation for future blackmail or denunciation or to simple bureaucratic inertia. Nevertheless, it is a gift that it survived. Later in life Lukács is not known to have mentioned or referred to its existence. The manuscript explicitly defends History and Class Consciousness against Abram Deborin and László Rudas, both rearticulating and deepening many of the themes in the original. This manuscript can leave absolutely no doubt that Lukács did not retreat philosophically or politically until sometime later than 1926, most likely following the defeat of the ‘Blum Theses’ at the 1929 congress of the Hungarian Communist Party. Prior to this, he did however change the focus of his intervention. While we cannot speculate as to why his defence of History and Class Consciousness went unpublished (was it his decision, or was the decision imposed by the Lenin Institute?) it is possible to say with confidence that Lukács continued to argue, politically, for the point of view he had expressed in 1923. Lenin – a Study on the Unity of His Thought is best assessed in this light. While this work is discussed in more detail in Part Two, it is worth pointing out here that although steeped in orthodox language, its dissident tone is distinctly audible to those whose ears are attuned. Amongst other things, in Lenin, Lukács advocates for party democracy and against the idea that the party is correct, by pure virtue of its possession of Marxist theory. He attacks the idea that it is the party which makes the revolution, insisting that this honour belongs to the proletariat. Moreover, he insists that the party can only win leadership of the class through a series of struggles in which it proves itself to the class. In this way, he overcomes what he identifies as the antinomy between Kautskyist and Luxemburgist approaches to revolution: while the former emphasises the role of the party (at the expense of independent action by the class), the latter emphasises spontaneous action by the class at the expense of the party. The key to Lukács’s overcoming of this antinomy is the actuality of revolution, which makes concrete leadership – leadership which is ‘only one step ahead’ – possible.50 Clearly, we see here antinomies with which Lukács struggled prior to writing History and Class Consciousness. His approach clearly opposes the bureaucratic voluntarist approach which predominated in the Comintern at the time. Equally, he emphasises the role of soviets – in an era in which the soviets

49 50

Illés 2000. Lukács 1967b, pp. 31–3.

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in Russia were virtually non-existent – and endorses Lenin’s own description of the USSR as a state capitalist economy.51 These were subversive points to make in 1924. Moreover, the whole work is situated in terms of the dialectic of theory and practice developed in History and Class Consciousness. Although far less laden with philosophical language, it is not difficult to read Lenin as a concrete and historical application of the conceptual dialectic Lukács had developed in the preceding years. Finally, by theorising Lenin, Lukács implicitly refused the cult of personality that was forming around him following his death. Consequently, it can well be said that Lenin remains one of the best and most democratic theorisations of Leninism produced to date. These details aside, the relevant biographical point is that following the very public critique of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács did not fall silent. Rather, he continued the polemic. When circumstance made it impossible or undesirable to continue a theoretical polemic, he fought on more explicitly political terrain. It would appear, moreover, that Lukács prioritised both organising and publishing in a Hungarian context.52 This strategy, while not successful, at least made him far less vulnerable to the charges laid against him by the anti-Lukács popular front. Moreover, this strategy fit logically with Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as he understood it (if not as it is outlined herein). Given his suggestion that philosophy is culminated logically by political praxis, it stands to reason that having completed the theoretical groundwork, Lukács shifted his attention to producing a situated theory of revolution based on the most (and only) successful instance of praxis available. At any rate, while some commentators detect a shift to the right in his writings from the mid 1920s, it is generally accepted that he did move to the right in the 1930s, following his withdrawal from active involvement in politics and his reluctant accommodation with the regime in Moscow.53 Yet this is beside 51 52

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Lukács 1967b, pp. 63–7, 75–6. Between 1925 and 1929, Lukács contributed articles to the European Communist press, to academic journals and to two Hungarian journals, Új Március and 100%, the latter of which he co-edited with Révai. For a collection of the most significant examples, see Lukács 1981. When writing in Hungarian, Lukács in these years often assumed a pseudonym. A full account of his political and philosophical evolution – to say nothing of his literary and aesthetic criticism – would need to take stock of this material as well as investigating Lukács’s political activities in the late 1920s. Such a research project would require scholars fluent in Hungarian and willing to undertake extensive archival research. Some commentators – notably Löwy – suggest a shift back towards more radical positions in his later years, following his involvement in the 1956 uprising in Hungary (Löwy 1979, pp. 208–13). This as-yet unexplored suggestion is beyond the scope of this study. Moreover, to explore it would require an exploration of Lukács’s later writings on literature, aesthetics, ontology and ethics.

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the point. For the purposes of this monograph, Lukács’s major writings from the period 1920 to 1929 will be considered as constitutive of his philosophy of praxis. This approach presupposes a periodisation of Lukács’s work which is neither original nor uncontroversial. The theoretical validity of such a periodisation will be proven in the course of the discussion that follows below. For now, what was unique about the decade of Lukács’s life spanning 1918 to 1929? Simply, these years were illuminated by the light of praxis. Lukács was there for its dawn, its noontide and its twilight. This praxis was political and revolutionary. More than anyone, Lukács expressed its philosophical truth. Although fear of fascism and desperation to remain within the party drove him to first disavow and later forget it, he left to posterity a remarkable body of work in which the light of praxis may still be glimpsed. Yet the significance of this work today is other than what was intended. While Lukács aimed his bow at political praxis, he shot too high, his arrow instead landing in philosophy. It is well that this was the case. Political praxis, after all, walks a slender and deeply contingent tightrope. In the 1920s, praxis first stumbled and then fell to its death, condemning Europe to Stalin and Hitler. Lukács was the prophet of this praxis and its fall signed the political death warrant for his 1920s philosophy. Perhaps a different Lukács may have chosen to work through the philosophical consequences of this. However, in choosing to disavow his work, Lukács once more left a part of himself lying with the fallen. But the work remained. So, the ghostlike spectre of Lukács in the 1920s was bound to his written word and was tasked with carrying the sacred remains of communist praxis to its midnight grave and, in so doing, he guaranteed its recollection for future generations. It is to this recollection that we now turn.

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Lukács and Marxian Philosophy of Praxis In the future, philosophy must permit itself to decay, to be transformed in principle, for as the poetry of art passed into the prose of thought, so must the philosopher step down from the heights of theory into the field of praxis. Practical philosophy, or more exactly stated, the Philosophy of Praxis, which would realistically influence life and social relationships, the development of truth in concrete activity – this is the overriding destiny of philosophy. August von Cieszkowski54

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Reproduced in Stepelevich 1974, p. 50.

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Georg Lukács may have been the most profound Marxian philosopher of praxis. However, he was neither the first nor was he to be the last. Indeed, philosophy of praxis is a diffuse and recurrent theme within Marxian thought. As a leitmotif, praxis was most likely introduced into modern Western philosophy by the Young Hegelian August Cieszkowski, whose work, in André Liebich’s words, ‘… marks a milestone in the development of thought from Hegel to Marx’.55 Although Friedrich Engels (and later, Alexander Herzen) claimed personal familiarity with Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena to Historiosophy, wherein his idea of praxis is first developed, Marx denied any such acquaintance. Instead, as Liebich suggests, it is probably Moses Hess who bears responsibility for communicating a notion of praxis to Marx.56 So, while praxis does not occur as a thematic term in Marx, it is not at all uncommon to view his early revolutionary writings – spanning the years 1844 to 1848 – as constituting a philosophy of praxis.57 Such famous declarations as ‘… one cannot transcend philosophy without actualizing it nor can one actualise philosophy without transcending it’, speak to this inheritance.58 Indeed, if it were necessary to choose a single foundational text for Marxian philosophy of praxis, the leading candidate would likely be the famous ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, with their emphasis on practical-critical activity and revolutionary practice.59 Nevertheless, as Adorno (among others) notes, the philosophical inspiration behind these theses receded to the background of Marx’s thought after 1848.60 Irrespective of whether it evidences an epistemological break or is merely indicative of a shift in emphasis, the fact remains that Marx’s interest in philosophy qua philosophy largely declined in his middle and later periods. And so in large part the approach to philosophy bequeathed to the 2nd International was defined by Engels; in particular, in his works Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, both of which announced the completion of philosophy by Hegel and its supersession

55 56 57

58 59 60

Liebich 1982, p. 14. Liebich 1979, pp. 14–15. This is in fact the argument that Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez makes in his book, The Philosophy of Praxis. In this work he argues that Marx’s philosophy of praxis culminates with The Communist Manifesto, which was his attempt to elaborate a unification – on the level of politics – between revolutionary theory and the practice of the proletariat (Sánchez Vázquez 1977, Ch. 3). Quoted in: Liebich 1979, p. 15. Marx 1969. Adorno suggests that Marx’s reticence to elaborate further a philosophy of praxis in his later years was, in fact, a crucial advantage, allowing him to produce the theoretical (but not practical or praxeological) breakthrough represented in Capital (Adorno 1998a, §. 14).

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by the workers’ movement.61 While Engels’s approach may have emphasised practice, he was insensitive to the richness, radicalism and deep immersion in philosophy in evidence in Marx’s early writing. Owing to Engels’ scientism and materialism and his comparatively dismissive attitude towards philosophy, he did not work with or make thematic a strong concept of praxis. Thus, it was left to Antonio Labriola to reintroduce the term philosophy of praxis into Marxian discourse in the latter part of the nineteenth century.62 This, in turn, allowed for the transmission of the term to Antonio Gramsci and possibly to Georg Lukács, although given the latter’s familiarity with German Idealism and the Young Hegelian movement, including Cieszkowski, it is impossible to determine where precisely he encountered the concept first.63 As much as it is cliché to say that praxis was in the air during the 1920s, it is apt. As Korsch famously pointed out in Marxism and Philosophy, the revolutionary wave of 1917–23 permitted avant-garde Marxist thinkers to reframe historical materialism once more in terms of praxis. Following his argument, the emphasis placed by theorists of the 2nd International on science, the economic forces of history and their diminution of Hegelian philosophy corresponded to a long period of stability and growth in both the capitalist system and the workers’ movement. Merleau-Ponty later made a similar observation, writing: ‘… dialectical and philosophical Marxism is suited to soaring periods, when revolution appears close at hand, while scientism predominates in stagnant periods, when the divergence between actual history and its immanent logic gets worse …’64 Hence, a more daring, activist and Hegelian Marxism took its inspiration from the wave of revolutions begun in 1917.65 So it was that immediately prior to the discovery and republication of Marx’s earliest writings, intellectual leaders like Korsch, Lukács and Gramsci were working, albeit in different ways, to reformulate historical materialism in terms strikingly similar to those with which Marx commenced his career. Thus, the 1920s saw the first major blossoming of the Marxian philosophy of praxis. If the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ and other early works by Marx are the founding texts of Marxian philosophy of praxis, then Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness is its cardinal text and the one most responsible for

61 62 63

64 65

Engels 1990a, 1989. Greene 2016–17. For Gramsci’s use of the term ‘philosophy of praxis’, see Section III of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971b, pp. 321–419). For a discussion of the meaning of this term in Gramsci’s work, see Haug 2000. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 64. Korsch 2008a.

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redirecting attention to this figure of thought. Indeed, the importance of History and Class Consciousness cannot be overstated. More than any Marxist work since Capital, it constituted a breakthrough whose echoes were destined to resound throughout the future of Marxist philosophy. However, as Russell Jacoby notes, History and Class Consciousness was categorised in the Soviet Encyclopaedias as part of the tradition (or, deviation) known as ‘Western Marxism’.66 This appellation was reconfirmed by Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 essay of the same title (which placed inverted commas around the word ‘Western’).67 MerleauPonty held History and Class Consciousness to be the central text of this tradition, as did Lucien Goldmann who broke ground in 1973 by suggesting that Heidegger’s Being and Time may be understood as a response to History and Class Consciousness.68 Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Lukács (further outlined in other essays which comprise Adventures of the Dialectic) stresses the democratic nature of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and is probably the most important single precedent for the interpretation proposed here.69 Despite the sophistication of so-called Western Marxism and the importance of Lukács’s work, neither found many sympathisers within the broader Marxist movement. Those few who did defend History and Class Consciousness initially either recanted or made wise strategic use of silence. As noted above, History and Class Consciousness was decisively rejected by those who upheld orthodoxy within the Comintern. Zinoviev’s words against Lukács and his co-thinkers, spoken at the 5th Congress of the Comintern, have already been quoted.70 So, Lukács’s rejection of naturalism (including the ‘dialectical’ variety), his critique of Engels and his emphasis on Hegel came to be viewed as capitulations to idealism, that grandfather of all 66

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Moreover, it can be argued – as Jacoby does – that despite clear overlapping, Western Marxism is a broader tradition than the philosophy of praxis. His book, The Dialectic of Defeat, is an invaluable guide to these issues (Jacoby 1981, p. 59). Merleau-Ponty 1973b. It may be speculated that Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman were responsible for the transmission of Lukácsian ideas to France. Jacoby suggests that their work La Conscience Mystifiée represents such a link. The absence of explicit references to Lukács therein may be explained by his then heretical reputation and Lefebvre and Guterman’s desire to appeal to an audience inclined more towards orthodoxy. This said, Jacoby also cites Guterman’s correspondence which suggests that he and Lefebvre were unaware of History and Class Consciousness in the 1930s, the period in which they were introducing Marx’s early work to French audiences (Jacoby 1981, p. 109; fn. 22). If this is indeed the case, the parallels between their work and Lukács’s are all the more remarkable. Goldmann 1977. Merleau-Ponty 1973a. For details, see Arato and Breines 1979, pp. 176–82.

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Marxian heresies.71 These sins were associated with his alleged ultra-leftism. Unsurprisingly, Social-Democratic aligned Marxists were equally sceptical of the apparent ultra-leftism and voluntarism associated with Lukács’s concept of class consciousness.72 Indeed, his only intellectual supporters of note in these years appeared to be Korsch and Bloch (both of whom reserved the right to disagreement) and his co-thinkers Béla Fogarasi and Jószef Révai. The parallels between Lukács and Korsch have been widely noted and questioned. Nevertheless, following the discussion at the First Marxist Work Week, Korsch was happy to declare, in an afterword to his major work from this period, Marxism and Philosophy: So far as I have been able to establish, I am happily in fundamental agreement with the themes of the author (Lukács), which relate in many ways to the question raised in this work, if based on a broader philosophical foundation. In so far as there are still differences of opinion between us on particular issues of substance and method, I reserve a more comprehensive position for a later discussion.73 While he would later distance himself somewhat more from Lukács, Korsch never produced a critique of the former, asserting as late as 1930 that they stood on the same basic side against Social Democratic and Communist orthodoxy.74 Bloch, for his part, was not drawn into the debate, although his review of History and Class Consciousness was both largely favourable and quite characteristic of his more expressionist approach to Marxism. His disagreement with Lukács was based on what he perceived as an overemphasis on political praxis, at the expense of religious, artistic or philosophical modes of praxis.75 Fogarasi does not appear to have published on Lukács in the 1920s. Later, he would recant and become a champion of Stalinist orthodoxy.76 Jószef Révai, with whom Lukács edited the Hungarian journal named 100 % in the late 1920s (which is, regrettably, as-yet untranslated) wrote one of the most interesting and perceptive early reviews of History and Class Consciousness. Fascinatingly and perhaps revealingly, Révai characterised Lukács’s theory of the proletariat

71 72 73 74 75 76

See Rudas 1924, Deborin 1924. See Marck 1924. Quoted in Haliday 2008, p. 15. Korsch 2008b, p. 103. Bloch 2019. See, for example Fogarasi 1959.

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as a mythology, but one necessary to communist revolution.77 Révai’s reading of Lukács will be discussed below. Regrettably, like Fogarasi, after the 1920s, Révai transformed himself into an upholder of Communist orthodoxy. The difference between his later and earlier selves was so extreme that it prompted Merleau-Ponty to speculate as to whether there in fact existed two Jószef Révais.78 Gramsci, despite mentioning Lukács in his prison notebooks, appears to have been unfamiliar with History and Class Consciousness. Although it cannot be proven, it is reasonable to assume that given both Gramsci’s highly qualified critique of Lukács on the topic of nature and how little nature is discussed in History and Class Consciousness, Gramsci was only familiar with it via Lukács’s detractors. The evidence we possess indicates that Gramsci had only read Lukács’s pre-1923 political articles, including those in Kommunismus and his critique (which Gramsci shared) of Bukharin’s textbook, Historical Materialism – a System of Sociology.79 Otherwise, one might have expected Marxists aligned with Trotsky’s Left Opposition to have evinced sympathy with Lukács, given their concurrent marginalisation following their rejection of Stalinism. Regrettably, it would appear that very few thinkers in this camp were familiar with Lukács. This may be, in part, due to Lukács’s scepticism regarding Trotskyism, which was in evidence even during the 1920s.80 It may also be explained by virtue of the progressive isolation of Trotskyism and its relatively early defeat in Germany, the country in which Lukács’s work was most widely known. After the 1940s, a few authors associated with Trotskyism accomplished the seemingly impossible when they produced writings on Lukács which outmatched the moral intensity and dogmatic orthodoxy of official Communist commentators.81 Of course, this should not be taken to imply that thinkers 77 78 79 80

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Révai 1971. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 70, fn. 21. Gramsci 1971b, p. 448. Despite the fascinating parallels and differences between the two, no in depth philosophical comparison has yet been produced. See, for example Lukács 1926b. Other works by Lukács from the 1920s disclose a somewhat more favourable attitude towards Trotsky’s own writings. (For example, see Lukács 2011). Hungarian writings by Lukács from the mid-to-late 1920s (including some which were penned by Lukács under a pseudonym) discuss Trotsky in more detail. However, due to the present unavailability of translations, it is impossible to pass judgement on these (see Lukács 1981). See, for example: Slaughter 1980, Nagy 1971/1972, 1972, 1972/3. This is not to suggest that the subgenre of Trotskyist polemics against Lukács is bereft of gems. A 1971 critique of Lukács by Rosemont, Schanoes and Manti stands as an eccentric masterpiece of surrealistTrotskyist vituperation. The adorable engravings of animals with which the facsimile is adorned are enough to make it worthwhile (see Rosemont, Schanoes, and Manti 1971).

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broadly associated with Trotskyism were uniform in their condemnation of Lukács. Löwy (mentioned above) as well as Rees and Perkins, as rather more heterodox Trotskyists, have all produced useful readings of Lukács which will be discussed in the course of this work.82 Interestingly, however, while at home with Lukács’s bolshevism, the heterodox Trotskyist responses to History and Class Consciousness (excluding Löwy’s) tend to be relatively philosophically illiterate. Of course, Lukács’s work profoundly impacted intellectuals working within a broadly Marxian framework but who remained unaligned with any party. Detlev Claussen, in his biography of Adorno, aptly described the First Marxist Work Week (in which Lukács participated) as: ‘… the most advanced intellectual debate about Marxism and revolution conceivable at the time’.83 This event, sponsored by Felix Weil (who also funded the publication of History and Class Consciousness), assembled the best and most critical theorists associated with the European left, including Korsch, Freidrich Pollock, Béla Fogarasi and Karl August Wittfogel. Famously, this event is credited as being that in which the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was first conceived. That Lukács’s work made a profound impression on the theorists associated with the Frankfurt School is beyond doubt. It is widely noted that prior to formulating his own distinctive approach, Adorno inhabited an ‘unorthodox Lukácsian’ worldview.84 Similarly, Marcuse made favourable reference to History and Class Consciousness in his 1930 review of Siegfried Marck’s The Dialectic in Contemporary Philosophy.85 Lukács’s impact was such that Gillian Rose has described his radical revaluation of the Marxian method as an ‘… invitation to hermeneutic anarchy’, allowing the most critical minds of the early twentieth century to free themselves from an increasingly hidebound tradition.86 Yet, despite their debt to him, the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School – primarily Adorno and Habermas – have criticised Lukács sharply and generally without firm textual basis. Worse still, the terms of their critique reproduced orthodoxies penned by Communist and Social-Democratic mediocrities. Their criticisms – which have been refuted extensively by Feenberg and Kavoulakos – will be discussed in the relevant sections of this work. Given all of this – as well 82 83

84 85 86

See Rees 1998, 2002, Perkins 1993. It is often asserted that the First Marxist Work Week took place in 1922. This is not correct, and appears to be based on a mistake in Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination. Credit for pointing out this discrepancy should go to Darren Roso (Claussen 2008, p. 83, Jay 1973, p. 5). Kavoulakos 2018a, p. 3. Marcuse 1976, p. 24. Rose 2009, p. 31.

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as what was said above, in the context of Lukács’s biography – one can hardly imagine a more brilliant, yet tragically-fated text than History and Class Consciousness. No doubt, in part due to the hostility with which Lukács and Korsch were met following the 1930s, the lines of development of the Marxian philosophy of praxis varied and diverged significantly. By the end of World War Two, Lukács himself had long since retreated from the position he outlined in the 1920s. In his autobiography, Lukács explains his retreat from political and philosophical writing as the price paid for the right to continue intellectual work. However, this should not be mistaken for evidence that Lukács retained his 1923 faith even in captivity. He was too rigorous and intellectually honest for such rearguard manoeuvres of the mind. Instead, he confronted the intellectual failure of his 1920s work honestly, in light of history as he lived it, drawing his own conclusions as to his mistakes. Later in life, he reflected upon the period between 1929 and 1933 as the years in which he finally cast off idealism and assimilated Marxism, via the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The self-criticism issued by the elder Lukács will be considered in due course; for now it is sufficient to note that it signalled his deprioritisation of the concept of praxis.87 This also raises the question of the periodisation of Lukács’s work, a topic of seemingly perennial interest. While this debate may appear more biographical than philosophical, it has always been a way of staking certain philosophical and political claims. This is natural given that few philosophers have so frequently and completely disavowed their own perspectives as did Lukács. Interestingly, many of Lukács’s critics have been unwilling to allow him this luxury. If one can prove that Lukács at his orthodox worst – say, in The Destruction of Reason – is the necessary result of Lukács at his best, his whole endeavour is undermined. Yet, even this text – known according to Adorno’s quip as the ‘destruction of Lukács’s own reason’ – has, in recent years, found its admirers.88 This aside, Arato and Breines and Martin Jay, amongst others, make cases for the overall continuity of Lukács’s work in order to criticise him.89 On the other hand, writers interested in defending Lukács’s work from the 1920s have found it more felicitous to establish clear boundaries between this and his earlier or

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88 89

Lukács 1983c, p. 81, 1967a, p. xxxvi. Tantalisingly, in the 1967 ‘Preface’ to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács refers to a lost manuscript of his that he wrote as he studied the 1844 Manuscripts. He describes it as a failure. Given the standard of Lukács’s self-described failures, this manuscript (were it discovered) would no doubt prove fascinating. Lukács 1980, Adorno 1991, p. 217, Aronowitz 2011. Jay 1984, Arato and Breines 1979.

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later periods. Paul LeBlanc and Michael Löwy amongst others, are in this category.90 Of course, there are exceptions: Frederic Jameson regards the whole of Lukács’s work sympathetically, as an evolving perspective dedicated to the exploration of narrative.91 All this noted, the debate over periodisation would appear to be a circuitous means of saying what one thinks. In order to avoid the risk of complicating a philosophical discussion with too much extraneous biographical and historical material or with endless comparisons between the themes in this or that period, this book proposes to side-step this ongoing debate. Nevertheless, the presupposition at play here is that while each subsequent period of Lukács’s work bears the mark of the one that preceded it, qualitative shifts are present. Of course, these shifts are prepared well in advance and, for better or worse, resolve dilemmas which are thematic in the preceding periods. After all, to a remarkable extent, Lukács wholeheartedly lived the philosophical categories with which his work was consumed. His epiphanies and moments of conversion are not merely biographical or psychological; they bear a philosophical significance that must be decoded. Nevertheless, the interpretive danger of deducing the necessity of later positions from earlier ones ought also to be avoided. Lukács’s decision to accommodate to the Stalinist regimes in the USSR and Hungary cannot be read simply as a necessary consequence of his 1920s position or of its failure. Indeed, this work will conclude by suggesting a number of disparate directions in which Lukács’s philosophy of praxis from the 1920s might develop; reconciliation under duress with Stalinism was only one. This said, the decision to focus on his 1920s period has not been made arbitrarily or out of convenience. Rather, as will be demonstrated by means of a close reading of Lukács’s texts from these years, a coherent and integral position can be discovered. Of what this consists will be briefly outlined in the methodological discussion immediately below. Of course, the ultimate proof of these presuppositions regarding periodisation can only be shown in the course of the exposition which follows. The other two 1920s philosophers of praxis fared little better post-war. Gramsci’s death at the hands of his fascist captors permitted more moderate and less praxis-oriented interpretations of his prison notebooks to predominate, at least until recently. Meanwhile, Korsch labouring in obscurity in America and supported by a meagre stipend provided by the Frankfurt School, placed greater distance between himself and the Lukácsian project. So, in the post-war

90 91

Le Blanc 2013, Löwy 1979. Jameson 1971, pp. 162–3; 2009, p. 202.

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years, philosophy of praxis found sympathisers elsewhere.92 Merleau-Ponty, whose work Adventures of the Dialectic forms part of the basis of the reading of Lukács presented here, has already been mentioned. Following the rise of the New Left, the journal Telos paid close attention to Lukács’s works and featured some of the most important scholarship thereon. Paul Piccone, Arato and Breines, Andrew Feenberg and James Schmidt were the most important contributors to this discussion. Their work will be discussed as it pertains to themes explored below. Sadly, other traditions and theorists rarely discussed Lukács in any depth. For those thinkers aligned to communist parties, it is likely this was because Lukács’s name still aroused suspicion. No doubt the extreme scarcity of copies of History and Class Consciousness, which was neither widely reproduced nor translated until the 1960s, contributed to its being misunderstood.93 Still, Lukács found a small number of defenders in the revolutionary left, of whom Michael Löwy is the most important. His intellectual biography of Lukács forms a key part of the basis of this account and will be referred to specifically in Chapter 4. Lukács’s student István Mészáros was also important in this period. While he is often associated with the Budapest School (mentioned below), his trajectory was rather different, as he left Hungary after 1956.

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Although they do not work primarily with concepts inherited from Lukács, one might include the Marxist humanist tradition, led by Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James or the French autonomist tradition, led in its early years by Cornelius Castoriadis, prior to his break with Marxism. The latter often refers favourably to Lukács in The Imaginary Institution of Society, although he is obviously not without his own criticisms (Castoriadis 2005, pp. 12, 13, 30, 52, 56, 132). Later, in the 1980s, the group known as the ‘Praxis School’, working in Yugoslavia and based around the journal Praxis, as their name might suggest, worked consciously within the philosophy of praxis, although again, they did not produce any major studies of Lukács’s philosophy. Praxis enjoyed a publishing run spanning just over ten years, between 1981 and 1993. Online archives can be accessed via the Central and Eastern European Online Library (see Various 2017). Karel Kosík, whose viewpoint was outlined in his magnum opus Dialectics of the Concrete, was also associated with philosophy of praxis (see Kosík 1976). In a very different context, the exiled Spanish philosopher, Adolfo Sánchez Vásquez also produced a book entitled The Philosophy of Praxis (see Sánchez Vázquez 1977). Of course, this is hardly an exhaustive list: it could easily be populated with a host of more minor or transitional figures. So far, no major studies have appeared discussing these thinkers in light of Lukács’s articulation of the philosophy of praxis. Finally, there are many theorists who have employed a concept of praxis without necessarily promoting it to paradigmatic position, including Benjamin, Lefebvre, Sartre, Arendt, Fromm, Friere, and others. Many more could be listed. Marshall Berman gives a good sense of the almost mythological status of History and Class Consciousness prior to its republication in his cheerfully named essay ‘Georg Lukács’s Cosmic Chutzpah’ (see Berman 1989).

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His 1972 book Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic remains one of the most perceptive on the topic. This work is useful, in particular, as a defence of Lukács against both his own self-criticism and against some of his detractors associated with the journal Telos. Students of the elder Lukács (collectively known as the Budapest School), amongst whom are included Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus and Mihály Vajda, maintained an interest in Lukács’s ideas. This group forms one of the more important intellectual trends within post-war critical theory. Exiled from Hungary, most members of the Budapest School settled in Australia and contributed to founding the journal Thesis Eleven, based at La Trobe University, in Melbourne.94 While their renewed engagement with Lukács’s work, which combined sympathetic appreciation with criticism, contributed to opening a new space for discussion of Lukács in the West, outside of a few articles that will be considered as part of broader discussions, the Budapest School did not theorise on the basis of Lukács’s 1920s philosophy of praxis.95 It may also be argued that the Frankfurt School – broadly considered – operated on the basis of a problematic inherited from History and Class Consciousness. Yet, as Andrew Feenberg has convincingly argued, with the partial exception of Marcuse, the theorists associated with the Frankfurt School clearly and decisively moved away from philosophy of praxis.96 Recently, Axel Honneth has attempted to rehabilitate Lukács’s concept of reification, albeit in a

94

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This is, coincidentally enough, totally unconnected to the sequence of events and interests that brought me to my interest in Lukács and to the doctoral research, undertaken at La Trobe University, which forms its basis. This was for a number of reasons. Firstly, they largely agreed with the elder Lukács’s selfcriticism (which will be disputed in Part One). Similar to Mészáros, they also believed that while the critique of reification held enduring value, the framework outlined in History and Class Consciousness had collapsed by the end of the 1920s. Simply put, they agreed with the widely accepted view that the proletariat was no longer the bearer of the historic mission inscribed to it by Marx. They consequently saw no point in preserving the standpoint of the proletariat, or related concepts. Additionally, owing to this, as well as their experience as dissident Marxists in the Eastern Bloc, they were neither interested in nor sympathetic towards Lukács’s interpretation of Leninism. Nor did they desire to produce an immanent critique of these views, as this work does. Indeed, Fehér explicitly criticised the Leninist aspect of Löwy’s treatment of Lukács in an otherwise positive review of his book Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (see Fehér 1981). For one article by Ferenc Fehér relevant to Lukács’s 1920s period, see Fehér 1979. Also see Lukács Revalued, edited by Agnes Heller, which contains the above essay, among others. These essays are less directly related to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, although they do shed light on his thought as a whole (Heller 1983). Feenberg 2014.

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drastically modified form. This has been sharply and decisively criticised by Kavoulakos.97 While Honneth will be mentioned briefly in Part One, it is worth noting that he makes no claim to philosophy of praxis, Marxian, Lukácsian or otherwise. So, it would appear that Andrew Feenberg (whose PhD thesis, supervised by Herbert Marcuse, formed the basis for his 1986 book Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, republished and updated in 2014 as The Philosophy of Praxis) and Kostantinos Kavoulakos (whose work Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis appeared in 2018) are the remaining major representatives of a philosophy of praxis directly derived from Lukács.98 Both authors (especially Kavoulakos) clearly and perceptively foreground Lukács’s neo-Kantian influences and inheritances, proving simultaneously that there is yet more to be discovered in Lukács and that Lukács may yet speak to the concerns of our world. To Kavoulakos, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis – reconstructed and defended against the egregious misreading of Adorno and Habermas – may serve as no less than the foundation for newly radicalised critical theory and a dialecticalpractical theory of modernity.99 On the other hand, despite his disagreements with Lukács (which are, when compared to the literature, of a considerably higher standard), Feenberg holds Lukács’s articulation of the philosophy of praxis to be the decisive one in that it clarifies the essential contours of the concept. As Feenberg writes of Lukács, ‘… in his writings the structure of this figure of thought [praxis] becomes clear’.100 Notwithstanding the modifications Feenberg wishes to make to Lukács (which will be discussed in due course), he regards the latter as the most radical and appropriate foundation for a revitalised and contemporary philosophy of praxis.101 97 98

99 100 101

Kavoulakos 2018b, pp. 141–50. Feenberg 1986, 2014; Kavoulakos 2018b. The most recent major publication concerning Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is Richard Westerman’s Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism. Westerman’s work proposes to read Lukács through the lenses of neo-Kantianism, twentieth century phenomenology and Lukács’s ‘Heidelberg Aesthetics’ (see Westerman 2018). At the time of completing this manuscript, Westerman’s book had not yet been released. As a result, it will not be discussed. Instead, this work will be considered in a special edition of Thesis Eleven, edited by the author of the present work and due for publication in 2019, dedicated to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Kavoulakos 2018b, p. 2. Kavoulakos’ work also stands as a superbly useful guide to the German discussion of Lukács, which is considerable, both in terms of its depth and radicalism. Emphasis in original. Feenberg 2014, p. xiv. The decision to foreground Feenberg and Kavoulakos should not occlude other writers who have contributed to a renaissance of interest in Lukács. Partial evidence of such a renaissance may be found in two volumes of essays on Lukács published in 2012. These contain a number of essays, some of which are relevant to the task at hand. These will

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These observations, in addition to the brief biographical narrative presented above, serve as a provisional justification for regarding Lukács as the definitive, if not final, proponent of Marxian philosophy of praxis. Nevertheless, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis will be the object of this study – not Marxian philosophy of praxis in general. Still, if the work of reconstruction and critique undertaken herein is successful, the implication that it has relevance to philosophy of praxis in toto is readily admitted, even if such a claim cannot possibly be substantiated thoroughly in the course of a focused monograph such as this.

3

Reading Lukács Speculatively … the method is nothing but the structure of the whole in its pure essentiality … this nature of scientific method is inseparable from the content … it determines its rhythm by way of itself and it has, as has already been noted, its genuine exposition in speculative philosophy. G.W.F. Hegel102

When one embarks on a serious study of any historically significant philosopher, one encounters a vast accumulation of objective culture. Documents, commentaries and artefacts, whose volume increases every year, compete for attention. A Lukács scholar is somewhat fortunate in this regard; mastering the wealth of knowledge necessary to understand him is, at this stage, a large task, but at least an achievable one. Marx scholars, for example, are not so fortunate – to say nothing of those working in other fields that do not possess the luxury of allowing one to focus on a single thinker. At the same time, today’s reader of Lukács is confronted by a historical distance of one hundred years. Given the extent to which modernity speeds the passage of time, this is a considerable abyss to be bridged. Yet, distance also has its advantages. Many of the active political hostilities and loyalties that informed the discussion in the twentieth century are long dead. The question must be asked, however, what remains of Lukács? Or, more luridly, how may one bring these remains to life, so they may speak to us? Further, presuming that Lukács has something to say that has not already been said, by what means can we induce his literary remains to part with their undivulged secrets? Or conversely, presuming that

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be discussed in their place, below (see 2012a, 2012b). The author of the present work has discussed these volumes elsewhere (Lopez 2015). Hegel 2018, §. 48, 57.

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one has something to say about Lukács that has not already been said (preferably something that matters), how should one go about saying it? These are essentially methodological questions. At their core is a specific relationship between subject and object, in this case, between the critic and the body of work being criticised. Speculative criticism desires to produce an account from a perspective which unites these poles, intellectually. One strategy for mediating this contradiction – perhaps the least interesting – is that of simple textual comparison. What Lukács actually said is compared to what people say that he says. This strategy reifies the text as much as the critic. Whether or not one vindicates Lukács or his critics depends purely on which quotations are chosen, how they are arranged and how they are translated. Such an apparently objective method conceals arbitrary subjective choice; after all, who chooses which quotes are arranged and how? Moreover, such a procedure either presumes that the work of one philosopher alone is true – in which case its simple and immediate truth must be defended from those who would, for nefarious reasons, do it harm – or the critic simply aims at ‘making a contribution’. The latter path, which is obviously more popular, conceals arbitrariness with false modesty. If one is simply making a contribution, to whom is it made and after how many contributions may we expect the truth to emerge? Or, is the process itself the goal? In this case, the endless chatter of commentary endlessly defers the emergence of something that’s true – but of course, progress, endless progress, is made! Better, then, to acknowledge the critical perspective/s with which one reads. Yet this raises further questions. How ought we combine different viewpoints? Arithmetic approaches reduce philosophy to a recipe. Take some of what Lukács said (discarding those parts which are old-fashioned). Add a cup of Marcuse and Adorno, a half-litre of New Left cultural criticism and a pinch of passing intellectual fashion. Filter out the Leninism. Finally, bake in an academic publisher and serve at an academic conference, with cream or ice cream. Sadly, however, philosophy is not a cake. To be fair, some cakes taste better than others. Yet it would be a strange turn of fate were the truth to be discovered as the by-product of an amalgam. Indeed, this method threatens to disavow the creative work of the theorist. Against this, one may be tempted to take refuge in perspective. In place of an amalgam, this approach to criticism is appropriative. Thus, one may read Lukács from the perspective of orthodox Marxism, existentialist philosophy, deconstructivism, feminism or even (probably) post-colonial theory. Whether one looks down from the lofty logical and linguistic heights of analytic philosophy or up from the subterranean depths of psychoanalysis, it is justified on the dual grounds of novelty and interest. Without further justification, such approaches conceal the dogmatism of arbit-

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rary preference and in so doing, they simply appropriate the object of criticism to a worldview that has already been chosen in advance. Theory becomes an artist’s palette with which to paint – starkly or subtly – an abstract picture of one’s soul, of course, qua the philosopher and viewpoint of one’s choosing. This is a cheap way to produce novelty and, occasionally, deeply penetrating flashes of insight. But it is not rational. This is because the produced unity of subject and object is one sided; it is no deep interpenetration. Moreover, because the critic here wears masks, there is no genuine dialogue; an aspect of the subject is concealed. Instead, speculative criticism demands immanence; namely, that the body of work – the object – be made receptive to the reading proposed. This equally forces the critic to justify their perspective, in light of the object of criticism. As a final example, a genealogical or historicist approach is superior. Here, the critic reconstructs Lukács in light of hitherto occluded influences and themes, tracing a thread back in time, so to speak. The theorist becomes an archaeologist, conducting a dialogue with the past by way of previously mute or forgotten texts, influences, events and interpretations. This approach is capable of generating both a wealth of insight and a recollection of Lukács’s stature in the face of those vandals who would sack the monuments to his memory. However, the dangers of this approach are twofold. Firstly, it also risks the presumption of an impartial vantage point. After all, what is it about our present that makes a genealogical or historicist method possible? Secondly, a toohistorical reading either transforms the object of inquiry into a curiosity or, paradoxically, risks detaching the object of study from its historical period, as though all that is required for Lukács to live again is that we re-trace his every intellectual influence and footstep. An excess of genealogy renders each subsequently discovered influence less meaningful. An excess of history devalues history by supposing that we may ever know a passed historical period fully. One may just as well try to rewrite Don Quixote word for word. How, then, are these pitfalls (not that this list is exhaustive!) to be avoided? In reconstructing Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as a historical-conceptual totality, this study proposes to adopt a method which is deeply grounded, in the first place, in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis itself. This method – which, following Hegel’s words reproduced at the beginning of this section, cannot be separated from its content – is central both to the critique of Lukács presented herein as well as the claim that I make to originality. In the most succinct reflection, I propose to read Lukács on the basis of what he calls the unity of genesis (which, as we will see, is history understood in light of its conceptual movement) and logic (namely, in light of a system of dialectically interrelated categories). That is, I propose to read Lukács simultaneously from within his

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system and from the standpoint of speculative philosophy. In what follows, this method will be outlined in its essentialities and justified on the basis of Lukács’s writing and in counterposition to other interpretive methods. In addition, an outline of the structure of this study will be given. This is necessary because – as Hegel notes – the method is the essential structure of the whole. Nevertheless, it is important to note that this introduction is not intended as a discussion of Lukács’s method as such (which will commence in Chapter 1 and proceed throughout). Rather, the aim here is to state the essence of the method of criticism that Lukács himself proposed and that will, in turn, be brought to bear on Lukács himself. In short, the first task is to uncover an immanent starting point. In addition to Lukács, this study draws on the speculative philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, specifically as expressed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic and the Philosophy of Right.103 Where appropriate, direct references to Hegel (be they methodological or in content) will be noted either in the text or in footnotes. I maintain that this does not violate the requirements of an immanent reconstruction and critique; it does not supplant Lukács’s method of reading with one derived externally to his theory. Lukács opened the door to Hegelian philosophy, and in so doing, he granted us the choice of whether to walk through that door. Or, in more philosophical language, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis possesses the shape of speculative philosophy, even if this was not clear to Lukács himself. Hegel already exists within Lukács, making it quite rational to read Lukács with Hegel. This is sufficient justification for drawing on speculative philosophy explicitly. Given these points, a separate discussion of Hegel would, however, be a distraction. Similarly, wherever other theorists or philosophers are introduced, their appositeness, by virtue of a conceptual connection with this or that element of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, will be made clear. In History and Class Consciousness, in the essay ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’, Lukács briefly outlines his interpretation of Marx’s and Luxemburg’s approach to criticism. He observes that when Marx criticised Ricardo and when Luxemburg criticised economists associated with the 2nd International, they did so on the basis of both totality and history.104 This is to say, unlike those theorists they criticised, Marx and Luxemburg did not seek to produce universally applicable economic formulae, or even formulae applicable to capitalism in general. Rather, they grasped the systematic and totalising logic of capitalism

103 104

Hegel 2018, 1991c, a. Lukács 1967a, pp. 29–33.

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in the context of the historical situation in which they found themselves. Thus, their criticism united totality and history. This allowed Marx and Luxemburg to comprehend the extent to which their rivals’ theories unknowingly hypostatised their own historical time in a reified logical system. In this sense, Lukács argues, Marx and Luxemburg were capable of perceiving aspects of their rivals’ thought of which the latter were themselves unaware. A few pages later, Lukács calls this the ‘literary-historical’ approach and identifies it once more in Lenin’s State and Revolution. He writes: To ensure that the problems under consideration will arise before us dialectically, they [Lenin and Luxemburg] provide what is substantially a literary-historical account of their genesis. They analyse the changes and reversals in the views leading up to the problem as it presents itself to them. They focus on every stage of intellectual clarification or confusion and place it within a historical context conditioning it and resulting from it. This enables them to evoke with unparalleled vividness the historical process of which their own approach and their own solutions are the culminations.105 As Lukács goes on to clarify, this approach differs to those which separate theory from history. It is neither a purely historical treatment, nor is it a purely theoretical one. Nor is this approach an amalgam of history and theory (after the fashion of intellectual history). Rather, the literary-historical method of criticism unites theory and history – or, to use the terms I referred to above and that Lukács develops in the course of his discussion of German Idealism – logic and genesis. Later in the 1920s, in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács further explains the utility of this method. The context is a discussion of debates over the failure of revolution in Hungary and Europe more broadly. In this discussion, Lukács rejects two points of view: the first which attributes failure to insufficiently developed objective circumstances, and the second which attributes failure to insufficiently developed subjective factors, including class consciousness. He argues that a correct political analysis transcends the immediacy of a given situation by perceiving the potential for action in an objective and empirically given class position. Thus, to blame objective circumstances or the immaturity of the proletariat for the failure of revolution is, in fact, to confess to an insufficient analysis. In contrast, revolutionary theory is tasked with

105

Lukács 1967a, p. 35.

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penetrating the immediacy of a given conjuncture by discerning the objective possibility for class struggle within it. The test for such theory is, of course, practical. However, Lukács makes the point that the difference between an incorrect and a correct view ‘… lies in the extent to which each is a deep or superficial, dialectical or mechanical, practical and critical or fetishistically ideological analysis of the objective social being, whose product they both are. At first glance they [a correct and incorrect theory] appear similar. Their difference only becomes noticeable when this immediacy is surpassed’.106 While in active, present-day politics the difference between a fetishistic and a true view is tested in practice, with respect to existent theories, the difference may only be assessed retrospectively. History itself stands as a judge of any given theory; history itself bears witness to whether ‘… the objective forms of mediation that remain hidden in a consciousness trapped in immediacy are penetrated’.107 Should a theory be proven to be incorrect, however, the verdict is not merely that it was wrong. Rather, history does violence to incorrect theory. Insofar as a higher theoretical vantage point is possible, it is thus a position from which to explain the incorrectness of the lesser vantage point in terms unavailable to the latter. As Lukács writes: ‘This is why a correct theory is not only able to refute a false one, but is also in a position to point to those moments of existence that spawn the incorrect theory. It can point out those moments that representatives of the incorrect theory adopted with unanalysed immediacy and then generalised in a correspondingly abstract way’.108 This study proposes to apply the literary-historical method of reading, which unites logic and genesis, to Lukács himself. After all, Lukács declared that ‘Historical materialism both can and must be applied to itself’.109 His own articulation of historical materialism is surely not exempted from this requirement. This might appear to imply the possession of an external and historically higher vantage point than that which is present in Lukács’s work. On one level, this is undeniable; to write about Lukács in 2019 surely gives one access to a certain advantage or two that Lukács himself did not enjoy. Yet, the inorganic introduction of new vantage points – if not impossible to exclude entirely – is to be avoided and regarded as irrational. Groundless presuppositions distract from a literary-historic critique and contradict the goal of reading Lukács immanently and as a conceptual totality. Andrew Feenberg’s work is an example of the price 106 107 108 109

Lukács 2002, p. 71. Lukács 2002, p. 71. Lukács 2002, p. 71. Lukács 1967a, p. 228.

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paid for indulging in such license. Although Feenberg’s philosophy of praxis is based partly on Lukács’s, he develops a different approach to philosophy of praxis which synthesises Marcuse and Adorno, as well as other theorists. While Feenberg locates the ground for his viewpoint as the post-1968 historical period, insofar as he criticises Lukács, he simply suggests that history proved Lukács wrong. Amongst other things, he notes that the proletariat failed its historic mission and the Soviet Union degenerated bureaucratically.110 While these facts are undeniably true, they imply that history – in the 1920s – possessed a content which Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was incapable of grasping. For Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to be mistaken about the proletariat is not some simple error that can be easily cordoned off; if he was mistaken, the consequences must be fatal for the theory and must result in an aspect of the theory which is ideological and mystifying. This represents the revenge of uncomprehended history on a wrong theory. Feenberg, however, does not pursue this line of criticism. Lukács’s overestimation of the proletariat is treated as incidental. Instead, Feenberg prefers to modify Lukács’s philosophy to fit the needs he perceives in his own time. Modifying a dialectical philosophy is not the same as replacing a broken guitar string; a change to any essential part must result in a change to the whole. So, Feenberg’s approach leaves unanswered questions about Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. After all, a theory cannot be true outside of or against history, least of all a theory which aims at unity with history itself. If history passes a negative judgement on a theory, then only two options are presented: either the theory is upheld against history, or the theory itself must be said to have failed to penetrate the immediacy of its time. The former path leads to a sectarian hypostatisation of theory against history, the latter demands an immanent critique in order to discern the aporias and crises of the theory in question. Thus, if Lukács’s critical method, outlined above, is to be followed, it is necessary to determine the extent to which Lukács’s philosophy of praxis hypostatises and mythologises the historical period in which he found himself. A historical critique of Lukács only half satisfies this task while an extrinsic critique merely counterposes one theory to another. Instead of these options, what is demonstrated here is the inner, logical limit to Lukács’s philosophy. So, we will inhabit Lukács’s philosophy of praxis in order to demonstrate the immanent logical necessity of its breakdown in the face of history. As confessed above, the hindsight of one hundred years is an advantage when judging

110

Feenberg 2014, pp. 81–2, 153. Feenberg’s critique of Lukács will be dealt with in greater detail and subjected to criticism primarily in Part Three.

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anyone. Moreover, the idea that one can ever fully or absolutely inhabit the thought of a theorist, or even a text, is absurd. Such assumptions transform dead philosophers and their texts into graven images or idols of gold and wood whose splendour rapidly accumulates dust and whose value – as Jeremy’s epistle to his stiff-necked people on the eve of their exile correctly warns them – is lower than that of animals who can at least move under their own will.111 So, the idea of a reading which maintains absolute fidelity to Lukács is rejected as impossible and prima facie ridiculous and ideological. There is, after all, a space and tension between every reading and the text being read. However, if this appears to imply a kind of Kantian paradox, in which a reading infinitely approximates a theorist or text which becomes a kind of ‘thing-in-itself’, this is not my intention. Rather, the gap between interpretation and text will be bridged by, in the first place, the illumination of an existing philosophical position within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis which allows for the dialectical transcendence of that philosophy. Thus, the standpoint of the interpretation will be discovered in the text itself; an apparent chasm becomes an immanent hermeneutic. This approach displays a respectful attitude towards the text in question by explicitly acknowledging the creative work of interpretation. Precisely by locating a standpoint within Lukács from which I may consider his philosophy, I place myself in dialogue with Lukács while, at the same time, refraining from imposing my arbitrary preferences or views. This corresponds to the moment of unfreedom and submission in one’s relation to an other. Yet, if successful, this ought to reveal – as Lukács demands above – those aspects of his philosophy which hypostatise or mythologise its historic context. Once more, this will be achieved not by means of an extrinsic critique, but by close attention to his writings, both in terms of their logic (their totality) and genesis (their inner historical-conceptual development). To put the same point slightly differently, the ultimate contention of this book is that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is in itself capable of sustaining a higher truth than it possesses for itself. Lukács’s philosophy was more radical and dangerous than he or his enemies knew, although their reaction surely indicated an apt, instinctive fear. However, to overcome the divide between 111

‘Now shall ye see in Babylon gods of silver, and of gold, and of wood, borne upon shoulders, which cause the nations to fear. Beware therefore that ye in no wise be like to strangers, neither be ye afraid of them, when ye see the multitude before them and behind them, worshipping them. But say ye in your hearts, O Lord, we must worship thee … Yet cannot these gods save themselves from rust and moths, though they be covered with purple raiment. They wipe their faces because of the dust of the temple, when there is much upon them … The beasts are better than they: for they can get under a covert, and help themselves’ (Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Baruch: 6:4–6, 12–13, 68).

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the in itself (i.e., a philosophy’s deeper significance) and the for itself (i.e., the superficial and self-aware truth of a philosophy) within a philosophical viewpoint, both sides must be revealed and subjected to the critique of the other. The unconsciousness of the for itself and its resultant aporias and crises must be brought to light; the dead end and self-contradiction that Lukács encountered theoretically must be demonstrated. Similarly, the in itself of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, as it is made clear for us (note well the intervention of this third term, mediating between the first two) must be shown to generate a higher and more self-conscious position which may reflect back on the philosophy as a whole, recollecting and overcoming it. By virtue of its greater self-consciousness, this higher position dialectically negates the content of the in itself which was its foundation. This is to say, the ground for a higher philosophical viewpoint must be demonstrated in Lukács, not just positively, but negatively, by applying this view itself to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Lukács must be turned against himself. Precisely what this higher viewpoint consists in will be outlined shortly. There is, however, more to be said on methodology. Reading Lukács according to the method he discovered in Marx, Luxemburg and Lenin, requires that his philosophy be read as a conceptual totality. To read Lukács conceptually means to read his philosophy in terms of its concepts which, although based in history, enjoy a universality which allows them to transcend their immediate concrete context.112 After all, History and Class Consciousness was immediately intended to effect a political transformation within the Third International. To this end, Lukács proposed to re-establish bolshevism on an entirely new theoretical basis. While the Russian Revolution, and to some extent, the failed European Revolutions, were the empirical-historical referents for this project, Lukács believed that Marxism could be placed on a more rigorous methodological foundation by situating his articulation of Leninism in explicitly philosophical terms and by reconnecting Marxism with its Hegelian roots. So, following the conceptuality of Lukács’s work, the intention here is neither to produce a historical reading nor an intellectual biography – tasks which have already been accomplished more than adequately. Rather, the overarching aim is to grasp the meaning of Lukács’s concept of praxis. Of course, it is impossible to abstract this concept from concrete history, especially given that history (meant in a variety of senses) plays such an important role in the development of praxis as Lukács understands it. As Chapter 9 112

The same might be said, for example, of Marx’s Capital. While it bears a relationship with history (and reproduces moments in the history of the development of capitalism), its unity and coherence are conceptual, not empirical or historical (Marx 2011).

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will argue, the chasm between philosophy and history entails potentially fatal consequences for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Nevertheless, it will be shown that Lukács’s work is best read as a conceptual reflection on history. So, as a philosophical reconstruction of Lukács, priority is given to Lukács’s conceptuality. This point becomes especially important when, for example, the empirical consciousness of the proletariat is discussed. Many commentators have misread Lukács on precisely this point. For instance, Arato and Breines argue that Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness necessarily results in an unbridgeable gulf between the party (the possessor of imputed class consciousness) and the empirical consciousness of the class. Empirically, this gulf did exist objectively in any number of historical situations.113 However, Arato and Breines (alongside many others) argue that in light of this gulf, Lukács substituted philosophy, and ultimately, the party, for the proletariat. However, if we read Lukács’s terms ‘empirical class consciousness’ and ‘imputed class consciousness’ conceptually, as a framework within which the theorist might perceive and comprehend the situation of the proletariat, then their meaning changes. No longer do these terms make impossible demands on reality or theory; rather, they orient theory towards reality in order that the immanent mediations in reality themselves might be grasped. Indeed, a careful reading of Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness reveals that he was well aware of the abstraction and one sidedness of the theory of even the best and most democratic party. Thus, the concept of imputed class consciousness itself demands concretisation by way of a sociological and historical analysis of and intervention into any given conjuncture. Insofar as theory is embodied in a party which is capable of intervening, the concept of empirical class consciousness is intended to aid in the development of this empirical consciousness towards class consciousness. This point – which Merleau-Ponty perceives with admirable and unsurpassed clarity – will be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. It could be suggested that a conceptual reading runs the risk of eclecticism or of concealing an all-too subjective interpretation. So, to read Lukács’s philosophy of praxis both conceptually and immanently demands that it also be read as a theoretical totality, in which the parts are illuminated by and organically give rise to the whole. Here, Hegel’s words in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit are apt:

113

Arato and Breines 1979, p. 155. Arato and Breines’ critique will be discussed in more detail below.

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The truth is the whole. However, the whole is only the essence completing itself through its own development. This much must be said of the absolute: It is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth. Its nature consists precisely in this: To be actual, to be subject, that is, to be the becoming-of-itself.114 Applied to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, these words give rise to three interrelated claims. The first claim is that the specific concepts which make up Lukács’s philosophy of praxis – including reification, imputed class consciousness, theory, praxis and so on – can only be understood in relation to the theoretical totality to which they contribute. Any attempt to separate these concepts from their context does violence not only to the whole, but to the concepts themselves. Axel Honneth presents us with a recent example of such an eclectic reading. He attempts to salvage Lukács’s concept of reification stripped of its sociological, political and even ontological content and proposes a rereading in which reification refers to pathological modes of intersubjectivity; to failures or forgetting of recognition.115 Drawing on Kavoulakos, Chapter 2 will develop an account of Lukács’s theory of reification at odds with Honneth’s (and others’) selective reading. Suffice to say, the approach proposed here is consciously in opposition to one sided readings which might cherry-pick ideas or concepts from Lukács while at the same time excluding, for example, his theory of revolution, the standpoint of the proletariat or his broader critique of philosophy. It will be argued that such attempts, whatever the virtues of the theoretical enterprises with which they are associated, generally result in a formalistic or sterile reading of Lukács. The second claim promised above, which follows from the first, is that Lukács’s concepts organically and logically interrelate to each other. Indeed, Lukács’s philosophy from the 1920s ought to be read in light of its inner dynamism, as something like a phenomenology of praxis.116 The starting point for the conceptual progression (and therefore, for Part One), is also the starting point for History and Class Consciousness: namely, Lukács’s critique of empiricist social theories, associated with 2nd International Marxism, which unconsciously reflect the immediacy of bourgeois society. The refutation of these

114 115 116

Hegel 2018, §. 20. Honneth 2008. Although Westerman also refers to Lukács’s work as a phenomenology, he has in mind the phenomenological school associated with Husserl. Gillian Rose is to be credited with noticing the phenomenological (in the Hegelian sense) aspect of Lukács’s presentation (Rose 2009, p. 218).

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theories reasserts the importance of the dialectical method which, for Lukács, consists in four terms: mediation, totality, genesis and praxis. This dialectical method, in addition to powering Lukács’s critique, reveals the social ground underpinning the empiricist theories he critiques; that is, it comprises what has been termed a ‘metacritique’. Yet, to be consistent, this metacritique must identify its own social grounds via the analysis and critique of the immediacy of capitalist society itself. The point is, then, that Lukács’s method, as immediate and unreflected upon method, is itself abstract and formal. In order to attain the concreteness it demands from other philosophies and to satisfy its own aspiration, method must give way to content – namely, Lukács’s critique of the formalism of a reified society. This, in turn, gives rise to Lukács’s account of the social totality, and so on. A summary of the structure of this book will be provided shortly. The point for now is that it aims at reconstructing Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as an immanent and hierarchical conceptual progression in which his methodological terms, and ultimately his concept of praxis, attain depth and richness. Thus, this reconstructive method precludes critiques which take aim at any one concept or idea within Lukács. For example, the elder Lukács’s self-critique, which accuses his younger self of having conflated reification with objectification and of lacking a concept of labour, has been quite influential. Whatever the merits of the elder Lukács’s framework as a whole, by taking aim at one concept within his earlier philosophy of praxis, even such a central one, he denies himself the opportunity to comprehend and criticise his younger position holistically or accurately. So, the elder Lukács’s self-criticism will be refuted in Chapter 2. As a further example, the same basic problem characterises Meyers’s account of Lukács. His defence of Lukács’s theory of soviet democracy is admirable and will be mobilised against those thinkers, such as Žižek, who cast Lukács as an antidemocratic thinker.117 Yet, by starkly counterposing Lukács’s theory of the party to the soviets, Meyers fails to note the democratic content in Lukács’s Leninism and to appreciate the conceptual necessity of both soviets and party in Lukács’s theory of revolution. To insist on reading Lukács holistically implies the third claim made in this study about Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Following Hegel’s words above, Lukács’s philosophy must be read in terms of its essence which only attains its truth by completing itself, that is, by producing an absolute result – a result which equally knows itself to be a result. The result Lukács had in mind was fully actualised praxis. This fully actualised concept of praxis – which, in

117

Meyers 2006.

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Lukács’s texts, both explicitly bears the weight of the Hegelian absolute and refers exclusively to the victorious proletarian revolution – is equally the foundation of the whole of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and the light which illuminates its starting points. This is perhaps the most important facet of the reading of Lukács proposed here; the idea of praxis is Lukács’s most essential idea. Moreover, it appears phenomenologically, moving from immediacy, through mediation, to richer determinations. The idea of praxis, when it appears initially, serves as an abstract negation of the formal immediacy of bourgeois society which entails the separation between subject and object, and theory and practice. However, precisely as an abstract negation, if it is to overcome these antinomies concretely, praxis requires further concrete determination. So, throughout the whole of his philosophy of praxis, the term recurs, each time at a deeper level of concreteness and self-consciousness. In Lukács’s view, as mentioned above, the highest and most concrete term in his philosophy of praxis is the fully actualised political praxis of the proletariat. Again, this methodological point is counterposed to many other readings of Lukács. For instance, it is not uncommon to attempt to read Lukács sans the proletariat as subject-object of history. This may be done sympathetically, as is the case in Jameson’s reading, or with more hostility, as is the case with Postone, Larsen and others associated with value form Marxism. These critiques of Lukács will be discussed in Chapter 3. While often correct in their conclusions, these critiques fail to appreciate the radicalism and scope of the whole of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. By focusing critique on one concept, in this case, the proletariat, they ultimately relapse into garden variety extrinsic critique. To offer a different example, Žižek places an altogether different emphasis on Lukács’s idea of praxis. Informed by his blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-Marxism, Žižek argues that praxis, for Lukács, represents something like the Lacanian Real, or, pure negativity.118 Not only does this reading do rather extreme violence to Lukács’s words – at times inverting their explicit meaning – it excludes the democratic intent of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis which, above all, aims at the creation of a self-conscious humanity. Žižek, despite making some tantalising suggestions that may be adopted here, nevertheless ultimately relapses into a more or less sterile attempt to appropriate Lukács as an antecedent to his own philosophy.119 Finally, only a few other theorists 118

119

See Žižek 2000. Žižek’s reading of Lukács, which exhibits a fascinating symmetry with those critiques of Lukács which cast him as an authoritarian Leninist, will be subjected to criticism in Part Two. Another example of misreading Lukács’s concept of praxis is supplied by other commentators, many of whom are on the radical left, who have attempted to defend Lukács’s polit-

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have sought to criticise the whole of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis in accordance with an inner logic. Perhaps Richard Kilminster’s account in Praxis and Method is the most important and successful of these. It will be mentioned in Chapter 9.120 Nevertheless, Kilminster’s critique does not aim at immanently generating a position beyond Lukács’s own. As outlined above, this work claims to discover an immanent self-contradiction in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. For itself, that is, in Lukács’s opinion, actualised political praxis represented the most concrete and self-conscious category in his philosophy. So, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was an anti-philosophy; it was premised on a critique of philosophy which, although it regarded the role of philosophy as vital, nevertheless viewed philosophy proper as a moment to be transcended in the course of the emergence of actual praxis in history. The strictly Lukácsian philosopher of praxis knows himself or herself to be the possessor of an abstract and theoretical standpoint and consciously aims at overcoming this standpoint by way of immersion in the movement of the proletariat. This, in turn, was intended to be the salvation of the theorist who, as a committed activist loyal to a proletarian party, aimed at contributing to the articulation of genuine praxis. Thus, Lukács intended the actual praxis of the proletariat – ultimately the outcome of a dialectical dialogue between the party and the soviets – to bear the weight of Hegel’s absolute. This will be shown in detail in Chapter 8, which critically reconstructs Lukács’s critique of German Idealism and the Young Hegelians. His concept of actual praxis was intended to represent the emergent self-consciousness of humanity; the famous solution to the riddle of history which knew itself to be the solution. The logical progression which informs this position is visible in the structure of the central essay in History and Class Consciousness, which begins with a sociological and historical critique of reification, passes through a philosophical critique of German Idealism, and culminates with the standpoint of the proletariat.121 This standpoint,

120 121

ical positions and his theory of revolution. Included in this category are works by Rees, Lanning and Perkins. While they have generally defended Lukács in light of his whole theory, these commentators have been less sensitive to the difficult logical and philosophical questions produced by Lukács’s concept of praxis. Insofar as they regard Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as a whole, it is as a schematic whole whose truth is implicitly independent of history (Rees 1998, Lanning 2009, Perkins 1993). Kilminster 1979, Part Two. In the preface to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács confirms these basic observations, writing: ‘For the most part they [the essays collected in History and Class Consciousness] are attempts, arising out of actual work for the party, to clarify the theoretical problems of the revolutionary moment in the minds of the author and his readers’. After discouraging the reader from looking to the book for a complete scientific system, he con-

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in turn, may only be actualised, in Lukács’s view, politically – hence the last and most Leninist third of History and Class Consciousness, notably the essay ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation’. It will be argued that this is where Lukács’s philosophy of praxis degenerated into the kind of conceptual mythology he sought to avoid. This articulation of the philosophy of praxis burdened the real movement of the proletariat and the Bolshevik Party with a philosophical weight they could not have hoped to carry. While this critique of Lukács is quite similar to that made by MerleauPonty, notwithstanding the debt owed to him, it is on this point that the argument here differs from his.122 For Merleau-Ponty, this crisis of praxis – as the culmination of the dialectic – results in a collapse of dialectical Marxian philosophy. Instead, it is proposed that in this collapse, a higher vantage point within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, of which Lukács himself was only dimly aware, may be salvaged. A further transcendence is possible. It will be shown that in actual fact, philosophy of praxis is the genuinely higher and more concrete vantage point in Lukács’s work from the 1920s. So, in place of the structure indicated above, this work reorganises Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. This reorganisation informs the broad structure of this book, split into three parts. Part One will detail what might be described as Lukács’s sociological critique of reification; namely, his account of the essential logic of capitalism (Chapter 1), reification and totality (Chapter 2) and the standpoint of the proletariat which underpins his account (Chapter 3). Part Two will turn to history and politics. It will commence, in Chapter 4, with the contemplative stance which underpins the standpoint of theory which is oriented towards the praxis of the proletariat. From this, Chapter 5 will demonstrate how this account of theory underpins Lukács’s critique of ideology. Part Two will culminate with Chapters 6 and 7 which will outline Lukács’s historicised theory of the party and, finally, with his account of the emergence of actualised, historic praxis as the outcome of a dialectic between party and class. As will be argued, Lukács believed this actual praxis to be the highest and most concrete concept in his own theory. Part Three will dispute this, proposing instead that Lukács’s account of philosophy constitutes the genuinely higher standpoint within his viewpoint. Chapter 8 will thus critically reconstruct Lukács’s critique of philosophy – namely, of German Idealism,

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tinues, noting that: ‘Despite this the book does have a definite unity. This will be found in the sequence of the essays, which for this reason are best read in the order proposed’ (Lukács 1967a, p. xli). See the chapters ‘Pravda’ and ‘The Dialectic in Action’ in Adventures of the Dialectic (Merleau-Ponty 1973a).

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Hegel and the Young Hegelians. Chapter 9 will adapt Lukács’s critique of philosophy to his philosophy of praxis itself. Even as a philosophy, it will be argued that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is incapable of sustaining the burden of the absolute; that is, of a thinking that is transparent to itself and which has traversed the antinomies of bourgeois thought. Nevertheless, the achievement of the standpoint of philosophy opens the way to a number of proposed alternatives that will be explored in the conclusion to Part Three, which will also serve as an overall conclusion. As such, Part Three both draws on the total conceptual reconstruction of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis presented here and constitutes its most critical part. It is hoped that the conceptual necessity of this structure, which reorganises Lukács’s own proposed structure, will be demonstrated in the course of the reconstruction. This book argues that the radicalism of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis may only be sustained by philosophy itself. So, instead of rejecting Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, this study will ultimately argue that Lukács’s philosophical framework from the 1920s may form a pathway from Marxism back into Hegelian philosophy proper. Thus, the contradiction inherent in Lukács’s concept of praxis need not result in a total collapse; rather, his philosophy can be sustained in its own dialectical negation. Such a proposal is not unprecedented. Indeed, it follows Gillian Rose’s critique of Lukács and Marxism as a whole. It will be suggested that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis presents an occasion for the ‘reformation’ within Marxism for which she called.123 Additional resources for critique will be drawn from Adorno and Hegel, among others.124 Ultimately, it will be suggested that only a Hegelian thinking of the absolute may sustain the radicalism and the ethical imperative that underlie Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on a rational and non-theological basis. To employ the spatial metaphors of which Hegel was so fond, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis possesses the shape of philosophy. Yet, it has not recognised this fact. And so, it experiences the circle of philosophy as a bad infinity; a line stretching endlessly into the past and future, down which one may walk eternally while never moving. Such a devaluation of the present condemns one to a tragic fate. In place of this, it is necessary to take Lukács’s essential concept, praxis, to its 123

124

Rose 2009, pp. 234–5. This book may be read as criticising Lukács in similar terms to those with which Rose criticised Adorno in The Melancholy Science (Rose 1978). This said, aspects of Rose’s critique of Lukács will be refuted below. Where Adorno is concerned, this work draws on recent work by Timothy Hall, who fruitfully staged a confrontation between Adorno and Lukács’s philosophical positions. Where Hegel is concerned, it will be argued that his critique of Christianity in the section of The Phenomenology entitled ‘Revealed Religion’ anticipates the conceptual moments of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis (Hall 2011b, Hegel 2018, §§. 748–87).

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limit, to force it to give itself up and in so doing, discover a new and deeper essence that may endure in face of what is universal, infinite and absolute. So, the death of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis must be endured and faced. That which is beautiful about it, worthy of love and which may still contribute to knowledge must be reappropriated as our possession; as a philosophy for us. This is a work of mourning. If this work is successful, Lukács’s spirit from the 1920s may be resurrected to an eternal life, to guide us on the path to the absolute and to speculative philosophy. What was once experienced as a bad infinity may thus be recognised as a circle unbroken.

part 1 Towards a Theory of Praxis

∵

Introduction to Part One We are all living outside our time, the forerunners of a new era, of a new order of mankind. We know that nothing is to be hoped for on the present world level. The end of historical man is upon us. The future will be in terms of eternity, and of freedom, and of love. The resurrection of man will be ushered in with our aid; the dead will rise from their graves clothed in radiant flesh and sinew, and we shall have communion, real everlasting communion, with all who once were: with those who made history and with those who had no history. Instead of myth and fable we shall have everlasting reality. All that now passes for science will fall away; there will be no need to search for the clue to reality because all will be real and durable, naked to the eye of the soul, transparent as the waters of Shiloh … We are not of this world, nor are we yet of the world to come, except in thought and spirit. Our place is on the threshold of eternity; our function is that of prime movers. It is our Privilege to be crucified in the name of freedom. We shall water our graves with our own blood. No task can be too great for us to assume. We are the true revolutionaries since we do not baptize with the blood of others but with our own blood, freely shed. We shall create no new covenants, impose no new laws, establish no new government. We shall permit the dead to bury the dead. The quick and the dead will soon be separated. Life eternal is rushing back to fill the empty cup of sorrow. Man will rise from his bed of ignorance and suffering with a song on his lips. He will stand forth in all the radiance of his godhood. Murder in every form will disappear forever. Plexus, Henry Miller1

… I love him who justifies men of the future and redeems the men of the past: for he wants to perish by the men of the present. Zarathustra2

∵ 1 Miller 2015, p. 501. 2 Nietzsche 2003b, pp. 44–5.

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In 1919, a few months prior to the Hungarian Revolution, Lukács announced his conversion with three essays. In ‘Tactics and Ethics’, his once resigned, tragic worldview was reborn, revolutionary. To become the salvation of a world of absolute sin, the communists were required to emulate Judith of the Old Testament. To create a world free of sin, it was necessary to embrace sin, taking it into themselves, along with all of its consequences.3 This essay was closely followed by ‘“Intellectual Workers” and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership’. This magnificent declaration of revolutionary Hegelianism was, regrettably, the only member of this troika omitted from History and Class Consciousness – perhaps because it contains the most audacious and radical praise for Hegel in Lukács’s entire oeuvre. Here, Lukács presented the proletariat not merely as an inheritor of Hegel’s world spirit, but as its living embodiment and ‘true executor’. In pursuit of this, Lukács demanded that ‘… the class consciousness of the proletariat itself must become conscious’.4 Finally, in ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’, Lukács famously railed against the tyranny of facts. ‘Lenin and Trotsky’, he wrote, ‘… as truly orthodox, dialectical Marxists, paid little attention to the so-called “facts”’. Rather, ‘Decisions, real decisions, precede the facts’.5 Should vulgar Marxists wield a litany of facts against the tide of revolution, then in the words of Fichte, ‘So much worse for the facts’.6 In these three essays, we see distilled a volatile mixture of Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.7 While Marx was a distinctive presence in the mix, he would take some years to be fully synthesised. Despite the instability of Lukács’s worldview in this period, many have taken these writings as the first

3 Lukács 1972k. 4 Lukács 1972b, p. 17. Emphasis in this and subsequent quotations are in the original unless otherwise indicated. 5 This quote should not be taken to imply a Schmittian influence on Lukács’s early Marxist works. Schmitt’s major works were published in the early 1920s, a few years after this essay appeared. If anything, a case might be made that Lukács influenced Schmitt, especially given the latter’s reference to Lukács in The Concept of the Political as the then-contemporary theorist closest to Hegel (Schmitt 2007, p. 63). For Lukács’s part, there is evidence from the late 1920s that he was aware of Schmitt, although his comments on him are regrettably brief (see Lukács 1928a). 6 Lukács 1972m, pp. 26–7. This article may be read in parallel with Gramsci’s ‘The Revolution Against Capital’ which also viewed the October Revolution in voluntarist terms, declaring it to be a break with the economic logic which had dominated previously (Gramsci 1994). 7 Baraneh Emadian very perceptively identifies the presence of a number of Nietzschean themes in Lukács’s early 1920s philosophy (see Emadian 2016). Similarly, a recent work on Kierkegaard has brought Lukács into direct conversation with the former, drawing further attention to a residual Kierkegaardian influence, even following Lukács’s conversion to Marxism (see Ryan 2014).

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and final words of his philosophy of praxis.8 This is wrong. Löwy’s analysis of Lukács’s shift away from tragic messianism and towards a more rounded and mature position, between the years 1919 and 1923, has already been noted.9 History and Class Consciousness was, of course, the work that expressed his mature 1920s philosophy. Yet, if not the last words in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, these three essays outlined a research programme that Lukács would develop throughout the 1920s. Herein we can observe three deeply held convictions which shaped and guided his thinking for the next decade. Firstly, Lukács’s condemnation of capitalism as an age of absolute sinfulness shines through clearly. While he moved away from such absolutist ethical thinking (as Part Two will argue), his essentially ethical decision to commit to bolshevism – at any price – opened an intellectual space within which he was able to elaborate the most important philosophical breakthrough in Marxism since Marx himself. Secondly, Lukács’s conviction that the workers’ movement – with the help of Marxian intellectual leadership – would be the redeemer of the world is also clearly present. Notwithstanding his assertion, made in the same period that ‘[p]olitics is merely instrumental; culture is the goal’, Lukács’s increasingly political orientation may be observed here.10 After all, having recognised the importance of intellectual leadership, it was a small step to understand that the actualisation of his ethical commitment would require political reason-

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Adorno is the most eminent amongst the champions of this interpretation. In Negative Dialectics, he accuses Lukács of regarding all objectivity, all thingness, as ‘radical evil’, and of attempting to ‘dynamize all entity into pure actuality’. This, according to Adorno, reveals a basic hostility to otherness, an orientation which leads to a type of ‘absolute action’ whose ‘violent satisfaction lies in itself’. Thus, in Adorno’s reading, Lukács’s alleged idealism transforms itself – via his ultrarevolutionary abhorrence for objectivity – into an authoritarian voluntarism. This, in turn, is said to have cleared an unusual path for Lukács’s reconciliation with Stalinism (Adorno 1973, pp. 190–1). Andrew Feenberg’s reply to Adorno on this count is concise and compelling: [Adorno’s] critique carries the imprimatur of a great thinker. It is elaborated against a sophisticated theoretical background and represents the tradition of the Frankfurt School which shared Lukács’s ambition to construct a Marxist philosophy on the ruins of German Idealism. Adorno’s critique has been very influential and forms a kind of barrier to the original. And yet Adorno is tone deaf to the music of Lukács’s dialectic. His critique exhibits a dismaying indifference to the nuance and complexity not too different from the crudity he finds in Lukács’s own later literary criticism. No doubt Adorno has real differences from Lukács, but they are not precisely where he locates them (Feenberg 2012a, pp. 72–3). More will be said in Chapter 9 on what a more sensitive and nuanced Adornian critique of Lukács might look like, via Timothy Hall (see Hall 2011b). Löwy 1979, Ch. III. Quoted in Kettler 1971, p. 84.

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ing. Increasingly, as he assimilated Lenin’s work, he came to view politics as the sphere in which praxis must actualise itself. Thirdly, and most importantly, Lukács expressed his belief (to paraphrase Lenin) that revolutionary practice would require revolutionary theory. Indeed, this conviction, expressed most clearly in the essay on intellectual workers, separated Lukács from many of his contemporaries. After all, ethically committed and politically serious European communists were not in short supply in the early 1920s. More than any other leader of his time, however, Lukács understood that to enter the age of freedom, the bearer of the consciousness of the proletariat – the party – would have to become conscious of itself. Political leadership requires theoretical clarity. Thus, Lukács issued the demand that the conservatised, vulgar historical materialism associated with the Second International be overthrown by a return to the dialectic, to Hegel and to what he regarded as the lost revolutionary orthodoxy of Marx. This last point, then, became the bearer of the first two. Lukács saw no other way to satisfy the demands for ethical life and revolutionary politics than to initiate a radical refoundation of Marxian theory. Politics and ethics were united under the banner of theory. Indeed, precisely because of the immediacy and obvious pathos with which Lukács expressed himself in these early essays, his demands for revolutionary politics and ethics retain a clearly subjective, abstract and utopian character. The goal must be, therefore, to overcome this onesidedness by transforming them into rich, concrete and realistic concepts. Whether Lukács succeeded in this goal can only be known in light of the totality of his philosophy of praxis. If it fails, his starting convictions are doomed to retain an air of voluntarism and mystification. If it succeeds, they may be regarded as rational. Either way, what matters at this stage in the exposition is that the conceptual starting point for the whole of Lukács’s 1920s work was his demand for a theory of praxis. It is with this demand that History and Class Consciousness commences.

chapter 1

From Immediacy to Commodity Fetishism 1

Immediacy and Method Facts are the enemy of truth! Don Quixote de la Mancha

‘Fact’ is in modern culture a folk concept with an aristocratic ancestry. Alasdair MacIntyre1 … a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers … Socrates2 History and Class Consciousness begins with a thoroughly revised version of ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ In the second part, Lukács returned to the critique of facticity he had ventured into the original version, albeit in much more measured tones. Instead of rejecting facticity in the name of a revolutionary decision, Lukács now suggested that it ‘… goes without saying that all knowledge starts from the facts’.3 Here, as in the earlier, more voluntarist version, Lukács referred to the social knowledge required by communist parties in order to lead the proletariat. Although he now conceded that knowledge must begin from the facts, Lukács continued to insist that true knowledge transcends the immediacy of facts. Indeed, he suggested that facticity constitutes the immediacy of capitalism. Owing to the reification of the social relations and labour which produce our world (which will be explained in more detail in Chapter 2), the immediate appearance of knowledge consists in a mass of apparently static and isolated facts. In Lukács’s view, to transform this immediacy into a mode of comprehension constitutes a fetishisation of facticity and a hypostatisation of capitalist social relations that precludes real knowledge and socially transformative action. So, Lukács criticised the common sense of the ‘blinkered empiricist’ who uncritically premises theory on the apparent independence and objectivity of facticity.4 Here, Lukács specifically referred to 1 2 3 4

MacIntyre 2007, p. 79. Plato 2018, ‘Laches, or Courage’, p. 91. Lukács 1967a, p. 5. Lukács 1967a, p. 5.

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theorists associated with revisionist Marxism, such as Bernstein or Max Adler, both of whom proposed to revise Marx, scientifically. Lukács is at pains to point out that these theorists often complement a fetishisation of facticity with abstract, Kantian ethics.5 This, as will be shown later, is characteristic of the contemplative stance which reproduces the antinomies of bourgeois life in thought. At any rate, although Bernstein and Adler’s efforts were tied up with a much more conservative socialist project than that to which Lukács was committed, it is clear that the latter took aim at a worldview as much as the specific exemplars thereof. This is why he included Engels in his critique, despite his far greater sympathy for him.6 To overcome the intellectual fetishisation of facticity, Lukács criticised empiricism for what he regarded as four dogmatic assumptions. The first assumption is that empiricism accepts the static and fragmented appearance of facticity as both objective and as sufficient for the comprehension of reality. In some cases, this was allied with an idealist (in the case of Marxist followers of Ernst Mach) or Kantian (in the case of Bernstein and Adler) metaphysics, while in others, it merely aimed at the production of more limited, empirical knowledge. Whatever the case, according to Lukács, by virtue of the belief ‘… that every piece of data from economic life, every statistic, every raw event already constitutes an important fact’, the empiricists forgot that ‘[h]owever simple an enumeration of “facts” may be, however lacking in commentary, it already implies an interpretation’.7 Thus, the fetishisation of facticity uncritically accepts the truth of facts as given. The second dogmatic assumption Lukács criticised is a consequence of the first. He argued that empiricism either denies that it inhabits an explanatory framework, or, in the case of more sophisticated empiricism, simply reproduces the formalistic methodology of natural science which relies upon the isolation of facts and complexes of facts on the basis of observation, abstraction and experimentation. Upon these separated domains of facticity, special and autonomous disciplines of knowledge grow spontaneously with which to understand them. Upon the basis of such scientific disciplines, the empiricists opposed what they regarded as the ‘forced constructions’ of the dialectical method.8 In this manner, empiricism simply reproduces a logical organisation it encounters uncritically. This leads to the third case of dogmatism: the occlusion of the historicity of both facts and of science. So, Lukács argued that empiricism – both with regards to society and 5 6 7 8

Lukács 1967a, pp. 9, 11. Lukács 1967a, p. 3. Lukács 1967a, pp. 5–6. Lukács 1967a, p. 5.

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nature – is blind to the ‘… historical character of the facts upon which it is based’.9 As Lukács wrote, even the … … ‘pure’ facts of the natural sciences arise when a phenomenon of the real world is placed (in thought or in reality) into an environment where its laws can be inspected without outside interference. This process is reinforced by reducing the phenomena to their purely quantitative essence, to their expression in numbers and numerical relations. Opportunists always fail to recognize that it is in the nature of capitalism to process phenomena in this way.10 Empiricism, therefore, is barred from comprehending the impact of the historical origin of both the facts and the theorist, taking them to be natural. Fourthly, and finally, Lukács observes that empiricism either excludes the subject of knowledge or views it as irrelevant to the truth which is sought.11 Empiricism never truly grasps the interrelationship between subject and object. Praxis, considered for now as the practical unity of knower and known, is prima facie excluded. These four points, which constitute Lukács’s critique of empiricism, are the first instance in History and Class Consciousness of what Feenberg terms ‘metacritique’; namely, an approach to the criticism of ideology which points out the obscure social and historical foundations of that ideology.12 Thus, the conservative theoretical and political consequences of empiricism are revealed: ‘If such [empiricist, scientific] methods seem plausible at first this is because capitalism tends to produce a social structure that in great measure encourages such views’.13 So, following Marx’s argument that economic categories are not merely intellectual constructs but are equally ‘forms of being’ 9 10

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Lukács 1967a, p. 6. To illustrate the point, Lukács continued by noting Marx’s sensitivity to this problem. Where the latter discusses the ‘process of abstraction’ with regards to labour, Lukács notes that he consciously limited his discussion to the ‘historical particularity of capitalist society’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 6). Lukács 1967a, p. 112. Although Lukács draws attention to this fourth dogmatic assumption made by empiricism later in the text, it constitutes the logical conclusion of the first three. As Feenberg writes, ‘Philosophy [for Lukács] is not regarded as a mere rationalization of covert interests, nor as a passive reflection of production relations. Rather, it is the form in which the actual contradictions of social life are raised to consciousness under the horizon of the given society. The juxtaposition of the philosophical concepts with a specific social background both explains the impasses and antinomies of theory, and shows a path to resolution through social action’ (Feenberg 2014, p. 12). Lukács 1967a, p. 5.

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and ‘conditions of existence …’, Lukács’s ultimate point is that empiricism is based on a facticity which is constitutive of the immediacy of capitalism itself.14 This is why Kavoulakos is entirely right to draw attention to the neo-Kantian term, Gegenständlichkeitsformen, which he identifies as subject to regular mistranslation (most commonly, but not exclusively, as ‘objective forms’) in the Rodney Livingstone translation. By retranslating this term as ‘form of objectivity’ and reconnecting it with its origin in Emil Lask, Kavoulakos very aptly draws attention to the social-ontological and historical weight that it bears.15 In this manner, he makes a similar point to that made above – although with recourse to the rich tradition of antipositivist philosophy that shaped Lukács’s worldview. To return to the argument at hand, in his critique of empiricism, the essential components of Lukács’s method become visible. Rather than desiring the sheer liquidation of facticity (as in his 1919 essay), by 1923 Lukács came to insist that the revolutionisation of facticity be viewed as a methodological question. ‘The only question is: which of the data of life are relevant to knowledge and in the context of which method?’16 As was mentioned above, Lukács’s methodological demands were for mediation, totality, genesis and praxis.17 These methodological points correspond to the four dogmatic assumptions outlined directly above. These points are interconnected in the sense that without each other, they fail to overcome the fetishisation of immediacy they are intended to sublate. Together, and only together, they constitute a rigorously dialectical methodology. For this reason, these terms are developed throughout each part of this book and, ultimately, in the whole; their fully developed unity (which transcends method) is the final underpinning for the standpoint of speculative philosophy. The reconstruction proposed here depends entirely upon tracing their interconnection and development in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. The first methodological demand, for mediation, insists that the immobility of facts be rendered fluid. That is, Lukács proposes to dialectically negate the givenness and immediacy of the facts. In this sense, Lukács’s term ‘mediation’ bears a negative weight, not dissimilar to Hegel’s concept of negation. Although negation often possesses a moment of pure negativity, this cannot 14 15 16 17

Lukács 1967a, pp. 4, 6. Kavoulakos 2018b, pp. 90–2. Lukács 1967a, p. 5. Elsewhere in his work from the 1920s, Lukács alters these terms slightly. For example, when discussing Hegel, totality is often rendered as ‘system’ or ‘logic’, while genesis is rendered as ‘history’. These shifts in nomenclature are not arbitrary or adaptions to a foreign terminology. Rather, they represent the enrichment and deepening of these terms. In the exposition that follows, these terminological shifts will be reproduced and explained.

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be its concluding moment. Were this the case, mediation would amount to a dissolution of facts into pure fluidity, reminiscent of Hegel’s famous ‘night in which all cows are black’.18 At most, this might constitute an immediate critique of facts by way of asserting their indeterminate negation. Clearly, such a one sided critique represents the proverbial other side of the coin to a fetishisation of facticity. So, pure negativity, although it is a moment in his dialectic, is decisively not what Lukács means by mediation.19 Criticising Engels’ statement in Anti-Dühring, that dialectics consists of a ‘… continuous process of transition from one definition to another’, Lukács notes that without establishing the concrete mediations between facts and totality, any attempt to maintain the fluidity of facts is ultimately illusory.20 Such an approach merely replaces facticity with an endless flux whose apparently infinite motion conceals its own stasis. Conversely, Lukács expressly rejected a formal or linear interrelating of facts on the basis of cause and effect or interaction between otherwise unchanging objects.21 Insofar as formal (and therefore abstract) connections between facts are proposed, these connections do not necessarily transcend the static or fragmentary nature of those facts, nor do they penetrate through the given arrangement of the facts. As Lukács wrote: If by interaction we mean just the reciprocal causal impact of two otherwise unchangeable objects on each other, we shall not have come an inch nearer to an understanding of society … After all, there is e.g. an interaction when a stationary billiard ball is struck by a moving one: the first one moves, the second one is deflected from its original path. The inter-

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Hegel 2018, §. 16. In addition to Adorno, Kołakowski places the accusation that Lukács dwells in the moment of pure negativity at the centre of his critique. His emphasis is, however, different from Adorno’s, and much more inflected with anti-communism. Kołakowski begins his critique with ‘Tactics and Ethics’, mentioned above, but instead asserts that Lukács’s concept of totality entails absolute primacy over the facts. Totality, of course, is the possession of the party. So, Kołakowski links Lukács’s alleged rejection of natural science with an alleged political authoritarianism (Kołakowski 1978, pp. 1026–8). Whether or not these charges are legitimate will be discussed below, in light of commentators much less prima facie hostile to Lukács’s Marxism. For now, however, the point is that by 1923 Lukács’s critique of facticity is in no way (if it ever was) premised on a dogmatic imposition of a view of totality over and against facticity. Rather, Lukács strives to demonstrate that the facts of social life are organically interconnected; insofar as they become part of a totality, the logic of this totality is shown to develop through the immanent interrelation of the facts. Any totality which overrides facts becomes a mystification, an ideology and a dogma. Quoted in: Lukács 1967a, p. 3. Lukács 1967a, p. 13.

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action we have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwise unchanging objects.22 Given that facticity lends itself immediately to organisation and cognition according to a formal and therefore linear logic, such links do not contribute to a metacritique of the appearance of facticity. Superficial links do not discover the social essence or logic that underpins the facts that are so connected. Thus, for Lukács, mediation must be concrete. That is, mediation must criticise the formal and abstract appearance of the facts to discover their real underlying content. Lukács writes: Thus we must detach phenomena from the form in which they are immediately given and discover the intervening links which connect them to their core, their essence. In so doing, we shall arrive at an understanding of their apparent form and see it as the form in which the inner core necessarily appears.23 Thus, by disclosing their essence, concrete mediation discloses the real and organic interconnections between facts. Later in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács stresses these aspects of mediation explicitly, writing that ‘[m]ediation would not be possible were it not for the fact that the empirical existence of objects is itself mediated and only appears to be unmediated in so far as the awareness of mediation is lacking so that the objects are torn from the complex of their true determinants and placed in artificial isolation’.24 At the heart of Lukács’s concept of mediation there exists, therefore, a dialectic of appearance and essence and a dialectic of form and content. If static facts constitute immediacy, this immediacy must be defetishised not by a moralistic rejection of the facts, but by the discovery of their essential logic. Precisely what constitutes the essential logic and the social content of the facts will be outlined below. For now, however, this leads to Lukács’s subsequent methodological demand: totality. To demand the interrelation of the facts on the basis of their essence is to demand a totalising analysis. The critique of the formalism of immediacy as a whole reveals the concealed content of that immediacy. In the first place, consistent with Lukács’s demand for concrete mediation, a totalising analysis must discover the real connections between facts. More than this, Lukács argues that the objective mean22 23 24

Lukács 1967a, p. 13. Lukács 1967a, p. 8. Lukács 1967a, p. 163.

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ing of the facts can only be understood in light of their real relation to the whole, which is equally the product of the facts themselves. Thus, a further dialectic between the parts and the whole, or (as it pertains to a different, albeit related register of knowledge) between the particular and the universal is established. In this dialectic, the totality both develops out of the parts and enjoys a conceptual priority over them. As Lukács famously stated: ‘Concrete totality is, therefore, the category that governs reality’.25 Later, in ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’, he places an even stronger inflection on the argument, writing: The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundation of a wholly new science … In the last analysis Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent sciences of law, economics or history, etc.: there is nothing but a single, unified – dialectical and historical – science of the evolution of society as a totality.26 When viewed in their immediacy, which Lukács also described as ‘abstract onesidedness’, the parts or the facts, as well as their corresponding partial sciences, are false.27 Things may only be known as they truly are in light of both their appearance and essence and when comprehended in connection with totality: Only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality. This knowledge starts from the simple (and to the capitalist world), pure, immediate, natural determinants described above. It progresses from them to knowledge of the concrete totality, i.e. to the conceptual reproduction of reality. This concrete totality is by no means an unmediated datum of thought. ‘The concrete is concrete’, Marx says, ‘because it is a synthesis of many particular determinants, i.e. a unity of diverse elements’.28

25 26 27 28

Lukács 1967a, p. 10. Lukács 1967a, pp. 27–8. Lukács 1967a, p. xlv. Lukács 1967a, pp. 8–9. Feenberg points out the similarity between this conception of concrete totality and Marx’s, noting that both owe their origin to Hegel (Feenberg 2014, pp. 84–7).

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In this sense, the view of totality reveals a deeper and more concrete reality than is available immediately. Facts which had hitherto been arranged formally, may now be related to each other in light of their real content. This, in turn, reveals the necessity of the formal appearance of the facts. Beyond this, in the above quote, we may observe further aspects of Lukács’s concept of totality. Firstly, Lukács stresses that ‘… the category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity’.29 This would merely substitute one abstract immediacy with another equally abstract and ultimately fictitious one. Rather, Lukács’s totality establishes the truth of seemingly isolated facts and in so doing creates a rich and concrete picture of both the facts themselves and the totality. Furthermore, to be adequate to reality, the concept of totality must also be dynamic and processual. This dynamism must be more than the endless motion of unchanging objects: ‘Every substantial change that is of concern to knowledge manifests itself as a change in relation to the whole and through this as a change in the form of objectivity itself’.30 So, Lukács’s concept of totality is qualitative, dynamic and organic; it is more than an artificial, arbitrary or formal amalgam of otherwise autonomous facts and objects. Finally, as Lukács makes clear in the above quote and elsewhere, his concept of totality is a ‘conceptual reproduction of reality’.31 In this way, Lukács’s concept of totality is modest; it never claims to substitute for reality, merely to reproduce reality conceptually. This both acknowledges a distance between the view of totality and reality itself and asserts that precisely by virtue of this conceptual reproduction otherwise hidden aspects of reality are revealed. This point also makes the theoretical status of the concept of totality apparent. A totalising viewpoint is, in the first place, a picture of the world generated by a critical theorist. The theorist’s ability to produce such a conceptual reproduction of reality depends on the possession of both a complex theoretical apparatus and a detailed, empirical analysis. Consequently, the accuracy of a given totalising analysis must be debated, both theoretically and empirically. However, for Lukács, the ultimate test of such a representation is practical. This is, indeed, the only way a totalising conceptual reproduction of reality can transcend its status as an image or model. Insofar as an image of reality identifies solutions to the contradictions inherent in that reality, it does not do away with them, but points towards a real resolution in history: ‘When 29 30 31

Lukács 1967a, p. 12. Lukács 1967a, p. 13. Lukács 1967a, p. 8.

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theory (as the knowledge of the whole) opens up the way to resolving these contradictions it does so by revealing the real tendencies of social evolution. For these are destined to effect a real resolution of the contradictions that have emerged in the course of history’.32 So, via history, the concept of totality attains practical concreteness. This must be a reciprocal relationship; a genuinely perceptive conceptual reproduction of reality evokes a response from that reality itself.33 In this sense, a successful totalising analysis may be taken, ultimately, as a moment in development of a social reality towards its own self-consciousness. On the contrary, a dogmatic, formalistic or artificial totalising perspective is doomed to irrelevance and to conceptual mythology. Totality, therefore, leads towards the third methodological demand: genesis.34 Genesis refers to history comprehended according to its essential and conceptual logic. Without this, history is a blind succession of shapes or a recollection and a narrative with no meaningful connection to the present. On the other hand, history may be understood as genesis only by virtue of a successful totalising comprehension of reality. Genesis is therefore, in the first place, the meaning discovered in history by virtue of successful theoretical labour. The demand for genesis thus arises immanently from the first two demands for mediation and totality. Taken together, these concepts produce an image of the concrete totality which is processual, defetishised and therefore historical. Specifically, such a view allows us to regard immediacy as a product of human activity and relationships. This represents a further defetishisation of the immediate and apparently objective form of reality. Revealed as a his-

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Lukács 1967a, p. 10. As will be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, Lukács viewed the October Revolution as the outcome of such a historicisation of totality. Lenin, in conjunction with his party, generated a complex picture of the Russian and international political situation. This picture informed the intervention of the Bolshevik Party. Thus, Lenin’s conceptual reproduction of reality both revealed a dimension of reality hidden to other participants in history, and in doing so, allowed for the revolutionisation of that reality. This, finally, validated Lenin’s conceptual reproduction of reality by subjecting it to a practical-historical test. Lukács introduces this term later, in the context of his discussion of German Idealism, where it refers to the unity of history and creative activity; that is, history as understood in terms of its having been created by humanity. At the outset, Lukács refers more to history and human activity, albeit in close proximity to each other. Similarly he tends to confuse two senses of history: history as the past, and history as the present in its unfolding. Nevertheless, methodologically speaking, these ideas are better understood as aspects of the one genesis. The tensions between the different senses of genesis will be outlined more thoroughly in Part Three.

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toric product, a formerly neutral and even natural objectivity is recognised as expressing contingent social relations. Lukács writes: The fetishistic illusions enveloping all phenomena in capitalist society succeed in concealing reality, but more is concealed than the historical, i.e. transitory, ephemeral nature of phenomena. This concealment is made possible by the fact that in capitalist society man’s environment, and especially the categories of economics, appear to him immediately and necessarily in forms of objectivity which conceal the fact that they are the categories of the relations of men with each other. Instead they appear as things and the relations of things with each other.35 As this paragraph implies, Lukács held that the fetishism of a formally organised facticity, the paradigmatic instance of which is found in economics, is the distinguishing mode of mystification under capitalism. This will be outlined in greater detail in Chapter 2. For now, the point is that the further defetishisation of immediacy, which grasps the contingent social relations that give rise to immediacy, allows us, in principle, to comprehend the historical genesis of society, not merely in the sense of the historic rise of capitalism within precapitalist societies, but also in the sense of the reproduction of capitalism in recent and present history. Finally, this points to the last methodological demand Lukács makes, for praxis. In fact this was already implied above by the distinction Lukács makes between a concretely totalising conceptual reproduction of reality and that reality itself. The point of a conceptual reproduction of reality is that it may contribute towards the revolutionisation of that reality. The successful transformation of reality is, as noted, the test of all totalising representations. Equally, a practical movement which aims to revolutionise reality must grasp it as a totality, in light of its essence. So, praxis results from the unity of mediation, totality and genesis. Without this, any conceptual reproduction of reality, no matter how historicised or humanised, will ultimately remain an image which tends towards abstraction, metaphysics and stasis; that is, towards immediacy. Similarly, any attempt to grasp genesis will either reduce itself to an analysis limited to the past or into platitudes about the endless dynamism of history in the present. These observations help explain Lukács’s sharp criticism of Engels early in History and Class Consciousness. Commenting on Engels’s neglect of the dialectic of subject and object, Lukács writes: 35

Lukács 1967a, p. 14.

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… without this factor dialectics ceases to be revolutionary, despite attempts (illusory in the last analysis) to retain ‘fluid’ concepts. For it implies a failure to recognize that in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality.36 Any attempt at a fluid (and therefore historical) comprehension of reality that does not lead to praxis, is in danger of becoming a pseudo-dialectic of infinite fluidity. Instead, comprehended as the unity of totality and genesis, praxis is the point within the present at which history may become aware of itself by virtue of having grasped its totalising conceptual logic, and therefore, its genuine reality. Additionally, in the above quote, Lukács anticipates a number of aspects of his philosophy of praxis which will be discussed in due course (including both the contemplative stance and his critique of theories of ‘eternal becoming’).37 Moreover, at this point, it becomes obvious that Lukács’s demands for mediation, totality, genesis and praxis push against their abstract and methodological character; they both demand and presuppose a definite content which must be supplied by an analysis of society, grasped as a historical totality. For now, however, the point is that Lukács’s methodological demands culminate in praxis which necessitates the overcoming of the dualisms, between thought and being and between subject and object, that structure reality. This drive to overcome all dualism, even if it ultimately fails, indicates Lukács’s most Hegelian impulse. Praxis, understood here as a methodological demand, not only completes the interrelation of the first three methodological demands, but points towards the dialectic of theory and practice. Praxis, even as a methodological demand, evokes the need for a form of social practice capable of transforming reality. As Lukács’s condemnation of Second International Marxism makes clear, he regarded this as a political question. Additionally, Lukács’s polemic against empiricist Marxism makes it clear that he viewed praxis as an ethical category. Congruent with their fetishisation of facts, Lukács accused the empiricists of having reified ethics by asserting a methodological dualism between econom-

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Lukács 1967a, p. 3. This latter idea will be referred to throughout this work. Lukács’s essential point is, however, that theories of eternal flux or eternal becoming conceal, in fact, something like eternal recurrence; ceaseless quantitative motion is, in fact, self-identical, and therefore, at stasis.

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ics and ethics.38 In addition to necessitating a transcendental conception of the good, this hypostatises the division between subject and object. Inasmuch as objective reality is presented as bound by fixed, fatalistic laws, the transformation of reality is precluded. In this case, ethics can only survive on an impoverished, individual level. Describing this situation, Lukács writes: Man finds himself confronted by purely natural relations or social forms mystified into natural relations. They appear to be fixed, complete and immutable entities which can be manipulated and even comprehended, but never overthrown. But also this situation creates the possibility of praxis in the individual consciousness. Praxis becomes the form of action appropriate to the isolated individual, it becomes his ethics.39 As will be outlined in Chapter 4, in Part Two, which deals with the contemplative stance, this individual ethical orientation towards praxis should not be dismissed out of hand. Even the most immediate and one sided terms possess a truth that may be liberated by critique. Indeed, as the above passage makes clear, the idea of praxis occurs in the first place conceptually, as a desire for individual ethics. Nevertheless, this passage makes clear that Lukács ultimately has in mind a totalising form of praxis. This makes it possible for ethics to be realised on the level of society, not just on the level of the individual. For Lukács, the desire to transcend facticity is equally a desire for an ethical collective mode of practice which transcends the individual. As Lukács’s critique of individualistic ethics, discussed below in Chapter Four, will make clear, praxis therefore represents the simultaneous sublation of individual ethics and the salvation of the ethical individual by his or her entry into an ethical community. For Lukács, praxis is therefore an inherently ethical category. Finally, inasmuch as the methodological demand for praxis insists on a mode of comprehension that is capable of transforming reality, it also demands a transformation of theory: Only when consciousness stands in such a relation to reality can theory and practice be united. But for this to happen the emergence of con-

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 37–8. Lukács’s quote continues to note the similarity between the empiricist dichotomy between individual ethics and naturalised social objectivity and Feuerbach’s view, writing: ‘Feuerbach’s attempt to supersede Hegel foundered on this reef: like the German idealists, and to a much greater extent than Hegel, he stopped short at the isolated individual of “civil society” ’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 19).

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sciousness must become the decisive step which the historical process must take towards its proper end (an end constituted by the wills of men, but neither dependent on human whim, nor the product of human invention). The historical function of theory is to make this step a practical possibility.40 Both the subjects of this consciousness and the ground upon which Lukács understands them to operate will be outlined below. The point, for now, is that the methodological demand for praxis necessitates the transformation of theory and practice. Theory, transformed by this critique, is intended to uncover a pathway, via totalising practice, to actualised, real world praxis. This is the theme of Part Two of this study. So far, Lukács’s four methodological demands have been outlined. Left at this, they could be viewed as one sided, abstract and externally imposed on the facts. As a result, this exegesis may appear to commence on a relatively schematic and arbitrary basis. Similarly, although Lukács does not make as stark a separation as has been made here, the first parts of History and Class Consciousness seem to possess a rhetorical character. In the opening chapters, Lukács appears to defer a serious explanation of his dialectic of praxis in favour of a relatively declaratory approach which demands a return to the dialectical method as he understands it. This is epitomised by his famous statement that even if modern findings were to dismiss all of Marx’s specific discoveries, Marxism would remain valid purely as a method.41 This argument entailed a highly methodological definition of Marxist orthodoxy: ‘Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the “belief” in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method’.42 Of course, Lukács did not mean the term ‘orthodox’ in a pejorative sense. As has been outlined, by reasserting the primacy of the dialectical method to Marxism, Lukács was trying to challenge what he perceived as conservative revisions of Marxism. However, as a number of more ‘classical’ Marxist commentators have observed, and not

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Lukács 1967a, p. 2. As Lukács writes: ‘Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious “orthodox” Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 1). Lukács 1967a, p. 1.

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without reason, Lukács’s extreme emphasis on method is hardly plausible.43 Gillian Rose has also criticised Lukács on this count, albeit in the service of a very different project. She has noted that his emphasis on method implies an unsurpassed Fichtean strain in his thought which trapped him within a (radicalised) neo-Kantian ‘phenomenology of the facts of consciousness’.44 While it is both true and insightful to suggest that Lukács ultimately relapses into a Fichtean position, he does so for reasons other than those which Rose suggests. Moreover, relapsing into a Fichtean position after seeking to escape it for a decade is very different to – and potentially far more productive than – reproducing a quasi-Fichtean methodological stance uncritically. Lukács’s insistence on method is less one sided than Rose and others grant. It had a clear context; namely, his opposition to antidialectical, anti-Hegelian and empiricist or positivist trends in socialist thought. Moreover, as Lukács himself points out, one sidedness and abstraction are necessary, especially in the early stages of an exposition:

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John Rees, for example, makes this criticism of Lukács (see Rees 1998, p. 241). Rose 2009, p. 34. In her account, Lukács’s methodological gesture had ‘… an immensely liberating effect on those philosophers such as Bloch, Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adorno, who were graduating from the schools of neo-Kantianism …’ Nevertheless, Rose holds that it was equally ‘… an invitation to hermeneutic anarchy’. Specifically, she contends that this anarchy manifests in a philosophy stricken by a dichotomy between, on the one hand, Lukács’s analysis of reification, in which ‘… “reification” and “mediation” become a kind of shorthand instead of a sustained theory …’ and on the other, a ‘… speculative sociology of the proletariat as subject-object of history’. So, Rose argues that Lukács’s concept of objectification is much more indebted to neo-Kantianism. While this concept had the advantage of avoiding the base/superstructure model common to contemporary Marxists, according to Rose, this led to a more extreme messianism; by enshrining concrete totality as the ‘… category that governs reality’, Lukács made a totalising subject equally necessary. Thus, his very success in demonstrating the ‘… prevalence of reification, of the structural factors inhibiting the formation of political, proletarian class consciousness, meant that he could only appeal to the proletariat to overcome reification by apostrophes to the unification of theory and practice, and by introducing the party as a “… deus ex machina”’ (Rose 2009, p. 31). Thus, following Adorno, Rose believes that Lukács’s critique of Kant leads to Fichte and not Hegel. Insofar as Lukács overcomes Fichte, it is with a more radical practical reason, founded on the consciousness of the proletariat. Again echoing Adorno’s critique, Rose argues that this ultimately implies the domination of the object by the subject (Rose 2009, pp. 32–3). More will be said on Lukács’s concept of objectification (via his theory of reification) immediately below. The political aspect of Rose’s charge (namely, Lukács’s account of the party) will be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. Ultimately, as will be argued in Chapter 9, Rose is partly correct in her conclusion, but not in her brusque overall treatment of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.

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It is of the essence of dialectical method that concepts which are false in their abstract one-sidedness are later transcended (zur Aufhebung gelangen). The process of transcendence makes it inevitable that we should operate with these one-sided, abstract and false concepts. These concepts acquire their true meaning less by definition than by their function as aspects that are then transcended in the totality.45 So, his initial emphasis on method must be seen in light of an aspiration to overcome the divide between method and content (ultimately, between thought and reality). Theory, which in Lukács’s account is simply a more developed, manifold and concrete expression of form, logic, and method, may only rise to concreteness insofar as it encounters history, via the practice of the proletariat. To acknowledge this implies a self-criticism of theory; an often overlooked but quite essential moment of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. From these points it follows that the success or failure of Lukács’s dialectic of praxis cannot be judged on the basis of his method as separated from the complex theoretical system upon which it depends, or even on his early emphasis on method. Rather, it must be assessed in light of the many concrete mediations he proposed to connect immediacy with totality, genesis and praxis. In fact, as the above discussion of Lukács’s method shows, its four major components themselves demand concretisation and actualisation, by means of a concrete social, historical and political content. Method itself must be subjected to metacritique; it must be grounded in the object it seeks to comprehend. In fact, this move equally represents an application of the above methodological demands to Lukács’s philosophy itself. Lukács demanded this much in his original preface to History and Class Consciousness. By way of explanation for his apparently extravagant claim that Marxism might be reduced to method, he denied any intention to ‘improve’ upon Marx: ‘On the contrary, our underlying premise here is the belief that in Marx’s theory and method the true method by which to understand society and history has finally been discovered. This method is historical through and through. It is self-evident, therefore, that it must be constantly applied to itself, and this is one of the focal points of these essays’.46 Rather than imposing method on content, Lukács understood his aim to be the self-comprehension of Marxism, via history and theoretical self-reflexivity. It is therefore to this content that the exposition will turn.

45 46

Lukács 1967a, pp. xlv–xlvi. Lukács 1967a, p. xliii.

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Form and Content, Quantity and Quality, the Commodity But money economy and the domination of the intellect stand in the closest relationship to one another. They have in common a purely matter-of-fact attitude in the treatment of persons and things in which a formal justice is often combined with an unrelenting hardness. The purely intellectualistic person is indifferent to all things personal because, out of them, relationships and reactions develop which are not to be completely understood by purely rational methods – just as the unique element in events never enters into the principle of money. Money is concerned only with what is common to all, i.e. with exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level. Georg Simmel47

To realise and ground Lukács’s methodological insights demands a critique of society beginning from the same immediacy that underpins empiricism. In order to mediate that immediacy, this critique must discover the essence of social reality that gives rise to its immediate and formal appearance. This is also necessary in order to ground Lukács’s move to totality, and ultimately, to genesis and praxis. To Lukács, the essence of capitalism is the commodity. As a ‘real abstraction’, that is, an object which is immediately relational and conceptual, it contains the unity of form and content of capitalist society, in unconscious and reified form. Indeed, this unconsciousness is constitutive of its apparent objectivity and solidity. Beneath this solidity, the commoditystructure conceals a contingent social-historic relationship between people. As Lukács writes: The essence of the commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.48 In this regard, Lukács follows Marx’s famous theory of commodity fetishism and of the dual nature of the commodity.

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Simmel 2011b, p. 11. Lukács 1967a, p. 83.

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However, these points presuppose reasoning which has yet to be elucidated. Indeed, the method outlined above demands a specific mode of analysis. Firstly, Lukács’s analysis of the commodity may not be derived, in the first instance, empirically. Similarly, a critique of the commodity cannot be derived a priori, as a hypothesis generated by some external viewpoint. As both these strategies make dogmatic assumptions, they likewise threaten to reproduce immediacy in thought. Rather, in keeping with Lukács’s methodology, the commodity must be derived immanently. Yet social immediacy is precisely the reality that the theory of commodity fetishism is intended to mediate. Given that this immediacy is itself abstract, it is impossible to approach it free from theoretical preconceptions. So, Lukács’s analysis of the commodity can only be rationally grounded by an immanent theoretical critique of those theories which reflect, in different ways, the immediacy of capitalism.49 Feenberg has referred to this method as ‘sociological desublimation’. Explaining it, albeit with reference to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as a whole, he writes: Philosophy [for Lukács] is not regarded as a mere rationalization of covert interests, nor as a passive reflection of production relations. Rather, it is the form in which the actual contradictions of social life are raised to consciousness under the horizon of the given society. The juxtaposition of the philosophical concepts with a specific social background both explains the impasses and antinomies of theory, and shows a path to resolution through social action.50 Following this argument, if it is possible to derive the concept of the commodity from Lukács’s critique of reified thought, then this in turn justifies Lukács’s reliance on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, which would otherwise constitute a theoretical leap of faith. This is the only way, in Lukács’s view, to place a philosophy of praxis on a firm basis. Without immanent critique, any conceptual reproduction of totality runs the risk of becoming a dogmatic imposition on the facts it seeks to comprehend. This, as has been shown, blocks genesis and 49

50

In this respect, both similarities and differences between Marx’s and Lukács’s methods are apparent. Marx also approached the immediacy of political economy by way of a theoretical labour of the negative. However, he did so via the critique of political economy. See, for example, the first manuscript of the 1844 Manuscripts or the Grundrisse (Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 235–70, 1987b). Lukács, on the other hand, produced no immanent critique of political economy. Nevertheless, as this section shows, his understanding of commodity fetishism is based on a critique of neo-Kantian and Hegelian theories of alienation or reification. Feenberg 2014, p. 12.

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therefore praxis. Instead, beginning with form, the argument here builds up an account of the essential form and content of capitalist society that grounds Lukács’s analysis of the commodity. Following this, the analysis will outline a theory of the commodity which allows for the further development of mediation, totality, genesis and praxis. The starting point for the critique which reveals the commodity as the estranged essence of capitalism is provided by Lukács’s critique of empiricism, discussed above. As has been shown, empiricist social theories relate to facticity formally and on the basis of quantity. As he writes: The ‘pure’ facts of the natural sciences arise when a phenomenon of the real world is placed (in thought or in reality) into an environment where its laws can be inspected without outside interference. This process is reinforced by reducing the phenomena to their purely quantitative essence, to their expression in numbers and numerical relations.51 Lukács viewed economics as the example of this, par excellence. Where empiricist social theories replicate this methodology, they unknowingly reproduce the quantitative immediacy of capitalism, on the level of theory. This reveals, as Lukács makes clear, that the overextension and domination of quantitative logic (or, in more Weberian language, calculable rationality) is an essential characteristic of capitalist immediacy. Left at this, however, the commodity-form is not yet revealed, nor is any account given of the content or quality which coexists uneasily with quantity. Consequently, it might be tempting to criticise the immediate quantitative appearance of facticity by way of an equally immediate, qualitative view. Indeed, Lukács was no stranger to vitalist, romantic or irrationalist philosophies, such as those of Nietzsche or Bergson, who counterposed life to the flat rationalism of modernity. The foundation for such philosophies is found in the immediate and intuitive availability of qualitative aspects of reality. After all, when one enters a shop, one is immediately confronted by a vast array of qualitative use values. One who is tired of the city may experience nature as an outpouring of life and quality. Of course, more radical, qualitative experiences are not hard to imagine. Some of these experiences of quality may, when counterposed to the quantitative rationalism of capitalism, prove radicalising. This is of particular importance to understanding Lukács’s concept of the contemplative stance. Indeed, in general, one of the aims of the reading of

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 5–6.

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Lukács’s philosophy of praxis presented here is to demonstrate the persistence and ongoing role of quality, content, utopia and other concepts which emerge, initially, in antinomic relationship with quality, form, everyday reality, and so on, and to relate these qualitative aspects of life to the reified totality and reified thought. Nevertheless, to return to the argument, by the time he wrote History and Class Consciousness, Lukács had come to reject immediately-qualitative critiques of quantitative reason.52 To found a critique of the quantitative logic of modernity on such immediate and intuitively available qualities would constitute the kind of abstract negativity, mentioned above, that Lukács rejected. Given this, in keeping with Lukács’s concept of mediation, it is necessary to derive the concrete mediation of quantitative immediacy from that immediacy itself, by way of critique. All this requires is that the qualitative be derived from the quantitative, that content be derived from form, or that the critique of economics be derived from the logic of economic objects themselves. As noted above, Lukács did not primarily achieve this through a work of political economy.53 Rather, his philosophy of praxis was underpinned by a critique of 52

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For example, he writes: ‘Philosophy can attempt to assemble the whole of knowledge encyclopaedically (see Wundt). Or it may radically question the value of formal knowledge for a “living life” (see irrationalist philosophies from Harmann to Bergson). But these episodic trends lie to one side of the main philosophic tradition. The latter acknowledges as given and necessary the results and achievements of the special sciences and assigns to philosophy the task of exhibiting and justifying the grounds for regarding as valid the concepts so constructed’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 110). As this passage makes clear, by the 1920s, Lukács regarded vitalist philosophies as largely irrelevant to the development of a critique of reification. Whether or not this was justified is beside the point; what matters is that his scepticism regarding viewpoints that extrinsically or intuitively opposed some quality such as life to the quantitative logic of reification. Nonetheless, he does explain the same point at length with regards to pure economics: At every stage of social evolution each economic category reveals a definite relation between men. This relation becomes conscious and is conceptualised. Because of this the inner logic of the movement of human society can be understood at once as the product of men themselves and of forces that arise from their relations with each other and which have escaped their control. Thus economic categories become dynamic and dialectical in a double sense. As ‘pure’ economic categories they are involved in constant interaction with each other, and that enables us to understand any given historical cross-section through the evolution of society. But since they have arisen out of human relations and since they function in the process of transformation of human relations, the actual process of social evolution becomes visible in their reciprocal relationship with the reality underlying their activity. That is to say, the production and reproduction of a particular economic totality, which science hopes to understand, is necessarily transformed into the process of production and reproduction of a particular social totality; in the course of this transformation, ‘pure’ economics are naturally

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formalism both explicitly directed against neo-Kantianism (particularly, Simmel) and thoroughly indebted to Hegel. A resume of this critique makes it possible to anchor the concept of the commodity in terms of its immanent relationship to the theoretical starting points of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. This, in turn, makes it possible to ground adequately Lukács’s insight that the commodity – in terms of its dual character, as divided between form and content and between quantity and quality – is the essence of reification, without resorting to empiricism or a ‘transcendental’ and quasi neo-Kantian critique. The analysis and critique of quantitative, rational and calculable social forms was not uncommon among Lukács’s contemporaries. Aside from Marx, the work of Georg Simmel is arguably the most important single source for his theory of reification.54 In Simmel, the form of quantity, ultimately represented by money, both expresses and constrains the content of life. However, to Sim-

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transcended, though this does not mean that we have to appeal to transcendental forces (Lukács 1967a, p. 15). This illustrates amply that to charge Lukács’s philosophy of praxis with ignoring political economy (as do some critics, mentioned below) is at least unfair; Lukács himself pointed towards the theoretical spaces wherein political economy might underpin and inform a philosophy of praxis. Simmel analysed at length both the quantifying logic of modernity and its pre-history in The Philosophy of Money (see Simmel 2011c). This theme also appears throughout his work and extensively in his famous essay ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’. For example, he writes: If all the watches in Berlin suddenly went wrong in different ways even only as much as an hour, its entire economic and commercial life would be derailed for some time … Punctuality, calculability and exactness, which are required by the complications and extensiveness of metropolitan life, are not only most intimately connected with its capitalist and intellectualistic character but also colour the content of life and are conductive to the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impulses which originally seek to determine the form of life from within instead of receiving it from the outside in a general, schematically precise form (Simmel 2011b, p. 328). Additionally, it should be noted that, in his pre-Marxist years, Lukács drew extensively on the Simmelian antinomy between form and life which is best expressed in Simmel’s ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’ (see Simmel 1997). The influence of this basically Simmelian problematic is strongly felt in Lukács’s early volume of essays Soul and Form, which, in broad terms, expresses his struggle with an experience of life impoverished by overgrowth of form and the consequent over-refinement of the individual (Lukács 2010). Lukács later reframed this in more Marxian terms (as Kavoulakos points out) as the antinomy between form and content (Kavoulakos 2011, p. 160). Still, although his solution is radically different, it may be said that this problematic continued to frame Lukács’s work, including in the 1920s. This will be explored as pertains to his concept of the contemplative stance in Chapter 4. Most recently, Yoon Sun Lee has drawn out this aspect of Lukács’s thought, as it recurs across his career with reference to his literary criticism (see Sun Lee 2011).

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mel, this is an open-ended and ultimately tragic logic; as form grows it becomes both increasingly necessary for the cultivation of the individual and simultaneously oppressive to that individual. No reconciliation is envisioned; the only praxis available is that of the cultivated individual who becomes increasingly subsumed under the vast overgrowth of objective culture. Lukács was critical of this resigned attitude. In fact, he argues that by ‘scientifically deepening’ social laws generated under capitalism, and in so doing, rendering the divide between objective form and life as a transhistoric and tragic antinomy, Simmel produced one the purest intellectual reflections of reification. He argued that in the ‘abstract, quantitative mode of calculability … the reified mind necessarily sees it as the form in which its own authentic immediacy becomes manifest and – as reified consciousness – does not even attempt to transcend it’.55 This is to say, for having produced a purely theoretical reflection of reification which did not discover any mediation beyond the opposition between quantity and quality, but rather which eternalised that opposition, Lukács charged Simmel with having produced a new, theoretical immediacy. This was, in fact, Lukács’s critique of neo-Kantian thought as a whole. Quoting Marx, Lukács compared Simmel’s sociology to economic theories which hold that money possesses the property of producing more money. Just as ‘vulgar political economy’ mistakes the ‘fetish-form’ of capital for reality by asserting that capital is self-expanding, Lukács argues that Simmel takes capitalism at face value by eternalising its form in opposition to life.56 So, Lukács wrote: Just as the economic theory of capitalism remains stuck fast in its selfcreated immediacy, the same thing happens to bourgeois attempts to comprehend the ideological phenomenon of reification. Even thinkers who have no desire to deny or obscure its existence and who are more or less clear in their own minds about its humanly destructive consequences remain on the surface and make no attempt to advance beyond its objectively most derivative forms, the forms furthest from the real life-process of capitalism, i.e. the most external and vacuous forms, to the basic phenomenon of reification itself. Indeed, they divorce these empty manifestations from their real capitalist foundation and make them independent and permanent by regarding them as the timeless model of human rela-

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Lukács 1967a, p. 94. Lukács 1967a, p. 94.

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tions in general. (This can be seen more clearly in Simmel’s book The Philosophy of Money, a very interesting and perceptive work in matters of detail).57 Given the fate of Lukács’s own project, it is fair to say that his critique of Simmel is rather hyperbolic. Those who live in glass houses (or in conceptual mythologies) should refrain from throwing stones, or at least, learn to throw them well. Indeed, Lukács’s own critique of reification, as this section argues, emerges through his critique of Simmel’s extraordinarily perceptive theoretical reflection of immediacy.58 This, however, is beside the point. Rather, the point is that for Lukács, immediacy itself becomes visible in forms of thought which hypostatise that immediacy. In this sense, Simmel’s social theory, from Lukács’s point of view, constitutes a pure theoretical reflection of the unity of form and content, and therefore an unconscious theoretical reflection of the structure of the commodity itself. While Simmel produces a totalising theory, in Lukács’s view, by virtue of Simmel’s inability to mediate the immediacy he arrives at, it is ultimately ahistorical, fictitious and trapped in that immediacy. In contrast, Lukács’s critique states that a genuinely critical sociology – one which may satisfy and ground the demands of mediation, totality, genesis and praxis – must cut to the heart of the real life-process of capitalism. If this underlying reality is discovered, theory may preserve the totalising critique of quantitative reason evident in Simmel, while also identifying a mediation beyond the immediacy that is reflected in thought. This additionally allows theory to comprehend its own role in reflecting that immediacy. While Lukács identifies the ‘real life-process’ of capitalism via Marx, he argued that the first person to identify the essential form and content of capitalism was Hegel. This should not be surprising, given that the critique of formal and quantitative modes of cognition and life occurs regularly in Hegel. Indeed, it may be argued that Lukács’s critique of formalism is homologous with that of Hegel. This has passed largely unnoticed. However, the point here is not to establish the genealogy of Lukács’s account of reification. Rather, Lukács’s

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 94–5. It should be noted that other thinkers who were, broadly considered, connected with neoKantianism were also influential to Lukács. It would be equally possible, for instance, to ground Lukács’s analysis of immediacy in his critique of Max Weber. Nor is this section intended to discount other, more subterranean influences on Lukács, such as Lask or Rickert. Most recently, Feenberg and Kavoulakos have admirably highlighted these influences on Lukács. See, for example, Feenberg 2014, pp. 69–89.

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reception and critique of what he regarded as Hegel’s incipient theory of the commodity provides for the four methodological demands that were not capable of attaining satisfaction on the basis of Simmel. Firstly, in his reading of Hegel, Lukács uncovers the essential structure of the commodity, as divided between use and exchange value. Secondly, he establishes that this structure is constitutive of the reality and objectivity of the totality. Thirdly, he uncovers the historical specificity (that is, the genesis) of the commodity form. Finally, the impasse that Lukács identifies in Hegel points towards the resolution of the antinomies of the commodity form in praxis. Perhaps the clearest example of Hegel’s critique of quantitative reason is found in the preface to The Phenomenology, where Hegel calls the quantitative mode of thought ‘mathematical cognition’.59 As a specific instance of what Hegel generally refers to as ‘representative thought’, he argues that the concept of mathematical cognition is magnitude. As such, it does not really grasp the thing which it seeks to understand, but only dwells on its surface, reducing what is actual to space and quantity. By thus establishing quantitative equivalence as the principle of knowledge, mathematical cognition abolishes real difference – or reduces it to purely quantitative difference. In this way, Hegel argues, mathematical cognition both abolishes immanent, qualitative change and establishes infinite – yet meaningless – movement as the principle of its object. Moreover, to Hegel, mathematical cognition abolishes action by placing the subject outside of the object of cognition.60 So, mathematical cognition flattens quality and excludes it, both from the subject and the object of cognition. The parallels between this argument and Lukács’s critique of undialectical thought, summarised above, are readily apparent. Of course, Hegel’s comments both presuppose and inform his philosophy as a whole. Lukács did not share this philosophy, although he did argue for the appro-

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Hegel 2018, §. 38. Of mathematical cognition, Hegel writes: Its purpose, that is, its concept, is magnitude … For that reason, the movement of knowledge in mathematics takes place only on the surface; it does not touch on the thing that really matters, does not touch on the essence, that is, the concept, and hence does not constitute any kind of comprehension of what is at stake. The material that provides mathematics with this gratifying wealth of truths consists of space and numerical units. Space is the existence in which the concept inscribes its distinctions as it would in an empty, dead element in which the distinctions themselves are just as unmoved and lifeless … The principle of magnitude, that is, the principle of the contentless distinction, and the principle of equality, that is, of abstract, lifeless unity, are incapable of dealing with that pure restlessness of life and is absolute distinction (Hegel 2018, §. 43–5).

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priation of Hegel’s method. Rather, the point of this homology with Hegel is, firstly, to establish that Lukács’s critique of the essential form and content of capitalist society was more indebted to Hegelian and Marxian thought than to neo-Kantian. Secondly, it illustrates that Lukács’s sociological extension of commodity fetishism relies, conceptually, on a dialectical critique of theories which reproduce the immediacy of reification in thought. This critique allows Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to reveal the reality which is hypostatised in theory. So, in one of the most penetrating parts of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács argues that the quantification of time – which is equally the reduction of time to space – underpins commodity production.61 Universal commodity production and the rationalism of the capitalist production process requires … … a perfectly closed system, [which] must likewise transform the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world: it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space … Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.62 As this passage argues, the reduction of quality to quantity and of time to space and quantity underpins the formalism of immediate facticity. In this paragraph, Lukács identifies the real, essential unity of quality and quantity as contained in the capitalist form of production. This form of production entails the principle of rationalisation, as Lukács writes: ‘We are concerned above all with the principle at work here: the principle of rationalisation based on what is and can be calculated’.63 Quoting Marx, he continues: ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the incarnation of time. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day …’64 Admittedly, if this accounts for the formalism of capitalism, it does not yet account for the content which both underpins that form and is expressed by it. While Simmel opposed life to form, Lukács opposed labour to form. In fact, following Marx, Lukács 61 62 63 64

Lukács 1967a, p. 89. Lukács 1967a, p. 90. Lukács 1967a, p. 88. Lukács 1967a, pp. 89–90. Further dimensions of Lukács’s critique of capitalist rationalisation will be provided below, in Chapter 2.

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argues that only in a society where labour has been completely subsumed formally under commodity relations can it be perceived as the essential content of the value that is expressed quantitatively, in terms of money and capital. As he argues in ‘Class Consciousness’, this is because only under capitalism is the full price (although, of course, not the value) of labour-power paid. Where exploitation proceeds by way of force (for example, under slavery or serfdom), it simply appears that a portion of the labour is unpaid for.65 In short, only the total subsumption of labour under the value form allows us to identify labour as the content underpinning form. This insight grounds Lukács’s account of commodity fetishism. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, to Lukács, the commodity is the object which contains the immediate unity of form and content of capitalist society. This point is not only established by the homology between Lukács’s critique of quantitative reason and Hegel’s, but by Lukács’s critique of Hegel. Although Lukács criticised Hegel for ultimately relapsing into a separation between logic and genesis, he argued that Hegel’s discovery of a revolutionary methodology which could grasp reality was made possible by his perceptive, albeit incomplete grasp of the real content of capitalism. Hegel’s perspicuity, in Lukács’s view, was in large part founded upon his appreciation of critical political economy, which was both unique amongst the classical German idealists and far in advance of the Young Hegelians. Specifically, Lukács believed that Hegel grasped the unity of method and system, of form and content and of subject and object – not merely in intellectual or methodological terms, but in concrete social-historical terms. This was precisely because at certain moments, he drew close to an understanding of commodity production. In his essay ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics’, Lukács identifies just such a point in the chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit entitled ‘The Truth of Enlightenment’. Specifically, Lukács argues that the ‘this-sidedness’ of Hegel’s account (i.e., the extent to which he grasps reality concretely) is bound up with the category of ‘the useful’.66 Lukács writes: The decisive category that actually brings about this this-sidedness is, rather, an economic one (albeit in mythological form): the useful. And this category of the useful already exhibits very clearly the dialectical double 65

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Lukács 1967a, p. 52. Note: this point depends on a technical distinction between the price of labour-power, namely, a wage, and the value produced by concrete or variable labour which is subsumed under the commodified form of labour-power. In his reproduction of Marx’s argument, Lukács is rather less precise in his use of these technical terms. Lukács 1972d, p. 212.

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nature of the commodity, the unity of use-value and exchange-value, the appearance of thing-ness along with internal relatedness in itself.67 Lukács continues to explain that with this category (which occurs, in Hegel, as the product of the struggle between enlightenment and superstition), consciousness is able to constitute an external, objective world in which it also feels itself to be wholly objective. ‘Through the useful, this stage of consciousness achieves what the earlier stages lacked: reality’.68 According to Lukács, this newly real world is, for Hegel, one of alienation and estrangement in which consciousness is confronted with an objective and legitimate world which is both autonomous and estranged from the subject; that is to say, is negative to consciousness. And yet, this world results from the unity of individuality and being; its existence results from the ‘… work of self-consciousness, but likewise an actuality immediately present and alien to it, which has a peculiar being of its own and in which it doesn’t know itself … It acquires its existence by self-consciousness of its own accord relinquishing itself and giving up its essentiality …’69 Lukács thus believes that here Hegel had understood, albeit in a mythological and all-too-philosophical form, the basic antinomies of a world built upon universal commodity production. The category of the useful contains the essential determinants of the commodity: use value and exchange value; concrete labour and abstract labour; quantity and quality; form and content and ultimately, subject and object. And yet, the useful unites these terms unconsciously, and in such a way that they appear to be strictly separated. One could very well nominate other sections of The Phenomenology of Spirit or the Philosophy of Right that resonate similarly, and indeed, an extended discussion of the economic content of Hegel’s thought is to be found in Lukács’s later work, The Young Hegel.70 The point here, however, is not to discover Marxist categories in Hegel’s thought, but to 67

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Illustrating the point, Lukács continued, quoting Hegel: ‘“It is”, says Hegel, “something that subsists in itself or a thing; this being in itself is at the same time only a pure moment; it is in consequence absolutely for something else, but is equally for an other merely as it is in itself these opposite moments have returned into the indivisible unity of being-for self” ’ (Lukács 1972d, p. 213). Lukács also argued later, as will be outlined below, that the self-comprehension of the commodity allows us to perceive reality in a higher and more concrete manner. Lukács 1972d, p. 212. Lukács 1972d, pp. 212–13. Generally speaking, little has been written about this work. While less radical than his philosophy of praxis from the 1920s, it still contains a great deal of critical material, not least of all his critique of the logic of bureaucracies, as expressed via his account of Hegel’s early work on Christianity (see: Lukács 1975).

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illustrate the extent to which Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and his reading of Marx are founded on the concept of the commodity. Others have also noticed this. For example, summarising the changes Lukács effected within Marxism, Stephen Eric Bronner suggests that in Lukács’s hands, ‘The “labor theory of value” now assumes phenomenological form, and the empirical investigation into the commodity dissolves into a critical analysis of the constitutive social relations that it hides’.71 The critique of formal rationalism generated through Lukács’s critique of Simmel and engagement with Hegel provides for the philosophical critique and mediation of immediacy; specifically, for the identification of its underlying reality and essence. This grounds Lukács’s critique of commodity fetishism, to which the discussion will now turn. As he wrote, the ‘commodity-structure’ must be seen as the ‘… central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects’, capable of being made to ‘… yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with the subjective forms corresponding to them’.72 However, despite the importance he accords to the commodity, at no point in his work from the 1920s does Lukács outline the concept in detail or outline a critique of political economy. He has been criticised for this omission, both by Rose (in passing) and by others.73 One explanation for this silence is that he largely saw this task as having been completed by Marx and subsequently defended by Rosa Luxemburg.74 Where Lukács does speak of political economy, it is almost always by quoting Marx. Additionally, as has been demonstrated, it is just as viable to ground an analysis of commodity fetishism in a metacritique of reified social theory. Nevertheless, the unity of opposites represented by the commodity, between exchange value and use value, underpins the entirety of Lukács’s analysis of reification and the contemplative stance. To illustrate this, and to supply the grounds to explain fully these aspects of Lukács’s thought, a brief resume of Marx’s understanding of the commodity is necessary.75 71 72 73

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Bronner 2011, p. 19. One wonders whether Bronner had in mind Gillian Rose, whose words to similar effect were noted in the introduction. Lukács 1967a, p. 83. Rose 2009, p. 31. In fact, the first author to make this criticism of Lukács would appear to be Israil’ Vainshtein, writing in 1924 in Under the Banner of Marxism. This article, recently translated and published on the blog The Charnel House, does not appear to have been reprinted or noticed by any other commentators on Lukács. It is one of the more interesting early criticisms of Lukács, raising points that were destined to only re-emerge in the secondary literature in the 1970s (cf. Vainshtein 1924). Lukács 1967a, p. xlii. The following summary is based on Chapter 1 of Capital (see Marx and Engels 1996, pp. 45– 81).

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As Marx outlines in Capital, the commodity appears as an object to be measured by its own properties. The most immediate property which commodities possess is their utility; they must satisfy some human need. This utility is bound up with the physical properties of the commodity and is realised in the consumption of that commodity. Use values are, therefore, manifold, concrete and qualitative. On this basis, however, it is difficult to compare, let alone exchange commodities. So, Marx writes: ‘As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value’.76 The requirement that commodities be exchanged, therefore, requires a third term that mediates between two concrete, qualitative use values. This is, in the first place, their exchange value, which is an abstract measure of quantity. The realisation of this exchange value requires a further series of mediations, including money, capital, the market, price and so on.77 For now, however, it suffices to note that in Marx’s view, one of his two most significant discoveries in the field of political economy was not simply the dual nature of the commodity, but the twofold character of labour, in which concrete labour is understood as labour’s use value, while labour-power (or, abstract labour) is understood as the content of exchange value.78 This point is also central to understanding Lukács. Labour power and concrete labour exist in the same relationship as exchange value and use value. Commodities are comparable on the basis of their exchange, but exchange value is a form possessing no definite content of its own. The magnitude of exchange value is determined elsewhere. According to Marx, it is not arbitrarily or subjectively set, but rather represents a certain quantity of concrete labour (technically, socially necessary labour time). Yet wages are not determined by the value of concrete labour embodied in commodities. Rather, they are determined by the value of labour power, the commodified form of labour. Thus, labour power, or abstract labour, represents the exchange value of labour, while concrete labour stands for the use value of labour power, which is expended at work. The former is quantitative and fixed, 76 77

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Marx and Engels 1996, p. 48. A discussion of these terms, their systemic interrelations and the related problems would venture into Marxist political economy proper, which is irrelevant to the present exposition. Such an exposition may also be found in I.I. Rubin, whose work was both contemporaneous with and complementary to that of Lukács (cf. Rubin 1973). As Marx wrote to Engels: ‘The best points in my book are 1) the two-fold character of labour, according to whether it is expressed in use value or exchange value (all comprehension of the facts depends upon this). It is emphasised immediately in the first chapter; 2) the treatment of surplus value independently of its particular forms as profits, interest, ground rent, etc’. Marx and Engels 1987c, p. 407.

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while the latter is variable and qualitative. Labour power is valued according to the labour market, while the new value added to commodities is produced by concrete labour. The difference in value between these two types of labour is the secret of surplus value. This is the key to the specificity of exploitation under capitalism and it is the foundational concept for the theories of commodity fetishism and reification. This is to say, a commodity may be profitably sold owing to the fact that the value of the real, concrete labour that was expended in its production is greater than the value of the labour power purchased in the employment of waged labour. More will be said on the alienation of labour below. For now, this analysis demonstrates that the commodity form contains the basic antinomies of capitalism and is a historically contingent relationship of exploitation between humans concealed beneath a series of depersonalised objective mediators, including money, wages, capital and so on. Out of this discussion of the commodity it is possible to assemble some concluding points about the essential reality of capitalism. As the immediate unity of form and content under capitalism, the commodity is equally the point at which quantity and quality and subject and object meet. However, they do so fetishistically and unconsciously. Quality, the essence of concrete labour, is expressed quantitatively and as a result, is flattened and formalised. Yet without the qualitative aspect of human labour supplying a use value, the commodity is unthinkable. Beyond this, the free sale of labour power or abstract labour allows subjects to relate independently to their work and the objects of their labour while at the same time separating the qualitative aspect of their labour from their control. The entire relationship takes on a real objectivity which conceals its relational character as a type of power or domination. This domination rests on a domination of time (specifically, the working day) organised under the aegis of calculable or quantitative reason. Indeed, recalling Hegel’s argument about the triumph of the category of ‘utility’ – which immediately precedes the famous section of the Phenomenology that discusses ‘Absolute Freedom’ – we may go further and point out that the commodity is the social form which underpins negativity as such, and therefore the concept of mediation itself which, as we have seen, only attains concretion in light of this foundation.79 Elsewhere, Hegel points out that this abstract freedom is a moment in the necessary foundation for ethical life and second nature.80 Thus, abstract freedom leads, conceptually, to the totality in Hegel, too. These points will recur, of course, in a Marxist key, later in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.

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Hegel 2018, §§. 537–95. Hegel 1991a, §§. 4–6.

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For now, this completes the concretisation of the first methodological demand, for mediation. The commodity form, as the underlying reality of capitalism, connects the fragmented facticity of immediacy by identifying its underlying reality. Thus, the discussion has moved from the immediate facticity, through a rejection of one sided critiques of that immediacy (abstract mediation) to a grasp of society, to its economic essence. In the commodity form we can discover the basis not only for Lukács’s theory of reification (that is, totality), but also for his understanding of the subjective experience of a reified world. Moreover, we have at hand the starting points for his analysis of genesis and, ultimately, praxis. Finally, it is worth observing that the starting moment of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis – the critique of immediate facticity – only attains conceptual completion in the analysis of the commodity as a category, which is supplied by Lukács’s discussion of Hegel in ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics’, one of the final texts of the same philosophy of praxis. The beginning is only rationally underwritten at the end. With this reflection, the circularity of Lukács’s 1920s philosophy comes into view for the first time.

chapter 2

Reification and Totality 1

Subjective and Objective Reification; Society as Second Nature The individual’s purely singular engagements are related to the needs that he has as a natural creature, which is to say, as an existing individuality. That even these, its commonest functions, do not come to grief but rather have actuality, comes about by way of the universal sustaining medium, by way of the power of the whole people. – However, not only does it have this form of durable existence for its activity as such; it has its content equally as much within the universal substance. What the individual does is the universal skillfulness and ethos of all. In his actuality, he is intertwined with the activities of all insofar as this content is completely individualized. The individual’s labor for his needs is a satisfaction of the needs of others as much as it is of his own needs, and the satisfaction of his own needs is something he attains only through the labor of others. G.W.F. Hegel1 The basis of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point of departure is the will; the will is free so that freedom constitutes its substance and destiny and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature. G.W.F. Hegel2

To speak of the commodity as the essence of capitalism implies a totalising analysis. It is for just such an analysis that Lukács is most famous. Yet, his concept of totality is precisely where many of the more influential critiques of Lukács – including that of his elder self – have taken aim. So, this chapter has four goals. Firstly, it will reproduce Lukács’s concept of reification in such a manner as to satisfy the demand for a concrete totality, outlined above, as the logical development of mediation. In so doing, care will be taken to separate between the subjective and objective dimensions of reification, as well as to

1 Hegel 2018, §. 351. 2 Hegel 1991a, §. 4.

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explicate the meaning of Lukács’s description of society as a ‘second nature’.3 Secondly, the inner dynamism and dissonance of Lukács’s concept of totality will be highlighted. These points will help us to reply to some of Lukács’s many detractors. Although this is a somewhat ungrateful task, given that the popular front against Lukács continues to recruit ardent neophytes even today, it is necessary to settle some long unpaid accounts. (The reader who is disinterested in polemic and counterpolemic is invited to skip section 2 of this chapter). Finally, this will prepare the groundwork for the concretisation of the third methodological demand: genesis. Without wanting to anticipate the argument too much, it will be argued that Lukács’s concept of totality requires that he posit the principle of labour and the resultant standpoint of the proletariat in order to account for the genesis; that is, the historic and ongoing creation of the reified social totality. Lukács’s theory of reification accounts for how labour is socially organised according to the quantitative and economic logic of commodity fetishism and how this colonises the entirety of our world, subjective and objective, natural and social. Yet, even this relatively uncontroversial statement conceals an assumption that must be addressed. The account of commodity fetishism provided above presupposes the universalisation of commodity production. As Lukács writes, ‘The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it’.4 So, in the first place, reification results from the universalisation of commodity production. Prior to the universalisation of commodity production, the commodity appeared as an ‘isolated and non-dominant phenomenon’, and consequently, while the world may well have been subject to alienation, it was not reified.5 So, Lukács argues that prior to capitalism, economic relationships appeared primarily as relationships of power between individuals. Insofar as fetishistic economic categories dominated life, following Marx, Lukács asserts that these assumed more superficial forms, as money, interest-bearing capital and so on.6 Moreover, given

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Lukács’s theory of ‘first nature’ – that is, nature itself – will be dealt with in Part Two. Lukács 1967a, pp. 85–6. Lukács 1967a, p. 85. This argument presupposes that the insights generated by Marxian political economy are valid retroactively. To some extent this is true, although extreme care must be taken given that (as Lukács acknowledges) the logic of precapitalist societies was far less economic and rational (Lukács 1967a, p. 86).

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that the logic of precapitalist societies was not economic, other fetishistic categories – for instance, caste, status, or religion – predominated in humanity’s self-understanding. On the other hand, as commodity production hegemonised society, a qualitative change was effected in that society: ‘The distinction between a society where this [commodity] form is dominant, permeating every expression of life, and a society where it only makes an episodic appearance is essentially one of quality’.7 In Lukács’s view, it was not pity that killed God, but the commodity, universalised.8 What qualitative shift is brought about in society by the advent of universal reification? Lukács’s answer to this question takes stock of the most important characteristic of reification and the key way in which it differs from precapitalist alienation. Reification, unlike any other historic form of objectification or alienation, purifies the antinomy between subject and object: What is of central importance here is that because of this situation a man’s own activity, his own labour becomes something objective and independent of him, something that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien to man. There is both an objective and subjective side to this phenomenon. Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market). The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power. The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own activity. Subjectively – where the market economy has been fully developed – a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any other consumer article.9 A number of crucial aspects of Lukács’s account of reification are present here. Chief among them is the distinction he makes between subjective and object7 Lukács 1967a, p. 84. 8 This said, universal commodity production is the basis for bourgeois humanism. In turn, bourgeois humanism depends upon formal equality – and as a result, it institutionalises, as one pole of its ideology, pity for those who are socially disadvantaged and subjected to concrete inequality, provided, of course, they remain subservient and subject to slave morality. In this way, a bridge may be constructed between Lukács and Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the death of God. 9 Lukács 1967a, pp. 86–7.

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ive reification. Subjective reification describes the experience and standpoint of the reified subject, who is taken to be a free individual. Indeed, the freedom of the individual subject is a necessary precondition for the sale of labour power – as Marx and Hegel (following their words, quoted above) were well aware. Objective reification describes the dynamic of an estranged world which acts with apparent autonomy. Both the objective and subjective sides of reification are the product of the abstraction of human labour required for commodity production. As a result, both sides reproduce the quantitative logic of exchange value. With regards to the objective or social side, Lukács explains that ‘… in so far as the commodity form facilitates the equal exchange of qualitatively different objects, it can only exist if that formal equality is in fact recognized – at any rate in this relation, which indeed confers upon them their commodity nature’.10 Thus reification presupposes and produces a market which equalises diverse use values and qualities on the basis of their exchange value. On the subjective or individual side, the ‘… formal equality of human labour in the abstract is not only the common factor to which the various commodities are reduced; it also becomes the real principle governing the actual production of commodities’.11 So, reification tends towards not only the standardisation of labour, but also the abstraction and atomisation of labour. As the labourer is free to sell his labour power, he becomes the agent of his own abstraction and in this sense, is complicit in his own exploitation. This entails a series of subjective experiences that will be outlined below. Prior to this, an important qualification is necessary. Although the separation between subjective and objective reification might appear stark and mutually exclusive, to read it in such non-dialectical terms results in a distorted and untenable social theory. Both sides of reification, subjective and objective, are marked by their own inner determinate complex of the subjective and objective and of the qualitative and quantitative. That is to say, within the subjective side of reification, there also exists an objective and subjective, or a qualitative and quantitative side. The same is true for the objective side of reification. The presence of the other side within the first both allows the two sides to dynamically interact and forms the motor contradiction for development within each. Understanding this is crucial for understanding the inner dynamics and tensions of reification which leads towards dereification. Without this caveat, the resulting account of reification would be too monolithic and would preclude any possibility for resistance. 10 11

Lukács 1967a, p. 87. Lukács 1967a, p. 87.

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As a cautionary example, Arato and Breines produce such a one sided reading, suggesting that Lukács went too far in extending rationalisation into all spheres of society. While they concede that capitalism gave great impetus to the rationalisation of the non-economic spheres of society, they argue that Lukács’s analysis leaves no space for resistance within these spheres.12 They argue that for Lukács, this … made his own task immeasurably more difficult. Not finding any elements or possible traces of emancipation in the various spheres of the social world, he was not only drastically confined to the Marxian answer that proletarian revolution will dissolve the dynamic center of reification, the factory-based capitalist economy, but he was also forced into a dramatically mythological version of the thesis of proletarian subjectivity … Since the realm of the superstructure was, however, conceived according to the most rigorous standards of the Weberian concept of ‘rationalization’, he could not (and, of course, did not want to) squeeze any element of potential subjectivity and creativity or even dynamic possibility out of law, science, bureaucracy, technology. As a result the theoretical burden on the revolutionary proletariat became impossibly great.13 So, they argue that Lukács’s concept of reification is far too monolithic, simultaneously obscuring concrete and grounded possibilities for resistance and demanding a mythological praxis.14 Yet this relies on a dramatically simplified and one sided presentation of Lukács’s analysis of reification. Just as exchange values cannot exist without use values, the objective world of reification cannot exist without human subjectivity. Of course, a contradiction exists between these two sides and it is ultimately this contradiction, driven to crisis, which Lukács believes grounds the possibility for dereification. Arato and Breines acknowledge this to some extent, as will be discussed below. However, they fail to notice that within each side of reification, a further antinomy exists. Rational, calculable and quantitative objects and objective forms also possess a qualitative aspect while abstractly free subjects find their lives divided between quality and quantity or between subjective and objective styles of life and their corresponding ideologies. Within the objective side of reification, 12 13 14

Arato and Breines 1979, p. 121. Arato and Breines 1979, p. 122. This goes hand in hand with Arato and Breines’s argument that Lukács was incapable of providing the necessary mediations between the empirical class consciousness of the proletariat and their imputed class consciousness. This will be discussed in Chapter 3.

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that is, the world of structures, the state and justice system are worthwhile examples. While the state and justice system are organised according to calculable reason, they nevertheless possess a utopian or qualitative aspect which constitutes their ideology. Typically, Lukács does not dwell long with this aspect of reified objects. No doubt this was because he wrote in a historical period when, owing to war, crisis and revolution, social institutions did not generally enjoy the ideological power they do today. So on the basis of his rhetoric, it is perhaps forgivable to assume that for Lukács, reified objects are entirely rational and calculable. However, if one’s goal is to critique, the spirit of generosity demands that the strongest and most rigorous version of an opponent’s argument be erected. Arato and Breines fall short of such generosity. Beyond this, a more nuanced account fits far more satisfactorily with Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as a whole. The textual basis for this emerges clearly when Lukács criticises ideology and writers he considers to be ideological. This is particularly the case with those whom he charges with utopianism or irrationalism. For example, in one passage Lukács counterposes Jacobi’s irrationalism to Kant’s rationalism, writing: Jacobi had rebelled in the name of ‘humanism’ against the tyranny of the ‘law’ in Kant and Fichte, he demanded that ‘laws should be made for the sake of man, not man for the sake of the law’. But we can see that where Kant had left the established order untouched in the name of rationalism, Jacobi did no more than offer to glorify the same empirical, merely existing reality in the spirit of irrationalism.15 Shortly after these lines, Lukács goes on to criticise Lassalle in similar terms for his idealisation of the state. This, he argues, is founded on an ‘abstract and absolute’ separation of the state from the economy, as well as a ‘rigid division between man as a thing on the one hand and man as man on the other …’ Such undialectical views, in Lukács’s opinion, have two consequences. Firstly, they bear responsibility for a fatalistic and uncritical acceptance of immediate empirical facticity. Here Lukács has in mind Lassalle’s infamous ‘Iron Law of Wages’. Secondly, as Lukács writes: ‘… the “idea” of the state is divorced from the development of capitalism and is credited with a completely utopian function, wholly alien to its concrete character. And this means that every path leading to a change in this reality is systematically blocked’.16 This is to say, by proposing to separate the ideality of the state – its utopian ideology and stated telos – 15 16

Lukács 1967a, p. 195. Lukács 1967a, p. 195. Some of the political consequences of such mistakes will be discussed in Part Two, with regards to reformism and the fetishism of illegality.

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from its empirical being, Lassalle created an ideology that combined passivity with utopianism. This is, in fact, the structure of all ideology, as we will see in Part Two. Lukács describes this way of thinking as an ‘inorganic aggregate of the empirical and the utopian’.17 That is to say, it hypostatises the antinomy between quantity and quality or between the empirical and utopian. This critique is further illustrated by an article entitled ‘Der Nelson-Bund’, in which Lukács outlines a critique of Leonard Nelson and the organisation with which he was associated. In sum, Lukács praises Nelson as an ‘honest’ ideologist: that is, he evinces sympathy with Nelson’s rejection of the pragmatism and implied relativism of those theorists of legality who take an existent system of laws as an immutable given and who argue that the rational concept of legality is therefore built on power, perhaps in the manner of Schmitt. Lukács argues that this represents a kind of cynical bourgeois realism that sacrifices the goal of a rational legal order to the positive reality encountered. While endorsing this aspect of Nelson’s view, Lukács criticises him for proposing instead a natural and rational foundation to law. Lukács argues that in making this proposal, Nelson unknowingly reproduces political categories associated with the rule of the bourgeoisie. He thus argues that Nelson produces a pure ideology that is honest, capable of sustaining a critique of more relativist or pragmatic approaches to law, but which ultimately lacks the capacity to ground its utopian vision in the reality of society. In contrast to this, Lukács proposes what he considers to be a non-ideological critique of law built on the standpoint of the proletariat.18 From the metacritique of these ideological viewpoints, we may infer firstly that the object (in this case, the legal system) itself possesses these two sides. Secondly, we may infer that the two sides are dialectically interrelated in such a way that the utopian or qualitative aspect simultaneously emerges from and reinforces the quantitative or quotidian (dare we say, dystopian) side. Consequently, any viewpoint which hypostatises either side – either the prosaic or the utopian – fails to grasp the reality of social objects and institutions.19

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Lukács 1967a, p. 196. Lukács 1926a. Lukács’s political development prior to his writing History and Class Consciousness is also evidence of this view. For example, in ‘The Question of Parliamentarianism’, Lukács argues that the advent of soviets renders parliamentary tactics obsolete. Notwithstanding that this essay is marked by ultraleftism, such a point implies that prior to the actuality of revolution, some aspect of bourgeois parliaments might be used fruitfully by the workers’ movement. This is possible and necessary precisely because of the qualitative and ideological aspects of those institutions (cf. Lukács 1972i). A more mature (and less ultra-

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Finally, the same antinomy between the qualitative and quantitative may be observed within the subject. Even though the worker is required to abstract himself and subordinate himself to the quantitative rationality of the production process, short of the dystopian science fiction imagination, this is impossible unless some remainder of quality and humanity is left to the worker. This might manifest itself as a separation between the work day and private life. Or, in the case of creative or aspirational workers, it might manifest in a workideology that valorises the qualitative aspects of work, in order to conceal the economic and calculable reality. One is reminded of the workplace culture promoted in Google, within academia or by a HR department that tries to mandate compulsory happiness. Nevertheless, as will be elaborated further below, the qualitative or utopian remainder left to the individual becomes crucial when discussing the standpoint of the proletariat, the contemplative stance as well as the possibility for resistance to reification. As a further aside, Lukács’s attention to the determinate presence of the subjective and objective within either side of reification and within social institutions allows his philosophy of praxis to enter into dialogue with Marxisms more influenced by structuralism or, for that matter, Foucault, whose most important works grasped the deep interaction of the subjective and objective sides of structures in unparalleled historical detail.20 Let us return to the account of reification. The second qualitative transformation enacted by the universalisation of commodity production is that which Lukács refers to as the full socialisation of society. This is the consequence of and the condition for the full domination of nature by society. As Lukács writes: Bourgeois society carried out the process of socialising society. Capitalism destroyed both the spatio-temporal barriers between different lands and territories and also the legal partitions between the different ‘estates’. In its universe there is a formal equality for all men; the economic relations that directly determined the metabolic exchange between men and

20

left) elaboration of the same methodology is visible in the essay ‘Legality and Illegality’, included in History and Class Consciousness. Cf. Foucault 1991. While this is not the space to enter into such a discussion, the Lukács whose thinking is outlined here may fruitfully enter into a dialogue with Foucault’s historical investigations into the rationalisation of structures of authority, power and sexuality. Conversely, it is suggested that Foucault’s work may be read as the most important attempt to generate an essentially Lukácsian historical social theory without recourse to a universal subject of history or any overarching logic to history. Of course, this is not to reduce Foucault to Lukács, nor is it to imply that this was Foucault’s aim or to make any assertions about the extent to which he was or was not influenced by Lukács.

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nature progressively disappear. Man becomes, in the true sense of the word, a social being. Society becomes the reality for man.21 Consequently, bourgeois society is more homogenous and totalised than prior societies. This entails an important point: the possibility of identifying the social totality as primary only exists as a result of reification. This is not to say that precapitalist societies did not function as totalities; Lukács argues they did.22 However, the economic moment in those societies had not yet separated itself and hegemonised the whole. Rather, the economic dynamics of precapitalist societies were both tied to nature and bound up with a myriad of other dynamics, including status, tradition, religious belief and so on. So, Lukács writes: ‘… because class interests in precapitalist society never achieve full (economic) articulation … the structuring of society into castes and estates means that economic elements are inextricably joined to political and religious factors’.23 As a result, pure economic categories did not exist in precapitalist societies. Lukács continues, drawing out the consequences of this fact both for precapitalist and capitalist societies: ‘In Hegel’s parlance the economy has not even objectively reached the stage of being-for-itself. There is therefore no possible position within such a [pre-capitalist] society from which the economic basis of all social relations could be made conscious’.24 More will be 21 22

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Lukács 1967a, p. 19. In fact, Lukács was quite definite about discerning an internal dynamic within precapitalist societies – no doubt a position taken over from Hegel and Marx and counterposed to the late nineteenth century historicist school, associated with Leopold von Ranke. Particularly, Lukács was scathing of the idea attributed to the latter, which saw every epoch as ‘equally close to god’. He argued that such a view abolishes progress in history, and in so doing, abolishes the history of the present, thus fetishising the institutions of the present. This, in Lukács’s view, is the link connecting apparently relativist or irrationalist historiography with a much more commonplace naturalisation of the present (Lukács 1967a, p. 55). Lukács 1967a, p. 55. While Lukács does suggest, in relatively orthodox Marxian fashion, that the logic of precapitalist societies was determined by their organisation of labour, he does not suggest of what this logic might have consisted. After all, only capitalism organises labour economically. Lukács 1967a, p. 57. Given this admission, Lukács’s claim that precapitalist societies were governed by a totalising logic may well be questioned. After all, if it requires an outside viewpoint to discern their totalising logic, is this not an anachronism? Lukács’s preliminary answer would be that insofar as we discern a totalising logic in precapitalist societies, we impute it to them from the standpoint of the present, which is capable of sustaining a more universal viewpoint. This need not detract in the least from the truth of the insight; rather, it establishes that true historical insight is bound up with a modern stand-

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said about the standpoints of modern classes below. For now, however, the essential point is that capitalism achieved the goal of fully socialising society.25 This was achieved as the economic moment of society separated itself out and hegemonised the whole. Reification is thus totalising in the fullest sense of the term. This further entails that under capitalism, the social totality dominates nature for the first time – hence Lukács’s infamous argument that nature is a social category.26 For now, another consequence of the full socialisation of society according to an estranged economic logic is that social reality itself takes on a natural aspect. Lukács describes this objective world of reification as a ‘second nature’.27 He writes:

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point. Similarly, we may be reasonably certain that cave men and women breathed oxygen, notwithstanding their own opinions on the matter which should no doubt be taken into careful consideration. Lukács makes a number of other comments about the nature of precapitalist societies that open up interesting questions for historical materialism. These are tangential to the argument at hand, but are worth detailing nonetheless. Firstly, he argues that precapitalist societies are less integrated; the parts enjoy far more autonomy from the whole. Secondly, in precapitalist societies, the state does not mediate the economic domination of society, but rather, represents the unmediated and direct dominance of the ruling class itself. As a result of these (and other) factors, privilege – that is, the attribution of special status and entitlements based on the quality of the individual in question – plays a far greater role in social distinction in precapitalist societies (Lukács 1967a, pp. 55–9). Capitalism has thus already ‘checked its privilege’. These observations relate to a fact that has been mentioned: prior to capitalism, consciousness of the real dynamics of history and society was impossible. Thus, social and historical conflicts played out in mystified and ideological fashion; economic interests only formed and interacted with history in highly mediated ways. This raises further questions about the internal dynamics of precapitalist class societies. This is not addressed clearly in Lukács’s work from the 1920s. While he argues that the social form of labour is essential to determining the central contradictions and breakdowns of precapitalist society, he doesn’t concretise this assertion or furnish it with examples. Moreover, he gestures in an altogether different direction when he favourably quotes the young Marx’s view that Moloch and the Delphic Apollo were real powers in the ancient world (Lukács 1967a, p. 127). These scattered comments, in addition to the sharp methodological disagreements between Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and the more schematic articulations of historical materialism extant in the 1920s, raise the possibility of a different and more flexible historical materialism. After all, when Lukács argues that ‘Concrete totality is, therefore, the category that governs reality’, his view is undoubtedly at odds with approaches that thematise the forces/relationships of production or the base/superstructure antinomy (Lukács 1967a, p. 10). Lukács 1967a, p. 130. For example, Lukács 1967a, pp. 86, 128.

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That is to say, the contradiction that appears here between subjectivity and objectivity in modern rationalist formal systems, the entanglements and equivocations hidden in their concepts of subject and object, the conflict between their nature as systems created by ‘us’ and their fatalistic necessity distant from and alien to man is nothing but the logical and systematic functioning of the modern state of society. For, on the one hand, men are constantly smashing, replacing and leaving behind the ‘natural’, irrational and actually existing bonds, while, on the other hand, they erect around themselves in the reality they have created and ‘made’, a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier on with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the social relations which appear in this form).28 This also relates to Lukács’s critique of empiricism: that if social scientists wish to ground their analyses in methodologies borrowed from the natural sciences, then the precondition for this is that society itself has fully dominated nature and has as a result become naturalised. It pays to note, in this respect, that there is an irony in Lukács’s term second nature. The victory of society over nature is quixotic in the sense that the harsh necessity of natural law returns in even greater force: The purest, indeed one might say the only pure form of the control of society by its natural laws is found in capitalist production. For is it not the world-historical mission of the process of civilization that culminates in capitalism, to achieve control over nature? These ‘natural laws’ of society which rule the lives of men like ‘blind forces’ (even when their ‘rationality’ is recognized and indeed all the more powerfully when that is the case) have the task of subordinating the categories of nature to the process of socialisation.29 Hence, Lukács believes that objectively speaking, reification manifests as an external, rational and law bound world which dominates us in a manner that comes to appear as natural. Nature takes its revenge for having been dominated by imposing its unfreedom on society.30

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Lukács 1967a, p. 128. Lukács 1967a, p. 232. Such would be the theoretical foundation for a Lukácsian critical ecology.

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Insofar as the subject relates to this world, he or she does so by adapting to its laws without altering them: Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market). The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power. The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own activity.31 This is to say, as capitalism replaced the irrational, natural and traditional bonds of precapitalist society and as it dominates nature scientifically, in equal measure, it created an alien social objectivity that dominates us as a naturalised world of unfreedom or necessity. This world may be partly comprehended by formal rationality, hence economics and other disciplines. Yet, this apparently rational comprehension does not penetrate to the core of the system nor does it allow us to alter genuinely the impersonal economic logic around which it revolves. Insofar as change occurs, it does so automatically and autonomously. Insofar as no conscious social subject exists with the power to alter the fundamental relations which constitute reification, capital itself is the only force which can be said to act and create history on a social level, although it does so blindly and above the wishes even of those individuals who make up the capitalist class.32 This insight brings Lukács into dialogue with those theorists – considered in Chapter 3 – who regard capital itself as the subject of history. On the other hand, in such a worldview, the individual subject is only negatively and abstractly free, as is necessitated by their participation in a property owning and exchanging society. So, the individual, in spite of whatever importance he sees him or herself as possessing, is subordinated to a vast and hostile social world to which he can only conform but never change. Lukács describes this subject position as the contemplative stance, which is the topic of Chapter 4.

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 86–7. The political/historical standpoint of the bourgeoisie will be discussed in Chapter 5.

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The Controversy over Reification The truth is the whole. G.W.F. Hegel33 The whole is the untrue. Adorno34

As has been mentioned, many of Lukács’s critics take aim at his theory of reification and his concept of totality. In what follows, a number of these critics will be refuted, beginning with the elder Lukács himself. Where possible and appropriate, more sensitive readings of Lukács will be mobilised to reinforce the critique presented here. The aim of this section, like the other polemical sections in this book (Chapter 3.2, Chapter 4.2, and Chapter 9.1) is to settle long overdue accounts. If the tenor of this countercritique is terse, it is because shallow, ungenerous and unrigorous readings of Lukács have for far too long barred a serious understanding and in depth critique of his philosophy of praxis. Indeed, that theorists of the stature (in most cases) of those discussed here would criticise Lukács so poorly is surely indicative of a deeper historical and theoretical impasse that rendered their blindness necessary. Perhaps it is characteristic of those who uncritically inhabit one side of a theoretical antinomy (for example, the antinomy within Marxism between praxis-oriented theory and structuralist theory or political economy) that they cannot recognise the truth of the other precisely because it covertly overdetermines their own view. If this countercritique is effective, the implication is this theoretical antinomy has already been overcome by history and the immanent development of Marxian theory itself. If this is true, the task remaining for us is to recognise the new truth amidst the ruins of formerly antagonistic viewpoints. As we have seen, in the 1920s Lukács was very careful to distinguish between capitalism – as a society of universalised commodity production, and therefore, of reification – and precapitalism. His comments on the fetishistic categories which dominate pre-economic societies imply both an awareness of pathological or mystified forms of pre-modern social objectification and a clear separation between pathological and non-pathological forms of objectification, although this latter point is naturally more resistant to elucidation.35 These 33 34 35

Hegel 2018, §. 20. Adorno 2005, §. 29. The term alienation is associated more with Marx than with Lukács. Moreover, it carries an historical-anthropological weight and a search for foundations that is generally

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observations, then, are an appropriate juncture in which to raise the elder Lukács’s 1967 self-criticism, namely that his early theory conflated alienation and objectification (and, by implication, reification and objectification). This criticism has been one of the more important and influential, recurring regularly in diverse accounts, including (to name a few) those of Paul Piccone, Martin Jay and most recently, Stephen Eric Bronner.36 Gillian Rose also repeats the criticism while separating it from the question of Hegel. This has been alluded to above. Her full critique, on this point, is as follows: In the essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács generalizes Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism by making a distinction between the total process of production, ‘real life-processes’, and the resultant objectifications of social forms. This notion of ‘objectification’ has more in common with the neo-Kantian notion of the objectification of specific object-domains than with an ‘Hegelian’ conflating of objectification, human praxis in general, with alienation, its form in capitalist society.37 As the following argument will show, this is a much less persuasive line of attack on Lukács than Rose’s methodological critique. At any rate, it behoves us to respond to the elder Lukács’s paradigmatic articulation of this critique of his 1920s philosophy of praxis. Describing Hegel’s reticence to illustrate how the identical subject-object of history might be realised in reality, the elder Lukács wrote: Hegel’s reluctance to commit himself on this point is the product of the wrong-headedness of his basic concept. For it is in Hegel that we first encounter alienation as the fundamental problem of the place of man in the world and vis-à-vis the world. However, in the term alien-

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absent in Lukács’s account. Nevertheless, given the specificity of reification, it is reasonable to provisionally distinguish between the two phenomena. Alienation can be viewed as a transhistoric phenomenon, associated with all societies built on a separation between subject and object, notwithstanding the very many forms that this separation might take, while reification may be viewed as the specific form of alienation that arose with capitalist modernity. Such technical distinctions may form the basis of a productive comparison between Marx’s early works and Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. For a useful contribution to this, see Márkus 1982. Piccone 1969, 1972, Jay 1984, p. 114, Bronner 2013, p. 54. Rose 2009, p. 30. Implied here is a different use of the term ‘alienation’ than the one suggested above. This difference is, for the moment, not important.

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ation he includes every type of objectification. Thus ‘alienation’ when taken to its logical conclusion is identical with objectification. Therefore, when the identical subject-object transcends alienation it must also transcend objectification at the same time. But as, according to Hegel, the object, the thing exists only as an alienation from self-consciousness, to take it back into the subject would mean the end of objective reality and thus of any reality at all. History and Class Consciousness follows Hegel in that it too equates alienation with objectification [Vergegenständlichung] (to use the term employed by Marx in the EconomicPhilosophical Manuscripts).38 The consequences of the mistake the elder Lukács discerns in his early Marxist work and attributes (rightly or wrongly) to Hegel are stated immediately prior to this passage. In short, in 1967 Lukács agreed with the majority of his critics who suggested, albeit from widely varying perspectives, that his 1920s framework must ultimately dissolve the object into subjectivism as a result of his philosophical overestimation of the proletariat as subject-object of history.39 Thus the elder Lukács argues that his alleged earlier conflation of objectification with alienation is wrong on the grounds that objectification is a necessary part of human life. He argues that all interaction with being and between people involves the externalisation of an object in practice; work and language are fundamental to our being in the world and both involve practical objectification. He writes that ‘… in so far as this is the case, objectification is a neutral phenomenon; the true is as much an objectification as the false, liberation as much as enslavement’.40 Given this, Only when the objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essence of man into conflict with his existence, only when man’s nature is subjugated, deformed and crippled can we speak of an objective societal condition of alienation and, as an inexorable consequence, of all the subjective masks of an internal alienation. This duality was not acknowledged in History and Class Consciousness.41 Alienation is here described as a pathological mode of objectification. While Lukács notes in passing both that reification is closely related with alienation 38 39 40 41

Lukács 1967c, pp. xxiii–xxiv. Lukács 1967c, p. xxiii. Lukács 1967c, p. xxiv. Lukács 1967c, p. xxiv.

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and that it is non identical with it, he does not expand on these comments.42 Finally, he associates the issue with his 1920s concept of totality. While he argues in 1967 that one of the enduring achievements of History and Class Consciousness was to restore the category of totality to its importance in Marxian thought, he suggests that it went too far. Contrasting his efforts with Lenin’s, whom he also credits for moving in the direction of totality, the elder Lukács writes: ‘… whereas Lenin really brought about a renewal of the Marxian method my efforts resulted in a – Hegelian – distortion, in which I put the totality in the centre of the system, overriding the priority of economics’.43 These substantive criticisms are based on a one sided reading of his own philosophy of praxis and as a result are simply incorrect. Prior to demonstrating this, it is worth noting that Lukács’s self-criticisms entail a number of conservative conclusions. Firstly, they propose that labour, as a non-alienated species being or human essence, may be known, even in an alienated or reified world. Hence Lukács criticises History and Class Consciousness for lacking a concept of labour.44 This will be disputed below. For now, this entails two further consequences. Firstly, the elder Lukács reinstates nature as ontologically prior to society.45 Secondly, this forced him to revise his critique of Engels. Originally, Lukács argued that industry provides no basis upon which to resolve the problem of the thing-in-itself or to ground a concept of praxis. In his later years he argued that partial forms of praxis may indeed be known on the basis of science and industry.46 The first point (regarding the knowability of the thingin-itself) forces Lukács to defend a basically pre-Kantian version of ‘reflection’ epistemology, in which knowledge is held to reflect being, notwithstanding occasional mystification. The second point (the reinstatement of the priority of economics, and the suggestion that industry may form a basis from which to comprehend partial forms of praxis) requires that philosophical issues, such as the relationship between subject and object, be founded in a study of economic categories. Given this, it stands to reason that a philosopher so oriented to noneconomic qualities like beauty and goodness would turn towards ethics and aesthetics, to supply further forms of praxis. We may thus discern in this selfcriticism the foundation for Lukács’s research programme from the late 1930s

42

43 44 45 46

A comparison of Lukács’s late and early Marxist philosophy would no doubt be fruitful. Given the unreliability of the elder Lukács’s self-criticism, it would need to find its own points of departure. Lukács 1967c, p. xx. Lukács 1967c, p. xvii. Lukács 1967c, pp. xvi–xvii. Lukács 1967c, pp. xviii–xix.

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until his death. To comment on this programme and its results is unnecessary. However, the elder Lukács would surely agree that it represents a less radical and less Hegelian approach than that of his 1920s philosophy of praxis. These points aside, Lukács is substantively wrong in his self-critique. To begin with, his earlier theory of reification does involve a strong distinction between alienation and objectification. Firstly, reification is bound up with the calculable rationality of the commodity, and secondly, it only attains its qualitative significance upon being universalised. This much has been demonstrated decisively. So, it is a phenomenon entirely bound up with capitalism. Moreover, as was made clear at the beginning of this chapter, as well as in Chapter 1, only under the regime of the total abstraction of labour may labour be discovered as human essence. Arato and Breines notice this, correctly observing that reification is, therefore, a distinct mode of alienation which both presupposes the abstraction of labour and enables us to discover a concept of labour.47 Equally, as his comments on precapitalist modes of mystification make clear, Lukács employed an implicit concept of alienation as a distinct form of estrangement or pathological objectification. Additionally, economic categories clearly do have their place in Lukács’s concept of reification. As we have seen, he held that reification resulted from the totalisation of an economic logic. Although he differed from Marx in that he uncovered the essence of reification by way of a metacritique of social theory and philosophy (as opposed to Marx’s metacritique of political economy) the two approaches need not be read as contradictory or mutually exclusive. After all, as he argues, following Marx, our capacity to comprehend economic categories is conditioned precisely by their totalisation.

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Arato and Breines also distinguish between reification and alienation. They write: From commodity fetishism, Lukács deduced a concept that, as a student of Simmel, he had been utilizing since at least 1910: the concept of the alienation of labor. Lukács argues that labor (labor power and labor product) becomes a system of objective, independent things – commodities – whose autonomous laws control and subjugate the laborers. On this basis Lukács investigates the consequences from both the objective and subjective sides. From the objective point of view, it means the estrangement or alienation of human activity and the deactivation of the men who are forced to face and work within this second nature (p. 98). Thus, Lukács deduces from ‘reification’ the notion of ‘alienation’, which is important both in the work of the young Marx and, according to Marx, in the history of the species. From the alienation of labor, Lukács at once moves to its specific historical form under capitalism: the abstraction of labor (Arato and Breines 1979, p. 115). It is apparent here that Arato and Breines employ a different definition of alienation to the one suggested above. Nevertheless, they are quite correct in pointing out the relationship between Lukács’s terms. This reinforces the defence of Lukács’s early Marxism made here.

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In this sense, Lukács’s argument that the totality is the category that governs reality is vindicated. Political economy itself requires an economically structured totality. There are of course further issues to be discussed in response to Lukács’s selfcriticism. For the moment, the point is that a far more dialectical and nuanced reading of Lukács’s 1920s concept of reification is possible than he allowed for in 1967. Finally, it should be noted here that György Márkus, one of Lukács’s students, also rejected Lukács’s self-criticism that he had conflated reification and objectification. Márkus points out that this is glaringly incompatible with Lukács’s claim that capitalism is the first ‘social’ society. Moreover, he notes that were the charge that Lukács had conflated objectification and reification to be true, one would expect to find in History and Class Consciousness comments about the transhistorical ‘material character of human life-activities’ in general.48 Such comments cannot be found; in accordance with its aim, History and Class Consciousness is deeply historicised. In fact, Márkus believes that Lukács’s mistake was quite different. Márkus argues that Lukács conflates alienation and reification, and that in so doing, he creates an overextended account of capitalist rationalism that both precludes resistance and demands a messianic counterposition of the future to the present. This, Márkus argues, draws Lukács closest to Marx’s earliest and most utopian works.49 Márkus’s charges might be partially right in their conclusion. It will be argued later that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis ultimately fails because it regards the present as a nihilistic abyss between the past and the future. However, this cannot be proven on the basis of Lukács’s concept of reification which is capable of informing many forms of resistance and struggle, both individual and collective. In fact, despite Lukács’s totalising account of bourgeois rationalism, his theory of reification explicitly and regularly points towards the dissonances within reification which constantly give rise to a non-messianic, immanent process of dereification. The elder Lukács was not alone in taking aim at his earlier theory of reification. It has been subjected to criticism since at least the 1950s. The first sustained attack on it came from theorists associated with structuralist Marxism – namely, Gareth Stedman Jones, Louis Althusser and Lucio Colletti. They were joined by Leszek Kołakowski, despite his rather different theoretical and political agenda. Although these attacks extend into the domains of politics, nature, science and philosophy, they all centred on a critique of Lukács’s concepts

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Márkus 1982, p. 155. Márkus 1982, pp. 155–6.

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of reification and totality.50 These critiques are not particularly interesting, in and of themselves. However, owing to the ongoing popularity and indisputable importance of Althusserian Marxism, they must be kindly put to death. This is indeed a prerequisite for productive engagement between Althusserian Marxism and philosophy of praxis, whether it be Lukácsian or not. Regrettably, Gareth Stedman Jones’s essay ‘The Marxism of the Early Lukács’ became one of the most popular mid-century introductions to History and Class Consciousness.51 His attack on Lukács centred on the latter’s alleged romanticism. Stressing that antipositivism and romanticism, even when anticapitalist, are only eclectically progressive and are often racist, Stedman Jones attacked Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as essentially ideological, and counterposed it to Marxist science. So, Stedman Jones emphasised the influence of Simmel, Bergson, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky on Lukács. Of course, Lukács was influenced by these thinkers, as all biographical accounts concur. Stedman Jones’ point was that Lukács imported an irrationalist and historicist relativisation of science into Marxism. This is no minor issue. As Stedman Jones writes: ‘This attack upon the role of science and technology is not simply a residual aberration carried over from Lukács’s pre-Marxist past. It forms the theoretical core of the whole book [History and Class Consciousness] and determines all the political errors and lacunae which thereafter derive from it’.52 Following this, Stedman Jones accuses Lukács of a litany of familiar charges, such as ascribing an absolutist and messianic role to the proletariat’s imputed consciousness, possessing a quasi-miraculous anarcho-syndicalist theory of revolution, subsuming empirical reality under an abstract category of totality and of rejecting romantically industrial production. Predictably enough, these deviations are cast as the result of Lukács’s recidivist Hegelian idealism. This critique, as Michael Löwy has acerbically noted, is hindered by the fact that it cites very little, if any, textual evidence. In fact, when Stedman Jones does cite Lukács, his exegesis generally contradicts Lukács’s obvious meaning.53 Similarly, Feenberg has pointed out the gross biographical distortions imposed on Lukács by Stedman Jones’s narrative, writing: ‘The huge intellectual labor through which Lukács freed himself from his youthful romanticism and arrived

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Kołakowski’s critique of Lukács was discussed briefly in a footnote to Chapter 1. Given that his substantive criticisms of Lukács are repeated by others in a less polemical light, they will not be discussed further here. Stedman Jones 1977. Stedman Jones 1977, p. 37. Löwy 1979, p. 176.

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at an original interpretation of Marxism is simply ignored’.54 Other commentators, such as Richard Kilminster, have also noticed the basic intellectual dishonesty of Stedman Jones’s account.55 The impetus for Stedman Jones’s attack came from Althusser, whose own theoretical project was more ambitious in scope. He lists Lukács, along with Gramsci and Korsch, as amongst those who would emphasise a historicist and humanist element in Marxism. This he describes as theoretical ‘leftism’, counterposing it to Marx’s writing following his ‘epistemological break’.56 So Althusser argues that Lukács converted historical materialism into a subjective theory of will and in so doing, rejected the objectivity of science in favour of seeing Marxism as the expression of the working class. From this, Althusser concludes that Lukács believed in the superiority of ‘proletarian science’ to so-called bourgeois science.57 Against this, Althusser defends Kautsky’s formulation that class consciousness must be brought to the class from outside. Althusser counterposes his own scientific understanding of Marxism to what he believes is the essentially ideological nature of the humanist Marxism of Lukács and others.58 At any rate, Althusser’s critique is not marked by the same basic dishonesty and impatience as Stedman Jones’s, although it is sub-

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Feenberg 2014. p. 68. Kilminster 1979, pp. 69–74. In ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, Althusser locates this break in The German Ideology, a text that Lukács also praised highly in the early 1930s. However, as is well-known, Althusser altered this view many times during his career. For instance, in the critical bibliography attached to his ‘Preface to Capital’, Althusser suggests that the only text by Marx completely free of Feuerbachian humanism and Hegel is his final written work: Marginal Notes on Wagner’s ‘Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie’ of 1882 (Althusser 2001, pp. 37–8, 105). Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 119–42. Again, the meaning of Althusser’s articulation of Marxist science is difficult to pin down given the extent to which he altered his opinion throughout his career. Nevertheless, Althusser had more trouble delinking Marxian ‘science’ from the class struggle than he might care to admit. In ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, Althusser argues that philosophy may only contribute to a ‘scientific practice’ when directed towards intervention in politicaltheoretical disputes in the workers’ movement. Famously, Althusser argues that Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, despite its acknowledged crudity, represented such an intervention, and by virtue of this, placed Marxist philosophy on a firm scientific footing for the first time. Evidently, Althusser was willing (at least, at one point in his career) to link philosophy and science not only with the practice of the proletariat, but with a narrow philosophical intervention by Lenin into party debates in 1908. It is not unfair to the letter of his argument to suggest that, in his analysis, Lenin founded the science of Marxist philosophy as a result of the practical need to expel Bogdanov. Such a radically practical – indeed, pragmatic – foundation for philosophy would make Lukács, even at his most Leninist, blush (Althusser 2001, pp. 61–8).

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stantively similar. Moreover, Althusser does not encumber himself by referring extensively to Lukács’s writing; his critique is made in passing. It has nevertheless been damaging that a thinker of his stature should repeat these tropes. The issues that Althusser raises will be discussed below, but not in response to Althusserian Marxism, which has yet to generate a systematic engagement with Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Lucio Colletti is the third major name associated with the anti-humanist and anti-Hegelian critique of Lukács. Colletti also magnifies the impact of Simmel and Rickert on Lukács while noting Hegel’s considerable influence. He agrees that History and Class Consciousness is written on the basis of a Hegelian theory of the identity of the subject and object and argues that this is related to the central problem of reification.59 In his critique, however, Colletti associates himself with Lukács’s late autocritique. He argues that the idea of reification in History and Class Consciousness is overextended into a suspicion of all objectification. This, he argues, means that the overcoming of reification implies the overcoming of objectivity. This repeats a Hegelian mistake.60 He argues that because Hegel holds the object to be merely an alienation of self-consciousness from itself, to take it back into the subject would result in the destruction of reality. So, ‘History and Class Consciousness follows Hegel [in both the above mistake and] in that it too equates alienation with objectification … this fundamental and crude error has certainly contributed greatly to the success enjoyed by History and Class Consciousness’.61 Once more, this is associated unsurprisingly with the now-familiar charge that Lukács collapsed the objectivity of nature into alienated subjectivity. This argument will be replied to below, in Chapter 4. While Colletti is at times a little more generous towards Lukács’s 1920s works than other members of the anti-Lukács popular front, he does not substantively develop their argument. After all, he eventually relapses into the quip that Lukács enters the factory ‘not with Capital but with Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience …’ and accuses Lukács of harbouring a protoHeideggerian hostility towards machinery and technology in toto.62 Despite his rather too diplomatic attempts to qualify this unsubstantiated accusation or to praise other aspects of Lukács’s work, Colletti’s substantive views are aligned with those of Althusser and Stedman Jones.

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Colletti 1973. p. 175. As Löwy observes, this fits into a general campaign to free Marx from Hegel, which in turn pushed Colletti to replace Hegel with Kant as the main precursor to Marxism. The merits of Colletti’s exercise are beyond the scope of this work (Löwy 1979, p. 181). Colletti 1973, p. 176. Colletti 1973.

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A number of points may be raised in response to these critiques. The assertion that Lukács, in the 1920s, equated reification with objectification and sought the liquidation of both into subjectivity has already been refuted. Equally, as the reconstruction of Lukács’s theory of reification provided above should make clear, in no sense does Lukács idealise precapitalist production. Only the advent of universal commodity production and the resulting reification of the work process make it possible to conceive of reification as something to be overcome. Moreover, in no sense does Lukács suggest during the 1920s that the content of such an overcoming might be drawn exclusively, primarily or even partly from the precapitalist past. Clearly, Lukács has in mind a much more classically Marxist supersession of capitalism. Nevertheless, by emphasising Lukács’s romantic inheritance, these critics do raise the question of dereification and a dereified (or, communist) society. As would be expected given his rearticulation of Marx’s critique of utopianism, Lukács declined to dwell on these issues at length. Yet he does make some suggestive comments. To begin with, philosophically, while Lukács associates communism with the overcoming of the antinomies of bourgeois society, he does not typically suggest what positive principles will structure a dereified society.63 He does, however, suggest that once dereification has commenced in earnest in the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, humanity may both reclaim and comprehend the truth of precapitalist cultural and religious forms which possess a significance going beyond their historical context. Equally, he suggests that only in light of a dereifying society might we rise to true knowledge of nature.64 These arguments demonstrate that it is unfair to charge Lukács with a backwards-looking romanticism or hostility to science; rather he argues that only on the basis of a dereified society may we fully appreciate the culture of the past and nature. As the discussion in Chapter 4 will illustrate amply, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is in no way premised upon a rejection of natural science; rather, he takes aim at theories which reify nature by claiming that it is epistemologically or ontologically prior to society and history. Lukács’s argument is simply that neither knowledge of nature nor the category of nature itself are possible outside a socially conditioned and therefore historical viewpoint. This said, insofar as Lukács does comment on the content of dereification itself, he makes two points. The first is that dereification cannot be conceived of as a miraculous or instantaneous event; rather, it must be regarded as a

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Lukács 1967a, p. 189. Lukács 1967a, p. 237.

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punctuated process. This is to say, workers’ revolution represents a qualitative and predominantly conscious leap in a much longer historic process of dereification.65 So, Lukács cuts against both what we might call a quantitative reformist-socialist approach to dereification and a purely qualitative, irrational or miraculous approach to dereification. Secondly, insofar as Lukács does suggest a content to communism, it is simply that under communism the present will dominate the past, and that the conscious control over society by humanity entails the creation of the ‘qualitatively new’.66 Two provisional conclusions can be drawn from these important comments. Firstly, the content of a dereified society is less interesting to Lukács than the praxis that might lead towards such a society. As a thinker of immanence, this is unsurprising. Indeed, as the discussion in Chapter 3 and Part Two as a whole will show, following Timothy Hall, we may point out that Lukács’s concept of praxis does not uniformly tend towards identity or closure, but equally towards dissonance, tension and openness.67 Praxis, for Lukács, is objectively and subjectively produced by the crises, fractures and qualitative eruptions produced by the irrationalism of a calculably rational social totality. Similarly, Hall has also noted that Lukács’s concept of praxis stresses ‘ontological novelty’.68 This important aspect of praxis will be discussed fully in Part Three. For all that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis ultimately conceals a conceptual mythology, closure and a relapse into identitarian philosophy is only one possible outcome of the paradox that that the failure of praxis to bear the absolute generates. Moreover, Lukács was mindful of this very danger. At any rate, these observations make it possible to suggest two provisional rejoinders to Lukács’s structuralist critics. Firstly, insofar as Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is the ‘expression’ of the proletariat – to concede momentarily to terminology foreign to Lukács’s language – it is no iron-clad claim to total truth. Rather, it is a critical hypothesis, or, an aspiration towards totality founded on the dissonances, both objective and subjective, produced by reification itself. This will be discussed immediately below. Of course, this does rely on the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’. However, by rejecting prima facie the possibility of producing theory from the standpoint of the proletariat, Lukács’s structuralist critics deny themselves the opportunity to challenge Lukács’s argument at its strongest. Secondly, while the structuralist Marxists are incorrect in suggesting that Lukács entertains a romantic rejection of technology, science or 65 66 67 68

Lukács 1967a, p. 250. Lukács 1967a, pp. 248–50. Hall 2011a, pp. 131–2. Hall 2011a, p. 131.

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even reification as such, this theme raises a difficult question. Feenberg has suggested, with good reason, that a post-capitalist society will not be able to do without forms of objectification which treat their objects as external and lawbound. So he suggests that the reified structures of science, bureaucracy and the economy will be necessary.69 However, instead of dominating and obscuring its human origin, in his vision, reification will simply become a moment in the creation of knowledge, subject to permanent mediation.70 Thus Feenberg imagines a liberated society as one in which reification is permanently mediated in the production and reproduction of ontologically distinct levels of reality. This understanding of dereification will be criticised in Chapter 9. For now, another conception of dereification is viable: insofar as praxis and dereification are built on the overcoming of the antinomies of bourgeois thought, they push towards reconciliation of subject and object in the form of a socially and historically desublimated version of Hegel’s absolute. In short, Lukács’s understanding of communism may be read as the ongoing practice of a reconciled humanity, not in flat identity with itself, but in knowing mastery of its forms of objectivity. Or, in other words, one may imagine two versions of dereification: a neo-Kantian version in which dereification is a permanent and endless process, or a pseudo-Hegelian (or better, left Hegelian) version, in which the absolute (whatever its content) is realised socially and consciously, as well as on different ontological levels. This proposition raises difficult questions that can only be discussed in the light of the whole of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Nevertheless, such questions are well in advance of the criticisms raised by the structuralist Marxists. For the moment, Feenberg’s argument shows that Lukács’s concept of reification does not necessarily imply a romantic or antimodern rejection of science, technology or other reified social objects. In a sense, the worst failing of the critiques produced by structuralist Marxism is that by taking aim at relatively superficial readings of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, they missed an opportunity to criticise it in light of its full radicalism and total logic. Much more recently, Axel Honneth has revisited Lukács’s theory of reification.71 Despite Honneth’s prominence, his rethinking of reification is probably the least relevant to this project given how extensively he modifies Lukács’s concept. As Timothy Hall points out, Honneth distinguishes between three forms of reification in Lukács. These are the reification of objects and nature,

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Feenberg 2014, p. 147. Feenberg 2014, p. 143. Honneth 2008.

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the reification of persons and the reification of the self.72 Honneth argues that to compress these views, or to explain them in a unified theory, is reductionist. Moreover, this move implies a theory in which ideology mystifies the essential character of reality. This, in turn, suggests that social reality is built on a distorted or deficient form of praxis. Yet, as Hall notes, this begs the question: ‘If reification describes a deficient form of praxis then the question inevitably arises as to what a non-distorted or genuine praxis consists in?’73 So Honneth’s critique of Lukács suggests that his theory of reification lacks a normative basis and implies a non-existent model of genuine praxis which is distorted into reified forms. Against this model of reification, however, Honneth counterposes his own in which reification is held to be a form of misrecognition or a forgetfulness of the recognition of the other. This is to say, Honneth dismisses social or natural reification and focuses on intersubjective reification.74 Honneth has attracted a good deal of criticism over this rereading of Lukács. Hall, cited above, while expressing his admiration and sympathy for Honneth’s project, notes three ways in which Honneth’s reading fails. Firstly, Honneth removes the improvised, open and contingent aspect of praxis and ‘… converts it, in the process, into a species of moral theory, the very thing that Lukács sought to define it [his concept of praxis] against’.75 Secondly, Honneth tends to dismiss Lukács’s sociology as either irredeemably Marxist or an inherently unstable combination of Marx and Weber. Finally, this leads Honneth to impute to Lukács a crude base/superstructure model of society. Hall, whose reading of Lukács is much closer to that proposed here, notes that Honneth fails to evidence these assertions and instead glosses over those sections of History and Class Consciousness which would contradict his reading.76 Ultimately, however, Honneth’s failing is that his alternative fails by its own criteria. As both Hall and Kavoulakos note, it implies its own finalistic model of morally informed communicative action. Hall thus writes: It seems incontrovertible, however, that Honneth, for all his differences with Habermas, follows him in reformulating critical social theory along broadly transcendental lines. While he challenges Habermas’ concept of social differentiation – he encases his own dynamic accounts of social recognition in the different spheres of modern society in a communic72 73 74 75 76

Hall 2011c, p. 198. Hall 2011c, p. 199. Feenberg 2012b, p. 102. Hall 2011c, p. 203. Hall 2011c, p. 204.

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ative ethics. Thus struggles for recognition produce consensus which are themselves normatively grounded in the possibility of un-coerced agreement.77 Somewhat more bitingly, Kavoulakos makes a similar point, noting that today, ‘… communicative theory seems to assume increasingly the role of the preacher who praises with passion the goods of “democratic culture” and “liberal cosmopolitanism”, even though he knows that they do not belong after all to this world’.78 Kavoulakos expands upon these sentiments to excellent effect in his recent book on Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, arguing that Honneth’s concept of reification is itself reified.79 Similarly, Larsen (who will be discussed further below) has argued that ‘Honneth has foisted onto Lukács, probably the most profound reader of Marx and of Capital of his time, something like a “rational choice” liberal economic theory in which, pace Marx, the process of commodity production and exchange no longer takes place “behind the backs” of society – all forms of social praxis being “viewed according to their potential usefulness in economic transactions”’.80 Larsen suggests that reification, for Honneth, simply becomes a form of subjectivity in which participants behave as detached observers rather than as active participants in social life. ‘Evidently a passionate act of commodity exchange would, according to Honneth, escape reification’.81 Feenberg has added his voice to this chorus of criticism, noting that a relationship of recognition is entirely possible between an employer and employee on the basis of contractual obligation. Feenberg points out that for Lukács, on the contrary, such a relationship is fundamentally reified, quite irrespective of what either party might believe.82 It speaks to the aristocratic disposition of the final generation of the Frankfurt School that no response to these rather apt criticisms has been forthcoming. At any rate, Lukács himself appears to have anticipated such bizarre liberalisations of the Marxist critique of exploitation. According to an anecdote, during a meeting of the Sunday Circle, one of his friends challenged him, asking: ‘Isn’t there a deep inner bond between the factory owner and the worker?’ Lukács is said to have replied: ‘Yes, quite decidedly. The same as that between the spider and the fly in its web’.83

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Hall 2011c, p. 101. Kavoulakos 2011, p. 280. Kavoulakos 2018b, pp. 141–50. Larsen 2011, p. 82. Larsen 2011, p. 82. Feenberg 2012b, pp. 102–3. Quoted in: Le Blanc 2013, p. 48.

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Fragmentation and Crisis And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of the thing: Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians. Daniel, 5:25–2884

While Lukács is certain that reification is totalising, he means this in the sense that there is no ‘outside’; no non-reified aspect of life which transcends the totality. As this section will argue, despite possessing a unifying economic logic, reification is, for Lukács, fragmented, dissonant and crisis-prone. This is so much so that he describes capitalism as a system of permanent crisis.85 The most essential form of fragmentation is individualisation, a direct consequence of the market given that individuals are the simplest bearers of property. As individuals, the freedom to participate as buyers and sellers of commodities is a prerequisite for a developed commodity-producing economy. Hence on the side of the subject, the hegemony of reification manifests, at least immediately, as a social order of atomized individuals. This situation also gives rise to the opposition between the individual and society which, according to Lukács, informs the common sense of bourgeois thought.86 So, Lukács writes: ‘Ideologically, we see the same contradiction in the fact that the bourgeoisie endowed the individual with an unprecedented importance, but at the same time that same individuality was annihilated by the economic conditions to which it was subjected, by the reification created by commodity production’.87 On a deeper, ontological level, the fragmentation and isolation of the individual are based on the universalisation of quantitative reason, born by the commodity, outlined above. This imposes an abstract form on modern life which, as has been shown, transforms our perception of reality on a deep level, modifying categories as central as time and quality. Indeed, as was noted above,

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Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, p. 976. The words Mene, Mene, Tekel and Upharsin possess a double meaning. They translate as the verbs ‘to count’, ‘to weigh’ and ‘to divide’ at the same time as referring to ancient denominations of currency, namely, a mina, a shekel and half a mina. Lukács 1967a, p. 40. Lukács 1967a, p. 28. Lukács 1967a, p. 62.

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this situation is a precondition for theory itself, insofar as theory is regarded as the intellectual practice of negativity.88 The second form of fragmentation that Lukács discusses is bound up with the division of labour and production of commodities. He writes: The unity of a product as a commodity no longer coincides with its unity as a use-value: as society becomes more radically capitalistic the increasing technical autonomy of the special operations involved in production is expressed also, as an economic autonomy, as the growing relativisation of the commodity character of a product at the various stages of production. It is thus possible to separate forcibly the production of a use-value in time and space. This goes hand in hand with the union in time and space of special operations that are related to a set of heterogeneous usevalues.89 So, objectively, production is fractured by a division of labour and by a complex system of exchange. This produces a concurrent subjective experience of fragmentation for the worker: On the one hand, the process of labour is progressively broken down into abstract, rational, specialised operations so that the worker loses contact with the finished product and his work is reduced to the mechanical repetition of a specialised set of actions. On the other hand, the period of time necessary for work to be accomplished (which forms the basis of rational calculation) is converted, as mechanisation and rationalisation are intensified, from a merely empirical average figure to an objectively calculable work-stint that confronts the worker as a fixed and established reality. With the modern ‘psychological’ analysis of the work-process (in Taylorism) this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.90

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This aspect of Lukács’s thought is also very reminiscent of Sohn-Rethel’s argument that philosophy and abstract, mental labour may only exist in societies which have developed exchange, and consequently, the capacity for abstraction (cf. Sohn-Rethel 1978). Lukács 1967a, p. 89. Lukács 1967a, p. 88.

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Lukács goes on to outline how this mechanisation of the subject of production tends to exclude the human qualities of labour, casting idiosyncrasies and creativity as sources of error. In this way, the subject of the labour process loses all control over that process, and must submit to it passively.91 The subject of the labour process is reified, not merely as an abstractly free individual, but also as a mechanical object. This logic is, for Lukács, taken to its extreme in the industrial proletariat and equally entails an extreme separation between mental and manual labour.92 Interestingly, despite declining to make the mental/manual labour divide a prominent theme in his work, Lukács does make some astute comments about professions which require the subordination of the ‘full personality’ to reification. He views these types of professions as the ‘apogee’ of reification in that no intellectual or emotional space is left to the worker. Journalists are the example of this par excellence, in Lukács’s opinion. This remainder of qualitative humanity allowed to the worker, namely, a private mental and emotional life, is denied to professions which are more wholeheartedly invested in reification. This point might seem tangential, but is relevant to the standpoint of the proletariat, as will be seen below. Beyond the fragmentation of the subject and of commodities into increasingly immeasurable chains of production, Lukács points to a further fragmentation of the economy itself, which is the essential cause of crisis. Use values are separated from exchange values in both a spatial and temporal sense. Spatially, commodities are produced by increasingly vast, multinational chains of production. Temporally, use values must remain unchanged or frozen during the process of exchange and the realisation of the surplus value they embody. Economics (as well as the economic practice of the bourgeoisie), therefore, only concerns itself with use values and the needs they correspond to insofar as their exchange value may be realised.93 ‘The formal act of exchange which constitutes the basic fact for the theory of marginal utility likewise suppresses use-value as use-value and establishes a relation of concrete equality between concretely unequal and indeed incomparable objects’.94 While separation is necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy, Lukács argues that during an economic crisis, the suppressed use value returns pathologically. That is to say, the breakdown in commerce and exchange means that human needs

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Lukács 1967a, p. 89. Lukács 1967a, p. 100. This point leads to the relative separation of production and consumption, as well as ideologies that lionize either frugality or consumption, a connection noticed by Marx as early as the 1844 Manuscripts (cf.: Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 309–11). Lukács 1967a, p. 104.

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are unable to be met, despite an abundance of commodities.95 The suppressed qualitative takes its revenge on the quantitative. Finally, it is not only the economic logic of the totality that is dissonant. The totality itself is fractured. This is to say, the different spheres of life appear as separate from each other, as domains of particular forms of rationality and as unconnected with (or at least, as strongly autonomous from) the totality. Once more, Lukács unmasks this reality via a metacritique of the apparently scientific viewpoints which reflect it. Speaking of scientism, he writes: … the more intricate a modern science becomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more resolutely it will turn its back on the ontological problems of its own sphere of influence and eliminate them from the realm where it has achieved some insight. The more highly developed it becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp.96 Thus, the fracturing of the social totality works to obscure the essence of the totality, and therefore, the ontological foundation of the specific spheres within the totality and their relation to each other and the whole. Validating this insight, of course, demands that we outline the determinate and essential relationships between specific parts and the whole.97 Moreover, the determinate

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Lukács 1967a, p. 105. Lukács 1967a, p. 103. Arato and Breines object to Lukács’s generalisation of the logic of commodity production to other spheres of society, such as the legal, political or ideological, noting that the logic of rationalisation existed in these areas well before commodity production became universal. They also argue that even if a homology exists between the factory and society as a whole, this does not imply a causal relationship (Arato and Breines 1979, p. 121). To the first point, it might be suggested that commodity relationships do not develop ex nihilo, but rather, correspond to a form of rationalism developed by the bourgeoisie which also expressed itself in legal, political and cultural forms for centuries prior to the triumph of bourgeois hegemony on a national and global level. Moreover, the assumption of a causal relationship between commodity production and bourgeois hegemony is an unnecessary simplification of Lukács’s theory. After all, he was willing to grant that pre-modern societies were scene to different, competing logics. Why, then, must the logic of the commodity predominate in the sequence of historical events that brought the bourgeoisie to power? Of course, after their triumph, society did come to possess a unitary – albeit fractured – logic. This rejoinder also identifies the calculable rationalism of bourgeois power as the

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links between parts and whole determine the specificity of crises and tensions that occur between parts and the whole. As an aside, this point allows Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to grasp what Althusserian Marxism refers to as overdetermination without, at the same time, dispensing with the category of totality. With regards to the state, bureaucracy and law, Lukács endorses Max Weber’s famous observation that under modernity, these spheres of social life are predicated on the separation of the tools of administration and governance from those who exercise them and those upon whom they are exercised.98 This is to say, the functioning of an impersonal, abstract and universal economy requires an impersonal, abstract and universal state.99 The requirements of rational predictability cut sharply against the irrationality of individual prejudice or arbitrariness. ‘There arises a rational systematisation of all statutes regulating life, which represents, or at least tends towards a closed system applicable to all possible and imaginable cases’.100 The judge, famously, becomes an ‘automatic statute-dispensing machine’.101 Insofar as the legal system tends towards formal closure, it conflicts with the functioning of the economy. This produces ‘… an uninterrupted series of conflicts between the unceasingly revolutionary forces of the capitalist economy and the rigid legal system. But this only results in new codifications; and despite these the new system is forced to preserve the fixed, change-resistant structure of the old system’.102 Subjectively, for the bureaucrat (and, it might be added, for the legislator or judge) this produces a kind of bureaucratic Jesuitism which invades the realm of ethics:

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link between the factory and society as a whole. Although essential to bourgeois class rule, the commodity is not itself responsible for bourgeois rule. To argue as much would indeed impute to it a historic power divorced from the men and women who wield it; that is, would imply a fetishistic view of history. Finally, the question as to whether there exists a formalistic logic underpinning modernity deeper than what is present in class relations (as Hegel may suggest) is left open for the time being. It is conceded that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis implies the presence of such a deeper logic. Yet, given that his philosophy of praxis is so intimately connected with a class standpoint, further exploration of this issue may only be undertaken from a vantage point beyond Lukács that has abandoned class as the ultimate standpoint. Lukács 1967a, p. 95. Evgeny Pashukanis’s work Law and Marxism may be read as an extended analysis of the legal system on the basis of a broadly Lukácsian understanding of reification and commodity fetishism (cf. Pashukanis 1989). Lukács 1967a, p. 96. Lukács 1967a, p. 96. Lukács 1967a, p. 97.

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The specific type of bureaucratic ‘conscientiousness’ and impartiality, the individual bureaucrat’s inevitable total subjection to a system of relations between things to which he is exposed, the idea that it is precisely his ‘honour’ and his ‘sense of responsibility’ that exact this total submission, all this points to the fact that the division of labour which in the case of Taylorism invaded the psyche, here invades the realm of ethics.103 Additionally, this highlights an important point about the state. Lukács argues that in precapitalist societies, where the economic moment has not dominated the totality, the state represented unmediated domination.104 On the other hand, with reification, the state itself becomes an economic power, albeit one elevated above civil society. This elevation is simultaneously a real and necessary appearance and a necessary condition for the smooth functioning of the economy as well as a potential fetter on it. Yet, as Lukács also points out, it ultimately relies on a monopoly on violence and the naturalisation of the norms of bourgeois life.105 In this manner it becomes possible to locate within the social totality the well-known antinomy between the state and civil society. This point will become particularly important for Lukács’s theory of revolution. More could be said about different spheres of society – including but not limited to the interpersonal, cultural, religious and philosophical spheres – and how these reflect the logic of reification in determinate ways. Lukács makes some interesting points along these lines, particularly with regards to art and religion in his essay ‘On the Changing Function of Historical Materialism’. In these areas of human culture, as well as in philosophy, Lukács agrees with Hegel’s distinction between absolute and objective spirit. In sum, Lukács’s reading of this distinction is that spheres of objective spirit – namely, economics, law and the state – are much more dependent upon their historic era. So, forms of objective spirit rarely survive long after the destruction of their civilisational foundation. On the other hand, artworks, as well as religious and philosophical systems, belong to the domain of absolute spirit. As a result, these works may – if they are sufficiently meaningful – break to some extent from their historical context and express something enduring about humanity

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 99–100. This immediately recalls Marx’s comments on the spirit of bureaucracy in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right of which, as is well-known, Lukács had no knowledge in 1923 (cf. Marx 1975). Lukács 1967a, p. 56. Lukács 1967a, pp. 242–3. In these comments, as in many others, Lukács anticipates Gramsci (cf. Gramsci 1971b, Ch. II, Section 2, ‘State and Civil Society’).

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and our relationship to nature. Thus, classical works of art retain their appeal despite the demise of the societies which created them.106 While themes will be revisited later, to fully explore this idea would require a full engagement with Lukács’s concept of art. This is outside the scope of the present study. Despite Lukács’s lifelong interest in art and literature, these questions were of secondary importance to the philosophy of praxis which he articulated in the 1920s. They are raised here to illustrate the point that Lukács’s concept of totality is not a reductionist category which seeks to flatten the particularity of the areas of society or culture it encounters. Rather, the point is to understand the concrete and highly mediated relationship between the parts and the whole in light of the determinate logic of both. This said, Lukács’s suggestion in History and Class Consciousness that art, religion and philosophy participate in the sphere of absolute spirit, represents an important insight into the enduring significance these domains possessed for him. Even while theorising under the banner of political praxis, Lukács’s mind strained towards the infinite. At any rate, these comments on fragmentation are important because they cut against the idea that Lukács’s concepts of totality and reification are monolithic. Just as exchange value can never entirely obliterate use value and as form cannot entirely dominate content, Lukács was well aware that for capitalism to function, the logic of the whole cannot absolutely hegemonise the parts. Moreover, far from remaining static, the antinomies and contradictions Lukács perceives are dynamic and crisis-prone. The whole only ever emerges incompletely from parts, reflecting back at the same time on the parts. The essence of the parts, as parts alone, can never be fully closed. And yet, because of the constitutive incompleteness of the whole, the parts seek their finality there in vain. Lukács makes this point clear when he denies that capitalism enjoys a wholly unified or homogenous structure: ‘Certainly, societies with a wholly unified, homogenous structure are rare in history. (Capitalism has never been one of them and according to Rosa Luxemburg never can be).’107 The crucial result of this admission is that the totality may never be exhaustively or completely articulated intellectually. Indeed, this was implied above when it was asserted that the concept of totality is a representation or an image. Speaking of this aporia, Lukács writes: ‘Furthermore, such a law [the uncon106 107

Lukács 1967a, pp. 234–5. Lukács 1967a, p. 242. We can only speculate as to which society he might have in mind as having been wholly unified and homogenous. Perhaps, like the young Hegel, he had in mind Ancient Greece.

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scious logic of the totality] must not merely impose itself despite the wishes of individuals, it may not even be fully and adequately knowable. For the complete knowledge of the whole would vouchsafe the knower a monopoly that would amount to the virtual abolition of the capitalist economy’.108 Social totality, for Lukács, is in fact an open-ended process of totalisation that is unknowable in its totality. Any notion that this violates the conceptual priority of totality over the parts is a misconception. Rather, it merely asserts that the totality bears an unconscious dynamism that must be discovered, and that this discovery must transcend the concept of totality. Consequently, all theoretical representations of totality are aspirations towards totality. For such an aspiration to be satisfied – that is, for the conceptual reproduction of totality to become equal to reality – it must move into different terrain, becoming historical. What this entails will be specified in Chapter Three, which will discuss the methodological demands for genesis and praxis. For now, however, the blind and antagonistic dynamic of which Lukács speaks must be discussed briefly. Here we arrive at a final and crucial aspect of Lukács’s definition of reification: his theory of crisis.109 This is where the logic of reification pushes the most towards genesis. That is, crisis reveals both the historically contingent character of capitalism and provides for an initial moment of dereification wherein the socially constructed nature of objectivity is revealed. In Lukács’s account, the calculable rationality of reification breaks down both at the levels of the parts (the commodity, the individual’s experience of dissonance, the clash of determinate spheres of society, etc.) and at the level of the whole (crisis of the economy, of politics, etc.). Subjectively, these crises may be experienced in myriad ways, some of which will be dealt with below as part of the discussion of labour and the contemplative stance. Objectively, however, economic crisis is the most immediate form of crisis.

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Lukács 1967a, p. 102. Crisis, as a paradigm or figure of thought, regularly recurs in Lukács’s work. As Andrew Gilbert points out in his 2016 PhD thesis, prior to his conversion to Marxism, Lukács understood crisis mainly in cultural, ethical and civilisational terms. Some of these senses of crisis are preserved, albeit transformed, in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Similarly, Gilbert draws attention to the more millennial aspects of Lukács’s account of crisis, for example, by citing a number of passages in which Lukács declares the crisis of the 1920s to be terminal. This fits with the broader picture he paints of Lukács as a messianic thinker (Gilbert 2016, Ch. 2). While not incorrect, this aspect of Lukács’s thought will be discussed in Part Two. For the purposes of the present exposition, however, Lukács’s understanding of crisis is meant in a narrower and perhaps more abstract sense: as the spaces and moments in which reification breaks down.

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This in mind, Lukács argues that crisis stems from the unconsciousness entailed by the naturalistic objectivity of reification. The blind and anonymous power of the objective dynamic of reification both contradicts itself and comes into conflict with humanity. So, while the rationalisation of the world appears to be complete and to penetrate to the depths of human experience, it is in fact limited by its own formalism.110 Formal and quantitative rational structures, when confronted by a content or quality that defies their hegemony, become irrational and incoherent. Speaking of the apparently natural laws of capitalism, Lukács writes: But the disregard of the concrete aspects of the subject matter of these laws, upon which disregard [sic] their authority as laws is based, makes itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact. This incoherence becomes particularly egregious in periods of crisis. At such times we can see how the immediate continuity between two partial systems is disrupted and their independence form and adventitious connection with each other is suddenly forced into the consciousness of everyone. It is for this reason that Engels is able to define the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist society as the laws of chance.111 Here, Lukács implies the possibility for a clash between different spheres of society – for example, between politics and economics. Equally, however, crisis may cut to the essence of the totality and affect the whole. As we have seen, the divide between use values and exchange values is the essential cause of economic crisis. As an extension of this, crisis may occur on the levels of production or distribution, or may unfold through complex and highly mediated economic mechanisms. For instance, Lukács endorses Luxemburg’s theory that capitalism requires a non-capitalist sector of the world economy in order to provide markets for the export of capital. Upon the full expropriation of these non-capitalist sectors, he argued that the same tendency must express itself in imperialist competition and conflict.112 Granted, Luxemburg’s theory is relatively discredited within Marxian economics. Yet, the precise mechanisms behind economic crisis are beside the point. At the deepest level, Lukács regards bourgeois society as caught in a permanent, albeit often latent crisis. This is why he was able to write that ‘On closer examination the structure of a

110 111 112

Lukács 1967a, p. 101. Lukács 1967a, p. 101. Lukács 1967a, p. 182.

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crisis is seen to be no more than a heightening of the degree and intensity of the daily life of bourgeois society’.113 If daily life represents a permanent crisis, then it remains to be explained how this manifests at the level of totality. To begin with, Lukács notes that ‘A general crisis always signifies a point of – relative – suspension of the immanent laws of capitalist evolution; except that in the past the capitalist class has always been able to force production back once again into a path laid down by capitalism’.114 This is to say, during a crisis, the natural movement of the economy is suspended to a degree. This increases the importance of other aspects of the social totality relative to the economy – particularly the political and coercive spheres – and potentially produces a situation in which the future of society becomes a practical question of class struggle. Lukács concretises this view with reference to the state by contrasting a period of relative stable bourgeois hegemony with one in which coercion predominates: … the organs of authority harmonise to such an extent with the (economic) laws governing men’s lives, or seem so overwhelmingly superior that men experience them as natural forces, as the necessary environment for their existence. As a result they submit to them freely. (Which is not to say that they approve of them.) For if it is true that an organisation based on force can only survive as long as it is able to overcome the resistance of individuals or groups by force, it is equally true that it could not survive if it were compelled to use force every time it is challenged. If this becomes necessary, then the situation will be revolutionary; the organs of authority will be in contradiction with the economic bases of society and this contradiction will be projected into the minds of people. People will then cease to regard the existing order as given in nature and they will oppose force with force.115 In other words, crisis is both the product of the blind dynamic of reification and the first and most important force in the dereification of society. In crisis, the relational and contingent nature of reified social objects becomes apparent. The rationality of reification becomes its opposite and force predominates over consent. This is why Lukács wrote that every crisis ‘represents the objectification of a self-criticism of capitalism’.116 113 114 115 116

Lukács 1967a, p. 101. Lukács 1967a, p. 243. Lukács 1967a, p. 257. Lukács 1967a, p. 253.

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Without wishing to re-tread ground covered in response to Lukács’s critics, a further point must be made. Lukács’s concept of totality is quite self-consciously a theoretical aspiration towards totality, or a totalising conceptual reproduction of reality. The necessity for this is given by the totalising logic of capitalism itself. Yet, by presenting Lukács’s concept of totality as an aspiration, one which must capture both the real essence and the dissonances of the totality it represents, the charge that Lukács produces a dogmatic or flat totality is conclusively refuted. Yet, the thinkers mentioned above are all correct in one important sense: Lukács’s philosophy of praxis requires a perspective from which a dereifying critique may be applied. So, Lukács’s concept of totality does necessitate a concretely totalising standpoint: it relies on the standpoint of the proletariat. Ultimately, as this study intends to show, this perspective was only made possible, historically, by the fully actualised historic praxis of the 1917 revolution. Conceptually, of course, fully actualized praxis is a higher and richer concept than the standpoint of the proletariat which is, at the outset, a theoretical hypothesis and a way of looking at the world. However, such is the nature of a logically integral philosophy; although concepts must be ordered in an immanently-derived logical hierarchy, they are nevertheless concurrently operative. We might refer to this as the synchronicity of the concept – such a synchronicity is also visible in Hegel who, after all, commences the Phenomenology of Spirit from the same vantage point (absolute knowledge) with which it culminates.117 Additionally, this observation indicates that actual history and philosophy, while deeply connected, are non-synchronous. Theory and history develop in profound interconnection, but never in simultaneous identity. Hence both the prescience of Marx and the comprehension of history after the fact of Hegel. So, while the theory of reification both leads to and presupposes the standpoint of the proletariat, Lukács’s description of reification was in no way monolithic or uniformly totalising. Nor is it a straight, one-to-one expression of the proletariat; in fact, Lukács dwells just as much in the spaces of crisis or dissonance. So, for Lukács to claim an omniscient vantage point qua the proletariat would jeopardize the complexity and openness that he so carefully built into his argument. In the same manner, it will now be argued that Lukács’s standpoint of the proletariat was a self-consciously theoretical imputation. Read in this light, it need not ascribe to the proletariat the mythological or messianic power that Lukács’s structuralist critics suggest is the necessary consequence of his concept of totality. Indeed, just as Lukács’s concept of totality

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stresses dissonance, his concept of labour and the standpoint of the proletariat stresses openness; genesis completes totality, not with a new closure, but with a higher problematic.

chapter 3

The Standpoint of the Proletariat 1

The Principle of Labour and the Proletariat as Subject-Object of History In contrast [to the master], work is desire held in check, it is vanishing staved off, that is, work cultivates and educates. The negative relation to the object becomes the form of the object; it becomes something that is persisting because it is precisely for the labourer himself that the object has self-sufficiency. This negative middle term, this formative activity, is at the same time individuality, the pure being-for-itself of consciousness, which in the work external to it now enters into the element of persistence. Thus by those means, the working consciousness comes to an intuition of self-sufficient being as its own self. G.W.F. Hegel1 Only through developed industry – i.e., through the medium of private property – does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, in its totality as well as in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man’s own practical activity. Marx2

Lukács’s theory of reification both relies upon and leads to the standpoint of the proletariat. Moreover, without the standpoint of the proletariat, the more mediated and complex aspects of Lukács’s thought either collapse totally, or must be salvaged on a radically different basis. Perhaps precisely because of this importance, the idea of a standpoint of the proletariat has been subjected to considerable controversy. For many critics, the idea of the standpoint of the proletariat is implausible simply because they see little evidence that the empirical proletariat has ever or could ever live up to the potential imputed to it. Some theorists (including the elder Lukács) fault the theory in the opposite way, arguing that the absence of a concept of labour results in an inability to sustain the praxis envisaged. Others still see the standpoint of the proletariat

1 Hegel 2018, §. 195. 2 Marx and Engels 1975, p. 322.

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as the origin of Lukács’s supposed authoritarianism, arguing that he places far too great a historical burden on the proletariat and, as consequence of this, resolves the resultant impasse by way of an elitist party which possesses the secret of history. This chapter, as the one preceding it, will be divided into three sections. To begin with, the ontological basis of the standpoint of the proletariat (in the principles of labour and the proletariat as subject-object of history) will be reconstructed. This will pass through three moments. Firstly, the presence of a negative or abstract principle of labour will be demonstrated. In the course of this, the opportunity will be taken to begin replying to some of Lukács’s critics, beginning with his elder self. Secondly, positive content will be provided for the principle of labour, via Lukács’s metacritique of German Idealism. Thirdly, it will be shown that the principle of labour gives rise to the principle of the proletariat as the subject-object of history and demonstrated how this principle demands its completion in the standpoint of the proletariat. As the controversy surrounding these terms is too large to address in the context of the exposition, a further response to Lukács’s many and varied critics will be given in Section 3.2. As will be shown, in contrast to readings proposed by Jay, Postone, Larsen and others, Lukács’s principles of labour and the proletariat as subjectobject of history stress ontological openness and novelty, as well as the processual character of the proletariat as subject-object in becoming. Lukács’s theory is not the assertion of a flatly ‘identical’ subject-object of history which grants the theorist a monopoly on truth. So, Section 3.3. outlines the completed standpoint of the proletariat; namely, a revolutionary theoretical worldview which strains towards practical actualisation. As a whole, this chapter produces a concept of labour as the genesis of the social totality, which gives rise to a theoretical-programmatic demand, based on the standpoint of the proletariat, for actual proletarian praxis.3 This dovetails with the overall aim of this part, which is to complete the theoretical movement which rises from immediacy via mediation, totality and genesis, to praxis. So, this chapter will thus complete the groundwork of Lukács’s theory of praxis, so that theory may then seek its further actualisation and completion by way of history and politics. In order to guard against a common misunderstanding, an important caveat must be first outlined. Despite the fact that the standpoint of the proletariat is built on a critique of utopianism, precisely as a theory which imputes a de3 Only later, in Part Three, under the aegis of philosophy, will the two broad moments represented by Parts One and Two of this work be united in a philosophical reflection. As has been noted, this implies a differentiation between theory and philosophy in which the latter overcomes the dogmatism of theory by reflecting on its essential moments.

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reifying content to the proletariat’s class situation, the resultant position still has the character of an ethical ‘ought’. As a result, the standpoint of the proletariat should not be confused with the concept of praxis, nor does it describe the views of any empirical proletariat or individual worker. Lukács’s account of the development of the empirical proletariat towards its imputed class consciousness is the subject matter of Chapter 7. Rather, the standpoint of the proletariat produced here remains entirely within the concept of theory. Should this go unrecognised and should the theorist fail to perceive his or her own role in generating this insight, the standpoint of the proletariat risks breaking down into a new, dogmatic immediacy, the crux of which is the utterly untenable presupposition of an immediate identity between the theory of the proletariat and the proletariat itself. This problem will be discussed briefly in the conclusion of this chapter. It also forms the central problematic of Part Two. These preliminaries aside, we may turn to the principle of labour. Although such a principle clearly operates in the works comprising Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, it has not always been noticed or appreciated. In addition to the charges discussed above, in 1967, Lukács also accused his younger self of having omitted a concept of labour. Noting his earlier failure to found his work on a Marxian political economy, the elder Lukács wrote: ‘… the purview of economics is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labour as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing’.4 The late Lukács linked this failure with his supposed earlier failures to appreciate the ontological priority of nature and to distinguish between objectification and alienation. The first reply to this has already been implied. In the course of refuting the idea that History and Class Consciousness failed to distinguish between alienation and objectification, it was suggested that within its pages may be found a concept of objectification which serves as a transhistoric mode of human behaviour, by virtue of which we interact with nature and each other. After all, it is only possible to diagnose reification as a pathological mode of objectification if a non-pathological mode is implied. So, implicit in the above refutation is an idea of labour, at least as a negative reflection on the present. Had the elder Lukács’s charges passed unnoticed, perhaps this is all that would need to be said. However, in a 1969 article entitled ‘Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness Half a Century Later’, Paul Piccone inaugurated what might be termed the ‘New Left’ interpretation of Lukács.5 In this article, Piccone raised a number of now-familiar criticisms of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis 4 Lukács 1967c, p. xvii. 5 This discussion was generally far superior to the majority of those which preceded it. No

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from the 1920s, invoking the elder Lukács’s charge as the centrepiece of his argument.6 Like the structuralist Marxists, Piccone alleged that Lukács had failed to distinguish between objectification and alienation, that he had denied the ontological priority of nature and had opposed science. However, Piccone made less of these charges. Rather, Piccone cast Lukács’s concept of alienation (or reification) as too absolute and as precluding the possibility for any actual or empirical consciousness that grasps its object. He extended this to argue that Lukács’s philosophy lacks a strong concept of mediation. In Piccone’s view, these failings resulted ultimately from an absent concept of labour which, in turn, necessitated an elitist conception of the party and reduced Lukács to the abstract ethicism he had sought to escape. In addition to demonstrating that Lukács’s concept of reification is clearly distinguished from both alienation and objectification, Chapter 2 has placed sufficient stress on the dissonances and crises produced by reification in order to cut against any reading of Lukács’s concept of totality as monolithic. Furthermore, the idea that History and Class Consciousness lacked a concept of mediation is disproven by this work as a whole, given the extent to which it is structured precisely around that concept. This said, when Piccone suggests that Lukács lacks a concept of mediation, he is using this term in too general a fashion. After all, it is very easy to point to many mediated concepts and viewpoints in History and Class Consciousness. Piccone’s meaning would have been clearer if he had suggested that Lukács lacks specific mediations. In Piccone’s view, labour is the most essential of these.7 Typical of Lukács’s twentieth century critics, Piccone also drew Hegel into the argument, presenting Lukács’s

doubt this was given impetus by the radicalisation of 1968. Most of this discussion took place in the pages of Telos which also published articles by Arato and Breines (discussed above) as well as Martin Jay, James Schmidt and Andrew Feenberg. As Piccone notes, some of this discussion had already begun in Italian, given the republication of History and Class Consciousness in Italian in 1967 (Piccone 1969, p. 96). Laura Boella’s work Il giovane Lukács would appear to be the most important product of the Italian discussion. Owing to the regrettable absence of a translation, it cannot be considered here. 6 In 1972, Piccone published another article on Lukács in Telos, entitled ‘Dialectic and Materialism in Lukács’ (Piccone 1972). While this article in some respects builds on Piccone’s 1969 critique of Lukács, it focuses much more on Lukács’s account of revolution and the supposed lack of any mediator between the empirical and imputed class consciousness of the proletariat. It will be discussed in Chapter 7, which deals with Lukács’s reading of Lenin. 7 Interestingly, a diametrically opposed critique of Lukács also exists. Postone’s critique, which is repeated by other theorists associated with Wertkritik Marxism, accuses Lukács of having fetishised labour. This argument will be mentioned below and considered in detail in Section 3.2., below (cf. Postone 2003, p. 93).

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excesses as a cautionary tale for Marxists who fail to place Hegel properly on his head.8 So, Piccone explained the consequences of Lukács’s failure to outline a concept of labour as follows: The consequence of this failure, to base the analysis on the fundamental notion of labor [sic] also vitiates a central concept of the book: the praxis. By forcefully stressing it, Lukács meant to undermine ‘the merely contemplative character of bourgeois thought’. But without a solid basis in labor, ‘praxis’ itself becomes an idealist contemplation and classconsciousness – which is clearly distinguished from any statistical average of actual consciousness of the proletariat – remains an abstract construct that cannot be translated into revolutionary praxis. Therefore, both the attainment of class-consciousness by the proletariat and its subsequent translation into practice become problematic with the consequence that voluntaristic elements, once again, have to come to the rescue.9 The starting points for a response to Piccone (and for the first, immediate appearance of the concept of labour) were developed in the first two chapters of this part. To begin with, the commodity depends on the dichotomisation of labour into abstract and concrete labour. This implies a qualitative concept of labour, the producer of use values and itself the use value of labour power, which is subsumed under the quantitative measure of labour time. As has been shown, this subsumption, in fact, makes it possible to conceive of labour for the first time. As noted, Lukács makes this point first with regards to slave labour which appears, when compared with free labour, as gross underpayment or theft backed up by open coercion. So, the equal exchange involved in the purchase of free labour makes it possible to distinguish, for the first time, between abstract and concrete labour and therefore to develop a labour theory of value. Speaking of the universal significance of the reification of labour, Lukács writes: Here we need only establish that labour, abstract, equal, comparable labour, measurable with increasing precision according to the time socially necessary for its accomplishment, the labour of the capitalist division of labour existing both as the presupposition and the product of capit-

8 Piccone 1969, pp. 106–8. 9 Piccone 1969, p. 107.

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alist production, is born only in the course of the development of the capitalist system. Only then does it become a category of society influencing decisively the objective form of things and people in the society thus emerging, their relations to nature and the possible relations of men to each other.10 Thus Lukács would no doubt have agreed with Isaac Illich Rubin when the latter wrote: ‘We would not be exaggerating if we said that perhaps the concept of man in general and of human labour in general emerged on the basis of the commodity economy. This is precisely what Marx wanted to point out when he indicated that the general human character of labour is expressed in abstract labour’.11 Later, between 1925 and 1926, in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács made a similar point in the course of a discussion of categories. Citing Marx, he wrote: The simple category is then, for Marx, the starting point of the exposition (commodity, labour, money, etc.). His materialist dialectic, his historical materialism, however, saves him from the error of overlooking the historical (and under certain circumstances historically delayed, much diverted) character of simple categories. He comments there precisely about labour: ‘Labour seems to be a very simple category. The notion of labour in this universal form, as labour in general, is also extremely old. Nevertheless ‘labour’ in this simplicity is economically considered just as modern a category as the relations that give rise to this simple abstractions … the simplest abstraction, which plays a decisive role in modern political 10 11

Lukács 1967a, pp. 87–8. Rubin 1973, p. 138. In fact, it is suggested that insofar as Lukács lacks an explicit political economy, the addition of Rubin’s work may make good on this failing. As quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Marx also made the same point about labour in the 1844 Manuscripts, writing: True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal. Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labor, and that on the other it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation. (Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 279–80).

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economy, an abstraction that expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations, nevertheless appears to be actually true in this abstract form only as a category of the most modern society’ (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW 28, p. 40).12 This comment, endorsing Marx, also makes it clear that Lukács believed that the category of labour may be retroactively applied to precapitalist societies.13 Moreover, the comment occurs in the context of a discussion of nature, in which Lukács argues that social labour mediates between man and nature. Lukács returns to this point when he asserts, contra-Rudas, that consciousness is not natural, but that it arises from production; namely, socially organised labour. To this end, he cites Marx a number of times, referring not only to Capital, but to Theories of Surplus Value volumes I, II and III, as well as A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.14 Similarly, in his 1925 review of Bukharin’s Historical Materialism, Lukács criticises Bukharin for his scientific, technologically determinist and naturalistic articulation of historical materialism.15 In contrast to this, Lukács reasserts totality as the primary category, arguing that this can only be comprehended on the basis of the organisation of labour in any given society. While Bukharin, for example, argues that technology made slavery impossible, Lukács argues that this analysis turns the logic of history on its head. Rather, slavery made technological development impossible; the breakdown of productive relationships based around slavery was the precondition for further technological development.16 Of course, Piccone can be forgiven for having passed over this relatively obscure review. Nor does anyone expect him to have read A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, which was still ensconced in a Soviet state archive while he wrote. Yet, that Lukács does possess a concept of labour as worldcreating is indicated clearly early in History and Class Consciousness when he writes: ‘To posit oneself, to produce and reproduce oneself – that is reality’.17 This points capably to the ontological priority and totalising power which 12 13

14 15 16 17

Lukács 2002, p. 110. Reference in original. Additionally, it establishes that Lukács’s concept of labour is derived via an economic and philosophical critique and not proposed as a positive, metaphysical concept. This point is of relevance to the critique of Lukács proposed by the theorists associated with Wertkritik Marxism, discussed below. Lukács 2002, pp. 98–100. This further discredits the idea that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is incompatible with a Marxian political economy. Merleau-Ponty also notices this argument against Bukharin (Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 48). Lukács 1972e, pp. 136–40. Lukács 1967a, pp. 15–6.

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Lukács accorded to labour. As a result, it may be considered proven both that Lukács possessed a concept of labour in the 1920s and that it was fundamental to his philosophy of praxis. Granted, Lukács did not elaborate on labour anthropologically, in the fashion of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. Two reasons for this might be suggested. Firstly, such efforts tend towards utopianism by engaging in a speculative (in the nonHegelian sense) discussion of what might constitute free labour. Secondly, this would tend towards foundationalism; that is, a speculative search for a first ground of dereified knowledge. As Feenberg points out (unlike Heidegger for example), Lukács is uninterested in such a search for foundations, preferring to focus instead on forms of practice which are dereifying.18 Thus, Lukács considers that history itself (as the unfolding of the present) is the appropriate ground for dereifying knowledge. In order for this potentiality to be actualised, a subject-object of history must master what Lukács refers to as genesis – that is, it must comprehend the creation of the object of knowledge which is, at this point, the social totality. This subject is, of course, the proletariat. Understandably, Lukács’s argument has been highly controversial. Jay, for his part, presents Lukács’s proletariat as an idealist subject-object, a standpoint that both does violence to the empirical proletariat and that leads to closure of all antinomies in thought.19 This, in turn, leads him to characterise Lukács’s totality as ‘normative’, and as one that completely subjectivises the object. That is, he sees Lukács’s totality as an abstract negation of reification.20 Postone, in contrast with those theorists who deny that Lukács possesses a concept of labour, alleges that he relies on a metaphysical concept of labour. Postone counterposes this to his own understanding of Marx, writing: ‘Whereas Lukács understands the commodity only in terms of its abstract dimension, Marx analyses the commodity as both abstract and concrete. Within this framework, Lukács’s analysis falls prey to a fetish form; it naturalizes the concrete dimension of the commodity form’.21 Again, Postone sees this mistake as the origin of Lukács’s other errors. While they will be discussed in more depth in section 3.2., the solutions proposed here are intended to address the issues raised by Jay and Postone. They

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Feenberg 2012b, p. 105. Jay 1984, pp. 110–1. Given the considerable textual evidence against this position, Jay does tend to hedge his bets. Moreover, he suggests that Lukács shifted to a more open ended conception of totality towards the end of the 1920s. However, in Jay’s reading, this merely cleared the way for Lukács’s reconciliation with Stalinism (Jay 1984, pp. 115, 123). Postone 2003, p. 93.

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do so firstly by stressing the openness and non identity in Lukács’s concept of labour; namely, its ability to produce ‘ontological novelty’.22 Secondly, it is proposed that Lukács’s proletariat as subject-object of history be regarded not as a given reality but in becoming. The starting point for this process of becoming is the theoretical identification of the proletariat. However, this is only a starting point – and as a result, it still requires concrete mediation to overcome the abstraction characteristic of all theory. Further, with regards to Postone, this section derives Lukács’s concept of labour through an immanent critique of reified thought. Given this, and given that the concept of labour is grounded in a thoroughly non-metaphysical and dialectical account of the commodity and reification (outlined above), it is maintained that Lukács’s concept of labour is non-metaphysical and non-transcendental; rather, it is grounded and mediated. Thus far the principle of labour has only been given abstractly and negatively, on the basis of political economy and Lukács’s critique of vulgar Marxism.23 Of course, the concrete sociological existence of the proletariat and the praxis of 1917 were necessary preconditions for Lukács’s argument.24 Yet, as was the case in Chapter 1, it is argued that Lukács’s insights into the proletariat and labour were not premised, conceptually, on immediate sociological or political knowledge. After all, these disciplines presuppose too much and threaten to fetishise immediacy. Given the systematic mystification of reification, genesis is, in its immediacy, opaque. Rather, Lukács approximates the essence of genesis by way of theories which reproduce immediacy. The abstract 22

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This reading is not unprecedented. In addition to Feenberg and Merleau-Ponty, Hall proposes a similar reading of Lukács’s concept of labour, in order to outline the possibility of a reconciliation between Adorno and Lukács. Hall’s argument will be considered in Chapter 9 (see Hall 2011b, a). Indeed, Lukács did not care to produce a positive sociological account of labour; he was largely uninterested in those empirical aspects of modern labour, inasmuch as they exist, which point beyond reification. One may, however, deduce some of these from Lukács’s critique of reification. For instance, he criticises Taylorism for separating the product from the worker, for compartmentalising the production process, for reducing the worker to a machine and for regarding human idiosyncrasies as errors (Lukács 1967a, p. 88). From this it is reasonable to assume that Lukács would imagine a more holistic, less fragmented and more qualitative institution of labour as being compatible with a liberated society. This, however, as all utopian speculation about the content of communism, raises unanswerable questions. For instance, what balance ought to be struck between rationalised mass production and humanised craft production? To these questions Lukács might have suggested that a liberated society would institute production as it sees fit, in accordance with needs and aims it has consciously set itself. Meyers, in the context of an overall excellent discussion of Lukács’s politics, makes this point (See Meyers 2006, p. 559).

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concepts already highlighted provide the starting points; what is needed is a rich concept of labour that can account for the creation of quality and ontological novelty while also sustaining the totalising consciousness posited by the critique of reification and the aspiration to totality. That is, what is needed is a concept that can sustain genesis, on both a deep ontological level and on the levels of the totality and history. Thus, it stands to reason that Lukács developed his positive account of creativity and universal historical consciousness via a metacritique of the German Idealist tradition. While at first glance this may seem odd, it is in keeping with Lukács’s methodology, particularly as it was explained in Chapter 1, with reference to Andrew Feenberg’s summary of what he describes as the social desublimation of philosophy. Lukács’s metacritique of Kant, Fichte, Schiller and Hegel diagnoses the antinomic impasse ultimately reached by German Idealism and in so doing uncovers the principles of labour and of the proletariat as subject-object of history in becoming.25 For Lukács, therefore, the first notion of labour emerges in philosophy as an abstract and formal intuition that the world is not merely given, but that it is produced: ‘… modern philosophy sets itself the following problem: it refuses to accept the world as something that has arisen (or e.g. has been created by God) independently of the knowing subject, and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product’.26 So, Lukács recalls Marx’s recollection of Vico’s dictum that ‘the history of man is to be distinguished from the history of nature by the fact that we have made the one but not the other’.27 In this way, Lukács argues that the central conviction of modern philosophy, from Descartes to Hegel, has been that the object is knowable by virtue of its being constituted by the subject. Initially, this conviction was founded on the unexamined assumption that abstract reason, and ultimately, mathematics and geometry, were the key to the constitution of the world by the subject. Lukács notes that this assumption was at times a sceptical one, as with Berkeley and Hume, and at other times a supremely confident one, as with Spinoza and Leibniz.28 Regardless, Lukács links this assumption with the social ground upon which it was made, writing:

25

26 27 28

The purpose of this discussion is to outline the conceptual bases for Lukács’s standpoint of the proletariat. Part Three will return to Lukács’s critique of German Idealism, as it pertains to his own philosophy of praxis. Lukács 1967a, p. 111. Lukács 1967a, p. 112. Lukács 1967a, p. 112.

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We wish only to sketch the connection between the fundamental problems of this philosophy and the basis in existence from which these problems spring and to which they strive to return by the road of the understanding. However, the character of this existence is revealed at least as clearly by what philosophy does not find problematic as by what it does … And if we do put the question in this way we then perceive that the salient characteristic of the whole epoch is the equation which appears naïve and dogmatic even in the most ‘critical’ philosophers, of formal, mathematical, rational knowledge both with knowledge in general and also with ‘our’ knowledge.29 Thus the assumption that the object may be comprehended by way of formal reason, mathematics and geometry is ultimately an intellectual reflection of the calculable rationality of reification and the reified subjectivity associated with it. There is more significance in this than Lukács’s critique of German Idealism. Indeed, it suggests that a concept of labour cannot be rationally derived except through an immanent critique of reified consciousness.30 This point will be concretised later, where it will be shown that the standpoint of the proletariat (as distinct from the principle of labour) develops through a critique of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. Lukács argues that the problem is initially bound up with the antinomy between the rational system and the thing-in-itself, or, between form and content. Lukács praises Kant (in contradistinction with neo-Kantians) for presenting this antinomy starkly and without attempting to deny its severity. Acknowledging the impossibility of accounting for the thing-in-itself on the basis of pure reason alone, Lukács suggests that in his Critique of Judgement, Kant introduced the notion of ‘intelligible contingency’. This was intended to suggest the radically contingent relationship between the contents of experience and the rational forms. In Lukács’s account, the virtue of this presentation was that it intensified the antinomy, clarifying the two options open to Kantian thought. Each option, however, risks hypostatising one side of the antinomy. The first 29 30

Lukács 1967a, p. 112. This further distinguishes Lukács’s approach from Marx’s, which is more anthropological. As Feenberg notes, Marx seeks to found his concept of labour in a historical anthropology of the senses and needs in order to reverse what he sees as the abstraction of Hegel’s philosophical conception of labour. Lukács, however, develops his concept of labour via an immanent critique of philosophical conceptions of labour. So, while it may potentially contain an anthropological dimension, this dimension is implicit and undeveloped. This difference underpins Feenberg’s critique of Marx and his defence of Lukács’s concept of nature. Some of these issues will be discussed in Part Two (Feenberg 2014, pp. 44–8).

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option that Lukács notes privileges the irrationality of the contents of experience or of the thing-in-itself. This results in a partial rationalism which, in the course of an infinite progress, may internalise new contents. However, a dual price is paid for this apparent openness: this option threatens to destroy the principle of rational systematisation and is debarred from comprehending the essential mediation between subject and object or between form and content. The second option proposes to construct a dogmatic rational system which denies the irrationality of the contents. This, of course, risks the catastrophic return of a suppressed content in the form of the irrational.31 Here, incidentally, we see Lukács’s anticipation of two misreadings of the concept of totality. Insofar as a flat identity between subject and object (or, between reason and its object) is proposed, the result is a dogmatic and static totality. Insofar as no link between subject and object is sought, totality may only be cast as an aspiration towards totality which infinitely approximates totality without ever grasping it. Both cases internalise reification by generating a formal totality and both ultimately exclude the producer of reality, taking reality instead as given. The first is formal by virtue of its rigid and self-evident stasis while the latter is formal by virtue of its infinite quantitative expansion which, like Heraclitus’s river, merely conceals stasis under endless self-identical motion.32 The sterility of these two antinomies demonstrates that without a

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Describing these alternatives, Lukács writes: At first sight we seem to be faced with an insoluble dilemma. For either the ‘irrational’ content is to be wholly integrated into the conceptual system, i.e. this is to be so constructed that it can be coherently applied to everything just as if there were no irrational content or actuality (if there is, it exists at best as a problem in the sense suggested above). In this event thought regresses to the level of a naïve, dogmatic rationalism: somehow it regards the mere actuality of the irrational contents of the concepts as non-existent. (This metaphysics may also conceal its real nature behind the formula that these contents are ‘irrelevant’ to knowledge). Alternatively we are forced to concede that actuality, content, matter reaches right into the form, the structures of the forms and their interrelations and thus into the structure of the system itself. In that case the system must be abandoned as a system. For then it will be no more than a register, an account, as well ordered as possible, of facts which are no longer linked rationally and so can no longer be made systematic even though the forms of their components are themselves rational (Lukács 1967a, p. 118). As Lukács writes of Heraclitus’ river: It may be the case, as Heraclitus says, that one cannot step into the same river twice; but as the eternal flux is and does not become, i.e. does not bring forth anything qualitatively new, it is only a becoming when compared with the rigid existence of the individual objects. As a theory of totality eternal becoming turns out to be a theory of eternal being; behind the flowing river stands revealed an unchanging essence, even

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concept of genesis – that is, of the production and history of the totality – totality itself falls into irrationalism. Nevertheless, Lukács firmly argues that Kant’s enduring virtue was, firstly, that he presented unflinchingly the antinomies of form and content, or between reason and the thing-in-itself and secondly, to suggest the need for a practical principle upon which a system might be based.33 If Kant was able to elaborate the problem fearlessly and intuit the need for a practical principle upon which the totality might be comprehended, in Lukács’s view, Fichte took the next step towards developing a concept of labour. Of Fichte, Lukács argues: What is relevant to our problem here is the statement that the subject of knowledge, the ego-principle, is known as to its content and, hence, can be taken as a starting-point and as a guide to method. In the most general

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though it may express itself in the incessant transformations of the individual objects (Lukács 1967a, p. 180). More will be said on Heraclitus’ river in Part Three. Lukács 1967a, pp. 117–8. Lukács suggests that these basically Kantian antinomies structured neo-Kantian philosophy in his day. In his view, philosophers such as Mach, Avenarius, Poincare and Vaihinger preserved and asserted the irrationality of the contents or object. While this marked an advance on ‘naïve dogmatism’, in Lukács’s view, it led both to theories which centred on fiction, in which the irrationality of the world is taken as given or an ‘ultimate fact’, and to positing as the aim of philosophy the … ‘understanding of the phenomena of isolated, highly specialised areas by means of abstract rational special systems, perfectly adapted to them and without making the attempt to achieve a unified mastery of the whole realm of the knowable’ (Lukács 1967a, pp. 119–20). In referring to philosophies of fiction, Lukács no doubt had in mind Hans Vaihinger (the founder of the famous Kant-Studien), who was noted for the thesis that all knowledge is nothing but a fictitious hypothesis. This also brings to mind Nietzsche, whose persistent influence Lukács was already coming to see as a threat to reason. Lukács also suggests that Windelband, Rickert and Lask fall into this pattern of thought. To Lukács, any concession to the underlying irrationalism of the world constitutes a peace treaty between the irrationality, the ‘non-createdness’ and the ‘givenness’ of the underlying material substratum to knowledge and rational and formal subsystems of that knowledge (Lukács 1967a, p. 120). Lukács attributes this failure to proceed beyond this antinomy to the culture of bourgeois society. In the absence of any other vantage point, this ‘… culture cannot be derived from anything else and has simply to be accepted on its own terms as “facticity” in the sense given to it by the classical philosophers’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 120). However, according to Lukács, German Idealism was different: existing with one foot in the old world and one in the new, it was capable of elevating these problems to the level of consciousness and solving them there. In thought, classical German philosophy was ‘… able to take all paradoxes of its position to the point where the necessity of going beyond this historical stage [capitalism] in mankind’s development can at least be seen as a problem’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 121).

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terms we see here the origin of the philosophical tendency to press forward to a conception of the subject which can be thought of as the creator of the totality of content. And likewise in general, purely programmatic terms we see the origin of the search for a level of objectivity, a positing of the objects, where the duality of the subject and object (the duality of thought and being is only a special case of this), is transcended, i.e. where subject and object coincide, where they are identical.34 Fichte posits the ego principle as the identical and practical subject-object at the foundation of facticity. ‘Fichte’s task, therefore, is to exhibit the subject of the “action” and, assuming its identity with the object, to comprehend every dual subject-object form as derived from it as its product’.35 In Lukács’s summary, Fichte’s subject-object is immediately an ethical subject object. Thus, the principle at the core of the totality is no longer purely rational and quantitative; it is now practical and ethical. However, Lukács criticises Fichte’s identical subject-object precisely on the basis that it dogmatically asserts an identity between subject and object where none exists. Fichte’s ego fails to nominate a concrete or historical subject, and so, is ultimately reducible to an ethical act. As a result of this, the supposed freedom in ethical action of Fichte’s identical subject-object is unexplained. The irrationality of the object is transferred into the subject; the original act of the Fichtean ego becomes the irrational substratum to knowledge. This, in turn, reinstates the reified world in all of its inexorable necessity. On the other hand, the ‘… freedom and the autonomy that [are] supposed to result from the discovery of the ethical world are reduced to a mere point of view from which to judge internal events. These events, however, are seen as being subject in all their motives and effects and even in their psychological elements to a fatalistically regarded objective necessity’.36 So, the hiatus irrationalis between form and content and between subject and object is not bridged. The world remains a given and the resulting ethic becomes formal and devoid of content. ‘The principle of creation collapses as soon as the first concrete content is to be created’.37 This critique of Fichte, in addition to outlining aspects of Lukács’s concept of labour, demonstrates that Lukács possessed a sharp critique of both an identical subjectobject and of identitarian concepts of creation. More will be said on this below. 34 35 36 37

Lukács 1967a, pp. 122–3. Lukács 1967a, p. 123. Lukács 1967a, p. 124. Lukács 1967a, pp. 124–5.

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Following this critique of Fichte, Lukács turns to a brief discussion of praxis, then to an excursus on Engels in which he critiques the latter for nominating modern industry as sufficient for grounding praxis. It should be noted that at times Lukács appears to conflate praxis with labour. This is generally to be avoided, however, as it compresses terms that while related, should be considered in their conceptual specificity. A further justification for having separated these terms is that the purpose of philosophical reflection is to render familiar concepts critical and reflexive.38 Perhaps the most important reason why a conceptual distinction must be maintained between praxis and labour is that (as we will see), a concept of labour is possible from the historic moment that the proletariat appears on the scene, whereas a fully actualised concept of praxis only became possible following the October Revolution. Thus, if one identifies them, one either denies that Marx possessed a concept of labour (on account of his lacking a worked out concept of praxis) or one inadvertently commits oneself to a dehistoricised version of historical materialism whose truth remains basically static from the moment of the emergence of the proletariat. These ideas will be discussed further in Chapters 8 and 9. At any rate, the rather tangential sections of Lukács’s essay which discuss Engels will be discussed later. For now, they do not bear directly on the concept of labour except to suggest that it may not be deduced immediately from industrial production, which Lukács holds to be closely allied with formal, scientific cognition, and is therefore essentially contemplative.39 Rather, Lukács next develops his concept of labour via Schiller. He argues that corresponding with the reified and formalistic conception of nature, as an aggregate of fixed laws, there also exists a romantic conception of nature which finds representation in art. This is significant for the moment not so much for what it says about nature, but for what it says about a human longing for a lost unity both with nature and itself.40 Inasmuch as this remains

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See Hegel’s critique of ‘familiar’ concepts whose very familiarity and widespread usage conceals incomprehension and unscientific cognition. Hegel 2018, §§. 31–2. As Lukács writes: But Engels’ deepest misunderstanding consists in his belief that the behaviour of industry and scientific experiment constitutes praxis in the dialectical, philosophical sense. In fact, scientific experiment is contemplation at its purest. The experimenter who creates an artificial, abstract milieu in order to be able to observe undisturbed the untrammelled workings of the laws under examination, eliminating all irrational factors both of the subject and the object. He strives as far as possible to reduce the material substratum of his observation to the purely rational ‘product’, to the ‘intelligible matter’ of mathematics (Lukács 1967a, p. 132). Lukács 1967a, pp. 135–7.

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a romantic nostalgia, it is quite compatible with the irrationalism outlined above. If this longing seeks realisation only through art, it either suggests an aesthetic (and therefore irrational) image of the totality, or it sacrifices the unity of the labourer to the unity of a finished artwork, which becomes estranged from the artists, as part of objective culture.41 This delineates the limits to a philosophy based on aesthetic rationality, and therefore, informs Lukács’s critique of Schiller. Aesthetic rationality may achieve totalisation within the sphere of art. This, however, leaves the world untouched, or, what is worse, it risks a philosophical hypostatisation of the principle of art as a means to resolving the antinomies of bourgeois philosophy. Lukács, however, believes that by defining the aesthetic principle (which is suggested by the romanticism of nature) as the play-instinct, Schiller takes a further step towards discovering the principle of labour. By recognising that man is only ‘… fully human when he plays’, Schiller recognises both that social life has destroyed man by fragmenting him and that man and the world must be made whole again.42 Lukács quotes Goethe: ‘Everything which man undertakes to perform, whether by word or deed, must be a product of all his abilities acting in concert; everything isolated is reprehensible’.43 Moreover, insofar as playful or aesthetic experiences are available to us even in a world of reification, they point towards the availability of an experience of the qualitative that is non-transcendental. So, in addition to the power of creating a totality, Lukács’s concept of labour is enriched with an aesthetic and – at least, implicitly – an erotic dimension.44 By now, Lukács’s search for a principle upon which to unite subject and object has become significantly more concrete: ‘… with the shift to a fragmented humanity in need of reconstruction (a shift already indicated by the importance of the problem of art), the different meanings assumed by the subjective “we” at the different stages of development can no longer be concealed’.45 This is where Lukács introduces Hegel. He writes:

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 139–40. Lukács 1967a, pp. 138–9. Lukács 1967a, p. 141. Eros is here meant in the Freudian sense of ‘cathexis’ – i.e., the capacity for a pleasurable investment in the object of labour. This presumes a definition of play which incorporates eros. As is well-known, Lukács was not enamoured of psychoanalytic theory. Thus, it is suggested that he merely implies these dimensions, but does not engage in a further analysis of them. Feenberg pursues these lines of inquiry further, with reference to Marcuse’s reformulation of the philosophy of praxis (see Feenberg 2014, pp. 185–7). Lukács 1967a, p. 141.

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The genesis, the creation of the creator of knowledge, the dissolution of the irrationality of the thing-in-itself, the resurrection of man from his grave, all these issues become concentrated henceforth on the question of the dialectical method. For in this method the call for an intuitive understanding (for method to supersede the rationalistic principle of knowledge) is clearly, objective and scientifically stated.46 This quite remarkable statement would appear to tend towards the type of neo-Kantian preoccupation with method of which Gillian Rose accuses Lukács. However, this comment must be read in light of Lukács’s view of Hegel, whom he credited with transforming Kant’s intuition of genesis into a scientific and methodological principle. This is a crucial step towards outlining the interrelation of subject and object on the basis of history. Lukács suggests that Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Science of Logic, was the first to achieve this by ‘… consciously recasting all problems of logic by grounding them in the qualitative material nature of their content, in matter, in the logical and philosophical sense of the word’.47 This produced a ‘… new logic of the concrete concept, the logic of the totality …’ and was only possible on the basis of the dynamisation of both substance and subject, something hitherto not attempted.48 While, as Lukács concedes, this indicates firstly that philosophy, in Hegel’s hands, still sought an identity between ideas and things and a ‘ground of existence’ that may be held to be the ‘first principle’, he points out that this identity would be required to explain the concreteness and dynamism of its substance or object. As such, this identity must have undergone a radical change. Consequently, Lukács argues that Hegel discovered history as the underlying order in which the connections between things were to be established.49 History here is not meant in the sense of an endless unfolding which leaves the methods and assumptions of rationalistic formalism untouched. Lukács argues that in this type of conception, history itself becomes the irrational barrier to knowledge.50 Rather, Lukács suggests that genesis, viewed in light of history, must 46 47 48 49

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Lukács 1967a, p. 141. Lukács 1967a, p. 142. Lukács 1967a, pp. 142–3. Lukács wrote: ‘The arguments which go to show that here and here alone [in history] is the concrete basis for genesis are extraordinarily diverse and to list them would require almost a complete recapitulation of our analysis up to this point. For in the case of almost every insoluble problem we perceive that the search for a solution leads us to history.’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 143). Lukács 1967a, pp. 143–4.

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alter the forms of knowledge: they must accommodate the creation of ‘… what is qualitatively new’. As he 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’.51 This, once more, demonstrates that Lukács dissociates genesis from the production of a fixed or heteronomous identity between subject and object. Moreover, as mentioned above, it points towards a dynamisation of both subject and object. As this relates to the principle of labour, it demands that labour be situated historically and be capable of producing ontological novelty. Thus, Lukács argues that only Hegel’s philosophy realises Vico’s programmatic demand that we may know what we have created. In this sense, in Lukács’s reading, Hegel returns humanity to its world via historical genesis.52 As is well-known, Lukács argues that Hegel was incapable of identifying the concrete ‘we’ of genesis; that is, he was incapable of pointing towards the proletariat as the concrete subject-object of history. The reasons for this and the consequences Lukács ascribes to this will be discussed in Chapter 8. Nevertheless, the point of this exposition has been to demonstrate that the subject of genesis – for Lukács, the proletariat – is the producer of the reified world. It could well be asked, however, what bearing this has on the principle of labour. It affects it in a number of ways. Firstly, it should be recalled that this discussion takes place by way of Lukács’s critique of philosophy. For Lukács, philosophy then becomes a means whereby principles may be thought, but not realised. Lukács, as a philosopher of praxis, seeks to transcend philosophy. He outlines the nature of this transcendence in the section of History and Class Consciousness entitled ‘The Standpoint of the Proletariat’. His discussion of philosophy therefore is a propaedeutic for a more concrete, historical and political argument. Insofar as ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’ generates a principle upon which to unite phenomena and noumena, form and content, subject and object, and ultimately, totality and genesis, this is the principle of the proletariat as subject-object of history. As has been outlined, this principle has a number of concrete determinations. Following Kant, it is intuitive and practical. Following Fichte, it is ethical and action oriented. Following Schiller, it is aesthetic, erotic and holistic. Following Hegel, it is capable of producing ontological novelty and history itself. Taken together, these aspects ground not merely the historic mission of the proletariat, but also the universal human essence that Lukács believes is

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Lukács 1967a, p. 144. Lukács 1967a, p. 145.

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revealed by the existence of the proletariat. This essence is equally the basis of dereifying practice which may alter its object. Yet, as principles, labour and the principle of the proletariat as subject-object of history are still abstract, critical hypotheses. By virtue of being principles, these concepts are still the possession of theory, a far cry from a liberated labour or an actualised praxis which might speak for itself. Or, to put the same point in more Hegelian terms, as theoretical principles, labour and the proletariat as subject-object of history exist initially for us – that is, for theory – and in themselves, as unconscious aspects of reality. Philosophy of praxis aims to contribute to labour existing in and for itself, that is, as the liberated and self-knowing labour of a dereified world. In this way, the principle of labour is teleological – it implies and is ultimately only validated by the praxis of the proletariat. Yet it is a separate term and must be considered as such. Failure to do this necessarily results in a misreading of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.

2

In Defence of the Standpoint of the Proletariat The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which for a short time made itself felt in the ‘Spartacus’, was objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working-class the role of the saviour of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs. Walter Benjamin53

The basic components of Lukács’s standpoint of the proletariat have been outlined immediately above. The discussion sought to emphasise the openness of Lukács’s principle of labour and the processual nature of his principle of the proletariat as subject-object of history. The reconstruction of these theor-

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Benjamin 2006, Thesis XII, p. 394.

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ies emphasised their status as principles; that is, as critical hypotheses born of a critique, firstly, of philosophy. Shortly, it will be shown that further concreteness is added by way of a consideration of the social and historical situation and experience of the proletariat. It was argued that this reconstruction of Lukács’s theory allows it to withstand the majority of his critics who have focused on the role of the proletariat in his theory. This section will consider these critics’ arguments in more detail, in order to illustrate this point further. The reader more interested in the broad conceptual logic of the reconstruction proposed by this work is invited to skip ahead, to Section 3.3. Additionally, in the more critical secondary literature, the standpoint of the proletariat is almost always conflated with Lukács’s theory of revolution and class consciousness. Care is taken here, therefore, to separate these issues. Chapters 6 and 7 of this work outline a defence of Lukács’s theory of revolution, the party and actual praxis. The structuralist Marxists discussed above initiated the modern critique of the standpoint of the proletariat by criticising Lukács’s concept of totality as ‘expressive’. This is, they faulted him for building a view of totality on the basis of the standpoint of the proletariat. Martin Jay relies on this critique, writing: Because of Lukács’s reliance on the verum-factum principle and his contention that theory expressed the revolutionary process, the view of totality he was advocating has justly been called ‘expressive’ by his more recent structuralist critics [Here, Jay refers primarily to Stedman Jones]. According to this notion, the whole expresses the intentionality and praxis of a creator-subject, who recognizes itself in the objective world around it. Other ways of making the same point are to call it a ‘genetic’ or ‘reflective’ or ‘self-activating’ view of totality, because the whole is understood as a reflection of its own genesis, the product of its own praxis. For Lukács, at least in certain moments of History and Class Consciousness, the subject of history and the object of history are ultimately one.54 As an aside, we can already see the conflation of praxis with the standpoint of the proletariat. By presenting these terms in such close proximity, without attention to the mediations between them, Jay dramatically compresses and simplifies Lukács’s analysis. After all, praxis entails consciousness. So to suggest that proletarian praxis creates reification is to suggest both that the proletariat is already the master of its world and that it has consciously produced capitalism. It seems implausible that this is what Jay had in mind.

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Jay 1984, pp. 108–9.

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This aside, Jay’s line of argument builds on the view that Lukács follows Fichte in proposing the object may be comprehended on the basis of its creation by an identical subject-object.55 So in Jay’s reading, Lukács’s concept of genesis results in closure and the resolution of all antinomies.56 Thus, the theoretical core of Jay’s critique is that Lukács’s proletariat is an idealist subject.57 This, in turn, leads him to characterise Lukács’s totality as a ‘normative’ totality which completely subjectivises the object. That is, he sees Lukács’s totality as an abstract negation of reification.58 It is hoped that the discussions above, of totality and Lukács’s theory of the proletariat as subject-object of history, have shown that this reading is sharply one sided. While it is true that Lukács believes that the comprehension of totality is bound up with genesis, it has also been proven that Lukács consciously avoids positing genesis in terms of identity, criticising Fichte on precisely this basis. Lukács’s subject-object is both historically situated and must be capable of producing ontological novelty. For Lukács, genesis is not an identity, but a process; his subject-object is in becoming. This fits with his presentation of totality as an aspiration towards totality. Of course, Jay is partly right when he notes that for Lukács, dereification is bound up with the proletariat conquering the genesis of totality; namely, by realising that it has made the world, and in so doing, reappropriating it in order to change it and be at home in it. Yet he is wrong to suggest that this must end in the resolution of all antinomies and an abstract negation of reification. Lukács views dereification as a process of self-education by a subject-object in becoming. From this, two things follow. Firstly, insofar as the theorist is a participant in this process, their vantage point is neither absolute nor final. This is why it is necessary to understand that the standpoint of the proletariat is, in the first place, a theoretical vantage point. Seen this way, it does not claim absolute or final knowledge, but in fact may acknowledge its own situatedness and particularity. Secondly, this allows us to avoid presenting dereification as the abolition of all contradiction. This is Goldmann and Feenberg’s view of dereification. So, while Jay indicates his awareness of Feenberg and Goldmann’s more open readings of Lukács, he does not discuss them in any detail, instead preferring to

55 56 57 58

Jay 1984, pp. 106–7. Jay 1984, pp. 110–1. Jay 1984, p. 115. Given that there exists considerable textual evidence against this position, Jay avoids overly categorical statements. Moreover, he suggests that Lukács shifted to a more openended conception of totality towards the end of the 1920s. However, in Jay’s reading, this cleared the way for Lukács’s reconciliation with Stalinism (Jay 1984, p. 115, 23).

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attribute them more to Goldmann than to Lukács himself.59 At any rate, some of these points will be discussed in greater detail in Part Two. Moreover, given that the bulk of Jay’s critique is political, a full consideration of this argument presupposes the defence of Lukács outlined in Chapters 6 and 7. More recently, a unique criticism of Lukács’s standpoint of the proletariat has emerged amongst theorists associated with the Wertkritik branch of Marxism. Wertkritik, broadly speaking, might be described as a project which attempts to formulate a critique of capitalism on the basis of the critique of the commodity form, without falling into traditional Marxism or metaphysics.60 This loose intellectual tradition draws inspiration from the first generation Frankfurt School, as well as I.I. Rubin and Sohn-Rethel, Marx and Hegel.61 Moishe Postone is associated with this tradition and his chapter, ‘Lukács and the Dialectical Critique of Capitalism’, is one of the more interesting commentaries on Lukács to emerge in recent times.62 Postone’s criticism centres around the standpoint of the proletariat. Although he credits Lukács with partially breaking away from traditional Marxism, he believes that Lukács’s understanding of the commodity and his form/content dialectic fail to ground a genuinely dialectical critique of capitalism. He counterposes this to Marx, writing: ‘Whereas Lukács understands the commodity only in terms of its abstract dimension, Marx analyses the commodity as both abstract and concrete. Within this framework, Lukács’s analysis falls prey to a fetish form; it naturalizes the concrete dimension of the commodity form’.63 This is, in Postone’s view, Lukács’s core mistake as it leads the latter to overstate the importance to capitalism of concrete class domination while failing to perceive that capitalism is, in fact, governed by the logic of real abstraction. So, in Postone’s view (which he generally expresses via his reading of Marx), capitalism represents the domination of real abstraction:

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Jay 1984, p. 109n. Traditional Marxism is here associated with naturalistic, economic or class reductionism, simple base/superstructure or appearance/essence paradigms, and so on. Given that he is hostile to a similar type of Marxism, Lukács should be seen as a forerunner of Wertkritik Marxism. Given that, as Larsen points out, the bulk of Wertkritik publications are untranslated from German, this discussion relies on his admittedly compressed summary of the tradition. Moreover, it is by no means intended to pass judgement on the whole tradition or to foreclose on further discussion. Given that Lukács is at the heart of the intellectual conjuncture Larsen describes, it would appear that there is considerable scope for further research (Larsen 2011, p. 87). Postone 2003. Postone 2003, p. 93.

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The form of mediation constitutive of capitalism, in Marx’s analysis, gives rise to a new form of social domination – one that subjects people to impersonal, increasingly rationalized structural imperatives and constraints. It is the domination of people by time. This abstract form of domination is real, not ghostly. Nevertheless, it cannot be grasped adequately in terms of class domination or, more generally, in terms of the concrete domination of social groupings or of institutional agencies of the state and/or the economy. It has no determinate locus and, while constituted by determinate forms of social practice, appears not to be social at all.64 Whether or not this constitutes an accurate reading of Marx is beside the point. For now, the point is that it is the theoretical core of Postone’s critique of Lukács. Beyond this, in Postone’s view, Lukács’s analysis implies a framework still beholden to traditional Marxism. Once more, Postone presents his critique via his reading of Marx and Hegel. He believes that Marx’s subject is similar to Hegel’s in that it ‘… is abstract and cannot be identified with any social actors. Moreover, it unfolds in time independent of will’.65 Continuing this point with reference to Lukács’s critique of Hegel, he writes: Marx’s critique of Hegel, then, is very different from Lukács’s materialist appropriation of Hegel. The latter posits ‘labour’ implicitly as the consti64 65

Postone 2003, p. 95. Postone 2003, p. 86. It would be amiss, however, not to comment on this rather sweeping statement. While it would take a much larger work to critique fully Postone’s interpretation of Hegel and Marx, for now it ought to be pointed out that the nature of subjectivity, in Hegel, is highly dependent on the specific dialectic or level of analysis in question. By no means is subjectivity always abstract and disembodied or dissociated from historical actors in Hegel. See, for example, Section B, III, of Chapter VI of The Phenomenology of Spirit. While spirit in the form of absolute freedom may well be abstract, the historical referent is clearly the Jacobin dictatorship between 1793 and 1794. Indeed, the dialectic presented in Section C of the same chapter, which culminates in the famous dialectic between the acting and judging consciousness, may well be described as a process in which the conscious subject of politics becomes concrete by reappropriating its universal substance by way of the other subjectivity (Hegel 2018 Ch. VI, Section B, III; Section C, a-c). It is true that Hegel’s Phenomenology was intended as a conceptual (that is, philosophical) work. This explains his rendering of concrete subjects in conceptual terms. Still, to sustain his critique, Postone would have to firstly criticise this and secondly, demonstrate how his own account – which is also theoretical and, therefore, conceptual – differs. Similarly, other concrete embodiments of subjectivity could equally be cited from across Hegel’s oeuvre. Finally, while it may be granted that Marx does indeed view capital as ‘self-moving substance’, it is another thing altogether to assert that he detached this from any empirical or embodied subject. To make this claim requires an extremely selective reading, especially given his rather well documented antipathy towards the empirical bourgeoisie.

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tuting substance of a Subject, which is prevented by capitalist relations from realising itself. The historical Subject in this case is a collective version of the bourgeois subject, constituting itself and the world through ‘labour’. That is, the concept of ‘labour’ and that of the bourgeois subject (whether interpreted as the individual, or as a class) are related intrinsically.66 This leads Postone to suggest that a further difference between Marx and Lukács exists in the concept of totality. While Marx conceives of capital as the totality (and not labour or the species) he argues that for Lukács, labour constitutes the totality.67 Ultimately, these mistakes (which coalesce around Lukács’s alleged misreading of the commodity form, cited above) cause Lukács to fall back on oppositions which recall the base/superstructure model; namely, between quantity and quality or between form and content, in which the latter category is cast as the real essence of the former. There are further consequences, the first of which concerns the view of history. Marx (again, in Postone’s idiosyncratic reading) presents his account of historical change in terms of the development of capital, that is, in terms of changes in the nature of surplus value and related changes in the process of production. Lukács, on the other hand, in his account of history and the development of class consciousness, ‘… is curiously devoid of a historical dynamic. History, which Lukács conceives of as the dialectical process of the self-constitution of humanity, is indeterminate in this essay [‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’]; it is not analysed with reference to the historical development of capitalism’.68 In the absence of a historical analysis and in light of his misreading of the commodity, Postone argues that Lukács views labour as a hidden, concrete dimension of production, masked by the form of exchange. This posits labour metaphysically as a transhistoric anthropological category; as a human essence that must be liberated from capitalism. This, in turn, according to Postone, leads Lukács to believe that the concept of labour must be realised rather than abolished. Again, he counterposes this to Marx: Marx’s theory, then, extends far beyond the traditional critique of the bourgeois relations of distribution (the market and private property); it grasps modern industrial society itself as being capitalist. It treats the 66 67 68

Postone 2003, p. 86. Postone 2003, p. 87. Postone 2003, p. 92.

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working class as the basic element of capitalism rather than as the embodiment of its negation, and does not conceptualize socialism in terms of the realization of labour and of industrial production, but in terms of the possible abolition of the proletariat and of the organization of production based on proletarian labour, as well as of the dynamic system of abstract compulsions constituted by labour as a socially mediating activity.69 This proposes a model of subjectivity sharply at odds with that of Lukács. This will be discussed below, via Neil Larsen. At any rate, in Postone’s view, Lukács’s mistake rendered him incapable of understanding his immediate future. ‘Rather than pointing to the overcoming of capitalism, Lukács’s approach entails a misrecognition that affirms implicitly the new state-centric configuration that emerged after the First World War’.70 Prior to continuing the discussion via Neil Larsen, a few initial rejoinders may be suggested. Firstly, it might be pointed out that the idea of reification as the domination of abstraction – specifically, the domination of time and the reduction of time to quantity – was central to Lukács’s theory. This, however, would miss Postone’s point. In Lukács’s view, this domination of abstraction has a concrete dimension; corresponding to capital, as a disembodied social logic, there also exists a class of capitalists. So capital, as a system of real abstraction, ultimately arises for Lukács in conjunction with the generalisation of the lifestyle and culture of the bourgeoisie. Capitalism without an empirical class of individuals who embody capital as a social relation, is, to Lukács, inconceivable. This may well constitute a weakness in Lukács’s theory. Nevertheless, insofar as he points to the transformation of time into space as the conceptual heart of formalism, he does at least suggest the possibility of a critique of capitalism, built upon his philosophy of praxis, capable of grasping historic forms of capitalism that exist sans bourgeoisie – like, for example, state capitalism. Otherwise, this book has already demonstrated the extent to which Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is built on an understanding of the dual nature of the commodity. This, too, seems to be beside the point. The real question would appear to concern the meaning of the concrete, the qualitative, the content or labour, as opposed to the abstract, the quantitative, the form and capital. Postone’s most challenging criticism of Lukács is that he transforms the former series 69 70

Postone 2003, p. 97. Postone 2003, p. 98. Postone’s evaluation of Lukács’s failure to comprehend the rise of statist economic and political forms following World War One is similar to Hall’s. This failure (of which Lukács was assuredly guilty) is explained in Chapter 9.

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of terms into metaphysical essences. To address this question we may begin with totality. Although it might seem a small point, it is inaccurate to say that in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis labour constitutes the totality. Clearly, capital and its attendant logic does. The logic of reification is a social generalisation of commodity production. Rather, as the discussion in Chapter 3, section 1 demonstrated, labour is the point of view from which the totality may be comprehended via its genesis. Therefore, insofar as labour is involved in the production of the reified totality, it is reified labour; that is, labour as instituted quantitatively and formally by capital, as labour power, as a commodity and an object. Lukács’s principle of labour, which is closely related to the standpoint of the proletariat, is a qualitative concept of labour. This concept first emerges immanently, as the shadow cast by a quantitative concept of labour, so to speak, and then is developed further via Lukács’s discussion of classical German philosophy. As the next section of this chapter will show, the principle of labour can only become a self-conscious principle through a consideration of the experience of the emptiness and dissonance of the labour process. So while the reified totality of capital gives rise to a concept of labour as the genesis of the totality, these terms are certainly not identical. This is an initial answer to Postone’s charge that Lukács suggests a metaphysical essence. Insofar as Lukács suggests essences (including content, quality, labour), he does so immanently, in light of their relationship to their antinomic counterpart. He strives to push them to their extremes and to stage their interaction, in order to produce their concrete overcoming. Moreover, he avoids ahistorical foundationalism; Lukács’s essences are historicised. Whether he is successful in this must be judged on the basis of his philosophy of praxis as a whole. Chapter 8 will consider Lukács’s own philosophical reflection on his methodological terms, providing further evidence that he strives against dualistic oppositions. If Lukács’s solution ultimately does not stand, its failure cannot be traced to his concept of labour per se, but rather, to his over-burdening praxis with the Hegelian absolute. Yet this failure does entail consequences for the concept of labour. In this regard, some of the results of Postone’s critique of Lukács may be upheld, but not because of Lukács’s allegedly metaphysical rendering of labour. Where history is concerned, Postone is more obviously incorrect in his reading. As will be demonstrated shortly via Larsen’s critique of Postone, there is a strong sense of history in Lukács. This is initially contained in his understanding of historic crisis, or, as he calls it, the actuality of revolution. In a sense, therefore, Lukács is uninterested in the objective dialectic of capital – that is, the seemingly disembodied movement of capital as an abstract subject of history. He assumes that this dialectic has played out, resulting in a crisis. In

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1923, this assumption was not unfounded. Lukács was instead much more interested in the subjective dialectic of history, whereby freedom and consciousness emerge. He believed the dialectics involved in class struggle and revolutionary politics were the key to this. Again, in 1923, this was perhaps the more pressing question. So, Lukács’s discussion of proletarian class consciousness (which Postone believes to be devoid of history) presupposes the actuality of revolution. Its grounding is therefore inherently historical, as is outlined fully in Chapter 5. For now, however, this bears on Lukács’s concept of subjectivity. To begin with, insofar as capital moves according to a logic which transcends individuals or social groups, it may be said to exist (following Postone) as substance in the form of subject. Equally, however, the bourgeoisie constitutes itself as a class and possesses a class-subjectivity, that is, its ideologies and selfunderstandings. Yet the formalism implicit in the bourgeois style of life and culture gives rise, in Lukács’s view, to an insoluble contradiction in bourgeois class consciousness. The subjective consciousness of the bourgeoisie can never correspond accurately to the material constitution of that class or with history; the bourgeoisie is doomed to produce history under the domination of its own ideology. Insofar as the bourgeoisie is comprised of individuals who believe themselves to possess subjectivity, their subjectivity is ultimately one sided; bourgeois subjectivity can never reappropriate their substance. This view will be discussed immediately below and again in Part Two, with regard to Lukács’s critique of ideology. These issues, however, also have bearing on the subjectivity Lukács imputes to the proletariat. This is the most important issue pertaining to the present discussion and three interrelated points must be made. Firstly, the starting point for Lukács’s account of proletarian subjectivity (or, the concept of the proletariat as subject-object of history) is the institution of the proletariat as a pure object, devoid of subjectivity. In the terms of political economy, this is represented by the subsumption of labour under the abstraction labour power. The basis of the immediate unity of subject and object (as we will see below) is the experience of time during the work day. This, in Lukács’s view, gives individual proletarians a basic experience of quality which allows them to view themselves as a self-conscious object. Consideration of this experience, by the theorist, forms the basis for the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat, as we will see shortly. These points also have a bearing on the empirical proletariat. The proletariat as a historic class commences its self-education, once more, as an object. Whether or not Lukács can account for the full self-education of the proletariat is a different question, to be discussed in Part Two. For now, the point is that Lukács’s concept of proletarian subjectivity does not require a mytho-

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logical or transhistorical starting point: rather, it is entirely immanent. This is why Lukács argued that historical materialism should be seen as the ‘… self-knowledge of capitalist society’.71 Does this mean, as Postone argues, that Lukács equates communism with the realisation of labour, and not with its self-abolition? No such consequence is, prima facie, necessary. The concept of labour, as has been shown, is premised on non-identity and the ability to create ontological novelty. Given this, the content of the liberation of labour is strictly unknowable. The content of communism, therefore, becomes the radically new. From this we may infer that concepts derived from capitalism (including labour, both concrete and abstract, the commodity, and, in fact, Lukács’s entire conceptual apparatus) will be rendered, in the distant communist future, as sublated moments. As has been conceded, this solution to the problem posed by Postone is not without its own issues. To posit communism as radically new risks making the term into a new absolute negativity. Still, this consequence can only be explored in light of Lukács’s concept of praxis – which is the highest bearer of radical novelty and historic creativity. These comments do not exhaust Postone’s critique of Lukács. Indeed, a full discussion would have to take stock not only of Postone’s work, but his reading of Marx and Hegel.72 Moreover, they do not exhaust the incipient polemic between Wertkritik Marxism and Lukács. Norbert Trenkle and Neil Larsen are also contributors to this project and to the critique of Lukács. Most of their criticisms are political and historical; ultimately, they believe that Lukács made a historical error in identifying the proletariat as the subject-object of history, which resulted in a ‘theology of class’ which failed to bridge the famous divide between imputed and empirical class consciousness.73 As political and historical arguments, these issues will be discussed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Nevertheless, they bear strongly on the theoretical issues at stake here. Larsen, with good justification, suggests that prima facie, the immanent critique of reification, which is the aim of History and Class Consciousness, appears all but impossible sans proletariat.74 For the most part, Larsen agrees with Postone’s critique of 71 72

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Lukács 1967a, p. 229. Lukács 1967a, p. 111. Equally, the commonalities and differences between Lukács, Rubin and Sohn-Rethel have barely been touched on. Firstly, were it proven possible to unite Rubin with Lukács, the latter might be supplied with a long-missing political economy. Secondly, given Lukács’s tantalising comments regarding the existence of reification in ancient Greece, as well as the relationship he charts between philosophy and reification, common ground with Sohn-Rethel would appear to be readily apparent (see Sohn-Rethel 1978). Larsen 2011, pp. 90–1. Larsen 2011, p. 85.

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Lukács, discussed above. Far from viewing labour as a transhistorical human essence, and the foundation for dereifying practice, he believes that it is a term both produced by and ultimately enmeshed within reification. He writes: ‘The goal of critical theory and practice must be to supersede not only the fetishism of the commodity but that of the real abstraction of work itself, as the substance constituting social praxis, so to speak, of self-valorizing value’.75 Indeed, summarising Trenkle, Larsen goes further, arguing that the consequence of this mistake, for Lukács, is that the ‘… fundamental difference between capitalist and communist society would thus in the end be merely that, in the latter, mediation by means of abstract labour would “take place consciously” ’.76 This is to say, in Larsen and Trenkle’s view, Lukács reduces communism to selfconscious capitalism. They suggest that this would amount to self-imposed exploitation, potentially not dissimilar to systems ordinarily described as state capitalist. This avenue of thought, anticipated above, is not, however, explored. Suffice to say, this book follows Lukács (and Hegel) in suggesting that selfconsciousness might just as well bring about a fundamental transformation in the object of consciousness.77 This is neither Larsen’s main criticism of Lukács nor is it his last word. In fact, despite sharing their rejection of the standpoint of the proletariat, Larsen defends Lukács against Trenkle and Postone. Describing Trenkle’s critique of Lukács and the paradigm of subjectivity as such (which he also discovers in Postone, albeit articulated more cautiously), Larsen writes: Echoing an ongoing critical-theoretical project of Wertkritik generally, in which not only ‘labour’ but the ‘subject form’ itself as a category purportedly bequeathed by bourgeois Enlightenment thought becomes the target of critique, Trenkle here effectively takes a step beyond Postone’s claim to have discovered the demystified Subject of History in capital rather than a disalienated labour on the level of ‘species-being’. In effect, the Hegelian dialectical categories in terms of which Lukács had derived a theory of the dialectical negation of reification and reified consciousness – essence, historical Subject and totality as telos, all purportedly in statu nascendi in the form of a revolutionary, proletarian classconsciousness – turn out here to be, along with labour, forms of reification themselves, abstract labour’s ‘metaphysical’ pseudo-negations.78 75 76 77 78

Larsen 2011, p. 87. Larsen 2011, pp. 90–1. Lukács 1967a, p. 169. Larsen 2011, p. 91.

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While Larsen agrees that the ‘metaphysical pitfalls’ of class as the historical agent of dereification must be avoided, he is suspicious of this rejection of subjectivity.79 He argues that the question of subjectivity returns via a back door. So both Trenkle and Postone suggest that following the abolition of totality, a ‘plurality’ of subjectivities and practices might flourish. In response, Larsen writes: ‘… such pronouncements smack of a certain theoretical pragmatism, even of a kind of “bad abstraction”. Indeed, without being further mediated and concretised, they risk calling into question the viability of the very theory and critique of reification that they are meant to rectify and reactualise’.80 By way of example, Larsen criticises attempts to rescue the idea of class struggle by equating the proletariat with whatever form of social subjectivity appears to challenge the world order, in the manner of Hardt and Negri, or by way of endorsement of a ‘… sheer, creative and active cry of negation in relation to what is …’ in the manner of John Holloway. These alternatives to the class paradigm amount to a ‘… political equivalent of an emancipatory “night in which all cats are grey”’, which is to say, they provide no criteria by which to judge movements as diverse as Al Qaeda and the piqueteros.81 This is precisely the pitfall into which Larsen believes that Postone and Trenkle fall: ‘One must at least question whether, theoretically speaking, the mere insistence on a “plurality” of resistances to reification and, in Postone’s case, “nontotalising forms of political coordinations of society” get us very much further than Hardt and Negri, for example, despite resolutely parting company with the “retro-discourse” of proletarians and class struggle’.82 Further than this, Larsen rightly raises the question: without the proletariat, upon what may an immanent critique of reification be based? The assertion of plurality and nontotalising critique might satisfy left-poststructuralism, but it is not adequate to the standards of the Marxian thought which Larsen credits Postone and Trenkle with upholding elsewhere.83 A further consequence of this approach to subjectivity is that the immanent critique of capitalism itself is reduced to vague abstraction. For instance, Larsen notes that counterposition between the self-expanding value of capital and ‘the commons’, defended by ‘popular oppositional forms’ falls well short of the ‘… immanent “realizable ought” ’ of

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Larsen 2011, p. 91. Larsen 2011, pp. 91–2. These examples are Larsen’s own. Larsen 2011, p. 92. Larsen 2011. Larsen 2011, p. 92.

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Lukács’s argument.84 In vague and potentially utopian formulations such as this, the practical force of critique is all but lost.85 A similar impasse is reached by Vasilis Grollios, albeit in a much less illuminating manner. After constructing a model of Lukács’s dialectics based entirely on the latter’s later work, he uses this to fault Lukács of History and Class Consciousness in the usual way, namely, for suffering a democratic deficit. Like Postone (and before him Piccone, Arato and Brienes, Adorno and a host of others) Grollios presents an account which he claims is ‘heretical’ in terms of the literature on Lukács. In short, he argues that Lukács’s dialectic is not based on the contradictions of reified form, but between economic and non-economic values. This produces a pseudo-dialectic that fails to transcend liberal thought and which tends towards identity thinking. The thoroughly conventional conclusion that results from this heretical reading is that Lukács substitutes the party for the class. With heresies such as these, one hardly needs inquisitors. In this exposition, Grollios also commits a number of blunders which render his article one of the least interesting recent commentaries on Lukács and Marxism. For instance, comparing Lukács to Marx, he asserts that: ‘Nowhere in his writings does Marx presuppose a specific knowledge, such as that of the whole or of long-term objectives that could be considered a “true class consciousness” or an “authentic class consciousness” that might make the class struggle effective’.86 Unfortunately, however, Marx’s most famous piece of writing directly contradicts the claim. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, he (and Engels) wrote: The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.87 As an aside, these lines are also a useful rejoinder to Postone’s insistence on a Marx devoid of all lionisation of the proletariat. Of course, the terms true or authentic class consciousness are absent. But the similarity between Marx’s comments and Lukács’s framework is undeniable, even if the former is less elaborate. And this is merely one example of Marx’s writing on the concept 84 85 86 87

Larsen 2011, p. 93. Grollios 2014, p. 576. Grollios 2014, p. 579. Marx and Engels 1976, p. 497.

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of a proletarian party. The alternative Grollios holds up is a paradoxical abdication of theory in favour of open ended practice: ‘Defetishization requires that we reject subordinating our doing to the demands of the accumulation of wealth now, without having a pre-prepared plan in place. Through turning the topsy-turvy world on its head, through non-identity thinking, we propel a class struggle that can overturn capitalist logic by opening cracks in it, even though we cannot know with certainty where these cracks will lead us’.88 Grollios cites John Holloway as an inspiration. Yet this type of anti-theoretical advocacy for anything which rejects the ‘time is money’ logic of capitalism is completely indeterminate; it can equally describe shoplifting, turning up to work hungover, permaculture, conservative religious utopianism, and so on. Whether one agrees with the standpoint of the proletariat or not, at the very least it provides a measure by which to assess the potential of emancipatory movements. Given that these criticisms of Grollios generally mirror those that Larsen makes of Postone and Trenkle, the question of Larsen’s alternative is raised. Because he shares Postone and Trenkle’s rejection of the class paradigm, in order to avoid the pitfalls he attributes to them, he must nominate a potential standpoint that bears the weight of Lukács’s standpoint of the proletariat. Even though this is where his argument is weakest, it is still suggestive and illuminating. In short, Larsen argues that in History and Class Consciousness, in addition to the standpoint of the proletariat, there is another category which can potentially ground dereification. This category is crisis.89 As Lukács’s concept of crisis, as pertains to reification and the actuality of revolution, has been outlined above, Larsen’s exposition need not be summarised in detail. For now, however, Larsen’s argument is that in the face of a deep crisis (possessing multiple dimensions, economic, social, environmental, and so on), society itself might emerge as a subject. He writes: But with all explicit references to class momentarily suspended, what potentially emerges from this sinister crisis scenario [in History and Class Consciousness] is a theoretical insight into the reality that it must ultimately be society itself, the very possibility of the social in the face of the catastrophe of capitalism, that takes up the role of historical ‘subject/object’. The still intractable problem of how such a radically social Subject – one more radically and concretely totalised than its class vari-

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Grollios 2014, p. 579. Larsen 2011, p. 95.

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ant – breaks free of reified into dialectical consciousness remains, of course, for Lukács, as for us. But unconstrained by the ‘traditional’ Marxist fetish-categories of labor and class struggle, here at least the problem is posed in a way that is consistent with the historical specificity of a society mediated by the real abstractions of value, labour and capital, and the inexorable logic of social annihilation that comes ever more clearly into the scope of mass consciousness as capital’s terminal crisis – its genuine catastrophe – becomes historical reality.90 Indeed, Larsen argues that insofar as Lukács refers to the proletariat, this indicates a presentiment of this alternative that he nevertheless lacked the theoretical vocabulary to articulate.91 It would be possible to respond to Larsen by accusing him of the same vagueness and metaphysics of which he accuses Postone and Trenkle. After all, it is unclear how society as subject differs greatly with a Rousseauean volonté générale, a radicalised Kantian conception of civil society or, indeed, with Hegel’s world spirit. Moreover, one is struck by the absence of political categories. In Lukács’s conception, the proletariat only actualises its potential as subjectobject through a political struggle. Insofar as this political struggle must contest the terrain produced by the state (which is, in turn, structured by the logic of reification), it traverses objective and necessary political categories generated by capitalism, including the antinomies of force and consent, of party and class, and so on, down to more concrete categories, such as representation and leadership. In this regard, Feenberg and Meyers, to name two commentators, are quite right to note that Lukács’s vision of dereification is inherently political and radical democratic. However, this response to Larsen is only negative. Neither does it reply to the patently obvious fact that the proletariat has failed to fulfil the potential ascribed to it by Lukács. Furthermore, the fact that the revolutionary proletarian movement, wherever it has been most successful, has either founded or contributed to the founding of state capitalism cannot be ignored. A possible answer to this problem is suggested in the conclusion to this book. In short, Lukács’s identification of the proletariat was not some metaphysical mistake, but rather, the necessary philosophical hypostatisation of the praxis of the October Revolution. Precisely as a theoretical hypostatisation, or, a conceptual mythology, it is dashed against the same reefs that Lukács identified in German

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Larsen 2011, pp. 96–7. Larsen 2011, p. 97.

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Idealism and Hegel, albeit in the context of a more advanced historical situation. Read in this way, Lukács’s identification of the proletariat was a fundamental aspect of his philosophy of praxis and can only be criticised from the point of view of a critique of that philosophy as a whole. Seen like this, Lukács’s mistake was productive in that in fact it reveals aspects of the immediacy he unknowingly reproduced intellectually. That is, the critique of Lukács ought to disclose an occluded dimension of history itself which, in turn, ought to reveal something about Marxism as such. A simple rejection of his concept of the proletariat as a metaphysical mistake precludes reading his failure as productive. Moreover, grasping the historical necessity behind Lukács’s ‘mistake’ relieves the critic of the need to construct a dubious account of Marx that is somehow free from any fetishisation of the proletariat or labour. So, as with Rose and Postone, the result of Larsen’s critique – that Lukács creates a political theology of the proletariat – may be upheld, but not for the reasons that Larsen suggests. Beyond this, however, a few more provisional points can be made against Larsen’s reading. Firstly, Larsen is quite right to note that the problem of subjectivity is ineluctable. Any critique of reification implies a subject position, whether acknowledged or not, upon which the critique is based. Insofar as a critique of reification moves in a practical direction, it will be forced, firstly, to identify concrete social actors and secondly, to identify immanent contradictions and forces that allow change to be comprehended in a non-utopian fashion. Yet insofar as the critique of reification is the domain of a theorist or a small group of theorists, it will necessarily possess an abstract and utopian character. This cannot be avoided. What matters, therefore, is firstly that this abstract and theoretical character be acknowledged (and elevated to self-consciousness) in order that any corresponding identification of a social subject be made provisionally. So far, however, this suggestion is quite compatible with Larsen’s nomination of society as subject. Two further points can be made, however, in defence of Lukács’s theory of the standpoint of the proletariat. Firstly, if it is accepted that every category of analysis is subject to reification and if the category of labour is unfolded in a non-metaphysical and immanent fashion (as was presented in the above), there is nothing in principle wrong with premising the critique of reification on labour. Labour, seen in this light, might become something like a regulative principle which guides critique. Moreover, far from being limited by the particularity of the proletariat, Lukács’s concept of labour and the standpoint of the proletariat are fundamentally universalising; by becoming the subject-object of history, the proletariat equally transcends its being as a class and becomes a universal subject-object. In political terms, this means the formation of a universal hegemonising project which can articulate new values which cannot be concretely anticipated prior to their advent.

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In this sense, it is just as plausible to suggest that the proletariat might constitute the foundation for society as subject as it is to suggest that the amalgam of individuals who constitute society might do the same. Moreover, if one accepts that the logic of capital is constitutive of the totality, as Postone, Trenkle and Larsen do, then, as a term derived from political economy and the immanent critique of reification, the proletariat has a potential power and situation that no other social group does. The defence of the proletariat as subject-object in this book is not intended to reproduce the mythologies of twentieth century Marxism. Nevertheless, seen in these terms, the idea of the proletariat as subject-object of history might furnish a dialectical model of a self-educating subject that, at least in some regards, goes beyond the immediacy of liberal or utopian critiques of capitalism. For this to succeed, however, it would require that the theorist outline not only a superior standpoint, but also the mediations between that standpoint and the theorist in question. After all, by what right does the theorist promote himself to the status of spokesperson for society as subject? In contrast, philosophy, conceived of as the standpoint of absolute knowledge, is the only plausible vantage point higher than these contingent historical-political standpoints, not least of all because it is born of a deep account of the philosopher and their role in expressing the conceptuality of history. This proposition will be discussed in Chapter 9. For now, given that the purpose of the current exercise is to reconstruct Lukács’s philosophy of praxis in its conceptual totality, Larsen’s critique of those who would read Lukács sans proletariat is fundamentally correct and well received. Whatever one makes of the proletariat as subject-object of history, one cannot understand Lukács without understanding this aspect of his thought. Finally, Larsen’s critique of the standpoint of the proletariat and labour affords the opportunity to discuss briefly one final approach to the standpoint of the proletariat, suggested first by Fredric Jameson. Jameson introduced Lukács to the New Left with his book Marxism and Form. In this work, he emphasised (albeit briefly) some aspects of Lukács’s thought quite at odds with the dominant readings that would emerge with the New Left, including those of Arato and Breines and Jay, outlined above. Firstly, he argued that the title of History and Class Consciousness is misleading: ‘for the new book is not so much political as it is epistemological, and aims at laying the foundation in a technical manner for a new Marxist theory of knowledge’.92 He continued, arguing that class consciousness ought not to be understood as

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the empirical or psychological consciousness of the class, but as a perspective through which the theorist might look at the world. Similar to Marx’s critique of middle-class economics, Lukács’s critique of bourgeois knowledge points to its limits and inherent contradictions. Through the standpoint of the proletariat, Lukács discovered the category of totality, barred to thinkers who are unwilling or unable to go beyond the class perspective of the bourgeoisie. This standpoint – built on an intellectual consideration of the life experience of the proletariat – dialectically overcomes the contradictions of bourgeois philosophy. Thus he views the first achievement of History and Class Consciousness as the relativisation and social contextualisation of Marxism itself.93 Notwithstanding that Jameson tends to elide the political aspect of class consciousness, by emphasising the methodological aspect of History and Class Consciousness, his reading opened the way to a serious consideration of this category. Superficially, it might appear similar to the interpretation proposed here. However, in 1988, Jameson returned to these leitmotifs in his essay ‘History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project’.94 In this piece, he staged an impressive defence of the category of totality, against thinkers who would read it as a monolithic dogma which flattens subjective experience. He writes: Knowledge is power, no doubt, and ‘theory’ is repressive and patriarchal: truths we have learned from a whole range of highly theoretical thinkers from Foucault to Luce Irigaray. But ‘totality’ is not in that sense, for Lukács, a form of knowledge, but rather a framework in which various kinds of knowledge are positioned, pursued, and evaluated. This is clearly the implication of the phrase ‘aspiration to totality’ which we have already quoted. Meanwhile, as we will show later on, such a concept and framework is not an individual matter but rather a collective possibility which very much presupposes a collective project.95 Thus Jameson expands on his reading of History and Class Consciousness as a work dedicated to formulating a totalising epistemology on the basis of class standpoint. However, in his 1988 essay, he adds additional standpoints, referring to works by feminist and race theorists, who formulate critiques based on the standpoints of women and non-white subjects respectively. This is the 93 94 95

Jameson 1971, pp. 182–4. Jameson 2009, p. 210. Jameson recently republished this essay unchanged in Valences of the Dialectic. All references are to the more recent republication. Jameson 2009, p. 211.

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sense in which Jameson sees History and Class Consciousness as an unfinished project, he believes that today, this project must refuse to prioritise the working class in the way that Lukács does, developing instead specific critical epistemologies upon the basis of every concrete situation of privation and oppression. So the point upon which a totalising critique may be formulated is less class consciousness and more an opposition to late capitalism.96 This is, of course, a very different vision of political praxis to Lukács’s theory elaborated in the 1920s. Neil Larsen, in the essay discussed above, notes somewhat caustically that this abolition of the proletariat amounts to an uneasy ‘theoretical-political peace treaty’ between the third section of Lukács’s essay on ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ and the academic flank of identity politics and new social movements, such as the feminist or black movements.97 This move, Larsen notes, casually discards more than half of History and Class Consciousness, and in so doing, drops vital themes, such as the distinction between empirical and imputed class consciousness. Thus Lukács’s understanding of the structuring of consciousness by reification is dissolved and its critical power potentially dissipated.98 Although a full discussion of Jameson’s project is outside the scope of this work, it pays to note, following Larsen, that an attempt to rescue the standpoint of the proletariat by means of an epistemology of multiple standpoints is fraught. At the very least, this would appear to compromise the category of totality. After all, the proletariat only emerges for Lukács as the subject-object of history through the immanent critique of reification. If other standpoints, for example, those of women or non-white subjects were to be accorded equal importance, this would appear to suggest either a model of totality premised on a deeper logic than all of these standpoints, or a model of society organised around multiple intersecting totalities. Both of these possibilities, whatever their virtues, depart sharply from Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Indeed, this bears on one of the major arguments of this book: Lukács cannot be saved by a dogmatic repetition of his concepts, nor can he be saved by adapting them to prevailing fashion.99 The most recent example of this

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Jameson 2009, p. 221. Larsen 2011, p. 83. Larsen 2011. When I refer to critics as dogmatically repeating Lukács’s concepts, I have in mind a number of writers who have approached Lukács from the point of view of the organised Trotskyist and Marxist left; specifically, John Rees, Stephen Perkins and Robert Lanning. These writers have (to varying degrees of sophistication) defended Lukács’s philosophy of

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second strategy is that of Anita S. Chari whose 2008 PhD dissertation, entitled ‘Reification of the Political: Critical Theory and Postcapitalist Politics’, seeks to produce a theory of radical politics based on a Marx/Lukács account of reification. Hers is a dense and multilayered work which engages critically with a host of contemporary theorists. Moreover, her theory of politics is built not only upon Marx and Lukács, but upon Adorno, the political practice of the SDS, as well as an engagement with late-Frankfurt School thinkers like Honneth, and Wertkritik Marxists like Postone. Given this, it is beyond the scope of this work to comment on Chari’s work as a whole. Nevertheless it is cited because it is a particularly clear example of the tendency to adapt Lukács to a new historic context at the expense of the original integrity and force of his ideas. praxis in more or less explicitly political terms. The rather untimely political convictions of these readers have helped them cut through some of the most uncharitable and shallow readings of Lukács which narrowly identify him with Leninist or Stalinist authoritarianism. For this, as well as other points of detail, their work is to be commended. However, in many ways, they produce the opposite mistake to that of other theorists criticised here; instead of criticising Lukács for failing to bridge the gulf between party and class, they suggest a rigid uncritical identity between the standpoint of the proletariat and the empirical consciousness of the proletariat. Instead of regarding the standpoint of the proletariat as a negative and theoretical hypothesis, subject to the abstraction and isolation of its theoretical origin, they regard it as a more or less unproblematic articulation of the interests of the empirical proletariat. If this is dogmatic in light of an actual proletarian movement, the mistake is magnified by the distance of history. To assert that Marxists in isolated groups, very far from anything resembling praxis, may possess the true consciousness of the proletariat is tragicomic. It also raises the question that many critics of Lukács take for granted, namely, the unfortunate fate of the twentieth century workers’ movement. Their solution to this question is, in effect, a political mythology. In short, the proletariat failed because its parties failed. This solution has the effect of transforming the standpoint of the proletariat into a moralising, nostalgic utopianism. The graveyard of the October Revolution is discovered in Germany. The German Revolution failed because there was no Bolshevik Party. There was no Bolshevik Party because Luxemburg did not split from the SPD early enough, and so on, back in history. One may trace original sins such as these as far back as one likes. The occluded secret of narratives such as these is the practical standpoint of this or that far left sect. The concept of a sect in Lukács’s theory will be discussed in Part Two. For now, it suffices to note that a sect transforms its own ethical-theoretical principle into the measure of its superiority to a world which is found constantly lacking. While this is accompanied by theoretical elaboration of varying degrees of sophistication, the genuine basis for such an attitude is practical – sect members and leaders make for themselves a home in a hostile world. The consequence, insofar as theory is allowed to become sclerotic, is that all fundamental questions are settled and all that remains to be done is to apply consistently Lukácsian Marxism to new empirical material. This is an undead approach to politics. Theories that refuse to die constantly chase the living matter of the world (see Rees 1998, Perkins 1993, Lanning 2009).

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Chari’s Lukács emerges with a decidedly post-Marxist, autonomist flavour. As Chari notes, her project resembles Jameson’s, although she takes the logic of his position much further. She rejects any overemphasis on collective subjectivity as this unintentionally leads towards the reification of existing political forms. This, in turn, forecloses on the invention of ‘… new forms which push beyond the horizons of the capitalist imaginary’.100 By way of alternative, she advocates the ‘theoretical pursuit to articulate new forms of rule, not in order to search for the “ends” of politics, conceived teleologically, but to search for new forms of human togetherness that open up the political field beyond a political imagination deadened by its confinement within the horizon of the state form’.101 Chari further demands that this practice avoid concepts which imply a vertical or hierarchical relationship (base/superstructure, appearance/essence, the class in-itself/for-itself) as these would ‘render emancipation a further instance of domination of the many by the few’. Rather than this, she prefers a ‘horizontal’ approach which, ‘beginning from individuals’ thrownness into a world which is heteronomous, alienating and reified … helps us to think about what it could mean to engage the situation politically, and to practice new forms of rule’.102 Further, while Chari follows Benhabib’s critique of ‘philosophies of the subject’, she refuses to jettison the utopian aspiration to be found in the best of these.103 In this light, she radically redefines Lukács’s ‘proletariat’: Who, then, is the proletariat for Lukács? I suggest in contrast to the essentialist reading of Lukács, that the proletariat can function not as a positive social agent, but rather as an agent that arises in the process of political construction: the practice of totalization, that is making connections between individual experiences of domination and a social system of domination, constitutes an act that is specifically political, in that it is not determined by something like the forces of production, or class position. Furthermore, the structure of domination is not something that is assumed in advance; rather, it is articulated through a political act which begins from individual experiences of reification, and proceeds to construct expanding webs of connections. Through this process, individuals chisel through fetishized, self-obscuring forms of capitalist domination,

100 101 102 103

Chari 2008, p. 102. Chari 2008, p. 104. Chari 2008, p. 104. Chari 2008, p. 120.

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without knowing in advance what constitutes an alternative. Dereified practice is the practice of determinate negation.104 In this way the concept of the proletariat is saved by alchemical transmutation into a self-reflexive individual activist who, in order to act collectively, must form ‘webs of connections’. This new subject, if it wants to create true democracy, ‘… must think and practice new dereified forms of politics, rather than taking the given boundaries of the political as somehow necessary and objective’.105 She cites the water wars of Cochabamba and the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of Basque Country as examples.106 Whatever one thinks of these struggles (which were, at any rate, rather less significant than the October Revolution of 1917), it is clear from the above that Chari redefines Lukács beyond recognition to fit with a model of radical activism based in the social movements of the 1990s and early 2000s. Whatever the merits of these movements, they do not help us understand Lukács. Indeed, the significance of Chari’s reading of Lukács is that she takes the redefinition of the standpoint of the proletariat (initiated by Jameson) to its logical conclusion. Chari replaces Lukács’s collective subject with the self-reflexive individual activist whose thrownness informs their participation in multiple projects which are horizontal, anti-teleological and pursuant of new political forms. That is, the proletariat is replaced by an individual activist with broadly autonomist politics. Such concessions to fashion, like fashion itself, date rapidly. Moreover, they too-often conceal the arbitrary preference of the theorist whose complex construct is, in the end, no more than a list of books and movements they have been interested in over the years. In a sense, therefore, the post-Marxist reading of the standpoint of the proletariat is the inverse of a sectarian Trotskyist reading, which counterfactually preserves Lukács’s politics. Both conceal an adaptation to prevailing fashion. The former does so openly, by somehow shoehorning Lukács into Heideggerian thrownness, rhizomal networks, différance and the endlessly self-same liberal pluralism of multiple subjectivities. The latter, sectarian, approach capitulates to the world by resigning the ability to think under the cover of more or less rigorous dogmatic repetition. The standpoint of the proletariat can be saved neither by dogmatic repetition nor by open-ended adaptation. The first option relegates Lukács to history through faint praise, while the second severs him from his context. Both 104 105 106

Chari 2008, pp. 108–9. Chari 2008, p. 124. Chari 2008, p. 18.

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approaches to Lukács relegate him to Heraclitus’s river which, despite its constant change, is constantly the same. Instead, to discover what is universally true in Lukács, and in so doing, to bring him to our present, the inner logic and unity of his work must be preserved and made clear, in the light of its context, in order that its inner tensions and contradictions speak for themselves.

3

The Self-Consciousness of the Commodity We have to be nothing in order to be in our right place in the whole. Simone Weil107 The aporia or gap is the Janus-face of the universal. Gillian Rose108

Having defined Lukács’s concept of labour and his idea of the proletariat as the subject-object of history in becoming on the basis of his metacritique of philosophy, it is now possible to discuss the standpoint of the proletariat in more concrete terms. This is the final step necessary for the theoretical account of the unity of mediation, totality, genesis and praxis. However, precisely as a theory, the account whose assemblage is completed with this chapter still constitutes – like all theory – a critical and negative hypothesis. Short of further elaboration by way of history, politics and philosophy, theory remains prisoner within a selfmade theoretical immediacy. As a result, the most important caveat to make at the beginning of this section is that this discussion – although it refers to the concrete situation of the proletariat under capitalism – solely concerns the elaboration of theoretical principles which do not yet have actuality. Whether or not any proletariat or proletarian has or does see themselves in the terms which are expounded here is for the moment strictly irrelevant because what is at stake is the theory of praxis. In sum, the standpoint of the proletariat is based on the self-consciousness of the labourer as commodity. As an object, the labourer constitutes the immediate subject-object of capitalism. Yet insofar as the worker may develop selfconsciousness, this immediacy may be transformed. As has been stressed, this description need not apply to any empirical worker; it is a conceptual possibility and initially, the possession of theory. If this appears to contradict the theory

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Weil 2002, p. 36. Rose 1996, p. 10.

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of the class conscious proletariat as the subject-object of history, it need not. As the immediate and unconscious subject-object of capitalism, the proletariat is, in the first place, identified by theory. Although it required Lukács’s philosophy to bring it to logical completion, just such a theoretical identification of the proletariat was made by Marx, as early as 1844, in his famous ‘Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in which he identified the proletariat as the practical element that would bring philosophy out of its abstract impotence, and in so doing, revolutionise the world.109 Yet, to attain its own self-consciousness and for class consciousness to become an actuality and not just a theory, the proletariat itself must traverse a series of mediations that Lukács outlines. That is, a historic process of self-education is required, in which theory, provided it develops according to its concept, may become an interlocutor with the empirical proletariat. This is the subject matter of Part Two. Conceptually, however, the complete theoretical elaboration of the standpoint of the proletariat precedes this stage. Regarding the achievement of the standpoint of the proletariat, Lukács writes: What change has been brought about, then, socially by this point of view [the standpoint of the proletariat] and even by the possibility of taking up a point of view at all towards society? ‘In the first instance’ nothing at all. For the proletariat makes its appearance as the product of the capitalist social order. The forms in which it exists are – as we demonstrated in Section 1 – the repositories of reification in its acutest and direst form and they issue in the most extreme dehumanisation. Thus the proletariat shares with the bourgeoisie the reification of every aspect of its life.110 This passage frames this section in that it asserts that the standpoint of the proletariat must begin with the immediacy of reification. Indeed, Lukács stresses that the objective reality of society is, in its immediacy, the same for the bour-

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For example, Marx wrote: As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into human beings will take place … The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality (Marx and Engels 1975, p. 187). Lukács 1967a, p. 149.

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geoisie and the proletariat.111 Given this, and given the extremity of reification encountered by the proletariat, it is clear that in the first place, the proletariat exists as an unconscious object. What differs between the standpoints of the bourgeoisie and proletariat are the ‘… specific categories of mediation by means of which both classes raise this immediacy to the level of consciousness, by means of which the merely immediate reality becomes for both the authentically objective reality’.112 Lukács introduces the question via a discussion of the limits on the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, his philosophy of praxis is framed by two antinomic possibilities: the standpoints of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He believes that the former, by virtue of its reliance on reified forms, is ultimately irrational. However, its antinomies may point towards a resolution that is possible on the standpoint of the proletariat. This is also relevant to the discussion above. Lukács’s critique of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie is more than a critique of the bourgeoisie as an empirical class; it constitutes a critique of all standpoints trapped within bourgeois culture. Lukács’s argument picks up where we left it, in the section of the ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’ dedicated to Hegel. As per his metacritique, object of knowledge is now recognised not as spirit, but as the social totality, while genesis points towards the historically situated production of that totality by humanity. This, however, is too abstract to effectively mediate totality or to give content to genesis. What Lukács requires is a concrete term (unavailable to Hegel) which may mediate between totality and genesis. He commences by counterposing two views of history which fail to unite totality and genesis.113 These are firstly historical relativism and secondly history seen as a formal amalgam of facts. The latter naively projects the cultural values of capitalism onto both past history and history as it unfolds, reducing it to a process of infinite quantitative change. The former appears to acknowledge qualitative change, but it does so in an irrational way, by failing to account for the specific social relations according to which history is made. Among others, Lukács cites Rickert and Max Weber as examples of this approach. While theirs were more critical than liberal or empiricist approaches to history, Lukács charges Rickert and Weber with failing to comprehend the totalising logic of the present. Insofar as they contrast pre-modern history with their own ‘cultural values’, 111 112 113

Lukács 1967a, p. 150. Lukács 1967a, p. 150. It should be noted that Lukács tends to use the term ‘history’ in a double sense, both as referring to past history and to history as it unfolds. Whenever one of these specific meanings is meant alone, it will be noted.

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the genesis of modern values becomes an inscrutable ‘thing-in-itself’, counterposed to an amalgam of facts which are, as a consequence, not concretely related to history itself.114 By way of illustration, Lukács refers to Marx’s understanding of modern industrial machinery, noting that in his account, the antagonisms associated with industrial production arise not from the machine itself but from the social relations of capitalist employment.115 In contrast, describing the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, Lukács writes: … the bourgeois method is to consider the machine as an isolated unique thing and to view it simply as an existing ‘individual’ (for as a phenomenon of the process of economic development the machine as a class rather than the particular appliance constitutes the historical individual in Rickert’s sense). We see further that to view the machine thus is to distort its true objective nature by representing its function in the capitalist production process as its ‘eternal’ essence, as the indissoluble component of its ‘individuality’.116 This failure to comprehend the genesis of machinery results in the hypostatisation of social relations which are viewed as properties of the nature of machinery itself. In this way, social relations become reified as objective and immutable things. This is one example amongst a few Lukács raises where history and totality are rendered immediately, in a fetishistic and abstract manner. It is clear, then, that Lukács believes the solution is genesis. However, as outlined above, for this term to bear the weight Lukács demands of it, it requires the identification of a concrete social logic that unites it with totality. Without this, genesis remains disembodied and abstract, not unlike Lukács’s characterisation of Hegel’s world spirit. Genesis therefore requires the discovery of a concrete mediation, existent in the object itself, which accounts for the creation of that object. This mediation may not be metaphysical or transcendental. Summarising the above points, Lukács writes: However, it should not be forgotten that immediacy and mediation are themselves aspects of a dialectical process and that every stage of existence (and of the mind that would understand it) has its own immediacy in the sense given to it in the Phenomenology in which, when confronted 114 115 116

Lukács 1967a, pp. 150–1. Lukács 1967a, p. 152. Lukács 1967a, p. 153.

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by an immediately given object, ‘we should respond just as immediately or receptively, and therefore make no alteration to it, leaving it just as it presents itself’. To go beyond this immediacy can only mean the genesis, the ‘creation’ of the object. But this assumes that the forms of mediation in and through which it becomes possible to go beyond the immediate existence of objects as they are given, can be shown to be the structural principles and the real tendencies of the objects themselves.117 This is one of the most important methodological passages in History and Class Consciousness, precisely because it indicates that any methodological solution to the antinomies of the bourgeois standpoint on history and society must be grounded in the real form and content of society. Summarising the point, he writes: ‘In other words, intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis’.118 In contrast, the standpoint of the bourgeoisie is characterised by its inability to grasp the essential mediations between the concrete totality and history. Thus Lukács writes: Unable to discover further mediations, unable to comprehend the reality and the origin of bourgeois society as the product of the same subject that has ‘created’ the comprehended totality of knowledge, its [the bourgeoisie’s] ultimate point of view, decisive for the whole of its thought, will be that of immediacy. For in Hegel’s words: ‘the mediating factor would have to be something in which both sides were one, in which consciousness would discern each aspect in the next, its purpose and activity in its fate, its fate in its purpose and activity, its own essence in this necessity’.119 So the standpoint of the bourgeoisie is trapped in immediacy. The quote Lukács takes from Hegel points to the way beyond this, methodologically, by suggesting the need to discover a mediating term in which totality and genesis are identical and which can sustain the unity of the antinomies of bourgeois culture. However, prior to exploring the concrete mediations available to the standpoint of the proletariat, Lukács expands upon his analysis of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. In essence, this standpoint is caught between insoluble antinomies, including those between subject and object, freedom and necessity and between the individual and society. Again, Lukács holds that 117 118 119

Lukács 1967a, p. 155. Lukács 1967a, p. 155. Lukács 1967a, p. 156.

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Simmel is a paradigmatic adherent to this standpoint.120 Lukács quotes Simmel, writing: ‘“And therefore now that these counter-tendencies [in reified life] have come into existence, they should at least strive towards an ideal of absolutely pure separation: every material content of life should become more and more material and impersonal so that the non-reifiable remnant may become all the more personal and all the more indisputably the property of the person”’.121 Lukács maintains that ultimately, this hypostatises reification, making of it the principle whereby existence is explained. This equally abolishes history by reducing it to infinite quantitative change. To illustrate the point further, he uses the metaphor of landscape painting, drawn from Bloch. When nature is represented in landscape painting (in contrast to an immediate experience of nature, characteristic of earlier art), the unmediated experience of the artist (which, as Lukács clarifies, is itself the product of many mediations) presupposes a spatial distance between the observer and the landscape. He writes: The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all. If he were to attempt to integrate himself and the nature immediately surrounding him in space within ‘nature-seen-as-landscape’, without modifying his aesthetic contemplative immediacy, it would then at once become apparent that landscape only starts to become landscape at a definite (though of course variable) distance from the observer and that only as an observer set apart in space can he relate to nature in terms of landscape at all.122

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Given this, it is clear that Lukács is not discussing the empirical consciousness of the bourgeoisie any more than the proletariat. In a sense, he is discussing ‘ideal types’, although of course, Lukács differs from the Weberian methodology this term implies. As a result, readings of Lukács which stress this Weberian inheritance, while often containing valuable insights, tend to elide the Hegelian-Marxist and radical dimension to his work. After all, if the antinomy between an empirical class and its ‘ideal type’ is rendered as a permanent state of affairs, reconciliation and dereification are impossible. Insofar as change is possible, it is reduced to an infinite progression towards the ideal, or, to a bad infinity which conceals stasis. Eiden-Offe’s recent article ‘Typing Class: Classification and redemption in Lukács’s Political and Literary Theory’ engages in such a reading, concluding unsurprisingly that Lukács fails to bridge the gulf between the proletariat as empirical and ideal type (see Eiden-Offe 2011, pp. 76–7). Quoted in Lukács 1967a, pp. 156–7. Lukács 1967a, p. 158.

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As Lukács goes on to explain, the illustration is intended to shed light on the theoretical problem. A work of art, insofar as it represents a successful unity of form and content, does not allow the gulf between subject and object in society or history to be bridged; the work of art becomes separate from the artist, and stands as a representation which at best intuits the possibility for reconciliation. At worst, the ‘… inner perfection of the work of art can hide this gaping abyss because in its perfected immediacy it does not allow any further questions to arise about a mediation no longer available to the point of view of contemplation’.123 What is required, then, where history and society are concerned, is not a sociology of transhistoric antinomies, but a standpoint from which subject and object may be viewed as identical. This has a twofold significance: firstly, it allows for an ‘… interpretation of the present in all its radical novelty’.124 This is to say, the perspective of the subject-object of history allows reality to be grasped objectively and in light of what is qualitatively new. This way, a dialectical-theoretical representation of reality can go beyond a critical sociology which simply describes the separation of subject and object, allowing access to a higher, more concrete level of objectivity than immediacy. This perspective, in turn, allows a second achievement: the identification of a practical principle whereby reality may be grasped and changed, not according to a transcendental principle, but immanently, according to what is both new in reality and which is, as a consequence of this novelty, as-yet unknown.125 Lukács quotes Hegel on the stages of self-consciousness to clarify this issue: Therefore consciousness has become an enigma to itself as a result of the very experience which was to reveal its truth to itself; it does not regard the effects of its deeds as its own deeds: what happens to it is not the same experience for it as it is in itself; the transition is not merely a formal change of the same content and essence seen on the one hand as the content and essence of consciousness and on the other hand as the object 123 124 125

Lukács 1967a, p. 158. Lukács 1967a, p. 158. Feenberg also notes this, writing: Lukács argues that the proletariat throws these immediacies into the movement of history and subjects them to a practical mediation that decisively alters the position of truth. Proletarian practice acts on the form of objectivity of its objects; it consciously transforms culture and therefore reality as well; and, as the expression of a cooperative and potentially universal historical subject, this practice need not accept any merely given immediacy as its horizon (Feenberg 2014, p. 56).

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or intuited essence of itself. Abstract necessity, therefore, passes for the merely negative, uncomprehended power of the universal by which individuality is destroyed.126 This important quote can appear somewhat cryptic. However, on close reading it outlines the criteria Lukács believes are necessary to grasping genesis. Firstly, the apparently absolute separation between subject and object characteristic of reification is required in order that consciousness may regard itself purely as object and as devoid of will. Secondly, as Hegel makes clear, this experience holds a different meaning for us to what it does for itself. This establishes that the standpoint of the proletariat is, in the first place, something that occurs for us – that is, for those who theoretically observe the situation of the proletariat. So, once more, the standpoint of the proletariat is initially a theoretical imputation and is grasped conceptually. In fact, this quote from Hegel would suggest that, at this stage in the conceptual progression, it is necessary that empirical proletarian consciousness exists in itself, as unconscious of itself and unaware of itself as the bearer of the unity between subject and object. This leads to the third point, that the consciousness in question, namely, the consciousness of the proletariat considered from the point of view of theory, exists as the unity of subject and object or, of abstract necessity (i.e. pure objectivity) and subjective freedom.127 Or, to put the same points in more Lukácsian terms, the mediation that Lukács seeks beyond immediacy bears three properties. Firstly, it emerges from the stark and absolute antinomy between subjectivity and objectivity. Secondly, it appears first for us as a theoretical mediation which has not yet risen to concrete actuality. It is the possession of the theorist. Thirdly, it is a mediation in which subjectivity and objectivity are immediately identical. In this sense, the theoretical identity of the subject-object only exists as a correlate to the antinomic separation of subject and object. Strictly speaking, then, when Lukács speaks of the ‘identical subject-object of history’ he refers to a situation of absolute estrangement between theory and practice. Nevertheless, this theoretical mediation constitutes the principle of genesis, which gives objectivity and reality to the analysis of totality and, by virtue of this, underpins practical dereification.128

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Quoted in Lukács 1967a, pp. 158–9. These figures, in Hegel, are regularly identified with each other. See, for example, §5 of the ‘Introduction’ to Elements of the Philosophy of Right or §§350–1 of The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1991a, § 5, 2018, §§ 350–1). This point is relevant to those theorists mentioned above, in Section 2.2. None of the attempts either to exclude the standpoint of the proletariat or redefine it take into account

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One clarification ought to be made here. The above analysis has carefully distinguished between the theoretical and imputed consciousness of the proletariat and the process that Lukács describes whereby the empirical consciousness of the proletariat rises to class consciousness. This is necessary in order to defend the standpoint of the proletariat as a theoretical hypothesis. Yet, many times, Lukács’s terminology slips and he seems to speak of the empirical class consciousness of the proletariat. For example, at the outset of Section 2 of ‘Standpoint of the Proletariat’, he argues that ‘The historical knowledge of the proletariat begins with knowledge of its present, with the self-knowledge of its own social situation and the elucidation of its necessity (i.e. its genesis)’.129 This passage would appear to contradict the argument that the standpoint of the proletariat is, initially, a theoretical standpoint. However, this would be a one sided reading which would necessarily omit much of the material cited above in support of the interpretation proposed here. Instead, the following solution is suggested. Rather than see Lukács as either describing theoretical, imputed consciousness or describing the process whereby the empirical consciousness of the proletariat rises to class consciousness, he is best (that is, most generously and radically) read as discussing both processes simultaneously. These two meanings of the standpoint of the proletariat are carefully separated here for two reasons. The first is strategic – in this way, Lukács’s theory may be defended against his detractors without distorting it. Secondly, this approach fits with the conceptual structure of this work as a whole which seeks to move from theory, to praxis, to philosophy. Insofar as this involves making nuanced distinctions between the meanings of terms that Lukács uses relatively freely, this is justified by the careful philosophical reflection upon these terms that is the task of this work. The proper place, therefore, to consider Lukács’s argument about the empirical development of the proletariat in class struggle occurs after the elaboration of theory. One further negative criterion for the standpoint of the proletariat must be outlined before it is examined positively. In Section 2 of ‘The Standpoint of the Proletariat’, Lukács argues sharply against subjectivist, utopian or voluntarist approaches to mediation. This point is especially relevant given the defence of

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these criteria which are notable inasmuch as they link an extreme experience of reification with the possibility for identifying genesis, theoretically. At the very least, this illustrates the radicalism and indispensability of the standpoint of the proletariat to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. To exclude it or redefine it compromises the meaning of Lukács’s whole project as well as our ability to salvage some truth from its collapse. Lukács 1967a, p. 159.

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the standpoint of the proletariat outlined above; none of the theorists who have sought to rescue the concept by modifying it have satisfied this criterion. As we have seen, while Larsen ably criticises Postone for the vague utopianism of his alternative to the standpoint of the proletariat, Larsen himself proposes that society itself, on pain of a crisis brought on by environmental destruction, may become a subject-object of history.130 Similarly, Anita S. Chari has explicitly argued for the preservation of a transcendental utopian impulse in an updated philosophy of praxis.131 Whatever the value of these proposals, both pass over Lukács’s critique of utopianism by effectively counterposing an indeterminate ‘ought’ to the empirical ‘is’. This point is also relevant with regards to the many theorists – beginning with, but surely not limited to, Adorno – who accused Lukács of wishing to subjectivise objectivity via a politics of the will. In fact, Lukács’s critique of utopianism and voluntarism seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Lukács begins this critique by insisting that the knowledge of the proletariat must commence with a knowledge of the present and its own social situation. He argues that genesis and history may coincide (that is, history understood in light of its having been made) only if two conditions are fulfilled. Firstly, ‘… all the categories in which human existence is constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the description of that existence).’132 Secondly, ‘… their [the categories] succession, their coherence and their connections must appear as aspects of the historical process itself, as the structural components of the present’.133 As Lukács continues to explain, this entails that the world which confronts us be comprehended as a dynamic objectivity, as a process of mediation between past and future that is demonstrably the product of man in his society. This requires that theory concretely understand the objective present and the immanent tendency towards change within it. Any attempt to leap over the present or reject it results in a covert reaffirmation of the present. Lukács writes: Such a desire [an abstract rejection of the present], such an evaluation of empirical reality would indeed be no more than subjective: it would be a ‘value-judgement’, a wish, a utopia. And even though to aspire to a utopia is to affirm the will in what is philosophically the more objective and distilled form of an ‘ought’ (Sollen) it does not imply that the tendency 130 131 132 133

Larsen 2011. Chari 2008, p. 120. Lukács 1967a, p. 159. Lukács 1967a, p. 159.

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to accept empirical reality has been overcome. This applies, too, to the subjectivism of the impulse to initiate change which admittedly appears here in a philosophically sophisticated form.134 Indeed, Lukács’s critique of ought goes further than this. Citing Kant, he argues that every ought presupposes an existing reality to which it might apply in principle. ‘Whenever the refusal of the subject simply to accept his empirically given existence takes the form of an ‘ought’, this means that the immediately given empirical reality receives affirmation and consecration at the hands of philosophy: it is philosophically immortalised’.135 This point may be connected with the discussion of objective and subjective reification, above, and on a deeper level, with the commodity form. In addition to affirming empirical existence, every ought is based in empirical existence. With regards to the commodity, the use value can be seen as such an ought, in contradiction with the quantitative exchange value. This is true not solely because a use value strains to be used or because it bears an ideological or promissory dimension, but because the process of circulation and exchange demands that a use value be frozen for a determinate period of time during which the contents of its use value can only refer to a future usage which ought to take place in the service of some need. If this use is deferred indefinitely, eventually the use value will spoil, destroying any exchange value with it. Similarly, where social structures are concerned, as the arguments regarding the state and the legal system in Chapter 2 outlined, even the most calculably rational structures possess a utopian side that is also often deferred, but which cannot be indefinitely deferred without hollowing out the structure in question, depriving it of its ideological power. It will equally be shown, below, that the contemplative stance, for all that it entails passive adaptation to reification, also entails a utopian and subjective attitude towards the same reality. So in order to lead to dereification, the ought must go beyond what Lukács calls its ‘purely subjective character’. Insofar as an ought is purely subjective it is merely grasped in ignorance of its material foundation, and is therefore, overdetermined by this foundation: thus the apparent freedom of an ought becomes the unfreedom of reification. Instead, Lukács proposes that any rejection of empirical reality must ‘… presuppose a principle that transcends the concept of both what “is” and what “ought to be” so as to be able to explain the real impact of the “ought” upon what “is”’.136 134 135 136

Lukács 1967a, p. 160. Lukács 1967a, p. 160. Lukács 1967a, p. 161.

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Lukács here criticises bourgeois-liberal attempts to bridge the divide between ought and is. If an ought is erected as a transcendental principle or regulative ideal, then a rigid opposition between ought and is ensues. Following Hegel, Lukács argues that this results in a bad infinity; the contradiction is never resolved, but eternally recurs. This in turn reduces the view of history to an infinite process of approximation to an ideal. Again, following Hegel, Lukács notes that the mediator between such starkly opposed antinomies is purely quantitative.137 Surely Lukács has in mind what Hegel described in the Science of Logic as a ‘spurious infinity’ or a ‘finitized infinite’.138 This recalls once more Heraclitus’s river, or the process of the world market, in which ceaseless motion belies stasis and excludes qualitative change. Linking this analysis to the above critique of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, Lukács notes that the key consequence of such a stark opposition, between the ought and the is, is that it leaves the irrationality of facticity untouched and abolishes history by obscuring qualitative change. Hence any utopian or subjectivist rejection of the present frustrates the search for the concrete mediation which may unite totality and genesis. Utopia, for Lukács, is strictly a moment of the present. This critique of utopianism requires that the standpoint of the proletariat be concrete and founded in reality. Lukács writes: But in fact, to leave empirical reality behind can only mean that the objects of the empirical world are to be understood as aspects of a totality, i.e. as the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change. Thus the category of mediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of the empirical world and as such it is not something (subjective) foisted on to the objects from outside, it is no value-judgement or ‘ought’ opposed to their ‘is’. It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure.139

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Lukács 1967a, p. 161. For example, speaking of a concept of infinity that has not yet developed the capacity to sustain itself within view of its opposite, finitude, Hegel writes: The infinity of the infinite progress remains burdened with the finite as such, is thereby limited and is itself finite. But this being so, the infinite progress would in fact be posited as the unity of the finite and the infinite; but this unity is not reflected on. Yet it is this unity alone which evokes the infinite in the finite and the finite in the infinite; it is, so to speak, the mainspring of the infinite progress (Hegel 1991c, p. 141). This is especially noteworthy given that Hegel develops the concept of the infinite immediately following the ought and the is. Lukács 1967a, p. 162.

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This establishes a crucial criterion for the standpoint of the proletariat and praxis; it must be discovered as an objective aspect of the world. ‘If, then, the standpoint of the proletariat is opposed to that of the bourgeoisie, it is nonetheless true that proletarian thought does not require a tabula rasa, a new start to the task of comprehending reality and one without any preconceptions’.140 This edges closer to discovering the concrete mediation upon which the standpoint of the proletariat is founded. Here, Lukács notes a further difference between the standpoint of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Observing that ‘… every method is necessarily implicated in the existence of the relevant class’, he asserts that immediacy constitutes an outer methodological barrier to bourgeois thought.141 On the contrary, immediacy constitutes for the proletariat an inward barrier. This is to say, the originary moment of the standpoint of the proletariat is the subjective and inner experience of the proletariat. Lukács, not uncharacteristically, uses rather extreme language to describe this, suggesting that becoming aware of the dialectical nature of existence is a matter of life and death.142 While this seems hyperbolic, what Lukács is indeed suggesting is that while the bourgeoisie encounters the limits of ‘abstract categories of reflection, such as quantity and infinite progression’ in its relationship with the external world, the proletariat encounters these limits internally.143 For the bourgeoisie, therefore, crisis represents the limit of undialectical categories; irrational catastrophe interrupts the rationalism of reification.144 On the other hand, for the proletariat, these categories have a subjective and internal significance. In the first place, this experience is felt as pure objectification. Lukács writes: For the proletariat social reality does not exist in this double form. It appears in the first instance as the pure object of societal events. In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence. This forces upon him the knowledge that the most element gratification of his needs, ‘his own individual consumption, whether it proceeds within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of reproduction or not, forms therefore an aspect of the

140 141 142 143 144

Lukács 1967a, p. 163. Lukács 1967a, p. 164. Lukács 1967a, pp. 164–5. Lukács 1967a, p. 165. Or, to cite a vastly overused quote by Frederic Jameson, ‘… it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Jameson 2003, p. 76).

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production and reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing idle’.145 In being forced by economic realities to sell his labour and in the experience of work itself, the worker is reduced to an object determined externally by the market and by the rational organisation of the factory. Here, the worker experiences immediately the ‘quantification of objects [and] their subordination to abstract mental categories’, both in his total subsumption under the process of work and in the sense that he is compelled to adapt himself voluntarily to it. Again, Lukács clarifies the point by noting that for the capitalist, there exists the same doubling of personality, the same splitting of man into an object (insofar as he is involved in commodity production) and a subject (insofar as he observes the process). However, for the capitalist, this activity appears as something emanating with himself and affirming himself. This allows the capitalist to preserve the illusion of subjective freedom and power. On the other hand, the worker ‘… who is denied the scope for such illusory activity, perceives the split in his being preserved in the brutal form of what is in its whole tendency a slavery without limits. He is therefore forced into becoming the object of the process by which he is turned into a commodity and reduced to a mere quantity’.146 Again, the somewhat hyperbolic language is beside the point. The theoretically relevant point is that the proletariat exists as the immediate and unconscious unity of subject and object; in this form, the typical proletarian is a subject who has totally transformed themselves into an object of the economy and work.147 The extremity of this experience creates a basis for the self-consciousness of the object. In Lukács’s argument, which draws on Marx, the experience of the proletariat is such that in the experience of the working day, quantity transforms into quality. He writes: But this very fact forces him to surpass the immediacy of his condition. For as Marx says, ‘Time is the place of human development’. The quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence. The transformation of quantity into 145 146 147

Lukács 1967a, p. 165. Lukács 1967a, p. 166. As Feenberg terms it, the worker is his own ‘proximate object’ (Feenberg 2014, p. 237).

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quality is not only a particular aspect of the dialectical process of development, as Hegel represents it in his philosophy of nature, and following him, Engels in the Anti-Dühring. But going beyond that, as we have just shown with the aid of Hegel’s Logic, it means the emergence of the truly objective form of existence and the destruction of those confusing categories of reflection which had deformed true objectivity into a posture of merely immediate, passive, contemplation.148 This is the heart of the standpoint of the proletariat. The worker experiences the work day, which is quantitatively organised by reification, as qualitative. Equally, time is experienced here not as space, but as an intensity of feeling. Thus Lukács discovers an immanent basis in social reality upon which the ‘truly objective form of existence’ may be understood. That is to say, reality is here experienced as a unity of quality and quantity and form and content. ‘Above all, as far as labour-time is concerned, it becomes abundantly clear that quantification is a reified and reifying cloak spread over the true essence of the objects and can only be regarded as an objective form of reality inasmuch as the subject is uninterested in the essence of the object to which it stands in a contemplative or (seemingly) practical relationship’.149 To review the fundamental moments of the standpoint of the proletariat so far, firstly, Lukács argues that the situation of the proletariat constitutes an immediate unity of ‘purpose’ and ‘fate’ (or, of freedom and necessity or subjectivity and objectivity).150 So while this experience may be conceptualised from outside the proletariat, for Lukács it is available only to the proletariat.151 In this regard, Lukács notes that although the bourgeois makes himself an 148 149 150 151

Lukács 1967a, p. 166. Lukács 1967a, pp. 166–7. Lukács 1967a, p. 156. This point is also relevant to some of Lukács’s critics and interlocutors, discussed above. For instance, insofar as Larsen proposes an alternative subject-object of history – that is, society as subject – his proposal is not grounded by a concrete mediation such as the one Lukács identifies. Another example is provided by Frederic Jameson. Although he understands that the standpoint of the proletariat is a theoretical imputation, by proposing a redefinition that incorporates the standpoints of women and people of colour, he sacrifices the radicalism, immanence and concrete determination of Lukács’s understanding. For him, the foundation of a totalising critique is not so much the standpoint of the proletariat as it is an opposition to late capitalism (Jameson 2009, p. 221). Yet this opposition would appear to be a simple moral rejection, on its own insufficient for praxis. Of course, these proposals may well have merit in their own terms and as part of different theoretical projects. However, such a redefinition of the standpoint of the proletariat would compromise the conceptual integrity of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.

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object for the economy, in addition to preserving a subjective freedom, he experiences this objectification as something emanating within himself and to his benefit. Hence, insofar as his immediacy is irrevocably split and antinomic, this split is at no point condensed into a single activity or experience. The standpoint of the bourgeoisie therefore alternates between freedom and fate, but cannot mediate the two. To put the same point the other way, while the experience of the bourgeoisie is indeed antinomic, it is tragically antinomic. No pure identity is formed externally to itself. Despite being antinomic, in a sense, the standpoint of the bourgeoisie does not generate sufficient distance for selfcognition. Subject and object, though split, are neither absolutely external to each other nor identical, meaning that they may not be grasped purely in consciousness. So while the subjective freedom exercised by the bourgeoisie is in large part illusory, it is still sufficiently powerful to prevent the bourgeoisie being reduced to the fate of an object or thing. In contrast, as noted above, the worker must objectify and quantify himself totally, in opposition to his or her personality. What matters here, however, is that the worker must do so freely, on the basis of his or her own subjective will. This experience is concentrated in the work day, which is, for the worker, a unity of quantity and quality; this is to say, objectivity, that which had previously been regarded as quantitative, may be given qualitative form. The moments of this standpoint provide for what Lukács calls the self-consciousness of the commodity which is equally the immediate self-consciousness of the identical subject-object of history. Above all, the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity … in the commodity the worker recognises himself and his own relations with capital. Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the self-consciousness of the commodity; or in other words, it is the self-knowledge, the self-revelation of the capitalist society founded upon the production and exchange of commodities … when the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge.152 To paraphrase, the worker may comprehend himself as essential to not merely the livelihood of the bourgeois, but as the creator of the world. Given that the commodity is the universal formal category of bourgeois society, and given 152

Lukács 1967a, pp. 168–9.

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that its qualitative essence in human labour is obscured, the self-consciousness of the commodity is simultaneously the immediate universal content of bourgeois society understood as practical and qualitative. Here, human activity in reified form is understood as the producer of its world. This achieves the demand for genesis and renders the image of totality concrete. As should be clear, this analysis disputes Postone’s charge that Lukács’s concept of labour is metaphysical and based on a fetishisation of quality or content. The experience of the proletariat as pure object, or, pure quantity, is in fact crucial to the development of the standpoint of the proletariat and then, to class consciousness. Lukács does not present the standpoint of the proletariat in Kantian or in Fichtean style, but in Hegelian style. The experience of pure objectivity gives rise, out of its bleakness, to pure subjectivity. Pure quantity (experienced in the work day) gives rise to pure quality; that is, the immediate class consciousness of the proletariat.153 This further demonstrates that the development of Lukács’s theory of praxis is entirely immanent. This is why Lukács argued that historical materialism should be seen as the ‘… self-knowledge of capitalist society’.154 Clearly, however, this is not the end of the story. The proletariat as immediate subject-object of history is in no sense identical with a class conscious proletariat or praxis. Rather, for Lukács, the concept of the proletariat as subjectobject of history grounds his theory of revolution. Many theorists oversimplify this, however, reducing complex mediations to a caricature which presents Lukács effectively as a Fichtean idealist. So for Lukács, this initial, immediate form of class consciousness, the immediate form of the self-consciousness of the subject-object of history is the beginning of a complex chain of mediation which culminates in revolution. He makes this clear, writing: … the structure [of reification] can be disrupted only if the immanent contradictions of the process are made conscious. Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which 153

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This non-metaphysical account of the standpoint of the proletariat also disputes Postone’s argument that the emancipation of labour provides, in Lukács, for the full content of communism. In actual fact, the emancipation of labour, for Lukács, is the creation of historical and ontological novelty. Lukács makes a similar point explicitly with reference to historical materialism: ‘The substantive truths of historical materialism are of the same type as were the truths of classical economics in Marx’s view: they are truths within a particular social order and system of production. As such, but only as such, their claim to validity is absolute. But this does not preclude the emergence of societies in which by virtue of their different social structures other categories and other systems of truth prevail’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 228). Lukács 1967a, p. 229.

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the dialectics of history is objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to a consciousness of the process, and only then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality.155 Lukács is clear that in order to become the actual subject-object of history, the proletariat must traverse an entire process of development spanning the whole social totality, in which the key dialectic is the interaction of theory and practice. Referring to Engels’s metaphorical assertion that the truth of the pudding is in the eating, Lukács writes: ‘This pudding, however, is the making of the proletariat into class: the process by which class consciousness becomes real in practice. This gives a more concrete form to the proposition that the proletariat is the identical subject-object of the historical process, i.e. the first subject in history that is (objectively) capable of an adequate social consciousness’.156 Finishing this essay, and anticipating the remainder of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács confirms that only upon the unity of theory and practice – that is, only upon the advent of actual class consciousness as praxis – ‘… would the statement that the proletariat is the identical subject-object of the history of society become truly concrete’.157 The other side of this argument reconfirms a point that has been made throughout this section; the standpoint of the proletariat is, for the proletariat, something that exists in itself, but unconsciously. It becomes conscious, firstly, for theory – that is, for us. Given this, the specific empirical content of the situation of any given proletariat or individual worker is irrelevant, as are the specific forms of alienation and rationalisation to which he is subject. The standpoint of the proletariat is, initially, a way of looking; a negative hypothesis based on the theorist’s consideration of the situation of the proletariat. It is quite correct to say, as Lukács does above, that only the historic actuality 155

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Lukács 1967a, p. 197. There are many such quotes in History and Class Consciousness. Earlier in the same essay, Lukács wrote ‘If the attempt is made to attribute an immediate form of existence to class consciousness, it is not possible to avoid lapsing into mythology: the result will be a mysterious species-consciousness (as enigmatic as the ‘spirits of nations’ in Hegel) whose relation to and impact upon the individual consciousness is wholly incomprehensible’ (Lukács 1967a, pp. 173). Later, he elaborates, writing: ‘The deed of the proletariat can never be more than to take the next step in the process. Whether it is ‘decisive’ or ‘episodic’ depends on the concrete circumstances …’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 198). Lukács 1967a, pp. 198–9. Lukács 1967a, p. 205. Other commentators – including those who disagree with Lukács’s politics – have noticed this. For example, in his 1980 thesis, Michael Clarke noted that Lukács’s essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ ends only with a philosophy of praxis that must still realise itself in the world (Clark 1980, p. 93).

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of the proletariat as subject-object of history in praxis can ultimately confirm this hypothesis. Yet to understand the dialectic of theory and practice that underpins the actuality of proletarian praxis, the theoretical moment, outlined above, must be considered separately. So, if the theory of the standpoint of the proletariat has been discussed in itself, it remains to be discussed for itself. That is, Lukács’s account of theory itself, or, the standpoint of the theorist must be outlined. This will be the subject of the next part of this book.

Conclusion to Part One Since it set out to determine the notion of God by means of thinking, what emerged as the concept of God was only the abstraction of positivity or reality in general, to the exclusion of negation, and God was accordingly defined as the Supremely Real Essence. But it is easy to see that, since negation was excluded from it, this Supremely Real Essence is precisely the opposite of what it should be and of what the understanding intended it to be. Instead of being what is richest, and utter fullness, it is instead rather the poorest, and utter emptiness – all on account of this abstract apprehension of it. The mind and heart rightly long for a concrete content, but concreteness is only present if the content contains within it determinacy, i.e., negation. When the concept of God is apprehended merely as that of the abstract or Supremely Real Essence, then God becomes for us a mere Beyond, and there can be no further talk of a cognition of God; for where there is no determinacy, no cognition is possible either. Pure light is pure darkness. G.W.F. Hegel1

∵ In this part, three broad theoretical moments have been outlined. These are mediation, totality and genesis. Taken together in terms of their internal development, these give us a theoretical anticipation of praxis. This is as-yet still an abstract idea lacking concretisation and actuality. As such, it has the character of a regulative ideal which exists as a sectarian-utopian theoretical reflection based on the standpoint of the proletariat within reified society. Left at this, the philosophy of praxis would be forced into one of two sterile antinomies. As Merleau-Ponty writes of the theorist’s conception of the proletariat: This brings back the alternative: either they are subjects of history, and then they are ‘gods’; or it is the theoretician who supposes a historical mission for them, and then they are only objects of history. Marx’s answer would be that there is no theoretical way of going beyond the dilemma.

1 Hegel 1991b, §. 36.

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In the face of contemplating consciousness, the theoretician must either command or obey, be subject or object, and, correlatively, the proletariat must obey or command, be object or subject. For theoretical consciousness there is no middle ground between democratic consultation of the proletarians, which reduces proletarian praxis to their thought and their feelings of the moment and relies on the ‘spontaneity of the masses’, and bureaucratic cynicism, which substitutes, for the existing proletariat, the idea made of it by the theoretician.2 It would appear from this that the philosophy of praxis has reached a dead end. Terry Eagleton has made this impasse the basis for his critique of Lukács, writing: … to claim that only the proletarian perspective allows one to grasp the truth of society as a whole already assumes that one knows what it is. It would seem that truth is either wholly internal to the consciousness of the working class, in which case it cannot be assessed as truth and the claim simply becomes dogmatic; or one is caught in the impossible paradox of judging the truth from outside the truth itself, in which case the claim that this form of consciousness is true simply undercuts itself.3 However, a solution to this impasse has been implied by the above analysis of the standpoint of the proletariat which is initially for us, that is, for theory. In its immediacy, it consists of a theoretical imputation to the proletariat; the proletariat is held to be more in itself than it is for itself. This has struck some of Lukács’s critics as elitist, however, as Lukács argues in the Defence of History and Class Consciousness, there is nothing out of the ordinary about imputing views to a group, provided they do not subsume the empirical consciousness of that group.4 A theoretical imputation is only elitist insofar as the theorist conceals his or her own gaze. Presuming that one accepts the standpoint of the proletariat, then as Merleau-Ponty outlines, echoing the passage from Hegel reproduced above (unintentionally, of course), for the theorist to conceal their gaze

2 Merleau-Ponty 1973b, pp. 49–50. 3 Eagleton 1991, p. 97. 4 As an example, Lukács cites Marx’s discussion of the interests, consciousness and capacities of bourgeois parties in France between the years 1848 and 1849 (Lukács 2002, pp. 64–5). These issues will be further addressed in Chapters 6 and 7, which discuss Lukács’s understanding of the relationship between imputed and empirical class consciousness, or, between party and class.

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leaves only two antinomies. Either the proletariat is absolutely everything, in which case theory no longer has a role to play aside from advising its followers to get a real job. Or, the theorist makes themselves into a god by virtue of their arrogant claim to know the totality perfectly via their imagination of the proletariat. Instead, in order to elaborate a radically democratic philosophy of praxis – which attains to the critique of philosophy and the ontological openness outlined in the course of this part – it is necessary that the theorist examine their own standpoint. This may be achieved purely immanently, on the basis of the terms examined so far. The basis for this is provided by the difference between the imputed consciousness of the proletariat (which is theoretical) and the world (which, insofar as it demands theoretical elaboration, contains a reality as-yet hidden to itself). This is to say the very existence of theory discloses a gap between theory and reality. It would be profoundly uncritical to propose that this gap leaves theory itself unaffected. Theory is, rather, impoverished and abstract. But this must mean that there is something within theory itself that the standpoint of theory cannot know. In a sense, then, the theorist is doubled; the theorist who looks from the standpoint of the proletariat is for himself less than he is in himself. Or, to put the same argument another way, insofar as the theorist discerns the moments of the standpoint of the proletariat, he equally and immediately creates the basis upon which he might comprehend himself, and by virtue of this, the standpoint of theory in itself. The motivation for doing this is supplied by the ethical impulse with which the philosophy of praxis began. For what else can motivate the philosopher of praxis aside from a love for the other which desires neither absolute distance nor absolute proximity (which amount to the same thing) but to be at home. To thus establish a concretely free and loving relationship with the other, actualised under the sign of praxis (as the potency of the proletariat, as subject-object of history) requires the selfcriticism, self-emptying and confession of theory. In discovering the standpoint of the proletariat and completing a theory of praxis, the theorist has already emptied him or herself of ideology. Yet, one self-critical step is still missing. This is the only path to a self-comprehension that can ground the reconciliation between what theory is, in itself and what theory is for itself. Only in this manner can the last vestiges of an ultimately formal, subjective and individual ought be rendered transparent to the standpoint of theory itself. Indeed, without the self-critique and self-comprehension of theory, no genuine engagement with the world or with history is possible. This is to say, theory must negate itself and rise to the concrete in order to discover the mediations towards dereifying practice. To grasp the concepts of mediation, totality, genesis and praxis as they are universally and to become spokesperson for them, theory

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must determinately renounce itself. This renunciation is in turn a more authentic and thoroughgoing practice of the power of negativity, or mediation, than has occurred hitherto. In criticising itself, theory also attains to its principle. The self-knowledge of capitalism must also know itself. Such a self-criticism of theory produces a silence in which the theorist may hear the voice of the universal and decipher the meaning of its actions and dreams. This also allows theory itself to become practical – a necessary step in order to grasp fully Lukács’s dialectic of theory and practice, the subject of Part Two. This transition is homologous to that between the standpoints of the unhappy consciousness and reason in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Speaking of the confession and self-sacrifice of the unhappy consciousness, Hegel argues that … sacrifice of the inessential extreme term was at the same time not a onesided act; instead, it contained the other’s activity within itself. For on the one hand, surrendering one’s own will is merely negative in terms of its concept, that is, in itself, but at the same time it is positive, specifically, it is the positing of the will as an other, and, especially, it is the positing of the will as universal, not as the will of an individual. For this consciousness, the positive significance of the negatively posited individual will is the will of the other extreme term, which, precisely because it is an other for consciousness, becomes in its eyes the act of giving counsel.5 The most important difference is that in Hegel, this transition occurs via the mediation of a priest. In Lukács, it occurs by way of the theorist’s voluntary commitment to a party. As we will see, these phenomena are not necessarily as distinct as they appear. 5 Hegel 2018, §. 230.

part 2 From Theory to Praxis

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Theory in Itself and for the Proletariat 1

The Contemplative Stance I should look upon every sin I have committed as a favor of God. It is a favor that the essential imperfection which is hidden in my depths should have been to some extent made dear to me on a certain day, at a certain time, in certain circumstances. I wish and implore that my imperfection may be wholly revealed to me in so far as human thought is capable of grasping it. Not in order that it be cured but, even if it should not be cured, in order that I may know the truth. Simone Weil1

Part One of this work outlined a theory of praxis which contained the following moments. The essential mediation of immediacy was discovered in the commodity, itself a unity of quality and quantity, or, form and content. This mediation was connected with a conceptual reproduction of the social totality which stressed its character as an aspiration towards totality and which sought to highlight the dissonances in that totality. However, in order to attain concreteness, it was necessary to demonstrate the genesis of that totality in labour and in the proletariat as the immediate, albeit unconscious, unity of subject and object. This gave rise to the standpoint of the proletariat which demands an overcoming of reification and the inhuman situation of the worker by way of praxis. Yet, as was argued in the conclusion, this position conceals a further dualism: the resultant theory of praxis was predicated on the standpoint of the proletariat. Yet it was outlined theoretically, by virtue of an act of imputation. If this act of imputation is not raised to self-consciousness, the perspective generated will become a new immediacy, practically powerless and intellectually split between a formal, descriptive sociology and a transcendental and moralistic ought. So the aim of this part is to demonstrate that within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, there exists a conceptual framework within which the standpoint of theory may become visible to itself. The starting point for this is a simple observation about the standpoint of the proletariat. As an imputation produced by the theorist who looks from the

1 Weil 2002, p. 58.

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standpoint of the proletariat it is, in its immediacy, equally the standpoint of Marxist theory in itself, that is, unaware of itself. This identity makes it conceptually possible to develop the standpoint of theory. From this foundation, further conceptual development will retread the moments of mediation, genesis, totality and praxis. They will, however, be modified. This time, they are not found on the side of an objective world which is grasped by theory, but on the subjective side of a theory which seeks to comprehend itself and actualise itself in the world, via the practice of the proletariat. If the first part of this work represented an initial, objective motion from immediacy towards a theory of praxis, the second part represents a second, subjective motion, from theory back towards a richer conception of objectivity. Thus, Part Two of this work completes Lukács’s theory of praxis, in order that Part Three may reflect philosophically on the completed whole. Or, to put the same point in Hegelian terms: Part One represented the development of consciousness to self-consciousness. Part Two stages the development of self-consciousness, by way of its estranged self-representations, towards what Hegel would term spiritual self-knowledge. Part Three recalls these moments in their essentialities, leaving theory behind in favour of philosophy. As has been shown, reification creates a dichotomy between the individual and society. This situation forms the conceptual starting point for the standpoint of the proletariat. It equally forms the starting point for the standpoint of the theorist who is, before anything else, an individual who relates to the world negatively, that is, critically. Although in his 1920s works Lukács was not primarily concerned with the experience of the individual, without establishing a connection between the standpoint of theory and the standpoint of the proletariat, his philosophy of praxis collapses. While not always explicit, sufficient resources exist in Lukács’s oeuvre for such a theorisation. This said, he can be misleading. At times, he insists that there is no path between the individual and totality.2 At other times he asserts that the immutable and natural appearance of reification ‘… creates the possibility of praxis in the individual consciousness. Praxis becomes the form of action appropriate to the isolated individual, it becomes his ethics’.3 Towards the end of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács makes clear his view that the culmination of individual ethics and the realisation of genuine (as opposed to merely subjective) freedom is to be found in voluntary self-subordination to a communist party.4 Between

2 Lukács 1967a, p. 28. 3 Lukács 1967a, p. 19. 4 Lukács 1967a, p. 315.

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these two extremes – the individual as isolated from totality and history and the individual subsumed under the praxis of the proletariat – there exists a series of mediations. The starting point for these is the contemplative stance, which is what Lukács names the basic subject-position under reification. Before turning to the mediations between the individual and history in Sections 4.2. and 4.3., this concept will be the reconstructed on the basis of some of Lukács’s writings from prior to the 1920s, as well as his biography. This will demonstrate the manner in which Lukács himself encountered the mediations between the individual (who orients to the world contemplatively) and the standpoint of the proletariat. To paraphrase Nietzsche, every great philosophy has been a confession on the part of its author.5 Yet Lukács’s confession is not primarily of purely biographical interest; rather, the intensity of his personal experience furnished conceptual mediations which are universally valid, although obviously neither exhaustive nor appealing to everyone. As has been widely noted, prior to his conversion to Marxism, Lukács expended vast intellectual and emotional energy exploring and living the contradictions of individual life on the levels of personal relationships, ethics and aesthetics and finally, in philosophy and politics. So, while Lukács’s break with his pre-Marxist work was sharp enough that he virtually never referred back to it during the 1920s, it would be wrong to assume that it left no trace in his philosophy of praxis. Indeed, it may well be said Lukács’s silence regarding both his own experience and his pre-Marxist work both conceals his innermost ethical drive and gives it an unacknowledged power over his work. Of course, the vast diversity of subjective experiences available and theories reflecting them makes it virtually impossible to suggest any definitive series of concrete mediations between the individual and praxis. What is important here is not so much exhaustiveness, but to demonstrate the conceptual possibility of such a path by way of mediations which have universal significance but which are not encountered by everyone. The aim, therefore, is to demonstrate that in the first place, the essential mediation beyond the contemplative stance is a voluntary ethical self-subordination to the praxis of the proletariat. Finally, insofar as it is necessary to outline a sociological basis for the account that will follow, Löwy’s account of the early twentieth century anti-capitalist intelligentsia is invaluable.6 Löwy notes that the intelligentsia is not a class in the traditional Marxist sense, but rather a ‘social category’. Insofar as intellec-

5 Nietzsche 2003a, §. 6. 6 See Löwy 1979, Ch. 1.

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tuals pursue the humanities or other humanist disciplines, they enjoy relative autonomy from the strictly economic processes of capitalism. Thus the humanist intelligentsia works in what Löwy describes as predominantly qualitative fields; they deal with human values such as truth, the good, justice, and so on. Löwy notes that these values arise on the basis of capitalism, but also come into contradiction with it. This can result in different attitudes which are often formed in response to the historic situation. So, one may detect in the writings of Weber or Simmel a kind of tragic resignation in the face of the iron cage of modern rationalism, the commensurate fragmentation of knowledge and the diminution of the individual.7 And yet, in both of these writers, one also discerns a deep and subterranean commitment to human values. In a more extreme situation, insofar as the intelligentsia is committed to qualitative values, there is a potential for radicalisation. Prior to World War One, this radicalism was muted. Yet Weber, Simmel, Tönies and others in their generation, while not personally radical, contributed either directly (through sponsorship and mentoring) or indirectly to an intellectual atmosphere in which intellectuals like Lukács, Bloch, Emile Lask, Karl Mannheim and others developed. World War One catalysed this process. In Löwy’s account, Lukács’s milieu became increasingly volatile during the war. This was by no means directed exclusively in a left-wing direction. It is not uncommon to cite Thomas Mann’s character, Leo Naphta (an unstable synthesis of communism, the Jewish tradition and Jesuitical Catholicism), as illustrative of the contradictions faced by this milieu in general and by Lukács specifically. Löwy’s discussion of the figure of Leo Naphta and his possible connections to Lukács is most likely the definitive statement on this issue.8 Whether this character was based on Lukács himself (as is commonly assumed) or Ernst Bloch is beside the point. What matters is that the sociological basis for the radicalisation of the contemplative stance that will be explored below is not so much the proletariat, but the experience of radical intellectuals during a deep, civilisational crisis. Such crises will be discussed from the point of view of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis in Chapter 5 of this part. The analysis must begin with a basic definition of the contemplative stance, which is how Lukács names the subjective side of reification. Like the reified social totality to which it owes its origin, the contemplative stance is bifurcated. Lukács’s basic definition presupposes the institution of society as a second nature, outlined in Chapter 2. This is to say, the reified world confronts 7 Cf. Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ or Simmel’s ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’ (Weber 2004. Simmel 1997). 8 Löwy 1979, pp. 56–65.

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the individual as a ‘brutal and senseless fate which is eternally alien to him’.9 In contrast with pre-modern alienation, Lukács argues that reification gives rise to the rationalist conviction that the world may ‘… be understood by means of a theory which postulates “eternal laws of nature”’. He continues to note that ‘… [such] a theory endows the world with a rationality alien to man and human action can neither penetrate nor influence the world if man takes up a purely contemplative and fatalistic stance …’10 Of this contemplative stance, Lukács writes: Within such a world only two possible modes of action commend themselves and they are both apparent rather than real ways of actively changing the world. Firstly, there is the exploitation for particular human ends (as in technology, for example) of the fatalistically accepted and immutable laws which are seen in the manner we have already described. Secondly, there is action directed wholly inwards. This is the attempt to change the world at its only remaining free point, namely man himself (ethics). But as the world becomes mechanised its subject, man, necessarily becomes mechanised too and so his ethics remain likewise abstract. Confronted by the totality of man in isolation from the world it remains merely normative and fails to be truly active in its creation of objects. It is only prescriptive and imperative in character.11 Here, a number of important observations about the contemplative stance may be made. Firstly, while the specific instantiations of the contemplative stance available to individuals may well vary depending on their class background as well as a myriad of other contingent factors, these are for the moment extraneous to the concept. What Lukács has in mind is a default and universal subject position associated with reification. Within the contemplative stance, the reified totality (which includes nature) immediately confronts the individual as a hostile and alien world, that is, as fate. This world is ordered quantitatively and rationally; it is intelligible. However, as this rationality is divorced from its origins in human practice, it equally contains irrationality. This irrationality may be denied or minimally experienced as a ‘fundamental dissonance of existence’, to use Lukács’s cutting formulation.12 Alternately, this irrationality may be experienced maximally as crisis, both at the level of the 9 10 11 12

Lukács 1967a, p. 38. Lukács 1967a, pp. 38–9. Lukács 1967a, pp. 38–9. Lukács 1971c, p. 62.

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whole and reflected at the level of the individual. This tension dichotomises the contemplative consciousness between what might be termed an objective side, which is rationalist, fatalistic and quantitative and a subjective side, which is irrationalist, voluntarist, vitalist or qualitative. The former is fatalistic, the latter hubristic. As Lukács makes clear above, despite the generally outward orientation of the objective side and generally inward orientation of the subjective side, neither is able to transform the reality they encounter. Consequently, no resolution is possible. Thus, the divide between a quantitative and qualitative side is the most important attribute of the contemplative stance. It is notable that this divide corresponds to the divide between use value (which is qualitative and subjective) and exchange value (which is quantitative and objective) in the commodity. Of course, here, the same divide is experienced in terms of an individual life-orientation. Commenting on the labourer’s experience of the objective side of the contemplative stance, Lukács writes: As labour is progressively rationalised and mechanised his [the labourer’s] lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative. The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system …13 Although Lukács is referring here to the experience of labour, he makes it clear that this experience is where the ‘… contemplative nature of man under capitalism makes its appearance’.14 Hence, Lukács’s consideration of the contemplative activity of the worker made it possible to discern the nature of the contemplative stance as such. This is because the essence of rationally calculable activity consists in the ‘… recognition and inclusion in one’s calculations of the inevitable chain of cause and effect in certain events – independently of individual “caprice”’.15 Activity organised in this manner does not transcend calculable adaption to an existent system that is found ready-made. Indeed, despite best intentions, such an orientation does not even guarantee the evasion of accidents and disruptions. Given this, Lukács argues that ‘bourgeois legends of the “creativity” of the exponents of the capitalist age’ may be dismissed.16 Rather, the apparently ‘creative’ element in bourgeois activity at best 13 14 15 16

Lukács 1967a, p. 89. Lukács 1967a, p. 97. Lukács 1967a, p. 98. Lukács 1967a, p. 98.

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reflects the extent to which the rational laws of the objective world are applied. ‘The distinction between a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology, is purely quantitative; it does not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness’.17 This point is particularly important given that it is not at all uncommon to read Lukács’s contemplative stance as essentially passive. The most recent author to put forward such a one sided reading is Jan Rehmann. The chapter on Lukács in his otherwise interesting book Theory of Ideology contains many of the standard misunderstandings refuted in this work.18 However, with specific reference to the contemplative stance, Rehmann argues that its ‘passivity’ precludes understanding phenomena such as ‘possessive individualism’, which includes activities related to buying and selling such as ‘demonstration, persuasion, outwitting, speculation …’ and so on. He claims that the self-disciplining ‘Do it Yourself’ ideology of neo-liberal capitalism cannot possibly be understood under the heading of contemplation, and that to view this type of thing under the subset of commodity-fetishism ‘erases its modes of social practice and agency’.19 In contrast to this, the reading proposed here, in which the subject is radically split between objective and subjective orientations and activity, is more than adequate to explain the ideological phenomena Rehmann cites. In fact, Lukács’s theory may be proposed as a model par excellence of the antinomies of this ideology. After all, Lukács was the first Marxist theorist to fully incorporate the insight that modernity splits the subject between a subjective and objective side. Insofar as neoliberalism may be understood as capitalism drawing ever closer to its concept, then it stands to reason that commensurate with this, the reification of the individual and his division between an objective and subjective orientation assumes a purer and more extreme form. Lukács’s attention to the extremes of ideology and lifestyle should not be surprising given his debt to Simmel. The latter’s critique of the ‘adventurer’ as a personality type is a paradigmatic example. An adventure as such represents a suspension of normal time, in favour of an experience of time as an exceptional and qualitative intensity that becomes, in recollection, ‘dreamlike’.20 The adventurer, like the gambler, lives a life that is excessively present17 18 19 20

Lukács 1967a, p. 98. I have had occasion to criticise some of the misreadings committed by Rehmann elsewhere (see Lopez 2018). Rehmann 2013, pp. 80–1. Simmel 2011a, p. 188.

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ist, in which future and past are forgotten and deferred and in which chance overwhelmingly determines the course of his life. However, unlike the gambler who typically accommodates this by way of superstition, subordinating himself to chance, the adventurer draws the play of chance into his ‘central feeling of life’ and in so doing, experiences the antinomy between chance and necessity as a totalising aesthetic which exults his personality.21 This aspect – as well as the experience of time as a qualitative intensity – is why Simmel associates the adventure with the love affair. This is perhaps why holidays or travel (degraded forms of the adventure) are so conducive to ephemeral and yet intense romance. Nevertheless, while the love affair holds out the possibility of a reconciliation with ordinary time (that is, the romantic aestheticisation of every-day life as its duration is shared alongside a loved one) this is not available to the adventurer. Neither the adventure itself nor the adventurer may grow old. Such a ‘predominance of the process of life over its substance’, says Simmel, is ‘alien to old age’.22 In this manner is disclosed the inner self-contradiction of the adventurer whose successive triumphs must inevitably end with one final failure. Such antinomic lifestyles evidently informed Lukács’s concept of the contemplative stance, bifurcated as we have seen between hubristic and fatalistic poles. What he sought, however, was a mediator between the quantitative and qualitative. While the adventure involves an experience of qualitative time that ultimately must disclose its opposite, Lukács sought an experience of time as quality that could endure and mediate the presence of quantity. Moreover, he sought this on the basis of the most extreme separation of either term as a necessary step towards their unity. As was indicated above, the experience he nominated was, for the worker, one of dehumanisation. For the proletarian, the quantitative experience of the contemplative stance, in the form of a working day, can transform into a qualitative experience, although obviously not a happy one. This provides the starting point for a dialectic of class consciousness. Yet this is both a practical path and a path that exists for a class. At this stage, the path being sought is a theoretical one that occurs for an individual. After all, as has been stated, the standpoint of theory is in its immediacy no more than the standpoint of an individual; the most basic subject position within a reified society. For the individual, development towards the comprehension of praxis proceeds in the first place via the subjective or qualitative side of the

21 22

Simmel 2011a, pp. 191–2. Simmel 2011a, pp. 197–8.

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contemplative stance. In a sense, this is analogous to the proletariat’s qualitative experience of the duration of work, in that development takes place via a quantitative mediation. However, in the case of the proletariat (considered as a theoretical representation, that is), this was an essential mediation that allowed for the self-consciousness of the commodity. Thus, the mediation united quantity and quality immediately. In the individual, however, no such immediate unity of quality and quantity is immediately available. After all, as the example of the adventure shows, an orientation towards the qualitative or subjective side of the contemplative stance is not necessarily any less superficial than its calculable, objective opposite. What is needed is a mediation which firstly unites quantity and quality and secondly, which allows the theorist to access the totality. For Lukács, unless such an experiential mediation leads the theorist towards the proletariat, it cannot discover the essence of the social totality or a pathway to genesis and genuine praxis. Finally, it goes without saying, development within the contemplative stance is not necessary and may occur under a number of different concepts, in a variety of contexts. After all, it is only governed initially by the logic of an individual life within a historical context. It is recalled that the self-consciousness of the commodity, as outlined above, also commenced with an inward turn. In Lukács’s view, a radicalisation of the subjective side of the contemplative stance also takes an inward turn: In the absence of a real, concrete solution the dilemma of freedom and necessity, of voluntarism and fatalism is simply shunted into a siding. That is to say, in nature and in the ‘external world’ laws still operate with inexorable necessity, while freedom and the autonomy that is supposed to result from the discovery of the ethical world are reduced to a mere point of view from which to judge internal events. These events, however, are seen as being subject in all their motives and effects and even in their psychological elements to a fatalistically regarded objective necessity.23 This is to say, in the light of the hostile and mechanical objective world, the one point of freedom that remains to the reified subject is the self. However, it is important to note that this is initially an abstract freedom; voluntaristic subjective attitudes towards the object of action (be it nature or society) are quite compatible with the contemplative stance. Similarly, to describe the objective side of the contemplative stance as passive is somewhat misleading: as we have

23

Lukács 1967a, p. 124.

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seen, Lukács makes it clear that activity, even frantic activity, is possible within the contemplative stance.24 Insofar as this activity fails to comprehend and alter its object, it is described as passive in a philosophical sense. Further discussing the dichotomised consciousness of the contemplative stance, Lukács writes: The reified consciousness must also remain hopelessly trapped in the two extremes of crude empiricism and abstract utopianism. In the one case, consciousness becomes either a completely passive observer moving in obedience to laws which it can never control. In the other it regards itself as a power which is able of its own – subjective – volition to master the essentially meaningless motion of objects.25 He notes shortly afterward that this presentation of consciousness as trapped between two antinomies should not be taken to mean that these extremes cannot coexist in the one individual or worldview.26 Discussing the Marxism of the Second International, Lukács notes that empiricist reformism was often adorned with an abstract ethical component which supplied a missing subjective side to an otherwise mechanical worldview.27 Lukács’s concept of the contemplative stance is a framework for understanding the reflection of the reified social totality within various antinomic worldviews. Therefore, in addition to its descriptive power, the concept of the contemplative stance contains criteria by which antinomic worldviews may be judged. That is, for Lukács, a worldview is progressive insofar as it comprehends and overcomes the contemplative stance.28 Of course, vast number of mediations – of greater and lesser complexity – may be grasped on the basis of an ultimately contemplative worldview. These mediations correspond to various levels of the social totality which are themselves split between their universal or ideal and their particular and pragmatic dimensions. So, for instance, following Lukács’s comments on Lassalle, cited above, we may argue that the idealism of the state consists in its claim to represent actualised reason, while the materialism of the state consists of careerism, bureaucracy and ultimately, class rule.29 24 25 26 27 28 29

Lukács 1967a, p. 130. Lukács 1967a, p. 77. Lukács 1967a, p. 77. Lukács 1967a, p. 38. This methodology, broadly speaking, informs Feenberg, Kavoulakos and Larsen’s critique of Honneth. This was summarised above. Lukács 1967a, p. 196.

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Correspondingly, as citizen, a person exists for the state as an abstraction and an ideal. This ideal existence is contrasted against that individual's concrete existence, as a member of civil society with determinate interests, needs, and so on. Marx makes a similar point when he criticises the citizen, in the context of criticising Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The general law here appears in the individual. Civil society and state are separated. Hence the citizen of the state is also separated from the citizen as the member of civil society. He must therefore effect a fundamental division with himself. As an actual citizen he finds himself in a twofold organisation: the bureaucratic organisation, which is an external, formal feature of the distant state, the executive, which does not touch him or his independent reality, and the social organisation, the organisation of civil society. But in the latter he stands as a private person outside the state; this social organisation does not touch the political state as such. The former is a state organisation for which he always provides the material. The second is a civil organisation the material of which is not the state. In the former the state stands as formal antithesis to him, in the second he stands as material antithesis to the state.30 As Marx continues to explain, this creates a rift in the activity of the citizen who is only political insofar as he leaves civil society (in which he possesses a more concrete individuality) by virtue of representing himself to the state as a ‘blank individuality’.31 Thus, just as civil society is subsumed, bureaucratically, under the state, the individual – insofar as he or she is political – enacts the replacement of their concrete individuality by a bureaucratic abstraction, namely citizenship. The contemplative consciousness corresponding to this situation is therefore divided between the idealism of politics, which views the political sphere as a realm of potential justice and reason, and the crass materialism of politics, which understands the pragmatism, opportunism and violence of politics ‘as it really is’. These are, in fact, the ideological counterparts to the two sides of reification discussed above, in Chapter 2. While individuals or worldviews might accentuate or even absolutise one or the other of these sides, to some extent they will always coexist; without the former ideal side, the latter material side collapses into meaninglessness. Without the materialism of the real state, the idealism of the state becomes a transcendental ideal with no

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Marx and Engels 1975, p. 77. Marx and Engels 1975, p. 77.

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grounding in reality which eventually starves. Even the most cynical politician possesses a qualitative motivation, even if this is ultimately only bitterness or resentment. Nuance could surely be added to this account – but this is beside the point. The main thing is to demonstrate that a full conceptual mapping of the dimensions of the contemplative stance would, in fact, require a full conceptual mapping of the social totality. This quixotic goal is not the task at hand. Rather, the aim is to discover a path between the individual and the praxis of the proletariat. This path proceeds via the subjective or value-oriented side of the contemplative stance. Consequently, two moments will be outlined: an aesthetic and an ethical one. It would be possible to conceive of other moments in the development of the subjective or qualitative side of the contemplative stance towards totality.32 However, these two initial moments must be stressed because they are fundamental to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and because they broadly correspond to the moments of the critique of German Idealism presented above. After all, as has been noted, insofar as the standpoint of labour was outlined, so, too, implicitly, was the standpoint of the theorist oriented towards labour. That a homology between the two conceptual progressions exists is, as they say, no coincidence.

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The Ethical Idea of Praxis In this way human beings collapse into themselves, without a path or a goal beyond the quotidian. They lose their properly human wakefulness, substantiveness, existence; they forfeit their polarity, their comprehensive teleological awareness; and finally everything grand, powerfully massive, atomises under the ‘knowing’ gaze into the false, disenchanted details; every blossoming becomes a whitewash, or ultimately mendacious superstructure. Certainly those who are actually satisfied with this state do not even come into consideration here; they do not think and they shall not be thought of. Higher stands the one who is at least desperate, just for being desperate; but the artists above all, out of the deepest awareness of their constructive powers, battle against the all too technical or even resentful dismantling. Nevertheless: not even the artist can always be present everywhere, can always easily believe in that

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Lefebvre and Guterman’s essay ‘Mystification: Notes for a Critique of Everyday Life’ may be seen as an extension on Lukács’s critique of the contemplative stance which, indeed, deeply informs Lefebvre’s work (cf. Guterman and Lefebvre 2003).

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which lets his thought light the way in him, above him. The ultimately still exposed doubt, desperation, this shortage of the deadly seriousness of the unconditional Yes to the vision, is a second experience of grief, the worry of the productive human being that even as such, he is not completely true and genuine. Ernst Bloch33 In the decades prior to his conversion to Marxism, Lukács sought an aesthetic solution to the problems of modernity and the contemplative stance. This was closely bound up with his preoccupation with ethics, which will be discussed shortly. Of course, many others have commented on Lukács’s early aesthetics.34 Additionally, the contours of Lukács’s search are too detailed and nuanced to reproduce here. Still, as Andrew Gilbert has pointed out, Lukács’s pre-Marxist exploration of aesthetics and culture was characterised by a search for an aesthetic form which could give expression to the soul. For Lukács, this quest was to a large extent tragic. Thus, the bulk of his praise is reserved for those authors who grasp this tragedy, or, at best, who intuit and represent aesthetically a new ethic or cultural form.35 Dostoyevsky, for Lukács, was foremost amongst these.36 Nevertheless, as a critic, Lukács was only able to comment upon the representation of reconciliation in the sphere of aesthetics; he could not find a pathway to it. He always found himself at a distance from those pieces of literature in which he invested redemptive hopes.37 As early as 1910, these impasses led Lukács to an intensification of his inner crisis, as well as a despairing radicalism. 33 34

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Bloch 2000, p. 167. Richard Westerman discusses Lukács’s philosophy of praxis from the point of view of his ‘Heidelberg Aesthetics’ (see Westerman 2018). J.M. Bernstein also deserves mention in this context. In addition to favouring a reading of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis very similar to that presented in this study, he is arguably the best interpreter of Lukács’s early aesthetics (see Bernstein 1984, 1988). See also Goldmann, Jameson and Márkus, as well as other sources listed below, in the discussion of Lukács’s ethics (Goldmann 1967, Jameson, Márkus 1983). Gilbert 2016, pp. 30–3. Lukács 1971c, pp. 152–3. MacIntyre makes a similar point with regard to Lukács’s appreciation of Lask and Weber. MacIntyre writes: For Lukács, Lask therefore raised questions about the place of philosophical inquiry in a life such as his. In what ways might philosophy illuminate his situation? In what ways might its abstractions obscure from view the nature of the realities that he encountered? Might it be possible to transform theory so that it no longer distanced theorists from their lived experience? Might it not perhaps be the case that the forms that artists and others impose on reality distort and disguise the nature of those realities? (MacIntyre 2006, pp. 155–6).

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Mary Gluck notes this, citing a dairy entry from 1910 in which Lukács writes: I feel in spite of everything that the shadow of a great crisis is hovering ahead of me. Perhaps it is because I have again been unable to work decently for two days. But this makes no difference. For what kind of life is it which requires the constant narcotic of work in order ‘to feel well’? … I think today: if I reach all my inner and outer goals through work – what then? What have I reached? Is not the meaning of my life – taken in its entirety – directed towards an ever sharper clarification and upward struggle so that one day its ultimate emptiness and futility may stand revealed in all its nakedness: the tragedy. I feel it coming with a deep certainty as never before.38 This private confession was penned at the same time as Lukács expressed a hope that a cultural reawakening could be brought about by means of the proletariat: In the proletariat, in socialism, is the only hope. That hope is that the barbarians come and tear apart all excessive refinements with their crude hands; that persecution might serve to sort and select (thus, Ibsen believed that Russian tyranny would foster the love of freedom); that when a culture hates and opposes art, nevertheless art grows deeper. But of course, this wouldn’t have been the crucial thing, but only something secondary or accidental. Yet we might trust the force of the revolutionary spirit, which has unmasked every ‘ideology’ and caught sight of the true motive forces everywhere, to see and feel clearly here as well. By sweeping everything peripheral away, it might lead us back to the truly essential, even if this follows a long transitional period of anti-artistic lifemoods.39 In the same essay, however, Lukács simultaneously despaired of the socialist movement, concluding that it lacked the moral and mythic force of early Christianity. Nevertheless, the point here is that through an uncompromising embrace of the tragedy of aesthetics and modern culture, Lukács had already begun to intuit the need for a redemptive force that could reconcile subject and object, or, life with form.

38 39

Gluck 1985, pp. 135–6. Lukács 1998, p. 373.

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Despite shifting his attention largely away from aesthetics and culture following his conversion to Marxism, these concerns both contributed to his conversion and left enduring traces. A 1919 order signed by Lukács, acting as the Commissar for Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, calls for the autonomy of art from politics: ‘The Communist Cultural program is: to make available to the proletariat the highest and purest art, and the Commissariat will not tolerate the corrupting of taste with editorial poetastery corrupted for political purposes’. This order famously concluded with the statement: ‘Politics is merely instrumental; culture is the goal’.40 Although the capacity of art to express or comprehend praxis is criticised in History and Class Consciousness, as well as in the other works of Lukács’s mature philosophy of praxis, art retains a special role as a representation of totality and an intuition of praxis. Lukács’s comments on Schiller, which have been discussed above, bear witness to this as do comments he made in the late 1920s, on the perspicuity and limitedness of the artist: For the artist always perceives life in its immediacy; the truer the artist, the more direct and unmediated is his experience of life. He may engage in bold criticism of men, groups, institutions and so on, yet to remain an artist he must always stand in a relation of sensuous, naive immediacy to the underlying objective forms in which the life of his time presents itself … But when he becomes a critic of his time, the modern writer inevitably remains stuck fast in pallid, abstract, nonsensuous and artistically unsatisfactory criticism. For bourgeois consciousness, society as a whole is given at best as an abstract concept. And when, for artistic reasons, he turns his back on this abstract totality, when he turns his gaze exclusively to the ‘concrete’, uncritically apprehended phenomena of perception, then he becomes artistically suffocated in the grey and barren triviality of bourgeois everyday life.41 Culture and works of art, for Lukács, were only capable of aesthetically representing reconciliation. While the artist may well engage with reality in an immediate fashion, no such simple unity was open to the critic who, before everything else, already found him or herself outside of the artwork and apart from the artist, and within the estranged world of forms.

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Quoted in Kettler 1971, p. 84. Lukács 2011, pp. 159–60. Gail Day, to name one author amongst many, has recently demonstrated the continued relevance of Lukács’s Marxist aesthetics. See Day 2011.

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Thus, Lukács redirected his attention towards the ethical sphere – and it was here that he found his own path towards history and reality. Consequently, in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, ethics supplies the sought after and first conceptual mediation between the individual trapped in the contemplative stance and the practice of the proletariat. To begin with, while it might appear as though the objective side of the contemplative stance is devoid of ethical content, this is not so. The objective side of the contemplative stance encompasses the world of normative morality as it relates to the consciousness of the subject. For Lukács, this is embodied in the state and the public authority. He writes: … the organs of authority harmonise to such an extent with the (economic) laws governing men’s lives, or seem so overwhelmingly superior that men experience them as natural forces, as the necessary environment for their existence. As a result they submit to them freely. (Which is not to say that they approve of them.)42 This hegemony of the law is vital to a society which relies on consent; in comments reminiscent of Gramsci, Lukács notes that were force to predominate in social relations, the natural appearance of capitalism would disappear.43 Further, Lukács describes the hegemony of objective morality as a form of life which individuals internalise. As he recalls, ‘Dostoyevsky has noted in his Siberian reminiscences how every criminal feels himself to be guilty (without necessarily feeling any remorse); he understands with perfect clarity that he has broken laws that are no less valid for him than for everyone else. And these laws retain their validity even when personal motives or the force of circumstances have induced him to violate them’.44 This points to an objective ethical connection between the individual and the social totality. Lukács makes this quite explicit in comments reminiscent of Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: It was necessary to emphasise [the conservative utopianism of the Christian sects] only because it is no accident that it was the revolutionary religiosity of the sects that supplied the ideology for capitalism in its purest forms (in England and America). For the union of an inwardness, purified to the point of total abstraction and stripped of all traces of flesh and

42 43 44

Lukács 1967a, p. 257. Lukács 1967a, p. 257. Lukács 1967a, p. 260.

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blood, with a transcendental philosophy of history does indeed correspond to the basic ideological structure of capitalism.45 Thus, the contemplative stance, in both its subjective and objective sides, is an immediately ethical stance. One might well say that the immediacy of capitalism is ethical. This is reminiscent of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in which morality mediates between the individual and ethical life.46 This also suggests a separation between objective and subjective morality (or, conscience) in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. In the face of either the breakdown of objective morality (for instance, during World War One), or the estrangement of an individual from objective morality (as was the case with Lukács), subjective morality – which Lukács generally refers to as ethics – becomes the refuge of the ethical subject. Hence, a subjective ethics which seeks a path between the self and the other supplies the foundation for an aspiration towards a new order based on the unity of subject and object. Whether this other is conceived of as another person or society, at this stage, does not matter. In his critique of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Lukács comments that despite its shortcomings, subjective, practical ethics allows thought, on an individual level, to approach practical reason and a conception of its object as a totality, albeit metaphysically.47 This, according to Lukács’s account, opens the way to Fichte’s conception of an ethical subject-object and praxis.48 As we have seen, this move takes place within Lukács’s account of the antinomies of bourgeois philosophy. As the move applies to the contemplative stance, it occurs to

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Lukács 1967a, p. 192. For instance, Hegel writes: The unity of the subjective with the objective good which has being in and for itself is ethical life, and the reconciliation which takes place in it is in accord with the concept. For whereas morality is the form of the will in general in its subjective aspect, ethical life is not just the subjective form and self-determination of the will: it also has its own concept, namely freedom, as its content. The sphere of right and that of morality cannot exist independently; they must have the ethical as their support and foundation. For right lacks the moment of subjectivity, which in turn belongs solely to morality, so that neither of the two moments has any independent actuality. Only the infinite, the Idea, is actual. Right exists only as a branch of a whole, or as a climbing plant attached to a tree which has firm roots in and for itself (Hegel 1991a, §. 141). This said, Lukács’s account of the social totality and the mediations which join it to the individual is not as rich as Hegel’s. Lukács’s hostility to this work as exemplary of Hegel’s alleged conservatism is well-known. Lukács 1967a, p. 125. Lukács 1967a, pp. 122–3.

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the individual, whose strivings nevertheless possess an objective significance. So, rather than repeat Lukács’s philosophical critique of bourgeois ethics, it is preferable to account for the development of a contemplative stance towards an ethical idea of praxis on the basis of Lukács’s writings prior to History and Class Consciousness. This is neither intended as a detailed reconstruction nor as a definitive account of Lukács’s pre-Marxist ethical thought. Such accounts exist elsewhere.49 Rather, what matters is Lukács’s experience and his reflections upon it. The essays ‘On Poverty of Spirit’ and ‘The Foundering of Form Against Life’, are sufficient to illustrate the point.50 We will begin with the former which was written in the form of a dialogue, shortly after the death of Irma Seidler, with whom Lukács had a short-lived love affair.51 It is a profoundly personal reflection on the tragedy of human relationships in a reified culture. It dwells upon the problem of communication within an overgrown objective culture and dreams of a new ethic of goodness in which the individual is immediately and wholly united with the other. Speaking of such an ethic, Lukács writes: … it is a knowledge of men that illuminates everything, a knowledge wherein subject and object collapse into one another: the good man no longer interprets the soul of the other, he reads it just as he reads his own; he has become the other. It is for that reason that Goodness is the miracle, the grace, and the salvation. The descent of the heavenly realm to the earth.52 Lukács confesses, however, that this absolute unity with the other is itself fraught with uncertainty and is, moreover, available only to a few. The position 49

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Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God is foremost amongst these. Also excellent are Löwy’s account of Lukács’s tragic worldview in Georg Lukács – from Romanticism to Bolshevism, Arato and Breines’s account in The Young Lukács and the Origin of Western Marxism, and James Schmidt’s ‘The Concrete Totality and Lukács’ Concept of Proletarian Bildung’. In general, there has been no shortage of quality discussion of Lukács’s pre-Marxist period (see Goldmann 1964, Löwy 1979, Ch. II, Arato and Breines 1979, Part One, Schmidt 1975). Lukács 2010, Ch. 3 ‘The Foundering of Form Against Life’; ‘On Poverty of Spirit’. Agnes Heller’s essay on Lukács and Seidler is among the finest and most subtle writings on Lukács. While it does not pertain directly to his philosophy of praxis, it explores the significance and inner limitations of both Lukács and Seidler’s attitudes during their ultimately tragic relationship. The argument presented in this section is to some extent indebted to Heller, although no attempt will be made to reproduce her detailed, nuanced and beautifully-written analysis (see Heller 1979). Lukács 2010, p. 205.

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of the theorist in this essay (and in other essays collected in the volume Soul and Form) is tragic, in that the theorist can only perceive the need for a new ethic, but is incapable of living it. Elsewhere, Lukács despaired in similar terms of the position of the ‘Platonist’, or critic, who cannot create life, but only comprehend it.53 Specifically, Lukács felt that entrance to this new ethic required a heroism of which he, at this stage, felt incapable. Thus, ‘On Poverty of Spirit’ concludes with the suicide of the theorist who chooses death over a life of conscious estrangement. Lukács cited the Book of Revelation 3:15–16 in his closing words: ‘I know your Works, that you are neither cold nor warm; oh if only you were cold or warm. Because you are lukewarm, however, and are neither cold nor warm, I will spit you out of my mouth’.54 The second essay mentioned above, ‘The Foundering of Form against Life’, stages a criticism of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith into an authentic relationship with God. Lukács accuses Kierkegaard of hypocrisy for his decision to save Regine Olsen from his own melancholy by breaking with her. Although the act was ostensibly one undertaken for Regine’s sake, at the same time, Kierkegaard freely admitted to loving his melancholy more dearly than anything and to being unable to conceive of life without it.55 Kierkegaard’s gesture was the necessary culmination of living life as form (which is Lukács’s understanding of the ‘gesture’). Ultimately, the gesture failed – both because it became transparent to Regine Olsen, and because it betrayed a life lived towards death.56 To slip for a moment into Hegel’s terminology, such a gesture enacts pure being-for-self in the personal sphere. As Hegel describes it, being-for-self is the ‘… ultimate, most stubborn error, one which takes itself as the ultimate truth, whether it assumes the more concrete form of abstract freedom, of pure ‘I’, and further

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He writes: The critic’s way of creation is like the way of a Homeric hero when, for a brief moment, he brings to life the shade of another hero, languishing in Hades, with the blood of a sacrificial lamb. The inhabitants of two worlds confront one another, a man and a shade, the man wants to learn only one thing from the shade, the shade has come back to life in order to give only one answer – and only for the duration of the question and the answer, spoken together, does each exist for the other. The Platonist never creates a man; that man lives already or has lived somewhere else, no matter where, independently from his will and power; he can only conjure up shades and demand an answer to a question (only in this is the critic wholly sovereign), a question of whose significance the one who is questioned may never have been aware (Lukács 2010, Ch. 2, ‘Platonism, Poetry and Form’, p. 41). Lukács 2010, p. 214. Lukács 2010, p. 49. Lukács 2010, pp. 52–7.

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still of evil’.57 Ultimately, this is no subsistence at all. A being can only ever be defined, in its determinacy, by its other and its limit. Despite the regrettable brevity of this analysis, these two essays (and others contemporary to them) disclose a radical ethical dialectic within the subjective side of the contemplative stance, between being-for-self (egotism) and being-for-other (self-sacrifice), both of which conceal an ascetic inability to love and act. The former essay stages an action, although its finality renders its authenticity utterly tragic. Death, after all, is no resolution of antinomies. The latter criticises an action which conceals egotism and which is therefore, not authentic but contradictory, and therefore, hypocritical. Both sides (beingfor-self and being-for-other) are consequently incapable of ethically bridging the abyss between self and other. Regardless of his self-assessment as lukewarm, Lukács lived these opposites to their extreme points, and in so doing, experienced their covert unity as a personal trauma. It was this experience that prepared him to discover the mediation he sought. In his critique of Kierkegaard, Lukács explained that the apparently selfless rejection of the other (for her own sake) is self-contradictory. However, he underestimated what was at stake. Regine Olsen, at least, went on with her life after a period of grieving, leaving Kierkegaard to contemplate his gesture. This was not the fate of Lukács’s first love, Irma Seidler, the woman who inspired the Kierkegaard essay, as well as many others from Soul and Forms.58 Lukács’s relationship with Seidler affected him profoundly between the years 1907 and 1908, after which they parted, on Seidler’s initiative, largely because of Lukács’s inability to reciprocate her deep and persistent love and affection.59 57

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As he continues: It is the freedom which so misconceives itself as to place its essence in this abstraction, and, in thus shutting itself up within itself, flatters itself that it attains itself in all purity. This self-subsistence, to determine it further, is the error of considering its own essence negatively and of relating itself to it negatively. It is thus a negative relating to itself which, while wanting to gain its own being, destroys it – and this, his doing, is only the manifestation of the nullity of the doing. Reconciliation is the recognition that that towards which the negative relating is directed is rather its essence, and this is only in the desisting from the negativity of its being-for-itself rather than in holding fast to it. (Hegel 1991c, p. 140). Gluck 1985, p. 125. The details of the following account are based on Gluck’s biography of Lukács. Gluck suggests that an ascetic and puritanical attitude towards sex may have contributed to Lukács’s otherwise paradoxical combination of idolisation and rejection where Seidler was concerned. This speculation is made on the basis of a letter between Béla Balázs and Lukács in which the former reported to the latter his father’s (Jószef Lukács) concerns regarding his son’s apparent disinterest in intimacy or in taking a mistress (Gluck 1985, p. 80).

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In an essay that is as beautiful as it is ruthless, Ágnes Heller analyses the correspondence between Lukács and Seidler, placing the former’s almost pathological inability to listen or respond to Seidler’s affirmation of her love for him into sharp and desperately sad relief.60 Despite having pushed Seidler away, Lukács struggled to recover from the break, going as far as to pen a suicide note that was never sent. During the next two years, Lukács struggled profoundly with what he regarded as his inability to love, blaming himself, his melancholy and his obsession with work for their parting. At times he tried to convince himself that he had in fact saved Seidler. At other times, he imagined their separation was necessary to his work. After a period of two years apart, Lukács wrote to Seidler, asking permission to dedicate Soul and Forms to her. She assented, also designing the original title page. By early 1911, according to his diary entries, Lukács had almost succeeded in transforming his mental image of Seidler into something totally conceptual; as representative of an authenticity, wholeness and ethicism debarred to him. He imagined himself to be free from her. During this time, Seidler’s artistic career and marriage fell apart, as did the affair she was conducting with Lukács’s friend Béla Balázs. She drowned herself in the Danube. Lukács bore no empirical guilt for Seidler’s suicide. Yet, he experienced a profound spiritual guilt, writing in his diary: ‘No one is so poor that God cannot make him even poorer. Every tie has been broken because she was the tie to everything, and now all that is left is common strivings, and common goals, and work’.61 Heller argues that the spiritual guilt which wracked Lukács was well deserved. Without wishing to summarise the essay – it is far too subtle for that – it is sufficient to note than in Heller’s reading, Lukács had regarded Seidler inhumanly, rendering her, in his mind, an abstractly universal concept. This denied her love, making Lukács utterly deaf to her pleas for recognition from him.62 He had in fact treated her in the opposite manner to that which he had imagined, that is, purely formally and as an object whose existence was entirely for him. He had, to use the language of the Science of Logic, transformed her finitude into a bad infinity – and in so doing, he experienced what Hegel describes as the sadness of the finitude of things, whose only destiny is to perish.63 Unable

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Heller 1979. Translation quoted in: Gluck 1985, p. 128. Heller 1979. Additionally, Heller notes that earlier, Lukács had ventured that genuine tragedy could only be experienced by men. Following Seidler’s suicide, Lukács dropped this shallow and misogynist view. Hegel writes: The thought of the finitude of things brings this sadness with it because it is qual-

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to overcome his melancholic being-for-self, Lukács was guilty of having spiritually denied Seidler life. Indeed, in the end, Seidler was capable of genuinely tragic action where Lukács was not. In accepting his overwhelming guilt, Heller argues, Lukács learned to humble himself and in so doing, he overcame his ascetic pridefulness and over-refinement. This made it possible for him to chart a path away from a conception of himself as the solitary bearer of form, in opposition to life. Correspondingly, he came to replace his view of the world as one of ‘absolute sin’ with a redemptive vision of a world populated by habitable institutions and self-respecting, loving individuals. Indeed, Heller is to be credited especially for drawing attention to these lessons that Seidler taught to Lukács.64 No one else has reflected on Seidler’s impact on Lukács with half as much depth or perspicuity. Prior to arriving in a world of habitable institutions, Lukács was required to spend time in a purgatory of uninhabitable ones. In 1912, while holidaying with Balázs, Lukács met his first wife, Ljena Andrejevna Grabenko. She was, according to Mary Gluck: … a radical Russian student living in Paris … [and] a fascinating, unconventional figure who disarmed not only Lukács but also Balázs and their entire circle. She appeared to them a Dostoevskian heroine, the living incarnation of those literary ideals they cherished in the Russian novelist. ‘All her anecdotes, ideas, feelings could have come out of the most fanciful of Dostoyevsky’s chapters’, wrote Balázs. ‘She had been a terrorist, had spent years in jail, had ruined her nerves, her stomach, her lungs in the terrible labor. She is now ill and tired. She fears death and still wants something for herself out of life – to learn, to acquire culture … she is a sad, beautiful, deep, and wise human soul …’65

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itative negation pushed to its extreme, and in the singleness of such determination there is no longer left to things an affirmative being distinct from their destiny to perish. Because of this qualitative singleness of the negation, which has gone back to the abstract opposition of nothing and ceasing-to-be as opposed to being, finitude is the most stubborn category of the understanding; negation in general, constitution and limit, reconcile themselves with their other, with determinate being; and even nothing, taking abstractly as such, is given up as an abstraction; but finitude is the negation fixed in itself, and it therefore stands in abrupt contrast to its affirmative (Hegel 1991c, pp. 129–30). As he continues, this represents the stubbornness of the finite, which refuses to let itself be lost in the infinite and which, in so doing, debars itself from reconciliation while simultaneously rendering the passing away of the finite itself the infinite moment. Heller 1979, pp. 102–6. Gluck 1985, pp. 32–3.

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To endure such experiences as Grabenko did without becoming deformed by them requires the depth of soul of a saint. ‘One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled’.66 Or, as Simone Weil wrote, ‘[h]uman injustice as a general rule produces not martyrs but quasi-damned souls. Beings who have fallen into this quasi-hell are like someone stripped and wounded by robbers. They have lost the clothing of character’.67 Thus, Ljena Grabenko was – in the account of Lukács’s associates – deeply unstable and given to radical mood swings. She was incapable of marriage on a very deep level. This is the woman to whom Lukács chose to dedicate himself – perhaps tellingly, against the wishes of his utterly loyal father, from whom Lukács became temporarily estranged but who nevertheless supported them both financially without hesitation.68 To summarise Gluck’s account of her ill-fated relationship with Lukács, after marrying him and setting up residence in his family household in Heidelberg, she fell in love with a young musician who was, if anything, more unstable than she was. Ljena was afraid to leave the musician for fear he would commit suicide. Lukács was afraid to leave Ljena for fear the musician would hurt her.69 Describing the situation, Gluck quotes a diary entry by Balázs: ‘There exists a terrible, unimaginable hell down there in Heidelberg, and Gyuri [a diminutive for György] speaks quite seriously of one day all three of them being found dead – at the hand of the insane musician. And yet he stays with them because it is safer for Ljena this way. Gyuri is the greatest martyr of decency’. During this time, Lukács worked prolifically. Yet, one suspects that his self-imposed suffering was motivated by more than decency; the photographs that exist of Lukács from this period suggest that he endured deep depression. To quote Weil once more: ‘We must accept the evil done to us as a remedy for that which we have done’.70 From being-for-self, Lukács inverted his position, placing himself instead in the stance of being for the other. Grabenko, for her part, does not seem to have cared for this gesture of self-sacrifice, perhaps intuiting its inner emptiness. To love someone for their saintliness or revolutionary virtue, after all, is to still love an abstraction. Lukács repeated his sin, inverted. Interestingly, Béla Balázs, while admiring his friend’s selflessness, nevertheless suggested that 66 67 68 69 70

Nietzsche 2003b, p. 42. Weil 2002, p. 28. Gluck 1985, p. 80. Gluck 1985, pp. 32–3. Weil 2002, p. 74. Once more, this is by no means to suggest that Grabenko’s significance is solely that she served as an instrument for Lukács’s emotional maturation. One can hardly imagine her unhappiness. It is a tragic fate to live eternally only as a footnote in the life of a man.

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in his martyrdom to decency, there was ‘… also intermingled here a certain inability to act, even cowardice – the assumption is that it is better to put up with, or postpone all disasters in life rather than get up from one’s desk …’71 While we can only speculate as to the experiences and self-reflections that occurred to Lukács at this time, it would appear that he eventually found the opposite side of the antinomy to be equally empty and nihilistic as the first. Finally, he left Grabenko around 1918. From what little we know, Lukács was slow to draw correct lessons. He is reported to have said to Balázs that had he been truly good, he would have stayed with Grabenko.72 Nevertheless, it is suggested that Lukács’s love for Ljena Grabenko, insofar as he endured it as a penance for pride and over-refinement, served a tripartite role. Firstly it was a period of self-humbling in which he cured himself of the over-refinement, pridefulness and egotism with which he had treated Seidler. Secondly, this period prepared him for his leap of faith into the communist movement. As will be outlined in Chapters 5 and 6, the commitment of the individual to the party is, in the first place, the political manifestation of a commitment to being for the other. Thirdly, it allowed him to complete the emotional labour required for his later, far more concrete and human love for Gertrúd Bortstieber. In place of an antinomic existence, he made himself capable of inhabiting the space and the movement between being-for-self and being for other. Out of alternation between finitude and bad infinity, maintained in their absolute reciprocity, emerges the true infinite. ‘[T]he image of true infinity, bent back into itself, becomes the circle, the line which has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present, without beginning and end’.73 The circle is the shape of philosophy; it is Heraclitus’s river reconciled in both its moments of permanence and fleetingness. By combining these anecdotes (firmly within the realms of subjective ethics) with Lukács’s early writing on ethics, we can discern his extreme path towards a concrete ethical foundation capable of sublating the difference between the self and other, and in so doing, grounding his overcoming of contemplation. To use the Hegelian language mentioned above, we can see that Lukács encountered each extreme of personal, being-for-self and being-for-other, in the sphere of romantic love. In the first case, with Seidler, he first felt himself incapable of living purely for an other through the practice of a heroic and transcendent goodness. Thus, he renounced her in favour of his work, adding to her tragedy. Perhaps Seidler would have preferred a gesture that was 71 72 73

Quoted in: Gluck 1985, p. 34. Gluck 1985, p. 34. Hegel 1991c, p. 149.

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less than everything, but still something. In the second example, with Grabenko, Lukács found himself in the presence of the saint he wished himself to be. Now, his egotism took the form of voluntary self-subordination. This was more action than he had taken with Seidler, but it was still passive and contemplative. Little wonder that Grabenko – clearly in love with action – sought it elsewhere. These extreme circumstances constituted Lukács’s own self-emptying. The logical conclusion of both approaches brought him close to death. In the former, he experienced the lonely living death of a critic trapped in a world of form. Unable to carry out a genuinely tragic gesture, he was instead shown one by Seidler, and from this saw the logical consequences of being-for-self. In the latter, Lukács found himself in the presence of the ethical hero of action he despaired of becoming. He discovered in his lonely study that self-sacrifice and absolute being for other is just as deathly, and that this type of saintliness is still far too selfish and incapable of leaving the world of form. Thus, for Lukács, both alternatives were deathly and devoid of real action. This is because both terms, conceptually, remain within abstract freedom. The former seeks to purify the self by abolishing the other. The latter seeks a flat identity with another. Again, this is effected by abolishing the other – only in this case, one does so by becoming other to one’s self. In terms of the contemplative stance, both of these subjectively ethical stances revert to the nihilism and vacuity of the objective side of the contemplative stance. Indeed, this experience of nihilism, insofar as its freedom consists in a purely negative and abstract exercise of will, corresponds with the experience of the working day outlined in Chapter 3. Here, however, an experience that was imputed to the proletariat may be felt by the theorist, as authentically his or her own. By enduring this experience and reflecting upon it, the theorist might grasp a mediation beyond being-for-self. Such experiences – of which the above are by no means the only ones – push the contemplative stance to its absolute limit and in so doing, reproduce the inner emptiness of reification for the theorist. The experience of and reflection upon this contradiction serves as a basis to understand the path between the individual and the other upon which Lukács’s philosophy of praxis relies. Thankfully, Lukács recoiled from both of the above antinomic alternatives. This coincided with his conversion to communism and his love for Gertrúd Bortstieber, who Lukács, in his autobiographical notes, praises in the most concrete and touching language. Despite confessing that ‘[e]ver since I first met G. [Gertrúd] the need to be approved of by her has been the central question of my personal life …’ Lukács just as much describes a rigorous and equal, although not identical, intellectual and personal relationship. The two endured occasional periods of estrangement and later, in the early

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1920s, Lukács experienced the joy of helping to raise her children, later crediting it with helping him to grasp concrete, practical ethics.74 When Lukács writes that his differences with Bortstieber were part of the attraction and that any idea of total identification was foreign to them, one believes him, especially given his earlier experiences.75 It was to this woman that Lukács dedicated History and Class Consciousness. This was undoubtedly just. Without the loving reconciliation between self and other, in which neither commands and neither obeys, Lukács may never have discovered a path toward a life-world of habitable institutions, in which the universal is expressed through the particular just as much as the particular depends upon the universal. In the contemplative stance, each exists for the other as a finite – and consequently, the other is a bad infinity. In love, each also exists for the other as a finite being. Yet, in the kind of deep, human love that Lukács and Bortstieber shared, one may encounter this finitude and find in it the infinite and, in reciprocity, one’s own infinity. This makes it possible to experience the infinite without being destroyed by it; indeed, to be at home in it. This permitted Lukács to enter the circle of speculative philosophy. Yet, there was an air of religious faith about Lukács’s conversion to communism that renders it less rational than the terms that have been used so far to describe it. This indicates the persistence of estrangement, albeit in a different register, and must be accounted for. Alasdair MacIntyre, in a perceptive discussion of Lukács’s conversion, best captures its specificity and its significance for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. He observes that during World War One, Lukács’s atheism differed from the conventional variety not because he asserted the existence of God, but because he wished to look deeply and frankly into the consequences of the absence or death of God. Alongside his recognition of the present age as one of absolute sin, Lukács urgently sought deliverance and redemption. In MacIntyre’s argument, Lukács learned three lessons in this period, from Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and the Russian revolutionary terrorist Boris Savinkov. Undoubtedly, these are related to the biographical experiences discussed above – although MacIntyre does not explore this dimension. From Kierkegaard, Lukács learned to ‘… entertain the thought that what faith in God – for which Lukács substitutes faith in a Utopian future – may require of us is a “teleological suspension of the absolute”; that is, a willingness to perform acts which are normally taken to be unqualifiedly prohibited, as Abraham was by faith willing to kill Isaac, an act of murder, even if commanded by God’.76 74 75 76

Lukács 1983b, pp. 158–60. Lukács 1983b, p. 158. MacIntyre 2006, p. 158.

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From Dostoyevsky, Lukács learned the closely-related lesson that ‘… it may be part of saintliness to be willing to sin out of compassion, as Sonja sins in Crime and Punishment’.77 Given his inability to act and his ascetic relationship toward intimacy (noted above), this lesson bears special weight. If one approaches the other or oneself as a saint, it indicates a reluctance to face one’s finitude or to reconcile with the absolutely necessary evil of the moment of being-for-self.78 Finally, from Savinkov, Lukács learned that one must be willing to sacrifice one’s personal integrity to duty; that in certain circumstances, ‘[t]o fail to sin may be to sin’.79 These lessons culminated in Lukács’s quasi-religious conversion to communism. He famously expressed this conversion through a confession of both sin and the necessity of sin for salvation: … only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly – and tragically – moral. To express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the incomparably beautiful words of Hebbel’s Judith: ‘Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me – who am I to be able to escape it?’80 Of this conversion, MacIntyre writes: What then was the moment of Lukács’s conversion? It was the moment at which he not only for the first time saw and felt himself as morally selfindulgent in his condemnation of Bolshevism, as sacrificing the future possibility of a humane society to his selfish regard for his own moral integrity, but also understood himself as impaled on a moral and philosophical contradiction, which could be resolved only by joining the Communist Party and affirming its doctrines.81 MacIntyre explains Lukács’s conversion as a resolution of a Kierkegaardian ‘Either-Or’ choice; a choice so fundamental that it cannot be supported by 77 78

79 80 81

MacIntyre 2006, p. 158. As Rose wrote in her final essay, published before her death: ‘To know the violence at the heart of the human spirit gives death back its determination and its eternity’ (Rose 1996, p. 141). This, in her profound and moving argument, prepares one for ‘noble politics’ which is, as she suggests following Nietzsche, a ‘bridge to love’ (Rose 1996, p. 144). MacIntyre 2006, p. 158. Lukács 1972l, p. 11. MacIntyre 2006, p. 160.

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reason, but which creates, after the fact, its own retroactive justification and framework within which meaning – including ethical meaning – can unfold.82 These observations, which are undoubtedly well founded, constitute a critique of Lukács, although MacIntyre does not lay stress on this. However, what matters for the argument at hand is the significance that these moments have from the point of view of the philosophy of praxis that Lukács developed after his leap of faith. The essential point is that through a total admission of sin and through a leap towards a new, committed vantage-point, oriented towards the practice of the proletariat, an ethical bridge was formed between the individual and history. This, then, is the intellectual side of the personal self-emptying described above. MacIntyre is also correct that Lukács, as he developed his ideas in the 1920s and beyond, increasingly distanced himself from his leap, obscuring its meaning under layers of self-critique and with an aversion to his pre-Marxist works. This also partly explains why the path between the individual (trapped in the contemplative stance) and history, while clearly present in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, nevertheless requires careful excavation. The above commentary is important because it pushes away from any purely personal path towards ethical reconciliation. Undoubtedly, such a path existed for Lukács; he remained in love with Gertrúd Bortstieber until his death. Yet Lukács also sought ethical reconciliation on a social and historical level. In his ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis’ Adorno notes, critically, that the sublation of the ethical into the social, and then, into the political is a classically Hegelian move.83 Yet, given the actuality of revolution within which Lukács found himself, and given the intellectual resources he found at hand, this sublation took the form of a leap or a decision to commit himself to the cause of the proletariat. As MacIntyre notes, this decision, in itself a leap of faith, made possible all the insights of his philosophy of praxis, developed in the 1920s.84 Moreover, while I have argued that love forms part of the conceptual framework of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, it admittedly plays a subterranean role upon which Lukács barely reflected. This was not a man who was ever given, at least in his Marxist days, to introspection or psychology. Thus, Lukács’s conversion occupies a difficult halfway house between Hegel and a Kierkegaardian irrationalism born of the most radical and tragic Kantianism. Herein likes the subjective foundation for both the defence and the 82 83 84

MacIntyre 2006, p. 159. Adorno 1998a, Section 3. This observation, and the critique of philosophies of praxis that underpins it, will be discussed in Chapter 9. MacIntyre 2006.

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critique of Lukács proposed in this work. In short, Lukács entered into the circle of speculative philosophy. It is this and only this that gives his work its ongoing significance. Yet, Lukács was not capable of reflecting upon this philosophically. This is why the shape of philosophy can be discerned in his work, but only against his wishes. This is also what gives his philosophy its tragic and ultimately Kantian or Fichtean character. I will return to this point in Chapter 9. This is also what justifies the philosophical-biographical approach I have chosen in this section, which diverges from the otherwise strict attempt at a conceptual progression I have attempted elsewhere. If I am right, and this is the aspect of his life and philosophy upon which Lukács was least capable of reflecting, then while subjectively founding the speculative side of his work, it is also the least reflective, and therefore the least speculative moment in his philosophy of praxis. To return to the analysis, notwithstanding the fact that Lukács shifted sharply away from the Kierkegaardian framework that made this decision possible, it is evident that his ethical leap left a strong residue in his works from the 1920s. In a 1919 speech at a young workers’ conference, during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács informed his audience that ‘We all who struggle for the victory of the Proletariat are poisoned victims of Capitalism without exception’.85 Lukács viewed this admission of sin as both prerequisite to and compatible with the discovery of a social-ethical basis for communism. As Judith Butler notes, perhaps echoing MacIntyre’s assessment above, this constitutes part of Lukács’s overcoming of what Hegel termed the ‘beautiful soul’.86 As noted in the introduction, as a Deputy Commissar, Lukács demonstrated his willingness to both sin and to confront the evil of sin. He did so without becoming evil. This permitted love to also leave its telltale traces in his political and theoretical work. In the essay ‘The Moral Foundations for Communism’, Lukács argued that love will be the foundation for socialism. He wrote: … when economic life as well as the problems of life-sustenance cease to play a role in the construction of human existence, – when the question arises: what will sustain and bind this new society: what will be the most important content of its members’ lives? This question can be answered only via ethics. The radical extermination of class differences had only a meaning when, with its ouster, everything else that divided human beings form one another, from their mutuality of existence, was also ousted:

85 86

Lukács 1991c, p. 112. Butler 2010, p. 2.

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every anger and hatred, every jealousy and every vanity. With one word: when the classless society becomes the society of mutual love and understanding.87 Lukács reasserts in this essay that an inner transformation alone cannot bring on a new social order: ‘Until these social frames [communism] are constructed, until then every such inner transformation is futile’. Yet he also argues that communism itself is impossible, economically, ‘… unless the classless society becomes at the same time the society of love’. Prior to the construction of such a society, Lukács argues that communists must cultivate an ‘inner preparedness for love … a readiness for a new attitude [must] be present in everyone: for love, understanding and togetherness’.88 While Lukács’s concept of praxis supersedes immediate and interpersonal ethics, it very clearly contains an ethical component: love. Love is a reconciliation of self and other, in which neither commands and neither obeys. In the sphere of politics, the capacity to bear the ambivalence and beauty of such a relation with the other – in this case, the party – grounds one’s capacity to maintain and reflect upon a critical and yet committed stance. Thus, love forms the subjective foundation of Lukács’s uniquely critical and democratic articulation of Leninism, which will be fully explained in Chapter Seven. Suffice to say, the tragedy of this was that history and the essence of Leninism forbade any reciprocity whatsoever. These reflections – philosophical and biographical – round out our account of the essential mediation beyond the contemplative stance. For Lukács, this was in the first place, an ethic of voluntary self-sacrifice, whereby the individual dedicates himself to the practical-utopian project of the proletariat. Nevertheless, just as self-sacrifice did not conclude Lukács’s romantic life, this moment does not conclude the development of the contemplative stance towards praxis. After all, being for other is just the inverse of being-for-self. An ethical commitment, even a radical one that is self-sacrificing, is entirely compatible with reification, as has been shown above. Rather, what is needed is a comportment capable of reconciling with the other and being at home with them. However, while enough to sustain a loving relationship, more than love was needed to refound Marxian philosophy. The value, then, of this stance is

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Lukács 1991a, p. 76. Lukács 1991a, p. 77. It is worth noting that here Lukács appears to be messianic; it is at least implied that love is impossible prior to communism. The ethic is thus cast into the future. Chapter 9 will return to this point.

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that it forces the particular to account for him or herself in the face of what is universal. This opens the way to further progress within the contemplative stance. For the time being, a conceptual basis has been outlined which provides for the individual’s ethical decision to commit to the standpoint of the proletariat and its praxis. Yet the self-comprehension of this standpoint has not yet been outlined. This will be undertaken via a critique of ideologies which emerge on the basis of the objective side of the contemplative stance. The point of this is less to discredit or defeat those ideologies, but rather, to clarify via selfcriticism theory as oriented towards praxis. Finally, it is important to note: the ethical moment outlined above provides the enduring motivation for this further labour of the negative. Provided this labour is ongoing, love and emptiness are never in vain.

3

The Critique of Naturalism You want to live ‘according to nature’? O you noble Stoics, what fraudulent words! Think of a being such as nature is, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain; think of indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to such indifference … The truth of it is, however, quite different: while you rapturously pose as deriving the canon of your law from nature, you want something quite the reverse of that, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe your morality, your ideal, to nature, yes to nature itself, and incorporate them in it; you demand that nature should be nature ‘according to the Stoa’ and would like to make all existence exist only after your own image – as a tremendous eternal glorification to the universalisation of Stoicism! Nietzsche89

The overcoming of the subjective side of the contemplative stance, by an individual labour of theory, provides the conceptual basis for a consideration of the objective side of the contemplative stance. As the goal of this conceptual progression is to chart a path between praxis as an abstract theoretical and ethical principle, and actualised praxis, the standpoint of theory must ultimately find

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Nietzsche 2003a, §. 9.

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a way to encounter history. Prior to this, the immediate and abstractly objective instantiation of the standpoint of theory must be traversed. This will be achieved by way of a reconstruction of Lukács’s critique of naturalism. Given the quite ethical and subjective discussion preceding, this must seem incongruous. Yet, the conceptual necessity of this moment exists in the fact that naturalism consists in an immediate projection of the standpoint of theory onto nature itself. This is the position of theory which is both against itself and for an abstract and universal other. The metacritique of this reveals an occluded social basis for naturalism. The fact that Lukács was so roundly condemned for his critique of naturalism – and that this criticism (as we will see) has continued unto the present day – indicates that he hit a nerve, so to speak.90 This section will defend Lukács on the question of nature and in so doing will complete the mediation of the contemplative stance in preparation for an engagement with the social totality and history proper. Lukács is infamous for having argued that ‘Nature is a social category’. In addition to making this claim in History and Class Consciousness, he expressed it forcefully in a review of Wittfogel’s The Science of Bourgeois Society, writing: ‘For the Marxist as a historical dialectician both nature and all the forms in which it is mastered in theory and practice are social categories; and to believe that one can detect anything supra-historical or supra-social in this context is to disqualify oneself as a Marxist’.91 There is no indication that Lukács retreated from this formulation at any point during the 1920s, as he elaborated on it at length in his Defence of History and Class Consciousness. This will be outlined shortly. The formulation – that nature is a social category – is, however, repeated a few times in History and Class Consciousness. In one instance, he clarifies it as follows: ‘That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e. nature’s form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned’.92 As Andrew Feenberg notes, despite what commentators like Colletti (discussed above) assert, at no point during the 1920s did Lukács reject the natural sciences as a mode of comprehension suitable for generating knowledge of

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For a contemporary addition to the subgenre of naturalistic denunciations of Lukács, see ‘Lukács on Science: A New Act in the Tragedy’ by Paul Burkett (Burkett 2013). The only contribution Burkett’s article makes is the addition of an ecologically moralising tone. Andrew Feenberg’s excellent reply renders further discussion unnecessary (see Feenberg 2015). Lukács 1972c, p. 144. Lukács 1967a, p. 234.

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nature.93 Instead, Lukács’s goal was the dereification of knowledge. This entails two claims: firstly, the rejection of the methodology of natural science as appropriate to society and secondly, the historicisation of natural science. None of this entails the denial of the existence of nature or the validity of natural science, nor does it demand the reduction of nature to an identical subject-object. Feenberg explains Lukács’s meaning as follows: The theorist should become ‘conscious that the categories in which he conceives the objective reality (society and nature) are determined by the social being of his present moment, that they are only mental summations of this objective reality. (Categories are “forms of existence, conditions of existence” – Marx.)’ But the outcome of such dereification of nature is quite different from the dereification of society. Since nature as a system or totality does not depend on the unconsciousness of the practices in which it is understood, self-consciousness does not overthrow its reified from of objectivity although some results of scientific research may indeed be overthrown.94 What do these points mean and what do they entail for Lukács’s conception of nature? As was shown in Chapter Two, reification extends to nature and explains the apparent independence of nature from society. In a reified society, owing to the divorce between subject and society, society is naturalised as a second nature. In addition to creating the illusion that society is immutable, this gives rise to the ideological view that knowledge of nature exists prior to and independent of society and, therefore, is paradigmatic for understanding society. Where the Marxism of the Second International uncritically assumed the ontological primacy of nature, Lukács insists instead on the ontological and epistemological primacy of society. That society would not appear primary is a consequence of a reified social order which obscures its own history and genesis. Drawing on Marx, Tönnies and Hegel, Lukács notes that the intellectual forms with which we perceive nature are socially conditioned: After Hegel had clearly recognised the bourgeois character of the ‘laws of nature’, Marx pointed out that ‘Descartes with his definition of animals as mere machines saw with the eyes of the manufacturing period,

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Feenberg 2014, p. 48. Feenberg 2014, p. 141.

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while in the eyes of the Middle Ages, animals were man’s assistants’; and he adds several suggestions towards explaining the intellectual history of such connections. Tönnies notes the same connection even more bluntly and categorically: ‘A special case of abstract reason is scientific reason and its subject is the man who is objective, and who recognises relations, i.e. thinks in concepts. In consequence, scientific concepts which by their ordinary origin and their real properties are judgements by means of which complexes of feelings are given names, behave within science like commodities in society. They gather together within the system like commodities on the market. The supreme scientific concept which is no longer the name of anything real is like money. E.g. the concept of an atom, or of energy’.95 This is only heretical if natural science is accorded ontological primacy. Moreover, nowhere does it state that nature is constructed by an idealist subjectobject, in the form of labour. Indeed, History and Class Consciousness makes an explicit case against such an idealist reading of the concept of nature, although this has been lost on Lukács’s critics. In ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’, following Hegel, Lukács designates art, religion and philosophy as spheres of ‘absolute spirit’.96 Lukács is insistent that artefacts of absolute culture are conditioned by their social origin, but nonetheless have the potential to outlive the social foundations to which they owe their origin. Instead, they disclose an aspect of being itself. This asserts both the prior existence of nature (but not its ontological priority) and the idea that part of the significance of absolute spirit is that it captures an eternal truth about our relationship with nature. So, nature is neither excluded nor reduced to humanity. Rather, this implies that the process of human cultivation is equally a process of the mastery of nature and of rendering nature for us. In principle, History and Class Consciousness, despite the brevity of Lukács’s comments, suggests that we are that part of nature which has split itself off, and, via labour, become conscious of itself. This is essentially the position that Lukács defends during the latter part of the 1920s. Further, this suggests that our knowledge of nature is always mediated firstly by social categories and that nature is unknowable outside of these social categories. 95 96

Lukács 1967a, pp. 130–1. As has already been quoted, he writes: ‘in contrast to the forms of the objective spirit (economics, law and the state) which shape social, purely human interactions […] [the spheres of absolute spirit] are also essentially, although in ways that differ from each other, involvements of man with nature, both with the nature that surrounds him and with that which he finds within himself’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 235).

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To the contemplative consciousness, our categories – and the content upon which they operate – are reified and hypostatised. In the context of his discussion of reification, Lukács notes this: ‘What is novel about modern rationalism is its increasingly insistent claim that it has discovered the principle which connects up all phenomena which in nature and society are found to confront mankind. Compared with this, every previous type of rationalism is no more than a partial system’.97 So under capitalism, nature is primarily instituted as an ‘aggregate of a system of laws’.98 Correspondingly, our knowledge of nature becomes rational, calculable and capable of infinite expansion. This expansive and universal rationalism is the theoretical reflection of the vast expansion of the exploitation of nature that has occurred under capitalism. However, as was mentioned above, in Chapter Three, in connection with labour, corresponding to this there is an opposed, romantic conception of nature. Given that the fatalistic and rationalist conception of nature outlined above excludes aspects of humanity and nature itself, it gives rise to ‘another conception of nature, a value concept, wholly different from the first one and embracing a different cluster of meanings’.99 (Here, Lukács’s term ‘value concept’ refers not to economic value, but to qualitative value). He believes that an antinomy exists between reified nature and a romantic or qualitative representation of nature. He explains the point as follows, using the history of natural law as a case study: For here [in the history of natural law] we can see that ‘nature’ has been heavily marked by the revolutionary struggle of the bourgeoisie: the ‘ordered’, calculable, formal and abstract character of the approaching bourgeois society appears natural by the side of the artifice, the caprice and the disorder of feudalism and absolutism. At the same time, if one thinks of Rousseau, there are echoes of a quite different meaning wholly incompatible with this one. It concentrates increasingly on the feeling that social institutions (reification) strips man of his human essence and that the more culture and civilisation (i.e. capitalism and reification) take possession of him, the less able he is to be a human being. And with a reversal of meanings that never becomes apparent nature becomes the repository of all these inner tendencies opposing the growth of mechanisation, dehumanisation and reification.100

97 98 99 100

Lukács 1967a, p. 113. Lukács 1967a, p. 136. Lukács 1967a, p. 136. Lukács 1967a, p. 136.

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Lukács continues these reflections, noting that nature can be imbued with nostalgia for a human essence that has been lost. Nature becomes a symbol for humanity’s lost wholeness: ‘But at the same time, it can be understood as that aspect of human inwardness which has remained natural, or at least tends or longs to become natural once more. “They are what we once were”, says Schiller of the forms of nature, “they are what we should once more become” ’.101 These two antinomies suggest a third concept of nature based on the reconciliation between nature and ourselves. Nature, in this third conception, represents … authentic humanity, the true essence of man liberated from the false, mechanising forms of society: man as a perfected whole who has inwardly overcome, or is in the process of overcoming, the dichotomies of theory and practice, reason and the senses, form and content; man whose tendency to create his own forms does not imply an abstract rationalism which ignores concrete content; man for whom freedom and necessity are identical.102 Similar points were noted in connection with labour, in Chapter 3 where the aim was to establish labour’s capacity to create and its capacity to produce ontological novelty. Here, Lukács suggests that a reconciliation between man and nature will free man to create his own forms without imposing abstract rationalism on the concrete content of nature. This strongly suggests that nature is not reducible to humanity; in fact, it suggests the opposite. For labour to be capable of producing ontological novelty, nature too must provide qualitatively infinite material upon which this might be sustained. For Lukács, representation is not reconciliation. He sees the key to the theoretical resolution to the antinomies which emerge on the basis of reification and the contemplative stance as being the standpoint of labour.103 For Lukács, the

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Lukács 1967a, p. 136. Lukács 1967a, pp. 136–7. The reconciliation between man and nature was also implied in the example of landscape painting, mentioned above in connection with the standpoint of labour. In Chapter 1, this example was cited to illustrate the dimensions of Lukács’s concept of labour. Equally, however, as we have seen, Lukács held that art might depict a reconciliation between humanity and nature (Lukács 1967a, pp. 157–8). Lukács 1967a, pp. 206–7. This also informs Lukács’s criticism of Hegel’s concept of nature. On the one hand, while Lukács praises Hegel for having discerned the ontological primacy of society and history over nature, he faults him for tending to reduce nature to the idea by viewing it as a negative other of spirit. This, in turn, leads Lukács to criticise Hegel for making a ‘positive dialectics’ of nature impossible. In Lukács’s view, Hegel’s failure

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dereification of the concept of nature cannot take place on the basis of nature or even be thought from within the vantage point of a dualistic or naturalistically monist ontology. Lukács praised Hegel for having grasped this, writing: ‘… Hegel does perceive clearly at times that the dialectics of nature can never become anything more exalted than a dialectics of movement witnessed by the detached observer, as the subject cannot be integrated into the dialectical process, at least not at the stage reached hitherto’.104 Or, as Lukács expressed in a footnote to his essay ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’, ‘… the crucial determinants of dialectics – the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc. – are absent from our knowledge of nature’.105 These comments help us interpret Lukács’s occasional concession that there exists a dialectic of nature. He asserts that in order to think the dialectic, it must have some basis in nature. At the same time, nature is infinite. Insofar as we grasp dialectical categories in nature, these are what Lukács describes in his Defence of History and Class Consciousness as simple categories of the dialectic. They include the transition from quantity to quality, or the interaction between genus and individual, and so on. We only impute these logical patterns to nature from a higher standpoint, namely that of society.106 So, to Lukács, while some dialectical laws may be said to exist in nature; they emerge to consciousness on the basis of society at a certain stage of historical development which allows for their retroactive application to nature. To comprehend this and to avoid fetishistic and naturalistic concepts or articulations of ‘the dialectic’, society itself must be comprehended. This requires a dialectic of higher concepts, namely, consciousness. Lukács writes:

104 105 106

was the result of his historic situation; primarily that he wrote prior to the emergence of the proletarian movement (Lukács 1967a, pp. 236–7). While this last claim is true, the argument about Hegel’s alleged failure to comprehend nature is opaque and open to dispute, especially given the similarity between Lukacs and Hegel’s position. Nevertheless, the point is that at every step, Lukács was aware of the possibility of an idealist or subjectivist concept of nature, represented (in his mind) by Hegel and Fichte respectively. Lukács 1967a, p. 207. Lukács 1967a, p. 24. He writes: ‘… I characterise as the decisive dialectical categories not transformation of quantity into quality, etc., but rather interaction of subject and object, unity of theory and praxis, alteration of the categories as effect of the change of material (reality underlying the categories)’ (Lukács 2002, p. 112).

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From this we deduce the necessity of separating the merely objective dialectics of nature from those of society. For in the dialectics of society the subject is included in the reciprocal relation in which theory and practice become dialectical and refer to one another. (It goes without saying that the growth of knowledge about nature is a social phenomenon and therefore to be included in the second dialectical type.)107 This insight has two consequences. Firstly, it entails once more that there is no immediate, sensuous or pure access to nature. Our understanding of nature is, before everything else, mediated by society and social categories which are, in themselves, dialectical. Yet, because capitalist society is only in itself dialectical and not conscious of its own logic, this can give rise to the naïve belief, common to theorists of the Second and Third Internationals, that dialectical thought derives from nature and somehow exists independently of society and history, or even of our ability to think it. Secondly, however, this insight helps us clarify Lukács’s understanding of dialectical philosophy itself, as the self-consciousness of capitalist society. This is an important point in his account of the self-understanding of theory and it points us towards the overarching dialectic of theory and practice, the subject of the chapters that follow. For now, however, a few more points about naturalism are necessary in order that the theory of praxis might free itself from uncomprehended, reified concepts. Against Rudas and Deborin, Lukács extensively emphasises that there is no immediate access to nature. To begin with, he cites the classical Marxist maxim that social being determines consciousness. Given this, he asks how Rudas and Deborin can conceive of knowledge of nature outside of social being, writing: Rudas’s conception is not only in its undialectical foundation close to the Kantian one, but it also takes as its starting point a similar ‘epistemological’ problematic, in so far as it does not seek the question of objectivity in the real historical interaction of the objective and subjective moments of development, in order to analyse it in its living interaction. Rather from the outset (a priori, timelessly in epistemological terms) it attempts to purify ‘objectivity’ of ‘all subjective ingredients’.108

107 108

Lukács 1967a, p. 207. Lukács 2002, p. 101.

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Lukács continues to explain that in order to preserve the ‘objectivity’ of nature, Rudas and Deborin attempt to separate nature and society by presenting society as the subject and nature as the object. This, however, leads at worst to the conclusion that nothing in history or society is objective – a conclusion sharply and obviously at odds with Marxism – or at best to the conclusion that nature exists independently of society and history and impacts upon society and history ‘from outside’. Rudas falls into this mistake insofar as he believes that science, with its privileged access to nature, will ‘drum’ dialectical logic into the heads of scientists.109 Lukács responds as follows: And if, accordingly, the reason for the transformation of our knowledge of nature is not sought in the transformation of social being (which always changes the type and degree, etc., of the exchange of matter with nature), then either pure idealism ensues, as with Comrade Rudas and his immanent-dialectical development of science, or it must be accepted that the fundamental changes in natural science at any one time are reflections of changes in nature. (Along the lines of – the sun used to circle around the earth, but now the relationship has reversed itself – and so Copernicus is explained; but we do not want to go any further with this nonsense.)110 This is to say, the consequence of the ontological or epistemological prioritisation of nature is very far from the hard-headed materialism imagined by its proponents. The logical consequence of naturalism, or any dualistic framework which presents nature externally as object, is out and out crude idealism.111 This is precisely because the concept of nature being used by Rudas and Deborin is an unconscious and abstract one which occurs estranged from its social origins. This falls into the mistake of positing nature as an abstract and absolutely positive whole. Their position either implies absolute knowledge of nature (which is patently not the case), or it renders nature as a thing-in-itself which we infinitely approximate by reflecting it. This, in turn, establishes knowledge as an infinite quantitative process of expansion, that is, a bad or finitised infinite. This both denies the qualitative and creative aspect of labour and splits the concept of nature between positivity (nature as known) and abstract negativity (nature as thing-in-itself). 109 110 111

Lukács 2002, p. 95. Lukács 2002, p. 106. Lukács 2002, pp. 107–8.

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In other words, the reified idea of nature both estranges human activity onto nature, investing in nature qualities which are excluded from humanity due to reification, and posits an aspect of nature as eternally unknowable. One is reminded of Lukács’s paraphrase of Rickert: Rickert once described materialism as an inverted Platonism. And he was right in so doing. As long as thought and existence persist in their old, rigid opposition, as long as their own structure and the structure of their interconnections remain unchanged, then the view that thought is a product of the brain and hence must correspond to the objects of the empirical world is just as much a mythology as those of recollection and the world of Platonic ideas.112 Or, to quote Engels in Dialectics of Nature: ‘… according to an old and wellknown dialectic law, incorrect thinking, carried to its logical conclusion, inevitably arrives at the opposite of its point of departure’.113 This point will be emphasised shortly. However, prior to this, Lukács’s own account of nature and natural science must be completed. His comments will be quoted at length in order to render his position unmistakable. Self-evidently society arose from nature. Self-evidently nature and its laws existed before society (that is to say before humans). Self-evidently the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it weren’t already effective as a principle of development of nature before society, if it did not already objectively exist. From that, however, follows neither that social development could produce no new, equally objective forms of movement, dialectical moments, nor that the dialectical moments in the development of nature would be knowable without the mediation of these new social dialectical forms. For obviously we can speak only about those moments of the dialectic that we already know or are on the point of knowing. The dialectical conception of knowledge as a process does not only include the possibility that in the course of history we get to know new contents, new objects, that we have not known until now. It also means that new contents can emerge, which can be understood only with the aid of principles of knowledge that are just as newly available. We are aware that at this very moment we know only one part of infinitely objective reality (and that part quite certainly is known only partially correctly). But in understanding the process of 112 113

Lukács 1967a, p. 202. Engels 1987, p. 354.

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knowledge dialectically, as a process, we must also understand this process as, at the same time, part of the objective social process of development. That is to say, we must understand that the what, the how, the how far, etc., of our knowledge is determined by the stage of development of the objective process of development of society. In so far as we grasp the dialectical character of knowledge we understand it simultaneously as a historical process. As a historical process, knowledge is only one part, only the consciousness (correctly or falsely conscious) part of the historical process of development of that uninterrupted transformation of social being, which occurs likewise in uninterrupted interaction with nature (exchange of matter between society and nature).114 Once more, this is to say that insofar as we wish to comprehend the philosophical significance of scientific knowledge, our attention is turned back towards society. Society and nature are here thought of as a totality which is comprehensible on the basis of the higher dialectics of society. Indeed, Lukács anticipated that this would be interpreted as a relativistic or subjective position which equates the scientific knowledge of dissimilarly developed civilisations. This was clearly not his position. The scientific knowledge of any historical moment is only relative insofar as it might be modified or falsified through higher developments. This requires the higher development of economic structures and social relations. So all knowledge of objectivity – including both nature and society – is mediated by categories which emerge on the basis of the ‘social being of [the] present moment’.115 This is relativism only in the sense that it calls for an awareness of the limits and social contingency of knowledge. Thus, ‘knowledge itself is understood to be just as much a product of the objective process of history. It is not compelled to absolutise either the knowledge itself, or the present historical reality which determines the form and content of knowledge …’116 In the context of his critique of Engels, Lukács explains this point using more Hegelian terminology. In science and nature, the development of knowledge proceeds through the antinomy of ‘in itself’ and ‘for us’, which in fact, correspond.117 It is on this ground that Lukács takes exception to Engels’ solution to the problem of the thing-in-itself (which, as we have seen, Lukács believes is at the core of reified thought). In Lukács’s view, the fault in Engels’s argument 114 115 116 117

Lukács 2002, pp. 102–3. Lukács 2002, p. 105. Lukács 2002, p. 105. Lukács 2002, p. 119.

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occurs when he asserts that modern chemistry, by synthesising organic compounds, transforms these substances from a thing-in-itself to a thing-for-us.118 Lukács replies as follows: Above all we must correct a terminological confusion that is almost incomprehensible in such a connoisseur of Hegel as was Engels. For Hegel the terms ‘in itself’ and ‘for us’ are by no means opposites; in fact they are necessary correlatives. That something exists merely ‘in itself’ means for Hegel that it merely exists ‘for us’. The antithesis of ‘for us or in itself’ is rather ‘for itself’, namely that mode of being posited where the fact that an object is thought of implies at the same time that the object is conscious of itself.119 As was mentioned above, the thing-in-itself, namely, the object of perception (whether this is a discreet object or a totality, such as nature), is regularly and comprehensively rendered a thing-for-us by science. This is to say, a thing can be grasped relatively easily in terms of its appearance or its phenomena. This is more than adequate to the practical requirements of modern industry. However, this move does nothing to solve the irrationality of the thing-in-itself; the irrationality of the contents. Grasping a thing as a thing-for-us leaves an unexplained and irrational remainder which must be covered over dogmatically (for example, by insisting that the thing-in-itself has been grasped completely, as is common in works which propose a reflection theory of knowledge, such as Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism).120 Alternately, the irrationality of the thing-in-itself might be maintained alongside the rationality of the thing-for-us. This sacrifices the universality of reason by delimiting the sphere in which reason operates and conceding that it is founded irrationally. Finally, insofar as the aspiration towards praxis is concerned, this view produces a pernicious dualism; truth might be located either on the side of the object (the thing-in-itself) or on the side of the subject (the thing-for-us), but these sides can never touch. Thus truth is rendered as variously external to either the subject or the object. It is worth observing that Lukács’s solution to this problem is conceptually very similar to that of Hegel. For instance, in the introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel deals with this issue in very clear terms. He grasps the basic scientific dialectic that Engels describes above – between a thing in-itself and 118 119 120

Lukács 1967a, p. 131. Lukács 1967a, p. 132. Lenin 1972, pp. 17–362.

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for us – and notes that through the process of science, these terms shift locations. What previously had been grasped as an attribute of the object in-itself, once discovered, becomes a truth that exists for us. Yet Hegel introduces here a third term: experience. By reflecting on the experience of this basic dialectic of science (the alteration between the in-itself and the for-us of an object) the scientific consciousness can obtain self-consciousness. This allows it to perceive, in principle, its unity with the object of cognition, and allows it to comprehend that the mysterious ‘in-itself’, which had been rendered as a hidden aspect of the object and external to the subject, is in fact merely the negative moment of a whole process in which consciousness, qua self-consciousness, is the active agent. Thus, the object (and, we might add, equally the subject) can become in-and-for itself, via a reunification under one concept. The point of this observation is that in his critique of Engels’s handling of the thing-in-itself, Lukács follows Hegel. Just as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit rises from the abstraction of sense certainty to the concrete spheres of society and history, so too does Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.121 Of course, the two part company over the status of philosophy. These points suggest that dereification must entail a transformation of science. In contradistinction to the scientific revolution that preceded the rise of universal capitalism, Lukács is clear that any such transformation of our scientific knowledge could only emerge following the establishment of communism. Lukács believes that this transformation of scientific knowledge entails a detailed research programme. In his view, Marx (and, we might add, Lukács himself) established only the basic fact that science and our perception of nature have a historical genesis and cannot exist outside or independent of social reality. However, in order to dereify scientific cognition genuinely, it would be necessary to discover which social categories inform scientific ones and how.122 This does not entail the overthrow of contemplative scientific knowledge. Rather, Feenberg proposes that Lukács avoids this consequence by means of a methodological separation between nature and society, a solution which is rather different:

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Hegel 2018, §§. 84–8. A similar relationship may be observed in the movement between being-for-self and being-for-other, in Chapter Three of the Science of Logic, albeit within the absolutely presuppositionless conceptuality of absolute being as it unfolds according to its purely immanent logic. Of course, here, experience (which is too psychological a category for such an essential dialectic) is not the key mediation. Instead, Hegel suggests that determinate being reconciles between the two abstractions (cf. Hegel 1991c, Ch. 3). Lukács 2002, p. 117.

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There is a realm in which consciousness is practice, in which we can transform our objects by becoming socially self-conscious, and alongside it, there is another realm in which our action will always be contemplative, i.e., technical. The first realm is society, the second is nature. Lukács claims that we need not organize our whole social life through technical control of some human beings by others, as capitalism requires, but that we will always stand in a technical relation to nature.123 In Feenberg’s argument, therefore, reification is a permanent aspect of our relationship with nature. What matters for him is less the absolute abolition of reification by an identical promethean subject-object, but rather, the institution of a permanent process of mediation in which we reappropriate the categories with which we comprehend nature.124 This avoids relativism because it views knowledge as capable of qualitative expansion and progress. Insofar as it envisages a transformation of science, it in no way implies the need for a ‘proletarian’ science, let alone the destruction of science. Feenberg sums up where this account situates Lukács’s concept of nature. Notwithstanding certain reservations about his proposal, the summary is useful not simply for nature, but because it returns us to history: Under the finite horizon, history, not nature or the thing-in-itself, is ultimate reality. The reification of nature is a moment of the historical process in which the experience, knowledge and technical control of nature develop. The social totality contains a reified moment – nature – that is not cancelled by self-consciousness, but which rather opens up a realm of irreducible facts and theories. Nature may not be dereified by human practice on the same terms as society, but its participation in the dialectic reveals it to be fundamentally historical.125 It may be objected that Feenberg’s account of Lukács’s concept of nature goes too far in eternalising reification as a necessary aspect of our engagement with nature. Strictly speaking, however, this is not a disagreement over nature, but over the nature of reification and dereification. The point will be discussed below, in light of the discussion of praxis and the absolute. For now, however, the important point is that naturalism, especially the naturalism of the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals, is a barrier to 123 124 125

Feenberg 2014, p. 135. Feenberg 2014, p. 139. Feenberg 2014, p. 142.

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the goal of dereification, both in theory and in practice. Firstly, naturalism – as a form of reified thought – locates the truth outside of human knowledge or activity. At its most extreme, this leads to the suggestion that truth exists independently of being thought by humanity. Seen in this light, the efforts of Rudas and Deborin, as well as other defenders of naturalism, are in fact attempts to exclude humanity and human activity from thought. While this might proceed today under the cover of an environmentalist or even romantic sacralisation of nature, the problem with reification is not that we have subordinated nature, but that due to its reification, we are in fact still subordinate to nature: … the absence of such self-knowledge on the part of society is itself only the intellectual reflex of the fact that objective, economic socialisation in this sense had not yet been established. The umbilical cord between man and nature had not yet been cut by the process of civilisation. For every piece of historical knowledge is an act of self-knowledge. The past only becomes transparent when the present can practice self-criticism in an appropriate manner; ‘as soon as it is ready for self-criticism to a certain extent, dynamei so to speak’.126 So for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, naturalism is a case of reified consciousness par excellence. This is not only because naturalism excludes humanity, but because it limits our emancipation from nature. Because scientific naturalism, as defended by ideologists of the Second and Third Internationals defends nature as an absolute object (independent of our knowing) and because it depends on a method which excludes the subject (be that the experimenter or society and history as conditioning our knowledge), it is guilty of the very crime with which Lukács was accused. Naturalism produces a flat identity of subject and object; the absent subject of the natural scientist is submerged in the absolute objectivity of nature. As was suggested above, undialectical thinking arrives at the opposite of its starting point. Lukács’s critique is conceptually very similar to Hegel’s ringing condemnation of the naturalism of his own day, which he developed in a discussion on the observation of nature, and then, of phrenology: What was sublated by the very first observation of inorganic nature, namely, that the concept is supposed to be on hand as a thing, is established by this last mode of observation so as to make the actuality of spirit

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Lukács 1967a, p. 237.

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itself into a thing, or, to put it conversely, so as to give dead being the significance of spirit. Observation has thus reached the point where it gives articulation to what our concept of observation was, namely, that the certainty of reason seeks itself as an objective actuality. – By this it is not meant that spirit, represented by a skull, is declared to be a thing. Rather what is supposed to lie in this thought is certainly not materialism, as it is called. Rather, spirit must even more so be something very different from these bones. However, that spirit exists means nothing other than that it is a thing. When being as such, or being-a-thing, is predicated on spirit, then for that reason this is truly expressed by saying that spirit is the sort of thing which is a bone … Of spirit is to be said simply, ‘it is’. When otherwise it is said of spirit that it is, it has a being, it is a thing, an individual actuality, it is not thereby meant that it is something we can see, or take in our hands, or push around and so forth, but that is what is said of it, and what in truth the foregoing has been saying may be expressed in this way: The being of spirit is a bone.127 Although expressed in different language, Hegel here is making identical points to Lukács. Naturalism, under the guise of materialism, supposes that reason and truth are on hand in the form of an inert ‘thing’ – ultimately, the totality of nature. Insofar as this insight is brought to bear where spirit is concerned, it reduces spirit to an inert thing, a bone. This excludes spirit’s capacity for selfcreation. Equally, for Lukács, the naturalism of the Second International was allied with philosophical and political tendencies that excluded the possibility for human self-transformation in praxis. Moreover, the outcome of Hegel’s critique is similar to that of Lukács. In Hegel’s view the positive achievement of this stage of consciousness is the transition to a figure of reason capable of thinking itself. By reducing spirit to a pure inert category, which exists for consciousness in the form of being, the unmediated object (spirit itself) is made present and available to consciousness. Thus consciousness transfers its infinite judgement to itself, where it determines itself to be a self-consciousness with relation to the object. ‘That is, the category, which has run through the form of being in observation, is now posited in the form of being-for-itself. Consciousness no longer wants to find itself immediately. Rather, it wishes to engender itself by its own activity. It itself is in its eyes the purpose of its own activity in the way that in observation it was in its own eyes concerned merely with things’.128 127 128

Hegel 2018, §. 343. Hegel 2018, §. 343–4.

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So, in order to comprehend its essence and its real unity with the world, the standpoint of theory must move beyond an abstract relationship of being for the other. It must instead turn itself towards the spheres in which human selfactivity and self-comprehension might emerge: namely, the social totality and history.

chapter 5

The Critique of Ideology 1

The Standpoint of the Bourgeoisie But if we look more closely, we perceive that this history already formed, which is called or which we would like to call ‘non-contemporary’ or ‘past’ history, if it really is history, that is to say, if it means something and is not an empty echo, is also contemporary, and does not in any way differ from the other … Therefore this past fact does not answer to a past interest, but to a present interest, in so far as it is unified with an interest of the present life. Benedetto Croce1 All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should ‘vibrate in the historian’s mind’, that is to say, that the evidence for them should be here and now before him and intelligible to him. For history is not contained in books or documents; it lives only, as a present interest and pursuit, in the mind of the historian when he criticizes and interprets those documents, and by so doing relives for himself the states of mind into which he inquires. R.G. Collingwood2

Lukács’s conversion to Marxism assumed the actuality of proletarian praxis, both in Hungary, and, more importantly, in Russia and Germany. Nevertheless, Lukács joined a movement still dominated by a conception of theory inherited from the Second International. This is self-evidently true with respect to the social democratic movement. Yet it was also true, albeit less obviously so, with respect to the communist movement. With the partial exception of Lenin,

1 Croce 1921, p. 12. 2 Collingwood 1994, Ch. IV, §. 4, v.

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whose study of Hegel allowed him to begin to reformulate Marxism (at least in his own mind), the most prominent theorists of the Third International were loyal to a brand of Marxism passed down via Engels, Kautsky and Plekhanov.3 Luxemburg was a partial exception to this, although her untimely death denied her the opportunity to renew historical materialism. Politically speaking, these Marxisms were inadequate to the praxis Lukács expected of the proletariat, as Lukács experienced firsthand in the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution and in debates over the German Revolution. So in large part, the intent of History and Class Consciousness was political. However, Lukács’s political critique was underpinned by a theoretical critique which, for the purposes of the argument at present, is more significant. Indeed, the aim of his theoretical critique was to render historical materialism conscious of itself; to divest it of dogmatism and ideology in order that it might enjoy more political success. In short, Lukács sought to dereify Marxian theory itself. He accomplished this primarily by criticising ideologies which reproduced the immediacy of reification in thought. We have already observed such a critique of ideology with regards to nature. Now, social and political theories which form a barrier to praxis are to be considered. However, to be clear: while this account moves towards political practice, it remains on the level of theory. What we are dealing with, then, is theory which is striving towards practice. Consequently, this discussion still occurs within the domain of reification, although now, we are considering the reified thought as it occurs from the point of view of classes and parties (which nevertheless articulate themselves through individuals). Classes and parties have a superior purchase within the social totality and history. In this regard, in this chapter, theory advances towards its self-comprehension by way of totality and genesis. The end result will be a conception of theory which knows itself to be abstract, and which may, by virtue of this self-criticism, encounter the practice of the proletariat divested of ideology. This chapter will thus discuss firstly the standpoint of the bourgeoisie before turning to sectarianism, reformism and vulgar Marxism. 3 Goldmann 1967, p. 179. Kevin B. Anderson has persuasively argued that Lenin’s reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic enabled him to transform his own understanding of Marxism (Anderson 1995). This said, the notebooks produced by this reading were unavailable in the early 1920s. Moreover, brief pronouncements about the duty of Marxists to form a ‘society of materialist friends of the Hegelian dialectic’ aside, Lenin never produced a theoretical work explaining his new conception of Marxism, presuming indeed that he possessed one. As Lukács suggests in Lenin, Lenin’s transformation of Marxism, while theoretically informed, was primarily practical. This is in large part why the meaning of Leninism and the October Revolution have been debated constantly since 1917 (Lukács 1967b, pp. 12–3).

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The aim of sections 5.1 and 5.2 is to outline the basic antinomies, inherited from bourgeois society, which bind the workers’ movement to capitalism. Finally, in section 5.3, Lukács’s concept of the actuality of revolution will be discussed as this historic periodisation contains the key to the concrete, practical overcoming of these antinomies. Given the orthodox tenor of both social democratic and Third International Marxism, it is hardly surprising that Lukács’s theoretical heterodoxy antagonised leading theoreticians in both camps. Sometimes this heterodoxy can be overlooked; perhaps this is a by-product of Lukács’s relatively discreet rhetorical strategy which both inhabited the language of the Third International and avoided direct polemic. Of those figures associated with Communist orthodoxy in the 1920s, Lukács only criticised Engels and Bukharin by name – and even so, his critique was always couched in (sometimes backhanded) praise. Given this, the ferocity of the official reply to Lukács can appear disproportionate. A few things explain this situation. Firstly, because Lukács (unlike Korsch) was committed to loyal opposition within the Comintern, he expressed radical criticisms in increasingly orthodox language. This tactic is most clearly in evidence in Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. This is perhaps why no denunciations were issued of it, unlike History and Class Consciousness. Secondly, the political stakes of Lukács’s position were not lost on the leadership of the Third International. Where heresy is concerned, bureaucrats and doctrinaires possess a sense of smell that puts truffle pigs and bloodhounds to shame. So, Zinoviev’s famous speech at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, in which he denounced Lukács et al. should be understood as an attack order issued in the context of rapidly growing patronage and clientelism.4 Just as Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was overdetermined by a political struggle against Bogdanov and other leftists within the RSDLP, much of the controversy that arose in the 1920s was politically charged, even if it superficially centred on Lukács’s allegedly idealist distortion of historical materialism. Perhaps the most important charge to emerge was that Lukács reduced nature to an idea and disparaged the role of science.5 This interpret4 See Breines 1972. 5 In these debates, Abram Deborin and László Rudas represented the Communist orthodoxy (Deborin 1924, Rudas 1924). Despite Deborin’s interest in Hegel, as Jacoby notes, his version of Hegel heavily emphasised the ‘scientific’ Hegel, foregrounding a dialectics of nature in order to oppose the more historical and idealist Hegel they associated with Lukács and his so-called tendency (Jacoby 1981, pp. 100–3). The publication of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in 1925 only bolstered their view. As Yakhot argues, Deborin, while not as compromised as the cynical apparatchik intellectuals of high Stalinism, nevertheless formed a bridge between the intellectual openness of the early 1920s and the totalitarianism of the 1930s. His denunciation was

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ation was refuted above. However, this aspect of the anti-Lukács polemic was never particularly illuminating; it speaks more to the indignation of offended orthodoxy and naturalism than it does to Lukács’s ideas. After all, Lukács’s comments on nature in History and Class Consciousness are brief and almost always relate to other arguments. Lukács’s attack on naturalism should be understood as just one front in his campaign to elevate historical materialism to self-consciousness. If the idea that nature may be fully grasped objectively, free from social interference, is rejected, then it must be admitted that the forms of perception of nature – from sensory immediacy, to scientific cognition, aesthetic representation and philosophical comprehension – are made possible by society. Society, for Lukács, is ontologically primary; reification conceals this. So, in contradistinction to the theorists of Second International Marxism, who sought to underwrite the ‘dialectic’ with natural science, Lukács asserted that any socalled dialectic of nature may only be derived from a society which is itself dialectical. However, precisely because of its mystifying power, capitalism is only dialectical in-itself. Consequently, once it is denied a ‘view from nowhere’ (such as is provided by scientism or naturalism), historical materialism’s ability to think dialectically is underwritten by capitalism itself. Thus, historical materialism is nothing more than the self-consciousness of capitalism. In its naturalistic articulation, historical materialism is oblivious to its real social and historical grounds, and as a result, it is forced to transform the dialectic into a formalistic methodology. Insofar as theorists committed to historical materialism posit nature as a foundation for the dialectic – as did Engels as well as theorists of the Second and Third Internationals – historical materialism may not become self-conscious. Once naturalism is done away with, historical materialism may resume the pursuit of self-comprehension by reorienting towards society and history. Indeed, Lukács makes this point a number of times in History and Class Consciousness, as well as in his defence of it. In history, as opposed to in nature, the object strives to become for-itself. This is to say, self-consciousness is moment of history, but not of nature. Dereification can only be thought on the basis of society and history. Of course, the class consciousness of the proletariat is the ultimate bearer of this dereification. Yet, as suggested above, Lukács’s

sufficient to isolate and discredit intellectuals. Later, Deborin fell victim to the authoritarian culture he had played his part in producing as he too was sidelined and silenced, only to be rehabilitated under Khrushchev (Yakhot 2012). The social democratic orthodoxy was upheld by Siegfried Marck who placed less emphasis on naturalism, criticising instead Lukács’s vanguardism (see Marck 1924).

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account of the emergence of class consciousness and praxis presupposes a critique of reified historical and political theories of society and history. Much as the standpoint of the proletariat emerges through a critique of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, Lukács’s account of class consciousness emerges on the basis of a critique of bourgeois class consciousness and its representatives in the workers’ movement. The starting point for this is indicated at the beginning of the essay on ‘Class Consciousness’, in which Lukács outlines a basis upon which to analyse the consciousness of different classes. He notes that they act and think within the ‘objective possibility’ created by their composition.6 That is, the position and constitution of a class within the totality both situates and limits its interests and its potential cognizance of the world. Such an analysis, if accurate, makes it possible to impute a maximum class consciousness which corresponds to the objective situation. As Lukács stresses, this imputed consciousness is ‘… neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class’.7 Rather, in the last resort, all ‘historically significant’ actions of the class are determined by this imputed consciousness, which is equally crucial for understanding those actions retrospectively.8 What does this mean? Firstly, Lukács is careful to distinguish his concept of class consciousness from a merely empirical or mass-psychological account of consciousness. Instead, Lukács proposes a sort of Hegelised version of Weber’s ‘ideal type’ of consciousness. That is, imputed consciousness is an immanently transcendental ideal towards which the real, empirical consciousness of the class in question tends. Clearly, however, Lukács was no disinterested sociologist; he wished to transform the ideal type of proletarian consciousness into an actuality. Thus, what mattered to him were the available mediations between imputed and empirical class consciousness. Indeed, in his view, the antinomy between imputed and empirical consciousness only pushes towards resolution in the case of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In Lukács’s view, certain classes – namely, the peasantry and the middle class – are incapable of sustaining the most basic class consciousness.9 Thus amongst these classes, 6 Despite disagreeing with Lukács’s radicalism, Goldmann believes that this term, as well as the closely related ‘possible consciousness’, constitutes one of the enduring insights of History and Class Consciousness (Goldmann 1967, p. 178). 7 Lukács 1967a, p. 51. 8 Lukács 1967a, pp. 50–1. 9 Regrettably Lukács links the limits of the class consciousness of the petit bourgeoisie with a now clearly outmoded prediction about their inevitable historical eclipse. While historical predictions about the demise of the peasantry as a class have been vindicated, the same is patently not true of the many social groups that have been described as ‘middle class’ or

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the dialectical resolution of the problem of consciousness cannot commence. There exists no path between their imputed and empirical consciousness; if they unite, their unity is inorganic and based on an external hegemonic force. This is, of course, a repetition of Marx’s well-known metaphor concerning potatoes and sacks in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.10 Lukács was quite explicit that proletarian consciousness can only emerge on the basis of a critique of bourgeois consciousness: ‘Ideologically no less than economically, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are mutually interdependent’.11 In considering this, it is important to remember that Lukács was not primarily presenting an empirical or sociological description of the views of any actual class, or strata within that class. Nor was he generally discussing the perspectives of bourgeois parties or even bourgeois leaders, unlike Marx, for example, in his above-mentioned classic or in other works. Of course, such questions are important in the actualisation of class consciousness, including for the bourgeoisie. Yet this is jumping ahead. Indeed, whether or not the theorists Lukács discusses are drawn from the ranks of the bourgeoisie itself is a distant secondary question. To Lukács, one may look at the world from a basically bourgeois point of view if one eternalises or hypostatises the social relations of the bourgeoisie. In his view, the belief in the inevitable or natural basis of the bourgeois style of life and system of production was a revolutionary force during the Enlightenment, but over time became a barrier to the further development of thought. Although Lukács does not expand on the theme greatly in his works from the 1920s, a number of times he refers to a tendency for works penned from within a bourgeois viewpoint to become more mystifying, irrationalist and obscurantist in accordance with capitalism’s age. While these types of schema imply a model of capitalism in which it becomes increasingly decrepit as it ages, Lukács was clear to specify, citing Luxemburg and Lenin, that the demise of capitalism is no historical inevitability; there is no crisis too deep to be resolved by violence and renewed exploitation.12 Nevertheless, Lukács does present a narrative in which bourgeois thought becomes increasingly sterile, to the point of plagiarising aspects of proletarian thought; for instance, by conceding to the need for a planned economy.13 This narrative (which will later be considered in a

10 11 12 13

‘petit bourgeois’. Nevertheless, this does not affect the main thrust of his argument. Lukács 1967a, pp. 59–60. Marx and Engels 1979, p. 187. Lukács 1967a, p. 68. Lukács 1967a, p. 306. Lukács 1967a, p. 67.

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more philosophically developed form) is perhaps one of the easiest aspects of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to fault today. Yet, given his context in the early 1920s and the crisis of civilisation through which he lived, it is understandable. The consciousness of the bourgeoisie is, in Lukács’s view, unconsciously dialectical and therefore tragic. The resultant antinomies provide the necessary starting point for a dialectic of proletarian class consciousness. The first antinomies considered here concern history. Given that the bourgeoisie is more or less at home in its world, bourgeois thought tends to hypostatise the present as both its starting point and ultimate goal. This raises difficult questions for its understanding of and participation in history. While bourgeois thought is able to conceive of history as a problem, in Lukács’s view, history becomes an intractable problem. On the one hand, bourgeois thought is ‘… forced to abolish the process of history and regard the institutions of the present as eternal laws of nature which for ‘mysterious’ reasons and in a manner wholly at odds with the principles of a rational science were held to have failed to establish themselves firmly, or indeed at all, in the past’.14 In this fashion, the givenness of the present is projected into history, reducing it to a prehistory of capitalism. This, however, abolishes the qualitative specificity of the past. So, on the other hand, bourgeois thought banishes ‘… everything meaningful or purposive … from history’.15 As Lukács continues to explain, this makes it impossible to advance beyond the ‘individuality’ of the various epochs of history. In this case, ‘History must then insist with Ranke that every age is ‘equally close to God’, i.e. has attained an equal degree of perfection and that – for quite different reasons – there is no such thing as historical development’.16 This demonstrates the existence of two antinomies in the bourgeois view of history. The first, which we might call the fetishism of institutions, by naturalising the present, renders it impossible to understand the genesis of the present in human activity. If the institutions of the present were absent in previous eras, it is because they were suppressed by unnatural and irrational institutions such as the church or aristocracy. In this view, institutions are endowed with a transcendental existence and ‘[h]istory becomes fossilised in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men’.17 In the second side of the antinomy, history is viewed relativistically and irrationally, as subject to ‘blind forces’ which emerge as the ‘spirit of the people’ or ‘great men’ (or, as 14 15 16 17

Lukács 1967a, p. 48. Lukács 1967a, p. 48. Lukács 1967a, p. 48. Lukács 1967a, p. 48.

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we may add in the case of social history and structuralism respectively, of ‘little men’ and ‘structures’).18 In this case, history is reduced to contingency. Lukács argued that this excludes any principle of conceptual organisation other than aesthetic; history is presented merely as a narrative. This view equally hypostatises its present, although disingenuously under the cover of a refusal to impute anachronistic concepts (such as class) into pre-modern historical periods. Thus according to Lukács, in the bourgeois view, history may, at best, be regarded as an instrument which is senseless in itself wherein supra-historical principles are worked out. In the absence of the unity of genesis and totality, the most that is possible is a ‘formal typology of the manifestations of history and society using historical facts as illustrations. This means that only a chance connection links the theoretical system to the objective historical reality that the theory is intended to comprehend’.19 This is closely related to one of the criticisms Lukács makes of Hegel. In his view, for Hegel, history exists in order to abolish itself and give rise to a pure dialectic of ideas. Thus Hegel’s dialectic, in Lukács’s view, entertains history but only in order to resolve into an ahistorical absolute spirit.20 This criticism of Hegel will be addressed below. For now, these two antinomies are covertly united by their failure to comprehend the genesis of the present. The former treats man as an object, subject to natural and rational institutions which he may change only at his peril. The latter antinomy may appear to reinstate humanity, although it does so at the expense of comprehending the logic of the institutions that exist as alienated from man. Thus, objective history is either denied, regarded as the meaningless prehistory of the present or liquidated into a relativist flux. In place of these options, Lukács proposes that the objectivity of institutions be comprehended as ‘… the self-objectification of human society at a particular stage in its development; its laws hold good only within the framework of the historical context which produced them and which is in turn determined by them’.21 All history is thus the history of the present. This argument, therefore, turns our attention towards the concrete social relationships under question and the forms of objectivity they produce. The ground for answering these questions was established in Part One. Yet given that the task at hand is the clarification of theory to itself, this raises the question of why Marxism is capable of a superior concrete insight into history and society. In this connection, Lukács makes three important obser18 19 20 21

Lukács 1967a, p. 49. Lukács 1967a, p. 154. Lukács 1967a, p. 147. Lukács 1967a, p. 49.

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vations. Firstly, by grasping the present in light of its concrete totality – that is, in light of its essential logic – it is possible to understand genuinely the relationship of different classes, parties, theories and individuals to the total historical process. This, in turn, allows the Marxian theorist to comprehend the false consciousness of different classes in light of their necessity. As Lukács writes: Concrete analysis means then: the relation to society as a whole. For only when this relation is established does the consciousness of their existence that men have at any given time emerge in all its essential characteristics. It appears, on the one hand, as something which is subjectively justified in the social and historical situation, as something which can and should be understood, i.e. as ‘right’. At the same time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately. This is to say, objectively, it appears as a ‘false consciousness’. On the other hand, we may see the same consciousness as something which fails subjectively to reach its self-appointed goals, while furthering and realising the objective aims of society of which it is ignorant and which it did not choose.22 This allows us to avoid crudely functionalist analyses of the behaviour of classes or parties. Although this or that piece of legislation or initiative may well be ‘in the interests of the bourgeoisie’, to leave analysis at this implies a conspiracy theory view of the bourgeois hegemony which inadvertently overestimates the consciousness of the bourgeoisie while simultaneously dismissing their real consciousness as a mere appearance. Today this is a fairly unremarkable insight. At the time, however, it constituted a decisive innovation within Marxism, establishing totality as the category from which the theorist might pass judgement on various forms of false consciousness, as opposed to the economy or any such other categories. As Lukács wrote earlier in History and Class Consciousness: It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois

22

Lukács 1967a, p. 50. Although couched in terms of orthodoxy, this claim is at odds with the Marxism of Lukács’s day, which, at best, entertained only an implicit concept of totality. Under the sign of totality, the explanation for ideology is not sought in the ‘economic base’, as opposed to a false and ideological superstructure. Rather, ideology is both constituted by and constitutive of the totality, at all of its ontological levels and in all of its interrelated spheres.

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but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundation of a wholly new science … Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science.23 As has been argued, this is made possible by the standpoint of the proletariat. Yet this entails a second observation. Historical materialism is formed as a critique, made from the standpoint of the proletariat, of the false consciousness of the bourgeoisie, and is itself a concrete part of the historical process. This leads to the third and most important observation, that historical materialism itself must be historicised. This is to say, in creating the standpoint of the proletariat, capitalism itself creates the possibility for a non-ideological investigation of its own constitution and historical basis, as well as the history of precapitalist societies. In order to overcome the antinomies of the bourgeois view of history, Lukács proposes that theory grasp the essence of the social totality, by way of critique of its appearance. When these moments are understood together, it becomes possible to see that historical materialism itself is an aspect of the same objectivity of which it is critical. Thus, Lukács refounds historical materialism on the basis of what might be called, following Gramsci, absolute historicism. This perspective equally allows historical materialism to transcend the closely related antinomy (discussed above, in Chapters 2 and 3) between a dogmatic totality and fragmentation by aspiring towards a totalising analysis. The tension between the imputed and empirical class consciousness of the bourgeoisie suggests that bourgeois class consciousness, like proletarian, is formed via conscious leadership which identifies concrete mediators between an ascribed interest and an empirical capacity. At the level of the social totality, this is self-evidently a question of political leadership; the state is the key institution which mediates the class struggle and around which hegemony is formed. Although Lukács doesn’t draw this out as explicitly as other theorists (for instance, Gramsci), it is clear that he possesses an implicit theory of the state. That this theory remained implicit is doubtless a disadvantage, and, as we will see, one related to the essential failing in his philosophy of praxis. Nevertheless, his understanding of the state was alluded to during the

23

Lukács 1967a, p. 27.

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discussion of legality and jurisprudence which, as summarised above, draws extensively on Max Weber’s characterisation of the formal rationalism of the modern legal system. Additionally, as in Chapter 2, Lukács’s view can also be discerned via his metacritique of the intellectual antinomies generated by the state. Thus, parallel with the argument above, Lukács argues that the bourgeois view of law alternates between ahistorical naturalism and historical irrationalism.24 The former, in Lukács’s opinion, corresponds to the Enlightenment, while the latter represents a betrayal of the once-progressive intellectual mission of the bourgeoisie. Speaking of such ‘critical’ and ‘historical’ legal theorists, Lukács argues that ‘they are systematically abandoning the attempt to ground law in reason and to give it a rational content; law is henceforth to be regarded as a formal calculus with the aid of which the legal consequences of particular actions (rebus sic stantibus) can be determined as exactly as possible’.25 In Lukács’s view, the abandonment of reason as a foundation of law gives way to a cynical realism which confesses that that the law originates in an act of irrational violence.26 This point leads to a discussion of force and consent in the chapter ‘Legality and Illegality’. In this section, Lukács argues that while the law is grounded in the economy, ‘… the organs of authority harmonise to such an extent with the (economic) laws governing men’s lives, or seem so overwhelmingly superior that men experience them as natural forces, as the necessary environment for their existence. As a result they submit to them freely. (Which is not to say that they approve of them.)’27 As he continues to point out, an organisation which relies totally or overwhelmingly on force can only survive by permanently overcoming resistance from those it organises. By creating a permanent state of war, such a situation would denaturalise the institutions in question and risk transforming the situation into a revolutionary one, something obviously at odds with the economic logic of reification, which requires rational calculability and stability.28

24 25 26

27 28

For Lukács’s discussion of two representatives of these trends, see his mid 1920s articles on Carl Schmitt and Leonard Nelson (Lukács 1928a, 1926a). Lukács 1967a, pp. 108–9. That Lukács would make this point is unsurprising, given his familiarity not only with Max Weber but also, potentially, with Carl Schmitt. N.B.: It is impossible to tell when Lukács first read Schmitt. He reviewed Political Romanticism in 1928 (Lukács 1928a). However, judging by his references to irrationalist and realist theories of law in History and Class Consciousness, it is by no means possible to rule out that Lukács had some acquaintance with On Dictatorship or Political Theology which appeared in 1921 and 1922, respectively. Lukács 1967a, p. 257. Lukács 1967a, p. 257.

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This also places Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on terrain ordinarily associated with Gramsci. It establishes that the state – as the bearer of armed force and legality – guarantees and forms the hegemony of reification. Bourgeois rule is organised via the state and the concealed substratum of formal bourgeois rationalism (whether it be the rationalism of political economy or legality) is the irrational and violent exercise of force. This raises a further point. In its heroic period, the bourgeoisie sought to intellectually ground its power in truth. In contrast, Lukács argued that in his era, bourgeois rule freely and cynically admitted its reliance upon practical power, not truth. Nevertheless, Lukács is certain: the hegemony of any class, the bourgeoisie included, requires and generates class consciousness. He writes: For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness enable it to organise the whole of society in accordance with those interests. The crucial question in every class struggle is this: which class possesses this capacity and this consciousness at the decisive moment? This does not preclude the use of force. It does not mean that the classinterests destined to prevail and thus uphold the interests of society as a whole can be guaranteed an automatic victory. On the contrary, such a transfer of power can often only be brought about by the most ruthless use of force (as e.g. the primitive accumulation of capital). But it often turns out that questions of class consciousness prove to be decisive in just those situations where classes are locked in a life-and-death-struggle.29 This raises a dilemma. On the one hand, bourgeois power is founded on systematic mystification; the standpoint of the bourgeoisie debars its thinkers from comprehending the world accurately. And yet on the other hand, Lukács maintains that class consciousness is crucial to establishing bourgeois hegemony. Lukács solved this dilemma by claiming that while the bourgeoisie’s consciousness is in itself dialectical, the bourgeoisie is constitutively incapable of grasping the dialectics of its own thought. This entails a permanent crisis in bourgeois thought. For example, the bourgeoisie’s fundamental science, economics, is simultaneously one of its key intellectual weapons and yet is incapable of being perfected. Each economic crisis reveals this. To understand political economy concretely and systematically (as Marx did) entails a renunciation of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie: ‘The fact that a scientifically acceptable solution does exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution,

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 52–3.

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even in theory, would be tantamount to observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the bourgeoisie. And no class can do that – unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely’.30 Therefore there exists both an objective and subjective limit to bourgeois consciousness. Or, more accurately, in order to transcend intellectually the limits of bourgeois consciousness, it is necessary to consciously reject the standpoint of the bourgeoisie in favour of another, more objective one. Large groups may be forced into this by the logic of events. For an individual, however, such a rejection is inevitably an ethical one. Short of this, thinkers who regard the world from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie are buffeted between the antinomies of bourgeois life and thought. For example, Lukács writes: This means that formally the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie is geared to economic consciousness. And indeed the highest degree of unconsciousness, the crassest form of ‘false consciousness’ always manifests itself when the conscious mastery of economic phenomena appears to be at its greatest. From the point of view of the relation of consciousness to society this contradiction is expressed as the irreconcilable antagonism between ideology and economic base.31 Bourgeois thought is therefore tragically antinomic as is, indeed, any thought that reifies economics. Explaining the consequences of this, Lukács writes: ‘theory and practice are brought into irreconcilable opposition to each other’. He continues, noting that ‘… the resulting dynamism is anything but stable; in fact it constantly strives to harmonise principles that have been wrenched apart and thenceforth oscillate between a new “false” synthesis and its subsequent cataclysmic disruption’.32 So, notwithstanding Lukács’s rhetoric about the wilful mystification of bourgeois thought in its period of decline, he believes that history and totality form the ultimate objective barriers to the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. Within totality or history, bourgeois thought is capable of infinite movement, but it is doomed to remain superficial. Insofar as the antinomies of bourgeois thought push beyond themselves, they do so unconsciously and are experienced, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, as an inescapable fate, 30

31 32

Lukács 1967a, pp. 53–4. Again, it ought to be recalled that Lukács is speaking here of a class. It is not uncommon for individuals to abandon the standpoint of their class, as did Lukács himself. Lukács 1967a, p. 64. Lukács 1967a, p. 64.

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catastrophe or, occasionally, as a mystical or messianic revelation. Nevertheless, these antinomies are the starting point for a theory of praxis as it rises to concrete involvement in the world. Lukács connects this with Marx’s famous diagnosis of the immanent limits of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto: ‘When the Communist Manifesto makes the point that the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers this is valid ideologically as well as economically’.33

2

Sectarianism, Reformism and Vulgar Marxism To be isolated is to assert oneself numerically; when you assert yourself as one, that is isolation. I’m sure all friends of association will concur with me in this, even if they are incapable of seeing that just the same isolation obtains when hundreds want to assert themselves as nothing but hundreds. Kierkegaard34

The above critique proposes the standpoint of the proletariat as a solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought. Yet this standpoint has not been outlined positively; further mediations must be discovered if theory is to return from abstraction and find its completion in practice. These are disclosed by Lukács’s critique of Marxist theories which reproduce reified thought. The starting point is a theory of praxis which understands the proletariat to be the solution to the problem of history and totality, but which is as-yet unaware of its own theoretical, abstract and ethical character. This theory therefore possesses an unacknowledged and untranscended subjective and contemplative element. Or, to put it differently, the achievement so far is historical materialism as a theory for itself, but not yet in and for itself. Historical materialism has, in the present articulation, an uncomprehended aspect, part of which is practical. The theories discussed in this section arise on the basis of practices which, while related to the practice of the proletariat, are characteristic of organisations that seek or claim to represent the proletariat prior to the actuality of revolution, while it is still hegemonised by the bourgeoisie. These practices and organisational forms, of course, generate theories. Thus, both reified theory and reified practice will be criticised in this section. As the sect is the lowest form of organ-

33 34

Lukács 1967a, p. 66. Kierkegaard 1992, p. 140.

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isation in which the theory of praxis may exist, this organisational form will be the starting point of this section. Subsequently, the discussion will turn to reformism and vulgar Marxism. Lukács’s critique of sectarianism (present in History and Class Consciousness, as well as certain political essays from the 1920s) was almost certainly formed in response to Béla Kun’s leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party, which he described as a form of bureaucratic sectarianism.35 Given Lukács’s well documented scepticism towards social democracy, when he turned towards Marxism, he was himself inclined to messianic and ultra-left sectarianism. Given this, the critique of sectarianism found in History and Class Consciousness probably also constitutes a self-criticism. Although they share a common essence, these varieties of sectarianism are distinct. Further, they both presuppose the actuality of revolution as well as (relatively) mass communist parties. Nevertheless, as an example of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, Lukács’s analysis of sectarianism is also applicable to smaller utopian, ethical or theoretical sects which exist outside or on the fringes of the workers’ movement. While Trotskyist, Maoist and other sects proliferated especially after the 1940s, such formations did also exist prior to World War One and the Russian Revolution. It is impossible to determine whether or not Lukács has in mind pre-war sects (for example, the Socialist Party of Great Britain) although it must be admitted that this is somewhat unlikely, especially as he makes no reference to them. Insofar as he directly refers to sects of this variety, he usually speaks of religious ones. As has been illustrated, in Lukács’s view, utopianism is an aspect of the subjective side of the contemplative stance, representing the hypostatisation of an ought, which is counterposed to what is. Lukács’s conversion to Marxism allowed him to reconcile these two sharply antinomic poles. This depended on two interrelated points. The first, discussed in Chapter 3 was the principle of immanent becoming. That is, Lukács understood that far from being in radical opposition to the world, an abstract ought contains an implicit acceptance of the world as it is. So the mediation between what is and what ought to be must in fact be discovered in reality. The standpoint of the proletariat, as the selfconsciousness of the commodity, provides such a concrete mediation. From the standpoint of theory, therefore, the class struggle mediates between is and ought. Lukács expressed this as early as 1919, in his essay ‘Tactics and Ethics’ in which he argued that proletarian class struggle transforms a transcendent objective into an immanent one: 35

Lukács 1983c, pp. 73–7.

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… the class struggle of the proletariat is at once the objective itself and its realisation. For if the ultimate objective of socialism is utopian in the sense that it transcends the economic, legal and social limits of contemporary society and can only be realised through the destruction of that society, it is anything but utopian in the sense that its attainment would entail the absorption of ideas hovering outside or above society. The Marxist theory of class struggle which in this respect is wholly derived from Hegel’s conceptual system, changes the transcendent objective into an immanent one; the class struggle of the proletariat is at once the objective itself and its realisation. This process is not a means the significance and value of which can be judged by the standards of a goal which transcends it; it is rather a new elucidation of the utopian society, step by step, leap by leap, corresponding to the logic of history. This implies immersion in contemporary social reality. The ‘means’ are not alien to the goal (as was the case with the realisation of bourgeois ideology); instead, they bring the goal closer to self-realisation. It follows that there will be conceptually indeterminable transitional stages between the tactical means and the ultimate objective; it is never possible to know in advance which tactical step will succeed in achieving the ultimate objective itself.36 In this text, he further argues that the class struggle collapses the dichotomy between means and ends into a debate over the next step that the struggle must take in order to realise its immanent goal. These comments are echoed in History and Class Consciousness where Lukács repeats Marx’s critique of utopian socialism, noting that this current failed to ‘take note of what is happening before their very eyes and to become its mouthpiece’.37 So, in order to abandon its transcendent character, utopian theory must immerse itself in the movement of the proletariat and the reality it confronts. This is easier said than done. In order to solve this problem, Lukács distinguishes between the possibility of forming a postutopian view of history and the actual overcoming of utopianism as a political current. He regards the conditions for the former overcoming as having been met in Marx’s day by the emergence of the proletariat as a class. However, he is quite clear that the actual overcoming of utopianism requires the unity of theory and practice, described by Marx.38 This, in turn, requires a revolutionary crisis in which the proletariat 36 37 38

Lukács 1972l, p. 5. Lukács 1967a, p. 78. Lukács 1967a, p. 78.

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might move towards its own class consciousness, as will be further outlined below. For now, it is the theoretical overcoming of utopianism that is at stake. This is not unconnected with the empirical state of the workers’ movement: to Lukács, Marx was a genius precisely because he was capable, far in advance of the fact, to perceive the non-utopian form that proletarian class consciousness would necessarily take. As early as 1843, Lukács argues, Marx understood that consciousness is immanent in history and that history itself would strive towards theory; only then will it ‘… be realised that the world has long since possessed something in the form of a dream which it need only take possession of consciously, in order to possess it in reality’.39 From this point, what remained was for Marx – primarily through a critique of various false and ideological theories of consciousness and practice – to comprehend the concrete, historic becoming of class consciousness.40 In order to engage with history, theory must overcome its being-for-itself, that is, its status as a utopian reflection on the world that exists. A simple flight from theory into the arms of an equally abstract empirical reality is no solution, however. The theoretical stance – as a specific instantiation of the contemplative stance – is an objective condition imposed on those who pass negative intellectual judgement on the world confronting them. To flee from theory merely sidesteps the question. Additionally, to make an obvious point, an individual, theoretical effort cannot alter reality any more than an individual ethical or aesthetic effort. Rather, what matters is that theory overcomes its own unconsciousness by situating itself not only in the world, but by way of proletarian class consciousness. Lukács grasped this as early as 1919, writing: Hence we Marxists not only believe that the development of society is directed by the so-often disparaged Spirit, but we also know that it was only in Marx’s work that this spirit became consciousness and assumed the mission of leadership. But this mission cannot be the privilege of any ‘intellectual class’ or the product of any form of ‘supra-class’ thinking. The salvation of society is a mission which only the proletariat, by virtue of its world-historical role, can achieve. And only through the class consciousness of the proletarians is it possible to achieve the knowledge and the understanding of this path of humanity that is essential to ‘intellectual leadership’.41

39 40 41

Quoted in: Lukács 1967a, p. 2. Lukács 1967a, pp. 77–8. Lukács 1972l, p. 18.

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This, however, raises an immediate question. The above insight, while posed as a critique of utopianism, in fact constitutes the basic intellectual and ethical possession of utopian Marxist sects. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács notes that the sect possesses (in common with a mass communist party) an ethic that appears to transcend individualism. This ethic requires the member to submit his ‘full personality’ to the discipline of his organisation. Conceptually speaking, we have begun to account for this Marxist instantiation of being for other above. As it pertains to sects, Lukács writes: ‘It has been, on the contrary, the characteristic of many utopian sects. Indeed many sects regarded this formal, ethical aspect as the sole or at least as the decisive principle and not as a mere aspect of the whole problem of organisation’.42 In a Marxist sect, such convictions are justified by a messianic conception of the proletariat as saviour. As Lukács continues to note, this ethic is a formal and one sided principle which annuls itself: ‘However, where the formal, ethical principle is given such a one-sided emphasis it annuls itself: its truth is not achieved, consummate being but only the correct pointer towards the goal to be reached. It ceases to be correct when that relationship to the whole of the historical process is dissolved’.43 As he explains, only the revolutionary party, by virtue of its living relationship with the class, can transcend objectively the ethicism of a sect. Yet as will be outlined in greater detail later, a revolutionary communist party may only be built in light of the concrete development of the class consciousness of the proletariat, which requires the actuality of revolution. Short of this, the sect necessarily reproduces the antinomies of bourgeois thought: ‘However hostile a sect may be towards bourgeois society, however deeply it may be convinced – subjectively – of the size of the gulf that separates it from the bourgeoisie, it yet reveals at this very point that its view of history coincides with that of the bourgeoisie and that, in consequence, the structure of its own consciousness is closely related to that of the bourgeoisie’.44 Following this, Lukács notes that a sect’s outlook repeats the duality of existence and consciousness which characterises the contemplative stance. Theory cannot but be regarded as separate from the historical process and from the concrete proletariat. Given this, Lukács argues that a sect may emphasise either itself or the class, mythologised: ‘It makes no difference whether, by a process of mythologising, a correct flair for revolutionary action is unreservedly attributed to the masses or whether it is argued that the “conscious” minority has 42 43 44

Lukács 1967a, p. 320. Lukács 1967a, p. 321. Lukács 1967a, p. 321.

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to take action on behalf of the “unconscious” masses’.45 Here, the antinomies of the contemplative stance are elevated to a theoretical opposition between, on the one hand, an abstract concept of the proletariat as a messianic saviour and, on the other hand, the equally abstract concept of the sect, possessed of the truth, as the salvation of humanity. Both antinomies are fetishistic. The former fetishises the standpoint of the proletariat while the latter fetishises the standpoint of theory. Both, therefore, remain unselfconscious. Indeed, the point of view of the sect represents both extremes of crass materialism and crass idealism; material reality, in the person of the proletariat, is expected as saviour on the one hand while the intellectual insight of the sect is held as absolute truth, regardless of the historic juncture. Thus a sect is trapped within the contemplative antinomy between voluntarism and pragmatic adaptation. Specific sects may emphasise either one or the other side of this antinomy, or both poles may co-exist. Both positions, as with all utopianism, conceal a hypostatisation of the present. This makes it impossible to assess, either objectively or subjectively, the course of history. Instead, the sect is ‘… led to the extravagant overestimation of organisation, or else to the no less extravagant underestimation of it. It is forced to treat the problem of organisation in isolation from the general questions of historical praxis and equally from the problems of strategy and tactics’.46 Strategies or policies, which should be justified contingently, become shibboleths and morally charged questions of principle, the violation of which puts one beyond the pale of the proletarian movement. It is hardly surprising that such fanaticism with respect to proletarian truth generally conceals the egotism of sect leaders who salve resentment born of a life of self-imposed ascetic service with bureaucratic cruelty and authoritarianism, and in more pathological cases, with abuse. Conceptually, sectarianism is in fact a quasi-political instantiation of what Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, termed the ‘law of the heart’ and the ‘insanity of self-conceit’. This figure, which is immediately rational, presupposes an abstractly ethical universal order, namely, civil society, in which individuals relate to themselves and others freely and possessively, as things.47 Born of an ethical rejection of this order, the ‘law of the heart’ describes an individual consciousness which regards itself as immediately universal. Insofar as a sect casts the proletariat as the universal class, and presents itself as identical with it, Hegel’s words equally pertain to the moralism and hyperrevolutionary ethicism of a sect. Hegel describes the law of the heart as follows: 45 46 47

Lukács 1967a, pp. 321–2. Lukács 1967a, p. 322. Hegel 2018, §§. 351–352.

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… it is the seriousness of a high purpose, which seeks its pleasure in the exhibition of its own admirably excellent essence and in bringing about the welfare of mankind. The law is what it actualizes, and its pleasure is at the same time universal for all hearts. Both are in its eyes inseparable; its pleasure is lawful, and the actualization of the law of all humanity produces its own immediate pleasure. For within its own self, individuality and necessity are immediately one; the law is a law of the heart.48 As the law of the heart – or the revolutionary sect – seeks to actualise its principle, it finds itself in conflict with itself. This is because, while the law of the heart took itself to be the living and just principle, as against the dead actuality of its present, in truth, the utopian aspiration towards absolute welfare and goodness is a universal moment of a reified social order. If we recall the importance of the utopian, subjective and ethical side of the contemplative stance, we can see that reification is a system built upon the ‘law of the heart’. Without the use value of the commodity, the exchange value collapses. Without the utopian side of reification, its structure collapses into meaninglessness. Without the subjective and qualitative side of the contemplative stance, humans would find no reason to relate themselves pragmatically to capitalism. So, the utopianism of an unmediated ethical stance is equally and immediately the conservatism of a social order whose essence is, in part, the abstract and subjective ethicism of conscience. Given this, any conflict between conscience and actuality is merely apparent. Hegel writes about the experience of the law of the heart: However, he finds that, on the contrary, actuality is animated by the consciousnesses of all and is a law for all hearts. This consciousness learns from experience that actuality is a living order, and in fact at the same time it learns this precisely as a result of actualising the law of its own heart, since this means nothing else but that individuality becomes in its own eyes an object as the universal but in which it does not take cognizance of itself.49 The truth of the law of the heart is in fact subjective freedom that has absolutised itself by virtue of an immediate an unconscious identification between itself and social being. If taken to its logical conclusion, this results in the neg-

48 49

Hegel 2018, §. 370. Hegel 2018, §. 374.

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ation of the individual or the sect which inhabits this stance. After all, such an orientation is megalomaniacal. If, however, the consciousness in question takes cognisance of individuals’ actual relationship with the universal social order, and they discover themselves to be a negative reflection of it, they may progress to a higher standpoint. Failing this, the negation of the law of the heart may take the form of death (political suicide or the living death of a hardened sect) or it may also take the form of the ‘insanity of self-conceit’.50 In Hegel’s view, this is often associated with a self-flagellating and self-denying moralism which, in the face of its inability to change the world, devalues the world and seeks refuge in hysterical castigation of the other – which is really just a cruelty inflicted upon the self. One is reminded of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. These antinomies might seem tragic, and on one level, they are. In Lukács’s view, the utopianism of the sect may only be resolved in a practice that preserves its revolutionary impulse during the actuality of revolution, as will be discussed below. Many is the sect that has justified its sad existence on the basis that nothing better is possible. Yet the identification of an antinomy like this already implies the possibility for its being overcome. After all, as Hegel notes in the Philosophy of Right, the Christian doctrine of original sin already presupposes our ability to free ourselves from sin.51 The ability to theorise sectarianism therefore presupposes the possibility of transcending it. That is to say, if the truth of the sect is comprehended and made self-aware, then theory subjects itself to critique and in so doing, makes possible an orientation towards practice. This equally reveals that the truth of a sect is not based on the proletariat, but on its own practice, which consists in forming an ethical community in opposition to the world. If this point appears to contradict the fact that the truth of a sect consists in a fetishism of its own theory, it need not. After all, no theory is conceivable without a corresponding practice. So, the theoreticism of the sect conceals the practice of an ethical community which

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Of this, he writes: The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind therefore passes over into the bluster of a mad self-conceit. It passes over into the rage of a consciousness which preserves itself from destruction by casting out of itself the very topsy-turvy inversion which is itself and which makes every effort to regard and to articulate that inversion as something other than itself. It therefore articulates the universal order as a topsy-turvy inversion of the law of its heart and its happiness, an inversion completely fabricated by fanatical priests and gluttonous despots, along with their various lackeys, who, by having lowered themselves to such abjection, now seek compensation for their own humiliation by humiliating and oppressing those further below them (Hegel 2018, §. 377). Hegel 1991a, p. 18.

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has found an unusual and apparently radical mode of cohabitation with the world. These insights represent a self-critique of theory in which the theoretical stance becomes self-conscious of its own abstraction and ethicism. This allows the theorist to grasp that the concept of praxis, in its immediate and abstract sense, is an ethical-utopian negation of the present. This further reorients theory towards the objective process of history and the process of the emergence of a totalising collective subject. Practically speaking, such an insight may also prepare a sect – although there is no guarantee that this always can or will take place – to merge itself with the practical movement of the proletariat. It should be openly admitted that this is a concession to reformism. Well that it is; reformism is both theoretically and practically higher than sectarianism. If sectarianism represents the fetishisation of theory in itself, it is overcome by a more modest theory that understands the need to ground theoretical truth in practice. Given that proletarian practice and consciousness emerge on the ground of reification and bourgeois hegemony, this practice is, in the first place, reformist. Thus, reformist Marxism – for all its oft-noted faults – represents the determinate overcoming of sectarianism and the next waystation in the creation of a reflexive theory of praxis. Unlike theorists associated with the Third International and some varieties of Trotskyism, Lukács’s understanding of reformism does not depend primarily on a sociological definition of the class or strata upon which reformist organisations and currents are based. While at times he discusses the social basis of reformism as the ‘labour aristocracy’ or a petit-bourgeoisified section of the working class, in Lukács’s view, such analyses are insufficient.52 Rather, like sectarianism, reformism reflects the practical and intellectual hegemony of reification in the workers’ movement, albeit 52

He writes: In my opinion, however, this fact alone [of the labour aristocracy] does not provide an adequate explanation of Menshevism. In the first place, this privileged position has already been undermined in many respects while the position of Menshevism has not been correspondingly weakened. Here too, the subjective development of the proletariat has in many way lagged behind the tempo of objective crisis. Hence we cannot regard this factor as the sole cause of Menshevism unless we are to concede it is also the comfortable theoretical position arrived at by inferring the absence of an objective revolutionary situation from the absence of a thorough-going and clearcut revolutionary fervour in the proletariat. In the second place, the experiences of revolutionary struggles have failed to yield any conclusive evidence that the proletariat’s revolutionary fervour and will to fight corresponds [sic] in any straightforward manner to the economic level of its various parts. There are great deviations from any such simple, uniform parallels and there are great divergencies [sic] in the maturity of class consciousness attained by workers within economically similar strata (Lukács 1967a, p. 305).

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at a higher level. By virtue of its accommodation with the state, social democracy maintains the proletariat politically and practically in the immediacy of bourgeois society: ‘Thus the proletariat submits to the “laws” of bourgeois society either in a spirit of supine fatalism (e.g. towards the natural laws of production) or else in a spirit of “moral” affirmation (the state as an ideal, a cultural positive)’.53 This begins to illustrate how the standpoint of the bourgeoisie is further reproduced in the workers’ movement. As has been shown, the standpoint of the bourgeoisie depends on the idea that society is ahistorical, natural and immutable. For Lukács, this mistaken point of view is repeated in the social democratic movement among theorists who were incapable of comprehending the historicity of capitalism. Describing pre-World War One social democratic theory, Lukács wrote: ‘It [social democracy] was compelled to construe the evolution of society as if it were possible for capitalist accumulation to operate in the rarefied atmosphere of mathematical formulae, i.e. un-problematically and without a World War’.54 Lukács noted that although this placed social democratic parties at a disadvantage compared with the cynical realism of bourgeois and conservative parties, ‘… it did enable them even then to take up their present theoretical position as guardians of the everlasting capitalist economic order; guardians against the fated catastrophic consequences towards which the true exponents of capitalist imperialism were drifting with open but unseeing eyes’.55 In addition to diagnosing the almost complete unpreparedness with which the social democratic movement met World War One, Lukács here makes the point that reformist or social democratic parties upheld the real idealism of liberalism against the increasingly illiberal and irrational reality of capitalism. Reformism was the most committed and least cynical believer in capitalism. These comments situate reformism within the contemplative stance. As has been outlined, the contemplative consciousness is dualistically quantitative and qualitative. Pragmatic, calculable adaption coexists alongside utopianism and idealism. Applying this to Social Democracy, Lukács writes: With the ideology of social democracy the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification that we have hitherto analysed in such detail. The important role increasingly played in this ideology by ‘man’ as a value, an ideal, an imperative, accompanied, of course, by a growing ‘insight’ into the necessity and logic of the actual economic process, is only one 53 54 55

Lukács 1967a, p. 196. Lukács 1967a, p. 32. Lukács 1967a, p. 32.

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symptom of this relapse into the reified immediacy of the bourgeoisie. For the unmediated juxtaposition of natural laws and imperatives is the logical expression of immediate societal existence in bourgeois society.56 Although Lukács’s work traverses many such antinomies, the most important in connection to reformism are between abstract ethics and crude empiricism, theory and practice (or, as they might be rendered more concretely, between principle and opportunism) and between economics and politics. With regard to ethics, Lukács’s condemnation of theorists such as Bernstein who sought to complement a scientific and empirical analysis of society with transcendental ethical values has been mentioned. This was not Lukács’s final word on the problem. While his philosophy is generally seen as a variety of humanist Marxism, he does in fact possess a critique of abstract humanism as the abstract negation of the inhumanity of reification. This is to say, while reification debases humanity and reduces it to the status of a machine, it equally makes it possible to think of humanity as an abstract universal category. In fact, this abstractly universal humanism is at the core of the utopian idealism of the state. Hence, Lukács distinguishes Marx’s (and his own) humanism from sentimental humanism: It is here that Marx’s ‘humanism’ diverges most sharply from all the movements that seem so similar to it at first glance. Others have often recognised and described how capitalism violates and destroys everything human … In such accounts it is shown, on the one hand, that it is not possible to be human in bourgeois society, and, on the other, that man as he exists is opposed without mediation – or what amounts to the same thing, through the mediations of metaphysics and myth – to this nonexistence of the human (whether this is thought of as something in the past, the future or merely an imperative.)57 On a theoretical level, abstract humanism risks transforming dogmatic materialism into an equally dogmatic anthropological relativism. If humanity, as a category, is not itself relativised and historicised, then it finds itself without a standard by which it can measure itself. This risks a relapse into a type of uncritical irrationalism which, if taken to its logical extreme, can provide no criteria 56 57

Lukács 1967a, p. 197. Lukács 1967a, p. 190. Perhaps Adorno had this passage in mind when he wrote: ‘The bourgeoisie however is tolerant. Their love for people, as they are, originates in the hatred of rightful human beings’ (Adorno 1998a, p. 17).

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by which to condemn its present.58 Seen in this light, humanism, as an immediate ethical response to the inhumanity of capitalism, has the character of an abstract ought. Within reformism, however, the antinomy occurs concretely, dualistically and in a presentist (that is, non-messianic) way. This constitutes a further manner in which reformism is conceptually higher than sectarianism. Precisely because reformism (correctly) rejects romantic revolutionism, while also suggesting that the humanist ought is absent in the economy and in everyday life, the ought must be located in the state and the sphere of politics proper. While this at least allowed social democracy a greater purchase on reality, Lukács condemned Lassalle for precisely this dualistic rendering of the problem. In his view, Lassalle’s rigid separation between man as a thing and man as man contributed to the fetishism of the state present in Second International Marxism. Extending this critique, Lukács notes that this uncomprehended antinomy may take different forms; it may exclude struggle in the economic sphere, while reducing political struggle to either adventurism or a policy of waiting for miracles.59 Alternately, it may be concentrated on the purely economic (at the expense of politics, as was the case with syndicalism) or in the name of a utopian politics (as is the case with Blanquism or other putschist tendencies).60 Yet, in the case of the German Social Democratic Party, the organisation that Lassalle (along with Engels) helped to found, this antinomy was expressed in an altogether more conventional manner. Lukács wrote: ‘… it is wholly within the class interests of the bourgeoisie to separate the individual spheres of society from one another and to fragment the existence of men correspondingly. Above all we find, justified in different terms but essential to social democracy nevertheless, this very dualism of economic fatalism and ethical utopianism as applied to the “human” functions of the state’.61 This undialectical admixture of economism and statist idealism was intimately tied with a separation between theory and practice, or between principle and exigency.62 This was, in turn, linked with further antinomies that were thematic in social democratic discourse; for instance, between economics and politics or between spontaneity and leadership.63

58 59 60 61 62 63

Lukács 1967a, pp. 186–7. Lukács 1967a, pp. 195–6. Lukács 1972l, p. 73. Lukács 1967a, p. 196. Lukács 1967a, p. 196. Both Lukács’s debt to and criticism of Luxemburg, who was amongst the first to theorise these antinomies, are well-known. For Luxemburg’s argument, see Luxemburg 2007.

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In principle, as has been argued, the ability to overcome these antinomies is tied up with the standpoint of the proletariat and the totalising, historical perspective of which it is capable. This is to say, the class consciousness of the proletariat is the sole basis upon which the antinomies of bourgeois politics may be comprehended and transcended. The neglect of this class consciousness was politically and organisationally guaranteed by reformism. Politically speaking, Lukács accused social democracy of reducing the class struggle to a ‘… vulgar “Realpolitik”’ which sacrificed principle in the name of immediate exigencies.64 In criticising this, Lukács was careful to avoid utopianism by asserting that the proletariat must proceed from the given facts of a situation. Nevertheless, Lukács charged reformism with subordinating class consciousness to the present. If sectarianism represents a hypostatised ought, reformism hypostatises the is. Lukács criticised this both theoretically and with reference to the material constitution of reformist parties. Contrasting them to a revolutionary party, Lukács argued that reformist parties are necessarily bureaucratic parties in which the membership is excluded from any real control over the leadership. In this regard, reformist parties reproduce in miniature the political alienation of the state, which relates to its constituents as citizens – formally equal but disempowered through atomisation. Lukács writes, citing Max Weber: Max Weber gives an apt definition of this type of organisation: ‘What is common to them all is that a nucleus of people who are in active control gather around them the “members” whose role is essentially more passive while the mass of the membership are mere objects’. Their role as objects is not mitigated by the fact of formal democracy, by the “freedom” that obtains in these organisations; on the contrary, this freedom only fixes and perpetuates it.65 This, Lukács notes, meant that Second International parties unconsciously subordinated their activity to events and circumstances beyond their comprehension; ‘… they must manifest all the symptoms that arise out of the structure of the reified consciousness and form the separation between consciousness and being, between theory and practice. That is to say, as global complexes they take up a purely contemplative position towards the course of events’.66 This explains the further antinomies that characterised Second International Marxism. 64 65 66

Lukács 1967a, p. 68. Lukács 1967a, p. 318. Lukács 1967a, p. 318.

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For instance, Lukács notes that a voluntaristic overstatement of the importance of the individual or party leadership may coexist with a fatalistic underestimation of the class. Insofar as the masses are regarded as active, their activity is carefully subordinated to the centre. ‘The “freedom” possessed by the members of such parties is therefore nothing more than the freedom of more or less peripheral and never fully engaged observers to pass judgement on the fatalistically accepted course of events or the errors of individuals’.67 This is in large part why the reformist parties of the Second International were unable to anticipate, much less learn from, spontaneous mass struggles of the working class. Politically, this internalisation of the standpoint of the bourgeoisie had a number of consequences. Firstly, Lukács notes that it subordinated the workers’ movement to bourgeois hegemony. This ‘… reduce[s] theory to the “scientific” treatment of the symptoms of social change and as for practice they are themselves reduced to being buffeted about aimlessly and uncontrollably by the various elements of the process they had hoped to master’.68 Additionally, Lukács notes that as much as the proletariat accepts the terrain of bourgeois politics, the bourgeoisie gains a home field advantage, economically, intellectually and politically.69 Their acquiescence also imposes upon the proletariat the division between economics and politics: in this way, the divide between the trade union movement and social democratic parties reproduced the antinomy between state and civil society. Further, this created a separation between immediate and ultimate goals (or, between a minimum and maximum programme); insofar as momentary or partial interests were pursued, in narrow economic struggles or with limited legislative reforms, these were purchased, according to Lukács, at the expense of the long term revolutionary interests of the whole proletariat.70 In this regard, Lukács’s assessment of opportunism was that it prioritised momentary or partial interests over the universal interests of the proletariat. This is justified by ideology which takes the idealism of the state, with its claim to universality, as good coin by accepting that it is above the class divide. Lukács writes: The great distinction between revolutionary Marxists and pseudoMarxist opportunists consists in the fact that for the former the capitalist state counts merely as a power factor against which the power 67 68 69 70

Lukács 1967a, pp. 318–19. Lukács 1967a, p. 69. Lukács 1967a, p. 69. Lukács 1967a, pp. 70–1.

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of the organised proletariat is to be mobilised. Whilst the latter regard the state as an institution standing above the classes and the proletariat and the bourgeoisie conduct their war in order to gain control of it. But by viewing the state as the object of struggle rather than as the enemy they have mentally gone over to bourgeois territory and thereby lost half the battle before taking up arms. For every system of state and law, and the capitalist system above all, exists in the last analysis because its survival, and the validity of its statutes, are simply accepted as unproblematic.71 Such was Lukács’s critique of reformism. Following the above analogy between sectarianism and Hegel’s ‘law of the heart’ these points suggest a further conceptual homology between Lukács’s understanding of reformism and the consciousness which Hegel characterises as the ‘knight of virtue’, a more advanced figure of consciousness than the law of the heart. Having comprehended that his goodness and truth exist as part of the ‘way of the world’, the knight of virtue seeks to champion his virtue and goodness in and through the world. His opposition to the way of the world is, therefore, cosmetic and superficial: It is the good, which as the in-itself of the way of the world is inseparably intertwined with everything in the appearance of the way of the world, and which also has its existence in the actuality of the way of the world. For virtue, the way of the world is thus invulnerable. But all the moments which virtue itself was supposed to put at risk and all those which it was supposed to sacrifice are just those existences of the good which are thereby inviolable relationships. The struggle can thus only be an oscillation between preservation and sacrifice, or to an even greater degree, what can come to pass is neither a sacrifice of what is one’s own nor an injury to what is. Virtue is not merely like the combatant whose sole concern in the fight is to keep his sword shiny; rather, it was in order to preserve its weapons that virtue started the fight. Not merely can it not use its own weapons, it must also preserve intact those of its enemy and protect them against virtue itself, for they are all noble parts of the good on behalf of which it went into the fight in the first place.72

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Lukács 1967a, p. 260. Hegel 2018, §. 386.

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The result of this stance is the victory of the way of the world. Equally, according to Lukács’s critique, there is a tragic element to reformism which surrenders its weapons to the enemy in order to preserve those very weapons. Hegel’s dialectic proceeds, therefore, through the way of the world, or through a series of instantiations of consciousness in which the universal and rational moment appears to have been lost in pure self-interest. Lukács’s dialectic parts company with Hegel here. In his view, the uncomprehended practice of bourgeois and reformist politics leads to a crisis in which a new, revolutionary consciousness may emerge. This will be discussed below. To return to the analysis, while Lukács’s critique of reformism was more sophisticated and radical than those which predominated in the 1920s, the point was hardly to discredit or defeat social democracy as a current. The hostile and generally nonplussed response to History and Class Consciousness amongst social democratic theorists confirms that even had they been Lukács’s audience, his argument fell on deaf ears.73 Rather, the point was to carry out a theoretical revolution within revolutionary Marxism. We have already seen that the naturalism and reification at the core of Second International Marxism imply a worldview without subjectivity, or at the best, one in which subjectivity is regarded as irrational and miraculous. For the most part, when theorists associated with Third International Marxism criticised reformism, they did not do so on the basis of a superior philosophy, but merely replicated its reified way of thinking. Given this, Lukács’s critique of reformism was at least in part intended to revitalise the theoretical resources of revolutionary Marxists. Consequently, the remainder of this section will examine this attempted theoretical revitalisation by way of Lukács’s critique of vulgar Marxism. This will complete the negative or critical motion of the theory of praxis, in turn opening the way for a positive elaboration of praxis and its actualisation. To begin with, Lukács associated his critique of vulgar Marxism with Kautsky. Again, it is suggested that this was a largely strategic choice, given Kautsky’s already poor reputation amongst Marxists of the Third International. So, in History and Class Consciousness when he explicitly criticised Kautsky, Lukács did so for his theory of history which he suggested tended (as with bourgeois thought in general) to reify modern, capitalist social relations and project them into history.74 This, in Lukács’s opinion, not only made Kautsky’s historical writing less perceptive, but tied it to a strong tendency to exclude the questions of violence and force – that is, the irrational – from historical analysis. Lukács writes: 73 74

See Marck 1924. Lukács 1967a, p. 238.

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However, the view of history favoured by the vulgar Marxists has also been a decisive influence on the actions of the workers’ parties and on their political theory and tactics. The point at which the disagreement with vulgar Marxism is most clearly expressed is on the question of violence; the role of violence in the struggle to gain and reap the fruits of victory in the proletarian revolution … The position is that vulgar Marxist economism denies that violence has a place in the transition from one economic system to another. It bases itself on the ‘natural laws’ of economic development which are to bring about these transitions by their own impetus and without having recourse to a brute force lying ‘beyond economics’.75 Against this, Lukács contended that the economic dynamic of capitalism, which leads to crisis, is only the precondition for social transformation. To go beyond this is a question of political class consciousness. Thus crisis ‘… signals the beginning of the end for the “natural laws” of economism. It means that the “greatest productive power” is in a state of rebellion against the system of production in which it is incorporated. A situation has arisen which can only be resolved by violence’.76 Lukács expanded upon his critique of Kautsky in a 1924 essay entitled ‘Bernstein’s Triumph: Notes on the essays written in honour of Karl Kautsky’s seventieth birthday’, adding detail to the account of reformism developed above. He argued that Kautsky’s theory of revolution is part of the theoretical root of his mistake. In The Proletarian Revolution and its Programme, Kautsky theorised a pure proletarian revolution which would remain independent of any trace of bourgeois revolution. This revolution was to take place within democracy and come as the result of the growth of the Social Democratic Party. In turn, this would obviate the need for any confrontation with the armed forces or the state. This is how he proposed to avoid counter revolution. Moreover, the principle of ‘pushing the revolution forward’, associated with Rosa Luxemburg, was also to be discarded. The crowning feature of this purely proletarian, largely non-violent revolution was held to consist in a coalition government as the form of transition between capitalism and socialism. In Lukács’s analysis, these theoretical points are clearly tied to a number of other political and theoretical shortcomings. Firstly, Kautsky simultaneously overestimated the power of social democratic organisation and underestimated the power of the state. Insofar as the question of organisation was posed,

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Lukács 1967a, p. 239. Lukács 1967a, p. 239.

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it was posed as purely a technical issue, as described above. This stands in stark contrast to Lukács’s characterisation of Lenin’s approach, in which organisational questions flow from the immediate questions of working class struggle and politics as related to the social totality. So while there exists a bureaucratic voluntarism in Kautsky’s emphasis on the Social Democratic Party, there also exists an underestimation of the importance of working class struggle – hence his disagreement with Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike. Thus Kautsky’s view reinforced the antinomies of bourgeois politics; the divide between economics and politics was not bridged, nor that between spontaneity and organisation. Indeed, the possibility for bridging these or other antinomies dialectically was excluded. In Lukács’s view, the consequence of Kautsky’s theory of revolution was the victory of Bernstein’s open reformism. Lukács writes: He, the ‘orthodox’ pupil of Marx, consciously rejects the very crux of the Marxist method: the inner, dialectical connection between all ‘spheres’ or ‘fields’ which, viewed in the reified terms of bourgeois thinking, necessarily appear as separate and independent of one another … However, it is precisely this turning away from dialectics (again, a triumph for Bernstein!) which enables him to fulfil his historic mission. Which is: cling to the entire vocabulary of the Marxist method and yet to derive conclusions from it which amount objectively to the elimination of the class struggle and to the cooperation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Objectively, then, it was Bernstein who was victorious in the struggle between Kautsky and himself. But his triumph was possible only in the form of victory for Kautsky. Only Kautsky’s theory could manage to transform the substance of Bernstein’s reformism into the theory of a large part of the working class.77 All this said, it was hardly the height of radicalism to criticise Kautsky or defend insurrection in 1924. Yet, as other works from the time make clear, the theoretical issues at stake spilled over into the Third International. While the Third International was politically far to the left of the Second, theoretically its break from vulgar Marxism was incomplete at best and non-existent at worst. Interestingly, the two theorists most associated with renovating Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s, Lukács and Gramsci, both took aim at Bukharin’s formulation of Marxism – specifically his book Historical Materialism, which was regarded

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Lukács 1972l, pp. 130–3.

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as a theoretical handbook in the Communist International.78 Lukács’s critique of Bukharin, although couched in somewhat more generous language, covers remarkably similar terrain to his critique of vulgar Marxism. Lukács notes that in his general philosophical introduction, Bukharin is ‘suspiciously close’ to bourgeois materialism. This is related to the fact that ‘… in his philosophical remarks, Bukharin rejects all the elements in the Marxist method which derive from classical German philosophy, without realising the inconsistency this involves’.79 While Hegel is mentioned, any comparison of his dialectic and Marx’s is neglected. This omission feeds directly into Bukharin’s endorsement

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Gramsci 1971a. A comparison of Lukács’s and Gramsci’s critiques of Bukharin would no doubt prove illuminating, especially with regard to the differences and similarities between these two philosophers of praxis. Regrettably, this is outside the scope of the present work. It would appear, moreover, that the two were barely familiar with each other in the 1920s and 1930s. The only reference to Lukács in Gramsci’s prison notebooks is relatively oblique. It reads: One must study the position of Professor Lukács towards the philosophy of praxis. It would appear that Lukács maintains that one can speak of the dialectic only for the history of men and not for nature. He might be right and he might be wrong. If his assertion presupposes a dualism between nature and man he is wrong because he is falling into a conception of nature proper to religion and Graeco-Christian philosophy and also to idealism which does not in reality succeed in unifying and relating man and nature to each other except verbally. But if human history should be conceived also as the history of nature (also by means of the history of science) how can the dialectic be separated from nature? Perhaps Lukács, in reaction to the baroque theories of the Popular Manual, has fallen into the opposite error, into a form of idealism (Gramsci 1971b, p. 448, fn. 94). As Hoare and Nowell Smith’s note to this comment in the 1971 Selections from the Prison Notebooks correctly observes, Lukács does not propose a dichotomy between man and nature in History and Class Consciousness. So, they suggest – most likely accurately – that Gramsci’s knowledge of History and Class Consciousness was probably largely or entirely informed by Abram Deborin’s hostile review. After all, given how little space Lukács devoted to nature, it would have been strange for a theorist such as Gramsci to dwell upon this point. Moreover, Gramsci’s suggested second reading of Lukács’s argument (that natural history be seen as part of human history) is very close to the reading of Lukács’s concepts of nature and science proposed above. A possible starting point for the comparison between Lukács and Gramsci might exist in James Robinson’s excellent 1983 thesis which very accurately situates both thinkers in light of the debates in the 1920s communist movement (Robinson 1983). Nevertheless, due both to the fragmentary nature of Gramsci’s work and the fact that he was less concerned with the elaboration of philosophy per se, a properly philosophical comparison of the two philosophers of praxis would probably require either the construction of a Gramscian philosophy (if such a thing is possible), the subsumption of Gramsci under Lukács, or the comparison of the two by reference to a third philosophical standpoint. Lukács 1972e, pp. 135–6.

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of the natural-scientific materialism that has already been criticised above. This, in Lukács’s view, systematically obscures the most important feature of Marxism: ‘… that all economic or “sociological” phenomena derive from the social relations of men to one another’.80 Lukács continues to note that such an emphasis on a false objectivity, leads, theoretically to fetishism. Specifically, Lukács objects to how ‘He [Bukharin] asserts (p. 206) that “in the last analysis” society is dependent on the development of technique, which is seen as the “basic determinacy” of the “productive forces of society”, etc’.81 Lukács notes that such a final identification between technique and the forces of production is not Marxist; technique is not a ‘final or absolute moment of change’ in history, but rather a moment within the totality which is constituted by the economic structure of society as a whole.82 To premise historical materialism on an analysis of technique and forces of production, or some other proposed ‘materialist base’, leads to fetishism. ‘For if technique is not conceived as a moment of the existing system of production, if its development is not explained by the development of the social forces of production (rather than the other way round), it is just as much a transcendent principle, set over against man, as “nature”, climate, environment, raw materials, etc’.83 Well may we say that from ‘… the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the “last instance” [of analysis] never comes’.84 The linearity of first and last was demonstrably Lukács’s object of critique well before it was taken up by Althusser. Lukács also strongly objects to Bukharin’s attempt to render ideological forms as secondary phenomena, determined in the last instance by technique. This approach, he argues, renders key historical transitions incomprehensible. For example, early medieval agricultural technique was, from the point of view of technology and productivity, inferior to late classical agricultural technique. Yet, it represented a step forward in the rational organisation of labour. The transformation was not achieved by technological means, but by violent ones. However, this transformation in social relations laid the basis for later technological developments – Lukács cites as examples the watermill, mines and firearms. Another example is where Lukács cites (following Weber) the fact that slavery hindered the development of more modern relations of production and the development of technique. Thus he inverts Bukharin’s judgement that the development of technology rendered slavery obsolete; on the contrary, 80 81 82 83 84

Lukács 1972e, pp. 135–6. Lukács 1972e, p. 136. Lukács 1972e, pp. 136–7. Lukács 1972e, p. 137. Althusser 2005, p. 113.

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the end of slavery made the development of technology possible.85 These are not merely questions of history, or even of the concepts of historical materialism. These are questions of method. Bukharin’s equation of the dialectic with the scientific method, his attempt to convert Marxism into a generally valid sociology, divorced from the standpoint of the proletariat, and his essentially formal-logical approach to history all do violence to the dialectic. Lukács writes: ‘The dialectic can do without such independent substantive achievements; its realm is that of the historical process as a whole, whose individual, concrete, unrepeatable moments reveal its dialectical essence precisely in the qualitative differences between them and in the continuous transformation of their objective structure. The totality is the territory of the dialectic’.86 Bukharin’s neglect of this linked, in Lukács’s view, with Engels’s formulation of dialectical materialism, created contradictions in Bukharin’s own theory. For instance, Bukharin defines theory as an overall abstract framework within which to comprehend history and society. In this way, the premises of theory are not examined, nor is theory situated within a context or a viewpoint. Instead, theory uncritically inherits the pure methodology of natural science. This leads to an unbridgeable gap between the concrete circumstances that Bukharin analyses and his theory. Bukharin himself admitted this, acknowledging that theories are at best analogies. Yet in this way, the path is opened to eclecticism.87 Insofar as Bukharin tried to bridge the gap between theory and reality, he did so quantitatively, arguing that we are unable to predict social phenomena with the same accuracy as we might natural phenomena simply because the incompleteness of our knowledge of social laws prevents us expressing them in statistical terms. In principle, however, nothing precludes this from being possible. As noted above, Lukács argues that while the principle of systematisation is raised by reification, a final law which captures the totality of the economy may never be formulated on the basis of reified thought. Yet, Bukharin uncritically endorses the attempt to discover such a law. This aspiration stands as an anticipation of the absolutisation of quantitative and calculable reason under the Stalinist state; that is, of the creation of a reified dogmatically totalising planned economy. Lukács objects to such methodological aspirations, writing: ‘Bukharin’s bias towards the natural sciences has made him forget that our knowledge of directions or tendencies rather than statistical predictions is not a result of the difference between what we actually know and what there is to be known, but of the 85 86 87

Lukács 1972e, p. 138. Lukács 1972e, p. 140. Lukács 1972e, p. 140.

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objective, qualitative difference in the object itself’.88 Simply put, Lukács accuses Bukharin of imposing a reified, quantitative and natural-scientific articulation of historical materialism onto the complexity of the world. Thus, ‘… Bukharin’s basic philosophy is completely in harmony with contemplative materialism; that instead of making a historical-materialist critique of the natural sciences and their methods, i.e. revealing them as products of capitalist development, he extends these methods to the study of society without hesitation, uncritically, unhistorically and undialectically’.89 In this context, Lukács makes some interesting comments on political economy. Following Marx, Engels and Lenin, he notes that when Marx proposes economic theories – for instance, the labour theory of value – they are understood to be tendencies and by their very nature, incapable of providing absolutely definite social knowledge, let alone prediction. This acknowledgement of the limits of economic theory has a number of consequences, of which Lukács refers to two. Firstly, following Lenin, he reasserts that Marxists must refrain from attempting to prove the intractability of economic crisis. Secondly, Marxists must refrain from converting a tendency of development into an ineluctable law of history. For example, Bukharin was famously criticised by Lenin for arguing that imperialism (understood as stage in world capitalism underpinned by certain economic tendencies) precludes national wars or other conflicts associated with pre-imperialist stages of capitalism. This criticism of socalled laws of history also cuts sharply against Third International orthodoxy as well as Trotsky’s Marxism, which developed in a similar intellectual context. In the 1920s, Bukharin was identified with the right of the Communist International. While Lukács did not criticise his politics or strategic perspectives explicitly, if any doubt lingers as to the political and strategic implications of Lukács’s articulation of historical materialism, they are dispelled in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. Most of this argument will be considered below, as it pertains to Lukács’s theories of the party and revolution. However, for now, it is worthwhile noting that both Deborin and Rudas stood on identical theoretical terrain to Bukharin and Kautsky. They saw Marxism as founded on empirical, natural science and consequently, they ignored the standpoint of the proletariat. To these theorists, class consciousness was at best a mass psychological and empirical question of secondary importance in history.90 Lukács responded not only to their indignation at his critique of naturalism, but to their rejection of his theory of revolution as subjectivist and voluntarist. At 88 89 90

Lukács 1972e, p. 141. Lukács 1972e, p. 142. Lukács 2002, pp. 70–1.

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this stage, to summarise Lukács’s critique would be needlessly repetitious. The point is, rather, that in 1926, Lukács perceived a shift away from Bolshevism and Marxism, in the direction of Menshevism and vulgar Marxism.91 This casts the explicit political purpose of Lukács’s critique of theory in sharp relief. It also completes the critique of reified theory. If theory is not to be vindicated in the ethical negation of capitalism (the possession of a sect), faith in the progressive course of history and the reason of the state (reformism), or in the possession of some transhistoric methodology that guarantees the truth (vulgar Marxism), then it may only find its realisation in history as it unfolds and in a presentist consciousness capable of grasping the totality concretely.

3

The Actuality of Revolution Wherefore I will bring the worst of the heathen, and they shall possess their houses: I will also make the pomp of the strong to cease; and their holy places shall be denied. Destruction cometh; and they shall seek peace, and there shall be none. Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall be upon rumour; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients. The king shall mourn, and the prince shall be clothed with desolation, and the hands of the people of the land shall be troubled: I will do unto them after their way, and according to their deserts will I judge them; and they shall know that I am the LORD. Ezekiel (7:24–7)92

The previous sections of this chapter have dealt with reified theories. These ideologies possessed one thing in common: they excluded conscious human activity, or, praxis. The most hardedged naturalism or economism reduces humanity to an object which might be comprehended scientifically, but which cannot act. Yet even this presupposes a residual but abstract subjectivity – the social scientist – who observes the world contemplatively. In the bourgeois view of history and society, this antinomy becomes systematic and tragic; objectivistic theories of the world have their analogue in voluntaristic overestimations of leadership, consciousness, and so on. However apparently radical, at their core, these untranscended antinomies relapse back into fatal-

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Lukács 2002, pp. 47–8. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, p. 910.

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istic and contemplative politics. As has been shown, Lukács’s theory of praxis is founded upon a critique of these antinomies as they occur in sectarianism, reformism and vulgar Marxism. He criticises these antinomies by reasserting a totalising and historical viewpoint and resolves them through the standpoint of the proletariat. However, the standpoint of the proletariat as it pertains to politics and praxis has not been explained; it has only been implied on a relatively abstract, theoretical and negative basis, as an alternative to undialectical theories of change. However, prior to completing the practical and positive side of the dialectic of class consciousness, in which theory actualises itself by way of an engagement with the practical struggle of the proletariat, a final aspect of the objective dialectic of reification must be reconstructed. This is the condition of social crisis and breakdown that Lukács designated the actuality of revolution. Such a crisis is a prerequisite for the dialectic of theory and practice, the topic of the next two chapters of this part. So, while elaborated theoretically, this section leaves the critique of ideology behind, regarding it as intellectually complete. A note is warranted before proceeding to Lukács’s argument. While the term ‘actuality of revolution’ appears in History and Class Consciousness, the major source for this concept is Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. This work is often ignored, or worse, dismissed as evidence of Lukács’s alleged conservative shift under pressure. Yet it was published in 1924, two years before Lukács likely completed A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. Seen in light of this later text and read carefully, there is no evidence to suggest that Lenin inhabits a more conservative position than History and Class Consciousness. In fact, this work should be read in light of the emerging cult of Lenin, as a nonetoo-subtle repackaging of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis couched in terms of loyalty and orthodoxy. Moreover, Lukács’s emphasis on the democratic role of the soviets, as well as his reproduction of Lenin’s comments on state capitalism in Russia, may be read as subversive.93 This work therefore represented a further attempt to introduce philosophy of praxis into the Communist International, albeit under the guise of orthodox loyalty to Leninism. This is perhaps why the text was not commented on at the time; Lukács’s critics felt incapable of expressing their disagreements, preferring to ignore it. The actuality of revolution refers to a historic period of crisis. The concrete analysis of such a crisis provides the key for understanding the totality in its present historic specificity. Thus, the actuality of revolution supplies the first mediation beyond reified ways of looking at history and society, discussed

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Lukács 1967b, pp. 63–8, 75–6.

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above, which tend to eternalise the given. This said, it is not uncommon to assume that Lukács’s term ‘actuality of revolution’ refers simply to the revolutionary will of the party to relate every question to the ultimate goal of revolution. While Lukács does believe that this is an aspect of a revolutionary party’s practice, to limit it to this superficial and voluntaristic definition would be an injustice to the concreteness of Lukács’s analysis. As this section shows, the concept of the actuality of revolution is a historic periodisation. It refers to an actualisation of the ‘latent’ crisis in capitalism, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Indeed, few commentators have noticed the term actuality of revolution, let alone understood it as a historic periodisation which makes possible the resolution of the antinomies of bourgeois thought. As is generally the case, Andrew Feenberg is an exception to this. In The Philosophy of Praxis, he notes that the closure of the actuality of revolution (that is, the abeyance of the revolutionary wave of the 1920s) informs the key differences between the approach developed by the Frankfurt School and Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.94 Indeed, it would appear that the only other commentator who grasps the importance of the term is Peter Alexander Meyers, whose defence of Lukács’s political theory is generally excellent. He argues, in line with the analysis presented here, that the divide between imputed and empirical class consciousness may only be dynamised in the context of the actuality of revolution. In this period, the distance between the short and long term interests of the proletariat begins to close. Insofar as short and long term interests coincide, this provides the average worker with a strong motivation for understanding and embracing their imputed class consciousness. This, in turn, provides

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Additionally, Feenberg uses the term actuality of revolution to distinguish Lukács’s philosophy of praxis from those that succeeded it. While observing that Horkheimer expressly rejected approaches to truth that were contingent on the success of revolution, Feenberg contends that the Frankfurt School expressed the truth of a new political period in which totalitarianism predominated and praxis was decisively absent (Feenberg 2014, p. 58). Later in The Philosophy of Praxis, in a footnote to page 214, Feenberg cites the absence of the actuality of revolution as a defence of the reformist strategy he supports, writing: ‘The temptation to dismiss this logic as reformist or co-opted must be resisted. A similar attitude would have led to the dismissal of the struggles of the early labour movement. The problem of reform versus revolution only arises in what Lukács calls the period of “the actuality of revolution.” We are not there.’ (Feenberg 2014, fn. 10, p. 214.) Feenberg elaborates on the actuality of revolution in his article ‘Post-Utopian Marxism: Lukács and the dilemmas of organisation’ (see Feenberg 2002, pp. 60–1). While quite right in his diagnosis of the present moment, as it occurred when his book was published, Feenberg does not adequately draw out the consequences of the missing actuality of revolution for philosophy of praxis. This will be discussed below.

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for the motivation of the working class to participate in soviet democracy and to make strong political judgements.95 Meyers’s argument will be discussed in more detail shortly. To return to the argument at hand, while Lukács does refer to differing degrees of actuality or actualisation in History and Class Consciousness, he does not typically employ the term actuality of revolution. Nevertheless, in his discussions of Rosa Luxemburg and class consciousness, the concept is clearly operative. In fact, the existence of the actuality of revolution is one of the core presuppositions of History and Class Consciousness, as well as Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as a whole. The first appearance of the concept occurs in ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’ in which Lukács argues that Luxemburg’s decisive advantage over the reformist wing of German Social Democracy was her identification of the concrete crisis of capitalism in the breakdown of accumulation.96 While he does not go into detail about Luxemburg’s political economy, he notes that she refrains from eternalising capitalism by both assuming the possibility of infinite and unchecked accumulation and refraining from any predictions about a final crisis. The concreteness of Luxemburg’s diagnosis is the key. Additionally, this was not merely an economic question; Lukács notes that Luxemburg was explicit that revolution can only occur in the context of a crisis of capitalism.97 In ‘Class Consciousness’, Lukács expands on this argument, writing: The same process that the bourgeoisie experiences as a permanent crisis and gradual dissolution appears to the proletariat, likewise in crisis-form, as the gathering of strength and the springboard to victory. Ideologically this means that the same growth of insight into the nature of society, which reflects the protracted death struggle of the bourgeoisie, entails a steady growth in the strength of the proletariat.98 While in this essay Lukács’s arguments about the development of class consciousness are relatively abstract and ahistorical, the quote contains an important point. In the first place, crisis is dereifying in that it deprives the bourgeoisie of power, initiative and coherence, undermining their hegemony and creating a space for counter-hegemonic projects. This is of significance not only for a revolutionary period, but for crises that punctuate periods of relative 95 96 97 98

See Meyers 2006, p. 564. Lukács 1967a, pp. 36–9. Lukács 1967a, p. 40. Lukács 1967a, p. 68.

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stability. In the context of comments explaining that reification fragments the totality and that the antinomies of bourgeois life obscure the central economic logic of capitalism, Lukács argues: The further the economic crisis of capitalism advances, the more clearly … [the] unity in the economic process becomes comprehensible in practice. It was there, of course, in so-called periods of normality, too, and was therefore visible from the class standpoint of the proletariat, but the gap between appearance and ultimate reality was too great for that unity to have any practical consequences for proletarian action.99 So, crisis makes the totalising economic logic of capitalism a tangible actuality, susceptible to social practice and not merely to theoretical analysis. Continuing his discussion of crisis, Lukács writes: ‘The unity of the economic process now moves within reach. So much so that even capitalist theory cannot remain untouched by it, though it can never fully adjust to it. In this situation the fate of the proletariat, and hence of the whole future of humanity, hangs on whether or not it will take the step that has now become objectively possible’.100 Lukács draws out the full consequences of this argument. Prior to crisis, the proletariat ‘… cannot go beyond the criticism of reification and so it is only negatively superior to its antagonist. Indeed, if it can do no more than negate some aspects of capitalism, if it cannot at least aspire to a critique of the whole, then it will not even achieve a negative superiority’.101 Thus, prior to the actuality of revolution, the workers’ movement must remain within the antinomies of reification. Prior to the actuality of revolution, revolutionary politics can only exist in a practical form as the abstract, sectarian-utopian ethical rejection of what is. ‘… [A]s long as an objective still lies beyond reach, observers with particularly acute insight will be able to a certain extent to envisage the goal itself, its nature and its social necessity. They will, however, be unable to discern clearly either the concrete steps that would lead to that goal or the concrete means that could be deduced from their doubtlessly correct insight’.102 As has been shown, due to its character as an ought, a revolutionary stance prior to the actuality of revolution is just as beholden to the contemplative stance as is reformism. Insofar as revolution is only an abstract, latent possibility of capitalism, so too are revolutionary 99 100 101 102

Lukács 1967a, pp. 74–5. Lukács 1967a, p. 75. Lukács 1967a, p. 76. Lukács 1967a, pp. 295–6.

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politics doomed to remain abstract and utopian. This is not necessarily a sterile position. Lukács argues that by virtue of rejecting the present, utopianism may at least understand that the present represents a problem which must be mastered. However, in the absence of the actuality of revolution, no concrete solution is available. So, the dichotomy between the final goal and movement (within which sectarianism dwells in the former and reformism the latter) may be transcended concretely as the actuality of revolution develops and as it becomes possible to resolve the problem of the present. As Lukács writes: ‘For a problem always makes its appearance first as an abstract possibility and only afterwards is it realised in concrete terms. And it only becomes meaningful to discuss whether questions are rightly or wrongly conceived when this second stage has been reached, when it becomes possible to recognize that concrete totality which is destined to constitute the environment and the path to the realisation of the goal in question’.103 This also indicates that prior to the actuality of revolution, both reformism and sectarian-utopian revolutionism, at their best, have their role to play: the former may develop a practical foundation for class consciousness, while the latter may develop a theoretical one. As has been argued, to rise to praxis, both must be subjected to a critique, practically and theoretically; their contributions may only be rendered useful insofar as their one sidedness is overcome. There is, of course, no guarantee that this will be the case. The concept of the actuality of revolution is concretised in Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought.104 Given that the actuality of revolution demands concrete historical analysis, Lukács’s discussion draws on the prehistory of 103 104

Lukács 1967a, p. 296. It is vital to note, however, that Lukács’s argument, despite being couched in sometimes incommodious praise for Lenin, is not based on the latter’s Marxism, or even on a close reading of any of his texts. Moreover, without entering into a discussion of Lenin’s theory or politics, it may be suggested that with regard to the former, Lenin was decidedly Lukács’s inferior in matters of philosophy and theory. With regard to the latter, while Lenin was undoubtedly a genius of practical politics, his democratic credentials are rather more ambiguous than Lukács’s. For instance, there is a vast gulf between the Lenin of 1914 who declared Taylorism to be man’s enslavement to the machine, and the Lenin of 1918 who demanded the expansion of Taylorism in Russia (cf. Lenin 1977a, pp. 152–4, 1977b, p. 80). This said, even in the former article, Lenin suggests the desirability of the rationalisation of labour under socialism. The justification for this resided in the class character of the Soviet state. Yet, given the relatively rapid decline of soviets following the October Revolution, one wonders how the logic of the young workers’ state differed from the logic of reification, except in intensity. This note is not intended to suggest, counterfactually, that a more libertarian or democratic alternative was possible in Russia; rather it simply suggests a difference between Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and the praxis upon which it was elaborated. After all, as mentioned in a note above, even in 1924, Lukács

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the Russian Revolution. However, this adaptation of Lukács’s argument does not make any historical claims; rather the aim is to reproduce what Lukács found conceptually and universally significant in the Russian experience. This was, after all, Lukács’s explicit intent.105 To begin with, he argues that Lenin’s practical-political genius consisted in his ability to detect, in the particular and backward conditions of Russia, universal and modern tendencies associated with the ‘last phase of capitalism’ which would create the space for a proletarian revolution and socialism: Lenin never generalised from parochially Russian experiences limited in time and space. He did however, with the perception of genius, immediately recognize the fundamental problem of our time – the approaching revolution – at the time and place of its first appearance. From then on he understood and explained all events, Russian as well as international, from this perspective – from the perspective of the actuality of revolution.106 It is already clear that the actuality of revolution is a concrete periodisation in which the contradictions of the reification raise, in reality, the concrete possibility of revolution. This makes it possible to complete historical materialism. Lukács writes: ‘… historical materialism as the conceptual expression of the proletariat’s struggle for liberation could only be conceived and formulated theoretically when revolution was already on the historical agenda as a practical reality …’107 Yet despite the objectivity of the actuality of revolution, Lukács is clear to note that it is not easy to perceive; common sense only notices it when ‘… the working masses are already fighting on the barricades …’ while vulgar Marxism, with its uncritical naturalisation of capitalist institutions, sees the actuality of revolution as a mistake or an irrational outburst.108 Consequently, historical materialism simultaneously presupposes the actuality of revolution, holds the key to understanding it and is itself transformed by it. So in Lukács’s view, Lenin represented a development on Marx not because

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emphasised the soviets. This difference, as well as its theoretical consequences, will be discussed in Chapter 9. Lukács 1967b, p. 9. Lukács 1967b, p. 11. Lukács 1967b, p. 11. ‘To him [the vulgar Marxist], the fighters on the barricades are madmen, the defeated revolution is a mistake, and the builders of socialism, in a successful revolution – which in the eyes of an opportunist can only be transitory – are outright criminals’ (Lukács 1967b, p. 11).

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Marx was mistaken in some respect, but because the reality and actuality of revolution were more advanced in Lenin’s time, permitting more concrete political insight. So: The actuality of revolution provides the key-note of a whole epoch. Individual actions can only be considered revolutionary or counter-revolutionary when related to the central issue of revolution, which is only to be discovered by an accurate analysis of the socio-historic whole. The actuality of revolution therefore implies the study of each individual daily problem in concrete association with the socio-historic whole, as moments in the liberation of the proletariat … The development of capitalism turned proletarian revolution into an everyday issue.109 Lenin’s advantage, therefore, consisted in the fact that he did not perceive the actuality of revolution as a general and timeless problem, but rather, as a concrete complex of presentist problems whose solution was both theoretical and, more importantly, practical. So, the actuality of revolution makes a practical solution to the antinomies of bourgeois politics possible where previously only a theoretical solution existed. For Lukács, ‘Lenin alone took this step towards making Marxism, now a quite practical force, concrete’.110 Given the above, the actuality of revolution entails a concrete complex of problems that face the proletariat at a specific conjuncture. This conjuncture constitutes a complex totality, consisting of an admixture of various class forces, national as well as international circumstances. The key to comprehending the actuality of revolution – and practically leading a revolutionary movement – is therefore the comprehension of the concrete totality as a present reality. In the Russian example, this centred on a number of key questions, many of which will be discussed fully in Chapter 6, as part of a general discussion of the dialectics of revolution. For now, however, they will be mentioned in passing in order to illustrate the process of concretisation which the actuality of revolution undergoes. The most immediate problem facing Russia, according to Lukács, was the question of bourgeois-democratic revolution. Lenin’s position here was distinctive. First, it opposed the Narodnik perspective which denied the organic development of capitalism in Russia. Secondly, it opposed the ‘Legal Marxist’ perspective which transformed the empirical development of Russian capitalism into an inexorable virtue. Lenin was able to avoid these anti-

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Lukács 1967b, pp. 12–13. Lukács 1967b, p. 13.

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nomies through the standpoint of the proletariat which opposed both the brutality and political oppression of Tsarism and the economic brutality of rising capitalism. This was more than a moral rejection: it translated into strategic and political terms. On the one hand, the actuality of revolution allowed Lenin and other revolutionary theorists in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (namely, Plekhanov and Trotsky) to perceive that an alliance between the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat was impossible; on the contrary, the threat of the proletariat pushed the liberal bourgeoisie into an alliance with Tsarism.111 Hence the proletariat was tasked with the role of fighting for a democratic revolution. Yet, given the working class’s minority status, this was impossible without forming a revolutionary coalition with the peasantry. So the earliest comprehension of the actuality of the Russian Revolution allowed Lenin to begin to develop his concept of proletarian hegemony as the leadership of the peasantry by the proletariat.112 Following this, Lukács continued to concretise the actuality of revolution via the debates about the party and its role in the revolutionary movement. He notes that Lenin’s concept of the party differed from approaches which emphasised the spontaneous revolutionary potential of the masses. Thus, for Lenin, the question of party organisation and political clarity was central: ‘The Bolshevik concept of party organization involved the selection of a group of single-minded revolutionaries, prepared to make any sacrifice, from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole’.113 Yet, Lukács was very clear to distinguish this view from the common stereotype of Lenin as an elitist who approached the mass of the working class from a technical, sectarian and cynical standpoint. He clarifies that this caricature of Lenin as a Blanquist

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Lukács 1967b, pp. 20–1. Lukács 1967b, pp. 22–3. Shandro employs the concept of hegemony to understand Lenin’s praxis in a remarkably similar way to Lukács. His account, however, is based far more on Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis than Lukács’s, of which he is quite critical. Shandro’s critique of Lukács is not notable in and of itself; it is of a piece with many other critiques of Lukács, and for this reason it will not be commented upon here (see Shandro 2014, pp. 177–9). However, it is important to note that the theorisation of Lukács proposed in this work opens the way to a comparison between Shandro’s theorisation of Lenin and between Lukács and Gramsci’s philosophies of praxis. Beyond this, it is hoped that the ongoing renaissance of interest in Lenin will also generate new interest in Lukács’s theorisation of him. For a recent intellectual biography of Lenin written along Lukácsian lines, see Krausz 2015. Lukács 1967b, p. 25.

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… misses the core of Lenin’s concept of party organisation simply because, as Lenin said, the group of professional revolutionaries does not for one moment have the task of either ‘making’ the revolution, or – by their own independent, bold actions – of sweeping the inactive masses along to confront them with a revolutionary fait accompli. Lenin’s concept of party organization presupposes the fact – the actuality – of the revolution … The party, as the strictly centralised organization of the proletariat’s most conscious elements – and only as such – is conceived of as an instrument of class struggle in a revolutionary period.114 These terms – party, class, class consciousness, and so on – are controversial. They will be discussed in full shortly. The point here is to illustrate that in Lukács’s conception, party organisation is not a timeless or technical matter but one which must be carefully related to the standpoint of the proletariat in the concrete actuality of revolution. Only in this way can we comprehend the many strategic and organisational twists and turns which took place in the pre-revolutionary years in Russia. ‘… the Leninist form of organisation is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution’.115 To be clear, this is not an abstract act of prediction, but one which depends on a concrete perception of the social totality and the many classes, as well as their political representatives, which populate it. In this way, the actuality of revolution makes it possible to overcome the bureaucratic or sectarian organisational forms discussed above. Similarly, Lukács emphasises that Lenin’s clarity regarding different strata of the population, including the labour aristocracy, the liberal bourgeoisie, various middle-class layers and the peasantry, made possible a more concrete approach to party building. Finally, Lukács emphasises that the party must be capable of learning and developing, organisationally and politically, in the course of class struggle.116 Two more major concrete political questions characterised the actuality of revolution in Russia: the world war and the state, specifically in the form of the Provisional Government. With regard to the former, the failure of the Second International in the face of the war is well-known. Lenin, and co-thinkers like Luxemburg and Bukharin, were able to stand apart from this owing to their concrete theorisation of imperialism. While this was partly an economic theorisation which drew on more moderate socialist thinkers like Hilferding, in Lukács’s opinion, Lenin’s superiority consisted in ‘… his concrete articulation 114 115 116

Lukács 1967b, p. 26. Lukács 1967b, p. 29. Lukács 1967b, pp. 28 ff.

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of the economic theory of imperialism with every political problem of the present epoch, thereby making the economics of the new phase a guide-line for all concrete action in the resultant decisive conjuncture’.117 We see here a specific partial unity of theory and political practice; Lenin’s ability to theorise imperialism was intimately connected with his ability to perceive the political positioning required to advance the position of the working class. This was, moreover, related to a host of other questions, such as that of oppressed nationalities as well as the tactical positioning of the Bolshevik Party following the February Revolution. With regard to the second political question, that of the state and the Provisional Government, a similar point emerges. As Lukács writes: A period’s revolutionary essence is expressed most clearly when class and inter-party struggles no longer take place within the existing state order but begin to explode its barriers and point beyond them. On the one hand they appear as struggles for state power; on the other, the state is simultaneously forced to participate openly in them. There is not only a struggle against the state; the state itself is exposed as a weapon of class struggle, as one of the most important instruments of the maintenance of class rule.118 In Russia, as in the wave of revolutions in Europe between 1918 and 1924, the question of the state was no longer abstract. Rather, the workers’ councils or soviets were concretely counterposed to the state. In light of this, the hegemony of the proletariat took on a concrete and practical form. In dual power, two forms of class power are manifested institutionally: the soviets as opposed to the bourgeois state. The existence of soviets therefore is characteristic of the highest degree of the actuality of revolution.119 Indeed, in an era of dual power in which soviets represent the political and practical actualisation of proletarian hegemony, it is possible to perceive the immediate and as-yet unconscious actualisation of praxis. This is to say, the soviets represent a concrete and practical overcoming of the antinomies of bourgeois politics. They have the actual power to alter the social totality, and this power may be exercised only insofar as the soviets are conscious of this power. This consciousness is formed politically, through a debate between competing tendencies within the soviets. Thus actual and concrete praxis is primarily a question of political leadership 117 118 119

Lukács 1967b, p. 41. Lukács 1967b, p. 60. Lukács 1967b, pp. 62–3.

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during the actuality of revolution. This is the significance for Lukács of Lenin’s realpolitik, or, as he described it in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, the dialectic between moments and process in the revolutionary situation. This will be discussed fully below. While the actuality of revolution is the product of an inexorable crisis brought on by the objective logic of capitalism, it is clear that it may only be grasped by way of those theorists – particularly Lenin, and to a lesser extent, Luxemburg – who grasped it as it unfolded. Hence, Lukács believes that the two works which inaugurated the rebirth of Marxism in the context of the actuality of the European revolution are The Accumulation of Capital and State and Revolution.120 From this, it is possible to sum up the key aspects of the actuality of revolution. The actuality of revolution is, in the first place, opened up on a national level in which the specific problems or contradictions that inhere in that nation’s history create a concrete possibility of revolution, and consequently, the ability to think through the problems of that revolution.121 In Russia, this took the form of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. This, in turn, made it possible to concretise the standpoint of the proletariat. No longer was theory restricted to an abstract view of the proletariat; rather, the theorists of Russian social democracy gained the ability to explore the concrete relations between the proletariat and other classes. Completing this task, however, required an analysis of the social totality. Only in this light could the interests of classes and strata of the population be discerned, and only in this light could a non-utopian revolutionary strategy be elaborated. In Russia, as in every country, this was impossible on a purely national basis. The world war was an extension of a long term economic crisis in European capitalism into every other sphere of reality – not merely the political sphere, but also the world-historical or civilisational sphere. This absolute crisis of capitalism was reflected as a subjective crisis, not merely as a subjective intellectual crisis for thinkers like Lukács, but as a matter of life and death for those who went through the war and were forced to confront the violence upon which European civilisation was premised. So the objective unfolding of history – or at least, objective insofar as none of the protagonists were capable of a genuine and penetrating consciousness of the process – led to a rupture in the form of the February Revolution. In this way, the objective dialectic of capitalism gave rise to a field of spontaneity which was an as-yet unconscious reassertion of 120 121

Lukács 1967a, p. 35. Once more, it could very well be argued that Gramsci’s discussion of Italian history was aimed at elucidating the actuality of revolution in Italy. Cf. Gramsci 1971b Ch. 3, ‘Notes on Italian History’.

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humanity against Tsarism. This rupture produced the soviets and dual power; the institutional manifestations of the actuality of revolution. It further allowed the question of praxis to be posed in terms of both theory and practice, by Lukács as well as other theorists with similar concerns, albeit after the fact. Consequently, dual power represents the culmination of the actuality of revolution because in it, the entirety of society, both civil society and the state, open themselves to revolutionary transformation. Dual power makes the concrete comprehension and dereification of the social totality a possibility and it establishes a practical criterion by which to measure this, namely, the success of praxis. As Lukács wrote in History and Class Consciousness: Every proletarian revolution has created workers’ councils in an increasingly radical and conscious manner. When this weapon increases in power to the point where it becomes the organ of the state, this is a sign that the class consciousness of the proletariat is on the verge of overcoming the bourgeois outlook of its leaders. The revolutionary workers’ council (not to be confused with its opportunist caricatures) is one of the forms which the consciousness of the proletariat has striven to create ever since its inception. The fact that it exists and is constantly developing shows that the proletariat already stands on the threshold of its own consciousness and hence on the threshold of victory. The workers’ council spells the political and economic defeat of reification. In the period following the dictatorship it will eliminate the bourgeois separation of the legislature, administration and judiciary. During the struggle for control its mission is twofold. On the one hand, it must overcome the fragmentation of the proletariat in time and space, and on the other, it has to bring economics and politics together into the true synthesis of proletarian praxis. In this way it will help to reconcile the dialectical conflict between immediate interest and ultimate goal.122 The workers’ council holds the key to overcoming the constitutive antinomies of bourgeois society. Yet Lukács was not a council communist. His theory of praxis was built on his appreciation of Leninism. Thus, in his theory, the soviets represent the practical and objective but as-yet unconscious dereification of capitalism. In order for praxis to become actualised, the soviets must rise to a consciousness of the social totality. This, however, is itself a dialectical process. So the actuality of revolution gives rise to an ideological crisis of the proletariat.

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The ideological crisis of the proletariat consists firstly in the fact that bourgeois hegemony is severely destabilised. Secondly, it entails that the proletariat is capable of sustaining a practical alternative to bourgeois rule. Thirdly, and most importantly, this crisis reveals that ‘… in many respects the proletariat is still caught up in the old capitalist forms of thought and feeling’.123 Consequently, the key barrier to praxis is now what Lukács refers to as the institutional bourgeoisification of the proletariat, under the leadership of Menshevik parties and unions. These organisations fight to restrict the spontaneous movement of the proletariat and to maintain its fragmentation as determined by the capitalist economy. So, the actuality of revolution renders political and ideological debates vitally important: As the decisive battle in the class struggle approaches, the power of a true or false theory to accelerate or retard progress grows in proportion. The ‘realm of freedom’, at the end of the ‘pre-history of mankind’ means precisely that the power of the objectified, reified relations between men begins to revert to man. The closer this process comes to its goal the more urgent it becomes for the proletariat to understand its own historical mission and the more vigorously and directly proletarian class consciousness will determine each of its actions.124 This ideological crisis of the proletariat signals therefore the transition between the objective dialectic of capitalism and the subjective dialectic of class consciousness and praxis. In addition to allowing objective reality to rise to consciousness, this moment allows the theoretical stance to rise to practicality. Theory, which had previously existed ‘… as “pure” theory, or as a simple postulate, a simple imperative or norm of action’, may now attain concreteness. Here, what Lukács calls ‘latent and theoretical’ class consciousness may take the form of a party which is capable of intervening in history.125 Before turning to the subjective dialectic that this entails, one final point should be raised. The above account implies a layered ontology, or, a differentiated totality in which an empirical and fragmented immediacy gives way to a more mediated, more concrete representation of the social totality. Yet, this more concrete representation reveals mediations and structures which were already present in reality, albeit in unconscious form. Thus the historical concretisation of the view of social totality is equally the actualisation of the 123 124 125

Lukács 1967a, p. 310. Lukács 1967a, pp. 69–70. Lukács 1967a, p. 41.

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revolutionary potential within it. Lukács alludes to this in History and Class Consciousness, when he reproduces Hegel’s critique of Kant. Lukács credits Kant with suggesting that a dialectic of concepts in movement is the only alternative to the latter’s own theory of the structure of concepts. Lukács believed that this intuited the structure of true praxis while leaving it unexplored. Hegel, in Lukács’s account, developed this further, as will be explored fully in Part Three. For now, however, the relevant point is that in Lukács’s reading of Hegel, the development of a historical view of the concrete totality also allows deeper gradations of reality to be perceived and ordered, conceptually.126 Applied to the emergence of praxis, this is an important idea. If the actuality of revolution itself begins to reveal the concrete and historically contingent structure of reality, this in fact implies that the highest truth about reality may only be discerned from the fully actualised standpoint of the proletariat. Lukács returns to explore the idea in some depth in his essay on ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics’ where he argues that every immediate certainty belies complex and highly mediated social forms.127 Every immediacy therefore corresponds to a reality which is already structured and mediated, but whose structure is either unknown or only known one sidedly. The standpoint of the proletariat allows for the theoretical critique of these immediacies. Yet even the most perfect theoretical critique contains an abstract element. It therefore must be concluded that theory, no matter how revolutionary, cannot grasp social reality fully. Rather, for Lukács, theoretical perspectives and critiques can only become effective and really concrete, and therefore, completely true, in the context of the practical class struggle of the proletariat. Not only does this make it possible to overcome the abstraction of the standpoint of theory or the revolutionary sectarian-utopian standpoint, but to Lukács, it represents a decisive step in the self-knowledge of reality; it makes it possible to comprehend the comprehension of reality. With this final insight, theory may 126 127

Lukács 1967a, p. 127. He writes: An immediate certain unity, an immediately obvious truth, can only be attained in two ways. In the first place, the basic societal forms of the present are given to us as immediate realities – in fact, the more subtle and complex (in Hegel’s terms, the more mediated) the forms, the more immediately evident they are. In the case of the economically social foundations, such immediacy can be seen through as mere appearance from the standpoint of the proletariat. Of course, the fact that we can see through these forms does not in any way alter the immediately obvious certainty that they are the forms of existence of our present, but it can on the other hand give our practical behaviour towards them a new quality, which in turn reacts upon our immediate behaviour (Lukács 1972d, p. 207).

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finally turn towards practice. Far from this turn sacrificing the abstract truth of theory, it in fact represents the completion of the truth of theory, by way of its opposite: ‘For Marxists the concrete analysis of the concrete situation is not the opposite of “pure” theory; on the contrary, it is the culmination of all genuine theory, its consummation, the point where it breaks into practice’.128 128

Lukács 1967b, p. 43.

chapter 6

The Party 1

The Party as Bearer of Imputed Class Consciousness Conceive all things at once: times, places, actions, qualities and quantities; then you can understand God. Hermes Trismegistus1

Lukács concluded his famous essay on ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ with the following lines: History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at issue. The truth that the old intuitive, mechanistic materialism could not grasp turns out to be doubly true for the proletariat, namely that it can be transformed and liberated only by its own actions, and that ‘the educator must himself be educated’. The objective economic evolution could do no more than create the position of the proletariat in the production process. It was this position that determined its point of view. But the objective evolution could only give the proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to change society. Any transformation can only come about as the product of the – free – action of the proletariat itself.2 To the majority of readers, this statement has been regarded as an act of theoretical substitutionism; the proletariat is substituted for a missing subject-object of history, and in turn, the party is substituted for the empirical proletariat which cannot but fail under the weight of its mission. This judgement is as shallow as it is widespread. As with many such criticisms of Lukács, this criticism has generally done little to advance our understanding of his philosophy of praxis. So, while it is necessary to mount a defence of Lukács’s theory of revolution and the party, this is a secondary aim (that will be undertaken in Section 6.2). The main aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the validity and importance of a much more democratic and critical reading of Lukács. The second aim is to the dialectic of class consciousness within his overall philo-

1 Salaman et al. 2000, p. 58. 2 Lukács 1967a, pp. 208–9.

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sophy of praxis. Such a reading is important for two reasons: firstly, if Lukács’s dialectic of class consciousness is misread, it renders an assessment of his whole philosophy of praxis impossible. Simply put, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is inseparable from the dialectic of class consciousness, out of which praxis emerges. To make the stakes of this admittedly radical reading clear: the actual praxis of the October Revolution, considered in terms of its universal and conceptual significance, that is, considered theoretically and philosophically, is the guarantor of the truth of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as a whole. This leads to the second reason why the reading proposed here and in Chapter 7 is important: it demonstrates, through its own logic, the contradictions that will be explored in Part Three. The starting point for the dialectic between party and class has been provided in Chapters 4 and 5. These sections, beginning with the reified individual, demonstrated the conceptual possibility of overcoming the contemplative stance by self-subordination to the proletarian movement. The antinomies of the workers’ movement – dependent as they are on the standpoint of the bourgeoisie – afforded further opportunity to concretise the standpoint of theory. As was shown, prior to the actuality of revolution, the only party forms which are possible reproduce reification intellectually and organisationally. The actuality of revolution makes possible a practical critique of reification, but initially, this is unconscious. So, the result of Chapters 4 and 5 was a critical articulation of historical materialism which is theoretically superior to versions of Marxism which reproduce reified thought. Yet, as a theory, even a self-critical one, this version of praxis remains a demand and not an actuality. Thus, two further developments must be accounted for. The first is the development of theory of praxis beyond critique, into a form where it may concretely engage with practice. The second is a development of practice itself, to a point where it becomes receptive to the suitably concretised insight of theory. The former issue is the subject of this chapter. The methodological demands for mediation, totality, genesis and praxis are here recast in light of a far richer content. Their development, as the knowledge a party, will form the content for Section 6.1. This knowledge represents the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat in itself, that is, in its self-certainty. However, the point which distinguished Lukács amongst Third International theorists was that he demanded that the knowledge of the party become self-conscious. So, following the defence of Lukács’s Leninism in Section 6.2, Section 6.3 will outline a theory of the party as a process of practical-theoretical learning. This will outline the party’s material constitution and self-understanding. This chapter will draw on those theorists who have read Lukács in a manner that highlights his radical democratic commitments. The most important of these are Merleau-Ponty, Mészáros, Feenberg

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and Meyers. The result of this chapter is the sublation of the contemplative stance by way of a revolutionary party in which the theory of praxis may actualise itself. This will finally provide the necessary conceptual prerequisites for Chapter 7 which will examine praxis as it emerges in the world, via the proletariat itself. The imputed class consciousness of the proletariat must, in the first place, take the form of a minority party because bourgeois hegemony imposes a discord between theory and practice. At times, in anticipating revolution and its general strategic contours, theory appears to run ahead of the practice upon which it is based.3 However, as has been shown, the price of this foresight is abstraction. Moreover, prior to the actuality of revolution, which alone makes concrete development of revolutionary theory possible, such foresight is in fact a form of recollection. As Gillian Rose observed, albeit in a rather different context, the future is the supreme anachronism, for ‘… the future is the time in which we may not be, and yet, we must imagine we will have been’.4 This is why the concrete developments in Marxian theory have occurred after praxis and have often taken the form of ‘lessons’ that are learned and preserved by the so-called memory of the class. Memory is, however, notoriously unreliable. By recollecting and comprehending forms of radical practice which emerged in the class struggle – for example, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the October Revolution – Marxist theory renders that practice universal. Such universality, however, is purchased at the expense of the particular situation that gave rise to it. Of course, in these cases, it was necessary that intellectual development took place on the side of theory only because the practices in question were not capable of articulating their own universal significance, not least of all due to their defeat or degeneration. Seen in this light, the divide between theory and practice in the workers’ movement is just as much a divide between past, future and present. Outside the actuality of revolution, even the most self-critical revolutionary theory may only exist as a simultaneous recol-

3 In fact, it could well be said that the abstract theory of proletarian revolution was given its first full (albeit lacking in detail) outline by Marx in The Communist Manifesto which was the product of a decade’s research and involvement in the democratic revolution. Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, in his book entitled The Philosophy of Praxis, argues persuasively that The Communist Manifesto represented Marx’s first attempt at a synthesis between theory and practice, in the context of an actual revolution and the first, though still weak, independent movement of the working class. This is not the place to discuss Vazquez’s philosophy of praxis in connection with Lukács, however, a comparison in the context of a broader work on the philosophy of praxis would be invaluable (‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ in Marx and Engels 1976, pp. 447–518, ‘The conception of praxis in Marx’ in Sánchez Vázquez 1977, Ch. III). 4 Rose 1996, p. 126.

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lection and abstract anticipation. Theory may, of course, strive to grasp the present. However, shy of class struggle on a massive scale, knowledge of the present will remain incomplete and largely impractical. At best, this knowledge may orient the essentially contemplative activity of a reformist party or a sect. Similarly, proletarian practice, insofar as it is bound to contemplative political forms, will be trapped in an eternalised present. In Lukács’s view, the actuality of revolution makes it possible to overcome this antinomy in the present precisely because, as has been shown, dual power represents an unconscious practical process of dereification.5 In this sense, the actuality of revolution bears praxis as a latent yet concrete possibility. However, for praxis to become conscious, that is, to attain fully its concept, the intervention of theory is required. This demands that the theory be embodied in a party and concretised into a programme and a series of policies and strategies which are informed by an analysis of the concrete, historical totality. That is, a theory of praxis, based on the standpoint of the proletariat, must become the imputed class consciousness of a proletariat within a given context. This requires that the methodological demands which have structured this work be developed further, in light of a positive social and historical content. The starting point for this is the standpoint of the proletariat as an ethical and critical insight into capitalism. In this regard, the knowledge of the party begins with a theoretical perspective which is inherited and abstract. This perspective must be concretised by knowledge of the social totality, in light of its genesis, which points towards concrete praxis. Of course, this process of learning relies on the practice of the party in dialogue with the practice of the class itself and in political combat with other tendencies. However, elaborating the question in these terms, which maintain a conceptual separation between theory and practice, demonstrates why Lukács’s presentation of this problem is distinctive. His achievement was not simply that he universalised Leninism. Many others attempted this, including theorists loyal to the Third International, as well as Trotsky, Gramsci and others. Instead, Lukács charts a path whereby the theory of the party may become self-reflexive. For Lukács, to rise to praxis, the imputed consciousness of the proletariat must become both in and for itself. As a result, it must be admitted here that this conceptual progression has only occurred within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, that is, in theory. No communist party ever developed the self-critical Marxism envisioned by 5 For example, in the actuality of revolution, Lukács argues that recollection and innovation might take place simultaneously. Lukács praises Lenin’s State and Revolution as a work which both recovers Marx’s insights into revolution and which expresses the new truth of the historic period in which it was written (Lukács 1967a, p. 35).

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Lukács. The consequences of this fact for Lukács’s philosophy will be discussed in Part 3. Nevertheless, this section outlines imputed class consciousness in itself. As shown, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis relies on the conviction that the proletariat is the first class in history capable of grasping its own interests and universal significance. In his defence of History and Class Consciousness, he wrote, citing Marx: ‘As will be well known by the readers of this polemic, my exegesis derives from Marx’s phrase (The Holy Family): “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment, regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will be historically compelled to do” ’.6 So to comprehend the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat is to see beyond its immediate or partial interests and to comprehend it in its totality. However, this insight – the standpoint of the proletariat – has already been generated. In itself, this standpoint constitutes an ethical and theoretical negation of capitalism, as has been shown. While this is a precondition for mediation, if it remains an ethical ought, it remains stuck in immediacy. As the standpoint of the proletariat develops it must learn that the ‘… desire to leave behind the immediacy of empirical reality and its not less immediate rationalist reflections must not be allowed to become an attempt to abandon immanent (social) reality. The price of such a false process of transcendence would be the reinstating and perpetuating of empirical reality with all its insoluble questions, but this time in a philosophically sublimated way’.7 Theory actualised in the form of a party thus understands that the overcoming of the world must be immanent to the world itself. The actuality of revolution makes possible such an immanent overcoming. What were previously theoretical disputes (i.e., the critique of reformism and sectarianism) may now be settled practically. In light of the actuality of revolution, the party forms a living ethical community which is both intellectually and practically committed to actualising the interests of the proletariat, and, more importantly, oriented towards the concrete mediations immanent in reality itself. Despite the residual abstraction of its theory, the party possesses at least one advantage: by virtue of its moral mission, it may become something like a collective intellectual and in so doing, begin to overcome the fragmentation of intellectual life characteristic of reification.8 6 Lukács 2002, p. 66. 7 Lukács 1967a, p. 162. 8 In a recent article, Katie Terezakis has noted that praxis (if not the party) represents a solution to the fragmentation and specialisation of reified life, pointing out that this solution was crucial to Lukács’s break with neo-Kantianism. She also connected these points with a critique of contemporary academia. She writes:

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Nevertheless, the ethical truth of the party may only be realised concretely. This leads back to the methodological demands which have structured this work: mediation, totality and genesis. In the imputed class consciousness possessed by a party, these terms take on, for the first time, a definite content. Concrete mediation, as has been shown, demands that immediacy and ethics be transcended in a non-utopian way. Initially, this requires the discovery of concrete mediations between the specific social objects which are encountered and the totality. This presupposes the possession of a totalising theory. Beyond this, it demands the application of theory to a given reality. In short, the party must analyse the conjuncture in which it finds itself. Lenin – A Study in the Unity of his Thought contains a relevant example of what this means. Speaking of the very early years of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Lukács argues that the first theoretical battle to be fought was over the class and economic nature of Russia. Contrary to the Narodnik

As it now stands, where those engaged in criticism will come largely from the disciplines of philosophy, English, comparative literature, and a small set of modern languages, it is significant for the youngest generation of critics that graduates outnumber tenure-track jobs, and that scores of thinkers work within unstable and inadequately remunerated posts as adjuncts, lecturers or visitors, often while carrying the financial debts of graduate school. The pecuniary cost of a PhD as compared with entry-level salaries is relevant, as is the all-pervading demand to ‘publish or perish’. Before seeing print (often even before the confirmation that they will see print), works may wait in a protracted queue, even at publishing venues with meagre circulation and reputation. Once disseminated, given the demand for records of publications and the myriad venues which have arisen to meet it, most critical works published in journals serving humanities disciplines can expect small readership; in the case of junior scholars, these works must also count as satisfactory ‘progress towards tenure’ within their disciplines, with all of the formal and thematic expectations entailed (Terezakis 2011, pp. 223–4). Terezakis observes that Lukács had noticed this tendency towards specialisation and fragmentation in late nineteenth century capitalism. The philosopher becomes a specialist, engaged in a field increasingly dominated by the logic of calculability. In this way, the logic of reification is internalised in academia; whatever liberating or dereified elements of thought remain become increasingly fragmented and insignificant in the face of an overgrowth of objective culture. Against this, Terezakis suggests that: ‘Lukács therefore tells us that we cannot afford a disengaged toleration of superficially historical discourses, any more than we should abide claims of historical neutrality or the transcendence of history. Lukács tells us that criticism must begin, ever again, with its own concrete situation, the flight from which, however appealing, dooms it to irrelevance’ (Terezakis 2011, p. 225). While she does not pass judgement on Lukács’s politics, she is quite correct that his idea of praxis was presentist, concretising and oriented towards overcoming the reification of theory as much as the reification of practice. Whatever one may conclude about Lukács’s politics, the idea of praxis as overcoming the reification of intellectual life remain suggestive with regards to the problems Terezakis identifies in the modern university.

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movement, Lenin and Plekhanov insisted on the inexorability of the growth of Russian capitalism and concretely identified the Russian proletariat. Of this, Lukács writes: This is a protracted and painful process through which every labour movement must pass. Only the individual problems in which the particularities of the class situation and the autonomy of the class interest of the proletariat express themselves constitute is specifically Russian element … But a correct solution to precisely these local problems as such must be found if the proletariat as a class is to win its independence of action. The best theoretical training is absolutely worthless if it limits itself to generalities: to be effective in practice it must express itself by solving precisely those particular problems.9 This shows quite clearly that while indispensable, Marxism, as a theory of proletarian revolution, was too abstract prior to its concrete development in the Russian context. On the other hand, this development allowed for the identification and articulation of the standpoint of the Russian proletariat, which was ultimately to be of universal significance. Prior to the emergence of praxis, the intellectual work required to grasp the conjuncture is both necessary and neverending. The representation of totality may be enriched with detail, but will remain in some regards abstract and formal. Gaps will be filled by an aspiration towards totality, and yet, new gaps will emerge. Strategic precepts may be outlined, but not yet tested. Moreover, the party will depend on an inherited (and therefore, abstract) conceptual framework. Nevertheless, despite the party’s inferior intellectual resources, the categories of mediation and totality potentially grant the party’s knowledge greater concreteness than that available to the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. While the bourgeoisie is at home in immediacy, the standpoint of the proletariat, as an ethical rejection of capitalism, motivates critique. Yet, this demands strict realism: ‘… the road beyond immediacy leads in the direction of a greater concreteness, if the system of mediating concepts so constructed represents the “totality of the empirical” – to employ Lassalle’s felicitous description of the philosophy of Hegel’.10 Here, Lukács makes an important point about his concepts of mediation and totality – one which is lost on many who have passed overly hasty judgements on his philosophy of praxis. Far from leap-

9 10

Lukács 1967b, p. 16. Lukács 1967a, p. 154.

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ing over reality or issuing philosophical license to ignore the facts, as many (for example, Kołakowski and Žižek) have argued, Lukács is in fact committed to a conception of mediation which develops the concrete totality out of the empirical. This indeed represents a reconsideration of his earlier, pre-History and Class Consciousness scepticism towards facts: ‘It may be the sacred duty of every genuine Marxist to face the facts squarely and without illusions, but for every genuine Marxist there is always a reality more real and therefore more important than the isolated facts and tendencies – namely, the reality of the total process, the totality of social development’.11 As this makes clear, neither the facts nor the concrete mediations encountered are arbitrary; rather, immediacy is transcended proportionately as totality is grasped and an underlying objectivity is revealed. Lukács writes: Mediation would not be possible were it not for the fact that the empirical existence of objects is itself mediated and only appears to be unmediated in so far as the awareness of mediation is lacking so that the objects are torn from the complex of their true determinants and placed in artificial isolation … The methodological function of the categories of mediation consists in the fact that with their aid those immanent meanings that necessarily inhere in the objects of bourgeois society but which are absent from the immediate manifestation of those objects as well as from their mental reflection in bourgeois thought, now become objectively effective and can therefore enter the consciousness of the proletariat.12 Beyond this, the standpoint of the proletariat as the ethical negation of capitalism pushes the party towards grasping present reality concretely in one further way: it gives the party a definite criterion whereby it might judge both its analysis and historical events; that is, it opens an intellectual path towards genesis. As we have seen, while the standpoint of the bourgeoisie is incapable of comprehending crisis, the proletariat has an immediate interest comprehending it. As Lukács writes, in a somewhat rhetorical register: ‘For the proletariat to become aware of the dialectical nature of its existence is a matter of life and death, whereas the bourgeoisie uses the abstract categories of reflection, such as quantity and infinite progression, to conceal the dialectical structure of the historical process in daily life only to be confronted by unmediated catastrophes when the pattern is reversed’.13 Interpreted in a non-hyperbolic 11 12 13

Lukács 1967b, p. 18. Lukács 1967a, p. 163. Lukács 1967a, pp. 164–5.

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manner, these comments suggest that mediation is not only in the interests of proletarian thought, but also that mediation is the only way to conceive of qualitative, non-incremental change without falling into catastrophic or irrationalist conceptions. In the absence of this, the antinomies that have been discussed recur.14 From the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, either the sequence and facticity of contemporary historical events are understood without a logic, or, a general logic is perceived ahistorically.15 The standpoint of the proletariat can resolve this. The unity of totality (i.e., the logic of the present) and genesis (i.e., history as the history of the present) must be discovered in the conceptuality of the present. To do so requires both a theoretical armoury and empirical investigation. If successful, previously unknown or only partly known categories which unconsciously structure the present may be revealed. In this way, the experience of the present as an uncomprehended fate is overcome by a knowledge which reveals both its conceptual-logical structure and the process whereby it was constructed. To cite an example of this, in Lukács’s opinion, Lenin’s greatest theoretical achievement prior 1917 was his theory of imperialism. This theory grasped concretely the historic crisis of World War One in light of its essential logic. Lenin’s accomplishment was a work of theory which was, in terms of its grasp of economics, relatively unoriginal and indebted to Hilferding, Bukharin and others. Yet this theory allowed Lenin to comprehend the connection between the war and the crisis of capitalism. This, in turn, allowed him to comprehend the role of social democracy during the war and to chart a course, unpopular at first, for the proletariat. So, Lukács writes: Lenin’s superiority – and this is an unparalleled theoretical achievement – consists in his concrete articulation of the economic theory of imperial-

14

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In ‘On the Changing Function of Historical Materialism’, Lukács briefly discusses the antinomies of bourgeois views of history in response to the outbreak of World War One. He argues that bourgeois realism was bought at the expense of a view of totality. Connecting this with imperialism, Lukács writes: On the contrary, this lucidity with regard to individual problems or phases only makes the blindness vis-à-vis the totality stand out more clearly. For this ‘lucidity’ is on the one hand for ‘internal use only’; the same progressive group of the bourgeoisie which saw through the economic ramifications of imperialism more clearly than many ‘socialists’ knows very well that this knowledge would be highly dangerous for sections of its own class, to say nothing of society as a whole (Lukács 1967a, pp. 226–7). It is quite possible that Lukács has in mind here Max Weber, whose support for the war dismayed Lukács. Lukács 1967a, p. 163.

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ism with every political problem of the present epoch, thereby making the economics of the new phase a guide-line for all concrete action in the resultant decisive conjuncture … Lenin’s superiority here cannot by any means be explained by cliché references to ‘political genius’ or ‘practical ingenuity’. It is far more a purely theoretical superiority in assessing the total process. For Lenin did not make a single practical decision in his whole life which was not the rational and logical outcome of his theoretical standpoint. Rhetoric aside, this is an excellent example of what Lukács understands by the concretisation of theory by way of the historical totality. We can see here that while the ultimate vindication of theory is practical (namely, the success of the workers’ movement) the guarantee of theory is by no means a short term pragmatism. As was noted above, Lukács viewed this as a key moment in which the party’s theory attained concreteness and pushed towards practice.16 In order to attain full concreteness, the knowledge of the party must be structured by different social ontological levels and by an immanent teleology. To use spatial metaphors, the party’s knowledge must traverse an immediacy corresponding to every structural level of the social totality it encounters, developing a rich map of the concrete totality which understands society horizontally and vertically, that is, in terms of its different spheres and their relationships. Its knowledge must cover deep layers, like the economy, as well as higher ones, such as legality and politics. This knowledge must also expand outward to other groups and strata within the social totality. Finally, this knowledge must be organised temporally; that is, informed by past history and according to an immanent trajectory that is related concretely to the goal of revolution. Making these points should not be taken to suggest that all knowledge is equally necessary. For example, an astute appreciation of art has never been a particularly crucial factor in a party’s grasp of the conjuncture. Equally, although Lukács’s philosophy of praxis does discuss natural science, no one seriously proposes that an up-to-date understanding of science is a key prerequisite for revolution. Rather, the most important structural fact of the social totality, one which is visible to theory on the basis of the critique of reformism above, is the divide between economics and politics, or, between civil society and the state. Just as dereifying consciousness starts with the essential, economic logic of capitalism, its crowning moment must ascend to the apex of the social totality: the state.

16

Lukács 1967b, pp. 41–3.

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This also indicates that the practice of the party, while predicated on the economic strength of the class, pushes towards politics. This is what is meant by the ‘primacy of politics’, and it is why, in his commentary on Lenin, Lukács argues that the question of the state was the ultimate question of the actuality of revolution and the culmination of Marxism.17 This entails a critique of reformism and other ideologies that reproduce reification. However, other more horizontally organised structural realities become important in turn – for instance, the positions and interests of various identity groups, milieus, classes, nations, and so on, in relation to the world. All of these must be organised into a totality which gains in richness.18 Again, to connect this with Lukács’s commentary on Lenin, the most important examples were Lenin’s theorisation of the land question or the question of oppressed nationalities. With regard to the question of land redistribution, Lukács argues that the aspirations of the peasantry could only be achieved on the basis of the standpoint of the proletariat. This is to say, contrary to the Narodniks (whose rhetoric emphasised the unity of the ‘people’), land redistribution was only possible on the basis of an explicitly independent proletarian movement which allied itself with the peasantry. Lukács argues that a similar logic applied to the causes of nationally oppressed peoples.19 In keeping with its concept, the goal of the party’s knowledge and practice is praxis. Thus, the knowledge of the party is inherently teleological. Yet, while the party remains a minority of the class, this ultimate goal remains distant. This implies some of the definite limits on the imputed consciousness of the proletariat. As Lukács writes: ‘… as long as an objective still lies beyond reach, observers with particularly acute insight will be able to a certain extent to envisage the goal itself, its nature and its social necessity. They will, however, be unable to discern clearly either the concrete steps that would lead to that goal or the concrete means that could be deduced from their doubtlessly cor-

17 18

19

Lukács 1967b, p. 70. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács speaks of distant and proximate objects: the economic struggle being a proximate object, culture or philosophy being distant ones, with questions of legality or politics occupying an intermediate ground. The actuality of revolution demands the comprehension of the most political of these objects, as questions of strategy and tactics. However, following revolution, Lukács argues that historical materialism may begin to create a concrete knowledge of more distant objects, such as culture, religion, philosophy, and so on. He attributes the failure of vulgar Marxism to develop nuanced accounts of these distant objects to its economism and lack of a clear distinction between the logic of capitalism and precapitalism (Lukács 1967a, p. 175; pp. 237–8). Lukács 1967b, pp. 21–2, 45–6. Following the post-World War Two period, these two questions dramatically changed and eventually diminished in importance.

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rect insight’.20 This is to say, even a rich and content-filled representation of reality guided by mediation, totality and genesis remains a representation, and therefore, incomplete and separate from practice. Although reality is, in principle, already fully mediated, the comprehension of these mediations and the ultimate unity of genesis and totality are, for Lukács, impossible outside the existence of a concrete subject-object of history. This has implications for the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat. In the absence of praxis, the most concretely mediated representation of reality becomes a new immediacy: Immediacy and mediation are therefore not only related and mutually complementary ways of dealing with the objects of reality. But corresponding to the dialectical nature of reality and the dialectical character of our efforts to come to terms with it, they are related dialectically. That is to say that every mediation must necessarily yield a standpoint from which the objectivity it creates assumes the form of immediacy.21 Insofar as the party exists as a fraction of the class and is its aspiring intellectual leadership, this is unavoidable. Given this, while the theory of the party may possess many advantages over purely contemplative theory, it is still enmeshed in the immediacy of bourgeois society. To some extent, the practice of the party – in dialogue with the practice of the class – is a counterbalance to this, as will be discussed in below. Lukács hoped that the crucial advantage of the knowledge of the party would be its self-consciousness. This is the most important and least appreciated aspect of Lukács’s conception of imputed class consciousness. In fact, it constitutes the most radical political insight of History and Class Consciousness, an insight which, although he expanded on it considerably, Lukács himself was unable to carry through to its logical conclusion. So long as the theory of the party is based on the as-yet unrealised principle of the proletariat as subjectobject of history, the party has an opportunity to comprehend its estrangement from the practice of the class whose consciousness it purports to possess. In short, despite striving towards reality and practice, imputed class consciousness relies on an abstract and ethical ought. Insofar as the party exists as the thought of the proletariat, it is the thought of a proletariat which is still primarily an object, incapable of thinking itself. This means that the knowledge of

20 21

Lukács 1967a, pp. 295–6. Lukács 1967a, pp. 155–6.

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the party, despite its push towards concreteness, retains a reified aspect. So, imputed class consciousness is a hypothesis or a wager on the future of the proletariat. Yet, the push towards mediation and concreteness described above obliges this theory to maintain an openness: ‘… the series of mediations may not conclude with unmediated contemplation: it must direct itself to the qualitatively new factors arising from the dialectical contradictions: it must be a movement of mediations advancing from the present to the future’.22 This is a further reason why, when Lukács discusses the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat, he refers to an aspiration towards totality: The unique element in its [the proletariat’s] situation is that its surpassing of immediacy represents an aspiration towards society in its totality regardless of whether this aspiration remains conscious or whether it remains unconscious for the moment. This is the reason why its logic does not permit it to reman stationary at a relatively higher stage of immediacy but forces it to persevere in an uninterrupted movement towards this totality, i.e. to persist in the dialectical process by which immediacies are constantly annulled and transcended.23 After all, a completed and comprehended totality could only be found in a social objectivity completely known to itself. In Lukács’s view, the only society capable of claiming such a degree of self-knowledge is a communist one. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Lukács poses the limits of theory as the possession of the party in the clearest terms. He begins by arguing that insofar as Marxism rejects historical relativism and seeks a logic in history, it is necessary to say that either the proletariat is already and always the fully self-aware and powerful subject-object of history (which is absurd) or that the theorist possesses knowledge of the proletariat’s true existence, as the revealed meaning of history. This would appear to privilege the theorist; the theorist covertly grants themself the status of subject-object of history.24 Merleau-Ponty (and Lukács’s) 22 23 24

Lukács 1967a, p. 179. Lukács 1967a, p. 174. The full quote from Merleau-Ponty is superb and is reproduced here to further illustrate the argument: But what do we mean when we say that the proletariat is the truth of the historical whole? We have already encountered the question and the following false dilemma. Either one truly places oneself in history, and then each reality is fully what it is, each part is an incomparable whole; none can claim to be reduced to being a sketch of what is to follow, none can claim to be in truth what the past sketched. Or one wants a logic of history and wants it to be a manifestation of truth; but there is no logic except for a

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solution to this bind was alluded to above. Their account of theory refused to privilege the party or the theorist; rather, praxis itself is the higher term that mediates between theory and practice, or, between party and class. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty insists, with Lukács, that praxis is not to be understood as a fixed or predictable outcome; it is rather a ‘… vector, an attraction, a possible state, a principle of historical selection, and a diagram of existence’.25 While the empirical proletariat does not rise to its imputed consciousness, there exists a temptation to assert the superiority of theory. This must be resisted as it would block the resolution of the impasse. Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘This [situation in which the proletariat is not class conscious] brings back the alternative: either they are subjects of history, and then they are “gods”; or it is the theoretician who supposes a historical mission for them, and then they are only objects of history. Marx’s answer would be that there is no theoretical way of going bey-

25

consciousness, and it is necessary to say either that the proletarians know the totality of history or that the proletariat is in itself (that is to say, in our eyes, not for itself) a force which leads to the realization of the true society. The first conception is absurd. Marx and Lukács cannot think of putting the total knowledge of history into the proletariat and into history, under the form of distinct thought and will, in the mode of psychic existence. In Lukács’s terms, the proletariat is totality only in ‘intention.’ … But then, even if Marxism and its philosophy of history are nothing else than the ‘secret of the proletariat’s existence’, is it not a secret that the proletariat itself possesses but one that the theoretician deciphers. Is this not to admit that, by means of a third part, it is still the theoretician who gives his meaning to history in giving his meaning to the existence of the proletariat? Since the proletariat is not the subject of history, since the workers are not ‘gods’, and since they receive a historical mission only in becoming the opposite, namely, ‘objects’ or ‘commodities’, is it not necessary that, as with Hegel, the theoretician or the philosopher remains the only authentic subject of history, and is not subjectivity the last word of this philosophy? Just because the historical mission of the proletariat is enormous, and because it should, as ‘universal class’ or ‘final class’, end what was the unvarying regime of history before it, it is necessary that it be fashioned by an unlimited negation which it contains in itself as class. ‘The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its struggle’. Does this not mean that its function prevents it from existing as a compact and solid class? In a society of classes it does not yet completely exist; afterwards, it no longer exists as a distinct class. To the extent that it is, it is a power of continuous suppression, and even its own suppression. Is this not to recognize that it is historically nearly unreal, that it chiefly exists negatively, which is to say, as idea in the thought of the philosopher? Does this not amount to admitting that one has missed the realization of philosophy in history that Lukács, after Marx, wanted to obtain? (Merleau-Ponty 1973a, pp. 46–7). Posing the question of imputed class consciousness in such sharp terms is just one of the many strengths of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Lukács. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 47.

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ond the dilemma’.26 This insight is crucial to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as it most clearly outlines the limits of theory and the role of practice in forming praxis. As Merleau-Ponty continues to argue, the above antinomy relapses into a version of the contemplative stance: In the face of contemplating consciousness, the theoretician must either command or obey, be subject or object, and, correlatively, the proletariat must obey or command, be object or subject. For theoretical consciousness there is no middle ground between democratic consultation of the proletarians, which reduces proletarian praxis to their thought and their feelings of the moment and relies on the ‘spontaneity of the masses’, and bureaucratic cynicism, which substitutes, for the existing proletariat, the idea made of it by the theoretician.27 On the contrary, the only solution is practical: ‘But in practice the dilemma is transcended because praxis is not subjugated to the postulate of theoretical consciousness, to the rivalry of consciousness. For philosophy of praxis, knowledge itself is not the intellectual possession of a significant, mental object: and the proletarians are able to carry the meaning of history, even though this meaning is not in the form of an “I think”’.28 More than just a strategy or a revolutionary methodology, praxis conceived of in this way guarantees the truth of Marxism by rendering Marxism self-critical. Hence the very truth of Marxism depends on acknowledging that without the proletariat, the party is itself a reified form of both theory and practice. In this light, imputed class consciousness as the possession of the party is a negative, critical hypothesis on the world which only rises to truth insofar as it expresses the truth of the proletariat in the practice of political class struggle: Unless one makes another dogmatism of it (and how is one to do so, since one cannot start from the self-certainty of a universal subject), Marxism does not have a total view of universal history at its disposal; and its entire philosophy of history is nothing more than the development of partial views that a man situated in history, who tries to understand himself, has of his past and his present. This conception remains hypothetical until it finds a unique guarantee in the existing proletariat and in its assent, 26 27 28

Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 47. Merleau-Ponty 1973b, p. 47. Merleau-Ponty 1973b, p. 50.

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which allows it to be valid as the law of being. The Party is then like a mystery of reason. It is the place in history where the meaning which is understands itself, where the concept becomes life; and, avoiding the test which authenticates Marxism, any deviation which would assimilate the relationships of Party and class to the relationships of chief and troops would make an ‘ideology’ of it. Then history as science and history as reality would remain disjointed, and the Party would no longer be the laboratory of history and the beginning of a true society … Led, but not maneuvered, the masses bring the seal of truth to the politics of the Party.29 This understanding of the party avoids either totally subsuming the proletariat under an omnipotent party (the party in the stance of being-for-self) or subsuming the party under the truth of a proletariat conceived of as gods (the party in the stance of being for other). Rather, Merleau-Ponty and Lukács’s solution seeks concrete freedom in the concrete mediation of these antinomies by virtue of practical class struggle. Putting the question in these terms illustrates the extent to which the concept of love as concrete freedom, outlined in Section 4.2 informed Lukács’s understanding of the party. There, of course, it pertained to an individual. Here, the same relation of concrete freedom found on the level of party politics, through the self-criticism of theory as it strives towards practice. Only this understanding of theory – imputed class consciousness – makes the party fit to respond to the class.

2

The Controversy over Lukács’s Leninism Bear in mind particularly that you can be no man’s judge. For a criminal can have no judge upon the earth until that judge himself has perceived that he is every bit as much a criminal as the man who stands before him, and that for the crime of the man who stands before him he himself may well be more guilty than anyone else. Only when he grasps this may he become a judge. Dostoyevsky30

Every major critique of Lukács has taken issue with his Leninism. Most of these critiques connect theoretical disagreements (for example, over reific-

29 30

Merleau-Ponty 1973b, pp. 51–2. Dostoyevsky 2003, p. 415.

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ation, nature/science, or the standpoint of the proletariat) or philosophical disagreements with his politics, although they do so in diverse ways. Lukács’s early Comintern critics saw his Hegelianism and antinaturalism as related to his alleged political voluntarism and ultraleftism.31 So too did his early socialdemocratic critic, Siegfried Marck.32 Given that these criticisms were in service of political projects unambiguously to the right of Lukács’s own, this stands to reason. Following Adorno, whose critique (mentioned above) was presented with far greater brevity, it became more common to impute a logic to Lukács’s position. Perhaps Kołakowski expresses this position most clearly.33 The intensity of Kołakowski’s position is redolent of his Cold War anti-communist trajectory. Yet his argument is similar to those made by other thinkers who will be

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As is well-known, Deborin and Rudas maintained this interpretation. Their commentaries are important historically, but not theoretically. Bloch, whose review of History and Class Consciousness was one of the only favourable ones, cuttingly notes that the Russians ‘… act philosophically, but think like uneducated dogs’, and suggests that they suspected the book of heresy because of its open recourse to Hegel (Bloch 1969, p. 601.) Given this, further commentary on Deborin and Rudas, excluding the discussion of Lukács’s reply, will not advance the argument here. See Deborin 1924, Rudas 1924. Marck 1924. Kołakowski writes: On this basis the unity of theory and practice, of facts and values turns out to be simply the primacy of political commitment over intellectual values: an assurance given by the Communist movement to its members that they possess the truth by virtue of belonging to the movement. Lukács’s Marxism implies the abandonment of intellectual, logical and empirical criteria of knowledge, and as such, it is anti-rational and anti-scientific (Kołakowski 1978, p. 1026). Connecting the philosophical argument with a political one, Kołakowski continues: Lukács at no time questioned the Leninist foundations on which the whole edifice of Stalinism was reared. He did not question the principle of one-party dictatorship and the abolition of the ‘bourgeois’ division of authority into legislative, executive and judicial: in other words, he accepted that the governing party should be subject to no form of public control and that socialism ruled out competition between independent political forces. In short, he accepted despotism in principle, although he later criticized some of its extreme manifestations. He was one of those Communists, numerous in the late 1950s, who believed that democracy could exist within the ruling Communist party although it had been abolished for the rest of the community. This delusion, however, did not last long, and the experience of Stalinism showed clearly that the liquidation of democracy in the state was bound to lead, in a short time, to the liquidation of democracy within the ruling party: the process, indeed, began under Lenin and with his encouragement (Kołakowski 1978, p. 1028). Given Lukács’s extensive and well documented defence of radical democratic positions, both practical and theoretical, this hyperbolic critique need not be discussed. It is cited as exemplary of the more extreme criticisms of Lukács. The remainder of this section will present Lukács’s 1920s theory in terms which starkly contrast with readings such as these.

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discussed below. The argument, simply put, is as follows: Lukács’s overly philosophical and too-totalising critique of reification is said to descend from the worst of German Idealism (either Fichte or Hegel or both, depending on the bias of the critic). This idealist streak, which sought to reduce objectivity to the idea in order to dynamise it and to place it under control of an identical subjectobject, placed impossible demands both on reality and on said subject-object. With regards to reality, Lukács’s position is said to abolish complexity and empirical truth. With regards to the subject-object, he is said to have imputed to the proletariat a promethean or godlike role. Unable to bridge the divide between the empirical consciousness of the proletariat and its imputed consciousness, Lukács is said to have substituted a Leninist conception of the party for the class itself. This, we are told, gave licence to intellectuals to run roughshod over the class itself and to justify any exigency on the basis of their infallible, theoretically (but not rationally) derived insight. So, Lukács prepared the intellectual groundwork for Stalinism. This might appear difficult to reconcile with Lukács’s ostracism within the official communist movement. This apparent paradox is usually explained by the assertion that Lukács expressed the truth of Leninism and Stalinism in terms too pure and consistent to cohabit with the real thing; Lukács is supposed to have penned the utopian side to their pragmatism. While Lukács’s post-1920s works are not the object of the present study, a brief comment on his alleged post-1928 Stalinism is in order. It is indeed quite extraordinary and hyperbolic to suggest that Lukács supported Stalinism, given his self-conscious retreat into academic work, his arrest by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, his participation in the 1956 Hungarian uprising and subsequent re-arrest and brief imprisonment in Romania and his many published interviews from later years, in which he explicitly criticised Stalinism. Indeed, anti-Stalinist themes are clearly visible in The Young Hegel, a work which was written in what is thought of as his most conservative period. These themes, it would seem, have gone completely unnoticed and they deserve full exploration in a separate work. Yet for the moment, it will suffice to note a number of instances in which Lukács extensively quotes from Hegel’s early works, including The Positivity of the Christian Religion. He does so in a masterful way that leaves one in no doubt that as well as making a point about Hegel’s development, he is discussing the intellectual culture in the USSR. For example, Lukács reproduces Hegel’s words as follows: The capacity for this [positive faith] necessarily presupposes the loss of the freedom, the autonomy of one’s reason which henceforth stands helpless before a superior power. This is the point at which all belief or disbe-

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lief in a positive religion begins. At the same time, it is the centre around which all disputes revolve and even if it never rises to the surface of consciousness it is nevertheless the deciding factor between submissiveness and rebellion. The orthodox must stand fast at this point and make no concessions … Recourse must be had, therefore, to a higher faculty before which reason must fall silent. Faith is erected into a duty and removed into a supernatural world to which the understanding has no access – and in this context faith means a configuration of events presented to the imagination while the understanding constantly searches for a different explanation. And what prevents the understanding from entering this world is duty, i.e. fear of a mighty ruler which compels the understanding to collude in activities abhorrent to it.34 Of course, Lukács is discussing Hegel’s early writings on the transformation of Christianity from a revolutionary worldview into an institutional one.35 This transformation required doctrinal modifications which both correlated with real world power structures and which compromised the spirit of Jesus and early Christianity. Such words – which are by no means isolated in The Young Hegel – could not have been read by an intelligent public in the USSR during the 1930s and 1940s without drawing obvious and glaring conclusions about Marxism. This more than likely explains in part why the publication of The Young Hegel was delayed until 1954, after Stalin’s death. That these themes have been lost on interpreters is no doubt a result of a complacent characterisation of Lukács’s post-1920s works as reconciled with Stalinism. Whatever reconciliation might have taken place, it is more complicated than most writers have acknowledged. Indeed, the analogy indicated above – between Christianity as a state religion and Marxism – potentially indicates that Lukács possessed an awareness of the possibility that Marxism might become theological. While it would require a separate work to discuss fully, this issue will be mentioned in the closing chapter of this study. This aside, what follows comprises a critical resume of the more radical and more insightful variations on the anti-Leninist critique of Lukács, including those by Piccone, Arato and Breines, Jay, and others.36 Fascinatingly, in 34 35 36

Lukács 1975, p. 23. See Hegel 1971. This is by no means to suggest that these writers are the only ones to propose this reading of Lukács. Other names could be added to this list. For example, Michael Löwy characterises Adam Schaff and Tom Bottomore as ‘liberal empiricist’ critics of History and Class Consciousness who repeat the view that Lukács fails to identify any bridge over the gulf between empirical and imputed class consciousness (Löwy 1979, pp. 176–7). Feenberg adds

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recent years, Žižek has proposed what turns out to be a very similar reading of Lukács, albeit resulting in a favourable assessment. In order to counter these, firstly Lukács’s term ‘imputed class consciousness’ will be defended. Secondly, Lichtheim to this list (Feenberg 2014, p. xv). One could also add works by G.H.R. Parkinson, Lee Congdon as well as the collections of essays entitled Lukács Today and Georg Lukács – Theory Culture and Politics (Parkinson 1977, pp. 52–3, Congdon 2007, Various 1988, Marcus and Tarr 1989). As collections of essays, these last two volumes are naturally more eclectic. The former, edited by Tom Rockmore, is quite mixed. Published in 1988 and containing articles by a number of Eastern Bloc authors, it bears distinctive signs of Glasnost. However, these articles, including those by Buhr, Hevesi, Larrain and others, do not break new ground but are more interesting for what they tell us about the intellectual climate in the Eastern Bloc in the last years of Stalinist hegemony. Insofar as they assess Lukács, they do so in terms of more or less official Marxism-Leninism, albeit with a more openminded and less dogmatic mindset than was typical in earlier decades. See, for example Béla Fogarasi’s 1959 denunciation (Fogarasi 1959). Other articles repeat the western orthodoxy on Lukács without greatly adding to it. This is the case with Ignatow, who takes aim at Lukács’s theory of the proletariat as subjectobject of history in becoming (See Ignatow 1988). Similarly, W.L. McBride revisits and summarises the laboured discussion of objectification, alienation and reification (McBride 1988). Given that these commentators do not add greatly to the discussion, either in quality or by revealing new dimensions, further discussion is unnecessary. Other articles in Lukács Today – notably those of Feenberg, Bernstein and Rockmore – are excellent. These theorists are discussed in the course of this work as a whole. The latter collection mentioned above, titled Georg Lukács – Theory, Culture and Politics and edited by Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tarr, is also a very mixed offering. It, too, includes an interesting article by Rockmore that will be mentioned below. And once more, some of its articles are useful while others are poor. An example of the former variety is Marshall Berman’s entertaining account of the impact of History and Class Consciousness in the late 1960s (See Berman 1989). An example of the latter variety is provided by George L. Kline, who thematises a perceived tension between a Hegelian and ‘Engelsian’ current in History and Class Consciousness. Rather uniquely, Kline accuses Lukács of being too ‘scientistic’ and Engelsian. He argues that Lukács solves the problem of immanent transformation of reality in a starkly non-Hegelian fashion, buy proposing a ‘will to the future’. This, we are told, leads Lukács to devalue the present, which in turn feeds into his support for the Communist Party and allows him to create a conceptual mythology not unlike that which he had accused Hegel of having created. This is no innocent error: Kline tells us that ‘… by the 1930s and 1940s Lukács was extending his full intellectual and (so far as one can judge by the available evidence) emotional embrace to the “transitional errors” of high Stalinism’ (Kline 1989, p. 23). This is probably the only time in the history of Lukács interpretation that he has been accused of being too scientific and too sympathetic to Engels. Ultimately, Kline’s critique of Lukács is a repetition, in a more shrill polemical register and with a shallower level of detail, of Kilminster’s, which will be considered in depth below. Insofar as Kline’s conclusions resemble some of the conclusions of this work, it is argued that they are derived from a much shallower reading than the one presented here. As a result, Kline salvages nothing from Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.

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an alternate reading of Lukács’s Leninism will be outlined with reference to other theorists (the most important of whom are Merleau-Ponty, Mészáros, Feenberg and Meyers) who have defended Lukács, if in different ways, on these accounts. This leans on the account provided above. Finally, this is not intended to be an exhaustive resume of the debate (which will undoubtedly trudge along). Rather, it is intended to clarify the issues at stake in the rest of this chapter. Lukács famously designated the knowledge of the party as the imputed consciousness of the proletariat, in contradistinction to the empirical or masspsychological consciousness of the actual class. While these themes are fully discussed in History and Class Consciousness and the works that follow it, they also form a strong theme in Lukács’s earlier writings. In the essay ‘ “Intellectual Workers” and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership’, he puts the issue in starkly Hegelian terms. He discusses Hegel’s concept of knowledge as a knowledge in which the distinction between subject and object is overcome and theory becomes practical without sacrificing its purity or truth. Lukács argues that Hegel’s greatness lay in his historicisation of this type of knowledge; in the idea that history is a process of coming to consciousness and self-consciousness of spirit.37 In this light, Lukács argued that Marx’s achievement was not to abolish this concept or ‘place it on its feet’ by substituting materialism for idealism, but rather, that he deepened Hegel’s concept of consciousness. Marx is seen here not as overthrowing Hegel, but as his continuation and completion. Lukács writes: But Marx did more than simply take over the Hegelian theory of development: he also modified it essentially through his critique – not, as the vulgar Marxists assume, by the mere substitution of ‘materialism’ for ‘idealism’ (empty phrases), but on the contrary, by essentially enriching and deepening the Hegelian concept. The essential feature of Hegel’s prodigious world system was its view of nature and history as one great homogenous process, the essence of which is the development of its everclearer consciousness of itself (the Spirit). According to Hegel’s philosophy, the Sprit in nature is still wholly unconscious. Man, on the other hand, in his so-called spiritual life, becomes ever more conscious, until finally, through institutional systems, through art and religion, he rediscovers himself in philosophy.38

37 38

Lukács 1972l, p. 15. Lukács 1972l, p. 16.

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Specifically, Lukács argues that Marx’s key discovery regarding Hegel was that absolute or dereified knowledge is immanent within the class struggle; proletarian class consciousness holds the solution to spirit’s alienation from itself.39 Yet, Lukács was very far from identifying this universal, human spiritual consciousness with the immediate consciousness of the working class. He wrote: But proletarian class-consciousness is in itself only a step towards this [human] consciousness, for, as a mere given quantity, it simply establishes the relationship of the immediate interests of the proletariat to the laws governing social development. The ultimate goals of development remain abstract ideals, situated at a new – utopian – distance. In order for society to become truly self-conscious, a further step is necessary: the class consciousness of the proletariat must itself become conscious. This means understanding above and beyond direct class-consciousness, above and beyond the immediate conflicts of class interests – that world-historical process which leads through these class interests and class struggles to the final goal: the classless society and the liberation from every form of economic dependence.40 The empirical class consciousness of the proletariat, for Lukács, at best manifested as an immediate realpolitik whose political expression was Social Democracy. The role of intellectual leadership would instead fall to a universal consciousness: ‘This consciousness – in Hegelian terms, the development towards self-consciousness of society, the self-discovery of the Spirit seeking itself in the course of history – the consciousness which recognises its world-historical mission; this consciousness alone is cut out to become the intellectual leader of society’.41 This is to say, the bearer of universal spiritual self-consciousness, the intellectual leadership of society, was to be discovered in Marxism. Although the formulations in this essay are one sided in that Lukács outlines no path between the empirical consciousness of the proletariat and its universal consciousness, he is very clearly aware that this chasm is pernicious. Even in this early text, he specifically criticises the substitution of an intellectual class for the proletariat, writing:

39 40 41

Lukács 1972l, pp. 16–17. Lukács 1972l, p. 17. Lukács 1972l, p. 18.

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Hence we Marxists not only believe that the development of society is directed by the so-often disparaged Spirit, but we also know that it was only in Marx’s work that this spirit became consciousness and assumed the mission of leadership. But this mission cannot be the privilege of any ‘intellectual class’ or the product of any form of ‘supra-class’ thinking. The salvation of society is a mission which only the proletariat, by virtue of its world-historical role, can achieve. And only through the class consciousness of the proletarians is it possible to achieve the knowledge and the understanding of this path of humanity that is essential to ‘intellectual leadership’.42 This essay may well be considered immature compared with the much more sophisticated discussion in History and Class Consciousness, yet it is revealing in a number of ways. Firstly, it makes very explicit the demands which Lukács expects class consciousness to fulfil; class consciousness is no less than the selfconsciousness of humanity and the realisation of the Hegelian world spirit. Moreover, Lukács’s insistence that the universal, imputed consciousness of the class become identical with the actual class sets up a demand which his theory of praxis must fulfil. Even in his earliest and most messianic Marxist writing, Lukács is aware of the need to bridge the divide between the theoretical and practical consciousness of the proletariat. Without comprehending this overarching goal, the rest of his works from the 1920s can only appear as evasive ultra-Bolshevik rhetoric. The term ‘imputed consciousness’ is introduced seriously in the essay on ‘Class Consciousness’, as discussed above.43 While further determinants of imputed class consciousness are added in the remainder of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács defended the concept extensively in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. Given the controversy around this term, his defence 42 43

Lukács 1972l, p. 18. Lukács’s words, already reproduced in Chapter 5, are as follows: Now class consciousness consists in the fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production. This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual – and these actions can be understood only by reference to this consciousness (Lukács 1967a, p. 51). This articulation of the term is somewhat similar to an ‘ideal type’, which, as has been noted, indicates Weber and Simmel’s influence on Lukács. Equally, as has been noted, to read Lukács as remaining within this framework would be to cast him in neo-Kantian terms that he quite consciously rejected.

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remains relevant. At the outset, he notes that imputation (in the sense in which he defines it) is an objective term, aimed at eliminating the subjectivism of opinion and is used continually (and often unconsciously) in academic discussion. For example, in any discussion of a historic period, in order to produce the most objective view possible, the historian prioritises certain facts and events at the expense of others.44 Thus a hierarchy of importance is constructed amongst the facts which constitute an objective situation.45 This procedure could be replicated in all of the social and, indeed, natural sciences. Following this, Lukács makes the further point that when discussing the actions of a class in history, the observer necessarily imputes class interests to them. Thus, an actual class (and its political organisations and leaders) are conscious in proportion to their understanding and achievement of the goals that are objectively possible and available to them. This method is very common – Lukács cites Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as an example.46 Imputed consciousness presupposes a distance between the theorist who is passing comment and the empirical class to whom a possible consciousness is attributed. Following Meyers, it is easy to think of further examples of this: where intellectuals or leaders discuss the interests of any group (including identity groups, sociological groups, classes, groups with shared political affiliations, and so on) and the question of interest emerges, an act of imputation has taken place.47 This is teleological in the sense that it proposes a goal towards which a group ought to struggle. This teleology is only pathological in cases where the goal becomes a transcendental ought opposed to the real situation or imposed upon the group in question. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that any conversation between two equals involves continual acts of imputation: one 44 45 46

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Lukács 2002, pp. 63–4. Meyers’s reading of the term ‘imputed class consciousness’ reinforces the reading proposed here. See Meyers 2006. Lukács writes: The criticism that Marx and Engels levelled at the bourgeois parties in 1848–49 consists – methodologically – in always showing what they could have done and should have done given the objective economic and political situation and what they, however, failed to do. One might think of the criticism that Marx exercises in the Eighteenth Brumaire on the politics of the Montagne and the Party of Order. His analysis of the objective situation does not merely indicate the purely objective impossibility of a certain step or of success (impossibility of proletarian victory in the Junius battle). In certain places, it also shows the subjective incapacity of classes, parties and their leaders to reach possible conclusions from the given situation, and to act accordingly (Lukács 2002, p. 65). Meyers 2006, pp. 550–2.

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person imputes to the other the status of a human, capable of communicative reason, and presupposes some minimal goodwill in advancing the conversation. Read in this light, to abolish imputation in the name of abolishing elitism and teleology is itself an act of imputation; the theorist, in this position, argues that classes (or whatever the group in question) have no interests. To have no interests is to have no consciousness or agency; it is to be a pure object. Alternately, a theorist may suggest that a group or class may possess no interests aside from those which the class expresses itself, organically. Yet, to simply wait for a group to express its own interests organically denies the existence of any dialogue between leadership and led, or even between comparable members of the group and, moreover, puts the theorist in a bind when groups internally disagree. Often these issues are morally charged, but this is beside the point. In fact, it is a tragedy of our world that some groups of people – for instance, refugees or those who are pushed into ruin and homelessness – are often incapable of articulating their interests. This is a consequence of oppression. In such situations, to refrain from imputing interests is tantamount to complicity with that oppression. Strictly speaking, to address the injustices faced by the most powerless groups requires that other, more powerful actors speak on their behalf. Well short of this, however, imputation, as a specific logical form, is quite fundamental to our comprehension of the world. On the level of class, to refuse to entertain any notion of class consciousness apart from that which emerges only organically, from the class itself, is to abdicate the capacity to think in class terms, which both constitutes a relapse into the methodological individualism of the contemplative stance and which vacates the playing field to political actors with fewer moral compunctions. The political consequences of this apparently hyper-democratic move are authoritarian. In light of real differences of opinion within the proletariat or even within sections of it, taking no side is as good as taking the worst side. For example, during most strikes, a minority of workers will favour ending the strike early or even strike breaking. In this example, to argue that it is in the interests of the workers to win a strike and to oppose (with force, if necessary) strike breakers is to impute an ideal consciousness to those workers, albeit one that is immanent to their situation, namely, to win a strike. To refuse this imputation in the name of anti-elitism is, effectively, to side with strike breakers. Further, as has been suggested, in many historical examples, the imputed consciousness of a class is inaccessible to the class itself. This is the case, for example, with the peasantry or the middle classes, as Lukács argues in History and Class Consciousness, in terms which also recall Marx’s analysis.48 48

Lukács 1967a, pp. 59–67.

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This initial defence aside, the first critic of Lukács’s Leninism to be discussed is Paul Piccone. His initial critique of Lukács (that he failed to develop a concept of labour) was refuted above. Piccone’s second article on Lukács appeared three years later, in 1972.49 While not departing from his earlier view, here he developed a novel critique of Lukács. Piccone suggested his own articulation of Marxism as the only alternative, suggesting Mészáros as his only antecedent. Interestingly, however, despite Piccone’s praise, Mészáros, in his book Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, undertakes a reading of Lukács which is the opposite of that proposed by Piccone.50 It is thus useful to counterpose the two. To begin with, Piccone notes uncontroversially that in Lukács’s earlier, preMarxist works, he experimented with the idea of art as salvation from utter degradation. Piccone explains that, for Lukács, ‘[t]o the extent that the aesthetic subject can grasp the totality – even if it is a totality of reified fragments and corrupt parts – it attains salvation within a context of “utter degradation”’.51 Piccone notes that Lukács quickly moved beyond this position. As was detailed above, it does not provide for reconciliation between the subject and object, nor does it escape a tragic worldview. Hence Piccone argues that following the Russian Revolution, Lukács substituted the proletariat for the artist: ‘The same dialectic that allows the artist to escape the general state of corruption is generalised, after Lukács became a Marxist, to cover all of society when the proletariat is substituted for the artist. The dynamics are essentially the same’.52 This is where the problems emerge. As Piccone writes: To the extent that Lukács’s ‘proletariat’ is not composed of men in flesh and blood engaged in the historical process, but, rather, it is a Weberian ideal type derived from Marx’s works, revolution itself becomes a metaphysical deduction which only accidentally corresponds with actual historical events. His dialectical account does not include, even as an integral moment, a functional analysis of the objective situation of the actually existing, historical proletariat, or a phenomenological analysis of the real consciousness of the ‘ascribed’ revolutionary agencies … nowhere does Lukács concretely analyse the dialectical relation between ‘ascribed’ class

49 50

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Piccone 1972. Although he was also a student of the elder Lukács, Mészáros’s trajectory differed from that of The Budapest School (consisting primarily of Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda and others). Piccone 1972, p. 112. Piccone 1972, p. 113.

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consciousness as the determined and objectively valid proletarian consciousness (reality), and its empirical or reified counterpart (appearance) … Unaffected by practical considerations of this sort, Lukács continued to articulate his Marxism as a mere variation of Hegelian philosophy with the result that, when he finally realized that a living material foundation was missing, he thought he could leave everything essentially as it was by merely attaching to his philosophy the theory of reflection.53 This is startlingly at odds with even a cursory reading of Lukács’s works from the 1920s. A number of examples of his attention to concrete consciousness, his concept of mediation and his critique of pure theory have already been cited. Even were Piccone to argue that the above is a consequence of Lukács’s theory, he would need to account for any number of passages contradicting this. This ground, therefore, need not be retrod. Rather, Mészáros’s work – as noted, cited favourably by Piccone – counters the latter’s distorted reading. In an attempt to give his view a textual foundation, Piccone quotes a section of Mészáros’s book Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, where Mészáros discusses Lukács’s pre-Marxist position. In fact, Mészáros does agree that Lukács, in his pre-Marxist days, lacked a concept of mediation between the ‘bad’ immediacies of naturalism and symbolism (roughly analogous to crude empiricism and theoretical dogmatism).54 Yet, Mészáros goes on to clarify that this problem could only be resolved in light of the Russian and Hungarian revolutions and workers’ councils. That is, Mészáros solves the problem of mediation in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis by proposing a historicisation of Lukács.55 53 54 55

Piccone 1972, pp. 114–15. Piccone 1972, p. 116. Although Lukács’s biography and the stages in his intellectual development have not been a central concern of this study, Mészáros also outlines precisely what, in his view, led the elder Lukács to retreat into his own form of abstract ethicism. While the actuality of revolution made Lukács’s philosophy of praxis possible, the decline of the objectively existent mediations upon which that philosophy relied had the opposite effect. Mészáros explains Lukács’s shift to the right in light of the decline of soviets and trade unions and the degeneration of the party into a bureaucratic machine. Thus Mészáros historicises Lukács (Mészáros 1972. p. 91). It is, of course, possible to dispute that the elder Lukács did relapse into a form of reified philosophy – a difficult question that is not under discussion here. Rather, the point is that Lukács’s ability to identify and theorise concrete mediations was intimately bound up with a real historical process of revolution in which he was a participant. As has been said, one may well disagree with these mediations. But theorists do their critique no favours by declaring these mediations to be non-existent. Mészáros’s historicisation of Lukács raises difficult questions for any philosophy of praxis articulated outside the actuality of objective mediations that might reconcile the antinomies of bourgeois thought. These questions are pursued in Chapter 9.

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Firstly, Mészáros quotes at length from History and Class Consciousness where Lukács explicitly presents soviets as the dialectical solution to the problem of immediate interest and ultimate aim, or, to the antinomy between is and ought.56 Secondly, Mészáros presents overwhelming textual evidence that Lukács criticised other tendencies in Marxism and philosophy specifically on the grounds that they rejected or failed to grasp mediation, politically and theoretically. Mészáros cites not just from History and Class Consciousness, but also from Lukács’s essays on Moses Hess, Lassalle and his book Lenin – A Study in the Unity of his Thought. Far from lacking a concept of mediation, this concept is the centrepiece of Lukács’s critique of others. In Mészáros’s excellent interpretation, the commonality between such distinct phenomena as vulgar Marxism, economism, sectarianism, revolutionary romanticism, voluntarism, and Zhdanovism (amongst others), is that in one way or another, all of them reify the immediacy of capitalism.57 Indeed, this approach constituted the basic argument of Chapter 5, above. One may well disagree with Lukács’s critique of viewpoints which fail to transcend immediacy. One may well also disagree with the mediations that he identifies. But to claim that his work from the 1920s lacks a concept of mediation is prima facie implausible and discrediting. In addition to this, Mészáros’s work on Lukács raises important questions for Piccone’s alternative to Lukács. If it is indeed the case that the real world advent of actual praxis makes it possible for the theorist to mediate reified worldviews philosophically, then where does this leave philosophy in a world prior to the advent of praxis? Thus, having failed to read Lukács’s philosophy as mediated, Piccone reverts to his own unmediated ethicism. Although much of what he says about Marxism is well said and stimulating, in the end, his alternative to Lukács’s Marxism is ‘… a Marxism which will provide the theoretical tools to facilitate the creation of alternative institutions, grass-roots organizations free of centralized manipulation, a new science and a new culture fit for human beings’.58 It is understandable that this fit with the spirit of the New Left and the 1968 student radicalisation. Yet, what is missing is any concrete programme or analysis. Rather, we are presented with a series of relatively liberal and ultimately moralistic injunctions towards openness, decentralisation, and ‘newness’. Indeed, this move – unremarkable in itself – is notable for how common it is. Calls for diverse movements, vibrancy, heterogeneity, horizontality and so forth have become second last paragraph clichés in countless academic articles and books. These calls are generally abstract and free of content, although 56 57 58

Mészáros 1972, p. 55. Mészáros 1972, p. 74. Piccone 1972, p. 133.

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they often conveniently incorporate fashionable (although soon-to-be dated) struggles or the specific research interests of the author in question. Instead of overcoming crude, dogmatic thought, these approaches covertly reinforce it by affirming the antinomy: the romanticism of fragmentation and newness for the sake of the new. A few examples of this broad phenomenon were cited above, in connection with Postone, Larsen and Chari. Despite his outstanding reading of Lukács, as discussed in Chapter 9, Feenberg also falls into a similar type of moralistic utopian pluralism. While Piccone initiated the discussion of Lukács in the pages of Telos, Andrew Arato and Paul Breines’s contributions (developed in the same journal), were much richer, culminating in the book The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism. A few aspects of this scholarly and impressive work were discussed above. As Ferenc Fehér pointed out, it is one of the few genuinely valuable books available on Lukács.59 These things said, Arato and Breines’s reading of Lukács also falters on the issue of mediation, albeit in a more sophisticated way than that of Piccone. Unlike Piccone, they thematise the dialectic of theory and practice at the core of Lukács’s work. This allows them to understand Lukács’s view of history as an objective and estranged process which operates dialectically, regardless of the comprehension of any human subject or subjects. So, history – and in particular crisis – creates objective possibilities for transformation which can only be actualised insofar as they are grasped consciously by human participants. Thus, an objective dialectic gives rise to a subjective dialectic. The resolution of this dialectic depends entirely on the mediations between subject and object. In contrast, then, to writers who are over hasty in declaring Lukács an idealist, voluntarist, and so on, they correctly perceive that the search for concrete mediation was his central problematic.60 Their critique is, however, that Lukács failed to identify the mediations his theory required. They relate this failure directly to the way in which he presented reification and the demands he made of the proletariat.61 The former issue – that of reification – has been discussed above. So this counter-critique will dwell on the latter issue: the problem of the gap between the empirical proletariat and its imputed consciousness. Arato and Breines’ account also relies on the parallels they draw between Lukács and German Idealism. In doing this, they draw out quite usefully some of the connections between Lukács and Hegel. However, as with others, they cast Lukács much more as a Fichtean figure. Although not uncommon, their 59 60 61

Fehér 1981. Arato and Breines 1979, p. 113. Arato and Breines 1979. p. 155.

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regular references to Hegel’s absolute spirit, as though it has something in common with a Fichtean identical subject-object, are confused.62 In fact, it was not Hegel’s intention to express all substance as subject, but rather to express substance ‘equally as subject’.63 This is not a trivial distinction. At numerous points in The Phenomenology, Hegel attacks accounts – including that of Fichte, although characteristically he is not named – which reduce substance to subject. Such a reduction is merely an abstract negation of the independence of objectivity (or substance) which in fact leaves it untouched, while perfecting the estrangement of the atomised, egotistical subject. At any rate, as the preface makes clear, the progression of The Phenomenology is a logical-conceptual one, aimed at creating a so-called ladder between absolute knowledge and the everyday consciousness.64 While it has clear referents in world history and politics, the final viewpoint is philosophical. Hegel knows very well that this is an individual viewpoint that does not transcend socially existent estrangement, but rather, overcomes it in thought – not by reducing it to subjectivity, but in a philosophical practice that reconciles particularity with universality. This idea is further referred to in the 1832 introduction to the Science of Logic, in which Hegel associates it firstly with a view which posited the ego or selfconsciousness as the site of reconciliation between knowledge of the object and the thing-in-itself, and secondly with a nihilism that resolves all contradiction into nothingness.65 These two post-Kantian alternatives are usually ascribed to Fichte and Schelling, respectively.66 This noted, with reference to Lukács, Arato and Breines write: Thus, Lukács reaches the proletariat by way of the analysis of German philosophy. Even if the parallel to the development of the young Marx is striking, two critical comments can be risked. The concept of the identical subject-object derives from the quest of classical German philosophy to express all substance and in particular nature itself as the deed of a subject. As such, it is the subjective counterpart of total reification. It also well expresses what the thesis of total reification required of Lukács.67

62 63 64 65 66 67

Arato and Breines 1979, p. 128. Hegel 2018, §. 17. Hegel 2018, §. 26. Hegel 1991c, pp. 51–4. For example, see Stanley Rosen’s valuable and perceptive commentary (Rosen 2013, Ch. 3, ‘The Introduction’, pp. 53–68). Arato and Breines 1979, p. 130.

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The idea that Lukács’s account of reification is monolithically totalising has already been refuted. In fact, he proposes an aspiration towards totality and a picture of the reified totality which stresses dissonance. Indeed, were his account of reification genuinely totalitarian, to the extent that it precludes any space for resistance or the formation of dereifying consciousness or practice, then in consequence, this would render even the insight of the theorist impossible. The philosophy would then result in or at least imply total nihilism. Equally, insofar as Lukács proposes a subject-object of history, it is not a flat identical subject-object, but a subject-object in becoming. This said, Arato and Breines contend that Lukács’s idealist rendering of the subject-object of history places an impossible demand on the proletariat. They thus argue that in the face of this, Lukács failed to discover the concrete mediations his theory demanded. Consequently, his theory became a conceptual mythology. To evidence this, they identify two such ‘gaps’ which cannot be crossed: Lukács’s theory of the dialectic of class consciousness is presented in terms of two enormous gaps: one is between the minimal consciousness of alienation of proletarian individuals and the self-consciousness of the class as the potential subject of history oriented towards the totality of capitalist society. The other is between the process of defetishisation inherent in the life and work of the proletariat and the defetishising movement of revolutionary theory itself. In both cases the analysis is debilitated by an egological (‘I’, ‘we’, ‘theory of totality’) model of subjectivity (excluding interaction, intersubjectivity in work, everyday life institutional existence) that flows from both the uncompromising totalisation of the logic of reification to all social spheres and from the complementary conceptual myths inherited from classical German philosophy. Notwithstanding the care with which the dialectic of mediation was first unfolded, the gaps will be bridged by the myth of proletarian freedom that the theorist posited even before the analysis. The dialectic is thus a pseudo dialectic or, at best, an incomplete one.68 As an aside, it is worth pointing out once again that to escape conceptual mythologies is easier said than done. Arato and Breines favour an alternative which they, too, posit prior to the analysis. This is basically a liberal, pluralist theory which finds the possibility of emancipation and ‘creative subjectivity’ in vari-

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Arato and Breines 1979, p. 136.

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ous spheres of the social world and in different political institutions.69 This noted, Arato and Breines claim that Lukács is incapable of suggesting mediations between a ‘minimal consciousness of alienation’ in the workplace and Marxist theory, as the standpoint of the proletariat. This view is not uncommon; as has been shown, although somewhat less categorically, Martin Jay makes this point central to his own critique of Lukács.70 This reading was contested in the pages of Telos by Schmidt, who also presents Lukács in light of his earlier works (particularly The Theory of the Novel) and his debt to Hegel and Simmel.71 Schmidt argues that in Lukács’s view, Simmel’s conception of cultural education failed to transcend melancholic romantic individualism and resulted only in an abstract negation of reification. Regardless of how successful he was, Lukács’s overarching intention was to surpass this point of view. Hence Schmidt writes: [in Lukács’s view] … the proletariat is capable of carrying out a determinate rather than an abstract negation of the estranged reality, since it never is in a position to question that this reality is not a real and threatening presence. Unlike the subject of Simmel’s Bildung process which can withdraw to live on a presocial level, the proletariat is forced to stay within the reality marked out by the processes of objectification which have led up to the present state of affairs. Unlike the bourgeois social scientist who might occasionally employ an analysis which makes use of economic factors as causal antecedents of an ‘ideal-type’, arguing that life, of course, consists of much more than economic factors, the proletariat to a certain extent experiences reality as economically determined.72 Schmidt closely links this proletarian version of Bildung with Lukács’s concept of concrete totality which is contrasted to a closed, schematic and formalist totality. The ability to generate a concrete totality is intimately tied to the selfeducation of the proletariat. As in Mészáros, this clearly links Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to the historic praxis of the revolutionary movement in Europe between 1917 and 1923.

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Arato and Breines 1979, pp. 122, 155. Jay 1984, p. 113. Andrew Feenberg’s early articles also appeared in Telos, and were of an exceptional standard when compared with other commentary on Lukács. However, given that his assessment of Lukács does not substantially change, there is no need to refer to these articles in detail. Schmidt 1975, p. 33.

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Moreover, as Schmidt correctly points out, Lukács’s audience was not the proletariat itself; rather, his argument was addressed to the communist movement. In this light, the central argument of History and Class Consciousness cannot be read as theorising the imposition of the will of the Communist Party on the proletariat. This would reduce Lukács’s position to a sterile counterposition between a formalist totality and an inorganic, externally forced process of education. On the contrary, Lukács’s methodology cuts sharply against the abstract imposition of political will on a situation. Schmidt’s argument demonstrates that in Lukács’s conception, theory pushes towards practice, concreteness and actualisation, as was shown in detail above. Equally, theory as the possession of the party also strives towards concreteness and mediation, as will be further shown below. Indeed, given Lukács’s evolution from ultra-left communism to Leninism, this is not surprising. One may disagree, as Schmidt does, that Lukács was correct in his identification of the proletariat. But the point remains: to accuse Lukács of a basically Fichtean and unmediated attitude towards social transformation is to be blind to the overwhelming emphasis of his argument, his political evolution and his relationship to Marx, Hegel, Simmel and others. This said, the argument that no concrete mediation exists between the proletariat’s minimal consciousness of alienation and their imputed class consciousness remains. Chapter 7 will outline a number of concrete mediations that Lukács suggests for the empirical proletariat. However, for now, the most important mediation is the workers’ council, or soviet. This is also Peter Alexander Meyers’s point of view. His article, ‘Speaking Truth to Ourselves: Lukács, “False Consciousness” and a Dilemma of Identity Politics in Democracy’, is arguably the most important recent piece discussing Lukács’s politics. The essay is a quite remarkable and detailed consideration of the terms ‘false consciousness’ and ‘class consciousness’. Meyers’s aim is to demonstrate that these terms evolved within a strong democratic framework and can only be properly understood in this context. Although disagreeing ultimately with Lukács’s view of the party, Meyers’s defence of the contribution made by these terms to democratic political theory is impressive. His starting point is the uncontroversial claim that for Lukács, the concepts false consciousness and class consciousness necessarily and immediately refer to political truth claims. As must occur in strong democracies, these terms suggest a disagreement between two interlocutors with a common interest wherein one claims to understand the interests of the other better than the other. This is, in fact, not unique to Marxist or communist rhetoric. Every identity group, including women, racial minorities, and other minorities, utilises similar devices.73 Bey73

Meyers 2006, pp. 550–2.

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ond this, Meyers discerns two meanings of the term false consciousness, the first of which refers to the situation of general falsehood characteristic of reification. In discussing this, Meyers provides a very capable summary of Lukács’s understanding of reification and the position of the proletariat. The second meaning of false consciousness, referring to ‘aberrant class consciousness’, is where Meyers’s account shines. This is a situation in which one or more proletarians fail to perceive their long term interests and focus instead on short term ones.74 This is clearly tied up with the first sense of false consciousness and it also raises the following question: if we live in a world of generalised falsehood (reification), and if this world predisposes the proletariat itself to false consciousness, from what vantage point may we (the theorists) claim to speak truth? Meyers’s answer to this is the soviets.75 Insofar as reification is a structural problem, soviets as institutions begin to reconnect seemingly divorced elements of society (for instance, the political and economic aspects). They produce a space in which it becomes possible to consciously assess and reconstruct social practices and relationships which hitherto had operated in an unconscious and reified manner. Most importantly, they are a site of political discussion which overcomes the fragmentation of the proletariat in space and time, and allows the proletariat to criticise itself (and fulfil the historic mission assigned to it by Lukács and Marx). Thus, only in a soviet may true class consciousness triumph over false consciousness.76 Meyers writes: The struggle ‘of the proletariat against itself’, to ‘overcome these effects within itself’, and to engage in ‘self-criticism’ can be fairly read as having nothing to do with the top-down imposition of the party. The reflexivity is amongst individuals who meet together in the councils as equals and for the purpose of discovering, developing, and then acting on their longterm political interests. The call is for the self-shaping agonistic politics of strong democracy. If we take this as our starting point, Lukács opens up an important space for democratic theory.77

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Meyers 2006, p. 557. In this, Meyers follows the line of argument established by Mészáros, though in much more detail. He does not, however, reference Mészáros, so this similarity may be coincidental. Meyers 2006, pp. 559–60. Meyers 2006, p. 560.

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Given this, Meyers is quite scathing of what he calls the ‘Whiggish’ reading of Lukács, in which the party becomes the embodied will and reason of the proletariat. Following this remarkable exposition, Meyers goes on to discuss the concept of totality, arguing that it ought not to be seen as a fixed ontological category, but rather as a process of praxis overcoming the divorce between appearance and essence, or form and content, upon which reification depends. Thus, once more, he rejects decisively the caricature of Lukács criticised elsewhere in this work. In Meyers’s reading of Lukács, class consciousness is not solely a political term, but is also an ethical term. This is to say, reason may very well reveal the true interests of the proletariat, but something must also provide for their accepting these interests as their own. Meyers believes that Lukács answered this question in a basically Kantian fashion. He writes: That a working person would find something admirable in the ideal of class consciousness is not difficult to imagine. From that, Lukács seems to believe that something like a moral duty in Kant’s sense arises, in which political action has its base. Political action will succeed only when each worker sees his moral duty to ‘overcome … the devastating and degrading effects of the capitalist system upon [his] class consciousness’. So, once the option of power is laid at the feet of the people, each person must decide whether or not to pick it up. The moral question, ‘What should I do?’, and the political question, ‘What is to be done?’, are intertwined.78 A Hegelian rejoinder to this might argue that the ethical moment is sublated by the political; for the two to coexist on equal footing implies a failure to overcome the duality between immediate and long term interests. Yet this is perhaps beside the point. In outlining this aspect of Lukács’s theory, Meyers argues that a discussion about interests (within a soviet) ultimately involves the claim that: ‘you are wrong about your interests, and I am not’. This in turn becomes two claims: ‘I know myself, and I know you’. Seen in this light, two competing claims about class consciousness bear equal moral weight, and so, the resolution of the dispute comes down to the persuasiveness of the argument in question. This is, of course, also a practical question. The test of practice is a powerful persuader. This is very well as far as it goes. However, at this point, Meyers’s argument takes a dismaying turn. He is clear that such disputes require the framework of

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Meyers 2006, p. 568.

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a strong, participatory democracy. Following Lukács and Arendt, he notes that this is amply provided for by workers’ councils. However, while denying that Lukács entertained fully blown authoritarianism, Meyers argues that Lukács’s advocacy for a communist party contradicted his support for workers’ councils. Meyers poses this in light of the divide between Luxemburgist and Leninist tendencies in the European communist movement: With the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the split of the European Left into Socialist and Communist parties became irrevocable … The meaning of this split became clear two years later, when at Kronstadt the sailors asserted in no uncertain terms ‘We stand for the power of soviets, not parties’. When ‘the soviets revolted against the party dictatorship … the incompatibility of the new councils with the party system became manifest’. The discovery of this incompatibility is often credited to Anarchists like Alexander Berkman, but Lukács realized it first. He just chose the wrong side.79 This is a confusing and misleading paragraph in several ways. Firstly, it implies that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were on the social democratic side of the split in the European socialist movement, or at least, that they hoped to mediate between communism and social democracy. This is untrue. In fact, both were involved in founding the German Communist Party and both were assassinated by paramilitaries directed by a social democratic government.80 In addition to her famous criticisms (which are exaggerated and repeated ad nauseum compared to the rest of her work), Luxemburg explicitly defended the Bolsheviks and regarded a communist party as an essential component of any revolution in Western Europe.81 Beyond this, Meyers cites the Kronstadt Rebellion as 79 80 81

Meyers 2006, p. 571. See Pierre Broué’s paradigmatic account of the German Revolution. Broué 2005. For example, see this characteristic quote taken from a 1918 pamphlet on the Russian Revolution: In this situation, the Bolshevik tendency performs the historic service of having proclaimed from the very beginning, and having followed with iron consistency, those tactics which alone could save democracy and drive the revolution ahead. All power exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses, in the hands of the soviets – this was indeed the only way out of the difficulty into which the revolution had gotten; this was the sword stroke with which they cut the Gordian knot, freed the revolution from a narrow blind-alley and opened up for it an untrammelled path into the free and open fields. The party of Lenin was thus the only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period. It was the element that drove the revolution forward, and, thus it was the only party which really carried on a socialist policy (Luxemburg 1940).

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demonstrating the incompatibility between soviets and the Communist Party. Without entering into tired debates on the repression of the Kronstadt sailors – which was undoubtedly one of the darkest days of the Russian Civil War and a turning point in the degeneration of the revolution – it will suffice to note that soviets would never have been in power in Russia had it not been for the Bolshevik Party. No other party advocated for the soviets to take power, let alone organised to effect this programme.82 Strictly speaking, had it not been for Bolshevism, in all likelihood, the soviets would never have been theorised as a basis for radical democracy, rendering Meyers’s discussion of them impossible. This is certainly not to assert Bolshevik infallibility, nor is it to deny that the Bolsheviks suppressed soviet democracy, as the historical record patently shows. This fact, combined with the fact that the soviets were unable to assume power without the Bolshevik Party, poses serious questions for the theorisation of soviet democracy. Because of his one sided understanding of the party, Meyers cannot answer these questions. Indeed, Lukács’s account of the party is a natural and crucial extension to the democratic theory that Meyers unearths in his work. In Meyers’s account, a soviet is a strong democratic framework within which peers may debate their interests, not in a superficial way, but in a way capable of sustaining deep and challenging questions over class interests, the totality, and so on. This debate may bridge the divide within false consciousness, producing true class consciousness. Moreover, it allows for a learning process; participants may correct their views and learn from others. Yet, within such a wide ranging and intense debate, it is naïve to imagine that currents of common opinion would not emerge and coalesce. In order to maximise persuasiveness, it makes sense to group together with cothinkers, to present a joint case for action, to form alliances with other groups, and so on. This is all the more so when cothinkers find themselves united by an overall perspective that makes sense of the conjuncture as well as the mistakes they perceive in their opponents. To take this a step further, it is logical that those whose opinions are more often found to be true and effective will acquire respect as leaders. Equally, those in the minority, whose opinion is rejected, will often seek to win the argument over the long term by proving in practice the short sightedness of the prevailing majority position. Thus, in any soviet, political formations spontaneously and inevitably emerge. Such is the basis in a workers’ council for political parties. These are necessarily different from a soviet in a series of regards. Parties are volun82

For two excellent accounts (one classic and one recent) amongst many which argue this point, see Rabinowitch 1976, Miéville 2017.

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tary and particular associations, subordinated to the legality of the soviet as a whole. Parties will claim for themselves, however, a superior intellectual understanding of the general situation and the interests of the working class within it. That is, parties make a claim to know a universal truth without themselves constituting universal bodies. Consequently, these competing universal claims will contend for support and will be tested in practice. For this to take place, parties must be allowed to form government on the basis of soviets. In turn, the possibility for their removal must be provided for. Indeed, so strong is the basis for parties within the political practice of soviet democracy that we may say they become a necessity, a reality that must be dealt with and which cannot be wished away with pious anti-authoritarian sentiments. Indeed, it may be suggested that in-principle hostility to political parties itself betrays a Whiggish prejudice. After all, in reality, how strong is soviet democracy if it willingly – nay, enthusiastically – allows itself to be subordinated to a political party? And how might parties be prevented from forming, if not for authoritarian means? Indeed, in the Russian example, the major political parties that competed for power in the soviets pre-existed the revolution for decades. There was simply no question of suppressing them. Of course, more points could easily be made. As regards Meyers’s critique of Lukács’s idea of the party, it will suffice to say that such a superficial treatment is entirely out of keeping with the rest of Meyers’s superb essay. This superficiality precludes any real consideration, on the basis of Lukács’s philosophy, of the genuine antagonism that did exist between party and soviet, following the Bolshevik ascension to power. This aside, while Schmidt and Meyers respond to most of Arato and Breines’s criticism of Lukács, one question remains: namely, their accusation that Lukács produces a ‘mythology of the party’ whose consequence is the ‘substitution of the party for the proletariat’.83 This not uncommon accusation is ordinarily levelled at Lukács from an anti-authoritarian or liberal point of view. However, recent years have seen the same interpretation advanced by Slavoj Žižek, who embraces its authoritarian consequences. Indeed, Boucher and Sharpe have argued that Žižek is the modern theorist closest to Lukács.84 On a superficial level, it is not hard to see why this is compelling. After all, Žižek has posed himself as defender of Leninism and, having cast Lukács as the philosopher of Leninism, has claimed him for his cause.85 In so doing, Žižek has made extens83 84 85

Arato and Breines 1979, p. 155. Sharpe and Boucher 2010, p. 27. Characteristically, Žižek has republished the same writing on Lukács in a variety of places. The most recent repetition of his point of view is to be found in Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012). He has expanded upon this somewhat in his post-face to A Defence of History and Class Consciousness (Žižek 2000).

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ive use of Lukács’s critique of reification. Yet, he has attempted to subsume Lukács into his own eclectic Lacanian framework which is, in turn, connected with a radical, voluntaristic political project. The starting point is Žižek’s general philosophical evaluation. Commenting on Lukács’s (and Marx’s) materialist reversal of Hegel, he writes: The reason we should reject this ‘materialist reversal’ is that it remains all too idealist: locating Hegel’s idealism in the ‘subject’ of the process (the ‘absolute Idea’), it fails to see the subjectivist ‘idealism’ inherent in the very matrix of the dialectical process (the self-alienated subject which reappropriates its ‘reified’ substantial content, positing itself as the absolute subject-object).86 Contrary to this, Žižek suggests that we remain true to the Hegelian aphorism that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk; that we can only understand the content of a historic event after the fact.87 Were Žižek to leave it there, the contradiction between his view and Lukács’s would be clear. As is being argued, however, Lukács’s concept of praxis is radically presentist. It combines the sense of history as passed and history as it unfolds into the concept of genesis. This makes it possible to know, concretely, the social totality. Ultimately, for Lukács, the overcoming of reification by praxis establishes social consciousness over genesis and totality. This is clearly a very different project to Žižek’s, built on a critique of Hegel that Žižek disputes. And so, in order to read his own theory into Lukács, Žižek distorts Lukács dramatically. Žižek couches his appropriation of Lukács in a critique of the Kautsky-Stalin theory of the party, which poses the syllogism: history-class-party. In this syllogism, each term represents the truth or essence of the one preceding it and corresponds with its objective development. Žižek correctly rejects this as the basis for high Stalinism. Yet, his working through of this issue has two consequences, the first of which is Žižek’s view of the party. Despite seeing the Stalinist thermidor as an inevitable reassertion of the symbolic order following an ‘Event’, he seeks to extricate himself from the Stalinist connotations of the above syllogism. To do this, he correctly points out that the Stalinist (and Menshevik) party model is predicated on uncritical positivism; a special, objective, scientific knowledge that is the unique possession of the party.88

86 87 88

Žižek 2012, p. 261. Žižek 2012, p. 220. Žižek 2000, p. 153.

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In place of this, Žižek performs an inversion: he assigns to the Leninist view of the party a radical subjective negativity: One is tempted to resort here to Lacanian terms: what is at stake in this alternative is the (in)existence of the ‘big Other’: the Mensheviks relied on the all-embracing foundation of the positive logic of historical development, while Bolsheviks (Lenin, at least) were aware that ‘the big Other doesn’t exist’ – a political intervention proper does not occur within the coordinates of some underlying global matrix, since what it achieves is the ‘reshuffling’ of this very global matrix.89 In Žižek’s schema, the sequence of the syllogism is unchanged, except that it now bears a negative weight. Here, one is reminded of the sections entitled ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In the former, Hegel argues that the Enlightenment, by abstracting pure matter from all determinate content, in fact renders pure matter as equal to pure thought. In this sense, the materialism of the Second International – as inheritor (via Engels and Marx’s The Holy Family) of eighteenth century materialism – is equally and immediately a crude form of idealism.90 So, in a purely philosophical sense, materialism is quite compatible with abstract, subjective freedom. This becomes clear in the section on absolute freedom. Having absolutised itself following the defeat of faith by Enlightenment materialism and following the universalisation of the category of utility (Lukács’s interpretation of which is discussed in Chapters 1 and 8), absolute freedom ‘… elevates itself to the throne of the world without any power capable of resisting it’.91 This famously results in absolute terror and death: The sole work and deed of universal freedom is thus death, or to be precise, a death which has no inner amplitude and no inner fulfilment, since what is negated is the unfulfilled empty ‘point’ of the absolutely free self. It is therefore the coldest, emptiest death of all, having no more meaning than does chopping off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.92

89 90 91 92

Žižek 2000, p. 163. Hegel 2018, §. 577. Hegel 2018, §. 585. Hegel 2018, §. 590.

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We recall that Žižek’s defence of Lukács and Lenin rests on an inversion of the Kautsky/Stalin history-class-party syllogism. By arguing that in Lukács and Lenin, this syllogism is given the weight of radical negativity, Žižek forgets that in strictly Hegelian terms, the positive and negative articulations of this formula rest on an undisclosed identity. Materialism, strictly speaking, is equal to universalised subjective freedom and idealism. Moreover, Hegel’s critique of Jacobinism relies on the undoubtedly correct supposition that they did not understand themselves to be the historic embodiment of absolute negativity. Nor did Lenin and his Bolshevik party, who untiringly expressed their commitment to materialism. Nevertheless, Žižek casts Lukács and Lenin as Jacobins – and as worthy of praise on this basis. Insofar as Žižek supports this position, his position is less Hegelian than it is Fichtean. Whether this is a valid assessment of Lenin is beside the point. As will be argued shortly, Lukács’s syllogism would be much more accurately rendered as history-mediation-praxis, wherein mediation signifies the dialectic between party and class. While this is a quite schematic reduction, the point is that Lukács is at pains to avoid seeing the party as the truth of history or the class, regardless of whether these terms are rendered in the key of uncritical materialism or negativity and the Lacanian real. In Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, the highest truth is an emergent praxis – nothing less than the advent of human consciousness in history. No class or party can claim absolute truth in a world submerged in reification. Hence, the proletariat is a subject-object of history in becoming. This is also closely related to the self-knowledge and selfcriticism of the theory of praxis, that is, historical materialism. Žižek is blind and hostile to this side of Lukács’s thought. This, however, is not the end. Žižek also attempts to read Badiou’s ‘Act’ into Lukács. He does this via Lukács’s term augenblick – literally ‘blink of the eye’. This, in Žižek’s view, represents an ‘Event’ (created by the ‘Act’) that is irreducible to its preconditions. Žižek genuflects to concrete totality as providing a foundation for the act, yet as a result of his reading outlined above, he fails to understand the concrete as Lukács meant it, namely, consciously. This leads to the second major consequence of Žižek’s misappropriation of Lukács: while he precludes proletarian self-reflexivity, he wishes to retain the proletariat as a philosophical term. So he defines the proletariat as pure negativity. To do this, he recounts Lukács’s antinomy between empirical consciousness (immediacy) and imputed consciousness (the philosophy of praxis). He does not, however, agree with Lukács’s resolution of this antinomy in real world praxis; that is, class struggle at the highest level of objective potential. Rather, he re-interprets the split between empirical and imputed consciousness in terms which recall Lacan’s ‘Real’:

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The split is thus the split between the particular positive identity and the barrier, inherent blockage, that prevents the proletarians from actualising this very particular positive identity, (their ‘place in society’) – only if we conceive of the split in this way, is there a space for the act proper, not only for the actions that follow universal ‘principles’ or ‘rules’ given in advance and thus providing the ‘ontological cover’ for our activity.93 Thus, it is the positivity of the proletariat that is to be overthrown by the act. This grants philosophical licence to ignore completely the desires, views and interests of the real, empirical people who made up the proletariat. This is not the mediation of empirical class consciousness by imputed class consciousness. It is its annihilation. Characteristically, Žižek is frank about the consequences of this view. He writes: ‘Revolutionary politics is not a matter of “opinions”, but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the “opinion of the majority” to impose the revolutionary will against it’. He continues on the same theme, writing: The political legacy of Lukács is thus the assertion of the unconditional, ‘ruthless’ revolutionary will, ready to ‘go to the end’, effectively to seize power and undermine the existing totality; its wager is the alternative between authentic rebellion and its later ‘ossification’ in a new order is not exhaustive, in other words, that revolutionary effervescence should take the risk of translating its outburst into a New Order.94 All this is reminiscent of a left-wing version of Schmittian decisionism. It is an argument that is sharply counterposed to human self-reflexivity and autonomy. It necessarily splits humanity into two camps – those who carry out the act and those upon whom it is inflicted. Yet even those who act cannot claim consciousness. Rather, they are at the service of a socially overextended version of Lacan’s real. So Žižek transforms himself, via Badiou and Lacan, into the caricature of Lukács. Žižek’s comments on the augenblick occur in his post-face to Lukács’s A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. This text, which contains a dialectic of moments and processes in which Lukács further concretises his concept of praxis, is worth citing because it both anticipates and replies to Žižek. Of course, the detractors against whom Lukács wrote his defence attacked him on

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Žižek 2000, p. 170. Žižek 2000, p. 176.

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a typically Second/Third International positivist basis. Nevertheless, because Žižek inhabits the opposite philosophical antinomy, radical subjectivism, Lukács’ words are equally effective against him. Firstly, Lukács criticises any attempt to separate out subjectivity in the abstract. Citing Fichte as an example, he suggests that this creates a ‘conceptual mythology’ which sidesteps reality, leaves it untouched.95 Rather, Lukács argues that a moment can only be resolved progressively on the basis of proletarian praxis. Hence he stresses the conscious nature of subjective intervention. Citing Lenin’s critique of Blanquism in ‘Marxism and Insurrection’, Lukács argues that the crucial factor in a moment of revolutionary crisis is the consciousness of the working class. As evidence, he cites the relative reluctance of the Russian masses to fight for insurrection in July of 1917, compared to October. Lukács summarises the point, arguing: ‘… once the objective situation has ripened to insurrection, once the “moment” of insurrection is there, then the conscious, subjective moment of the revolutionary process raises itself to an independent activity’.96 Thus, Lukács’s conception of praxis is based on a unity of subject and object, where the two sides are consciously mediated. Extending on this, Lukács writes: … conceptions that mechanically generalise the decisive role ascribed to the actively conscious subjective moment to the whole process … [turn] the concrete truth of particular and concrete historical ‘moments’ into the abstract falsehood of a permanently decisive influencability of the process. Such a ‘left’ theory of moments ignores precisely the instant of dialectical change, the concrete, revolutionary essence of the ‘moment’ … The well warranted active role of the subject turns into an empty phraseology of subjectivism.97 These words, written in 1926, are more than sufficient response to Žižek. As with a few of the more perspicuous critics of Lukács, Žižek is from time to time correct in his conclusions. For example, it will be argued later that an ultimately subjective decision did indeed lie at the heart of Lukács’s augenblick. Insofar as this is true, the Bolshevik experience should be read as conceptually contiguous with Jacobinism, in the sense in which Hegel defined it. However, to make a virtue of this and to ascribe this virtue to Lukács is, based on the vast accumulation of evidence I have cited, nothing but charlatanism. Indeed, 95 96 97

Lukács 2002, pp. 54–6. Lukács 2002, p. 57. Lukács 2002, p. 59.

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the point of the reading at hand is to understand both the immanent logic of Lukács’s failure and in so doing, to discover what this failure tells us about the October Revolution and history more generally. Žižek instead transforms this failure into a virtue and appropriates it. By simply defending the caricature of Lukács-the-authoritarian (with the admixture of Lacanian terminology) Žižek adds nothing to our appreciation of this major figure in Marxist philosophy. Instead, he simply detracts Lukács’s radical democratic commitment to a selfknowing, dereified society. If one point should emerge from this counter critique, it is that Lukács strained with all of his theoretical resources to produce a philosophy of praxis that was both democratic and that refused to privilege the theorist or the party as the bearer of historic truth.

3

Party and Class The distinction between thought and will is simply that between the theoretical and practical attitudes. But they are not two separate faculties; on the contrary, the will is a particular way of thinking – thinking translating itself into existence. G.W.F. Hegel98

The previous section discussed theory as the possession of the party (imputed class consciousness) in order to expose and overcome the remaining abstraction present in such theory. However, in the first place, a party experiences this abstraction and weakness as its strength and principle. As an ethical community, the moral mission of the party is constituted by their abstract and theoretical rejection of capitalism and the commensurate adoption of the standpoint of the proletariat as an alternative. Prior to the advent of praxis, this is, as we saw via Merleau-Ponty, a hypothesis, moreover, one with a utopian character. Thus, the above section suggested the possibility of becoming aware of these limits to theory, and in so doing, generating a self-critical theory of praxis. However, in Lukács’s argument, the overcoming of the party’s abstraction does not take place primarily via theoretical self-criticism, but rather, through political practice. This practice is guided by the party’s theory and by its understanding of the conjuncture at which it finds itself, which includes the party’s analysis of itself, as well as of the empirical consciousness of the proletariat. These aspects, in combination with the material constitution of the party, allow

98

Hegel 1991a, §. 4; Addition (H, G).

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the party to relate to the class and in so doing, sublate its abstract truth practically. This interaction between party and class is radically democratic and will be the subject of this section which will proceed from the point of view of the party. It will begin by discussing the material constitution of the party, after which the discussion will turn to the practical aspect of the party’s imputed class consciousness. Finally, the democratic relationship between party and class will be outlined in order to place the self-critical aspect of Lukács’s Leninism in sharp relief. This clears the way for a synthesis between theory and practice in revolutionary praxis. In addition to its intellectual advantage over sects and reformist parties, the party possesses an organisational advantage. Lukács argues that the party overcomes the subjective individualism of the contemplative stance, albeit in a delimited field. Specifically, the party constitutes a particular, ethicalpractical community with a universal mission which informs its goal to overcome the contemplative stance in order to approach and lead praxis. As usual, Lukács presents the inner dialectic of party organisation in contrast with reified approaches to organisation. He criticises the ‘freedom’ of the bourgeois individual as follows: … the ‘freedom’ of the men who are alive now is the freedom of the individual isolated by the fact of property which both reifies and is itself reified. It is a freedom vis-à-vis the other (no less isolated) individuals. A freedom of the egoist, of the man who cuts himself off from others, a freedom for which solidarity and community exist at best only as ineffectual ‘regulative ideas’. To wish to breathe life into this freedom means in practice the renunciation of real freedom. This ‘freedom’ which isolated individuals may acquire thanks to their position in society or their inner constitution regardless of what happens to others means then in practice that the unfree structure of contemporary society will be perpetuated in so far as it depends on the individual.99 The negative freedom of the individual of civil society is an egotistical and tragic freedom, incapable of sustaining concrete universality.100 The resolution

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Lukács 1967a, p. 315. Lukács could equally have cited Hegel’s critique of subjective freedom; the ‘freedom of the void’ (Hegel 1991a, p. 38). This negative freedom leads, through its own self-contradiction, to an experience with death and ultimately to a voluntary commitment to the right of ethical substance. Of course, Hegel has in mind the idea of right, which is formed on the basis of the unity of the family, civil society and the state. Lukács’s party aims at the cre-

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of this tragic dilemma in a party is similar to the resolution of the dialectic of the contemplative stance in that the individual freely chooses their subsumption under a universal. The difference is that now, this is a practical subsumption of the individual into an active organisation, whereas before, the individual merely subsumed their viewpoint under the theoretical standpoint of the proletariat. As with the resolution of the contemplative stance, this is an ethical choice: The conscious desire for the realm of freedom can only mean consciously taking the steps that will really lead to it. And in the awareness that in contemporary bourgeois society individual freedom can only be corrupt and corrupting because it is a case of unilateral privilege based on the unfreedom of others, this desire must entail the renunciation of individual freedom. It implies the conscious subordination of the self to that collective will that is destined to bring real freedom into being and that today is earnestly taking the first arduous, uncertain and groping steps towards it. This conscious collective will is the Communist Party.101 This lends a prefigurative dimension to the party. It anticipates, albeit abstractly and in an undeveloped manner, a dereified ethic: ‘… like every aspect of a dialectical process it [the concrete freedom in the party] too contains the seeds, admittedly in a primitive, abstract and undeveloped form, of the determinants appropriate to the goal it is destined to achieve: namely freedom in solidarity’.102 So, the unhappy consciousness of the reified individual transforms itself into the happy consciousness of the community of solidarity. In Chapter 4, the basis for an intellectual departure from the immediacy of the contemplative stance was supplied by love, regarded as an ethical category which provides for a relationship to the other which is neither transactory, solipsistic, nihilist or egotistical. Insofar as a practical-ethical decision grounds an individual’s choice to join an ethical community, it represents the transposition of a loving relationship into the level of a political community; love both underpins and becomes solidarity. Lukács made precisely this point in the speech,

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ation of a concrete new ethical substance. Nevertheless, both hold in common the critique of subjective freedom (cf. Hegel 1991a, §. 141). Lukács 1967a, p. 315. MacIntyre, in a work from considerably earlier in his career than that which was cited in Chapter 4, captures well this sense of concrete freedom as the self-conscious devotion of an individual to an activist party. His position is essentially Lukácsian. MacIntyre 1960. Lukács 1967a, p. 315.

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cited above, in which he was quoted as suggesting that the dual ethics of communism are love and solidarity.103 Evidently, this ethical commitment is the basis, in the party, for discipline and unity in action. While from the point of view of the contemplative stance and the negative freedom of the reified individual this appears antidemocratic and authoritarian, to Lukács, the opposite is true. Parties formed under bourgeois hegemony internalise reification by instituting a division between party leadership and the mass. Lukács cites Max Weber’s description of this phenomenon to good effect: Max Weber gives an apt definition of this type of organisation: ‘What is common to them all is that a nucleus of people who are in active control gather around them the ‘members’ whose role is essentially more passive while the mass of the membership are mere objects’. Their role as objects is not mitigated by the fact of formal democracy, by the ‘freedom’ that obtains in these organisations; on the contrary, this freedom only fixes and perpetuates it.104 Such a structural divide between leaders and membership all but makes inevitable a commensurate divide between theory and practice. Consequently, the capacity of a reified or bureaucratic party to assess strategy or policy is crippled. In periods of stability, institutional learning may take place gradually and unevenly. However, in periods of crisis or rapid political movements, such limits can be fatal; mistakes can only appear as the irrational result of intrinsically poor leadership or, fatalistically, as the product of deficient objective circumstances. In both cases, the self-education of the party is forestalled. Thus, a reified party is unconscious. Moreover, structurally speaking, such a party reproduces the indifference and legalism of the state: ‘Like all the social forms of civilization these [reformist] organisations are based on the exact mechanised division of labour, on bureaucratisation, on the precise delineation and separation of rights and duties. The members are only connected with the organisation by virtue of abstractly grasped aspects of their existence and these abstract bonds are objectivised as rights and duties’.105 Unsurprisingly, this cultivates passivity.

103 104 105

See Lukács 1991a. Lukács 1967a, p. 318. Lukács 1967a, p. 319. This fact of reified political life is, in Lukács’s view, the origin of Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ of which Lukács was highly critical. In short, Lukács argued that Michels’s conception hypostatised the reification of bureaucracy, effectively rendering it a form of original sin (see Lukács 1928b).

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Against this, Lukács proposes a model of a revolutionary party which encompasses the ‘whole personality’ of its members: ‘Only when action within a community becomes the central personal concern of everyone involved will it be possible to abolish the split between rights and duties, the organisational form of man’s separation from his own socialisation and his fragmentation at the hands of the social forces that control him’.106 Lukács frames this point with reference to Engels’s critique of the Gentile constitution and to Marx’s critique of law as the universal application of an abstract, equal standard.107 In light of this, he writes: ‘Hence every human relationship which breaks with this [reified] pattern, with this abstraction from the total personality of man and with his subsumption beneath an abstract point of view, is a step in the direction of putting an end to the reification of human consciousness. Such a step, however, presupposes the active engagement of the total personality’.108 Seen in this light, the negative freedom of the reified individual is the false consciousness of the real unfreedom of class society. To the contrary, Lukács hoped that the discipline of the revolutionary party might lay the ground on which genuine party democracy could flourish. Insofar as members are actively and wholeheartedly committed to the party’s project, they possess a strong stake in the direction and policy of the party. Then the party forms a strong democracy (to borrow Meyers’s terminology) which can begin to overcome the formalism of bureaucratic organisation. So, while the party cannot be the bearer of actual praxis, it mediates between the individual and the actual praxis of the proletariat. The individual’s free self-subordination to the party, through the ethic of solidarity and discipline, mediates between theory and practice. Lukács writes: Organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice. And, as in every dialectical relationship, the terms of the relation only acquire concreteness and reality in and by virtue of this mediation. The ability

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Lukács 1967a, p. 319. We may speculate, on the basis of the texts that he had access to in the early 1920s, that Lukács had in mind Marx’s 1844 introduction to his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ and Engels’s comments regarding the Gentile constitution of Ancient Greece (and Athens in particular), in Chapter IV of The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (see Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 175–87, Engels 1990b, pp. 204–12). That Lukács was drawn to what were, at the time, relatively unknown and under-discussed sections of Marx and Engels’s work dealing with the phenomenon of political alienation illustrates not only the thoroughness of his study of Marxism, but his sensitivity to the problems of political alienation. Lukács 1967a, p. 319.

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of organisations to mediate between theory and practice is seen most clearly by the way in which it manifests a much greater, finer and more confident sensitivity towards divergent trends than any other sector of political thought and action. On the level of pure theory the most disparate views and tendencies are able to co-exist peacefully, antagonisms are only expressed in the form of discussions which can be contained within the framework of one and the same organisation and without disrupting it. But no sooner are these same questions given organisational form than they turn out to be sharply opposed and even incompatible.109 So, organisational embodiment renders theory democratic and practical. ‘… [O]nly an analysis orientated towards organisation can make a genuine criticism of theory from the point of view of practice. If theory is directly juxtaposed to an organised action without its being made clear how it is supposed to affect it, i.e. without clearly expressing their connectedness in terms of organisation, then the theory can only be criticised with regard to its own internal contradictions’.110 Lukács continues to note that this is why reformist organisations can tolerate a far greater diversity of theoretical opinions, including those which contradict the majority theory of the party. With no meaningful connection to practice, theory alone is no challenge to the orientation of the party.111 This point will be discussed further shortly. For now it must be noted that the above aspects of Lukács’s theory of the party have failed to enthuse many commentators. Too easily do they seem to describe a Stalinist-style party which exerts authoritarian and dogmatic force over its membership and which aspires to exert the same over the class it purports to represent. It can hardly be doubted that Lukács overestimated the internal democracy of the communist parties of Europe in the early 1920s, which were already showing signs of bureaucratism. There is, however, a simple explanation for Lukács’s emphasis: History and Class Consciousness was intended as an intervention into these parties. This was an intervention informed by Lukács’s own activism which – as was outlined in the introduction – clashed with bureaucratism and dogmatism more than once. Were his intervention couched in more explicitly critical terms, it would in all likelihood have met with even less success. It may also have compromised Lukács’s practical activity in the Hungarian Communist Party. After all, Karl Korsch chose the path 109 110 111

Lukács 1967a, p. 299. Lukács 1967a, 300–1. Here, Lukács no doubt has in mind Rosa Luxemburg, whose criticisms from within of the Social Democratic Party prior to 1914 were both prescient and impotent.

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of vocal opposition, leading to his early exclusion from the Communist International. Whatever the price of Lukács’s chosen strategy, Korsch’s strategy – of which Lukács was no doubt aware – had just as little to recommend it. Indeed, the two opposite political deadends represented by Lukács and Korsch may well be taken as indicative of the retreat of the praxis upon which their retheorisations of Marxism were based.112 Moreover, Lukács’s intervention proposed a conceptualisation of the Bolshevik Party in its heroic phase, prior to its possessing state power. Unlike, for example, Victor Serge, Lukács never penned a theoretical or political justification for the degeneration of soviet or party democracy in the USSR. Even later, in the less radical phase of his career, Lukács continued to advocate for soviet and party democracy.113 Anyway, whether or not Lukács’s characterisation was accurate is not the point. For the purpose of the argument at hand, what matters is the role the party plays in Lukács’s political theory, as a mediation towards praxis. Andrew Feenberg has noticed this dimension of Lukács’s theory, observing that within it there is an implicit contradiction between Lukács and Lenin. While the latter’s political practice went well beyond the bounds of the Second International, in his theory and self-explanation, Lenin remained loyal to the theoretical framework he had inherited from Plekhanov and Kautsky.114 Lukács thus elucidated dimensions of Lenin’s practice unknown to Lenin himself. This is particularly in evidence in Lukács’s remarkable reinterpretation of Lenin’s infamous formulation (borrowed from Kautsky) that class consciousness must be brought to the proletariat from without.115 In fact, as Feenberg notices, Lukács proposes a unique reading of this rather vexed formula: The party attempts to interpret the situation of the class in accordance with the concept of class consciousness, understood as the unarticulated meaning of class actions some of which have not yet occurred. This meaning can be ‘imputed’ to the class in the expectation that, if it is correctly interpreted, the class will recognize itself in the party’s language and acts. The translation of these imputed contents back into action by the class completes the cycle in which class consciousness advances to higher 112 113 114 115

Jacoby 1981, p. 99. This is not to imply, necessarily, that Korsch produced a philosophy of praxis. Serge 1972, pp. 272–3, cf. Lukács 1991b, pp. 125–8. Feenberg 2002, p. 56. Lenin 1961, p. 375. This infamous formulation of Lenin’s has come under sustained scrutiny in recent years, aimed at defending him (see, for example: Lih 2006, Shandro 2014). This said, the intention here is not to propose a new reading of Lenin, but rather, to elucidate Lukács’s reading of Lenin.

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levels. In this model of the development of class consciousness, the ideas the party brings to the class come both ‘from without’, in the sense that they arise from theory, and ‘from within’, in the sense that they reflect the (future) truth of class action.116 This is an important point that Feenberg explains very clearly. To expand on his argument, in Chapter 3, it was noted that landscape painting presupposes the distance between subject and object and represents, in aesthetic form, their reunification. Here, the same basic philosophical point holds, albeit in a very different, historical-political register. Estrangement is a fundamental moment in the development of consciousness. Simply put, the proletariat cannot be comprehended, nor can it comprehend itself, immediately. Any view of the proletariat (whether as object or as potential subject-object) is an act of representation. And as Lukács was well aware, all representation leaves the chasm between subject and object untranscended. Thus, while he endorses the idea that consciousness may be brought to the class from without, Lukács immediately relativises this ‘without’ by proposing that it be regarded as the alienated self-consciousness of the proletariat itself. Thus, the terms ‘from within’ and ‘from without’ are rendered dialectical; the inner truth of class consciousness can only be expressed as an estranged truth, developed outside the class. And yet, this ‘outside’ is an appearance; its very possibility is conditioned by the standpoint of the proletariat and its validity can only be assessed insofar as it is capable of making itself the accepted inner truth of the class. Lukács explains this covertly heterodox reading of Lenin in some detail in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. To begin with, Lukács quotes Lenin’s famous words: ‘“Correct class consciousness” (he uses the term social democratic consciousness here) “would have to be brought to them [the proletariat] from without”’. Lukács continues to reproduce the quote: “The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, that mean conviction of the necessity of organising as trade unions, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc”.117 Immediately following this, Lukács provides an explanation which makes his meaning unambiguous. Firstly, he disavows the idea that the working class might spontaneously (that is, without the intervention of a more conscious organisation) develop towards its own

116 117

Feenberg 2002, p. 65. Lukács 2002, p. 82.

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consciousness.118 He goes on to note that in addition to the question of the party’s relationship to the class, this raises basic questions about the status of Marxism as a theory developed apparently from outside the proletariat. Lukács solves this dilemma by proposing ‘… a dialectical relationship between this “from without” and the working class’.119 He continues to argue that even though Marx and Engels were products of a bourgeois upbringing, their doctrine was in fact a product of the development of the working class.120 Insofar as theory appears to impact the proletariat from outside, this is only to be considered dialectically exterior to the class, that is, as an estranged moment in the development of a richer truth. Or, better, Marxism is the thought of the proletariat in estrangement from itself. Seen this way, there is, strictly speaking, no outside. All theory is produced from within the horizon of the present totality of social being, including theory which seeks to transcend this being. To demand that the proletariat develop towards its consciousness purely internally would, in Lukács’s view, mythologise its spontaneous consciousness.121 Unlike Marx, Lukács’s aim was not to articulate the standpoint of the proletariat for the first time, but to discover the mediations within social being whereby the proletariat might reappropriate its own consciousness. As Lukács explains, this movement is one in which the proletariat moves towards the totalising perspective first held by the party. Quoting Lenin, Lukács emphasises that this is a political process: ‘Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of interrelations between all classes’.122 This explains the crucial role of politics in the proletariat’s development from a more immediate, economic class consciousness towards a totalising class consciousness. Moreover, this formulation does not substitute politics for economics, but rather, sublates these two antinomies with a third term, which is the standpoint of totality. As has been shown, initially the party is the bearer of totality. However, Lukács makes it clear that the relationship between the party and class is reciprocal; it

118 119 120

121 122

Lukács 2002, p. 82. Lukács 2002, p. 82. Indeed, Lukács argues that even Marx and Engels’s predecessors – Ricardo, Hegel, French historians and socialists – unknowingly summarised in thought the being of the proletariat. Lukács 2002, p. 82. Lukács 2002, pp. 82–3. Lukács 2002, p. 83.

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is not enough for the party to think the content of society, but this content itself must become conscious and be accepted by the proletariat.123 Lukács writes: ‘Forms of organisation are there in order to bring this process [of becoming conscious of totality] into being, to accelerate it, in order to make such contents conscious in the working class (in a part of the working class), which once made conscious turn the workers into class-conscious workers, precisely those contents that correspond as adequately as possible to their objective class situation’.124 Even as a minority party, the imputed class consciousness of the party grants it a strategic advantage. This begins as a negative practical freedom with regard to the antinomies of bourgeois politics. Perhaps the simplest example of this is Lukács’s chapter on ‘Legality and Illegality’. This chapter outlines a critique of legality and the state which both informs party practice and serves as a model which can be generalised to other issues. Lukács’s argument presupposes the account of the state summarised briefly in Chapters 2 and 5. The state is understood as a rationalistic system, premised on the irrational exercise of force. This underlying irrationalism suggests the essence of the state; that it is simultaneously the expression and organiser of the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. While the state relies on the consent of its subjects, it is underpinned by force. This critique is also an example of the methodological moments that have structured this work: the immediacy of the state is subjected to critique, which uncovers a mediated totality which is equally understood to be a historic product of class struggle. Thus, the state is demystified. This critique reveals two practical antinomies: the fetishism of legality and the romanticism of illegality. Both disclose an inner, intellectual fetishisation of the state. Insofar as reformism or sectarianism inhabit either of these poles, they do so unconsciously. In contrast, the party’s theoretical critique of the state makes it possible to become practically indifferent towards the state and legality. The party must be equally willing to pursue legal and illegal strategies, as the moment requires. This is a negative, indeterminate freedom regarding the state; so long as the party remains relatively weak, it consists in a sort of stoic indifference. In and of itself, the party is powerless to overturn the state. Thus the development of a concrete and practical approach to legality must be based on the conjuncture and the needs of class struggle. This formal attitude of the party is only rendered concrete and filled with content by its analysis of the class struggle and the actual consciousness of the proletariat. However, this initial indifference to the state is a great advantage in that it preserves the intellectual free123 124

Lukács 2002, p. 84. Lukács 2002, p. 84.

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dom of the party from forms of bourgeois thought, even in a situation in which these forms of thought (or, as Lukács calls them, ‘life forms’) still hold great sway over the proletariat as a whole. The independence of the party may therefore serve a pedagogical function where the class as a whole is concerned: Such tactics [a combination of legality and illegality, as the situation requires] are necessary in order to complete the revolutionary self-education of the proletariat. For the proletariat can only be liberated from its dependence upon the life forms created by capitalism when it has learnt to act without these life forms inwardly influencing its actions. As motive forces they must sink to the status of matters of complete indifference.125 Indeed, this practical-theoretical methodology can be applied to a whole range of questions, with determinate modifications. For example, the struggle for reforms or the question of a party’s relationship to trade union work or parliament are related questions.126 So, the theoretical truth of the party is both borne of its consideration of the lessons of struggle and facilitates practice from which the party can further learn. In educating the class, the party educates itself. This account emphasises that the party is a form of communication – the party must aim at being accepted by the class. On the other hand, the class may only choose its own self-consciousness to the extent that it distinguishes itself practically and politically. Towards the end of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács expresses the same point as follows: The Communist Party must exist as an independent organisation so that the proletariat may be able to see its own class consciousness given historical shape. And likewise, so that in every event of daily life the point of view demanded by the interests of the class as a whole may receive a clear formulation that every worker may understand. And, finally, so that the whole class may become fully aware of its own existence as a class.127 125 126

127

Lukács 1967a, p. 264. On the basis of his involvement in the Hungarian Revolution and his participation in debates revolving around the German communist movement, Lukács grappled with such questions, making his fair share of mistakes during the years leading up to the publication of History and Class Consciousness. Many of the essays collected in Tactics and Ethics document this development. Especially relevant are ‘“Law and Order” and Violence’, ‘The Question of Parliamentarianism’, ‘Opportunism and Putschism’ and so on (see Lukács 1972l). Lukács 1967a, p. 326.

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In Lukács’s view, it is an unmediated and essentially utopian hope that the proletariat may become spontaneously conscious of its historic mission. As Feenberg notes, Lukács regards this spontaneist view as remaining trapped within the broad framework of social democratic theories of class consciousness.128 Kautsky has already been discussed. Yet, with respect to this issue, Lukács also had Luxemburg in mind. He is critical of her on two counts. Firstly, he criticises her assumption that the proletariat’s consciousness will develop relatively homogenously, corresponding with the ‘purely proletarian’ nature of their revolution. Secondly, he is critical of her failure to carry the struggle against opportunism through to the level of organisation. These positions effectively deny the necessity of a Bolshevik-style party, leaving the hegemony of reformist organisations practically unchallenged. In the actuality of revolution, this becomes strategically debilitating for the proletariat. As Lukács argues, any revolution in a modern country will involve complex and shifting alliances, organised around concrete and rapidly evolving political questions which are not easy to comprehend. At times the proletariat might find itself on the defensive, in need of allies; at other times, the situation might demand an offensive. Alternately, politics may momentarily centre around an issue – say, an uprising of an oppressed people, on elections or on some other crisis. The ability to navigate such a rapidly shifting strategic environment requires hard-headed revolutionary realpolitik as well as the agility of an active and intellectually coherent membership.129 In the Gramscian lexicon, this kind of political combat is referred to as a ‘War of Manoeuvre’. Reformist parties, by virtue of their internalisation of reification, which internalises the legitimacy of bourgeois politics and norms, are incapable of this type of strategic leadership and will often conspire to block its emergence elsewhere. So, in Lukács’s view, ‘Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg were agreed politically and theoretically about the need to combat opportunism. The conflict between them lay in their answers to the question as to whether or not the campaign against opportunism should be conducted as an intellectual struggle within the revolutionary party of the proletariat or whether it was to be resolved on the level of organisation’.130

128 129

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Feenberg 2002, p. 60. Lukács 1967a, p. 286. In Trotskyist lexicon, these issues are usually dealt with under the categories of the united front or permanent revolution. In as much as these are formulas relatively divorced from a theoretical context, they tend towards schematism. Lukács’s theory, built in a similar context, possesses a far richer and more self-critical theoretical basis. Lukács 1967a, p. 284.

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As Lukács continues to explain, if the war against opportunism is conceived of as a struggle within the party, then it follows that the main focus is on winning a revolutionary majority. While this may be appropriate to the period prior to the actuality of revolution, if it remains the case in crisis, the political fight may never crystallise into a battle between different and opposed tendencies. This means that theory is never subjected to the trial of practice. Given this, ‘[n]aturally, it follows that the struggle against opportunism will degenerate into a series of individual skirmishes in which the ally of yesterday can become the opponent of today and vice versa. A war against opportunism as a tendency cannot crystallise out: the terrain of the “intellectual conflicts” changes from one issue to the next and with it changes the composition of the rival groups’.131 On the other hand, should the class consciousness of the proletariat exist in organisationally independent form, as a separate party, radicalising workers may be presented with a clear choice in the event of their more conservative leaders’ betrayal. Thus, the Lukácsian Leninist party wages an active struggle for political hegemony within the workers movement, both in theory and practice. The object of this struggle is to gain the ‘… confidence of the great masses and remove them from the power of opportunists by their actions …’132 From the above it should also be clear that the real test of imputed class consciousness is not theoretical, but practical. Lukács explains this further in his defence of History and Class Consciousness. Against Rudas, who believed that whatever mass psychological consciousness exists in a class constitutes its consciousness, Lukács argued that class consciousness is only true insofar as it is concrete and practical. Class consciousness – embodied in the party – is only true insofar as it comprehends the interests of the class as a whole, explains these interests to the class and is successful in leading the class in pursuit of these interests. In order to realise itself, imputed class consciousness has to unite itself with the consciousness of the actual class.133 There is nothing a priori that guarantees the insight of the party. Given this, the party must be capable of sustaining self-criticism. This self-criticism is neither an infinite development towards perfection, nor is it ever completed.134 Just like Lukács’s solution to the antinomies of bourgeois history, in his view, Bolshevik self-

131 132 133 134

Lukács 1967a, p. 286. Lukács 1967a, p. 289. Lukács 2002, pp. 75–7. From the foregoing, it ought to go without saying that this understanding of self-criticism has nothing in common with the moralistic and authoritarian ‘self-criticism’ associated with Maoist sects.

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criticism focuses on the tasks of the present moment and consists of the ‘… knowledge that the actions of the party, at any given moment, were not on the same level as might have been objectively possible in the given situation’.135 Lukács therefore insists that the actualisation of class consciousness is a dialectical process of learning between party and class, in which the former must concretise its theory by way of the actual class struggle. This constitutes a radical democratic theory of the party. It is sharply counterposed to both spontaneist theories of organisation, which see organisation as a permanent conservative fetter on the class, and authoritarian theories of organisation which impose their truth on the class. This is not to suggest that there are not tensions within a Leninist party, conceived of in Lukács’s terms. Given the complexities and sharp dynamics of a period of the actuality of revolution, it would be expected that at times, relatively spontaneous movements would impact upon or find expression within the party. Equally, it would be naïve to suggest that the leadership of such a party does not possess an authority which may, at times, predispose it towards a heavy handed or bureaucratic approach. Finally, it is difficult to imagine a mass party which does not include some formalisation of members’ rights and responsibilities. The key difference between a revolutionary party, in Lukács’s conception, and a reformist one is that the former does not reify its structure or constitution. Rather, the Lukácsian party represents a process of concrete mediation. Indeed, Lukács’s theory is counterposed to what might be described as a liberal democratic theory of organisation, which eclectically combines the first two poles in a bureaucratic party which nevertheless tolerates a degree of internal criticism, as in pre-war Social Democracy. In fact, all these views conceal an unresolved antinomy: spontaneist theories of organisation idealise the empirical consciousness of the class, while bureaucratic ones idealise the imputed consciousness of the class. Lukács’s point is that the truth of either antinomy depends on its opposite. Merleau-Ponty captures this aspect of Lukács’s thought with exceptional clarity. He writes: When one founds Marxist theory on proletarian praxis, one is not therefore led to the ‘spontaneous’ or ‘primitive’ myth of the ‘revolutionary instinct of the masses’. The profound philosophical meaning of the notion of praxis is to place us in an order which is not that of knowledge but rather that of communication, exchange and association. There is a proletarian praxis which makes the class exist before it is known. It is not closed in on itself, it is not self-sufficient. It admits and even calls for a

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Lukács 2002, p. 78.

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critical elaboration and rectification. These controls are produced by a praxis of a superior degree, which is, this time, the life of the proletariat in the Party. This higher praxis is not a reflection of the initial praxis; it is not contained in it in miniature; it carries the working class beyond its immediate reality; it expresses it and here, as everywhere else, the expression is creative. But it is not arbitrary. The Party must establish itself as the expression of the working class by making itself accepted by the working class. The Party’s operation must prove that beyond capitalistic history there is another history, wherein one does not have to choose between the role of subject and object.136 In addition to situating Lukács’s position beyond the antinomies of spontaneity and organisation, this argument reveals that Lukács’s resolution of the antinomy reveals a praxis which expresses a truth higher than that of both the party and the class. Moreover, it makes clear that in the Lukácsian party, the resolution of antinomies inherited from bourgeois society can only occur in the context of concrete class struggle and the concrete questions of the day; that is, by the praxis of democratic revolutionary politics. This praxis reveals dimensions of reality hitherto hidden to both the imputed and empirical class consciousness of the proletariat. As is clear from the quote reproduced above, this conception of the party regards it as a mediator and a form of communication. Merleau-Ponty is once again the theorist to have discussed this most perceptively. Indeed, his position sheds important light on Lukács’s concept of praxis which, as has been argued, is open and democratic. As he further writes: This philosophy [of praxis] does not take as its theme consciousnesses enclosed in their native immanence but rather men who explain themselves to one another. One man brings his life into contact with the apparatuses of oppression, another brings information from another source on this same life and a view of the total struggle, that is to say, a view of its political forms. By this confrontation, theory affirms itself as the rigorous expression of what is lived by the proletarians, and, simultaneously, the proletarians’ life is transposed onto the level of political struggle. Marxism avoids the alternative because it takes into consideration, not idle, silent, and sovereign consciousnesses, but the exchange between workers,

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Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 50.

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who are also speaking men – capable, therefore, of making their own the theoretical views proposed to them – and theoreticians who are also living men – capable, therefore, of collecting in their theses what other men are in the process of living.137 This conception of the party, which emphasises its dialogic nature, is unmistakably democratic. Merleau-Ponty describes this as a relationship in which no one commands and no one obeys. As he notes: ‘The proletariat’s acknowledgment of the Party is not an oath of allegiance to persons. Its counterpart is the acknowledgement of the proletariat by the party … In the communist sense, the Party is this communication; and such a conception of the Party is not a corollary of Marxism – it is its very center’.138 Here we see the radical democratic content of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis in clear relief: ‘… the masses are never the simple means of a great politics which is worked out behind their backs. Led, but not manoeuvred, the masses bring the seal of truth to the politics of the Party’.139 The truth of the party is only concrete if it actualises a potential and being inherent in the proletariat but which has not been brought to consciousness. All of this means that in order to achieve its goal, the theoretical consciousness of the proletariat must be strictly aware of its abstraction and negativity in isolation from practice. To be sure, Merleau-Ponty emphasises an aspect of Lukács’s argument, one that Lukács himself did not emphasise to a similar degree. Yet, this difference can easily be explained by reference to the contexts. Merleau-Ponty wrote in the shadow of authoritarian communist parties while Lukács wrote within a communist movement that was still, at least to some extent, democratic. Nevertheless, such radically democratic themes are clearly audible in Lukács, for those with ears to hear them. Speaking of the theory of the party, Lukács writes: For every purely cognitive stance bears the stigma of immediacy. That is to say, it never ceases to be confronted by a whole series of ready-made objects that cannot be dissolved into processes. Its dialectical nature can survive only in the tendency towards praxis and in its orientation towards the actions of the proletariat. It can survive only if it remains critically aware of its own tendency to immediacy inherent in every non practical

137 138 139

Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 50. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 51. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 52.

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stance and if it constantly strives to explain critically the mediations, the relations to the totality as a process, to the actions of the proletariat as a class.140 In the context of his critique of sects, Lukács puts this in even more stark terms, questioning the very viability of proletarian theory as estranged from revolutionary practice: ‘While the organisations of the sects artificially separate “true” class consciousness (if this can survive at all in such abstract isolation) from the life and development of the class, the organisations of the opportunists achieve a compromise between these strata of consciousness on the lowest possible level, or at best, at the level of the average man’.141 The sect can only aspire, theoretically, towards the desublimation of theory. It must endure the rift between theory and practice. Given adequate historical circumstances, the party overcomes this limitedness and holds out the possibility for the actual desublimation of its own theory, by way of practice. As Lukács explains shortly after, the party is ‘… a form of organisation that produces and reproduces correct theoretical insights by consciously ensuring that the organisation has built into it ways of adapting with increased sensitivity to the effects of a theoretical posture’.142 Following Habermas, it might be objected that this reading of Lukács imputes to him Merleau-Ponty’s existentialist Marxism.143 This study has sought to prove that a firm textual and logical foundation exists in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis for just this reading. In case any doubt remains, History and Class Consciousness is replete with passages which corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s reading. For example, Lukács insists that the ‘… Communist Party does not function as a stand in for the proletariat even in theory’.144 Indeed, in the context of a revolutionary situation, Lukács suggests that by virtue of its having become ‘wholly

140 141 142 143 144

Lukács 1967a, p. 205. Lukács 1967a, p. 326. Lukács 1967a, p. 327. Habermas 1984. pp. 364–5. The full quote reads: Thus the ability to act, the faculty of self-criticism, of self-correction and of theoretical development all exist in a state of constant interaction. The Communist Party does not function as a stand-in for the proletariat even in theory. If the class consciousness of the proletariat viewed as a function of the thought and action of the class as a whole is something organic and in a state of constant flux, then this must be reflected in the organised form of that class consciousness, namely in the Communist Party. With the single reservation that what has become objectivised here is a higher stage of consciousness (Lukács 1967a, pp. 327–328).

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practical and geared to the latest developments’, that theory may become a ‘guide to every day-to-day step’.145 As he explicitly states, immediately following these assertions, ‘… this is only possible if the theory divests itself entirely of its purely theoretical characteristics and becomes purely dialectical. That is to say, it must transcend in practice every tension between the general and particular, between the rule and the individual case “subsumed” under it, between rule and its application and hence too every tension between theory and practice’.146 Once more, Lukács’s point is clear: praxis possesses a higher truth value than either theory or practice or either the party or the class. Finally, to conclude this chapter, just as the imputed class consciousness of the party is based on the standpoint of labour which, as was shown, contains the principle of ontological novelty, the interaction between party and class produces a praxis which reveals new dimensions of social being and history. If successful, the unity of totality and genesis is accomplished, not in the articulation of a new theory, but in the creation of a living truth that is higher than both party and class or theory and practice. Praxis is thus a higher truth than the imputed consciousness of the class and the empirical consciousness of the class. Whether or not this argument ultimately holds is beside the point. For now, it is regrettable that Habermas – along with the other leading minds of the first and second generations of the Frankfurt School – chose to refute a poorer and less radical Lukács, even while aware of the possibility of a much more radical reading. 145 146

Lukács 1967a, p. 333. Lukács 1967a, p. 333.

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The Concept of the Proletariat in and for Itself And the words that are used For to get the ship confused Will not be understood as they’re spoken For the chains of the sea Will have busted in the night And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean Bob Dylan

The reconstruction proposed here argues, with Lukács, that ‘… proletarian thought is in the first place merely a theory of praxis which only gradually (and indeed often spasmodically) transforms itself into a practical theory that overturns the real world’.1 Chapter 6 outlined the development within the standpoint of theory, embodied first in the standpoint of the proletariat and later in a party, towards a practical and self-critical stance which makes it receptive to the practice of the class. But this is only one side of the dialectic of praxis. The proletariat itself must become receptive to the party. So, Section 7.1 of this chapter will reconstruct Lukács’s argument about the progress of the empirical proletariat towards its own class consciousness. Section 7.2 will reconstruct his concept of actual praxis as the outcome of a successful revolutionary struggle. Before this, a point of clarification is necessary. This part builds upon the discussion of the standpoint of the proletariat in Chapter 3, where a distinction was made between the standpoint of the proletariat as a theoretical hypothesis and the standpoint of the proletariat as it occurs to the empirical proletariat. This distinction was necessary to reveal the foundation for the theory of praxis and to subsequently chart the development of this theory towards self-criticism and an orientation towards practice. Given that Section 7.1 deals with the other side of the equation, that of the empirical proletariat, this term requires some initial clarification. Although this chapter discusses actual praxis, it ought also to be read as a conceptual progression. Therefore, it remains securely within theory of praxis. After all, a book can hardly leap

1 Lukács 1967a, p. 205.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004417687_011

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to life and become practice as such. To speak of the practice of an entire class – comprising hundreds of thousands or even millions of people – is obviously possible; or at least, if it is not, this whole study is in vain. Yet, to see the literary representation of past practice as other than conceptual is wrong, if for no other reason than because living practice always and only occurs in the present. Past practice becomes an image of itself, an echo, a recollection or a record embodied in physical artefacts. To reflect on past praxis is thus a conceptual and theoretical exercise. This is as true of History and Class Consciousness as it is of this work, notwithstanding that the former was penned far closer to the praxis that was its object of inquiry. This might seem incongruous given that the stated aim of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was to overcome theory as such. However, it is sufficient to note that in conceptualising the development of the proletariat towards its own consciousness and the actuality of praxis, Lukács expressed its development after the fact and in universal, and therefore, theoretical terms. His account was intended to show the possibility, rationality and necessity of the main moments in the development of proletarian class consciousness, in order that these be replicated elsewhere. This said, if one reads him literally, even pedantically, Lukács is not always clear about this. His language often slips into apparent descriptions of the thought of the proletariat itself. Yet, to focus on this is to obscure the more radical and self-critical side to Lukács’s thought. Finally, the intention here is to reconstruct Lukács conceptually – not to repeat him. Although History and Class Consciousness possesses a clear programmatic character, the same is not true of this work, whose aim is philosophy. With this clarification made, Section 7.1 will discuss the development of the empirical proletariat towards its imputed consciousness while Section 7.2 will complete the movement of Lukács’s theory of praxis, by discussing the actuality of praxis. The starting point for this chapter is the point of view of the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat which realises that it must seek its own concretisation in the actual practice of an empirically existent proletariat. This point of view adds richer and more practical content to the terms mediation, totality and genesis. As the possessions of the party, these mediations may generate a vastly more concrete representation of the world than is available to an individual theorist, bound to the contemplative stance. Yet, the knowledge of the party still deals in abstractions and representations. These inform strategic hypotheses which only become true once submitted to practice. As abstractions, representations and hypotheses possessed by a minority, despite now possessing a rich and multi-sided content, the knowledge of the party still fails to fully concretise mediation, totality and genesis. To rectify this, these terms will now be outlined as they occur practically, in revolutionary struggle, to the

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empirical proletariat. This is where, in Lukács’s view, they gain full concreteness and actuality. This account, in addition to stressing the ontological novelty and openness inherent in Lukács’s concept of praxis, will lay the groundwork for Part 3 of this study, which will outline Lukács’s philosophical reflection on praxis by demonstrating the logical scope and historical weight Lukács intended his concept of actual praxis to bear. The aspects of the standpoint of the proletariat outlined in Chapter 3 recur here, this time from the perspective of the proletariat’s practice. They will be summarised briefly. The core of Lukács’s argument is that while the proletariat shares the same immediacy as the bourgeoisie, its situation grants it access to practical categories of mediation which allow it to pierce through the veil of immediacy. Previously, these mediations were employed from the standpoint of theory in order to generate a critique of reified thought. Now that theory has emptied itself sufficiently of ideology, we may finally consider the development of the empirical consciousness of the proletariat towards its own imputed consciousness. While at times Lukács tends to present this process in moralistic or catastrophist terms (namely, when he speaks about life or death struggles), he does in fact present a clear argument.2 To use Arato and Breines’s terminology, Lukács charts a path of mediation between the proletariat’s ‘minimal consciousness of alienation’ and the concrete, historical totality. The starting point is the self-consciousness of the commodity which, as outlined in Chapter 3, has three components. The first is the total alienation of the worker as free labourer, which means that he experiences himself as an object. From this emerges the second aspect; by virtue of his subjective freedom, the worker may relate not just to his labour, but also to himself in externality. The worker may perceive himself as an object. In this sense, estrangement is a moment not just of the relationship between party and class, but of the worker’s relationship to himself. As with Hegel’s account of labour in the dialectic of mastery and servitude, the negative freedom won by the servant in his mediation of the natural world is equally the essence of consciousness, provided the consciousness reappropriates it.3 Although Hegel is not definitive on this point, as we have seen, following Lukács it may be argued that the fate of a slave 2 It remains the case that this is missed or misread. For example, in a recent article in Historical Materialism Joseph Fracchia accuses Lukács of a Platonic idealism where the proletariat is concerned. He contends that Lukács is incapable of and disinterested in considering the actual lived experience of the proletariat. Once more, Feenberg’s rather caustic rejoinder to Fracchia is more than sufficient to render unnecessary further discussion of this rather hyperbolic rendition of a standard critique (see Fracchia 2013, cf. Feenberg 2015). 3 Cf. ‘A: Self-sufficiency and non-self-sufficiency of self-consciousness; mastery and servitude’, in Hegel 2018, §§. 178–96.

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(in contrast to a modern worker) is imposed transparently on him or her; they are an object, but one with no residual subjectivity, or at least for whom subjectivity is an aspiration absolutely external to the labour process. Emancipation for a slave is the emancipation from labour. Yet, the modern labourer is already emancipated and negatively free. This abstract and negative subjectivity, insofar as it experiences itself as a pure object and remains cognizant that its objectification is its own activity, may become a conscious object; that is, an immediately united subject-object. Unlike the bourgeoisie, the worker experiences this fate as an activity of self-alienation in which he or she both preserves their abstract freedom and experiences it as absolute unfreedom. This recalls the lines with which Marx’s famous manuscript on alienated labour cuts off: First it has to be noted that everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement. Secondly, that the worker’s real, practical attitude in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker confronting him as a theoretical attitude. Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker.4 The observation that a worker’s alienation takes the form of self-motivated activity allows for the third aspect of the standpoint of the proletariat, namely, the worker’s experience of the quantitative logic of the workday as qualitative. It might be objected that many other experiences of quantitative logic break out into quality. However, what matters here is the concrete transcendence of this antinomy and not the transition of one side into another. This requires, in the first place, an experience of the immediate identity of both sides. To concretise what he means, Lukács refers to two examples, both of which are examples of quantitative change. The first is the growth or reduction in a sum of money. The second is the growth or reduction in labour time. In the former, nothing internal to the quantitative series pushes beyond abstract quantity. In the latter, the dehumanising experience of work is intensified as the period of labour time grows longer. So labour time, which is supposedly a purely quantitative measure, is immediately united with a negative experience of qualitative

4 Marx and Engels 1975, p. 282.

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labour. Insofar as the worker is an agent in his own exploitation, he actively suppresses the qualitative character of his labour (and his whole personality) as it is organised quantitatively into the work day.5 According to Lukács, other quantitative experiences which give rise to quality do so by flipping from one antinomy to the other, with the result that the two sides remain in estrangement. By grasping the essential mediation between quality and quantity – namely, estranged labour – the worker, as self-conscious commodity, may grasp the essence of the social totality. Lukács provides the following summary of the self-consciousness of the commodity. Referring to the worker’s experience of the working day, he writes: This does not mean that immediacy together with its consequences for theory, namely the rigid opposition of subject and object, can be regarded as having been wholly overcome. It is true that in the problem of labourtime, just because it shows reification at its zenith, we can see how proletarian thought is necessarily driven to surpass this immediacy. For, on the one hand, in his social existence the worker is immediately placed wholly on the side of the object: he appears to himself immediately as an object and not as the active part of the social process of labour. On the other hand, however, the role of object is no longer purely immediate. That is to say, it is true that the worker is objectively transformed into a mere object of the process of production by the methods of capitalist production (in contrast to those of slavery and servitude) i.e. by the fact that the worker is forced to objectify his labour-power over and against his total personality and to sell it as a commodity. But because of the split between subjectivity and objectivity induced in man by the compulsion to objectify himself as a commodity, the situation becomes one that can be made conscious.6 The self-consciousness of the commodity is self-evidently not the full overcoming of reification, neither in theory nor in actuality. After all, presumably at least a handful of workers have read and understood Lukács. The self-consciousness of the commodity is, however, the starting point for dereification. This begs the question as to which further factors propel the proletariat to travel down this path? The initial answer is found in the divide between theory and practice that occurs in the worker themself, or, to use Gramsci’s terminology, between

5 Lukács 1967a, p. 167. 6 Lukács 1967a, pp. 167–8.

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the worker’s theoretical consciousness and their practical consciousness.7 Lukács argues that the abstract negativity of the worker as a pure object contains the solution: ‘Thus the purely abstract negativity in the life of the worker is objectively the most typical manifestation of reification, it is the constitutive type of capitalist socialisation. But for this very reason it is also subjectively the point at which this structure is raised to consciousness and where it can be breached in practice’.8 Before outlining the further mediations immanent in this originary or immediate class consciousness, it is important to note that Lukács is quite aware that this only constitutes the initial, albeit essential, mediation. Totalising, concrete and historical class consciousness ‘… is only contained implicitly in the dialectical antithesis of quantity and quality as we meet it in the question of labour-time. That is to say, this antithesis with all its implications is only the beginning of the complex process of mediation whose goal is the knowledge of society as a historical totality’.9 So, the stage that was summarised above – the self-consciousness of the commodity, or, the worker’s minimal experience of alienation – is strictly not equal to fully actualised class consciousness. In fact, inasmuch as this immediate class consciousness remains a ‘psychological’ consciousness – the possession of an isolated individual which does not practically alter the situation of the worker – it is merely a tragic self-consciousness of the worker as exploited. On this basis, one may assume either a stoic, cynical, indignant or even manic disposition. Yet none of these are sufficient to transcend the contemplative stance: 7 Gramsci writes: The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless involved understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal conception is not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of the will, with varying efficacity but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or any choice and produces a condition of moral and political passivity (Gramsci 1971b, p. 333). It should be immediately apparent from this, as well as from the discussion that follows it which details the interaction between intellectuals and the mass, as well as the role of competing political hegemonies in producing the unity of theory and practice, that Gramsci and Lukács occupy very similar positions when it comes to class consciousness. 8 Lukács 1967a, p. 172. 9 Lukács 1967a, p. 169.

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… the fact that this commodity [labour] is able to become aware of its existence as a commodity does not suffice to eliminate the problem. For the unmediated consciousness of the commodity is, in conformity with the simple form in which it manifests itself, precisely an awareness of abstract isolation and of the merely abstract relationship – external to consciousness – to those factors that create it socially.10 In these cases, ‘The rigid epistemological doubling of subject and object remains unaffected and hence the perceiving subject fails to impinge upon the structure of the object despite his adequate understanding of it’.11 This presents further evidence that Lukács was very conscious of avoiding any ahistorical or immediate identical subject-object; his subject-object, as has been outlined above, is always one in becoming. The next step moves beyond mediation (the self-consciousness of the commodity) to totality. That this shift is immanently necessary has been shown, as the self-consciousness of the commodity entails an immediate realisation of the centrality of commodity production to the social totality. For the standpoint of theory, the development from mediation to totality and genesis relied essentially on a theoretical critique. Now, however, the standpoint of theory regards this as a practical question which arises directly from the selfconsciousness of the commodity: … when the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge. In this consciousness and through it the special objective character of labour as a commodity, its ‘use-value’ (i.e. its ability to yield surplus produce) which like every use-value is submerged without a trace in the quantitative exchange categories of capitalism, now awakens and becomes social reality. The special nature of labour as a commodity which in the absence of this consciousness acts as an unacknowledged driving wheel in the economic process now objectifies itself by means of this consciousness.12 This quote outlines the result of the three moments which have been discussed above. As an aside, it is worth noting that Lukács’s account of the experience of the worker in exploitation is clearly differentiated against the experience 10 11 12

Lukács 1967a, p. 173. Lukács 1967a, p. 169. Lukács 1967a, p. 169.

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of professions in which individuals must alienate ‘… subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression’. ‘[T]hese are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their “owner” and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand’.13 According to Lukács, then, there is no basis in middle class professions to develop a dereifying consciousness. Insofar as the worker is not required to alienate his soul, so to speak, there remains a point at which class consciousness can grow: For his work as he [the proletarian] experiences it directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this is hidden behind the façade of ‘mental labour’, of ‘responsibility’, etc. (and sometimes it even lies concealed behind ‘patriarchal’ forms). The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man who sells his achievement as a commodity the more deceptive appearances are (as in the case of journalism).14 This is a relatively minor point. The main transition to class consciousness is found in the experience of work. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning given that occasionally commentators have characterised Lukács’s concept of reification as monolithic, in the sense that it leaves no space from which resistance can be thought (asides from the position of the intellectual). In fact, the opposite is true. Reification requires a subjective remainder, no matter how interior or minimal, and this provides a minimal space from which it is possible to experience humanity in opposition to quantitative reason. Thus, the worker understands that the use value of their labour is the source of surplus value. Equally, as an immediately universal object, the worker understands that their situation is shared by other workers. The worker’s subjective freedom allows them to withdraw the activity upon which this exploitation is founded. From these points (which may be expressed in either the sophisticated language of philosophy or political economy, or in the crude language of common sense) the strike emerges as the central practical weapon of the proletariat in the class struggle. While this provides for the immediate, economic class struggle, the mediations between workplaces or within and between industries must be discovered, to say nothing of the mediations whereby a national working class or

13 14

Lukács 1967a, p. 100. Lukács 1967a, p. 172.

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the international working class might rise to class consciousness. Once more Lukács begins in general terms, observing that the understanding of labour as a commodity provides the basis upon which every commodity (and ultimately, political economy) may be understood as a product of contingent and historical social relations. Equally, he notes that for Marxism (as for Hegel), the whole may be perceived in every part, and the totality is in fact only generated through the inner logic of its parts. ‘… [T]his in turn can only be done if the aspect is seen as an aspect, i.e. as a point of transition to the totality; if every movement beyond immediacy that had made the aspect an aspect of the dialectical process (whereas before it had been nothing more than the evident contradiction between two categories of thought) is not to freeze once more in a new rigidity and a new immediacy’.15 Alone, this only establishes class consciousness as a rational and conceptual possibility. Yet it does point towards a concrete answer. Drawing on Marx, Lukács points to another series which appears quantitatively for the bourgeoisie, but qualitatively for the proletariat – namely, growth in the production and circulation of commodities.16 These factors result in the creation of larger workplaces, industrial areas, and economies and produce deeper, more generalised economic crises.17 This development ‘… means the abolition of the isolated individual, it means that workers can become conscious of the social character of labour, it means that the abstract, universal form of the societal principle as it is manifested can be increasingly concretised and overcome’.18 These facts render obvious objective mediations which were previously latent and unconscious. That trade unions exist on a national scale in most developed economies evidences the objectivity of these mediations. Once more, however, Lukács stresses explicitly that these factors, while necessary preconditions for the emergence of the proletariat as a class for itself, are not a guarantee. Indeed, he warns that to attribute an immediate form of existence to class consciousness would be to create a conceptual mythology, akin to Hegel’s ‘spirit of nations’.19 As he continues to note, such a move would both bar any serious relationship between the individual and class consciousness and would reduce class consciousness to a ‘mechanical and naturalistic psychology … [insofar as it] appears as a demiurge governing historical movement’.20 Addi-

15 16 17 18 19 20

Lukács 1967a, p. 170. This further illustrates that while Lukács did not possess a detailed political economy, he nonetheless premises his philosophy of praxis on Marx’s work. Lukács 1967a, p. 171. Lukács 1967a, p. 171. Lukács 1967a, p. 173. Lukács 1967a, p. 173.

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tionally, Lukács notes that the experience of exploitation is not exclusive to the working class, although their position in production is unique. This was a minor point at the time, although in light of defences and rearticulations of Lukács’s theory which either theorise multiple subjects or propose new candidates for the role of subject-object of history, this is important. Lukács’s theory rises and falls on his concept of the proletariat; to task any other strata, milieu, identity group, national group or class with the same role would require a vastly reworked philosophy of praxis identifying the concrete mediations between that group or subject and the unity of totality and genesis. Lukács thus argues that the class struggle causes the proletariat to aspire, practically and intellectually, towards totality. The class struggle refuses to allow the proletariat ‘… to reman stationary at a relatively higher stage of immediacy but forces it to persevere in an uninterrupted movement towards this totality, i.e. to persist in the dialectical process by which immediacies are constantly annulled and transcended’.21 Concretely, however, Lukács argues that struggle makes it necessary to relate the particular aspects of struggle to their universal aspect, and in so doing, to transform those particulars: For the proletariat, however, this ability to go beyond the immediate in search of the ‘remoter’ factors means the transformation of the objective nature of the objects of action. At first sight it appears as if the more immediate objects are no less subject to this transformation than the remote ones. It soon becomes apparent, however, that in their case the transformation is even more visible and striking. For the change lies on the one hand in the practical interaction of the awakening consciousness [of the immediate class struggle] and the objects from which it is born and of which it is the consciousness. And on the other hand, the change means that the objects that are viewed here as aspects of the development of society, i.e. of the dialectical totality, become fluid: they become parts of a process.22 Lukács describes the ‘innermost kernel of this movement’ as praxis, and argues that its point of departure is necessarily active and practical. Insofar as fights emerge over particulars – say, wages, conditions or other immediate demands – these are related to the totality of society and transformed. That is to say, these particulars are denaturalised and revealed as socially contingent relation-

21 22

Lukács 1967a, p. 174. Lukács 1967a, p. 175.

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ships. Moreover, the already-always universal character of totality means that it already impacts on the particulars of society before its impact is made conscious by practice: ‘The category of totality begins to have an effect long before the whole multiplicity of objects can be illuminated by it. It operates by ensuring that actions which seem to confine themselves to particular objects, in both content and consciousness, yet preserve an aspiration towards the totality, that is to say: action is directed objectively towards a transformation of totality’.23 Examples of this are not hard to imagine. Strikes may be declared illegal and broken by law enforcement. Laws detrimental to the interests of the working class may be passed by politicians who purport to represent their interests. The media may smear strikers in the interests of mobilising popular sentiment against them. In all of these cases, the class divided nature of the social totality becomes visible as a partial struggle of the working class is viewed in light of hitherto unconscious universal mediations. Further to this, Lukács notes that the interrelation of the totality with the partial experience of the proletariat also proceeds from the side of the totality. As crisis affects living standards or leads to a noticeable civilisational decline, the practical standpoint of the proletariat allows this to be brought to political consciousness. Interestingly, Lukács observes that while civilisational decline and crisis were visible prior to the emergence of the working class, these phenomena were often expressed and represented in artistic terms. He cites Aeschylus and Shakespeare as examples.24 However, Lukács believes that the practical standpoint of the proletariat, by virtue of its desublimation of reification, makes it possible to discover the social heart of this crisis. This is because the ‘… proletariat, however, stands at the focal point of this socialising process’.25 This entails two important consequences. Firstly, the transformation of labour into a commodity renders the immediate existence of the proletariat less than human. Secondly, and more importantly, ‘… the same development progressively eliminates everything “organic”, every direct link with nature from the forms of society so that socialised man can stand revealed in an objectivity remote from or even opposed to humanity’.26 Thus it is with the domination of nature and the rationalisation of social forms ‘… that we see clearly for the first 23 24

25 26

Lukács 1967a, p. 175. Lukács 1967a, p. 176. Following Fredric Jameson, one could very well cite modern parallels such as the work of David Simon (i.e., The Wire). Similarly, Nir has ventured a Lukácsian analysis of the work of Tarantino, suggesting that the fantasies of revenge in films such as Django Unchained represent the beginnings of a totalising subjectivity (see Jameson 2010, Nir 2016). Lukács 1967a, p. 176. Lukács 1967a, p. 176.

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time how society is constructed form the relations of men with each other’.27 Lukács stresses that this does not simply replace objectivity with a fluid conception of social relationality, but rather, it is capable of grasping the logic of reification which binds humanity to objects and objectified forms. Practical dereifying activity directed at the heart of the totality is where praxis in its true sense emerges: Action, praxis – which Marx demanded before all else in his Theses on Feuerbach – is in essence the penetration and transformation of reality. But reality can only be understood and penetrated as a totality, and only a subject which is itself a totality is capable of this penetration. It was not for nothing that the young Hegel erected his philosophy upon the principle that ‘truth must be understood and expressed not merely as substance, but also as subject’.28 Although the concept of actualised praxis will be detailed in the coming section, Lukács first describes the practical struggle of the proletariat as praxis at the point in which it raises itself to a comprehension of the totality. Indeed, Lukács observes that the proletariat in struggle is the embodiment of the historical dialectic; it is the actual and immanent process of history becoming conscious of itself. In committing a deed aimed at totality, the self-consciousness of the proletariat elevates itself to universality; ‘… since consciousness here is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self-consciousness of the object, the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object’.29 So, a totalising class struggle – for example, a general strike – in Lukács’s view allows the proletariat to resolve in practice the antinomy between subject and object upon which German Idealism founders, together with bourgeois life and politics. If the emergence of the proletariat as a subject-object is the process whereby praxis arises, the practical orientation in struggle towards totality is the immediately universal and collective form of praxis. This is where praxis ceases to be a theoretical recollection or anticipation and becomes concrete, actual and present. Totality ceases to be a methodological demand and is transformed into a tangible actuality. This has profound consequences. By virtue of its practical dereification, the proletariat reveals that a social order which had previously been experienced

27 28 29

Lukács 1967a, p. 176. Lukács 1967a, p. 39. Lukács 1967a, p. 178.

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as rational, law bound and natural is in fact a contingent, historically constructed ensemble of social relationships premised on the dominance of the bourgeoisie. This exposes the irrationality which is ordinarily concealed beneath the surface of capitalism or rendered an incomprehensible other: ‘The instant that this [immediately universal] class consciousness arises and goes beyond what is immediately given we find in concentrated form the basic issue of the class struggle: the problem of force. For this is the point where “eternal laws” of capitalist economics fail and become dialectical and are thus compelled to yield up the decisions regarding the fate of history to the conscious actions of men’.30 Or, more simply put, Lukács quotes Marx’s famous characterisation of the struggle between the rights of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: ‘Between equal rights force decides’.31 This is, therefore, the last major mediation encountered by the proletariat as it becomes a class for itself. Lukács observes that for the bourgeoisie, force underpins all consent and political power, however much ideology might conceal the fact. On the other hand, for the proletariat, the objective violence of capitalism is a radicalising factor which demands a willingness to use forceful means in self-defence. For the proletariat, ‘… its use, its efficacy, its potentiality and its intensity depend upon the degree to which the immediacy of the given has been overcome’.32 Previously, Lukács’s references to ‘life or death’ situations seemed moralistic. Here, however, contextualised in terms of class struggle, the point becomes concrete and meaningful. This moment of forceful contestation over the social relationships which govern the totality accounts for the moment of genesis because the human origin of hitherto naturalised forms of objectivity becomes transparent as they are altered. This also marks a transition to a qualitatively new situation – it is the moment at which the aspiration towards the abolition of capitalism becomes real and concrete. Utopia is here no longer a transcendental covert affirmation of the present, but rather a moment of the present which may be elevated to consciousness. At this moment, it becomes possible to envisage the overthrow of the past. With the advent of praxis, consciousness may begin to master the present and begin to construct the future freely. Lukács writes: This [emergence of praxis] throws an entirely new light on the problem of reality. If, in Hegel’s terms, Becoming now appears as the truth of Being, and process as the truth about things, then this means that the developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical 30 31 32

Lukács 1967a, pp. 178–9. Lukács 1967a, p. 179. Lukács 1967a, p. 179.

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‘facts’. It is doubtless true that in capitalist society the past dominates the present – as indeed we have shown elsewhere. But this only means that there is an antagonistic process that is not guided by a consciousness but is instead driven forward by its own immanent, blind dynamic and that this process stands revealed in all its immediate manifestations as the rule of the past over the present, the rule of capital over labour.33 Praxis, as seen above, reveals a new dimension of reality which had only previously been comprehensible in the forms of intuition or representation; now, the concrete overcoming of reification can be imagined. This marks the point at which ontological novelty and concrete freedom emerge in the present. No longer does history flow like Heraclitus’s river, as a bad infinity of the self-same only interrupted by irrational catastrophe. Here, humanity, qua the proletariat, can rise to a noncontemplative stance. This first appearance of praxis is still, however, immediate and negative: it has not been filled with new, emancipated, conscious and human content. A richer concept of praxis will be discussed below. For now, however, this conceptual progression on the basis of empirical class consciousness has consequences for imputed class consciousness. If totality conceived of in terms of its genesis is the highest and most concrete form of reality, and if it is brought to self-consciousness through the practical struggle of the proletariat, this implies that praxis reveals the hierarchy of categories or mediations that was referred to earlier, in the sections discussing the party. ‘The structure and the hierarchy of the categories [of social existence and conflict] are the index of the degree of clarity which man has attained concerning the foundations of his existence in these relations, i.e. the degree of consciousness of himself’.34 So the standpoint of the proletariat – both theoretical and practical – holds the key to the discovery of the concrete structure of mediation of the social totality: At the same time this structure and this hierarchy [of categories] are the central theme of history. History is no longer an enigmatic flux to which men and things are subjected. It is no longer a thing to be explained by the intervention of transcendental powers or made meaningful by reference to transcendental values. History is, on the one hand, the product (albeit the unconscious one) of man’s own activity, on the other hand it is the

33 34

Lukács 1967a, p. 181. Lukács 1967a, p. 185.

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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.35 Thus, with the unity of history and genesis, it becomes possible to think the present: When the problem of connecting isolated phenomena has become a problem of categories, by the same dialectical process every problem of categories becomes transformed into a historical problem. Though it should be stressed: it is transformed into a problem of universal history which now appears – more clearly than in our introductory polemical remarks – simultaneously as a problem of method and a problem of our knowledge of the present.36 Immediately following these comments, Lukács turns to discuss humanism, the absolute, and utopianism. These thoughts will be pursued more fully in Part 3, as further discussion of them moves beyond theory and concerns philosophy proper. Nevertheless, this moment marks an important conceptual turning point which is outlined more fully in section six of ‘The Standpoint of the Proletariat’. Here, Lukács outlines four criteria that must be satisfied in order for reification to be overcome and praxis realised. These also serve as a summary of the argument thus far. Firstly, the immanent contradictions of the historical process must be made conscious. This requires the sublation of the objective dialectic of capitalism by the subjective dialectic so that, in the person of the proletariat, history may become conscious. ‘… [O]nly then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality’.37 This requires that the proletariat must become conscious of the next step in the process; in fact, the ‘… deed of the proletariat can never be more than to take the next step in the process. Whether it is “decisive” or “episodic” depends on the concrete circumstances …’38 Secondly, what matters here is not an absolutely elaborated totality, but rather, an aspiration towards totality. The theoretical aspect of this aspiration towards totality has already been discussed. Here, however, the same aspiration appears practically. The con35 36 37 38

Lukács 1967a, pp. 185–6. Lukács 1967a, p. 186. Lukács 1967a, pp. 197–8. Lukács 1967a, p. 198.

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sequence of this is that the direction of history as a whole can depend on a decision or action regarding particular matters which, on the surface, may seem trivial. Indeed, this is as true for the bourgeoisie as much as it is for the proletariat. The difference is, however, that proletarian thought may comprehend the historic significance of such decisions. This implies the third criterion Lukács raises for praxis. For the proletariat, ‘… when judging whether an action is right or wrong it is essential to relate it to its function in the total process. Proletarian thought is practical thought and as such is strongly pragmatic’.39 This leads, finally, to the fourth criterion that must be fulfilled for the emergence of dereifying praxis: ‘… an adequate and correct class consciousness is seen firstly in a change in its own objects – and firstly, in itself’.40 So, the battle over the future becomes a political battle for hegemony within the proletariat, which may then be directed outward once more towards the social totality. This completes the reconstruction of Lukács’s argument regarding the development of the empirical consciousness of the proletariat towards its imputed consciousness and praxis. The practical standpoint of the proletariat begins as a pure economic object and rises through its own practical mediations to the possibility of comprehending the totality. This comprehension of the totality grasps the conceptual hierarchy of the totality, both in terms of its internal mediations and as a historic process culminating in the present. Thus economics gives way to politics. If the economic logic of capitalism is the essence of the social totality, its political moment is its apex and culmination. Objectively speaking, the actuality of revolution consists in a breakdown of the formal and calculable operation of capitalism. Subjectively speaking, the actuality of revolution, once it is comprehended by the proletariat, marks a historic era in which conscious intervention by class forces determines the outcome of that crisis. Hence it gives rise to an ideological crisis in the workers’ movement. As has been discussed, this consists of a fight between bourgeois hegemony in the workers’ movement and the revolutionary theoretical consciousness of the class. The difference is that now, the theoretical consciousness of the proletariat (the imputed consciousness possessed by a party) is no longer a utopiansectarian imposition on the real class or an abstract and theoretical hypothesis. Rather, it may be concretely thought. The scene is therefore set for what Lukács believed to be the highest dialectic in his philosophy of practice: the dialectic between party and class in revolution.

39 40

Lukács 1967a, p. 198. Lukács 1967a, p. 199.

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The Actuality of Praxis And truly, I had never seen the like of what I saw then. I saw a young shepherd writing, choking, convulsed, his face distorted; and a heavy, black snake was hanging out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much disgust and pallid horror on a face? Had he, perhaps, been asleep? Then the snake had crawled into his throat – and there it had bitten itself fast. My hands tugged and tugged at the snake – in vain! They could not tug the snake out of the shepherd’s throat. Then a vice cried from me: ‘Bite! Bite!’ ‘Its head off! Bite!’ – thus a voice cried from me, by horror, my hate, my disgust, my pity, all my good and evil cried out of me with a single cry. You bold men around me! You venturers, adventurers, and those of you who have embarked with cunning sails upon undiscovered seas! You who take pleasure in riddles! Solve for me the riddle that I saw, interpret to me the vision of the most solitary man! For it was a vision and a premonition: what did I see in allegory? And who is it that must come one day? Who is the shepherd into whose mouth the snake thus crawled? Who is the man into whose throat all that is heaviest, blackest will thus crawl? The shepherd, however, bit as my cry had advised him; he bit with a good bite! He spat far away the snake’s head – and sprung up. No longer a shepherd, no longer a man – transformed being, surrounded with light, laughing! Never yet on earth had any man laughed as he laughed. Zarathustra41

The starting point for the actualisation of praxis is a fully developed actuality of revolution, the objective dimensions of which were outlined in Chapter 5. What is required now is its subjective element. This consists in a more concrete interaction between party and class. Now, the imputed class consciousness of the party has concretised itself into a programme, a series of concrete analyses and strategic orientations; the party is the bearer of theory which is becoming practical. On the other side, the empirical consciousness of the proletariat has elevated itself to the concrete totality by virtue of its embod-

41

Nietzsche 2003b, pp. 179–80.

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iment in soviets; its practice here begins to grasp the totality. This situation makes possible a full dialogue between party and class, the outcome of which is, for Lukács, actualised praxis. To discuss this, Lukács’s theory of revolution will be considered first. While this is integrally connected to Lukács’s whole philosophy of praxis, his most explicit comments on revolution are found in the essay ‘Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s “Critique of the Russian Revolution”’. Some commentators have argued that Lukács’s assessment of Luxemburg shifts over the course of History and Class Consciousness, and have taken this as evidence of a hardening of Lukács’s position.42 This is not necessarily the case.43 It is possible to read Lukács’s comments in the latter third of History and Class Consciousness as conceptually congruous with his earlier comments.44 Differences in the emphasis and tenor in the two pieces may well be explained by the fact that the earlier essays were written in 1921, prior to the failure of the March Action, while the later essay – including ‘Critical Observations’ – were written towards the end of 1922.45 This aside, in ‘Critical Observations’, Lukács identifies a number of theoretical issues which led Luxemburg to confuse the political dynamics of proletarian revolution. A summary of this discussion will demonstrate how, in the tumult of a revolutionary process, it is possible to discern the concrete ‘next step’ for the class struggle (or, next link in the chain, to use the terminology from Lenin), referred to above. Following this, Lukács’s dialectic between moments and processes, outlined in his defence of History and Class Consciousness, will be considered finally as the most concrete dialectic in his theory of praxis. This is precisely where a presentist praxis (outlined above) breaks out and produces a new truth. Lukács’s first point is that Luxemburg overestimates the ‘purely proletarian’ character of the revolution. This involves a simultaneous overestimation of the 42 43 44

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See, for example: Arato and Breines 1979, pp. 102–8. Meyers’s view, criticised above, is similar. Feenberg is much closer to the mark in suggesting that Lukács attempts a synthesis of Lenin and Luxemburg. Feenberg 2002, p. 66. Moreover, ‘Critical Observations’ should not be regarded as a final ‘Lukácsian’ judgement on Luxemburg. After all, it is a critique of a document which remained unpublished during Luxemburg’s life and which was in stark contradistinction to other aspects of her politics, both as she expressed them and as were expressed during her time leading the Spartacus League and in the founding of the Communist Party of Germany. My thanks to Michael Löwy for pointing this out (Löwy 2018). This acknowledgement should not be taken to imply that Löwy shares the interpretation proposed here. While sympathetic to the idea that Lukács attempted a synthesis between Luxemburg and Lenin, he suggests that the intensification of Lukács’s critique of Luxemburg is indicative of his shift to a more moderate position over the course of the 1920s.

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power and clarity that the proletariat possesses in the first phases of revolution and an underestimation of the importance of non proletarian elements, including those who exercise power ideologically over the proletariat.46 This leads to paradoxical consequences. With regard to the latter issue, Luxemburg tended, in the policies she advocated, towards a utopian fetishisation of principle. Her attitude to the national question and the land redistribution were cases in point. She criticised Lenin for compromising socialist principle by conceding to non proletarian elements (namely, the peasantry and the nationalist petite bourgeoisie) by sanctioning private property through land distribution and nationalism through his advocacy for oppressed peoples’ national selfdetermination. In this, Lukács discerns a theoretical mistake: ‘She [Rosa Luxemburg] constantly opposes to the exigencies of the moment the principles of future stages of the revolution’.47 As regards the first issue, Luxemburg underestimated the need for conscious leadership by the party, emphasising the spontaneous character of proletarian revolution. Specifically, she criticised the decision taken by the Bolshevik and Left Social-Revolutionary Soviet government to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. Luxemburg held that institutions such as the Constituent Assembly may become fluid and representative by virtue of the energy of popular mobilisation and that this dynamic existed in the French and English revolutions. These mistakes are borne, in Lukács’s opinion, of a failure to understand the specificity of proletariat revolution, as evidenced by the fact that Luxemburg used the French Revolution as a model against which to compare Russia. Lukács’s reply is terse. He notes firstly that Luxemburg dramatically underestimates the role of force in the great bourgeois revolutions. Leaders and masses did indeed transform institutions – often by destroying them when they no longer represented the interests of the revolution. Beyond this, however, Lukács notes that insofar as a pattern can be discerned between the English Revolution of 1642 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tendency is towards a much greater popular involvement and power in the revolution. He writes: Via 1871 and 1905 the Russian Revolution of 1917 brings the transformation of these intensifications of quantity [of popular mobilisation] into changes of quality. The soviets, the organisations of the most progressive elements of the Revolution were not content at this time with ‘purging’

46 47

Lukács 1967a, pp. 274–5. Lukács 1967a, p. 276.

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the [Constituent] Assembly of all parties other than the Bolsheviks and the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries … they went even further and put themselves in their place.48 So the Russian revolution began as a bourgeois revolution, but became proletarian by virtue of the soviets (the institution of proletarian hegemony) claiming sovereignty, something which had never occurred on a national scale in history. This also sheds light on the nature of proletarian revolution. Bourgeois revolutions are by their nature far less conscious than proletarian. This suggestion, of course, recalls Marx’s famous words in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.49 The unconscious dynamic of multiple classes in struggle propels bourgeois revolutions forward, with different elements leading at different times. Naturally, popular elements emerged in bourgeois revolutions which, to some extent pushed against the limits of bourgeois revolution. For example, the Levellers and Diggers in the English Revolution, Les Enragés or Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality in the French Revolution. Yet none of these examples were properly proletarian in the modern sense. Neither were they capable of grasping the economic logic at the heart of the bourgeoisie’s mode of life, nor were they capable of overcoming the antinomies of bourgeois history or forming a non-utopian class consciousness. Thus they neither transcended bourgeois revolution, nor could their struggle reveal what is qualitatively different about proletarian revolution. Essentially, from a Lukácsian point of view, bourgeois revolution expresses and establishes the quantitative, egal-

48 49

Lukács 1967a, p. 280. Marx wrote: Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling brilliance, ecstasy is the everyday spirit, but they are short-lived, soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression seizes society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, and recoil again and again from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hie Rhodus, hie salta! Here is the rose, here dance! (Marx and Engels 1979, pp. 106–7).

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itarian and universal freedom of commodity production. By radicalising and universalising this subjective freedom, a truly radical bourgeois revolution may create the dynamic of self-destruction described by Hegel in his famous section of The Phenomenology on absolute freedom. This is perhaps why Žižek, given his emphasis on radical negativity, compares Robespierre favourably to Lenin.50 On the other hand, Lukács argued that the proletarian revolution takes as its starting point the hegemony of universal subjective freedom (which is, as has been shown, is the basis of reification). By consciously grasping the objective world and, at the same time, by building a universal, dereifying consciousness, Lukács hoped that proletarian revolution would overcome the unconsciousness, spontaneity and negativity of the bourgeois revolution. While the starting point may have been reification, he believed that the conscious creation of the new would become the key dynamic in proletarian revolutions. Whether this has been (or could be) achieved depends, of course, one’s evaluation of philosophy of praxis. Nevertheless, to Lukács, the opposite is true of bourgeois revolutions which begin ideologically and institute a social order that places itself beyond comprehension.51 For Lukács, proletarian consciousness is embodied in the soviets. Chapter 6 argued that the soviets represent the immediate unity of economics and politics. As soviets emerge in the wake of destabilised bourgeois hegemony, they are built in the workplace and immediately (albeit unconsciously) enjoy vast political power. Moreover, the soviets represent the concrete overcoming of the fragmentation of the proletariat in space and time by assembling representatives of the whole class, across industries. So, the process of proletarian revolution is essentially the coming-to-consciousness of the soviets. This is more or less the extent of Lukács’s commentary on the soviets in History and Class Consciousness. Yet, soviets feature largely in both Lukács’s early 1920s writing and in Lenin – A Study in the Unity of His Thought. As early as 1920, in his essay ‘On the Question of Parliamentarianism’, published in Kommunismus, Lukács argues that the struggle for proletarian hegemony is a struggle for the hegemony of soviets over and against the hegemony (in its forceful and ideological manifestations) of the bourgeois state, and that the strength of the soviets is the true index of the progress of the revolution.52 In the 50 51

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Hegel 2018, §. 585, Žižek 2017. The same might be said of counter revolutions. The full and terrifying tyranny of absolute freedom was on display in Russia in the 1930s during the height of Stalinism, with the difference that the negative freedom in question was the freedom of the totalitarian absolute state. In making these points, Lukács also anticipates many of the points he would make in History and Class Consciousness:

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same essay, Lukács goes on to observe that the soviets additionally spell the death of social democracy. This was perhaps a too-hasty formulation, given that Social Democrats enjoyed ample representation in the German Workers’ Councils (similar to their Menshevik and Social Revolutionary counterparts in Russia). However, given that the soviets overcome the reification which structures reformist parties, in identifying this logic, Lukács was quite correct. This was why in every European country which saw soviets, the reformist wing of the workers’ movement sought to subordinate them to the state and liquidate them. Lenin – A Study in the Unity of His Thought was published in 1924, by which time the soviets in Russia were a shell of their former selves. This fact lends a subversive edge to the emphasis that Lukács places on soviets within it.53 To begin with, he repeats and adds nuance to some of the points outlined above. Soviets emerge under capitalism, but signal the actuality of revolution. In the first instance their existence is both a product of and contributes to the destabilisation of the bourgeois state. ‘Soviets display this character: they are

53

Even more problematic than the relationship between parliamentary fraction and party is that which exists between the former and the workers’ council … As organisations of the entire proletariat (both conscious and unconscious) the workers’ councils by their mere existence point the way forward beyond bourgeois society. They are by their very nature revolutionary and organisational expressions of the growing significance, the ability to act and the power of the proletariat. As such they are the true index of the progress of the revolution. For everything that is achieved and attained in the workers’ councils is wrested from the defiant grasp of the bourgeoisie, and is therefore valuable not simply as a result, but chiefly as a means of education for class conscious action (Lukács 1972l, p. 61). In addition to pointing out the pedagogical role of soviets, he warns sharply against a trend which existed in the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which sought to subordinate soviets to the legality of the bourgeois state: Legality is the death of the workers’ council. As an offensive organisation of the revolutionary proletariat the workers’ council can exist insofar as it threatens the existence of bourgeois society, only insofar as it struggles for and prepares, step by step, the destruction of that society and hence the construction of the proletarian society. Legality in any shape or form – i.e. integration into bourgeois society, with precisely defined limits to its competence – would transform its existence into a sham: the workers’ council would turn into a cross between a debating society and a poor man’s parliamentary committee (Lukács 1972l, pp. 61–2). The emphasis on the soviets in Lenin also disputes the rather shallow narrative that suggests an evolution in Lukács’s position from a council-communist position to an authoritarian Bolshevik one. All such perceived differences are matters of emphasis or rhetorical exigency. After all, Lukács was never particularly interested in libertarian critiques of politics or political parties.

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an anti-government’.54 To play more than a negative, destabilising role, soviets must fight for sovereignty, in order to impose themselves as a state. So as to exercise this sovereignty, the soviets unite the proletariat with other sections of the population whose interests align. In the Russian example, peasants, soldiers and representatives of oppressed nationalities were the other major participants. This project of building hegemony also aims to splinter and destabilise the coalitions organised by bourgeois hegemony. Soviets must aim at the ‘radical seizure from the bourgeoisie of the possibility of ideological leadership of these classes – particularly the peasants – and in the conquest of this leadership by the proletariat in the transition period’.55 This also entails the destruction of bourgeois state agencies (police, secret service, military command, etc.) as well as the reappropriation of the bourgeois press and other ideological state apparatuses. As an aside, this demonstrates the practical form taken by the mediations between the proletariat, other strata and the totality which were discussed above, in political-theoretical terms. Additionally, given that hegemony (or sovereignty) involves both force and consent, Lukács is scathing of moralistic theories of revolution which desire the abolition of capitalism without the exercise of force or without organising the proletariat as a ruling class. Lukács is equally scathing of the constitutional form of bourgeois-democratic hegemony, which rests on the category of government by majority. He argues that the idea of formal democracy, in which the vote of every citizen is equal, regards men as ‘abstract individuals, abstract citizens or isolated atoms’, and forgets that these individuals are also ‘always concrete human beings who occupy specific positions within social production, whose social being (and mediated through it, whose thinking) is determined by this position’.56 Indeed, he argues that the pure democracy of bourgeois society excludes the mediation of formal equality by concrete inequality by connecting ‘… the naked and abstract individual directly with the totality of the state, which in this context appears equally abstract. This fundamentally formal character of pure democracy is alone enough to pulverize bourgeois society politically – which is not merely an advantage for the bourgeoisie but is precisely the decisive condition of its rule’.57 Against this, Lukács explicitly counterposes the power of soviets which represents ‘the attempt by the proletariat as the leading revolutionary

54 55 56 57

Lukács 1967b, p. 63. Lukács 1967b, p. 67. Lukács 1967b, p. 65. Lukács 1967b, p. 65.

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class to counteract this process of disorganization’.58 Just as the party mediates the abstract individuality of the revolutionary who approaches the world primarily from a theoretical standpoint, the soviets do the same for the proletariat and other oppressed strata. Further to this, the soviets provide not only for the representation of the proletariat and other strata, but for their mobilisation including that of ‘those active elements in the intermediary classes which instinctively rebel against the rule of the bourgeoisie’.59 From these points it is clear that Lukács views the soviets as politically dereifying; in the place of formal, abstract democracy and freedom, he expected the soviets to establish concrete, qualitative and participatory democracy. It is apparent that Lukács expected a workers’ government to transcend the ethical community of the party with an ethical state, in which abstract freedom could be mediated and become concrete and genuinely universal.60 Insofar as the soviets constitute themselves as a state, following a seizure of power and declaration of sovereignty, their task becomes the economic, political and ideological suppression of the bourgeoisie. At the same time, the soviets must ‘… lead to freedom all the other strata of society it has torn from bourgeois leadership. In other words, it is not enough for the proletariat to fight objectively for the interests of the other exploited strata. Its state must also serve to overcome by education the inertia and the fragmentation of these strata and to train them for active and independent participation in the life of the state’.61 Where the reification of the social totality – which is divided between economics and politics – disempowers and fragments the vast majority of humanity, in Lukács’s view, the workers’ state, comprised of soviets and led by a government elected in those soviets, pushes in the diametrically opposed direction. Its goal is to dereify, to raise society to consciousness by creating a foundation for a strong and organic democracy. Thus, although the soviet state cannot overcome bureaucracy and restricted hierarchies of power immediately, by rendering social life transparent to itself and by practically empowering a population, Lukács expected it to cut against bureaucracy. As Lukács writes: Everywhere, the Soviet system does its utmost to relate human activity to general questions concerning the state, the economy, culture, etc.,

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Lukács 1967b, p. 66. Lukács 1967b, p. 66. Lukács, however, did not care to elaborate at length on the political, constitutional and institutional forms this might take. Chapter 9 will suggest that this silence is revealing of the limits of Lukács’s thought. Lukács 1967b, p. 67.

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while fighting to ensure that the regulation of all state questions does not become the privilege of an exclusive bureaucratic group remote from social life as a whole. Because the Soviet system, the proletarian state, makes society aware of the real connexions between all moments of social life (and later objectively unites those which are objectively separate – town and country, for example, intellectual and manual labour, etc.), it is a decisive factor in the organisation of the proletariat as a class. What existed in the proletariat only as a possibility in capitalist society now becomes a living reality: the proletariat’s real productive energy can only awaken after its seizure of power.62 The argument that a soviet state is one which progressively counteracts bureaucracy, and in so doing, gradually transforms itself into an autonomous non statist social institution is reminiscent of the famous ‘withering away of the state’, predicted by Engels.63 This is also where the universalism of the proletariat, first observed by Marx in the introduction to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, is supposed to attain its concrete embodiment.64 That is to say, the proletariat, in the exercise of its hegemony expressed through the soviets, not only overcomes the alienation and fragmentation of bourgeois society, but raises non proletarian masses to a position where they can share in the rule of society. This, in Lukács’s theorisation, renders proletarian rule transparent to itself: ‘… the proletarian state is the first class state in history which acknowledges quite openly and unhypocritically that it is a class state, a repressive apparatus, and an instrument of class struggle. This relentless honesty and lack of hypocrisy is what makes a real understanding between the proletariat and the other social strata possible in the first place’.65 Lukács continues to add that this entails two important facts. Firstly, soviet power cannot rely primarily on force, but rather, on the consent of the strata involved in its exercise. Secondly, this entails that the seizure of soviet power is merely a stage in the overall process of dereification. The state is not the end goal of the proletariat, but a means towards the abolition of class society as a whole.66 The power of the state as a weapon of proletarian hegemony 62 63 64 65 66

Lukács 1967b, p. 68. Engels 1987, pp. 267–8. Marx and Engels 1975, p. 187. Lukács 1967b, pp. 68–9. Asides from Lukács’s comments, cited above, that culture is the goal of socialism and that love might constitute its ethic, he is silent on what might constitute the positive telos of a dereified society. No doubt, he explained this silence in his own mind as necessary for avoiding utopian speculation.

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depends directly on what the proletariat makes of it.67 The fact of proletarian state power, however, overcomes the antinomy between the immediate and long term interests of the proletariat; it becomes possible for the first time to take direct and conscious steps towards socialism. Clearly, this analysis is subject to criticism. After all, the dynamics within Russia – notwithstanding international pressures – hardly tended towards the radical democracy Lukács envisioned. Although the topic of this section is Lukács’s concept of praxis, it is worth commenting upon this issue briefly, especially as it points towards some of the political limits to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis which will inform the philosophical limits discussed in the next part. The rather vast distance between political realities in the USSR and the picture that Lukács paints of a soviet-based state forms the core of Feenberg’s political critique of Lukács (but not his philosophical critique, which will be discussed in Part 3). While many of Feenberg’s criticisms are well made, he misses the significance of Lukács’s political conception of praxis. Feenberg writes: Lukács’s synthesis of Luxemburg and Lenin drew both expressive and instrumental forms of action together under the reflexive concept of subjectivity. Although he lacked the term, Lukács clearly grasped the concept of exemplary action, which supplied the mediating link between the apparent contraries. The synthesis broke down, however, when Lukács turned from explaining the relation of party to class before the revolution to their relation afterward in the socialist state. Once the party’s acts became acts of the state, the informal popular controls under which it developed could no longer ensure its subordination to the class, and yet Lukács proposed no new controls capable of preventing a regression to Jacobin voluntarism.68 Feenberg continues to explain the consequences: What difference does this make? The Soviets cannot play the role in relation to the new state played earlier by proletarian spontaneity as a corrective and verification of the party’s line. The party’s existence is no longer rooted in a mass learning process; it now finds itself at the summit of the technical bureaucracies in charge of running an industrial society in which workers appear as simple subordinates.69 67 68 69

Lukács 1967b, p. 69. Feenberg 2002, p. 66. Feenberg 2002, p. 68.

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Prior to the revolution, the wrong policy would destroy the party, severing its connection with the class. Now, ‘[b]y no stretch of the imagination can the acts of the party at this point be described as moments in the self-reflection of the class’.70 In Feenberg’s view, this has consequences for Lukács’s theory. In the absence of a genuine institutional synthesis between party and class, ‘… he [Lukács] arrived theoretically at the same contradiction at which Lenin arrived practically: the assertion of the simultaneous and increased role of both the masses and the Communist party in a single-party Soviet state. In practice, this contradiction was resolved by the collapse of the social movement and the creation of a new kind of tyranny without precedent in Marxist theory’.71 Feenberg suggests, in Lukács’s defence, that his hesitant exploration of possible forms of institutional or constitutional mediation between party and class (in a workers’ state), including a concept of socialist citizenship at least suggests that he was alert to the problem. Nevertheless, these turned out to be utopian speculations on Lukács’s part. Feenberg’s critique of Lukács is quite apt on a political level. It is true that Lenin embodied both a mass democratic practice of politics and an authoritarian sovereign one simultaneously, even until the point where the latter had decisively eclipsed the former. Of course, more than a decade of counterrevolution was required to fully eradicate the radical democratic aspect of October. Nevertheless, it is also true – as this work argues – that Lukács grasped the importance of both moments and expressed them theoretically. If we regard his proposed synthesis (namely, his fully actualised concept of praxis) as a failure, then his politics become utopian: the mass democratic side of the equation may only provide theoretical cover for the authoritarian sovereign one. The conclusion to this work will discuss some of the political consequences that this admission it might entail. This said, Feenberg is wrong about the causes for and consequences of the failure he accurately perceives in Lukács. He writes: The inability of most revolutionary Communists in the 1920s to foresee and forestall the Stalinist catastrophe was due to a deep failure of theory and imagination. The cause of this failure was twofold. On the one hand, thinkers and activists like Lukács and Lenin confused emergency measures taken in the shadow of a revolution in a backward country with fundamental changes in the nature of the public sphere under social-

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Feenberg 2002, p. 69. Feenberg 2002, p. 69.

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ism. On the other hand, as a result of this first error, they underestimated the validity of the classic teaching concerning the political and legal preconditions of democracy developed in the course of several centuries of bourgeois and Marxist reflection and experience. The consequences of this failure are still very much with us and represent the inner theoretical limit of the dominant forms of Communism down to the present day.72 This is perhaps the most superficial way to read Lukács’s failure to solve the political problems of a workers’ state. Are we really supposed to believe that a stronger understanding of socialist constitutionality or an anticipation of Stalinism might have averted catastrophe? Multiple factions and countless activists resisted Stalin’s inexorable rise. It is highly doubtful whether a missing exposition of socialist constitutionality would have helped their fight.73 Moreover, it is quite counterfactual to suggest that the failure to understand Stalinism represented a failure of ‘theory and imagination’. From whence, precisely, were such a theory and imagination supposed to arise? Indeed, this superficial judgement effectively reduces Lukács’s error to a moral one; he failed, presumably for personal reasons, to be sufficiently theoretical and imaginative. What insight can we possibly gain from this besides the injunction to be imaginative and theoretical? On the contrary, when virtually every major thinker of an era shares in such a failure, we should probably search for an explanation in history and philosophy. After all, while in retrospect we may grasp Stalinism as an intensification of the reified logic of the modern state, at the time it was a more or less completely unprecedented phenomenon. Even critics of Stalinism like Trotsky first took recourse to older concepts, like Bonapartism, in order to make sense of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution as it unfolded. More libertarian Marxist critics of Stalinism were perhaps closer to the truth in proposing a theory of state capitalism. Yet, this still relies on the myth of a ‘healthy’ period of soviet democracy, commencing in October of 1917 and concluding at some later date chosen in accordance with the degree of authoritarianism one is willing to tolerate. Although not the main aim of this work, it will be proposed that the philosophical critique of Lukács’s concept of praxis may shed light on these otherwise rather tortured historical and political debates. Specifically, it will be 72 73

Feenberg 2002, p. 69. At any rate, the Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis did produce a major work on socialist constitutionality in 1924. This work, as has been observed, is broadly compatible with a Lukácsian philosophy of praxis. And yet, it did not seem to count for much against the rising bureaucracy (see Pashukanis 1989).

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suggested below that Lukács’s failure to solve the above-mentioned problem of democracy in a workers’ state is closely tied with the limits of his concept of praxis which, tragically, resulted in the kind of conceptual mythology it was intended to avoid. Yet, Lukács’s failure – precisely because of its sophistication and racialism – reveals something essential about the limits of the workers’ movement and the Russian Revolution. In short, Lukács’s reflection on the Russian Revolution was the most advanced possible at the time. In its theoretical limits, we might also discover some of the practical limits of proletarian praxis in the early twentieth century. All of this said, further consideration of this point would interfere with the purpose of this section, which is to reconstruct Lukács’s concept of praxis. The functions of the soviets (as summarised above), although expressed in the rather prosaic language of Bolshevism, amount to no less than the dereification of society. This is fundamental to Lukács’s theory of revolution. He stresses time and again, however, that this ought not to be understood as a miraculous or absolute event; rather, the seizure of power by the soviets marks a qualitative turning point but by no means represents the immediate abolition of reification. Reification is only overcome, step by step, as consciousness wrests ground away from necessity. For example, Lukács writes: The foundations of capitalist modes of production and with them their ‘necessary natural laws’ do not simply vanish when the proletariat seizes power or even as a result of the socialisation, however thoroughgoing, of the means of production. But their elimination and replacement by a consciously organised socialist economics must not be thought of only as a lengthy process but as a consciously conducted, stubborn battle. Step by step the ground must be wrested from this ‘necessity’. Every overestimation of the ripeness of circumstances or of the power of the proletariat, every underestimation of the strength of the opposing forces has to be paid for bitterly in the form of crises, relapses and economic developments that inexorably revert the situation before the point of departure.74 This argument cuts sharply against commentators on the left and the right, beginning with Adorno, who attribute to Lukács a messianic theory of revolution and a desire to subjectify all objectivity. Similarly, this understanding of dereification is quite different to the sense of the term proposed by Feenberg, who suggests instead a ‘… permanent mediation of rational institutions by their

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 281–2.

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members’.75 Both of these readings fall into opposed antinomies: Adorno casts Lukács’s concept of dereification as messianic, while Feenberg more or less consciously transforms dereification into an eternal process. Given his inattention to qualitative transformation, his position resembles a sophisticated reformism. By contrast, Lukács’s concept of dereification avoids these poles: his stress on the institutional and objective ground of dereification refuses the first antinomy, while his emphasis on the conscious overcoming of reification by praxis refuses the second. Rather, Lukács’s understanding of dereification should be seen as a classically Hegelian aufhebung. That is to say, Feenberg is quite correct to suggest that calculable, quantitative and contemplative rationality will necessarily continue to inform our relationship with science, bureaucracy and legality. Yet, if dereification is understood as the advent of social consciousness, then the basic essence of reification – namely, that it subjects humanity to blind, naturalistic fate – is transformed. Dereification, for Lukács, refers to the conscious mastery of reification; this is neither its total abolition nor its subordination to a permanent process of mediation. This conscious mastery entails a qualitative change; the quantitative rationalism of reification serves humanity rather than dominating it, and is founded on a qualitative concept of labour rather than suppressing it.76 Of course, the extent to which this vision is utopian is a different matter altogether. For now, however, in Lukács’s view, the battle to extend universal consciousness ‘… constitutes the most profound difference between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. The ability of bourgeois revolutions to storm ahead with such brilliant élan is grounded socially, in the fact that they are drawing the consequences of an almost completed economic and social process in a society whose feudal and absolutist structure has been profoundly undermined politically, governmentally, juridically, etc., by the vigorous upsurge of capitalism’.77 In fact, Lukács concedes that bourgeois revolutions need not involve an uprising; they may be imposed from above, as was the case in Germany. Gramsci would later term this process ‘passive revolution’.78 In contrast to the bourgeoisie, the proletariat is not permitted to develop its hegemony within bourgeois society, neither economically, politically nor culturally. Capitalism produces only the economic and political premises for the beginning of a transition to socialism. This, once more, places a far higher premium on class con75 76 77 78

Feenberg 2014, p. 220. These points have been discussed by the author of this work, in a review of Feenberg’s The Philosophy of Praxis (see Lopez 2018). Lukács 1967a, p. 282. Gramsci 1971b, pp. 106–13.

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sciousness in proletarian revolution: ‘The very fact that the proletariat is aware of the role of the state in the proletarian revolution, in contrast to the ideological masking of it in bourgeois revolutions, an awareness that foresees and overturns in contrast to the post festum recognitions of the bourgeoisie, points up the difference sharply enough’.79 In Lukács’s account, the consciousness of the proletariat must therefore be won through a series of political battles. These battles in turn bestow concrete truth to the standpoint of the party. While much of Lukács’s written work throughout the 1920s deals with the concrete dynamic of revolution, including the Russian, Hungarian and occasionally German revolutions, his theory of political class struggle is presented in the most clearly universal way in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. This work is framed by two concerns. Firstly, Lukács believed that Bolshevism, as he understood it, was the necessary logical conclusion of Marxism. Yet at the same time, he expressed the fear that by the mid-to late 1920s, a Bolshevik (and therefore Leninist) approach to revolutionary politics was being lost and a reversion to Menshevism (or, more generally, the antinomies of bourgeois politics) was in progress. Although his argument is couched as a defence of History and Class Consciousness, it contains the main conceptual determinants of the dialectic of revolutionary practice. Lukács’s starting point is to defend himself against the charge of ‘subjectivism’ levelled at him by Rudas and Deborin. Contra this accusation, Lukács clarifies his view on two important points. Firstly, insofar as he wrote of the role of the proletariat as subject-object of history in History and Class Consciousness, he stresses that this was to be understood as a process. Lukács is very clear that the proletariat does not exercise a super-historical subjective power over the present, but rather, rises to consciousness and therefore agency through a punctuated historical process. This has, of course, been the overarching theme of Part 2 of this work. Secondly, Lukács disputes that History and Class Consciousness represented a subjectivist or voluntarist political position by proposing a different understanding of these terms. Where political class struggle is concerned, the antinomy between subjectivity and objectivity is instantiated in three mistaken positions. The first is voluntarism (or, subjectivism or ultra leftism). The second is opportunism (or ‘tailism’, to employ Lukács’s rather awkward Russian-borne neologism) while the third is centrism. All of these are opposed to Leninism and are based on a reified grasp of politics.80 79 80

Lukács 1967a, p. 283. At this point in the exposition, an immanent critique of these terms is not required: this was provided, theoretically, in Chapter 5. Insofar as voluntarism, opportunism and cent-

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The first two terms (voluntarism and opportunism) present the two poles of the antinomy in a relatively stark and pure way, while the last (centrism) eclectically combines them in Kantian fashion. The concrete solution to these antinomies consists in discovering the next key link in the chain of mediations which lead towards praxis. Such a key link must be both presentist and practical. To define this in theory (which is, in and of itself, neither present nor practical) is easier said than done. So, to represent his solution to the dilemma, Lukács introduces what he calls a dialectic of process and moments. If either side of this dialectic is fetishised, praxis is blocked. The fetishism of history as a process views change as linear and quantitative and excludes agency. The fetishism of moments holds that change rests on a decision and a miraculous or irrational imposition of will on the historic process. In contradistinction to this view, Lukács defines a moment as: ‘A situation whose duration may be longer or shorter, but which is distinguished from the process that leads up to it in that it forces together the essential tendencies of that process, and demands that a decision be taken over the future direction of the process’.81 In a moment, the tendencies within a process, both conscious and unconscious, crystallise as a ‘… sort of zenith, and depending on how the situation concerned is handled, the process takes on a different direction after the “moment” ’.82 So, a moment breaks with the quantitative development of history by demanding a decision which resolves that moment. This decision creates a new objectivity and a new reality – obviously not divorced from the prior one, but which nevertheless renders visible hitherto hidden aspects of history. This, in turn, may give way to a new process, and so on. Left at this, the dialectic of moments and processes is merely a description of punctuated change. It would be just as possible to discover such movement (which is really just the transition from quality to quantity, and back) in nature as in politics. Two further determinants must be added in order to arrive at a concept of praxis: teleology and consciousness. These are strongly interconnected. To begin with, a moment may give rise to a situation demanding a decision and an imposition of agency, but this by no means implies that it is a moment in which all agents may become equally conscious. Rather, the resolution of a moment depends on the consciousness and power of the social actors involved. This consciousness is itself linked to the objective situation; in this sense, sub-

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rism are subjected to an immanent critique in political practice, this results from their practical failure to lead revolution. As has been shown, Lukács believed that a Bolshevik style party was required in order to draw the correct lessons be drawn from these failures. Lukács 2002, p. 55. Lukács 2002, p. 55.

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jectivity is a moment of the objective process. Yet, in praxis, Lukács argues that this subjectivity may ‘work back’ on the process. He explains this as follows: … in such moments everything depends on class consciousness, on the conscious will of the proletariat. This is where the moment of decision lies. The dialectical interaction of subject and object in the historical process consists in the fact that the subjective moment is, self-evidently as I stress again and again, a product, a moment of the objective process. It works back on the process, in certain historical situations, whose emergence is called forth by the objective process (e.g. HCC, p. 313), and gives it direction. This working back is only possible in praxis, only in the present (that is why I am using the word ‘moment’ – in order to highlight this practical and contemporary character). Once the action is completed, the subjective moment slots back into the sequence of objective moments.83 As is quite apparent, Lukács stresses that this may only occur in the present. So, while an objective process might lead towards praxis, its teleology is neither inevitable nor immediately transparent, but is also subject to decision. As Lukács makes clear, in addition to theoretical consequences, a mistaken approach to praxis entails political consequences. He makes this particularly clear as he polemicises against so-called leftist or subjectivist theories of revolution which divorce moments from the process which gives them meaning. These come in various forms – from a Luxemburgist emphasis on spontaneity to a Blanquist emphasis on the revolutionary minority. The attribute that these approaches possess in common is that they represent the theoretical moment of agency or subjectivity as divorced from the consciousness of the class upon which it must ultimately rely. Or, to put it slightly differently, both these attempts to transcend the divide between imputed and empirical consciousness fail because they rely on a miraculous event or moment to revolutionise either the class (in the case of Blanquism) or the party (in the case of Luxemburgism). So this approach becomes its opposite. Spontaneist and Blanquist theories of revolution implicitly accept the unconsciousness of history conceived of as a process with no subject; insofar as they uphold a solution to the problem of class consciousness, it is a miraculous one. Interestingly, Lukács raised this polemic not merely to oppose ‘leftist’ theories of revolution (although given his experience in the Hungarian Soviet Republic and his break with Béla Kun, this was no doubt on his mind), but equally to attack conservative or right-

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Lukács 2002, p. 56. The reference to History and Class Consciousness is in the original.

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wing approaches within the Comintern. In so doing, he highlights a remarkable essential similarity between these two antinomic approaches: That is to say, then, as is the case with those who – in a back-to-front way, like Comrade Rudas who completely dissolves ‘moments’ into the ‘process’, and so (seen in the best light) arrives at a Luxemburgist theory of spontaneity – turns the concrete truth of particular and concrete historical ‘moments’ into the abstract falsehood of a permanently decisive influenceability of the process. Such a ‘left’ theory of moments ignores precisely the instant of dialectical change, the concrete, revolutionary essence of the ‘moment’. Insurrection as an art is turned into insurrection as a game. The well-warranted active role of the subject turns into an empty phraseology of subjectivism.84 Here it is possible to see the distinctiveness of Lukács’s position. He attempts the dialectical overcoming of two interrelated (and in fact identical) one sided mistakes: objectivism and subjectivism. Both accept the world as it is and both fail to comprehend the subjective moment in history – the former does so by openly cutting out subjectivity, while the latter pretends that the subjective moment is everywhere (and therefore sees it nowhere). Both of these are abstract and ahistorical. Both ultimately arise from the standpoint of a party that has been incapable of immersing itself in the truth of the class and which is incapable of grasping the concrete key link which stands as the resolution of moments of crisis and decision in a revolution. The truth of a moment, separated from process and social totality, becomes an abstract falsehood. These critical comments allow us to define praxis in its fully actualised and concrete form, that is, as a complete concept. In a revolutionary situation, the class consciousness of the proletariat may grasp the total situation in terms of its main concrete determinants (including class forces, the issues around which the struggle is fought, the historic grounds of the struggle, and so on) and in terms of genesis – that is, in terms of history understood according to its logic and as a presentist unfolding. If, on the basis of this consciousness, the proletariat is able to make a decision in order to resolve key moments in its favour, it produces a unity of theory and practice, that is, praxis. Insofar as this praxis imposes its control and agency over the situation, the consciousness of the proletariat expresses the truth of the objective situation and in so doing, renders this truth subject. Thus, the proletariat is the bearer of the unity of sub-

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Lukács 2002, p. 59.

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ject and object of history only in praxis. This brings history – previously the unconscious dynamic of reified relations – to knowledge of itself. It is therefore an open and non-deterministic teleological process tending towards the creation of a liberated and dereified society. The foundation for this is Lukács’s concept of labour, which, as has been shown, stresses quality and ontological novelty. So, praxis is theoretically considered action which is grounded but which understands and creates a future which is both immanent in reality and new. None of this demands total knowledge; rather it demands a knowledge which combines mediation, totality and genesis under the sign of praxis, which is consciously practical. This knowledge is concentrated in the present, and crystallises around the next key link that must be grasped in order to move towards communism.85 Utopia as a moment of the present is finally desublimated.86 Although this definition of praxis may appear restrictive, it is crucial. Moreover, it does not preclude forms of praxis which are not fully or concretely realised. In this work, a number of senses of praxis have been offered, including the anticipation of praxis, the intellectual representation of praxis, the aesthetic or ethical intuitions of praxis, the praxis of an individual who moves from contemplation to praxis via critique and free subordination to a party, the unconscious praxis of a general strike, and so on. Yet, without this fully actualised and concrete concept of praxis – conscious proletarian class struggle at the highest level of historic possibility – the terms which make up Lukács’s philosophy of praxis fall apart into lifeless abstractions. Praxis is the lightning which wakes up the dreamer, trapped in a reified world of representations and intuitions. So, Lukács writes: ‘The dialectical interaction that I have outlined above arises “exclusively” in praxis. In “the abstract”, that is in terms of thought severed from 85

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Lukács explains this point further in Lenin: But the need to take into account all existing tendencies in every concrete situation by no means implies that all are of equal weight when decisions are taken. On the contrary, every situation contains a central problem the solution of which determines both the answer to the other questions raised simultaneously by it and the key to the further development of all social tendencies in the future. ‘You must’, said Lenin, ‘be able at each particular moment to find the particular link in the chain which you must grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link; the order of the links, their form, the manner in which they are linked together, the way they differ from each other in the historical chain of events, are not as simple and not as meaningless as those in an ordinary chain made by a smith’. Only the Marxist dialectic, by the concrete analysis of the concrete situation, can establish what fact at a given moment of social life acquires this significance (Lukács 1967b, p. 84). Lukács 2002, p. 56.

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praxis, subject and object clearly do indeed stand cut off from each other, and each thought that ascribes this characteristic of praxis simply to theory ends up in a mythology of concepts and must become idealist (Fichte)’.87 As this quote clearly argues, even a theory of praxis is inferior to actualised praxis; only praxis itself can sustain the truth of a theory of praxis and save it from conceptual mythology. Given this, praxis is a higher truth than that of a party whose truth retains a theoretical aspect even when immersed in praxis. It is also a higher truth than that possessed by the class, whose ideas are destined to lag behind their practice. Praxis, then, is the third term that emerges from the mediation between the party and class. It is, in Lukács’s view, no less than the advent of absolute truth: In the period of the ‘pre-history of human society’ and of the struggles between classes the only possible function of the truth is to establish the various possible attitudes to an essentially uncomprehended world in accordance with man’s needs in the struggle to master his environment. Truth could only achieve an ‘objectivity’ relative to the standpoint of the individual classes and the objective realities corresponding to it. But as soon as mankind has clearly understood and hence restructured the foundations of its existence truth acquires a wholly novel aspect. When theory and practice are united it becomes possible to change reality and when this happens the absolute and its ‘relativistic’ counterpart will have played their historical role for the last time. For as the result of these changes we shall see the disappearance of that reality which the absolute and the relative expressed in like manner.88 This new truth is higher than the dichotomy between absolute and relative truth which, in Lukács’s argument, characterises bourgeois philosophy. Or, as shall be argued in Chapters 8 and 9, Lukács’s concept of praxis bears the weight of absolute truth, desublimating it and raising it to actuality. As will further be argued, in Lukács’s view, philosophical truth is necessarily a reflection after the fact; it is therefore a dead and reified truth. Insofar as it points towards something living, it only does so abstractly: ‘The past which rules over the

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Lukács continues: ‘But just as much, all thought – and this is the case with Rudas – that misunderstands this specific character of proletarian praxis, a praxis that is revolutionary, ends up in fatalism, if it carries over the rigid opposition of subject and object from ‘pure’ theory into praxis. Thereby, it abolishes praxis. It becomes a theory of tail-ending’. (Lukács 2002, p. 56.) Lukács 1967a, p. 189.

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present, the consciousness after the fact with which this rule becomes explicit is only the intellectual expression of the fundamental economic condition of capitalist society and of that society alone: it is the reified expression of the possibility, contained in the relations of capital, renewing itself and of expanding through the constant contact with living labour’.89 So, the advent of praxis changes the relationship between past and future. As the proletariat reappropriates its labour, and as the formal and estranged objectivity of reification is humanised and denaturalised, so too ‘… disappears also the corresponding opposition in capitalist society of past and present whose relation must now be changed structurally’.90 The advent of praxis thus transforms the nature of truth. No longer is truth reduced to a quantitative reflection of reified form (as fact), or split between recollection and utopian anticipation (as a myth). Rather, praxis subordinates the past to the present. Therefore it permits the conscious creation of the future as the qualitatively new. The future here is no longer a utopian hypostatisation of the present, but a realm of concrete and conscious freedom. This effects a change in our most fundamental categories, including time. It will be recalled that reification is, at its core, the reduction of time to space. That is, time as qualitative is reduced to flat quantity. This gives rise to the antinomy between being and becoming: the present is eternalised either in a reified, formal logic which excludes the new, or in an apparently fluid conception of history which substitutes for the former variety of stasis, the stasis of eternally self-same objects in meaningless motion. Praxis, as the conscious creation of the new, transforms being and becoming, on the basis of the present, into a conscious reconciliation between past and future. The line stretching infinitely into the past and future is found to be a circle. Thus, mediation concentrates on a ‘… concrete here and now’.91 Rather than allowing this moment to dissolve, it instead becomes the ‘… focus of decision and the birth of the new’.92 Thus, humanity walks, laughing, through the archway labelled augenblick. Insofar as man fetishises the past or the future, the act of conscious creation is blocked, and the present forms a ‘pernicious chasm’; ‘Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth’.93 Praxis is therefore the reconciliation between the past as a realm of

89 90 91 92 93

Lukács 1967a, p. 248. Lukács 1967a, p. 248. Lukács 1967a, pp. 203–4. Lukács 1967a, pp. 203–4. Lukács 1967a, pp. 203–4. Lukács’s full quote (which is also reproduced in Chapter 8, in the context of a discussion of Lukács’s understanding of the absolute) reads:

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unfreedom, and the future as an abstract hypostatisation of the present; praxis is the conscious creation of the new, a decision and the advent of a new truth in the present. The truth of philosophy is realised in its overcoming. This is redolent of Zarathustra’s lion who, in his prideful refusal of duty, supplants the camel that stoically bore the tragic weight of the world. The camel, in bearing the weight of memory and history out into the desert, had a role to play – but this is now over. So, with his rage and his ‘sacred No’, does the lion slay the glittering dragon who declared that ‘All values have already been created, and all created values are in me’.94 This no is a moment of destruction; it liberates all the resentments nurtured by all the injuries and deformities of the past, allowing them to become an act of violent, negative will. Yet, Zarathustra’s lion proved incapable of creation; his negation creates only the freedom for new creation. Instead, creation is left to the child who ‘… is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a scared Yes’; the child is a ‘Yes’ because ‘… the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world wins its own world’.95 This spirit has no need for memory and no bitterness left to speak. Thus, it is free to create the new in accordance with no values but its own. Or, alternately, this moment recalls the culmination of Hegel’s dialectic, extricated from the grey of philosophy and made real in history; out of two antinomies no longer reconciled in thought, but in reality, comes a third. Mary wore three links of chain, and every link bore Jesus’ name. Only this God does

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Becoming is also the mediation between past and future. But it is the mediation between the concrete, i.e. historical past, and the equally concrete, i.e. historical future. When a concrete here and now dissolves into a process it is no longer a continuous tangible moment, immediacy slipping away; it is the focus of the deepest and most widely ramified mediation, the focus of decision and the birth of the new. As long as man concentrates his interest contemplatively upon the past or future, both ossify into an alien existence. And between the subject and the object lies the unbridgeable ‘pernicious chasm’ of the present. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth. (Lukács 1967a, pp. 203–204). Nietzsche 2003b, p. 55. If the introduction of Nietzsche here seems indecorous, then justification is given, firstly, by Lukács’s choice to label the moment of decision an augenblick – literally the blink of an eye, and also the inscription that Zarathustra finds on the archway connecting past and future. Further justification is given by recent scholarship which, with excellent reason, discerns a subterranean Nietzschean current in Lukács (see Emadian 2016). At any rate, conceptual affinities need not always be undergirded by the demonstration of literary bloodlines. Further grounds for a dialogue between Superman and proletariat, between Nietzsche and Lukács, will be given in Chapter 9. Nietzsche 2003b, p. 55.

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not need to die to become what he is; rather, the unity between knowing and doing expels the divine from heaven, bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. Or, as Hegel said of the reconciliation between the practical, acting consciousness and the theoretical, judging consciousnesses: ‘It is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves as pure knowledge’.96 96

Hegel 2018, §. 671. The theological connotations of this comparison are quite intentional and will be explained in Chapter 9, which will outline a critique of Lukács’s concept of praxis.

part 3 Praxis and Philosophy

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Introduction to Part Three Distance from praxis is disreputable to everyone. Adorno1

∵ The first two parts of this study have reconstructed the conceptuality of Lukács’s theory of praxis. This reconstruction passed through two broad moments. The first might be described as the development of a theory of praxis via the critique of reification. This was the subject of Part 1, the result of which was a critical theory of praxis in itself. This theory can be termed critical only insofar as it is directed outward, towards the world or other objects of criticism. In contradistinction, Part 2 initiated a second moment. This began with the self-criticism of the theory of praxis produced in Part 1. Initially, this self-criticism proceeded by way of the critique of ideology (under the broad sign of the contemplative stance). Thus, the critical theory of praxis developed in Part 1 became a genuinely critical – or a meta critical – theory of praxis, capable of criticising both the world and itself. The process of emptying the theory of praxis of all subjective remainders prepared it for its full desublimation and commensurate positive actualisation. This took place via history, the dialectic between party and class and, ultimately, revolutionary politics. The outcome of Part 2 was philosophy of praxis that was for itself. Theory, fully cognisant of its formalism and abstraction, seeks its concrete content and its completion in the world, via the practice of the proletariat. This second moment culminated in Lukács’s fully articulated concept of praxis, as class struggle at the highest degree of historic possibility, which creates ontological novelty. For Lukács, only actual praxis heralds the advent of the new and of a dereifying truth. Only actual praxis overcomes reified historical time. In the light of actual praxis, the present ceases to be witness to the eternal recurrence of the self-same; no longer is qualitative change rendered as utopian and mythological. Rather, as Lukács defined it, actual praxis represents the concrete becoming of human self-consciousness and freedom.

1 Adorno 1998b, p. 289.

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This concept of praxis – as has been shown and as was argued in the introduction to this work – is the light which illuminates the whole of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Even its most immediate stages (for example, the critique of formalism or the diagnosis of reification) were, in the strongest sense of the term, revealed by Lukács’s fully articulated concept of praxis. As well, this concept is the necessary logical conclusion to these critical postulates: they must lead to a notion of praxis. Most importantly, perhaps, the concept of praxis continually informs and grounds Lukács’s metacritique of reified ideology. Yet, all of this implies a paradox: how can a fully articulated concept – which can only be grasped at the conclusion of a complex argument – rationally ground the starting points and development of the same argument? Prima facie, then, there exists a dialectical contradiction between Parts 1 and 2 of this work. From the loftiest vantage point, Parts 1 and 2 are antinomies to each other: the former is in itself a theory of praxis while the latter is a theory of praxis that is for itself. I will clarify what I mean by this shortly. For now, Part 3 aims to reconcile these two moments by reflecting on them philosophically. This, it is argued, will allow for the reconstruction of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. It is noted that this implies a distinction between theory and philosophy. It is freely admitted that this is indebted to Hegel’s definition of philosophy. However, as will be demonstrated, the conceptual bases for such a distinction exist within Lukács’s work. This distinction is not externally imposed. Hegel’s definition of philosophy (which he here refers to as ‘science’) is most clearly outlined in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, wherein he writes: Science may be in itself what it will, but in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness, it presents itself as a topsy-turvy inversion of the latter, or, because immediate self-consciousness is the principle of actuality, and since, for itself, immediate self-consciousness exists outside of science, science takes the form of non-actuality. Accordingly, science has to unite that element with itself or to a greater degree to show both that such an element belongs to itself and how it belongs to it. Lacking actuality, science is the in-itself, the purpose, which at the start is still something inner, at first not as spirit but only as spiritual substance. It has to express itself and become for itself, and this means nothing else than that it has to posit self-consciousness as being at one with itself.2

2 Hegel 2018, §.26.

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This (as well as other related sections of the preface) expresses not only that the goal of philosophy is to reconcile what it is, both in and for itself, but suggests that this motion represents a reconciliation between subject (in this case, the philosopher) and substance, in which both sides are shown to be absolutely interrelated. This goal is also expressed via the metaphor of a ladder provided by the philosopher to the everyday consciousness, in order that the everyday consciousness might achieve the vantage point enjoyed by the philosopher. Hegel is clear to note that this is simultaneously desublimation of the otherwise abstract knowledge of the philosopher. Thus, the in itself and the for itself are finally united, for us, that is, for the philosophers who have by now grasped the standpoint of absolute knowledge and in so doing, have taken our place by Hegel’s side. This reference to Hegel helps to understand the aim of Part 3 of this work, which is to reconcile the two equivalent moments in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, for us. In this way, the in itself and for itself of Lukács’s theory of praxis will be shown to culminate in a philosophy of praxis. As an aside, the development of the standpoint of philosophy within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and its subsequent reflexive application signifies the completion of the method of literary-historical reading, outlined in the introduction. Only by reconciling the in itself of a philosophy (i.e., the texts and the meanings they bear, their ancestry, etc.) with the for itself (i.e., the intentions of the author, the relationship of the text to historic period, its reception, etc.) can we overcome approaches to textual criticism that reify the text or its interpretation. There are many ways to produce reified or ideological criticism: one may fetishise a text by making of it a sacred scripture. Or, one may lose sight of the text (and conceal one’s own opinion) either by extrinsic critique or under the relativist pretension that infinite interpretations are possible. One may produce a one sided criticism that lays too much stress on the meaning of words – a particular temptation in the case of texts that have been poorly translated. Or, one may produce a one sided reading in the opposite manner, by fetishising a historic and literary context, implying that the questions of ancestry and birthplace determine interpretive truth in the same manner as the possession of a birth certificate might determine the truth of one’s bloodline and nationality. Of course, this is not to deny the necessity of any of these critical gestures in a whole work of criticism. Still, it is asserted that in a work dedicated to truth, these interpretive strategies may only become rational in light of a third position: namely, the standpoint of philosophy itself, which requires immanence (the unity of the in itself and the for itself) and which consequently reproduces the text, simultaneously in its own highest truth, and for us. That is, just as the aim of Hegelian philosophy (and, we might add, philosophy of praxis) is a conscious return to the present, the aim of Hegelian

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criticism must be to return to the present. Given that the object of this study is far more modest than the conceptuality of all being, this is fortunately an easier task. To be clear: the ‘for us’ to which I refer is not merely a declaration of my own viewpoint, or some equally arbitrary covenant that I propose to establish between the author (myself) and my readers (who, after all, I cannot assume will understand me or like what I have to say). Rather, the for us of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is produced by the reconciliation of the two moments noted above: the in itself and the for itself. This part shall therefore prove that this reconciliation produces immanently the standpoint of philosophy. As Chapter 8 will demonstrate, Lukács’s definition of philosophy is strongly Hegelian – with the important modification that he intended praxis to bear the conceptual weight of the absolute. Yet, Lukács was an antiphilosophical philosopher. So, it will be argued that the standpoint of philosophy only exists unconsciously in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. This point is the lynchpin of the critique of Lukács proposed in Chapter 9 which, it will be argued, is both novel within the literature and which constitutes a far more thoroughgoing critique of Lukács than any hitherto proposed. The outcome of a deeply sympathetic immanent reconstruction and defence is a profound critique. Curiously, this critique vindicates the partial results of some of Lukács’s other critics – but not their method. Yet, because it generates a position within Lukács that goes beyond him, it also salvages philosophy from the ruins of his philosophy of praxis. This has never before been attempted. It is still necessary to outline the immanent bases for the shift that has been described, from theory to philosophy. Three observations based upon the reconstruction built so far demand that praxis be further elaborated philosophically. Firstly, while Lukács disagreed with Hegel’s dictum that philosophy as ‘… the thought of the world … appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state’, this disagreement does not alter the fact that his philosophy of praxis was formulated after the actual praxis upon which it was based.3 So, there exists an immediate gap between the articulation of praxis in History and Class Consciousness and other works and the praxis that they theorised. After all, the Comintern of 1923 was manifestly incapable of leading further revolutions on the model of 1917. Moreover, notwithstanding Hegel’s caution against ‘… issuing instructions on how the world ought to be’, this is most certainly what Lukács, in publishing History and Class Consciousness, sought to do, albeit in a manner highly

3 Hegel 1991a, p. 23.

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critical of all hypostatised oughts.4 Thus, the immediate motivation behind History and Class Consciousness was political. These two observations entail that firstly, Lukács wrote in light of an existent divide between theory and practice and that secondly, he believed it might be possible to overcome this divide by elaborating a theory of praxis. Left at this, however, the need to reflect philosophically on praxis is not accounted for. So, the second factor that made a philosophy of praxis a necessity relates to the first. Lukács not only wrote in light of a gap between theory and practice, but also in the rapidly fading light of the dying praxis upon which his philosophy was founded. In Lenin, Lukács makes a number of observations (which at the time were, as has been noted, quite politically charged) that clearly imply his awareness of the difficulties in which the international communist movement found itself. Quoting Lenin, he acknowledged that in Russia, at best, a workers’ state presided over a state capitalist economy, that revolution can only be victorious on a world scale and that without this, opportunism was bound to reassert itself.5 Moreover (as Lukács’s well-documented hostility towards Béla Kun, amongst others, testifies) he believed that the parties of the Comintern were in serious danger of falling short of Leninism, as he understood it. Lukács therefore, sought not only a political but also a theoretical reinvigoration of Marxism, based on his understanding of the October Revolution. That is to say, for Lukács, the failure of the revolution in Western Europe lay not on the side of objective circumstances but on the side of consciousness, that is, the party. In the Defence of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács explicitly took aim at accounts of the Hungarian Revolution which justified its failure on the basis of deficient objective circumstances. In his view, these accounts apologised for glaring political mistakes made by the Hungarian Communist Party. Moreover, he argued that this type of materialism effectively renders good leadership a mystery; insofar as Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were superior politically, Lukács was unwilling to attribute this to inexplicable genius and the mysteries of charisma or to the superiority of Russian conditions.6 Rather, he set himself the task of comprehending and universalising the experience of the Russian Revolution on the basis of a unity of subjective and objective conditions. This called for a revitalisation of Marxist theory. As has been shown, Lukács believed that resources for this theoretical reinvigoration were to be found in the philosophical tradition generally, and in Hegelian philosophy in particular. Additionally, Lukács’s late 1920s study of the Young 4 Hegel 1991a, p. 23. 5 Lukács 1967b, pp. 86–7. 6 Lukács 2002, pp. 51–3.

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Hegelians, while philosophical, clearly bore political significance. Thus, while for Lukács, philosophy occurs (conceptually speaking) prior to fully actualised praxis, outside of a real and living praxis, philosophy is an indispensable critical moment in the development of a self-critical theory of praxis. These comments supply ample justification for the position that Lukács’s critique of philosophy has enjoyed in the presentation so far. However, there is a third factor which necessitates a philosophical reflection on praxis; the failure of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. After all, Lukács lost the debate in the Third International decisively, both on the political and theoretical level. So, notwithstanding Lukács’s antiphilosophical intentions, it was precisely in the realm of philosophy (defined for the moment in very broad terms) that History and Class Consciousness has had most impact. This observation points towards the structural ambiguity within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. As noted in the introduction, the original structure of History and Class Consciousness culminates with actual praxis as class struggle at the highest level of political possibility; namely, where Part 2 finished. Lukács’s famous critical reconstruction of the antinomies of German Idealism and their overcoming by Hegel and Marx occurs in the central essay of History and Class Consciousness, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. This subsection is rightly famous, but in Lukács’s mind, it marked a waystation and a mediation on the path to actual praxis. The most philosophical section of History and Class Consciousness is immediately preceded by ‘The Phenomenon of Reification’ in which, by way of a metacritique of Weber and Simmel (among others) Lukács builds what I have termed his critical theory of praxis, in which his concept of reification is explained. ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’ is then succeeded by ‘The Standpoint of the Proletariat’ which, having famously restaged Marx’s parricide of Hegel, culminates in a call for praxis as ‘… the free action of the proletariat itself’.7 Notwithstanding that the latter essays of History and Class Consciousness (notably ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’) possess rich and often overlooked philosophical reflections, the work transposes itself into the key of political philosophy. Indeed, the shift is significant and consistent with Lukács’s argument in ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’. It is clear that he wishes the praxis of the proletariat to overcome the contradictions of German Idealism, and in so doing, inherit the tradition. Believing that this can only be effected in political praxis, he turns to political theory. Philosophy, then, is propaedeutic to political practice. By grounding the antinomies of bourgeois politics (i.e., force and consent, legality and illegality, spontaneity and leader7 Lukács 1967a, p. 209.

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ship, sectarianism and reformism, etc.), Lukács hoped, as he explained in Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his Though, to effect a theoretical revolution in Marxism, commensurate to the practical revolution led by Lenin.8 This, in turn, would generalise Lenin’s praxis beyond Russia, rectifying the hapless state in which the European communist movement found itself, following the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and, later, hopes for a German October. The audience for this was not the proletariat as such, but rather, the party that purported to lead it. In this light, the purpose of Lukács’s philosophical reflection on praxis was to intellectually underwrite the standpoint of the proletariat and the consequent dialectic of theory and practice, as it unfolds towards praxis, given the actuality of revolution. One would have trouble finding deafer ears for music such as this. So, what remained was a philosophy. Indeed, as an antiphilosophical philosophy, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is, at its best, capable of acknowledging its own failure and commensurate abstraction. Read in this manner, the purpose of philosophy of praxis can only be the attempt to philosophically recollect concepts generated by both praxis and by critical engagement with the most radical social theory of the era that the same praxis facilitates. The most essential of these concepts have been emphasised: mediation, totality, genesis and praxis. These function as structuring principles for Lukács’s entire philosophy of praxis and are enriched with concrete content throughout. Moreover, these terms bear a dialectical interrelationship; each requires the other, and may be maintained rationally only in light of these overall conceptual links. If any term fails, then all terms fail. Indeed, these terms must logically lead to each other, each demanding and finding its completion only in the next. The existence of this conceptual logic, if demonstrated, proves that Lukács was more than methodologically indebted to Hegel. He critically appropriated the content of his system as well. So, in Lukács’s view, only the unity of mediation, totality and genesis, under the sign of praxis, could sustain a philosophical standpoint that escapes the eternal return of the self-same, namely, the intellectual reflection of a reified social order founded on the subsumption of content under form and quality under quantity. Lukács hoped that this would allow the workers’ movement to escape the twin dangers of reformism and messianic sectarianism, and produce a praxis that would consciously create the new, and in so doing both liberate labour and indicate the advent of truth and freedom in history. Thus, in its own terms – that is, for itself – Lukács’s philosophy of praxis exhibits three broad motions. It begins with a critique (which possesses his-

8 Lukács 1967b, Ch. 1.

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torical and sociological dimensions) which aims at clarifying the basic terms of analysis including his concepts of class, class consciousness, ideology, history, and so on. Its second motion passes from the discussion of reification to a metacritique of bourgeois philosophy, aimed at clarifying an ontological and methodological foundation for praxis. The third motion aims at realising praxis by proposing the increasingly political mediations whereby the proletariat might rise to its intended role as subject-object of history. So, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis – again, in its own terms – culminates with political praxis; that is, class struggle at the maximum objective possibility. This structure is visible not only in History and Class Consciousness, but in the other works that contribute to his 1920s philosophy of praxis. Indeed, the period in which Lukács elaborated a philosophy of praxis came to a close with his political defeat; namely, with his failed political intervention into the Hungarian Communist Party, centred on the ‘Blum Theses’ of 1928. As was suggested in the introduction, this structure is conceptually unviable.9 The immediate reason for this was suggested above. Lukács expressed praxis in theoretical and philosophical terms which confessed to a distance from praxis. It will be demonstrated below that Lukács was in fact aware of this pernicious distance from praxis; specifically, his engagement with the Young Hegelians, discussed in Section 8.3 shows an incipient awareness of this problem. Indeed, Lukács took care to outline a philosophy that provides resources with which the theorist might comprehend this distance in the hopes of bridging it. In this sense, there is also an immediate justification in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to develop a critique of philosophy as a part of a revolutionary methodology which might give the theorist the best possible chance of comprehending and contributing to praxis. If the theorist of praxis admits the constitutive abstraction of their theory prior to the advent of praxis and the test of practice, then there can be no guarantees as to whether theory will be equal to a new, emergent practice. In the face of such ambivalence, it is an ethical duty to strive towards the dereification of theory, even where this task looks forlorn. Thus, the theorist of praxis makes a wager on their soul that it will be adequate to history when history finally tests it. When regarded

9 It may be objected that Lukács, as an essayist, intended no such structure. After all, as was recalled in the introduction, in the original preface to History and Class Consciousness, he wrote: ‘The reader should not, therefore, look to these essays for a complete scientific system’. Nevertheless, immediately after this, Lukács asserted to the contrary: ‘Despite this the book does have a definite unity. This will be found in the sequence of the essays, which for this reason are best read in the order proposed’. The objection contained herein refers to the sequence which Lukács proposes. (Lukács 1967a, p. xli).

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as a propaedeutic to a theory of praxis (and later, actual praxis), the purpose of philosophy is not to produce true knowledge, but simply to tip the odds of such a wager a little further in the philosopher’s direction. Such theory is all too modest. So, this part will propose instead that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis ought to be read as culminating both in a critique of philosophy as such and a failed attempt to construct a philosophy of praxis. This connects this final part with the structure described above: Part 1 of this work represents the development of a critical theory of praxis. Part 2 develops this theory to a self-critical position, whereby it seeks completion in history and politics. Part 3 reflects, philosophically, on the concept of praxis generated so far. Philosophy is no longer a waystation; it is now the goal. Indeed, this structure has been adopted as the structuring principle of this work as a whole in the hope of revealing the immanent conceptual logic of Lukács’s position and the validity of this reading. Thus, the goal also informs the starting points. It will be shown that this approach – although it constitutes a radical critique of Lukács – makes it possible to dissolve the aporias that exist within the more obscure moments of his conceptual whole. I admit freely that these are ambitious claims. Yet, Lukács was well aware that ambition and even hubris were required of anyone wishing to say something true. For the moment however, it is worth noting a further manner in which this re-structuring implies the critique of Lukács alluded to above. I contend that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis possesses a deeper meaning in itself than it did for Lukács. Simply put, my argument is that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis generates a philosophical vantage point from which it becomes possible to survey the totality of his theory. Yet, Lukács did not explore this vantage point, nor did he draw any conclusions from it. In a sense, it remains latent in his philosophy of praxis. To put the same point in a slightly different way, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis never rose to the self-consciousness which it both demanded and made possible. To rise to this self-consciousness entails a critique of praxis. To return to the Hegelian language utilised above, Part 1 of this work accounted for theory in itself. In Part 2, theory was shown to develop, according to its inner logic, towards a self-criticism. So, in Part 2, theory became for itself. Yet theory for itself (as a self-critical theory of praxis which aims towards its own overcoming via the actualisation of praxis in the world) misidentifies its own truth as well as the truth of the praxis for which it purports to speak. This is to say, precisely because of the process of self-emptying required to reach this stage, a theory of praxis which is for itself has not yet grasped (or better, has forgotten) what it is in itself. Thus, it remains within reified thought. In itself, philosophy of praxis is subjective dogmatism and the vanity of the theorist who immedi-

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ately identifies his or her own viewpoint with the standpoint of the proletariat. For itself, philosophy of praxis empties itself of these vanities by way of a confession and a self-criticism. This prepares philosophy of praxis for its salvation by history and politics. Yet, in submerging itself entirely in these concepts, it becomes an objective dogmatism. This contains a more pernicious subjectivism – one that views itself as having already been overcome. To transcend this, distance from history and politics must be regained by further reflection; this time, a reflection that unites the subject and object. So, this part develops a theory of praxis which is in and for itself ; that is to say, a theory that has fully comprehended itself and has become a philosophy. It will be argued that Lukács’s explicit and oft-repeated desire to sublate the absolute with the concept of praxis is the outer barrier to this task, rendering it impossible and tragic. That Lukács intended praxis to bear the same weight of truth as Hegel’s absolute will be demonstrated extensively in Chapter 9. Of course, an extended discussion of the absolute as it occurs in Hegel is beyond the capacity of a monograph such as this. Rather, the notion of praxis as the absolute, as Lukács defined it, will form the basis of the critique of Lukács presented here. It will be argued that his concept of praxis, even understood in its most radical sense, is incapable of sustaining the demands Lukács places on it. The result of this is that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis must issue in a conceptual mythology. This problem forms the outer limit between Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and speculative philosophy. Additionally, there also exists an inner barrier. This was alluded to in Chapter 4, in which it was argued that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was made possible by his experience of the mediation of the antinomies of personal ethics. This experience culminated with his love for Gertrúd Bortstieber. Consequently, within his work, it is possible to detect the subterranean presence of a concept of love. Transposed into the political register, love becomes solidarity. This approach to the reconciliation between subject and object both underpins his concept of praxis and explains how Lukács made himself fit to express it. If this argument is true, it must also be admitted that Lukács never reflected on the importance of this experience or these concepts for his philosophy of praxis. This is partly due to (and perhaps is the result of) the low priority he accorded to individual experience. Of course, as I hope to have proved, there does exist within Lukács’s 1920s work a conceptual framework within which individual experience can be comprehended. Nevertheless, the fact that this is one of the most occluded aspects of his philosophy is suggestive of what I will argue; namely, that Lukács was incapable of the kind of subjective reflection necessary for speculative philosophy. By this, I don’t mean to suggest that Lukács ought to have included personal reflection. Rather, what I mean is that in order to enter the circle of

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philosophy, it is not sufficient to define philosophy as such – it is also necessary to define the philosopher. Just as Lukács’s philosophy of praxis approaches the shape of philosophy while also denying it, the philosopher of praxis approaches the practice of philosophy, albeit under the cover of antiphilosophy. As I will argue in Chapter 9, these two barriers, inner and outer, or subjective and objective, are not insurmountable. They need not result in the annihilation of Lukács’s philosophy. Rather, if the darkness created by collapse and conceptual mythology is encountered honestly, a pathway may be discovered whereby Lukács’s philosophy might reach a space in which it can think itself, and in so doing, generate a genuinely self-critical philosophy. Although praxis qua the absolute must be sacrificed in order to proceed along this path, it completes the demand that Lukács issued for historical materialism to be applied to itself. Similarly, if it is shown that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis can produce an intellectual space capable of sustaining a subjective reflection on the role of the philosopher, this satisfies Lukács’s demand for an ethics that can reconcile between subject and object. Indeed, only this approach to philosophy may maintain – in thought – the unity of mediation, totality and genesis, and in so doing, satisfy, in the form of a philosophy, the revolutionary ethical impulse with which Lukács’s philosophy of praxis began, without relapsing into the subjectivism of the contemplative stance. Lukács’s soul is preserved, even if the body of his theory perishes. This part may be therefore read as a work of mourning.10 The point of mourning, however, is not to forget but to return to life, strengthened and not weakened by loss. In pursuit of these goals, Chapter 8 will begin by outlining Lukács’s account of the antinomies of bourgeois thought. While this exploration commenced in Chapter 3, the aim there was to disclose the standpoint of the proletariat. Here, the intention is to reconstruct Lukács’s view of philosophy proper. Following this, the discussion will move to Lukács’s critique of Hegel – whom, as is well-known, he held to embody the highest development in philosophy. Following this, Lukács’s critique of Hegel as he developed it via his critique of the Young Hegelians (including Moses Hess, Lassalle, Feuerbach, and others) will be detailed. The intention of this part is to render explicit the terms of Lukács’s proposed overcoming of philosophy: he quite explicitly expected praxis to bear the weight of the absolute by uniting mediation, totality and genesis. The accomplishment of this unity in politics was outlined in the previous chapter. Here, the unity is considered philosophically. The aim of Chapter 8

10

This is meant in the sense that Gillian Rose proposes, in ‘The comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of modern philosophy’. Rose 1996, Ch. 3.

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is to establish the philosophical demands that Lukács ultimately applies to Hegel in order that they be applied to Lukács himself. So, Chapter 9 will detail the impossibility of satisfying these demands (for mediation, totality, genesis and praxis as the absolute) from the vantage point of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. It will begin by considering the most important philosophical critiques of Lukács. This will include a discussion of Feenberg, Rockmore, Kilminster and Hall. Although hardly the most important point, this will suggest a possible reconciliation between Lukács’s most astute defenders and his most perspicacious critics. Following this, in Section 9.2 two specific critiques of Lukács will be proposed: a historical and a philosophical critique. As Section 9.2 represents the most original part of this work, it will in some measure depart from the method I have observed throughout. Although I will attempt to predicate my critique of Lukács on the structure of his philosophy of praxis, I will here draw upon ideas developed extrinsically by other theorists for the first time: primarily, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Benjamin and Hegel. In so doing, I will attempt to show that the introduction of these figures is a logical extension of the problems that Lukács encounters. Still, it is hoped that the reader will be satisfied that I have made good on my promise to produce an immanent critique. Lastly, by way of conclusion, some of the consequences raised by Lukács’s failed philosophy of praxis will be suggested, as will the two alternatives that I believe emerge from the approach I have developed to speculative philosophy.

chapter 8

Lukács’s Critique of Philosophy 1

The Antinomies of Bourgeois Philosophy If ethical life is abstract, then it can only be recognised by recognising its abstractions, the cobwebs, and their determination. In this way actuality is recognised and another indeterminate non-actuality is not posited. Gillian Rose1

Just as Marxian political economy takes the immediacy of commodity production as its starting point and just as imputed class consciousness took bourgeois society as its starting point, a philosophical account of praxis must take reified philosophy as its starting point. Thus, Lukács’s account is developed on the basis of a groundbreaking discussion of classical German Idealism. Indeed, Lukács believed that German Idealism, by virtue of its peculiar historical situation, was uniquely suited to grounding this exposition. He wrote: Classical German philosophy … arises at a point of development where matters have progressed so far that these problems [of reification] can be raised to the level of consciousness. At the same time this takes place in a milieu where the problems can only appear on an intellectual and philosophical plane.2 Prior to tracing the development of Lukács’s argument, it must be noted that this claim already entails a problem. By suggesting that German Idealism constitutes the highest vantage point possible within bourgeois philosophy, Lukács tacitly endorses a periodisation of bourgeois society (mentioned above) into heroic, intermediate and degenerate eras. After all, he stresses that the unique contribution of classical philosophy is its ability ‘… to think the deepest and most fundamental problems of the development of bourgeois society through to the very end – on the plane of philosophy’, and as a result of this, it is able to resolve, in thought, the paradoxes of bourgeois life.3 This, however, occludes 1 Rose 2009, p. 216. 2 Lukács 1967a, p. 121. 3 Lukács 1967a, p. 121. Lukács’s critique of German Idealism is, of course, intended as a conceptual argument and not a history or a systematic logical treatment. In this sense, it is somewhat

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Lukács’s own immediate philosophical predecessors and milieu. Indeed, one of the most outstanding merits of Kavoulakos’s recent book Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis is that it very convincingly demonstrated that the hidden – and sometimes not so hidden – interlocutors in this discussion are the various philosophers associated with neo-Kantian philosophy – most importantly Rickert and Lask.4 Already, then, it must be admitted that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis did not only emerge as a result of his groundbreaking engagement with German Idealism, but also via his philosophical contemporaries. The upshot of this is that firstly, Lukács’s historicisation of German Idealism is at least partly incorrect; if Lukács’s intellectual environment was capable of equipping him to engage, as an interlocutor, with the classical German Idealist tradition, then it must have enjoyed at least some relationship with history and society that made this possible. Of what this relationship might consist was suggested in Chapter 4, which discussed the contemplative stance as the social grounds for both theory and philosophy. Secondly, it implies, contrary to Lukács’s oft-repeated evaluation (borrowed from Engels) that philosophy did not come to an end with Hegel, but rather that philosophy retained at least some of its capacity for reflecting upon the antinomies of bourgeois life and thought. This cuts against the narrative of philosophy’s decline and degeneration into irrationalism, post-Hegel, presented most stridently in The Destruction of Reason. The further consequences of this contradiction in Lukács’s thought will be discussed later. For the time being, as Lukács explains following the quote reproduced above, the milieu that produced German Idealism and the fact that it resolved the problems of bourgeois life in thought were twin factors preventing the discovery of the ‘… concrete problems of society and the concrete solutions to them …’.5 Instead, ‘… classical [German] philosophy is able … in thought – to complete the evolution of its own class … [and] to take all the paradoxes of its position to the point where the necessity of going beyond this historical stage in mankind’s development can at least be seen as a problem’.6 In addition to these observations, there are two further starting points for Lukács’s account of German Idealism: the universalisation of reification and the intellectual intuition of praxis. These are tightly interconnected. To begin with, he is clear that modern philosophy emerges on the basis of a universal, reified social totality, beside the point to criticise his reading of this or that philosopher – what matters is the overall logic and content of his argument. 4 See Kavoulakos 2018b, chs. 2 & 3. 5 Lukács 1967a, p. 121. 6 Lukács 1967a, p. 121.

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in which the commodity forms the main mediation between man and man, and between man and object, as distinct from the quasi-natural immediacy and commensurately religious consciousness of pre-modern society.7 The universality of reification results in the intuition that the world is produced by the rational subject and that by virtue of this, it may be known.8 It is important to note here that the knowing subject to which Lukács refers is no empirical or concrete subject. Rather, he speaks of the enlightenment conviction that the world may be comprehended insofar as the object of our comprehension can be reconstructed rationally: … there is a direct line of development whose central strand, rich in variations, is the idea that the object of cognition can be known by us for the reason that, and to the degree in which, it has been created by ourselves. And with this, the methods of mathematics and geometry (the means whereby objects are constructed, created out of the formal presuppositions of objectivity in general) and, later, the methods of mathematical physics become the guide and touchstone of philosophy, the knowledge of the world as totality.9 So, according to Lukács, classical modern philosophy begins with the immediate conviction of the unity of the subject and object. Abstract, calculable reason – of which mathematical reason is presumed to be the model par excellence – is assumed to lie at the heart of our capacity to know the world.10 Addi-

7 8 9 10

Lukács 1967a, pp. 110–11. Lukács 1967a, p. 111. Lukács 1967a, p. 112. In making this comment, it seems likely that Lukács had in mind – or at least, had been influenced by – Hegel’s comments in the introduction to the Science of Logic, in which the latter polemicised against the idea that mathematical reasoning may supply a model for rational philosophy. Hegel wrote: Spinoza, Wolf, and other have let themselves be misled in applying it [mathematical reasoning] also to philosophy and in making the external course followed by Notionless quantity, the course of the Notion, a procedure which is absolutely contradictory. Hitherto philosophy had not found its method; it regarded with envy the systematic structure of mathematics and, as we have said, borrowed it or had recourse to the method of sciences which are only amalgams of given material, empirical propositions and thoughts – or even resorted to a crude rejection of all method (Hegel 1991c, p. 53). Immediately prior to making this point, Hegel endorses his earlier argument against mathematical reasoning in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit. This was cited in Chapter 1 as a model for Lukács’s critique of formalism. It seems apposite, then, that a

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tionally, this situates philosophy historically by locating it within the atomised and abstract individuality of commodity based social relations as well as ‘… the development of the exact sciences … [which] in turn interacted fruitfully with a technology that was becoming increasingly more rationalised, and with developments in production’.11 The important thing to note at this initial stage is that although praxis (that is, the unity of subject and object) is the founding conviction of philosophy, both subject and object are rendered in abstraction. This is so much so that both are placed implicitly beyond any social grounding. As suggested above, this uninterrogated conviction conceals an unexamined assumption: classical German philosophy, in Lukács’s reading, naïvely equates abstract rationalism with both knowledge in general and ‘our’ knowledge, initially neglecting to nominate the concrete subject of this knowledge.12 Nonetheless, the radicalism of German Idealism consists in this intuitive conviction and the consequent desire to prove the universality of reason. Lukács contrasts this with the partial rationalism of pre-modern philosophies which, despite intensifying reason in partial domains (Lukács – in all likelihood, following Hegel – cites Hindu asceticism as an example), permitted an irrational remainder.13 By contrast, the ‘… situation is quite different when rationalism claims to be the universal method by which to obtain knowledge of the whole of existence. In that event the necessary correlation with the principle of irrationality becomes crucial: it erodes and dissolves the whole system. This is the case with modern (bourgeois) rationalism’.14 That is, the persistence of irrationalism within a system of modern reason presents a fatal dilemma. Left unchecked, it destroys the universality of reason, or at least renders it particular, contingent and irrational. Just as the divide between a rationally calculable exchange value and a qualitatively human use value structures Lukács’s grasp of commodity fetishism, this antinomy structures his account of modern philosophy.

11 12 13

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similar point made in one of Hegel’s final writings frames Lukács’s critique of the formalism of early modern philosophy which Hegel (as quoted above) describes as ‘absolutely contradictory’. Further, this provides additional proof of the unconscious speculative circularity of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Its highest points both inform and rely on its lowest. Lukács 1967a, p. 113. Lukács 1967a, p. 112. For example, Hegel refers to the ‘… Hindu fanaticism of pure contemplation …’ in the Philosophy of Right, suggesting that this is the outcome of the ‘freedom of the void’, i.e., negative freedom, insofar as it is allowed to remain ‘purely theoretical’ (Hegel 1991a, §. 5). Lukács 1967a, p. 114.

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In Lukács’s view, the problem of Kant’s thing-in-itself, which becomes an irrational frontier of knowledge, is one form of appearance of the problem of the irrational. Of this frontier, Lukács writes: To put it briefly, these problems [of the frontiers of knowledge] can be reduced to two great, seemingly unconnected and even opposed complexes. There is, firstly, the problem of matter (in the logical, technical sense), the problem of the content of those forms with the aid of which ‘we’ know and are able to know the world because we have created it ourselves. And, secondly, there is the problem of the whole and of the ultimate substance of knowledge, the problem of those ‘ultimate’ objects of knowledge which are needed to round off the partial systems into a totality, a system of the perfectly understood world.15 Here we see the above antinomy expressed in two apparently insoluble problems: the antinomy between the part and the totality and that between the contents and form of knowledge and its total substance (i.e., matter). These sets of problems both threaten the conviction that the world is knowable and rational and the presumed unity of subject and object upon which modern philosophy was founded. So, Lukács’s discussion of German Idealism traces attempts to solve this constitutive intellectual dilemma as it develops through Kant, Fichte, Schiller and Hegel. Although in Lukács’s summary, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason dismisses the problem of totality (i.e., matter or substance) as poorly put, this side of the question recurs in mythological form (in the guise of God, the soul, and so on).16 Nevertheless, in his attempt to solve the problem of the contents of knowledge via the noumenon or thing-in-itself, Kant uncovers the hitherto neglected subject of knowledge by way of the category of possible experience, or, intelligible contingency. Thus, Kant indicates towards the essential philosophical mediation (or, in a more Hegelian register, negation) of formal rationality. Lukács writes of Kant: ‘He repeatedly emphasises that pure reason is unable to make the least leap towards the synthesis and the definition of an object and so its principles cannot be deduced “directly from concepts but only indirectly by relating these concepts to something wholly contingent, namely possible experience”’.17 As an aside, it is highly noteworthy that in the introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit, experience is the concept that mediates between the 15 16 17

Lukács 1967a, p. 115. Lukács 1967a, p. 155. Lukács 1967a, p. 116.

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thing-in-itself and the thing for us, adding both novelty to our appreciation of the thing and the knowledge of the role of consciousness in creating the thingin-itself, as an estranged representation of its power of negativity.18 At any rate, for Lukács, Kant’s recourse to possible experience in light of the limits of pure reason highlights two interrelated problems: firstly, that the thing-in-itself delimits totality and secondly, that it reinforces the irrationality of the contents of perception. These are in fact the first antinomies to emerge on the basis of universal reason, as mentioned above. Although the attempt to universalise reason results in a system which is incapable of its own fulfilment, this need not destroy either the universality of reason or the search for a content which grounds rational form. Rather, it may issue a demand for formal coordination of many partial systems of forms. Yet this requires that the connections between the partial systems be seen as both necessary (i.e., not arbitrary) and immanent to the forms themselves. This implies a unifying principle, or at least a general tendency, upon which a whole system can be posited. So, the consequences – an entire formal system – are contained in its founding principle and can be deduced from this principle predictably and calculably. This formal totality might be infinite in the sense that the whole cannot be surveyed at once. But this does not interfere with the principle of systematisation. As Lukács explains: This notion of system makes it clear why pure and applied mathematics have constantly been held up as the methodological model and guide for modern philosophy. For the way in which their axioms are related to the partial systems and results deduced from them corresponds exactly to the postulate that systematic rationalism sets itself, the postulate, namely, that every given aspect of the system should be capable of being deduced from its basic principle, that it should be exactly predictable and calculable.19 That this is homologous to the logic of the market is quite clear. It is also clear to Lukács that this type of perfect system of forms is incompatible with the recognition of any content which in principle cannot be rationally derived from the principle of form. Thus, it reflects the subsumption of use values under exchange values – or the suppression of need by profit. That is to say, content and actuality, as they are experienced qualitatively, are in tension with rational

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Hegel 2018, §§. 86–8. Lukács 1967a, pp. 116–7.

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form. In Lukács’s view, the greatness of classical German philosophy is that it was alert to this dilemma. On the one hand, German Idealism tried to account for and overcome the irrationality of the contents of thought, and on the other, it held fast to the demand that reason be universalised. Resolving this contradiction in favour of either side results in irrationalism – either the concealed irrationalism of a schematic and dogmatic system and uncritical materialism or of the tragic acceptance of irrationalism and the abandonment of the demands for reason and systematisation. Here, therefore, we see two further instantiations of the core antinomy of bourgeois philosophy: dogmatic rationalism, which obscures the contents of life, and irrationalism, which attempts to save the contents of life at the price of systematisation.20 Both sides present a version of totality; the former does so explicitly, while the latter does so under the critical guise of denying systematic intelligibility which is, when all is said and done, still a totalising gesture. The existence of this antinomy did not deter Kant or other classical philosophers; in fact, it provided the impetus towards intellectual development. Yet, their awareness of the irrationality of contents transformed the impetus towards systematisation. While recalling that the creation of a formal system was intended to satisfy the demand for praxis – that is, to realise the intuition that reality was created – Lukács argued that the awareness of the irrationality of contents led Fichte to describe a hiatum irrationalem between the object being represented by knowledge and our knowledge of it.21 Lukács believes that this allows us ‘… to locate the point at which there appears in the thought of bourgeois society the double tendency characteristic of its evolution. On the one hand, it acquires increasing control over the details of social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand it loses – likewise progressively – the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole …’22 Incapable of a social solution (or even comprehension) of this contradiction, German Idealism elevated it into the realm of pure thought. Thus, that which Lukács elsewhere categorised as the tragic structure of bourgeois consciousness is reproduced in thought, alongside an attempted solution. While the obscurity of bourgeois class consciousness to itself precludes grasping the social origins of these intellectual problems, the rendering of this paradox in thought is a precondition for its resolution, both intellectual and social.23 Thus the essential divide in bourgeois thought is revealed as a divide 20 21 22 23

Lukács 1967a, p. 118. Lukács 1967a, p. 119. Lukács 1967a, p. 121. Lukács 1967a, p. 121.

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between form and content or between totalising universal reason and the particular experience upon which it is founded. While this opposition has not yet been purified into one between subject and object, the intuited unity of subject and object nevertheless issues an incessant demand for systematisation. The resulting antinomy recasts the problem as a tension between the parts and the whole. As Lukács explains, ‘If it [classical philosophy] was not to renounce its understanding of the whole it had to take the road that leads inwards. It had to strive to find the subject of thought which could be understood as producing existence without any hiatus irrationalis or transcendental thing in itself’.24 As has been argued, this ‘inward road’ is also a moment in the development of the standpoint of the proletariat. In that case, the problem of commodity production is resolved by reference to an experience of inner emptiness and objectification that is imputed to the proletariat. This experience of emptiness (analogous to absolute negativity in Hegelian philosophy or a state of grace in Weil), by discovering in the worker the self-consciousness of the commodity, forms the first mediation towards class consciousness. Later, a further inward road is encountered as the theorist who imputes the above consciousness to the proletariat encounters his or her own subjectivity and, in so doing, confesses to the insolubility of the problem of ethics within the contemplative stance. Here, then, without necessarily comparing the insight to the moments within his own philosophy of praxis, Lukács reflects upon this subjective experience of negativity as an essential moment in the development of philosophy. Consequently, while Kant established the terrain of the above antinomy, in Lukács’s account, Fichte was the one to develop it further by turning towards practice and the subject. Instead of seeking the identity of the creating subject and the object of knowledge in a formal rational system and leaving the subject unspoken and assumed, Fichte sought it in the activity of an identical subjectobject. As Lukács points out, Fichte’s intention was not to oppose the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason, but to establish their unity on the basis of practice. Instead of beginning with the facticity of the world and proceeding to a system, Fichte suggested instead that the deed is the originary point at which the facticity of the world and its form meet. Yet, Lukács rejected Fichte’s immediate subject-object on the grounds that it internalised the contradiction in the subject. As a result, … here, on a philosophically higher plane, we find repeated the same failure to resolve the questions raised by classical German philosophy. The moment that we enquire after the concrete nature of this identical 24

Lukács 1967a, p. 122.

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subject-object, we are confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, this configuration of consciousness can only be found really and concretely in the ethical act, in the relation of the ethically acting (individual) subject to itself. On the other hand, for the ethical consciousness of the acting individual the split between the self-generated, but wholly inward turning form (of the ethical imperative in Kant) and of the reality, the given, the empirical alien both to the sense and the understanding must become even more definitive than for the contemplative subject of knowledge.25 In the absence of a concrete practical concept like labour, the antinomies of bourgeois philosophy are pushed back into the subject and intensified. ‘That is to say, in nature and in the “external world” laws still operate with inexorable necessity, while freedom and the autonomy that is supposed to result from the discovery of the ethical world are reduced to a mere point of view from which to judge internal events’.26 So, in Lukács’s account, if Kant expresses the basic antinomies of the objective world of reification, Fichte renders these antinomies subjective. His position reflects what Lukács elsewhere terms the contemplative stance, split as it is between a contemplative pragmatic objectivism and an abstractly ethical subjectivism. Moreover, as Lukács points out, this does not solve the problem of the thing-in-itself, but transfers it into the subject whose essence becomes as much of a mystery to himself as the elusive contents of experience were to the comprehension of the object. ‘Even the subject is split into phenomenon and noumenon and the unresolved, insoluble and henceforth permanent conflict between freedom and necessity now invades its innermost structure’.27 Here, one discerns an echo of the Lukács of Soul and Form, tormented by an inability to create or act freely and ethically. The consequence of Fichte’s move is, once more, a formalism in which the ethical act of the identical subject-object becomes contentless. Content for the ethical act therefore must be borrowed from the world of phenomena. Yet, this returns the question to the dilemma encountered above. It leads either to a dogmatic exclusion of the irrational or, what amounts to the same thing, a reconciliation with the irrational in the form of the acceptance of the partiality of reason. Nevertheless, Lukács believes that this turn to the practical, on the level of ethics, points towards the principle of praxis. Of course, practical ethics, an ethics of contingent and subjective judgement ‘… remains imprisoned within the same barriers that proved so overwhelming to the objective and con25 26 27

Lukács 1967a, pp. 123–4. Lukács 1967a, p. 124. Lukács 1967a, p. 124.

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templative analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason’.28 On the level of the contemplative stance, which imports the antinomies of bourgeois life into the subject, it is not possible to solve the problem of the thing-in-itself. Rather, ‘[w]hen the question is formulated more concretely it turns out that the essence of praxis consists in annulling that indifference of form towards content that we found in the problem of the thing-in-itself’.29 This redirects the search for a philosophical principle of praxis. What is demanded is conception of form ‘… whose basis and validity no longer rest on that pure rationality and that freedom from every definition of content. In so far as the principle of praxis is the prescription for changing reality, it must be tailored to the concrete material substratum of action if it is to impinge upon it to any effect’.30 Only an account of praxis which sublates the antinomy between form and content, without fetishising either, may be distinguished between the ‘… theoretical, contemplative and intuitive attitude’.31 Thus, by mediating the antinomies of German Idealism, Lukács converts what previously had been an intuitive conviction in praxis into a rational principle. This line of argumentation also establishes philosophically the link between contemplative philosophy and philosophy of praxis. While this immediate principle of praxis remains an abstract regulative ideal, it redirects the argument towards the overcoming of the form/content divide on both the levels of the subject and the object. That is, it establishes that praxis must be material and grounded and that a subject adequate to it must be discovered. Lukács argues that this step is possible because ‘[t]heory and praxis in fact refer to the same objects, for every object exists as an immediate inseparable complex of form and content. However, the diversity of subjective attitudes orientates praxis towards what is qualitatively unique, towards the content and the material substratum of the object concerned’.32 Although at first glance it may appear somewhat ambiguous, this is an important transitional argument. Lukács is arguing that in principle, the objects of philosophy, whether these are located in society, nature or the subject, constitute an immediate unity of form and content. Hitherto, contemplative philosophy had sought to realise the principle of praxis in an essentially quantitative system, that is, by extending the principle of form. On the contrary, Lukács is clear that the principle of praxis must be grounded in what is ‘qualitatively unique’, and on ‘the content and the 28 29 30 31 32

Lukács 1967a, p. 125. Lukács 1967a, pp. 125–6. Lukács 1967 [1923], p. 126. Lukács 1967a, p. 126. Lukács 1967a, p. 126.

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material substratum of the object concerned’.33 This is to say, the essence of praxis is an activity which both expresses the content and material substratum of its object and which produces the new. If discovered, such a praxis would preclude the possibility of ever exhausting the contents of reality while also avoiding the bad infinity of the endless quantitative expansion of a formal system. While not under discussion here, this philosophical understanding of the capacity to create the new is, as we have seen, an essential attribute of Lukács’s concept of labour. Just as modern industry entails a contemplative and detached attitude towards production which demands an overcoming in the praxis of class struggle, the philosophical critique of contemplative philosophy demands a concept of praxis capable of sustaining novelty. In this way, a link may be established between labour and Lukács’s philosophical concept of praxis: ‘… when the indissoluble links that bind the contemplative attitude of the subject to the purely formal character of the object of knowledge become conscious, it is inevitable either that the attempt to find a solution to the problem of irrationality (the question of content, of the given, etc.) should be abandoned or that it should be sought in praxis’.34 Lukács believed that this praxis-oriented solution to the problem of form and content necessitates a ‘dialectic of concepts in movement’ as an alternative to Kant’s theory of the structure of concepts. In fact, Lukács acknowledges that Kant himself suggested this, while declining to pursue this proto-Hegelian line of reasoning.35 So, this observation forms the starting point for Lukács’s turn towards Hegel’s method. In the first place, Lukács suggests that the dialectic of concepts in motion allows us to structure reality itself dialectically: ‘… the moment that the object is seen as part of a concrete totality, the moment that it becomes clear that alongside the formal, delimiting concept of existence acknowledged by this pure contemplation other gradations of reality are possible and necessary to thought (being [Dasein], existence [Existenz], reality [Realität], etc. in Hegel) …’36 This discovery allows for the dynamisation of totality; no longer is a fixed or ahistorical principle required to underpin an entire, formal system. Rather, an interrelated dialectical hierarchy of concepts may be articulated corresponding to the different levels of reality. This is a powerful rejoinder to formalism, which is ultimately a variety of reductionism. Additionally, this opens the path to a historicisation of the logical totality. Indeed, to anticipate a later argument, this move (credited by Lukács to Hegel) 33 34 35 36

Lukács 1967a, p. 126. Lukács 1967a, p. 126. Lukács 1967a, p. 127. Lukács 1967a, p. 127.

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allows Marx to structure history according to a dialectical conceptual hierarchy that both preserves the telos of communism while allowing for unevenness. Seen in this light, history is witness to a progression of different forms of praxis (for instance, artistic, religious, political) each of which enjoys truth in its moment, and in so doing, discloses an aspect of reality. As these forms of praxis touch on definite aspects of being, the truth they uncover may be regarded as absolute, in the sense that it possesses its validity even outside of the historic epoch in which it was produced. In the process of history, this teleological organisation of concepts does not come to a close; higher developments of society produce new forms of praxis which reveal concrete and more profound levels of existence. As an example, Lukács cites Marx’s doctoral thesis, claiming that Moloch and the Delphic Apollo were real powers in the Ancient Greek world which, as a result of the exhaustion of Greek civilisation, gave way to more concrete and real powers.37 The point of this somewhat cryptic argument is that Lukács desires to radicalise historical relativism (namely, the irrational projected into history) in order to produce what might be called absolute historicism. This is the view that truth is both historically delimited and teleological, or, capable of progressing towards a higher truth. To put the same point another way, Lukács wishes to preserve the historicism of relativism while simultaneously denying that every age is ‘equally close to God’. This establishes a historical teleology which tends towards higher forms of praxis while refusing closure.38 This is further evidence of Lukács’s deeply Hegelian inheritance and marks the point where his account of the logical antinomies of bourgeois philosophy turns towards history. As an aside, this insight also represents a compelling solution to the dilemma that Marx posed with respect to Greek art when he observed (now famously) that: ‘… the difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek art and epic poetry are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable model’.39 If the art produced by an earlier society is regarded as more profound than that which is produced in modern times, then its truth may be conserved in an absolute historicism which praises the genius of each era as contributing towards an enriched and many sided absolute. Of course, Lukács believed that this work of preservation and recollection could be completed only under communism.

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 127–8. Lukács 1967a, p. 48. Marx and Engels 1987a, p. 47.

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To return to the narrative and introduce the next step, Lukács quotes Kant’s summary of the impasse: ‘“Thoughts without content are empty” ’, and ‘ “intuitions without concepts are blind”’.40 While all that Kant can offer is a methodological programme, Fichte’s solution to the impasse, although it reveals the principle of practice and points towards praxis, turned out not to be enduring. The freedom (of the [Fichtean, practical] subject) is neither able to overcome the sensuous necessity of the system of knowledge and the soullessness of the fatalistically conceived laws of nature, nor is it able to give them any meaning. And likewise the contents produced by reason, and the world acknowledged by reason are just as little able to fill the purely formal determinants of freedom within a truly living life.41 Here, the necessity of nature (qua fate) and the individually free ethical subject appear irreconcilably opposed. In the third section of the essay ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’, Lukács reframes this problem somewhat with the help of Plekhanov.42 Here, he raises the antinomy whereby on the one hand, humanity appears to be the product of its milieu and on the other, humanity appears to be the producer of its world. Thus, the original antinomy is now instantiated as that between the individual contemplative and ethicalpractical principles, both of which are expressions of the bourgeois individual who confronts his society and nature as a reified, law bound and objective world.43 In Lukács’s account, it is not society but nature which holds the conceptual key to overcoming this antinomy. Consistent with reification (and as we have seen), nature is instituted as either rational or romantic. In a sense, the latter, romantic conception is an obvious example of the irrationalist fetishism of qualitative content while the former entails the projection of a more or less radical, formal, Fichtean subjectivism onto the object. In addition to this, Lukács suggests a third concept of nature in which, via artistic representation, nature becomes a stand-in for a lost humanity. The significance of this is not what it says about nature. Similarly, Lukács is at pains to deny that it suggests a new golden age for art. Rather, he argues that when Schiller suggests that artistic representation of nature rep40 41 42

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Lukács 1967a, p. 133. Lukács 1967a, p. 134. Given Lukács’s hostility to mechanical materialism, it is safe to conclude that he refers to Plekhanov out of strategy and convenience rather than due to any deep appreciation for his philosophical materialism which was, if anything, more extreme than that of Lenin and Engels. Lukács 1967a, pp. 134–5.

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resents both a sense of lost authenticity and a longing to become once more what we were, that the latter reveals a new ‘principle of art’.44 Specifically, this principle allows us to aesthetically experience two crucial aspects of the philosophy of praxis. The first of these is man’s full separation from nature, under the regime of reification. The second is a longing for liberation from ‘… the false, mechanising forms of society …’ and a sense of ‘… man as a perfected whole who has inwardly overcome, or is in the process of overcoming, the dichotomies of theory and practice, reason and the senses, form and content; man whose tendency to create his own forms does not imply an abstract rationalism which ignores concrete content; man for whom freedom and necessity are identical’.45 Thus, in Schiller’s principle of artistic creation, praxis is felt and expressed emotively.46 This begins to supply the content without which thought is empty. Of course, Lukács is not suggesting that art spells the death of reification or that it constitutes actualised praxis. ‘What is crucial here is the theoretical and philosophical importance which the principle of art acquires in this period’.47 While in certain ways Kant and Fichte anticipate this solution, according to Lukács, Schiller has the honour of having developed it, generalising it beyond aesthetics and into play. Lukács writes: Schiller defines the aesthetic principle as the play-instinct (in contrast to the form-instinct and the content-instinct) and his analysis of this contains very valuable insights into the question of reification, as is indeed true of all his aesthetic writing … By extending the aesthetic principle far beyond the confines of aesthetics, by seeing it as the key to the solution of the question of the meaning of man’s existence in society, Schiller brings us back to the basic issue of classical philosophy. On the one hand, he recognises that social life has destroyed man as man. On the other hand, he points to the principle whereby man having been socially destroyed, fragmented and divided between different partial systems is to be made whole again in thought.48 This argument may be cited to demonstrate an aesthetic and affective dimension of praxis without which praxis is doomed to remain an intellectual schema. After all, as Hegel wrote in one of his earlier texts: ‘[i]ntellectualistic 44 45 46 47 48

Lukács 1967a, pp. 136–7. Lukács 1967a, pp. 136–7. Lukács 1967a, p. 137. Lukács 1967a, p. 137. Lukács 1967a, pp. 138–9.

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people believe their words are true when they address feeling, imagination, and religious needs in intellectualistic terms; they cannot conceive why their truth is resisted, why they preach to deaf ears. Their mistake is to offer stones to a child who asks for bread’.49 Where philosophy of praxis is concerned, this stage discloses, for Lukács, both the richness and the self-imposed limitation of classical German philosophy. In his account, Schiller himself recognised the narrowness and utopianism of this solution to the problem of reification. If humanity is only at home and fully human when at play, then the contents of life must be reduced to this vantage point; reification can only be overcome insofar as the contents of life are aestheticised. But this entails the aestheticisation of the world, ‘… which is an evasion of the real problem and is just another way in which to make the subject purely contemplative and to annihilate “action”’. Alternatively, ‘… the aesthetic principle must be elevated into the principle by which objective reality is shaped: but that would be to mythologise the discovery of the intuitive understanding’.50 Once again, echoes of Lukács’s earlier intellectual stages are audible – for example, the Lukács of The Theory of the Novel. At any rate, as Lukács notes, in the aestheticisation of reality or individual life, the old dilemma recurs in a more concrete form. This leads him to clarify his account of philosophy as such, quoting Hegel: ‘ “When the power of synthesis … vanishes from the lives of men and when the antitheses have lost their vital relation and their power of interaction and gain independence, it is then that philosophy becomes a felt need”’.51 That is to say, once the utopianism of an aesthetic stance is made clear, philosophy becomes the last sphere in which praxis can be thought. As a further aside, this also implies that art is dead, or at least, is reduced to a mere propaedeutic to social theory and political praxis. This pessimistic reading is certainly borne out in Lukács’s art criticism from the late 1920s and into the 1930s. Short of this shift to philosophy, the aesthetic stance (or any other abstract approach to praxis) merely mythologises creation. This does nothing to overcome the fragmentation imposed on both reality and the subject by reification. Interestingly, unlike Hegel, Lukács does not recognise religion as a necessary moment in the development towards the absolute. While he does critique religious utopianism later in History and Class Consciousness, this silence on the philosophical significance of religion is perhaps revealing. This said, in his analysis of the aesthetic stance (qua Schiller’s principle of art) Lukács implies the need for a totalising subject. For this to 49 50 51

Hegel 1971, p. 171. Lukács 1967a, pp. 139–40. Lukács 1967a, p. 139.

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emerge, two more moments must be discussed: history and labour. The former was mentioned above, in the context of Hegel’s shift to a dialectic of concepts in motion. The latter has been suggested in the discussion of artistic creation. These points have shifted the problematic, which no longer seeks to establish the createdness of reality on the basis of reified mathematical or geometrical reason. Rather, the task is to deduce the unity of this ‘disintegrating creation and to prove that it is the product of a creating subject. In the final analysis then: to create the subject of the “creator”’.52 Thus the solution to the problem of the production of reality is equally the problem of the production of the creator – and this is a historical problem. Here, Lukács makes his first philosophical approach to the unity of genesis and totality. Lukács’s development of the problem of classical German philosophy to this point also refines the terms of the problem: ‘… with the shift to a fragmented humanity in need of reconstruction (a shift already indicated by the importance of the problem of art), the different meanings assumed by the subjective “we” at the different stages of development can no longer be concealed’.53 This is to say that the problem has become more concrete and more conscious. The antinomies (previously expressed as mind and matter, body and soul, faith and reason, freedom and necessity) are clarified as culture advances – now, they are rendered as reason versus the senses, intelligence versus nature and finally, as absolute subjectivity versus absolute objectivity. This purification of the question not only allows the antinomies of bourgeois philosophy to be ordered into a conceptual hierarchy, but it makes possible the purification of the dialectical method itself. The genesis, the creation of the creator of knowledge, the dissolution of the irrationality of the thing-in-itself, the resurrection of man from his grave, all these issues become concentrated henceforth on the question of the dialectical method. For in this method the call for an intuitive understanding (for method to supersede the rationalistic principle of knowledge) is clearly, objective and scientifically stated.54 The development of the concept of form gave rise first to the idea of a logical system and subsequently, to logical method. This is possible precisely because Hegel purified abstraction and elevated the power of negativity to its highest intellectual peak. 52 53 54

Lukács 1967a, p. 140. Lukács 1967a, p. 141. Lukács 1967a, p. 141.

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This capacity to dwell intellectually in the spaces of pure abstraction and death is a hallmark of radical philosophy. This is no doubt why more moderate or doctrinaire readers of Lukács tend to miss the theme entirely. In praise of this method, Lukács quotes Hegel: “To transcend such ossified antitheses is the sole concern of reason. This concern does not imply hostility to opposites and restrictions in general; for the necessary course of evolution is one factor of life which advances by opposites: and the totality of life at its most intense is only possible as a new synthesis out of the most absolute separation”.55 Notwithstanding his differences with Hegel, Lukács regards himself as appropriating this method wholesale. Moreover, he is clear to distinguish Hegel’s dialectic from earlier variants. In Hegel, form is elevated to philosophical method. This makes possible a full awareness of the abstraction of form and allows the search for a content to take rational form; namely, history understood as the advent of the qualitative. To explain what he means by this, Lukács notes that in contrast to pre-Hegelian approaches to dialectical philosophy, in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic, Hegel consciously recasts all problems of logic in light of the ‘qualitative material nature of their content’, this resulted in a new logic of the ‘concrete concept, the logic of the totality …’.56 Thus, following Lukács’s re-staging of the mediations of the antinomies of German Idealism, what was expressed earlier as a methodological demand for totalisation is now established in its pure, logical-philosophical sense. In addition to elevating the antinomies to unprecedented concreteness, Hegel historicises subject and object: ‘… the dialectical process, the ending of a rigid confrontation of rigid forms, is enacted essentially between the subject and the object’.57 So, we are given genesis – that is, history understood as the product of estranged human activity. These two figures are absolutely interrelated; only on the basis of the unity of concrete totality and historical genesis is a solution to the problem of reification possible. Hence, Lukács argued that: … only if that were the case, only if ‘the true [were apprehended and expressed] not only as substance but also as subject’, only if the subject (consciousness, thought) were both producer and product of the dialectical process, only if, as a result the subject moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the

55 56 57

Lukács 1967a, p. 141. Lukács 1967a, p. 142. Lukács 1967a, p. 142.

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abolition of the antitheses of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved.58 Lukács stresses, moreover, that in Hegel’s approach ‘… objectivity tends in every respect in the opposite direction to that given it by Spinoza for whom every subjectivity, every particular content and every movement vanishes into nothing before the rigid purity and unity of this substance’.59 That is, in Hegel, substance strives towards subjectivity as much as the subject does towards substance. This further makes it clear that in Lukács’s reading of Hegel, the unity of subject and object is posed not merely as a logical question but also as a historical question. The unity of subject and object can neither be discovered simply in a linear account of history, nor in any specific concrete historical period. Rather, only when history is comprehended as genesis, in accordance with its immanent logic and in accordance with its having been made, can the unity of subject and object be grasped. Or, to put the same argument from the other side, Lukács writes: ‘But if genesis, in the sense given to it in classical philosophy [as the process of unity between subject and object], is to be attained it is necessary to create a basis for it in a logic of contents which change. 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’.60 History therefore, compels knowledge to construct its conceptual system on a real content which is qualitatively new. The concrete totality of history as an outpouring of the new makes it possible to resolve the antinomies of bourgeois thought. By absolutising this antinomy and raising it to consciousness, Hegel holds out the possibility that the separation of subject and object in toto may be overcome. Here, Lukács writes, ‘[t]he idea that we have made reality loses its more or less fictitious character: we have – in the prophetic words of Vico already cited – made our own history and if we are able to regard the whole of reality as history (i.e. as our history, for there is no other), we shall have raised ourselves in fact to the position from which reality can be understood as our “action”’.61 Given that this resolution is still expressed philosophically, the problem of a subject of action and genesis recurs. To proceed, Lukács argues that it is necessary to discover both the ‘site’ from which the antinomies of bourgeois thought may be overcome and from which a subject of genesis emerges, and to 58 59 60 61

Lukács 1967a, p. 142. Lukács 1967a, p. 143. Lukács 1967a, p. 144. Lukács 1967a, p. 145.

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exhibit that subject itself.62 This is where Lukács begins his critique of Hegel in earnest. This critique continues in ‘The Standpoint of the Proletariat’ and in other of Lukács’s 1920s works which will be considered below. Suffice it to say, for Lukács, Hegel’s world spirit, despite its concrete incarnation in various epochs of world history, was ultimately mythologising and abstract. Despite his best efforts, Hegel ultimately reinstated the antinomies of bourgeois thought in philosophically hypostatised form; his system, taken to its logical conclusion, arrives at the opposite of its starting point and becomes ahistorical. In Lukács’s view, this is equally where history stops for Hegel: Having failed to discover the identical subject-object in history it [Hegel’s philosophy] was forced to go out beyond history and, there, to establish the empire of reason which has discovered itself. From this vantage point it became possible to understand history as a mere stage and its evolution in terms of ‘the ruse of reason’. History is not able to form the living body of the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in the ‘absolute spirit’, in art, religion and philosophy.63 This is an important point, not only for Lukács’s account of Hegel, but for Lukács’s account of his own philosophy. For Lukács, history is the domain of the absolute, and any attempt to go beyond history risks the hypostatisation of the reified present. To transcend history with philosophy is impossible because … history is much too much the natural, and indeed the uniquely possible life-element of the dialectical method for such an enterprise to succeed. On the one hand, history now intrudes illogically but inescapably into the structure of those very spheres which according to the system were supposed to lie beyond its range. On the other hand, this inappropriate and inconsistent approach to history deprives history itself of that essence which is so important precisely within the Hegelian system.64 It is important to note that here (and elsewhere), Lukács transitions to a second sense of the term ‘history’. Grasped as genesis, history becomes both past history understood according to its conceptuality and history understood as a presentist outpouring of the new; that is, history as it unfolds. Indeed, it may well be said that genesis, in its full actuality, is only sustained by the unity of these terms. After all, no one seriously expects passed history to sustain the 62 63 64

Lukács 1967a, p. 145. Lukács 1967a, p. 147. Lukács 1967a, p. 146.

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absolute or praxis. We might just as well search for praxis and the absolute in archives or in museums. So, history as it unfolds provides the content that disrupts philosophy which, in the figure of Hegel, represents the highest stage reached by form – namely, the dialectical method. In the first place, this intrusion of history into the domain of reason appears irrational and accidental. Thus arise narratives of history as catastrophic or messianic.65 Yet these do not live up to the demand of genesis, that is, for history to be knowingly made. For this to be achieved, history must be comprehended according to Hegel’s method: only when ‘genesis, [is] detached from history, [and] passes through its own development from logic through nature to spirit’, may the historicity of all categories and their movement may be incorporated into the dialectical method.66 Reciprocally, genesis completes logic. Here, in philosophical terms, Lukács outlines the overarching structure of his philosophy of praxis. It is not enough for history to tend towards logic; rather, totality (logic understood as a fluid dialectical system) and genesis (history understood as a presentist unfolding and creation) must both undergo their own development and become receptive to each other. This is why, notwithstanding the important virtues of Kavoulakos’ account of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, he is wrong to place the burden of praxis entirely on history. He writes: ‘If contemplative practice is based on reified calculative rationality, transformative praxis corresponds to the historicization of the given world [Italics in original], the recognition of the antagonistic tendencies that permeate it and, thus, its dereification through strengthening that tendency which represents the new in history’.67 This represents a one sided formulation of Lukács’s concept of praxis which, as has been shown, emerges from the dialectical unity of genesis and logic. This is connected with what I regard to be Kavoulakos’s extremely sophisticated and yet ahistorical defence of Lukács. For example, he writes: ‘Following Lukács’s approach, I consider this general methodological orientation [towards the reconstruction of Lukács’s philosophy in light of its historical setting] as a central aspect of his theory that retains its actuality today’.68 Strictly speaking, this is tautological. If Lukács’s philosophy can only be understood in light of its time, as a reflection on the unity of logic and genesis as they interacted in the 1920s, then any attempt to preserve his method or the content of his system one hundred years after the fact contradicts both the terms of Kavoulakos’ statement and Lukács’s actual method. To 65 66 67 68

This aspect of Lukács’s thought brings him into critical dialogue with Benjamin. This will be explored below. Lukács 1967a, p. 147. Kavoulakos 2018b, pp. 172–3. Kavoulakos 2018b, p. 178.

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be sure: Kavoulakos develops the further concrete and political determinants of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis admirably and with considerable perspicuity. In this sense, his work assumes the structure with which Lukács himself endowed his philosophy of praxis; it culminates with a concept of political praxis. On this point, the restructuring of Lukács proposed here constitutes a reply. Whether or not it succeeds will play a big role in determining the adequacy of these critical comments. Of course, Kavoulakos clearly does acknowledge that ‘… the concrete analysis of today’s globalized capitalism cannot rely on analyses made one hundred years ago …’.69 Yet this admission is made with a somewhat evasive and all-too-passing brevity. It resembles an admixture of past and present more than a serious attempt at synthesis. After all, if Lukács’s philosophy of praxis remains essentially methodologically correct, it is necessary to demonstrate what strange historical logic has made this so, decades after the last workers’ council was crushed and more than a century after the last proletarian revolution on a ‘Lukácsian’ model was victorious. Moreover, the demonstration of ongoing validity would require that we discover a vantage point within the present that sustains Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. In the absence of a class conscious proletariat, this is quite difficult, not least of all due to Lukács’s unconcealed disdain for ‘bourgeois’ philosophy. To return to the account of Lukács’s critique of German Idealism, he argued that to avoid the hypostatised and mythological fate which he attributes to Hegel’s philosophy, the unity between logic and genesis must take the form of a real world consciousness which may inherit classical German philosophy. It is the ‘… continuation of that course which at least in method started to point the way beyond these limits, namely the dialectical method as the true historical method was reserved for the class which was able to discover within itself on the basis of its life-experience the identical subject-object, the subject of action; the “we” of genesis: namely the proletariat’.70 So, via Hegel, form is finally concretised as the logic of the concrete totality while content is concretised as the historical development of the proletariat, the subject of genesis which philosophy had previously only been able to intuit or represent aesthetically and abstractly. If we recall, in Lukács’s account of Kant, the missing totalising principle recurred, mystified, as God. Here, then, the proletariat both realises and overcomes God. Thus, praxis occupies the same position in Lukács’s philosophy as the absolute does in Hegel’s; namely, as the resolution of the antinomies of the understanding (i.e., the Hegelian term for reified thought) and as a knowledge that emerges out of estrangement and theology, into a living and 69 70

Kavoulakos 2018b, p. 178. Lukács 1967a, pp. 148–9.

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present truth. Of course, in Hegel, it is the philosopher who bears this truth. In Lukács, it is praxis. Yet, in the thought of both, the ancient Abrahamic prohibition on graven images is updated and radicalised. Well may they both say, after the Old Testament prophets, my God is the living God. With this we have Lukács’s fully elaborated critique of bourgeois philosophy. Ultimately, the radicalism and tragedy of bourgeois philosophy was that it … did, it is true, take all the antinomies of its life-basis to the furthest extreme it was capable of in thought; it conferred on them the highest possible intellectual expression. But even for this philosophy they remain unsolved and insoluble. Thus classical philosophy finds itself historically in the paradoxical position that it was concerned to find a philosophy that would mean the end of bourgeois society, and to resurrect in thought a humanity destroyed in that society and by it. In the upshot, however, it did not manage to do more than provide a complete intellectual copy and the a priori deduction of bourgeois society.71 If philosophy thus points towards a radical method which in turn points beyond bourgeois society, it nevertheless expresses this solution in the form of an insoluble problem. Lukács, as is widely known, believed that the class consciousness of the proletariat held the historical key to this logical problem. There are more or less radical formulations of this view. In the version that Lukács came to support later in the 1920s, the solution was extant from the moment of the advent of the proletariat as a class, at some point in the early nineteenth century, and it was Marx’s genius to discover it. A more radical version – which will be explained below – argues that the philosophical unity of logic and genesis (on the basis of the praxis of the proletariat) can only subsist in the actuality of revolution as a reflection on the dialectical dialogue between party (representing the concretisation of philosophy as it orients towards practice) and soviets (representing the concretisation of practice as it orients towards totality). This latter version possesses the advantage of radicalising and historicising the terms of the theory. It also casts the distance between actual praxis and the philosopher of praxis in sharp relief. This reconstruction has aimed at outlining the grounds that exist within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis for an account of itself. To round it out, a number of final points must be made before proceeding to his critique of Hegel. Firstly, insofar as philosophy of praxis exists in the form of a philosophy, it is an

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Lukács 1967a, p. 148.

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antiphilosophical philosophy. Philosophy of praxis, by pure virtue of its status as philosophy, remains an abstract negative hypothesis about the immanent direction of the world; both a recollection of and generalisation upon past praxis and a critically and theoretically inspired faith in the emergence of a united subject-object of history. This line of argumentation will be elaborated upon below. However, the achievement here is that conceptual movements which were previously presented as methodological (as in Chapter 1) or which were given content by the critique of ideology and in history and politics (in Part 2) can now be presented philosophically. Formal rationalism is mediated in order to reveal its antinomic character. These antinomies (between form and content, reason and irrationalism, freedom and necessity, the part and the whole, and so on) are shown to exist both in the account of the objective world (as with Kant) and in Fichte’s account of the practical-ethical identical subject-object. They are moreover ordered into a conceptual hierarchy which equally reflects the picture of the world built in Chapters 1 and 2. Each deepening of the antinomy reveals a deeper substratum of reality. So, the antinomies demand resolution; they intuit or represent a potential unity between subject and object. Insofar as these demands are upheld (and not sacrificed to a dogmatic logic or a partial ‘critical’ rationalism), they might lead, via Lukács’s discussion of nature and art, to a principle of labour which explains the unity of subject and object on the basis of creation. In turn, to escape the abstraction of a conceptual mythology, the principle of labour must be historicised. Reciprocally, the principle of labour (qua the standpoint of the proletariat) concretises history by revealing its inner, economic and class logic. Thus, mediation, totality and genesis have been reflected upon philosophically, in light of their social and historic grounds. The programmatic demand for the unity of logic and genesis is therefore established philosophically, that is, self-consciously. This clears the path for a philosophical idea of praxis. In Lukács’s mind, philosophy, insofar as it concretises itself, plays the role of a critical (and absolutely necessary) discussant in this project. As has been shown, this implies a further dialectic between theory and practice. The highest truth of this dialectic resides in political praxis and not in philosophy. So, philosophy of praxis seeks its own negation in history. Yet, as has been mentioned, this work proposes to immanently restructure Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. This chapter thus constitutes a philosophical reflection on the conceptual structure of Lukács’s overall argument. Moreover, if Lukács’s argument is taken seriously, his philosophy of praxis was made possible not by the impartial exercise of reason (and less still genius), but by the advent of actual praxis – the actual outpouring of the new in history. Actualised praxis itself is sunlight which guides the praxis-oriented philosopher from their

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cave of representations and into the concrete reality of which their forms are mere shadows. Of course, Lukács believed that duty enjoined the philosopher to return to the cave and to liberate its other inhabitants. Thus, for Lukács, the necessity of philosophy is that it must be realised in order to be overcome. As in Plato’s myth, this did not go down well with the inhabitants of the cave. By 1923, the sun was setting. The heat and light under which History and Class Consciousness was written was rapidly dissipating into twilight. By then, very little remained of the ‘now’ of the October Revolution. Of course, further development of the Soviet Union produced new historical phenomena – but this took place unconsciously. Or, more accurately, history moved on the basis of a more savagely totalising form of reification and a more grotesquely divided contemplative consciousness than had hitherto been seen. The USSR was blindly determined by global and internal forces well beyond the control of the growing bureaucracy, let alone the proletariat which was decimated during the Russian Civil War. The bureaucracy responded with an intensified and remorseless bureaucratic voluntarism. Read in this context, Lukács’s work represents the philosophical comprehension and recollection of the truth of October. Although he did not specify it, his account of philosophy, when applied to itself, places philosophy of praxis always after the praxis upon which it is based. By this criterion, philosophy of praxis would appear to violate the unity of totality and genesis prima facie. If this was the case in 1923, it was surely not visible to Lukács or to any of his contemporaries. However, the fate of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis must be even more stark today, one hundred years after the advent of the praxis upon which it was founded. To be fair, it might be suggested that this fact need not jeopardise this truth: if Lukács (following Marx) was willing to allow that Moloch and the Delphic Apollo were real powers, with a corresponding truth and praxis in the ancient world, we might equally concede that the proletariat was a real power in 1917, with a corresponding praxis. Yet, such rearguard manoeuvres as these raise impossible paradoxes for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. These will be the subject of discussion in Chapter 9. One final point remains. This reconstruction both contests and confirms Andrew Feenberg’s and Konstantin Kavoulakos’s emphasis on Lukács’s neoKantian inheritance.72 Although his debt to Hegel is self-evident, the recurrence of the dialectic between content and form (albeit at increasing levels of concretion), as well as his relative lack of systematisation, would appear to place Lukács in an awkward halfway position between Hegelian philosophy

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Feenberg 2014, p. x, Kavoulakos 2018b, Chs. 2, 5, 6.

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and radical neo-Kantianism. Yet as Lukács’s emphasis on history as the absolute shows, his philosophy of praxis seeks a reconciliation and truth beyond all antinomies; he sought to transcend a conception of philosophy as method. This study has sought to shed light on this tension by organising Lukács’s philosophy of praxis systematically on the basis of conceptual logic which exists within it, but of which Lukács himself was not conscious. The next section, which outlines Lukács’s critique of Hegel, will push this exercise further. It is hoped that those aspects and consequences of Lukács’s thought which push beyond his position will be revealed. Equally, however, this exercise aims at revealing the immanent contradictions in Lukács’s position (which were referred to briefly above). In a sense, therefore, the next sections will attempt to establish the unity of logic and genesis within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. That is, the aim is to apply Lukács’s method to himself. If Lukács famously tried to ‘out-Hegel’ Hegel, then the present task is to ‘out-Lukács’ Lukács.

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Lukács on Hegel and the Absolute Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought. If we cannot think the absolute this means that it is therefore not our thought in the sense of not realised. The absolute is the comprehensive thinking which transcends the dichotomies between concept and intuition, theoretical and practical reason. It cannot be thought (realized) because these dichotomies and their determination are not transcended. Gillian Rose73

As was demonstrated in Part 2, the full articulation of actual praxis resulted from the real world synthesis of genesis and history. Intellectually, this was achieved by a Marxism embodied in the perspective of a party which had comprehended its present situation. Practically, this was achieved insofar as the perspective of the party proved itself in class struggle. That is to say, the imputed consciousness of the proletariat comprehends the logic and genesis of the social totality, and in so doing, lifts its comprehension to a level of concreteness adequate to an intervention into day-to-day politics. The result of this is praxis which reveals a previously hidden new truth of history. Similarly so, this section will demonstrate that philosophy of praxis results from an attempted philosophical unity of logic and genesis. As has been shown, in the con-

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Rose 2009, p. 218.

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text of his critique of Hegel, Lukács also renders the two terms as method (or form) and content, which, as noted, gives a neo-Kantian inflection to the argument. Insofar as Lukács proposes a philosophical comprehension of praxis, he remains on the level of reification, albeit self-consciously so. Nevertheless, he regarded this philosophical comprehension of praxis as a theoretical prerequisite for actual praxis. The final step in this process is Hegel. The reconstruction of Lukács’s critique of Hegel (the subject of this section and the next) therefore completes the re-assembly of Lukács’s whole philosophy of praxis. Simultaneously, these sections will specify the conceptual demands that must apply to the philosophy of praxis itself. This lays the final groundwork for the critique of philosophy of praxis presented in Chapter 9. In short, Lukács believed that Hegel anticipated and worked towards the synthesis of logic and genesis by historicising the antinomies of bourgeois thought and by seeking a concrete, non-transcendental subject-object of history. He wrote: But here [in the idea of history as genesis], we find once again, quite concretely this time, the decisive problem of this line of thought: the problem of the subject of action, the subject of genesis. For the unity of subject and object, of thought and existence which the ‘action’ undertook to prove and to exhibit finds both its fulfilment and its substratum in the unity of the genesis of the determinants of thought and the history of the evolution of reality. But to comprehend this unity it is necessary both to discover the site from which to resolve all these problems and also to exhibit concretely the ‘we’ which is the subject of history, that ‘we’ whose action is in fact history.74 Hegel, in Lukács’s view, despite his rigour and intention, was unable to unify history and genesis. This resulted in the ossification of his philosophy. In ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’, Lukács famously argued that a synthesis is made possible only by the standpoint of the proletariat; namely, a real world standpoint which makes it possible to comprehend rationally the historic unification of subject and object. This standpoint was clearly unavailable to Hegel, hence his failure and hence the significance, in Lukács’s opinion, of Marx’s transformation of the Hegelian dialectic. Consequently, Lukács argued that Hegel’s proposed subject-object of history – world spirit – became a mythology. Ultimately, Lukács’s explanation for this is that Hegel occupied a unique historical space. While this space allowed him to comprehend the pure rational 74

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contradictions of capitalism, Hegel nevertheless wrote prior to the emergence of the proletariat and therefore, prior to the historical solution represented by it. This is Lukács’s historical critique of Hegel. As an aside, this periodisation grants Hegel an exemption from the increasingly moralistic criticism Lukács applies to post-Hegelian philosophy. While it was impossible for Hegel to solve the constitutive problem in his philosophy, for later theorists to fail to recognise the solution (existent in the form of the workers’ movement) could only result from ignorance, the blinkeredness of their class situation unexamined, or evil. Commencing his logical critique, Lukács argued that Hegel’s proposed subject-object of history, World Spirit, fails to live up to Hegel’s demand for historical concreteness. The ‘we’ that he [Hegel] was able to find is, as is well known, the World Spirit, or rather, its concrete incarnations, the spirits of the individual peoples. Even if we – provisionally – ignore the mythologising and hence abstract character of this subject, it must still not be overlooked that, even if we accept all of Hegel’s assumptions without demur, this subject remains incapable of fulfilling the methodological and systematic function assigned to it, even from Hegel’s own point of view. Even for Hegel, the spirit of a people can be no more than a ‘natural’ determinant of the World Spirit, i.e. one ‘which strips off its limitation only at a higher moment, namely at the moment when it becomes conscious of its own essence and it possesses its absolute truth only in this recognition and not immediately in its existence’.75 So, the spirit of a people – the most concrete incarnation of world spirit – only appears as the subject of history and the author of its deeds. The appearance belies a dualism. World spirit qua reason makes use of the natural character of peoples, which despite their contingency and irrationality, may transiently correspond to the requirements and idea of world spirit. World spirit therefore uses peoples as a means. The result is that the self-consciousness of the subject-object of history necessarily occurs beyond and outside of history. Selfconscious action is abolished in history; all historical actors, despite their best intentions, are victims of the famous ruse of reason. As Lukács writes, this entails serious consequences for both praxis and the comprehension of history: ‘… in this way the deed becomes something transcendent for the doer himself and the freedom that seems to have been won is transformed unnoticed

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into that specious freedom to reflect upon laws which themselves govern man, a freedom which in Spinoza a thrown stone would possess if it had consciousness’.76 If the historic deed transcends the doer, then so too does freedom, and with it, the possibility for ethical action. It would also seem that this position entails irrational consequences for the comprehension history; that is to say, as Lukács observes, it precludes any vantage point within history as it unfolds, from which history itself can be comprehended. Hegel, however, in Lukács’s account, avoids this by departing the terrain of history as such: Having failed to discover the identical subject-object in history it [Hegel’s philosophy] was forced to go out beyond history and, there, to establish the empire of reason which has discovered itself. From this vantage point it became possible to understand history as a mere stage and its evolution in terms of ‘the ruse of reason’. History is not able to form the living body of the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in the ‘absolute spirit’, in art, religion and philosophy.77 In Lukács’s view, this shift is bought at a high price. Lukács argues that it impinges on Hegel’s grasp of history as well as his rationalism and system, introducing a fatal divide between the two. Writing that history is ‘… much too much the natural, and indeed the uniquely possible life element of the dialectical method …’, Lukács argues that in Hegel’s philosophy, ‘… history now intrudes illogically but inescapably into the structure of those very spheres [of absolute spirit] which according to the system were supposed to lie beyond its range. On the other hand, this inappropriate and inconsistent approach to history deprives history itself of that essence which is so important precisely within the Hegelian system’.78 A number of consequences flow from this. Before noting them, however, it is worth pointing out that in two places in History and Class Conscious76

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Lukács 1967a, p. 146. Even so, Lukács praises Hegel’s ‘realistic genius’. He continues to write: It is doubtless true that Hegel whose realistic genius neither could nor would disguise the truth about the nature of history as he found it did nevertheless seek to provide an explanation of it in terms of the ‘ruse of reason’. But it must not be forgotten that the ‘ruse of reason’ can only claim to be more than a myth if authentic reason can be discovered and demonstrated in a truly concrete manner. In that case it becomes a brilliant explanation for stages in history that have not yet become conscious. But these can only be understood and evaluated as stages from a standpoint already achieved by a reason that has discovered itself (Lukács 1967a, p. 146). Lukács 1967a, pp. 146–7. Lukács 1967a, p. 147.

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ness, Lukács suggests a tension within Hegel’s overall system, which manifests as a tension, between The Phenomenology of Spirit and his system as a whole. This tension is first referred to in the original preface, albeit in a relatively undeveloped way; it is unclear which works Lukács has in mind when he speaks of Hegel’s ‘system’.79 However, later on, in a footnote, Lukács clarifies his meaning somewhat. He notes that in The Phenomenology, ‘ “Absolute spirit” is the truth of the preceding moment, of history and therefore, in accordance with Hegel’s logic, it would have to have annulled and preserved history within itself’.80 This, however, as has been outlined, would just as much annul the dialectical method which is intimately dependent on history not only for its material, but for its own grounds. In Lukács’s reading, in the Philosophy of Right Hegel alludes to this problem and ultimately reinstates history: However, in the dialectical method history cannot be so transcended and this is the message at the end of Hegel’s Philosophy of History where at the climax of the system, at the moment where the ‘absolute spirit’ realises itself, history makes its reappearance and points beyond philosophy in its turn: ‘That the determinants of thought had this importance is a further insight that does not belong within the history of philosophy. These concepts are the simplest revelation of the spirit of the world: this in its most concrete form is history’.81 It could very well be argued, as does Gillian Rose, that such a reopening of history occurs in the conclusion of Hegel’s major works, rendering him a far less monolithic thinker than is usually asserted.82 It is interesting to note that Lukács, albeit briefly, seems to hold this possibility open. To fully pursue this question would, however, require a detailed reading of Hegel’s major works in light of both Rose’s and Lukács’s later scholarship on Hegel. In addition to being well beyond the scope of this study, what matters for now is not so much whether Lukács is right or wrong about Hegel, but the content of his critique of the latter and the manner in which it contributed towards the former’s philosophy of praxis. In Lukács’s view, Hegel’s sacrifice of history at the altar of reason leads to irrational consequences. Firstly, it renders the relationship between reason and history accidental; the emergence of philosophy, as the thought of the united subject and object, is delinked from any specific historic period or context. In 79 80 81 82

Lukács 1967a, p. xlv. Lukács 1967a, p. 216. Lukács 1967a, p. 216. See Rose 2009, Ch. 7, ‘With What Must Science End?’.

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fact, Lukács claims to quote Hegel himself on this point: ‘When, where and in what form such self-reproductions of reason make their appearance as philosophy is accidental’.83 The reference supplied in History and Class Consciousness for this seemingly out of character (or at least, out of context) quote is, however, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Furthermore, the reference supplied for this reference is solely ‘S.W. II, p. 350’. This would appear to refer to Volume II of Marx and Engels’ selected works. However, Ludwig Feuerbach does not appear in this volume of their selected works, let alone in the vicinity of page 350.84 At the very least, given this ambiguity, Hegel’s alleged confession that philosophy and history are only linked accidentally, as Lukács quotes him, should not be taken at face value. Nevertheless, by removing reason from history, Lukács continues to argue that Hegel causes history to relapse into ‘… the irrational dependence on the “given” which it had just overcome’. This, in turn, reacts back on reason: ‘And if its [history’s] relation to the reason that comprehends it is nothing more than that of an irrational content to a more general form for which the concrete hic et nunc, place, time and concrete content are contingent, then reason itself will succumb to all the antinomies of the thing-in-itself characteristic of pre-dialectical methods’.85 So, both history and philosophy become opaque and incomprehensible to themselves, thus reinstating the pernicious dualisms of form and content and of reason and irrationality, characteristic of reified thought. A second consequence of the relationship between history and philosophy that Lukács diagnoses is that it forces Hegel to predict the end of history, and in turn, to proclaim his own philosophy as the consummation of truth. Lukács links this to Hegel’s alleged infamously conservative politics: ‘This necessarily means that even in the more mundane and properly historical spheres, history must find its fulfilment in the restored Prussian state’.86 How this judgement sits with Lukács’s acknowledgment (concealed within a footnote, as noted above) that the Philosophy of Right in fact concludes with a return to history is not explored. The third consequence of Hegel’s detachment of philosophy from history is that genesis must find a way to ground itself, at least partially freed from history. However, given that all form is absolutely historical, this can only lead to the mystification of history.87 This is to say, without a vantage point within history from which to reflect upon itself, the dialectical method mystifies the real, 83 84 85 86 87

Lukács 1967a, p. 221. Cf. Marx and Engels 1949. Lukács 1967a, p. 147. Lukács 1967a, p. 147. Lukács 1967a, p. 147.

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historical genesis which is its genuine ground. The result is unstable. On the one hand, there exists a tendency towards formalism and idealism. Yet at the same time, ‘… the historicity of all categories and their movement intrudes decisively into the dialectical method and as dialectical genesis and history necessarily belong together objectively and go their separate ways because classical philosophy was unable to complete its programme, this process which had been designed to be suprahistorical, inevitably exhibits a historical structure at every point’.88 If in Hegel, then, history freezes over and movement becomes mere semblance, this also causes the method to harden and become contemplative. ‘And since the method, having become abstract and contemplative, now as a result falsifies and does violence to history, it follows that history will gain its revenge and violate the method which has failed to integrate it, tearing it to pieces’.89 This is how Lukács elaborates on Marx’s critique of Hegel as mythological. It only appears that world spirit, as the subject-object, makes history. This reduces history to a semblance, at the service of the absolute idea. This said, for Lukács, despite its mythological aspect, this semblance has a positive aspect; Hegel’s incomplete historicism was crucial to breaking through the impasse in which classical German philosophy had found itself. With this, Lukács returns to his suggestion that Hegel stands on the borderline between two eras – his historicisation of reason was necessarily incomplete. On its own terms, it tends towards formalism and all the attendant antinomies of bourgeois philosophy. Yet, in the same way that all antinomic thought demands reconciliation, to Lukács, Hegel’s method and system demand their completion in historical materialism, via the standpoint of the proletariat.90 This modifies the question. Now we may ask, specifically how does historical materialism overcome Hegel’s philosophy? Or, phrased differently, if Hegel’s method rebels against his system and if his dialectic tends to become a form, divorced from the real content of history, then exactly where does this occur, and with what new content may Marxism revolutionise and complete Hegel’s logic? Lukács’s answers to this are fundamental for his philosophy of praxis. His starting point is that in Hegel, history has already come to an end, and knowledge, including philosophical knowledge, can only emerge post festum. In making this argument, Lukács reproduces Marx’s assessment, suggesting that Hegel’s proposed inner dialectic of history was an illusion, and that his knowledge was ‘… no more than knowledge about an essentially alien material’.91 In addition to impoverishing 88 89 90 91

Lukács 1967a, pp. 147–8. Lukács 1967a, p. 148. Lukács 1967a, pp. 148–9. Lukács 1967a, p. 16.

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the philosopher’s knowledge of real history, this impoverishes the philosopher as well: ‘… the philosopher appears merely as the instrument by which absolute spirit, which makes history, arrives at self-consciousness after the historical movement has been completed. The philosopher’s role in history is thus limited to this subsequent consciousness, for the real movement is executed unconsciously by the absolute spirit’.92 Following the young Marx then, (or at least, the young Marx to whom he had access in the early 1920s), Lukács argues that to liberate Hegel’s radical method, Marx historicised Hegel: ‘… he [Marx] radically transformed all the phenomena both of society and of socialised man into historical problems: he concretely revealed the real substratum of historical evolution and developed a seminal method in the process’.93 This requires more than the sociological metacritique of philosophy. Rather, to maintain and surpass the radicalism of Hegel’s thought, it required Marx to discover a dereifying consciousness in reality. As Lukács points out, this explains why the efforts of the young Marx were so persistently directed towards the refutation of various wrong theories of consciousness.94 As is well-known, Marx’s solution was the proletariat. Yet in Lukács’s view, Marx’s realism, despite a few early hyperbolic formulations, forbade any naïve identification of the proletariat, in its immediacy, with the self-consciousness of history. In Lukács’s summary of Marx, the point was rather to discover the immanent tendencies of history which emerge, in the present, in a process of becoming conscious. That is, the young Marx’s breakthrough points towards a philosophy of praxis that Lukács was able to complete in light of the October Revolution.95 While for Hegel the truth is something that may be arrived at only after the fact, for Marx and Lukács, the truth is emergent in history as the unfolding of the present. This informs their critique of philosophy as such. As Lukács writes: The reified world appears henceforth quite definitively – and in philosophy, under the spotlight of ‘criticism’ it is potentiated still further – as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed to us humans. Whether this gives rise to ecstasy,

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Lukács 1967a, p. 16. Lukács 1967a, p. 17. Lukács 1967a, p. 77. As Adorno points out, it is interesting and significant that Marx himself made no attempt to complete his own philosophy of praxis, turning instead to the practice of politics (during 1848 and the First International) and to the elaboration of theory, in Capital (Adorno 1998a, §. 14).

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resignation or despair, whether we search for a path leading to ‘life’ via irrational mystical experience, this will do absolutely nothing to modify the situation as it is in fact.96 This is a crucial point, to which the discussion will return. For the moment, its significance is that the truth, in Lukács’s account of Hegel, emerges after the fact. As such, it is the recollection of an already dead truth; a Golgotha and a mournful preservation.97 On the other hand, for Lukács, the emergence of the truth of history – in the form of actual praxis – must occur in the present. This is why, as noted, when Lukács discusses history, it bears a dual meaning, referring to both the completed sequence of historical events and to the present day unfolding of history. History, for Lukács, although clearly directed towards the overcoming of reification, is therefore an open process. A workers’ revolution is simply a qualitative step towards the realm of freedom in which the new is consciously produced. Insofar as philosophy contributes to this, it is required to overcome itself. In this sense, as argued, philosophy of praxis stands as an antiphilosophical philosophy. Insofar as it opposes philosophy, it opposes that part of itself which is abstract and reified. It seeks its own salvation through the unfolding of real world history. This, in turn, informs a further distinction Lukács establishes between his philosophy of praxis and Hegel’s speculative philosophy. Lukács writes: ‘Hegel’s programme: to see the absolute, the goal of his philosophy, as a result remains valid for Marxism with its very different objects of knowledge, and is even of greater concern to it, as the dialectical process is seen to be identical with the course of history’.98 Here, Lukács identifies history itself – understood as a present day unfolding – with the absolute. According to Lukács, Marxism refuses to see the ‘categories of reflection’ as a permanent stage of knowledge, transcending both bourgeois society and thought. This breakthrough results in ‘… the discovery of dialectics in history itself. Hence dialectics were not imported into history from outside, nor is it interpreted in light of history (as often occurs in Hegel), but is derived from history made conscious as its logical manifestation at this particular point in its development’.99 This fits with Lukács’s conception of historical materialism as the emergent self-consciousness of the present as with his argument that bourgeois society is unconsciously and tragically dialectical. 96 97 98 99

Lukács 1967a, p. 110. Hegel 2018, §. 808. Lukács 1967a, p. 170. Lukács 1967a, p. 177.

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This, however, raises further questions about historical change. As detailed, Lukács, criticises reified accounts of historical change which view history as either a quantitative process or as irrational and catastrophic. These views transform change into stasis and divorce history from a creating subject. Lukács argues that Marxism, which inhabits the standpoint of the potential subjectobject of history, by virtue of this standpoint, is uniquely suited to perceive and comprehend qualitative change. Speaking of the chain of mediations that the proletariat must grasp, in order to rise to a concrete and totalising view of society, Lukács writes: ‘… the series of mediations may not conclude with unmediated contemplation: it must direct itself to the qualitatively new factors arising from the dialectical contradictions: it must be a movement of mediations advancing from the present to the future’.100 These lines were quoted in Chapter 6 to establish the negative and hypothetical character of imputed class consciousness. Here, however, the identification of the qualitatively new with a motion between present and future is what matters. Of course, Lukács assumes that the future, namely communism, is no longer comprehended in a utopian or transcendent sense. Rather, he is arguing that the production and comprehension of the qualitatively new is identical with the praxis of the proletariat, which is, in turn, the immanent logic of history, culminating in a present day consciousness which, for the first time in history, knowingly produces the future. Thus the impasse reached by Hegelian philosophy – in which humanity is merely the unconscious instrument of world history – is overcome. Both the past and the future are dereified by a self-knowing and self-creating present. This, in Lukács’s argument, marks a fundamental transformation not only in the content of philosophy, but in its form. He argues that only Marxist dialectics are truly ‘modern’, in contrast to ‘ancient’ dialectics. The high point and limit reached by ‘ancient’ dialectics, according to Lukács, is the premise that ‘… that things should be shown to be aspects of processes’.101 While this uncovers the contradictions underpinning movement, it leaves the moved object untouched: It may be the case, as Heraclitus says, that one cannot step into the same river twice; but as the eternal flux is and does not become, i.e. does not bring forth anything qualitatively new, it is only a becoming when compared with the rigid existence of the individual objects. As a theory of totality eternal becoming turns out to be a theory of eternal being; behind

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Lukács 1967a, p. 179. Lukács 1967a, p. 180.

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the flowing river stands revealed an unchanging essence, even though it may express itself in the incessant transformations of the individual objects.102 If this metaphor reveals the limit of the dialectics of the ancients (and, as Lukács says, the difference between idealist and materialist/historical dialectics), it also reveals something about reification. As Lukács points out, the movement of capital produces the same seemingly paradoxical combination of ceaseless motion and stasis; in this sense, the perpetual motion of ‘ancient’ dialectics resembles a theoretical hypostatisation of the bad infinity of an eternal quantitative sequence. As these comments imply, in Lukács’s view, Hegel stands at the point of transition between ancient and modern dialectics, combining both elements. This, therefore, is a more concrete elaboration of the tendency towards formalism that Lukács identifies in Hegel. According to Lukács, Marxist dialectics recognises the ceaseless movement of capitalism. Marxism goes further, however, by understanding that this produces universal objectification for humanity. This renders Marxism capable of understanding two new things: firstly, that social facts are not impartial objects, but relationships between people. Secondly, coupled with the critique of political economy and the commodity form, this insight allows Marxism to perceive that the proletariat, raised to self-consciousness, is in a position to destroy the practical basis of reification.103 Although Lukács’s practical and ultimately praxis-oriented alternative to Hegel’s absolute is outlined here, the reassertion of a historicised humanism is by no means Lukács’s final word on the absolute. In Section 5 of ‘The Standpoint of the Proletariat’, Lukács critiques the immediate, anthropological transformation of humanity into an absolute: For if man is made the measure of all things, and if with the aid of that assumption all transcendence is to be eliminated without man himself being measured against this criterion, without applying the same ‘standard’ to himself or – more exactly – without making man himself dialectical, then man himself is made into an absolute and he simply puts himself in the place of those transcendental forces he was supposed to explain, dissolve and systematically replace. At best, then, a dogmatic metaphysics is superseded by an equally dogmatic relativism.104 102 103 104

Lukács 1967a, p. 180. Lukács 1967a, pp. 180–1. Lukács 1967a, p. 187.

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In addition to criticising moralistic, Feuerbachian humanism, this is interesting because it sets up an additional demand for dereifying philosophy. It shows that the proposed subject of dereification must itself avoid transforming into a transcendental abstraction. So, while Lukács’s critique of reification may well be described as humanist, he nevertheless argues that the concept of humanity has to be historicised, related to the totality and be shown to give way to more determinate concepts – namely, classes. The proletariat becomes the bearer of human universality. Moreover, this suggests that the concept of the proletariat itself must avoid becoming a transcendental goal as this would result in the dogmatic metaphysics and relativism which inevitably arise on the basis of transcendental thought. As implied above, Lukács in fact argues that relativism presupposes an essentially static world. Thus ‘… it is only meaningful to speak of relativism where an “absolute” is in some way assumed. The weakness and half-heartedness of such “daring thinkers” as Nietzsche or Spengler is that their relativism only abolishes the absolute in appearance’.105 This is also where Lukács introduces some of his most important comments about the absolute. He writes: For, from the standpoint of both logic and method, the ‘systematic location’ of the absolute is to be found just where the apparent movement stops. The absolute is nothing but the fixation of thought, it is the projection into myth of the intellectual failure to understand reality concretely as a historical process. Just as the relativists have only appeared to dissolve the world into movement, so too they have only appeared to exile the absolute from their systems. Every ‘biological’ relativism, etc., that turns its limits into ‘eternal’ limits thereby reintroduces the absolute, the ‘timeless’ principle of thought.106 He continues with this line of argumentation, noting that wherever the absolute survives in a system – even unconsciously, through a failed overcoming of relativism – it will prove stronger than that relativism. This is because the absolute ‘… represents the highest principle of thought attainable in an undialectical universe …’ and, as he concludes, this means that Socrates was in the right against the sophists; logic and value theory must be in the right against pragmatism and relativism.107 That is to say, in Lukács’s opinion, a con105 106 107

Lukács 1967a, p. 187. The reproduction of this quote is not intended to endorse Lukács’s assessment of Nietzsche. Lukács 1967a, p. 187. Lukács 1967a, pp. 187–8.

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sistent and ultimately absolute idealism is the necessary and highest result of reified thought. His alternative is not a relativistic attempt at flight from the absolute or a banishment of the absolute. This would merely return thought to Heraclitus’s river. Given his language and choice of metaphors, it would appear that Lukács may well have also had in mind Georg Simmel’s account of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. Simmel wrote: Being and becoming are the most general, formal, and inclusive formulations of the basic dualism that patterns all human beings: all great philosophy is engaged in founding a new reconciliation between them, or a new way of giving decisive primacy to one over the other. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence also has the function of mediating between being and becoming, and in this concept the two poles move towards each other simultaneously. On one side, the empirical chain of finite and individual events forma an uninterrupted becoming that ebbs and flows ceaselessly. Here, in the river of Heraclitus, everything that seems to be substantial is dissolved. But, through their eternal return these events gain being and inevitable continuity: everything finite becomes a fixed point through which the river of becoming passes endlessly. All content is thereby liberated and removed from the flux: finitude wraps itself into the form of the infinite, and becoming into the form of being.108 These lines also recall Hegel’s famous critique of bad infinity, to which Lukács refers, as will be noted shortly. For now, Lukács’s objection to Simmel’s argument does not consist in a reassertion of the primacy of either being (as in scientific or empiricist historical materialism) or becoming (as in the relativist dialectics of eternal change). Nor is it the detached and tragic perspective of an individual who, following Simmel, maintains both antinomies in their separateness and interconnection. Lukács’s solution is rather the assertion of a creating subject: the proletariat. So one may well say – following MacIntyre – that in Lukács, Nietzsche’s superman is realised on a historical and collective plane.109 After all, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra also demanded the destruction of

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Simmel 1991, pp. 176–7. MacIntyre writes: Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thorough-going its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated. Yet if the moral impoverish-

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quantitative values and the ought of transcendental thought. He demanded the creation of the new in order to find meaning in nature and joy in the eternal return.110 A further comparison between Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Lukács’s proletariat (which is implicit in the present discussion) may well furnish further instructive similarities. Simmel, however, in the course of his critique of Nietzsche, by suggesting that every great philosophy founds a new reconciliation between being and becoming, would appear to have anticipated, at least in formal terms, Lukács’s Nietzschean Marxism. This aside, Lukács suggests that the dialectics of history allow the counter position between the relative and the absolute to be overcome through its historical concretisation: ‘… the absolute is not so much denied as endowed with its concrete historical shape and treated as an aspect of the process itself’.111 This could be taken as a simple statement, along the lines of the young Marx, that philosophy must be realised in order to be abolished. This is undoubtedly part of what Lukács has in mind. Yet, his explicit argument goes further. It asserts that the absolute is, in undialectical or pre-Marxist philosophy, the highest truth attainable. The overcoming of the absolute by dialectical thought (namely, philosophy of praxis), requires, therefore, not merely the relativisation or simple negation of the absolute, but a higher and more concrete term. This higher and more concrete term is the emergence of actual praxis in real history, which equally, is the highest truth: But as soon as mankind has clearly understood and hence restructured the foundations of its existence truth acquires a wholly novel aspect. When theory and practice are united it becomes possible to change reality and when this happens the absolute and its ‘relativistic’ counterpart will have played their historical role for the last time. For as the result of

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ment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Ubermensch – Lukács’s ideal proletarian, Leninism’s ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy. One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky’s cold resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies (MacIntyre 2007, pp. 262–3). These comments are to be faulted only by the observation that Trotsky, towards the end of Literature and Revolution, also flirted with a conception of humanity as the superman. At least Trotsky had the foresight to place the realisation of such fantasies firmly in the realm beyond this world, represented by Communism (see Trotsky 2005). Cf. Nietzsche 2003b. Lukács 1967a, p. 188.

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these changes we shall see the disappearance of that reality which the absolute and the relative expressed in like manner.112 The absolute is only overcome when realised in the sunlight of praxis. To illustrate this, Lukács further counterposes his conception of praxis with humanism (of the Feuerbachian variety). In any system which concludes with a metaphysical or transcendental absolute, the contradiction between what is and what ought to be recurs. So, speaking of non-Marxist humanism, Lukács argues that to critique bourgeois society on the basis of its inhumanity necessarily posits man as he ought to be, albeit on the basis of ‘metaphysics and myth’. He concludes noting that it is unimportant ‘… whether this is thought of as something in the past, the future or merely an imperative’.113 Further, Lukács draws out the similarity between this type of abstract ethicism and Christianity. The stark duality of the ought and the is, according to Lukács, appears as a recurrent theme in Christianity, from the time of the gospels, through the Reformation and up until modern Christian pacifism. This leaves society as it is untouched. It ‘… makes no difference whether this takes the form of “giving to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”, of Luther’s sanctification of the powers that be, or of Tolstoy’s “resist not evil”’.114 The religious critique of reality may take many forms. In some, God may appear to annihilate empirical reality; in others, the annihilation of empirical reality might take the form of stoic indifference to reality, as with saints who achieve inner mastery through an ascetic being towards death. These strategies, however, all violate the humanism of their initial premise and, despite their radicalism or emotional force, become apologetic. Even the revolutionary utopianism of radical Christian sects cannot break out of this bind. Referring to the Anabaptists and other similar sects, Lukács wrote: ‘On the one hand, they leave the objective structure of man’s empirical existence unimpaired (consumption communism), while on the other hand they expect that reality will be changed by awakening man’s inwardness which, independent of his concrete historical life, has existed since time immemorial and must now be brought to life – perhaps through the intervention of a transcendental deity’.115 Clearly drawing upon Weber but without referring to him, Lukács notes that it was necessary to criticise the conservative utopianism of the religious sects precisely because they supplied the ideology for capitalism in its purest forms – 112 113 114 115

Lukács 1967a, p. 189. Lukács 1967a, p. 190. Lukács 1967a, p. 191. Lukács 1967a, p. 192.

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in England and America. As was quoted above, in the context of the contemplative stance: ‘… the union of an inwardness, purified to the point of total abstraction and stripped of all traces of flesh and blood, with a transcendental philosophy of history does indeed correspond to the basic ideological structure of capitalism’.116 Lukács, furthermore, explicitly attacks any theory which involves a similar ‘dark and empty chasm’ or ‘hiatus irrationalis’ between theory and practice, including that of Ernst Bloch who, in Lukács’s account, sought to correct the economism of Second International Marxism via an engagement with religion.117 Ultimately, the failure of the revolutionary Christian sect arises from its failure to grasp the ‘Archimedian point from which the whole of reality can be overthrown’. In Lukács’s mind, their failure ‘forces them to aim too high or too low and to see in these things a sign of greater depth’.118 Of course, the question should be asked: what relevance does this have to Lukács’s critique of Hegel?119 After all, it could well be argued that Hegel’s critique of Christianity, in the penultimate section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, anticipated many of the points Lukács makes. The point, however, is that Lukács’s articulation of the philosophy of praxis is based, explicitly, on the overcoming of two points of view which he sees as necessarily interconnected. The first of these is absolute idealism, of which Hegel is the highest expression. The second is dogmatic relativism. It is less clear who Lukács has in mind here as he refers explicitly to Nietzsche and Jacobi, and later, albeit obliquely, to Bergson or neo-Kantian thinkers such as Rickert or Simmel. Lukács proposes the overcoming of these strands of thought not through the denial or abstract negation of the absolute, but through its historical realisation. Moreover, he explicitly criticises any account of this overcoming which proposes a new transcendental or metaphysical solution – hence his critique of moralistic humanism. So, the truth – the absolute truth – of the philosophy of praxis is to be found in the actual and present praxis of the proletariat. This has been shown to result from the unity

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Lukács 1967a, p. 192. Lukács 1967a, pp. 192–3. Bloch retorted, suggesting that Lukács’s over-identification of praxis with revolutionary politics tends to exclude broader cultural spheres of life. In particular, he suggests that Lukács is more set on becoming something like ‘a communist leader’ [kommunistischer Führer] and ‘a practitioner of theory’ than a ‘theoretician of praxis’ (Bloch 2019). Moreover, Bloch critiques Lukács’s ‘simplistic tendency’ to go for a ‘homogenisation’ of society in terms of a merely sociological reading of praxis, which leaves out the ‘artistic, religious, and metaphysical’ dimension of the ‘secret, transcendental being’ in man. Chapter 9 will return to these criticisms. Lukács 1967a, p. 193. Cf. Hegel 2018, §§. 748–87.

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of genesis and history, or, from the overcoming of past (is) and future (ought). As we have seen, this overcoming emerges in the sphere of politics. A failure to comprehend this, in Lukács’s view, results in a conceptual mythology which reinstates the antinomies of bourgeois thought, particularly between what is and what ought to be, even if potentially in an irrational or mystical form. As he writes: Mythologies are always born where two terminal points, or at least two stages in a movement, have to be regarded as terminal points without its being possible to discover any concrete mediation between them and the movement. This is equally true of movements in the empirical world and of indirectly mediated movements of thought designed to encompass the totality. This failure almost always has the appearance of involving simultaneously the unbridgeable distance between the movement and the thing moved, between movement and mover, and between mover and the thing moved. But mythology inevitably adopts the structure of the problem whose opacity has been the cause of its own birth.120 As he continues to note, mythology is merely the imaginary reproduction of immediacy, in its own insolubility. In this way, immediacy is reproduced in mystified form. Given this, any philosophy which ends with or rests upon a conceptual mythology will only stage a superficial resistance to immediacy. Mystified thought is quite free to reconcile itself with pragmatism and to content itself with acquiring that ‘… margin of “freedom” that the conflicting claims and irrationality of the reified laws can offer the individual in capitalist society’.121 As has been shown, this is entirely compatible with the contemplative stance and the commodity form itself, which is an unconscious aggregate of quantity and quality. If the absolute truth of the philosophy of praxis may only be realised in a presentist unfolding of political praxis, then non-dialectical thought must run aground on the reefs of the present. So, Lukács notes a final important feature of Hegelian philosophy. He believes that it necessarily splits the present into a mythological future and an ossified past, thus blocking reconciliation and dereification in the present. In order to build his alternative to this, Lukács suggests the need for a concept which reconciles past and future and thought and existence. He finds this in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, upon the basis of which

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Lukács 1967a, p. 193. Lukács 1967a, p. 195.

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he proposes a concept of becoming as conscious creation.122 This has two aspects. Firstly, in becoming, the appearance of reality as an aggregate of empirical existence is overcome. Like this, the true nature of the object is revealed; things are transformed into processes (as was demonstrated in Part 1). Yet in order to overcome an ‘ancient’ dialectics of infinite motion, it is necessary to grasp the specificity of the content which praxis creates. Rather than attempting an ontological answer, Lukács suggests one drawn from Marx’s political economy. Namely, he suggests that to gasp a creative concept of becoming, praxis must comprehend the process of capital accumulation: ‘… the recognition that capital as a process can only be accumulated, or rather, accumulating, capital, provides the positive, concrete solution to a whole host of positive concrete problems of method and of substance connected with capital’.123 As he goes on to argue, this involves an overcoming of the theoretical duality between philosophy and various special disciplines, or, the divide between methodology and factual knowledge. This is rather an opaque argument. However, the first point of Lukács’s concept of becoming is a call for a thoroughgoing and philosophically informed political economy which provides the basis both for the metacritique of philosophy and for the dereifying philosophical comprehension of the social totality. This ought not to take us by surprise, given that Lukács recognises the logic of reification as an economic logic. It stands to reason, then, that praxis must dereify complex economic processes in order to retake the social totality. Still, comments such as these are missed by those critics who fault Lukács for his lack of attention to political economy.124 Indeed, Lukács argues that political economy is superior to any purely logical or philosophical standpoint, including that of Hegel. As he writes: ‘For every pure logic is Platonic: it is thought released from existence and hence ossified. Only by conceiving of thought as a form of reality, as a factor in the total process can philosophy overcome its own rigidity dialectically and take on the quality of Becoming’.125 This provides the foundation for Lukács’s concept of becoming as conscious creation. The second aspect of this concept must reconcile the pernicious dualism between past and future. This was referred to briefly in Chapter 7. However, this is the appropriate juncture to consider these terms in light of their full meaning within the philosophy of praxis. This is important because it is pre122 123 124 125

Lukács 1967a, pp. 202–3. Lukács 1967a, p. 203. For example, many of the value form theorists discussed in Section 3.2. Lukács 1967a, p. 203.

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cisely this dualism that finally brings this philosophy to ruin. Nevertheless, explaining the role of his concept of becoming as the mediator between past and future, Lukács argues: Becoming is also the mediation between past and future. But it is the mediation between the concrete, i.e. historical past, and the equally concrete, i.e. historical future. When a concrete here and now dissolves into a process it is no longer a continuous tangible moment, immediacy slipping away; it is the focus of the deepest and most widely ramified mediation, the focus of decision and the birth of the new. As long as man concentrates his interest contemplatively upon the past or future, both ossify into an alien existence. And between the subject and the object lies the unbridgeable ‘pernicious chasm’ of the present. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth.126 A careful reading of this remarkable and crucial paragraph might pick up an oblique reference to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. After all, the immediacy of sense certainty – a sensory impression that is experienced ‘here and now’, but which is vanishing – is overcome by the consciousness which comprehends its own subjective activity as an aspect of constituting reality.127 As Hegel’s argument progresses and deepens through more complex concepts of objective reality (for instance, ‘Perception’, ‘Force and the Understanding’, and so on), more complex, inter-subjective and increasingly historical subjects 126

127

Lukács 1967a, pp. 203–4. The reference to the present as a ‘pernicious chasm’, although attributable to Bloch, is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s abyss over which man is stretched, as a rope (Nietzsche 2003b, p. 43). The fact that both the superman and Lukács’s proletariat are supposed to overcome this abyss via a decision which doubles as an act of creation is no coincidence. Similarly, Lukács’s reliance on a decision in the creation of the new indicates the possibility of a subterranean Schmittian influence to which Lukács would no doubt never have confessed. Given that the only evidence for Lukács having read Schmitt in the 1920s appears in the form of his 1928 review of Schmitt’s Political Romanticism, this is likely impossible to confirm (Lukács 1928a). Either way, Lukács’s emphasis on the decision, even if developed entirely independently of Schmitt, places him in an interesting relationship with the latter. Similarly, these influences and themes would also appear to call into doubt Lukács’s rather one sided critique of the irrationalist or relativist tradition in modern philosophy. ‘I: Sense-certainty or the “this” and meaning something’ in Hegel 2018.

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emerge which participate in the constitution of objectivity. In Lukács’s opinion, at some point, the conceptual progress of higher forms of concrete mediation breaks down in favour of a metaphysical subject. That Lukács anticipated Marx on alienation is a cliché of the literature. Nevertheless, the extent to which this critique of Hegel mirrors Marx’s own, presented in the final pages of the 1844 Manuscripts, is equally remarkable and far less frequently noticed.128 At any rate, Like Marx, in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács declines to specify precisely where within The Phenomenology of Spirit this metaphysical turn takes place. However, following his reading of Hegel’s discussion of the Enlightenment, outlined in the essay on Moses Hess, and adapted below, it may be presumed that this shift to metaphysics takes place somewhere between later sections of the chapter on spirit and the chapters on religion and absolute spirit. Whether this criticism is apt is beside the point; either way, it is freely admitted that Hegel places religion and philosophy on a higher conceptual footing than history. Ultimately, for Hegel, absolute spirit is that subject who understands their subjectivity as both constituted by and constitutive of reality; it is the self-knowing spirit which preserves its self-sufficiency in the face of history by virtue of its return from history to the present and its recollecting preservation of the conceptual logic of history.129 Whether or not this constitutes a metaphysics is a question for another day. For now, Lukács’s critique of Hegel’s final, philosophical, reconciliation of subject and object has already been outlined. Rather, we must further investigate Lukács’s argument that becoming may mediate between past and future if it is subject to a wilful decision that, in knowing the ‘concrete’ past and future, may create the ‘new’.130 Clearly, whether or not this degenerates into yet another conceptual mythology depends on Lukács’s own suggested subject-object. Without a more concrete subject of creation, Lukács’s concept of becoming has no claim to being any less mythological than Hegel’s. Indeed, if his subject fails, Hegel may very well hold the final trump card. At least he, as Lukács acknowledges, faces the full consequences of his position. Moreover, Lukács suggests that his subject be oriented as much towards the ground of transformation, that is, the past (which was accounted for in point one, on political economy) as towards the future. The truth of becoming must entail the conscious creation of the future which is immanent in the past and present. Only this can resolve the question as to the relationship between thought and being (which was part of the impetus to this discussion). As Lukács writes: ‘But when 128 129 130

Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 326–46. Hegel 2018, §. 808. Lukács 1967a, pp. 203–4.

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the truth of becoming is the future that is to be created but has not yet been born, when it is the new that resides in the tendencies that (with our conscious aid) will be realised, then the question whether thought is a reflection appears quite senseless’.131 As he continues to explain: It is true that reality is the criterion for the correctness of thought. But reality is not, it becomes – and to become the participation of thought is needed. We see here the fulfilment of the programme of classical philosophy: the principle of genesis means in fact that dogmatism is overcome (above all in its more important historical incarnation: the Platonic theory of reflection). But only concrete (historical) becoming can perform the function of such a genesis. And consciousness (the practical class consciousness of the proletariat) is a necessary, indispensable, integral part of that process of becoming.132 Here, the programmatic demand issued by Engels that the proletariat become the inheritor of classical German philosophy is renewed and retroactively extended to the entire philosophical tradition.133 Lukács’s comments in the pages following this statement clarify the meaning of his appropriation of this demand. On the one hand, he stresses that his concept of praxis, centred on becoming, avoids the flat identity of subject and object entailed by reflection theory (or any theory asserting a flat correspondence between thought and being). Instead, the unity between thought and being, or between subject and object, is to be understood as a historical process. On the other hand, Lukács explicitly anticipates and rejects a subjectivist reading of his argument, in which the proletariat invents being, in a creation ex nihilo. Becoming, in the sense in which he means it, is rather a process in which the immanent possibility and telos of the social totality are discovered, transformed, and actualised. Thus, becoming represents the rise from abstract possibility to concrete reality via the conscious intervention of the proletariat. This entails a concrete transformation of the object as much as the subject: ‘… this is no formal transformation. For a possibility to be realised, for a tendency to become actual, what is required is that the objective components of a society should be transformed; their functions must be changed and with them the structure and content of every individual object’.134 Finally, therefore, Lukács 131 132 133 134

Lukács 1967a, p. 204. Lukács 1967a, p. 204. Engels 1990b, p. 398. Lukács 1967a, pp. 204–5.

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reverses the conceptual ordering of practice and theory as it occurs in Hegel. While Hegel did argue that the ‘… theoretical is essentially contained within the practical; the idea that the two are separate must be rejected, for one cannot have a will without intelligence’, it is indisputable that he regarded theoretical cognition as closer to the absolute.135 Conversely, Lukács wrote: ‘But it must never be forgotten: only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat possesses this ability to transform things. Every contemplative, purely cognitive stance leads ultimately to the divided relationship to its object’.136 As is sometimes the case, Lukács appears here to slip between discussing the actual class consciousness of the proletariat and the theoretical concept of the class consciousness of the proletariat. This separation, however, is quite crucial. According not only to the letter of his argument, but its total logic and structure, only the actual class consciousness of the proletariat – that is, praxis – is capable of revolutionising the relationship between subject and object. A Marxist committed to the philosophy of praxis may well entertain a worked out and well-developed theoretical concept of the practical class consciousness of the proletariat, but this is a poorer and more abstract thing. Lukács confirms the importance of this distinction when he writes, as noted above, that ‘… every purely cognitive stance bears the stigma of immediacy’.137 As has been shown, Lukács insists that a ‘purely cognitive’ stance may only remain dialectical inasmuch as it both orients towards the actions of the proletariat and remains aware of its own abstraction. In this sense, Lukács suggests that theory and philosophy, insofar as they are alien to the proletariat, must aim at constant self-renewal and self-mediation. Theory itself becomes a theoretical practice which strains towards concrete practice. From this, it might be inferred that outside of the actual praxis of the proletariat, the highest vantage point available to a sufficiently critical theorist is what Lukács has described as ancient dialectics; namely, a dialectics of constant motion. The consequences of such an admission will be discussed below. For now, these arguments also shed light on the content of the dereification of other spheres of society. To begin with, for Lukács, the fact that the proletariat’s practice is the key to overcoming reification entails that, in the first place, the philosophy of praxis, as well as praxis itself, will leave a whole host of objects untouched. In the first instance, this is true of nature. Beyond this, Lukács nominates art. His point is that these fields of objective culture, while elaborated on the basis of a reified social totality, are sufficiently complex and 135 136 137

Hegel 1991a, §. 4. Lukács 1967a, p. 205. Lukács 1967a, p. 205.

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distant from the core of society that their dereification can only be imagined in a post-capitalist future and on the basis of the dereification of more fundamental social objects. Something like this is also true of more abstract social mechanisms which nevertheless clearly depend on the fundamental mechanisms of reification. Here, Lukács cites the relationship between interest and profit as an example.138 The contradictions in the former category in his argument can only ‘become dialectical’ in light of the comprehension of the contradictions in the latter. This places limits on the comprehension of the present. Admittedly, this argument is also somewhat opaque. Nevertheless, Lukács is simply arguing that under capitalism there exists a vast system of qualitative gradations which possess a hierarchical or systematic order that may only be brought to knowledge in light of the practical dereification of capitalism by the proletariat. Of these ‘qualitative gradations’, he writes: It would be necessary to set forth the whole system of these qualitative gradations in the dialectical character of the different kinds of phenomena before we should be in a position to arrive at the concrete totality of the categories with which alone true knowledge of the present is possible. The hierarchy of these categories would determine at the same point where system [or, logic] and history meet, thus fulfilling Marx’s postulate (already cited) concerning the categories that ‘their sequence is determined by the relations they have to each other in modern bourgeois society’.139 This may appear to contradict Lukács’s claim that praxis emerges on the basis of a knowledge of the concrete totality. This is not necessarily so. The knowledge which founds praxis is practical and political knowledge; it does not need to know every detail, fact or concrete mediation. Rather, it must simply identify the next key link – namely, the essential mediation required to advance the class struggle. In contradistinction, here Lukács is discussing the self-knowledge of a dereifying society. Lukács appears to be arguing that a complete conceptual mapping of the social totality would require a vast work of reappropriation of the alienated and unconscious networks of the market. In a sense, this mirrors Lukács’s attitude towards natural science, outlined in Chapter 4. While certainly not hostile to science, he did suggest the need for a conscious reappropriation of the conceptual frameworks of science, in order that humanity may

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Lukács 1967a, p. 206. Lukács 1967a, p. 206.

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grasp the connection between concepts and their historical origin. At any rate, these are clearly tasks for a socialist society. As regards the argument at hand, however, these points deepen the limitation on any philosophy of praxis which exists in relative separation from the practice of the proletariat. So, Lukács notes that in every consciously dialectical system – including that of Hegel (and also, curiously, Proclus) – the sequence of categories is itself dialectical. Yet insofar as such a system is elaborated in relative separation from conscious genesis, it tends towards schematisation; dialectical patterns tend to harden over and function in a ‘repetitively mechanical way (thus, the famous triad: thesis, antitheses and synthesis)’.140 While Lukács argues that a corrective to this schematisation is to be found in the ‘concrete historical method of Marx’ which alone may incorporate a ‘positive’ and particular content into a logical sequence, he also admits that outside of genesis, this positive content itself retains an unknown aspect.141 Although Lukács does not elaborate greatly on the meaning of this ‘positive’ content, it can be assumed that he is referring to the ‘new’. This interpretation is reinforced by the distinction that Lukács makes, drawing upon Hegel’s encyclopaedia, between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ dialectics.142 He asserts that in Hegel, the ‘… conception of nature as “otherness”, as the idea in a state of “being external to itself” directly precludes a positive dialectics’.143 At the same time, he notes favourably Hegel’s view that the dialectics of nature can never become ‘… anything more exalted than a dialectics of movement witnessed by the detached observer, as the subject cannot be integrated into the dialectical process …’144 These comments confirm Lukács’s view that social dialectics – including the dialectic of theory and practice – are higher than the dialectics of nature; that the growth of knowledge about nature, including the identification of dialectical patterns in nature is first and foremost a social phenomenon. Yet beyond this, Lukács uses this distinction between positive and negative dialectics to ground a demand for a systematic typology of dialectical forms. This resembles his demand (discussed above) for a systematic knowledge of the ‘quantitative gradations’ produced unconsciously by the reified social totality. Such a systematic typology of dialectical forms would, in Lukács’s view, clarify and incorporate the classically Hegelian distinctions between intuition, representation and concept. As he writes, however, these ‘… are only some of the possible types of distinction to be 140 141 142 143 144

Lukács 1967a, pp. 206–7. Lukács 1967a, p. 207. Lukács 1967a, fn. 71, p. 207. Lukács 1967a, p. 207. Lukács 1967a, p. 207.

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drawn. For the others the economic works of Marx provide abundant material for a clearly elaborated analysis of structures’.145 At any rate, from this, it is fairly apparent that Lukács regarded Hegel’s Science of Logic as premature. According to his comments, it was his view that a work which grasps the conceptuality of being, dialectically, is only possible given praxis and a dereifying society. It may appear that Lukács’s comments regarding Marx’s concrete historical method (which alone is capable of discovering the positive content of history) simply call for an ongoing dialogue between philosophy and history in the creation of an ever expanding intellectual enterprise. Yet this is not what Lukács is calling for. As summarised above, in the first section of this chapter, to remain content with a partial dialectical theorisation of the world, or a concept of theory as an infinite dialogue between logic and genesis, would fall back into the antinomies of bourgeois thought. Rather, as Lukács makes clear, he is instead describing the growth of dereified knowledge in a socialist society. He argues that: … more important than these systematic distinctions [between positive and negative dialectics, or along the lines of Marx’s economic work, as noted above] is the fact that even the objects in the very centre of the dialectical process can only slough off their reified form after a laborious process. A process in which the seizure of power by the proletariat and even the organisation of the state and the economy on socialist lines are only stages.146 It is clear that Lukács is in fact arguing that the growth of concrete, dialectical knowledge – knowledge of the ‘new’ premised on the overcoming of the divide between genesis and history – may only take place following the revolution. In fact, he suggests that immediately prior to revolution, in the ‘… decisive crisis-period of capitalism …’ there may in fact appear a tendency to ‘… intensify reification, to bring it to a head’.147 In this context, he cites a quote by Lassalle, summarising Hegel to Marx: ‘Hegel used to say in his old age that directly before the emergence of something qualitatively new, the old state of affairs gathers itself up into its original, purely general, essence, into its simple totality, transcending and absorbing back into itself all those marked differences and peculiarities which it evinced when it was still viable’.148 Lukács argues this 145 146 147 148

Lukács 1967a, p. 207. Lukács 1967a, p. 208. Lukács 1967a, p. 208. Lukács 1967a, p. 208.

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diminution of vision in an aging system is the necessary, albeit inverse correlate of a growing objective collapse of its fetishistic categories. This recalls Hegel’s famous concluding remarks to the preface to the Philosophy of Right: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk’.149 So Lukács writes: … on the one hand, there is the increasing undermining of the forms of reification – one might describe it as the cracking of the crust because of their inner emptiness – their growing inability to do justice to the phenomena, even as isolated phenomena, even as the objects of reification and calculation. On the other hand, we find the quantitative increase of the forms of reification, their empty extension to cover the whole surface of manifest phenomena. And the fact that these two aspects together are in conflict provides the key signature to the decline of bourgeois society.150 As has been shown, in Lukács’s view, only the praxis of the proletariat may cut against this tendency towards the degeneration and reification of thought. While in retrospect this argument can only appear as prematurely optimistic, it is crucial to situating Lukács’s critique of Hegel and his historicisation of the philosophy of praxis. The greater the crisis of reification, the greater are the possibilities open for the proletariat. ‘It [the proletariat] is given the opportunity to substitute its own positive contents for the emptied and bursting husks’.151 So, only in this crisis may the proletariat freely choose to transform society. This free transformation of society is equally the defetishisation of the past and future and the production of the new in the present by the conscious subject-object of history. And only this advent of truth makes it possible to develop a concept of becoming as wilful, conscious creation and which allows for the overcoming not only of Hegelian philosophy, but of philosophy in toto. The same concept is what allows us to discover the genuinely new contents of history with which to revolutionise a logical system that would otherwise tend towards schematisation. The unity between logic (systematic knowledge) and genesis (historical knowledge) may only be completed under socialism, with the creation of non-reified systems of knowledge in the domains of economics, science and philosophy. Yet, prior to this, unity is born by praxis. Absent this, 149 150 151

Hegel 1991a, p. 23. Lukács 1967a, p. 208. Lukács 1967a, p. 208.

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Lukács expected thought to harden over, to become grey and reified, as the system of reification became more brittle and crisis prone. Thus, the absolute of philosophy is reborn not only in the present comprehension of self-conscious praxis, but in light of the demise of philosophy itself. Philosophy of praxis therefore desires the resurrection and expects this to be the salvation of the theorist. This reconstruction of Lukács’s critique of Hegel has aimed at fidelity to his work. The point of this fidelity is to show the extremely high bar that Lukács establishes for philosophical truth; the absolute as the union of history and its self-consciousness, articulated in a presentist philosophy of praxis, which is adequate to its own overcoming and comprehending the free creation of the new. The extent to which, in Lukács’s view, proletarian revolution completes German Idealism should be evident from this. Yet, it should also be clear from this that Lukács was aware of the limitations on a philosophy of praxis insofar as it remains philosophy. As has been suggested, all of this implies deep questions for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Prior to considering these, Lukács’s last writings on Hegel and the Young Hegelians from the 1920s will be reconstructed and discussed.

3

Once More on Hegel, via the Young Hegelians Some of those philosophers, it is true, were able to perceive a certain amount of truth, among all their false notions, and they strove by laborious arguments to convince others of such truths as these: that God made this world, and himself controls it by providence, and truths about the nobility of virtue, about love of country and loyalty in friendship, about good works and all things belonging to an upright character. And yet they were ignorant of the end to which all these were to be referred and the standard by which they were to be assessed; whereas in that City of ours it was by prophetic, that is, by divine words (though conveyed by men) that they were set before the people. They were not inculcated by controversial disputations. In consequence, anyone who came to the knowledge of them dreaded to treat with scorn what was not the product of man’s cleverness but the utterance of God. Saint Augustine152

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The previous section reconstructed Lukács’s critique of Hegel, presented in History and Class Consciousness. As has been shown, his concept of praxis is both the key to the resolution of the antinomies he discovers in Hegel (between history and genesis, being and becoming, thought and reality, subject and object, etc.) and the foundation for his own philosophy of praxis. These themes recur in more detail in A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, as well as the essays ‘The New Edition of Lassalle’s Letters’ and ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics’, published in 1925 and 1926, respectively. In particular, the second of these essays is noteworthy for the extent to which Lukács praises Hegel and clarifies his importance in the development of Marx’s historical materialism. In this essay, specifically in his comments on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Lukács anticipates the analysis he began a decade later in The Young Hegel. While some commentators (Löwy in particular) have noted that his emphasis shifts over the late 1920s in the direction of realism, the argument here relies on the view that Lukács largely attempted to maintain and deepen the perspective he developed in 1923, even if in a new context which called for a more defensive communist strategy.153 However, his shifting emphasis does help us clarify both the stakes of the debate and some of the weaknesses in Lukács’s position. Moreover, it demonstrates Lukács’s ultimately failed attempt to grapple with these weaknesses. In short, Lukács left absolutely no doubt that his philosophy of praxis was built upon the rejection of subjectivism, idealism, abstract humanism and moralism he associated with the Young Hegelians, including Hess, Cieszkowski, Feuerbach, and others. In making this case, Lukács established a realist position based on Hegel and Marx. However, by moving towards this realist position, Lukács unknowingly returned to the antinomic terrain he had sought to overcome in 1923. This was not merely his accommodation to a changed situation, but was a conceptual necessity. The final groundwork for demonstrating this will be laid in this section. For the purposes of this discussion, it is fruitful to separate out Lukács’s political critique of Lassalle, Hess and others from his philosophical critique. He credits the representatives of ‘True Socialism’, particularly Hess, with a genuine revolutionary honesty which saw fewer of them cross to the side of the bourgeoisie than was the case with any of the other tendencies Marx and Engels criticised in The Communist Manifesto. As is well-known, the same was not true of Lassalle. Lukács endorses Marx and Engels’s categorisation of him as a ‘Tory153

As Löwy notes, Lukács broadly agreed with the reorientation that took place in the 1924 congress of the Comintern, which declared that capitalism had stabilised relative to the upheavals between 1917 and 1923. Thus, a revolutionary realpolitik in these circumstances demanded, above all else, realism (Löwy 1979, pp. 193–4).

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Chartist’.154 Excluding Lassalle, in Lukács’s estimation, all these theorists struck a more radical note, politically, than Hegel, given his putative endorsement of the Prussian state. According to Lukács, these were the last remaining representatives of an essentially bourgeois and Jacobin revolutionism. Nevertheless, this political critique – which largely served to bolster Lukács’s conception of Leninism – was built upon a philosophical critique which regarded these thinkers as inhabiting a position inferior to that of Hegel. Insofar as this is the case, Lassalle is the least interesting. While in Lukács’s reading the young Marx overcame Hegel, preserving the rational core of his logic, Lassalle both failed to surpass Hegel and violated his method. This is to say, despite considering Hegelianism to be immediately revolutionary, Lassalle never came to grips with its genuine relationship to reality and idealist character.155 In short, Lassalle was not concerned with reforming Hegelian thought. He declined to situate Hegelian thought itself historically and equally, therefore, foreclosed on the possibility of grounding a radical opposition to the historical society of which Hegelian thought was an unconscious philosophical expression. While Hegel’s reconciliation with bourgeois society, according to Lukács, was thus a step taken ‘quite unconsciously’, in Lassalle, it become a conscious choice.156 This took the political form of Lassalle’s veneration of the state and his unrequited flirtation with Bismarck. Nevertheless, Lassalle maintained a subjectively radical and action-oriented stance. Lukács argues that like Hess and Bruno Bauer, Lassalle achieved this by ‘complementing’ Hegel with Fichte.157 The basis for this was Fichte’s diagnosis of the age as one of absolute sinfulness, in which the death of spirit signifies a point of transition towards the perfection of the idea (most clearly expressed in Fichte’s The Characteristics of the Present Age). While superficially radical in its orientation towards the future, Lassalle fell short, philosophically, of Hegel in that his theory reverted to a separation between logic and history. Against this, Lukács defends Hegel’s notion of recon-

154 155

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Lukács 1972d, pp. 181–2. Lukács writes: He [Lassalle] does not see Hegelianism as the philosophical expression of bourgeois society, containing for that very reason within itself the elements of the dissolution, overcoming and supercession of that society; nor as entailing for that very reason the necessary liberation of those elements striving beyond the given system turning them against their author. No, Hegel appears to him as the discoverer of the method of thinking, thinking which if it is to be correct and scientific, can only be revolutionary thinking (Lukács 1972f, pp. 149–50). Lukács 1972f, p. 150. Lukács 1972f, p. 152.

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ciliation. Despite its ‘politically reactionary’ content, by virtue of its realism and orientation to the present, this category was objectively far more historical and radical than Lassalle’s rejection of the present. As Lukács writes: But it must not be forgotten that the Hegelian notion of ‘reconciliation’, the culmination of the philosophy of history in the present, implies – for all that this is politically reactionary and ends up philosophically and methodologically in pure contemplation – a more profound connection between the logical categories and the structural forms of bourgeois society. And that precisely because it was a ‘reconciliation’ (Hegel himself was, of course, largely unconscious of this connection, which consequently remained unexploited by him). Hence, it signifies a closeness to reality greater than anything Fichte could ever achieve. Fichte’s views may have been more revolutionary than Hegel’s, but they remained merely utopian, whereas Hegel is able to take into his system of categories the inner social structure of the present (including its self-transcending tendencies). In other words, the logico-methodological sequence of Hegel’s categories is far more dependent on this historical progression of real development than is that of Fichte’s categories.158 While in Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner the ‘loosening of the methodological connection between category and history’ resulted in radical philosophical subjectivism, in Lassalle it resulted in a formalism which fetishised apparently Hegelian logical categories, divorced from history.159 Lassalle’s tragedy, according to Lukács, was that he remained totally unaware that this constituted a regression to the basically Kantian duality between thinking and being. Therefore, insofar as Lassalle surpassed the Young Hegelians, it was not philosophically or methodologically, but only for circumstantial reasons. Moreover, the problem was concealed by Lassalle’s distinctively self-aggrandising psychology which, in Lukács’s account, explains Marx and Engels’s famously disdainful comments where he is concerned. Thus, while in Stirner and Bauer the logical idea, cut off from history, facilitated a descent into the depths of subjective idealism, in Lassalle the same divorce only appeared to give subjectivity pride of place; in reality, it reduced subjectivity to grandiose posturing which concealed a conservative politics. So, Lassalle’s philosophy was incapable of grounding his politics or orienting practice meaningfully.

158 159

Lukács 1972f, p. 153. Lukács 1972f, p. 153.

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Again, what is significant here is less Lukács’s assessment of Lassalle (who is at any rate a minor historical figure) and more his summary of Marx and Engels’s alternative which is both methodologically truer to Hegel and more radical: If, as in Marx and Engels, it is the concrete historical process itself which is understood as the origin and seat of the dialectic and which our thoughts merely summon into consciousness, then it is from that process itself that the decisive tendencies of social happening can be gleaned and thus made into the object of science. The science thus attained can guide practice as a science: it makes methodologically possible a Realpolitik in the world-historical sense. Lassalle, however, cannot derive any criteria for correct action from his dialectic or his philosophy of history, and so he is bound to become a practitioner of Realpolitik – in the usual sense of the word.160 Thus, Marx and Engels’s ‘science’, premised as it was on Hegel’s philosophy, makes possible a revolutionary realism and practice unavailable to Lassalle. On the contrary, Lassalle’s correction of Hegel via Fichte left him with a model of action in which freedom was reduced to the ‘irrationality of the purely individual decision’.161 In outlining Marx’s alternative to Lassalle’s periodisation of modernity, Lukács writes: ‘But whatever they [Marx and Engels] thought politically, they always had as their criterion: the class situation of the proletariat and the proletariat’s class consciousness deriving from that situation. And this criterion was to remain constant even when, in individual instances, it happened that not a single proletarian actually attained the level of classconsciousness’.162 160 161

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Lukács 1972f, p. 155. Lukács 1972f, p. 157. In light of this assessment, in the remainder of this essay Lukács discusses Lassalle’s historic drama Franz von Sickingen, his relationship with Countess Hatzfeldt (and his grandiose assessment of both her and himself as embodiments of aspects of the idea), his dealings with Bismarck and his famously scandalous death in a duel. His conclusion is that the essence of idealism in politics consists in its inability to solve the hiatus irrationalis between the idea and reality. Thus, the most important breakthrough made by Marx was to identify the age of proletarian revolution as the real world overcoming of this hiatus. As has been shown, the three keys to this, in Lukács’s opinion, are a grasp of reality in terms of its economic logic, the critique of the state and the discovery of the revolutionary practice of the proletariat. Lukács 1972f, p. 167. As an aside, this critique of Lassalle allows Lukács to pinpoint philosophically his political mistake. Without an overcoming of Hegel based on a critique of political economy, a critique of the state and the proletarian movement, Lassalle is caught between two interrelated options. The first is that the idea, which is itself a mythology, is

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This comment and the argumentation leading up to it appear to redefine some of the terms of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Elsewhere, as detailed above, he stresses the contingency of praxis, suggesting that the actuality of revolution be understood strictly as a periodisation of relatively short eras in history (for example, in Russia, roughly two decades between 1900 and 1920). Equally, formulations can be produced which almost suggest the impossibility of a philosophy of praxis (or, to use the terminology Lukács favoured in the late 1920s, a science of historical materialism) outside such periods. However, in his essay on Lassalle, Lukács tends in the other direction, towards considering Marx and Engels’s breakthrough as a truth valid at least for the entire period between the 1840s and the 1920s. At the very least, this ambiguity points towards a side of Lukács that tended towards the separation of logic and history. It would seem that Lukács comes close to falling victim to the charge he levels against Lassalle: that ‘… he is unable to prevent a loosening of the relationship between category and history finding expression in his own work’.163 This will be considered in more detail below. For now, the point is that in Lukács’s view, Hegel retained his orientation towards the historicisation of all categories, his own included, even if he at times only expressed this as a methodological demand. This is why Lukács sees Hegel as the necessary starting point for Marxism. Although he also saw them as continuers of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition, Lukács was more favourably predisposed towards Moses Hess, August Cieszkowski and Ludwig Feuerbach. His discussion of them is therefore one of the most sympathetic discussions of non-Marxist, post-Hegelian philosophy to be found in his whole Marxist oeuvre. Again, Lukács’s account is expressed in political terms. He underwrites his critique of these more radical Young Hegelians with reference to Lenin’s theory of revolution (and his own sum-

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immediately and irrationally expressed by an individual. The second option, which may cohabitate with the first, is that the abstract and rational character of the idea is maintained, in which case, its status as ideal can only be preserved via a juridical relationship. That is to say, it is subsumed by jurisprudence and becomes a fetishism of the state (Lukács 1972f, p. 163). In Lukács’s view, this explains Lassalle’s reliance on such a pre-Hegelian category as ‘natural right’ which equally underpins his famously statist approach to socialism. In this way, in Lukács’s view, Lassalle both perfects German Idealist philosophy and causes it to regress to a pre-Hegelian standpoint: ‘What Lassalle did was to reduce the problems of the French Revolution to their real conceptual meaning and to think them through to their proper conclusion. In this he performed the creditable feat of bringing German classical philosophy to perfection. But he in no sense went beyond it, and hence he found himself from a world-historical point of view in a vacuum’ (Lukács 1972f, p. 168). Lukács 1972f, p. 153.

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mary thereof, in Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought). He also states his belief that these apparently long dead philosophical disputes are related to the dispute between Menshevism and Bolshevism and the debates around the KAP and Luxemburgism in Germany.164 This is reinforced by Lukács’s habitual and rather satisfying (albeit unkind) comparison between Trotsky and Lassalle. None of this should come as a surprise, especially given the important role Lukács accords to the metacritique of ideology in forming philosophy of praxis. This is further grounds upon which to see his late 1920s writings as broadly contiguous with History and Class Consciousness. Lukács’s starting point is that True Socialism was a movement of intellectuals and was ‘essentially ideological’ and rootless, when compared with other socialist currents.165 As a movement of radical intellectuals seeking to synthesise utopian socialism and Hegelian philosophy, Lukács argues that the True Socialists produced a theory at a relative divorce from their own reality. Despite their best intentions and efforts, the True Socialists failed to develop a theory adequate to comprehending their reality. In Lukács’s view, Hegel was the stumbling block. Similar to Lassalle, Lukács believes that this inability to overcome Hegel resulted in a regression to pre-Hegelian philosophical positions.166 The essential difference was that unlike Lassalle, these more radical Young Hegelians did not seek to add a supposedly missing subjective aspect to Hegel. In Lukács’s summary, Cieszkowski sought to complete Hegel’s philosophy and comprehend the transformation of the present via an immanent concept of the future. For his part, Hess sought a practical basis upon which to transform what he regarded as the contemplative character of Hegelian thought. Where Lassalle asserted the eternal validity of Hegel’s logic, Cieszkowski and Hess demanded that philosophy itself be overcome. Lukács quotes Hess as follows: ‘German philosophy has carried out its mission, it has shown us the way to truth in its entirety. Our task now is to build bridges which will lead us back from heaven to earth. Whatever remains in isolation, becomes untrue, even truth itself cannot escape this fate if it persists in its lofty seclusion. Just as reality is bad if not permeated by truth, so too truth is bad if it is not made real’.167 In many ways, this search for a concrete practical principle by which to revolutionise Hegelian thought prefigures and parallels Marx

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Lukács 1972d, p. 181. In this regard, Lukács’s account of the Young Hegelians recalls his discussion of Leonard Nelson and the Nelson-Bund (cf. Lukács 1926a). Lukács 1972d, p. 185. Lukács 1972d, p. 186, footnote 11.

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and Engels’s breakthrough.168 Yet, according to Lukács, the search by necessity led back to Fichte, and paradoxically, to a more dogmatic and less practical position than Hegel himself. Nevertheless, in contradistinction to Fichte, when Cieszkowski and Hess made a communist future the object of dialectical thought, they tried to do so concretely, by viewing the future as the outcome of a dialectical process situated in the present. ‘Hence, for them [Hess and Cieszkowski] knowledge of the future was bound to become a methodological problem of the dialectic, whereas for Fichte the periodisation of history followed directly and unproblematically from his – ethical – conception of the absolute’.169 This is to say, rather than seeing the future as the pre-given outcome of a fixed principle, for Hess and Cieszkowski, the future is ‘… revealed methodologically as the concrete, intentional object of the philosophy of history’.170 Notwithstanding the proximity of this position to Lukács’s own, he faulted it, suggesting that any attempt to gain knowledge of the future, no matter how historicised in intention, is bound to revert to a speculative affirmation of the present: For the knowledge of the future, even if it is only a matter of the knowledge of its essence and not of the ‘infinite multitude of existent contingencies’, is only possible if the fundamental logical-metaphysical categories of the system are extended over past, present and future. True knowledge of the whole system (the inner contemplation of logic) must, in other words, include knowledge of the future. This, however, involves the logical necessity of heightening the purely aprioristic, purely speculative and hence purely contemplative nature of knowledge even beyond the level of Hegel’s system.171 This critique gave Lukács occasion to praise Hegel’s ‘magnificent realism’. He argues that in Hegel’s view, the future must be found in the present. Any attempt to undertake a ‘systematic quest for the logical within world history’, 168

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This is so much the case that at least one commentator has argued that Marx, too, reverted to a Fichtean position (see Rockmore 2011). As much as Fichtean themes may be found in Marx, the obvious downside of this view is that it does nothing to explain Marx’s breakthrough. Regardless of what one thinks about Marx’s social theory, it is fairly indisputable that history has judged it to be of vastly more importance than anything produced by other Young Hegelians. This cannot be the result of mere chance. Lukács 1972d, p. 187. Lukács 1972d, p. 187. Lukács 1972d, p. 187.

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ala Cieszkowski, without overcoming Hegel, ‘idealises’ and ‘ideologises’ the dialectic even more than Hegel does.172 Hegel’s genius consists, in contrast, in his insistence on stopping at the present: True, in stopping at the present, at what he calls the self-attainment of the spirit, Hegel’s system is reactionary both in substance and in its intentions and consequences. Looked at from the methodological standpoint, however, refusal to go any further reveals Hegel’s magnificent realism, his rejection of all utopias, his concern to conceive philosophy as the conceptual expression of history itself and not as philosophy about history. Hegel has often – and to some extent justifiably – been attacked for this tendency, this ‘reconciliation’ with reality. But it must be remembered that it derives methodologically from this urge to develop the categories out of the historical process itself, and that only in consequence of his reactionary hypostatising of the present did it change from a dynamic principle impelling reality forwards into a static one designed to fix the stage presently attained as an absolute.173 His thoroughgoing critique of all utopianism and subjective radicalism allowed Hegel to preserve his higher philosophical vantage point, albeit at a political price. While the contradictions that this entails for Hegelian philosophy will be discussed further, the point is for now that these contradictions were latent in Hegel himself. Cieszkowski and Hess’s attempt to overcome these contradictions via the knowledge of the future, however, had the effect of pushing the goal back, detaching dialectics from reality and blocking the discovery of a solution to the contradiction between is and ought, between utopia and reality. The bind faced by Cieszkowski and Hess therefore, recalls an issue that was discussed above, in Part 2. As has been shown, all aprioristic thinking, including that which seeks to comprehend its own historical reality, is posed with a fixed number of options. The first is a relativism, in which logical categories are regarded as matters of perspective, valid only in limited domains. As noted above, Lukács argues that all relativism conceals an absolute, and therefore, its own negation. So the second option is a dualism which necessarily seeks some reconciliation between ‘… reason and reality, category and history, aprioristic form and empirical material …’174 Again, insofar as this dualism seeks a transhistorical ‘thought-determinant’ upon which the antinomies might be recon172 173 174

Lukács 1972d, p. 188. Lukács 1972d, p. 188. Lukács 1972d, p. 188.

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ciled, it is faced with a further two choices: either reality is distorted in order to satisfy dogmatic and formalistic theory, or, these ‘thought-determinants’ adapt to the ‘superficial, merely empirical phenomena of historical reality, thereby raising such phenomena to the level of categories, of absolutes’.175 In either way, reality is once more hypostatised uncritically. Again, Lukács emphasises that all utopianism, no matter how radical, conceals a covert reification of the present. This raises further questions about Lukács’s critique of Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. In his essay on Moses Hess, Lukács in fact labels this the most troubling aspect of Hegelian philosophy: ‘The question of “reconciliation” reveals in fact the most problematical aspect of Hegelian philosophy: in defiance of his programme, idea and reality do not coincide, and hence the duality of theory and practice, the “unreconciled”; confrontation of freedom and necessity, remains unresolved. To put it in terms of the history of the problem: the Kantianism in Hegel remains not quite superseded’.176 This once more raises the question of Hegel’s absolute. According to Cieszkowski (and on this score, Lukács partly agrees) in Hegel’s system, the absolute as such is unobtainable as a result of its being introduced ‘from without’.177 Despite this, Hegel’s realism entails precisely the opposite point of view. To shed light on the problem, Lukács draws attention to Hegel’s famous formulation in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, that the … task of philosophy is to comprehend what is, for what is is reason. As for the individual each is a child of his time anyway; philosophy, too, is its time translated into thought. It is just a stupid to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can jump over his time, jump across the Straits of Rhodes.178 Lukács insists that this view is much closer to historical materialism than the constructs of Fichte, Cieszkowski, Hess and Lassalle. Nevertheless, Lukács’s aim here is to outline the basic antinomies of Hegel’s thought. That is, Lukács wishes to break open Hegel’s concepts of the absolute and of reconciliation in order to reveal the persistence of a basically Kantian problematic. According to Lukács, practical reason in Kant fails because the subject of action is assumed to be an abstract individual. So, to found reason on a practice that is genuinely cap175 176 177 178

Lukács 1972d, pp. 188–9. Lukács 1972d, p. 189. Lukács 1972d, p. 189. Lukács 1972d, p. 189.

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able of transforming reality and its object, a new collective subject is required (as well as a corresponding concept of practice). Outside this, the demand that practice transform reality is doomed to remain a formal and subjective ‘ought’.179 The absence of such a subject was key to Hegel’s limits. Lukács argues that ‘… Hegel senses very acutely the emptiness, the transcendent and abstract nature of this Ought. But since he is likewise unable to indicate concretely the real subject of revolutionising practice, he cannot go beyond a mere rejection of the Ought – which leaves the problematical nature of the concept in Kant’s system unsolved’.180 Hegel’s overcoming of this Fichtean ought, as has been shown, is sought in the present. Insofar as the present is understood as a unity of become and becoming, Hegel’s dialectics sought to encounter the future immanently, within the present. As Lukács writes: ‘Here was the germ of a true historical dialectics (the dialectics of history translated into thought). For it is precisely in the present that all forms of objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) can be revealed quite concretely as processes, since it is the present which shows most clearly the unity of result and starting-point of the process’.181 It was exactly his determination to comprehend the present that, in Lukács’s opinion, pushed Hegel to the right. This was because, in Hegel’s era, the only political form of revolutionary opposition to the bourgeois society available was itself bourgeois, formalistic and based on an abstract concept of reason. By way of contrast, when Fichte hypostatised an eternal law of reason, in contrast to empirical reality, he constructed a philosophy inferior to that which Hegel would produce, but which was better suited to the maintenance of a superficially or subjectively revolutionary stance. On the other hand, Hegel’s conviction in the necessity of conceiving of constitutional changes in an immanent and presentist way was richer philosophically but poorer politically in that it forced Hegel into accommodation and a proto-reformist stance. As we have seen, Lukács contends that as a consequence of this, Hegel brings history to a halt. Thus, Hegel is again accused of violating his own methodology. As we have seen, the ultimate consequence is that in Lukács’s reading, Hegelian dialectics turns into yet another metaphysics. As with all metaphysics, this too breaks open into a dualism: both reconciliation and the absolute are withheld.182

179 180 181 182

Lukács 1972d, p. 190. Lukács 1972d, pp. 190–1. Lukács 1972d, p. 191. Perhaps recalling Marx’s comments in The Holy Family, Lukács continues to suggest that such an ahistorical dialectic can only survive as an appearance or an aesthetics. (Lukács 1972d, pp. 191–2).

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The question therefore is to identify the content of the present which can provide for its own overcoming. In Lukács’s view only this can resolve the impasse reached by Hegel and his predecessors. Yet, following Hegel himself, Hess, Cieszkowski and the other Young Hegelians sought a solution on the level of logic and methodology. Thus, past and present and necessity and freedom are rendered as stark antinomies between which no mediation can be discovered. In contrast, Lukács suggests that the ambiguity of Hegel’s absolute and reconciliation is in fact a strength: ‘With Hegel himself, the inconsistency in the relationship between historical and logical succession of the categories was – at least in part – an instinctive corrective to the decline into formal apriorism and its vacuous constructs’.183 On the other hand, the Young Hegelians, by virtue of their greater consistency, were also more consistently idealist and formal. While Hegel gave strong indications that he had begun to discover the real interconnection between history and logic, the formalism of the Young Hegelians precluded their development in this direction. Lukács’s view of Hegel’s intuitions of the mediation between history and logic will be discussed shortly. For now however, this failing on the part of the Young Hegelians – in particular Hess and Feuerbach – in Lukács’s analysis, explains their moralistic and sentimental attitude towards communism, the proletariat and class struggle. Hess’s moralism hypostatised the antinomy between theory and practice. While the dualism between theory and practice did exist in the workers’ movement at the time, Marx and Engels were able, in Lukács’s opinion, to resolve it by discovering ‘in the social being of the proletariat itself the process whose real dialectics has only to be made conscious in order to become the theory of revolutionary practice’.184 Hess’s attempted mediation between theory and practice via the category of the future remained abstract. So too did his attitude towards the proletariat; for him, it remained an object of sympathy and concern, but not an agent itself. Even insofar as Hess regarded the actual struggle of the proletariat as an element in its own emancipation, it was always secondary. Instead, he expected philosophy itself, in the form of a philosophy of praxis, to assume a leading role. According to Lukács, Hess believed this to be possible as a result of philosophy’s position above society. ‘Hence, when he [Hess] strives honestly to recognise and proclaim the truth, he claims that he can see no social basis for the construction of his “truth”’.185

183 184 185

Lukács 1972d, p. 194. Lukács 1972d, p. 195. Lukács 1972d, p. 197.

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This also entailed a moralistic verdict on the present and on those tendencies opposed to revolution: ‘For if communism is not the class-truth of the proletariat; if it does not emerge from the proletariat’s class-situation as its conceptual expression, if rather, it is the “objective truth” of the historical process – then the motives for resisting the “truth” can only be ignorance or moral inferiority’.186 This point raises potential problems for Lukács’s position. As noted, the essays presently under discussion disclose Lukács’s gradual shift towards a more orthodox standpoint which regarded the validity of Marxism as a permanent fact of modern life, from the 1840s onwards. Of course, Lukács still regards Marxism as valid by virtue of its grasp of the standpoint of the proletariat. If, however, the proletariat in no sense tends towards its own imputed class consciousness, then the truth of the proletariat conceals the far poorer truth of the theorist who looks at the world from the standpoint of the proletariat. So, the motivation for accepting this truth can only be moral. If this is indeed the case, Lukács would appear to fall victim to the mistake of which he accuses Hess. To return to the analysis, Lukács notes that where Marx and Engels condemn the egotism of the bourgeoisie, they are clear to note that this egotism is not a personal characteristic or character flaw, but a consequence of their class position. Similarly, where Marx and Engels advocate for the working class, they do so not in opposition to egotism or some other moral grounds, but in the name of the interests produced by the proletariat’s class composition. Thus, they ground the communist project politically, without recourse to moralism and in opposition to what they regarded as abstract philosophy. On the other hand, Lukács quotes Hess as rejecting politics in the name of a new morality which can spiritually and organisationally unite the revolutionary movement.187 Insofar as this critique of Hess adds to our appreciation of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, it adds considerable weight to the argument that Lukács viewed actual praxis as the necessary overcoming of philosophy of praxis. This is to say, it reinforces the picture of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as an antiphilosophy and adds to the argument that he emphasised concrete mediation above all. These issues also pertain to Feuerbach, although in a different way. As is wellknown, Feuerbach initiated the materialist critique of Hegel. Lukács acknowledges that Feuerbach’s impact can be easily discerned in Marx and Engels’s early writing, although for his part, he downplays his influence significantly.188 186 187 188

Lukács 1972d, p. 197. Lukács 1972d, pp. 199–200. In a footnote, citing a letter from Engels, he suggests that: It seems to me that at the time when the young Marx was attempting to fight his way

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Whatever the case, Lukács is sharply critical of Feuerbach’s sensuous and naturalistic concept of immediacy, as well as his rejection of Hegel’s concept of mediation. Although he acknowledges the extent to which Feuerbach separated his concept of immediacy from pre-Hegelian and romantic thinkers (like Jacobi) Lukács argues that by rejecting Hegel’s concept of mediation, Feuerbach excommunicated himself from that aspect of Hegelian philosophy which contains the methodological possibility of developing towards materialist dialectics. In contradistinction, he argues that Marx methodologically drew on the most on Hegel’s concept of mediation.189 While Feuerbach was correct to reject the elevation of the idea or ego to universal status (like the Bauer brothers), his rejection of the idea was merely a crude materialist reversal of their idealism. Both positions involved the same reification of the ideal; the former is merely favourably disposed towards it and the latter negatively. This is an important point. As Lukács clarifies in a lengthy footnote, he is not concerned here with the opposition between idealism and materialism as such, but between dialectical and non-dialectical thinking. In effect, therefore, he posits an identity between non-dialectical idealism and materialism.190 This is entirely in keeping with History and Class Consciousness, in which Lukács favourably cited Rickert’s definition of materialism as ‘inverted Platonism’.191 Regarded thus, Feuerbach merely produces an absolute affirmation of the immediate. As Lukács quotes him: ‘Only that is true and divine which needs no proof, immediately speaks for itself and carries conviction, and entails immediately the affirmation that it is – the positive as such, the indubitable as such, the crystal clear’.192 This too breaks apart. Lukács argues that the only valid epistemological basis for true immediate knowledge is the unity of being and essence. Even Feuerbach, however, is forced to admit that in life (albeit only in so-called pathological cases), being is separated from essence. As Lukács writes,

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out of the conceptual jungle of Young Hegelianism and back to reality, Feuerbach’s materialism – despite profound disagreements – must have been congenial to him for the same sort of reasons as made Hegel at the period of his greatest reckoning with Kant and Fichte take to the naturalist philosophers of law (above all, Hobbes) whom he treated much more sympathetically than ever before and much more gently than Kant or Fichte. Marx very soon saw through Feuerbach quite clearly. And in later years the sections of The Holy Family where he praised Feuerbach struck him as ‘very humorous’ although he did not repudiate the work in its entirety (Lukács 1972d, footnote 47, p. 204). Lukács 1972d, pp. 202–3. Lukács 1972d, footnote 47, p. 204. Lukács 1967a, p. 202. Lukács 1972d, p. 204.

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‘Interestingly enough (though we cannot probe the matter further here) it turns out that both utopians and apologists have to face the same logical consequences’.193 This brings us to Lukács’s argument about the basic identity between Hess and Feuerbach’s philosophy. This is one of the most important arguments in his essay on Moses Hess in that it makes his emphasis on concrete mediation clear. Any immediate, ahistorical, logical or purely conceptual overcoming of the antinomies of bourgeois thought is bound to reinstate them, regardless of whether such an overcoming is avowedly idealist or materialist. To declare the resolution of the antinomies as a principle, outside actuality or without reference to the concrete unfolding of history in which they are mediated, simply hypostatises those antinomies, and with them, the present. An unmediated concept of becoming gives way, once more, to being. Indeed, mediation is inherent within all immediacy – as an objective aspect of reality, regardless of our comprehension of it. Of such immediate truths, Lukács writes: ‘… the basic societal forms of the present are given to us as immediate realities – in fact, the more subtle and complex (in Hegel’s terms, the more mediated) the forms, the more immediately evident they are’.194 Consequently, the fetishism of immediacy is itself a highly mediated social and historical phenomenon. To escape this and to see through the immediacy of society depends, then, on a mediated standpoint. As ought to be clear by now, Lukács proposes the standpoint of the proletariat. This standpoint, he argues, does not alter the immediate and obvious certainty that social forms possess. However, it does hold out the possibility of altering our practical behaviour towards them. He continues to explain that in the case of more mediated and more complex social forms, the dissolution of immediacy into mediation has fewer immediate practical consequences. The process of mediation … … therefore seems to be a mere conceptual one, a merely theoretical or logical operation. For example: we may well perceive clearly that our existence as isolated individuals is a consequence of capitalist development; but as long as our insight is merely theoretical, the individualistic structure of our feelings, etc. will survive in unshakeably immediate form. In the same way (although it must be stressed that the following example is intended to serve only as a psychological illustration), total understanding of the correctness of Copernican astronomy in no way affects the immediate impression that the sun comes up and goes down, and so on. 193 194

Lukács 1972d, footnote 48, p. 205. Lukács 1972d, p. 206.

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Only the practical tendency towards transforming the real, social foundations of this immediacy itself is able to bring about a transformation in behaviour in this context – and that does not in all cases have visible effects straight away.195 This constitutes Lukács’s explanation of why Hegel, despite his honest and serious attempts to solve the problem of immediacy, in the end only solved it in logical terms. In light of this failure, Lukács contends that Hegel’s categories of mediation took on an autonomous life, detaching themselves from history and in so doing, formed a new, philosophical immediacy. Again, while this was latent in Hegel, by developing upon this mistake Feuerbach ignored those aspects of Hegel which cut against it. Corresponding to the levels of the social totality, many immediate forms of knowledge are possible. Thus, Feuerbach’s emphasis on a sensuous and naturalistic immediacy can cohabit with an ethical and utopian immediacy: the first immediacy corresponds to the experience of nature, the second to second nature, that is, society. Both conceal a reconciliation with reality.196 Moreover, insofar as these levels of immediacy correspond to forms of practice, these are superficial and ultimately contemplative, leaving the structure of objective reality unchanged. Finally, self-reflection is precluded: ‘… in neither case is the attempt made to demonstrate concretely the genesis of the ethico-utopian mode of behaviour. It is taken for granted in just the same way as contemplatively grasped objective reality (or its so-

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Lukács 1972d, pp. 206–7. Lukács writes: This [naturalism] is the one form of the immediately given reality; closely connected with it is the second, the immediate acceptability of ethical Utopia. Its premise, in a nutshell, is that the objective forms of man’s concrete environment are immediately given to him and that the degree of their immediacy, far from providing a measure of their supra-historical essence, is the consequence of, on the one hand, the objective strength of those economic forces which produce them, and on the other, the class-specific prejudices and vested interests of man in the survival of his social environment. Hence, however, the concrete scope of his spontaneous emotional reactions to this social environment is likewise given. That is, he reacts to those given attitudes of his just as immediately as the environment itself. And it is precisely in the separateness of ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ that it becomes most clearly manifest that they are derived from one and the same social root that the immediate nature of each is a function of the most thoroughgoing reciprocal action of one on the other. In the case of a simple affirmative attitude towards reality, this connection hardly calls for detailed analysis. But if it is a question of Utopia, of the imperative ethical mode of behaviour, then their merely immediate nature seems at first sight less obvious (Lukács 1972d, pp. 207–8).

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called “ultimate principle”) was taken for granted’.197 Not only does Lukács endorse Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach; with these critical points, as well as a reference to the as-yet not republished German Ideology, he demonstrates his growing affinity with and appreciation for the young Marx’s philosophy of praxis.198 With this, the discussion may shift to Lukács’s assessment of Hegel’s partial solution to the problem of mediation between history and logic. Lukács believes that Hegel comes closest to outlining a solution to this problem in The Phenomenology of Spirit in which alienation – in addition to being treated as a general philosophical problem – is also posed as a problem specific to the structure of historically developed societies.199 Lukács notes that ‘… what is so very remarkable, fascinating and – at the same time – confusing about the Phenomenology of Mind is that it is the first work in the history of philosophy to treat the so-called final problems of philosophy, the questions of subject and object, ego and world, consciousness and being, as historical problems’.200 He clarifies that he does not mean this in the sense that Hegel applies aprioristic or timeless categories to history, treating it as an inert empirical matter. Rather, he discusses the categories of his thought equally as philosophical problems and historical ones. So, concepts for the first time are dealt with in their immanent historical development. Typically, Lukács is quick to eke out caveats to this assessment – he believes that Hegel was inconsistent. Insofar as Hegel regarded phenomenology as a propaedeutic to philosophy proper, then historical development is reduced to a subjective process of education. Equally, this reduces history to the level of illustration and subordinates it to philosophy. This, of course, echoes the criticisms of Hegel that have already been examined, as well as anticipating Marx’s comments on Hegel towards the end of the as-yet unpublished Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. For example, as Marx famously argued, Hegel’s standpoint was that of political economy. By virtue of this, Marx claims that Hegel understands the essence of labour as a social and historical power of creation. Yet, as Marx goes on to assert, he comprehends this only as abstract mental labour.201 So, in a sense, Lukács began to fulfil Marx’s injunction to systematically demonstrate what is materialist in Hegel. Even so, in this essay there exists more extensive praise for Hegel than

197 198 199 200 201

Lukács 1972d, p. 208. Whether the critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis outlined herein is valid also for that of Marx is a question open to further discussion. Lukács 1972d, p. 201. Lukács 1972d, p. 211. See Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 332–3.

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in any other text Lukács had yet penned, perhaps with the exception of his very early Marxist essay ‘“Intellectual Workers” and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership’. To continue, Lukács contends that the Phenomenology ‘… outgrows the place in the system which Hegel himself allotted it’, and points towards the fundamental concepts of historical materialism.202 He goes on to argue that Hegel’s discussion of the French Revolution and its political climax, the reign of terror (in the sections on ‘The Enlightenment’ and ‘Absolute freedom and terror’) form the heart of his anticipation of Marxism. In Germany, the French Revolution, as well as the bourgeois society that it produced, only existed as ‘forms of consciousness’, and not as concrete historical realities.203 Fichte’s response to this, according to Lukács, was to translate the conceptual substance of these historical events into the ethical postulates of natural law, and to oppose this to the actuality of German society. As a result of his consistent idealism, Hegel, on the other hand, was able to grasp history and conceptuality in their philosophical unity. So, he produced a philosophy which both fitted with his time and was capable of grasping its immanent direction. Insofar as Hegel established what Lukács calls the ‘this-sidedness of social reality’, he does so on the basis of a category that unifies ‘heaven and earth’ – that is, the category of the useful. In Lukács’s assessment, this category designates something that subsists in itself, but only as it is for something else. So, the useful object, taken as a totality (of being in itself and being for an other) exists as a unity of being-for-self. This, in Lukács’s view, is an essentially economic category which, although expressed in ‘mythological form’, expresses the basic essence of the commodity, divided as it is between use and exchange value.204 It should be noted, consequently, that this section in Hegel also anticipates (or, perhaps more accurately, inspires) the crucial dialectical turning

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Even so, Lukács is somewhat inconsistent in his assessment. In the sentence immediately following this quote, he also asserts that The Phenomenology of Mind contains the whole of Hegel’s philosophy (Lukács 1972d, p. 212). These ambiguities do not, however, seem to have a great deal of significance. Lukács 1972d, p. 212. Lukács’s words on this were quoted in Chapter 1. They are as follows: And this category of the useful already exhibits very clearly the dialectical double nature of the commodity, the unity of use-value and exchange-value, the appearance of thing-ness along with internal relatedness in itself. ‘It is’, says Hegel, ‘something that subsists in itself or a thing; this being in itself is at the same time only a pure moment; it is in consequence absolutely for something else, but is equally for an other merely as it is in itself these opposite moments have returned into the indivisible unity of beingfor self’ (Lukács 1972d, p. 213).

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point of History and Class Consciousness, in which the proletariat, instituted as an object for the bourgeoisie, grasps its being in itself and in so doing, begins to transforms itself into a being-for-itself.205 While other moments in the Phenomenology might well be taken to represent such a turning point (notably, the famous dialectic of mastery and servitude, or the transition between ‘Observing reason’ and ‘The actualisation of rational self-consciousness by way of itself’), Lukács draws specific attention to this moment because in his view, it constitutes Hegel’s most developed analysis of capitalism, combining both history and logic. This is because within the dialectic of the Enlightenment – following a historical development and by elevating the category of the useful – consciousness attains pure objectivity, and therefore, for the first time, reality. Objectivity, purged of subjectivity, is for the first time constitutive of the entire world of the consciousness. So, too, the essence of the contemplative stance is outlined and expressed by Hegel as the world of alienation and estrangement. This world – bourgeois society – appears to be devoid of spirit. Or, more precisely, in this world, ‘… [c]onsciousness is confronted by an objective, legitimate world, which in spite of – or rather, precisely in and through – its strangeness and autonomy is its own product’.206 Hence this stage of absolute estrangement and alienation of a purely economic social order prepares the ground for the respiritualisation of the world. In fact, such an estranged world is in itself a purely ‘spiritual reality’ which essentially fuses ‘individuality with being’, albeit in an uncomprehended way. Lukács summarises this discovery, quoting Hegel: Hegel says: ‘But that spirit, whose self is absolutely discrete, finds its content over against itself in the form of a reality that is just as impenetrable as itself, and the world here gets the characteristic of being something external, negative to self-consciousness. Yet this world is a spiritual reality, it is essentially the fusion of individuality with being. Thus its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but likewise an actuality immediately present and alien to it, which has a peculiar being of its own, and in which it doesn’t know itself […] It acquires its existence by self-consciousness of its own accord relinquishing itself and giving up its essentiality’.207 This analysis of The Phenomenology of Spirit, therefore, produces the starting point for Lukács’s whole philosophy of praxis, and consequently, this study, 205 206 207

Lukács 1972d, p. 212. Lukács 1972d, p. 213. Lukács 1972d, p. 213.

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which commenced by reconstructing Lukács’s critique of the facticity of bourgeois society by way of the commodity. This is why reference was made to this aspect of Lukács’s discussion of Hegel in Chapter 1. Indeed, within his analysis of Hegel’s argument we may further discern the concept of totality, the standpoint of the proletariat and the famous dual tendency of bourgeois society, expressed subjectively in the contemplative stance. This moreover sets the stage for the dual dynamics discussed in the middle part of this work, namely, the dialectic of theory and practice in which both theory (as the estranged consciousness of the proletariat) and practice (as the concept of the practical consciousness of the proletariat) rise from their being as an object or their being in themselves, to a unity which conceives of the proletariat as a subjectobject in the process of self-creation, that is, in praxis. It is important to note that in both Lukács and Hegel, presuming that we accept Lukács’s economic reading of Hegel’s analysis of the Enlightenment, the process of praxis emerges in the economy and culminates in the practice of radical, democratic politics. Moreover, as in Hegel, for Lukács this process is equally the solution to the ethical problems of the contemplative stance. In Hegel, this problem is ultimately expressed as the dialectic between the acting and judging consciousnesses and the overcoming of the beautiful soul. In Lukács, the problem of ethics is solved by the ethics of a communist party which, in turn, is both informed by and validated in dialogue with the proletariat. Further, in his most concrete and detailed assessment of Hegel, the starting point for the differentiated conceptual totality of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis comes into view. This homology between Lukács and Hegel – established on the basis of Lukács’s analysis of Hegel – is the strongest argument for the conceptual unity and structure of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, as well as his debt to Hegel. Read in this manner, Hegelian philosophy raises the essential problems of form and content that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was intended to solve: … Hegel comprehended the objective forms of bourgeois society in their doubleness, in their contradictoriness: as moments of a process in which man (Hegel’s mythological term is ‘mind’) in alienation comes to himself, to the point where the contradictions of his existence are driven to their extremes and produce the objective possibility of the upheaval and sublation of the contradictions themselves.208

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Here, alienation is grasped not merely as an appearance or as a mistaken view of the world. Nor is it seen as a transhistoric condition of our being in the world. Rather, alienation is rendered as a historically produced form of objectivity. Thus, the antinomies of philosophy correspond necessarily to the antinomies of bourgeois life. In fact, Lukács believes that Hegel struggled with this issue and its solution throughout his career. He lists as evidence for this claim the theory of essence in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Science of Logic, as well as Hegel’s account of bourgeois society in the Philosophy of Right. Additionally, he suggests that even in these works (which, as we have seen, he regards as less radical than the Phenomenology) Hegel’s famed tendency towards closure is at least ambiguous. For example, Lukács revisits the point that had been concealed in a footnote in History and Class Consciousness that the Philosophy of Right ends with world history.209 We may add that its final passages, which discuss the formation by world history of ‘… a secular realm of being for itself and an intellectual realm of being in itself …’ strongly anticipates the major themes of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis.210 Methodologically, Lukács regards such a reopening as cutting against the fetishisation of concepts, ethical-utopian conceptions of practice and Feuerbach’s reinstatement of immediacy. Left at this, Lukács’s critique of Hegel elaborated in the 1920s would constitute a research programme for the reappropriation of Hegelian thought by Marxism. Marx, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and elsewhere, called for what is really concrete in Hegel to be separated from what is idealist and mythological. Now, Lukács begins to add real content to this call. As has been outlined, this consists in the first place of his analysis of the specific mediations that Hegel discovered which point towards a comprehension of the fundamental economic logic of the system. Indeed, Lukács suggests that over the course of his career, Hegel became more immersed in political economy. The results of this may be discerned clearly in ‘Part One – Abstract Right’ of the Philosophy of Right, in Hegel’s discussion of property as the basis for a rational concept of right. Lukács also draws attention to Hegel’s theory of the estates as a prefiguration of a Marxist theory of class. Again, Lukács argues that Hegel’s reconciliation with bourgeois society makes this aspect of his thought possible; where the Young Hegelians disdained economics, considering their position higher than that, Hegel, Marx and Engels were willing to immerse themselves in the class-science of the bourgeoisie.211 After 209 210 211

Lukács 1972d, p. 214. Hegel 1991a, §. 360. Lukács 1972d, footnote 67. p. 217.

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a hiatus of some ten years, Lukács would return to this research programme in the late 1930s with The Young Hegel, which delved further into The Phenomenology of Spirit as a prefiguration of Marx’s analysis of commodity production.212 As pertains to the argument at hand, however, the significance of Hegel’s approximation of the commodity is that it points to the concrete mediation between history and logic. Lukács writes: Thus, finally, the historical and the philosophical approaches join forces as it becomes clear that each on its own is bound to remain stuck fast in immediacy, and it is shown, on the one hand, that true philosophical ‘deduction’ of concepts or categories can consist only in ‘creating’ them, in demonstrating their historical genesis, and, on the other, that history consists precisely in the constant transformation of those forms which earlier modes of thinking, undialectical and always stuck fast in the immediacy of their present as they were, regarded as supra-historical.213 Yet again, this makes the issue quite clear. Capitalism, considered as a distinct historical stage, produced an immediacy. The unification of history and philosophy, programmatically demanded and mythologically anticipated by Hegel, requires the mediation of this immediacy by a concept whose being may bear, simultaneously, the objective essence of the social totality and the collective subjectivity capable of consciously mastering the creation of its object. Hegel, writing prior to the emergence of the proletariat as a class, was incapable of grasping this, and therefore, was incapable of overcoming the divide between theory and practice. Nevertheless, his distinctive road to failure provided, in Lukács’s view, ‘… the methodological basis for a new, critical (practical-critical, historico-critical) approach to the present as a moment of the historical process’.214 In this new approach, Lukács argued that the duality of theory and practice is transcended; the present is grasped in its concreteness and immediacy but is comprehended via history, by ‘… pinpointing all the mediations which underlie its immediacy’.215 Simultaneously, these mediations demonstrate that the present is a moment of a process which transcends it. Only this critical approach to the present, in Lukács’s view, may identify the moments of the present which push towards revolutionary practice. 212 213 214 215

Lukács 1975. Lukács 1972d, p. 215. Lukács 1972d, p. 215. Lukács 1972d, p. 215.

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This concludes Lukács’s 1920s account of Hegel. In sum, he argues that without Hegelian philosophy, as it is preserved in its concrete negation by Marxian philosophy of praxis, it is impossible to produce a genuinely rational and concrete knowledge of the present that is adequate to the radical possibilities inherent within it. In Lukács’s view, any attempt to leap over Hegel is bound to degenerate into reconciliation or utopianism; namely, the tragic antinomies of the contemplative stance. In his argument, what differentiates Marx and Engels (as well as Lukács himself) from Hegel is their far more concrete comprehension of the essential mediation in bourgeois society – the commodity and its attendant dialectics. This essentially philosophical conclusion – which was produced at the very end of the period in which Lukács philosophised under the sign of praxis – gives rise to the conceptual starting point for the same philosophy of praxis (and, consequently, the starting point for this reconstruction). The philosophical critique of Hegel, from the standpoint of the proletariat, reveals the essence of bourgeois society and informs the whole of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. The solution to the mediation between philosophy and history is to be found in the commodity. Thus this philosophical account of Hegel completes at last the reconstruction of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Nevertheless, this critique of commodity fetishism only holds weight and is capable of satisfying the demand to overcome the divide between history and philosophy if it is totalised into a critique of reification and if it can ground the emergence of a practical subjectivity that can reappropriate its estranged world. If praxis is not true, none of this elaborate construction can be regarded as completely rational. This much is made clear by Lukács’s repeated emphasis on a presentist praxis. So, the starting point of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is only validated by the success of its end point: praxis. On this, therefore, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis stands or falls.

chapter 9

Praxis, the Absolute and Philosophy 1

The Philosophical Critiques of Lukács Just cos you shot Jesse James doesn’t make you Jesse James. Mike Ehrmantraut1

For the most part, the dominant interpretation of Lukács is in such a dismal state that the majority of his critics do not even approach a serious philosophical discussion of Lukács’s attempted refoundation of Marxism. Equally, the generally selective approach preferred by many critics, who focus on only a few moments in his philosophy of praxis, typically precludes the possibility of deriving deeper philosophical conclusions. In the dominant interpretation, Lukács’s 1920s work is regarded as a curious pathology with no great significance for the development of knowledge; a simple dead end in front of which we must erect warning signs to be ignored at the peril of the reader.2 Those few authors who have deviated from this stultifying consensus by producing genu-

1 Breaking Bad, ‘Live Free or Die’. Season 5, Episode 1. Directed by Michael Slovis, written by Vince Gilligan. AMC, 15 July 2012. 2 A recent example of such discussion-ending criticism is furnished by none other than Martin Jay, who is evidently not content with the damage he did in Marxism and Totality. In a 2018 argument, Jay has returned the scene of the crime, so to speak, connecting Lukács with theorists of the event (including Žižek and Badiou). In so doing, he grasps correctly that Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness is premised on a similar fidelity to the event and that, ‘[i]ronically, rather than insisting on the utter singularity of the Event … holds out hope for its repetition at a later date, as a Second Coming in which the suffering of the first will be redeemed’ (Jay, 2018: p. 209). However, this interesting insight is almost immediately foreclosed by a rather-too-cynical reference to Eric Auerbach’s understanding of ‘figura’ as a literary or rhetorical device. Whatever the merits of this theory, or its applicability as a metaphor for Lukács’s messianism, to reduce a theological category to a literary or rhetorical device both destroys its significance and denies philosophy its oldest and worthiest foe. In contrast to this, following Hegel, it is my conviction that philosophy may only emerge out of a critical engagement with theology. Lukács’s philosophy of praxis may well constitute a political theology of the event – but this does not give one licence to cast it aside with self-satisfied contempt. And at any rate, given that Jay feels the need to repeat multiple times how distasteful it is to reread History and Class Consciousness, one begins to question why he returned to it at all (to say nothing of the peer review process that permits such self-indulgence only to post-’68 intellectual ‘celebrities’ whose prestige is rapidly evaporating).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004417687_014

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inely philosophical evaluations or critiques of Lukács – among whom I number Feenberg, Rockmore, Kilminster and Hall – will be discussed in Section 9.1. This work, however, has taken a very different approach, both with regards to the ‘standard line’ on Lukács and the critics who take him more seriously. Lukács’s philosophy of praxis has been read and reconstructed as a conceptual totality. Or, to put the same point in Lukács’s words, this study has read Lukács in light of the methodology that he developed in his critique of Hegel; that is, in light of a dialectically interrelated hierarchy of categories which are situated historically. This was referred to in the introduction as a literary-historical method of reading. The reconstructive phase of the work was brought to a close with Chapter 8 which discussed the culmination of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis with its critique of German Idealism. As outlined, the immanent justification for this was to develop a self-reflexive approach to theory; that is, to render theory self-conscious and therefore philosophical. The immediate impetus towards this, in Lukács’s day, was the situation he found himself in as a loyal critic of the Comintern, striving to refound Marxism in order to rediscover the praxis that inspired his original breakthrough. Yet, insofar as Lukács’s philosophy of praxis remains within philosophy (and inasmuch as his critique of philosophy applies equally to his own), we are presented with an immediate contradiction. Namely, Lukács’s philosophy, even in the 1920s, was elaborated at a distance from the historical genesis upon which it was based. This reopens the pernicious chasm, or hiatus irrationalis, between logic and history – if ever it was closed in the first place. This threatens Lukács’s concept of praxis to its core. This basic problem frames this chapter which will undertake an immanent philosophical critique of Lukács. So, my own criticism of Lukács will be outlined in Section 9.2. This critique is borne of the conviction – one shared entirely by Lukács, as we have seen directly above – that if a philosophy exists outside history, then it is destined both to mythologise its own present and to contain its own logical contradiction. As John Lennon once quipped, following the other Marx, time wounds all heels. That is to say, severance from history entails the separation and degeneration of genesis and logic, casting philosophy into tragic, pre-Hegelian antinomies. Consequently, Section 9.2. will be divided into two aspects: a critique from history and a critique from philosophy. These are interrelated in a similar sense to that with which Lukács argues genesis and logic ought to be interrelated. Consequently, when I propose to criticise Lukács historically, I mean this not in the sense of Feenberg (among others) who declares Lukács to be superseded without at the same time discovering a commensurate logical, conceptual contradiction and, therefore, an immanent criterion by which to supersede him. In addition to reopening the rift between philosophy and history, such criticisms

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depend on an extrinsic standpoint. Neither do I mean to produce a merely logical critique. To simply discover some contradiction in Lukács would suggest that his philosophy of praxis could work, if only it were rearticulated with this or that addition or correction. This strategy, too, separates logic and history while concealing the genesis of the correction that is proposed. Rather, I take seriously Lukács’s idea that history comprises the substance whose truth praxis is supposed to articulate as subject. However, it will be shown that history – defined in his own terms – speaks against his concept of praxis much more than it speaks for it. Following this, the second critique will be logical, or more accurately, philosophical. It will be shown firstly that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis entails a fatal self-contradiction. This contradiction discloses that the ultimate truth of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is not praxis, as he claimed. Rather, the ultimate truth of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is none other than Hegel’s absolute. Insofar as Lukács spoke of the absolute, he did so by representing it as praxis. In representing the absolute as praxis, Lukács produced a political theology. Thus, it will be shown that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis mythologises both the praxis upon which it was built and the philosopher whose truth is falsely predicated on that praxis. The result of this criticism is not, however, a new concept of praxis. The outcome is rather a negation of Lukács’s concept of praxis. In pursuing this line of criticism, I adhere to Lukács’s method. As he argued, when the relationship with genesis is severed, a totalising philosophy is bound to become a conceptual mythology. As was cited above, Lukács wrote: Mythologies are always born where two terminal points, or at least two stages in a movement, have to be regarded as terminal points without its being possible to discover any concrete mediation between them and the movement … This failure almost always has the appearance of involving simultaneously the unbridgeable distance between the movement and the thing moved, between movement and mover, and between mover and the thing moved. But mythology inevitably adopts the structure of the problem whose opacity has been the cause of its own birth.3 This paragraph contains therefore the key argument whereby Lukács’s philosophy of praxis might be turned against itself and criticised. Lukács’s philosophy of praxis became just such a conceptual mythology and, by virtue of this, was riven with self-contradiction. Lukács misunderstood not only the histor-

3 Lukács 1967a, p. 193.

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ical praxis of 1917, but the genesis of his own philosophy. This misunderstanding holds on both an objective level (i.e., with reference to Lukács’s conceptual system) and a subjective one. That is to say, Lukács inadequately reflected both on the contents of his system and on the standpoint with which he produced it. A house so divided cannot stand. And yet, precisely as a mythology, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis adopted the structure of the problem whose opacity was the cause of its birth. Consequently, it is hoped that the metacritique of Lukács proposed below reveals a deeper truth about history and about philosophy. If successful, the critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis will contribute to the generation of a higher standpoint from which it may be comprehended, criticised, and ultimately sublated into philosophical knowledge. 1.1 Endless Mediation: Andrew Feenberg Feenberg’s major work on Lukács, The Philosophy of Praxis, neither purports to criticise Lukács’s philosophy of praxis wholesale nor inhabit it. Indeed, as has been made clear throughout this work, Feenberg’s reading of Lukács is uniquely generous and even handed. Nevertheless, Feenberg’s philosophy of praxis – particularly in its conclusions – illustrates well the consequences of what he describes as a ‘methodological’ and Kantian reading of Lukács.4 Whatever the virtues of Feenberg’s own project, it is argued that he sacrifices the Hegelian radicalism of Lukács’s work from the 1920s. There is therefore an implicit critique of Lukács in Feenberg’s work that must be drawn out. The starting point for this critique is the doubtless correct observation that during the 1920s, it was entirely reasonable to assume the radical potential of the proletariat while today no such thing is obvious. Feenberg writes: He [Lukács] takes for granted critical awareness of poverty, deskilled labour, and the indignities and injustices of life for the lower classes. These conditions [dehumanising industrial conditions; alienation in the labour process] appear as ‘content’ of the reified forms not for any intrinsic reason but simply because in generating them, capitalism ‘forms’ them inadequately producing poverty in terms of wages, deskilling as technical progress, and indignities and injustices as well-deserved consequences of personal failings. Obviously, this aspect of Lukács’s argument appears inadequate today. We would like to know how what might be called the ‘facticity’ of the working class enters consciousness, by

4 Feenberg 2014, p. 215.

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what process it becomes the basis for resistance and revolt. Lukács’s rather limited account is explained in his theory of class consciousness, discussed in the Appendix of this book.5 Following this, it could be asked whether one may assume the applicability of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to industrialised non-Western countries, such as China, Brazil, India, etc., where the working class does encounter alienated conditions immediately. These countries are, after all, more often scene to radical class struggle along the lines that Lukács theorised. Of course, this is a little beside the point. Rather, the above observation justifies Feenberg’s decision to relegate Lukács’s theory of revolution, literally, to an appendix. While Feenberg grasps quite well this theory of revolution, including its stress on radical democracy and mediation, he nevertheless declines to draw from it the philosophical conclusions that have been emphasised in this book. For Lukács, actual praxis is political class struggle or it is not at all.6 Of course, Feenberg is entirely right to note that Lukács’s theory of revolution pertains only during the actuality of revolution. Inasmuch as this period does not exist, one may conclude that the political praxis of the proletariat is blocked. Again, this raises serious consequences for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis that will be explored below. However, given Lukács’s strong emphasis on the historicity of theory, it is prima facie bizarre to conclude that a philosophy of praxis can be true outside or against history. In short, if praxis cannot arise

5 Feenberg 2014, pp. 81–2. 6 Worse is Feenberg’s treatment of Marx. He attempts to paint a picture of an almost entirely antipolitical Marx by arguing that the latter’s critique of purely political Jacobin/Blanquist approaches to revolution led him to advocate for a wholly social revolution. Feenberg writes: For Marx, it is necessary to transform civil society into a sphere of rational interaction. But paradoxically this is not a political goal. Marx was aware of the Hegelian critique of Jacobin voluntarism and quite self-consciously worked towards a non-voluntaristic formulation of revolutionary theory. Marx believed political revolution to be through and through tied to class society because in it moral principles contrary to the material interests of the individuals must be imposed by the state on a separate civil society of private owners. A revolution to abolish class society and private property would only reproduce these evils were it to attempt to impose morality in opposition to their interests. Rather, a social revolution against the very principle of class would necessarily have to be rooted in these interests; only on this condition would it overcome the antinomy of state and civil society, reason and need (Feenberg 2014, p. 28). This scandalously one sided reading of Marx has been criticised by the author of this work elsewhere (Lopez 2018). Suffice it to say, Marx’s writings on the explicitly political tasks and principles of proletarian revolution can – and do – fill volumes spanning his entire career.

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in the world, this must result not just in a historical critique of Lukács’s position, but also in a logical one. Logic cannot remain logical when divorced from history, as was shown in Lukács’s critique of the Young Hegelians. Feenberg, however, does not provide such a philosophical critique. The implication is that while Lukács was right, history has superseded him without necessitating any thoroughgoing critique of his philosophy of praxis. A further implication of this would be that were the actuality of revolution to reappear in the world, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis would become correct again, if not in details, then at least in essentials. Insofar as Feenberg does criticise Lukács, his critique is very brief and based on assumptions and arguments he credits to the Frankfurt School. So Feenberg writes: The rejection of Lukács’s version of the philosophy of practice [by the Frankfurt School] is also motivated by the breakdown of the unity of theory and practice, that is, the idealised relation of Marxism to the proletariat. Theory and practice can only be united where the crisis tendencies identified by Marxism open a breach in the reified forms, and where the proletariat enters that breach. Lukács believes in this prospect in the early 1920s. He notes that the proletariat is ‘free’ to reject its own revolutionary potential, but he shares the optimism of the post-World War 1 revolutionary upsurge. Furthermore, he is confident that the economic laws of capitalism will continually reproduce revolutionary conditions even if this upsurge fails.7 Of course, Lukács’s optimism proved to be unfounded. Whatever else one may say about the first generation of the Frankfurt School, their lasting merit was their willingness to face the new reality of the 1930s and 1940s completely bereft of illusion. Yet, as suggested above, if the free praxis of the proletariat failed, then this must have consequences for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. At the very least, this failure must be explained. Feenberg’s suggestions about the content of this failure are entirely beside the point. He writes: If Lukács failed to anticipate the breakdown of the unity of theory and practice, this is due not only to historical circumstances but to the rather small place occupied by technology and social psychology in his argument. For obvious reasons he lacks a media theory. He does note the reify-

7 Feenberg 2014, p. 153.

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ing consequences of mechanisation briefly and mentions the reification of the subjectivity of journalists and other middle-class employees. While conceding that immediate experience is reified for all classes in capitalist society, he considers workers partially exempt due to the mechanical nature of their labour. This is more or less the sum total of his dealings with the factors the Frankfurt School holds responsible for the failure of the revolution.8 This is, to say the least, shallow. Feenberg’s point is based on a dramatic compression of the standpoint of the proletariat and the experience of reification that makes it possible. As was outlined above, Lukács believed that the absolute experience of reification was precisely what gives the proletariat its potentially radical standpoint. Equally, the suggestion that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis failed due to a lacking critique of technology, social psychology or media is entirely superficial. Not only is Lukács’s philosophy of praxis quite compatible with the first and last of these things, this also misses the fact that praxis is formed on the level of political struggle.9 Given this, the implication that the workers’ state in Russia degenerated or that revolution in Western Europe failed due to the lack of a theory of technology or media is counter-factual history at its most light minded. It is also far too convenient. After all, Feenberg has spent the better part of his career developing a critical theory of technology. How propitious, then, that Lukács was lacking in precisely this rather narrow and specialised field! Be this as it may, Feenberg’s historical critique of Lukács continues: By the time he finally realizes that the revolution is not about to overtake the advanced countries of Europe but will remain confined to Russia for a long time to come, Lukács reasons about politics in Leninist terms. He can no longer draw on the resources of his earlier work to deal with the new problems emerging in advanced societies. As a result, he does not elaborate an independent theory of the failure of revolution in the West.10 Lukács’s philosophy of praxis (much like Gramsci’s) was formulated in order to universalise the October Revolution for the West. This was not merely an intellectual concern, but one born of the experience of defeat in Hungary and Ger8 9 10

Feenberg 2014, p. 153. Lukács was, of course, famously hostile to social or historical psychology. See for example: Lukács 1983a, 1929. Feenberg 2014, p. 154.

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many. Indeed, although he pursued an orthodox rhetorical strategy, Lukács’s political theory was quite clearly counterposed to the hyper-Leninist orthodoxy that had begun to take form by 1923. If this was not lost on the officials of the Comintern – from Zinoviev down – it is rather dismaying that it is lost on critical theorists today. In this regard, to suggest that Lukács possessed no answer to the problem of revolution in the West is to totally misunderstand the purpose behind, audience for and reception of his work. Of course, his solution failed. But this is not how Feenberg criticises Lukács. Beyond this, it is quite possible to elaborate a Lukácsian theory of the political failure of revolution in the West. Although it is a turgid and sterile task, the far left interpreters of Lukács (discussed briefly in a footnote to Chapter 3) undertake it with obvious relish.11 As was noted there, such a strategy is not without its price; it reduces Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to a sectarian recollection of Leninism not unlike the various sectarian Trotskyist theories of revolution that were also developed from the 1920s onwards. Of course, Feenberg is right about Lukács’s shift to the right and the intellectual sacrifice entailed by his decision to remain loyal to the communist movement. Nevertheless, this is beside the point. It was precisely Lukács’s capacity to reason about politics in Leninist terms that made him an opponent to those epigones of Lenin who oversaw the degeneration of Lenin’s revolution. This shallow historical critique of Lukács serves to introduce Feenberg’s own philosophy of praxis which, as he explains it, is much more indebted to the Frankfurt School. He correctly notes that Lukács’s metacritique of the antinomies of bourgeois thought (signified ultimately by the irrationality of the thing-in-itself) depended on the unity of theory and practice. So, in Feenberg’s account, while the Frankfurt School accepted Lukács’s metacritique, ‘… its rejection of his solution reverberates through every level of its approach from political theory to ontology’.12 Feenberg accepts this move, and it frames the rest of his philosophy of praxis. Insofar as it shapes his further reading of Lukács, it tends to deradicalise Lukács, resulting in precisely the type of neo-Kantian emphasis on method of which Rose and others have been critical. With respect to the Frankfurt School, despite occasional praise, Feenberg tends to side with Marcuse over Adorno. Feenberg notes that Adorno’s hostility to any philosophy of identity is partly warranted. He endorses Adorno’s insistence ‘… that thoughts are not things in the sense that there is always more to reality than is reflected in our comprehension of it; every universal concept,

11 12

I have in mind Rees, Perkins and Lanning (Rees 1998, Perkins 1993, Lanning 2009). Feenberg 2014, p. 154.

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indeed, even every constellation of such concepts, is incomplete’.13 Simultaneously, he endorses Pippin’s observation that this threatens to create ‘asterisk’ philosophy – i.e., that wherever a concept occurs, it is ritually accompanied by an asterisk warning of its incompleteness.14 Ultimately, however, he rejects Adorno’s approach to theory as ‘a curious waiting process’ and ‘a message in the bottle’ to the future in favour of theory that orients towards practice.15 Consequently, Feenberg believes that philosophy of praxis may be better advanced via Marcuse who, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, placed a wager on the New Left in full knowledge that it could not substitute for the missing proletariat. He writes: ‘Marcuse’s important innovation was to recognize the prefigurative force of the New Left without identifying it as a new agent of revolution. In this way theory might be related once again to practice without concession to the existing society, although with no certainty of success’.16 As Feenberg’s discussion of Marcuse is detailed, a full exposition is beyond the scope of this book. However, a few points will suffice to illustrate the relevance to Lukács. Firstly, Feenberg notes that Marcuse identified the New Left not as a totalising subject-object of history, but as a subject whose experience might found dereification: Marcuse substitutes the idea of a radical transformation of experience for that outmoded idea [of the proletariat]. The form of objectivity of a capitalist society is reflected in a truncated experience, but a richer experience is adumbrated in art and the oppositional movements. ‘The leap from the rationality of domination to the realm of freedom demands the concrete transcendence beyond this rationality, it demands new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, touching things, a new mode of experience corresponding to the needs of men and women who can and must fight for a free society’. The new mode of experience would mediate between the existing society and a new society based on a harmonious relation to nature.17 The struggles that emerge from this new mode of experiences are based on an ‘imaginative capacity to project a better future’.18 Feenberg quotes Marcuse to further illustrate the erotic depth of these new struggles:

13 14 15 16 17 18

Feenberg 2014, p. 160. Feenberg 2014, fn. 14, p. 160. Feenberg 2014, p. 171. Feenberg 2014, p. 172. Feenberg 2014, p. 182. Feenberg 2014, p. 183.

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What we have is a politicization of erotic energy. This, I suggest, is the distinguishing mark of the most radical movements today. These movements do not … constitute a struggle to replace one power structure by another. Rather, these radical movements are existential revolts against an obsolete reality principle. They are a revolt carried by the mind and body of individuals themselves … A revolt in which the whole organism, the very soul of the human being, becomes political. A revolt of the life instincts against organized and socialized destruction.19 In describing the Marcusian alternative, Feenberg is at pains to head off the rejoinder that it is essentially sentimental and romantic. He suggests that the conscious anthropocentrism of Marcuse’s alternative, which understands that beauty is not something inherent in nature, but a quality that emerges through human interaction with nature may serve as a rejoinder to this accusation. This is unpersuasive, especially given Lukács’s account of the romanticism of nature and his critique of sentimental humanism, as outlined above. Indeed, Feenberg’s quaint insistence that it is legitimate to introduce a notion of ‘life’ into public discourse does not lend his case as much gravitas as he might hope.20 The sacrosanctity of life is, after all, a value that has been claimed by rival warring armies. Of course, one might reply that the praxis of the New Left is just as superseded in the twenty-first century as that of the 1917 Russian proletariat. It could further be suggested that just as the social democratic and communist praxis of the proletariat in the early twentieth century created the social democratic and Stalinist statism of the mid twentieth century, the praxis of the New Left served as the avant garde of the cultural shift which went on to lay the basis for the hegemonic ideology of the neoliberal age. Just as social democratic and communist workers protested and resisted their leaders’ collaboration and betrayal, the New Left protested against neo-liberalism. Yet, in both cases the resistance was symbolic, fragmented and ineffective. It paved the way to acquiescence. In the former case, acquiescence took the form of Fordism and the post-war compromise. In the latter case, the New Left embarked on its long march through the institutions. This was made somewhat more comfortable by tenure, generous travel budgets and prestige within shrinking circles. Given all this, one could easily accuse Feenberg of excessive loyalty to the historic event (1968) and movement (the New Left) which gifted him with a long and interesting career. 19 20

Feenberg 2014, p. 186. Feenberg 2014, p. 184.

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Of course, while I do bite my thumb, far be it from me to stake my criticism of Feenberg on any of that. The main point that Feenberg preserves in Marcuse’s argument is an insistence that reconciliation with nature must take place via the mediators of science and technology, which must become ‘the great vehicles of liberation’.21 This leads into Feenberg’s own theoretical project which – as mentioned – has been for some years now the elaboration of a critical theory of technology. A full consideration of this project is also beside the point. Rather, my point is that Feenberg’s suggestions relapse into the utopianism of the contemplative stance. For example, he suggests that while scientific-technical rationality contains the potential for a domination of nature inimical to life, it is in itself neither destructive nor conducive to life. Instead, we exercise a choice over technology; we may choose to institute it in ways which allow life to flourish. The apparent neutrality of science conceals a value choice. In contrast to this, ‘[c]ounteracting the potential for domination implicit in science and technology requires incorporating values protective of life in design’.22 This requires a break with the unlimited scientific-rational logic of capitalism. Of this, Feenberg writes: Although Marcuse treats it as a revolutionary task, that engagement does not await the revolution. It began long ago as excluded actors protested the side effects of the dominant designs. Such protests were commonplace in the labor movement as it grappled with the threats to health and safety caused by the industrial revolution. The theory of reification illuminates this experience and links it to contemporary protests around issues such as environmental pollution. Resistance from below provides the impetus to revise technical assumptions and designs. These considerations belong to a dialectical critique of technology that is neither irrationalist nor technophobic.23 To his credit, Feenberg does not conceal the non-revolutionary consequences of this view, nor from their consequences for the philosophy of praxis: ‘The failure of proletarian revolution has not ended the struggle against reification but it has fragmented that struggle’.24

21 22 23 24

Feenberg 2014, p. 184. Feenberg 2014, p. 199. Feenberg 2014, pp. 200–1. Feenberg 2014, p. 203.

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Yet, these admissions bring us to now familiar terrain. As was mentioned first in Section 2.2, Feenberg saves Lukács’s concept of dereification by transforming it into a neverending process of mediation. For example, he writes: Reified rationality still prevails in society and it is still mediated by tensions between its forms and the content of the life processes it shapes and constrains, but it is no longer plausible to envisage a final end of this condition. Reification in some form is an essential aspect of modernity. Both the successes and failures of socialist revolution teach us that reified rationality, as embodied in social institutions, will always confront suppressed potentialities motivating transformation from below. This conflictual configuration is now the permanent state of modern society, but it does not at present take the form of general revolutionary struggle.25 This alters the concept of practice. In place of the totalising practice of the proletariat, Feenberg suggests a practice based on multiple fragmented struggles.26 In his argument, this also points to a ‘fuller account of practice’ that ‘reveals a hidden dimension … [in] the horizontal work of establishing the framework of meaning within which activity goes on. Reification is such a horizon and so is the dereifying challenge to it. If changes in that hidden dimension are understood as essentially transformative, then the philosophy of praxis survives the loss of its revolutionary guarantee’.27 He continues. In light of the twentieth century and the failure of revolutionary movements, what is now needed is a ‘… new paradigm of social change is … based not on the French and Russian revolutions but on a dialectical concept of mediation’.28 Expanding on these thoughts further, Feenberg writes: If we follow Marcuse in taking these resistances [fractured, modern ones] seriously, then we must return to the dialectic for a new approach. It teaches that modern institutions are not substantial ‘things’, but must be grasped in their contingency on the practices that constitute them. We must also cease thinking about the subject of resistance as a substantial, unified agent with stable characteristics and objective interests. Instead,

25 26 27 28

Feenberg 2014, p. 203. Feenberg 2014, p. 203. Feenberg 2014, p. 203. Feenberg 2014, p. 210.

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it too must be seen as a relational aspect of the fractured and contradictory unity of the reified institutions that assemble it.29 While this new paradigm calls into question the traditional concept of totality, Feenberg places at its core the dissonance between form and content and their mediation: ‘The essence of the Marxist dialectic is the process of mediation …’30 This in turn shades Feenberg’s conception of dereification. As outlined above, he asserts that reification is a necessary aspect of the market, bureaucracy and technology – these institution will not disappear under socialism, nor will they cease to be reified. Rather, in his view, socialism is essentially different to capitalism in that it permits constant challenge from below and constant dereification. Hence: Human action in modern societies, whether capitalist or socialist, continually constructs reified social objects out of the underlying human relations on which it is based. The reified form of objectivity of these objects gives a measure of stability and control while at the same time sacrificing significant dimensions of the human lives they structure. The chief difference between capitalism and socialism is not that one is reified and the other dereified, but rather that one stands or falls with reification while the other can support a continual mediating and transforming of reified social objects in order to realize the potential of those sacrificed dimensions.31 For fear that this may be interpreted in too radical a manner, let us see what concrete proposals Feenberg has in store. For example, he cites struggles over technology, internet censorship and environmental movements as examples of dereifying practice. While acknowledging their limits, he suggests these movements at least ‘enlarge the public sphere’ and ‘anticipate a more democratic form of modern society’.32 Feenberg anticipates the accusation of reformism by counterposing two Marcusian strategies: ‘the great refusal’ and the ‘long march through the institutions’.33 Feenberg’s decision to side with the latter against the former, by now, comes as no great surprise. Further, he suggests that technology might be re-formed by instituting input ‘from below’ into the design 29 30 31 32 33

Feenberg 2014, p. 211. Feenberg 2014, p. 211. Feenberg 2014, p. 118. Feenberg 2014, pp. 212–13. Feenberg 2014, p. 220.

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process. This is good news for Foxconn workers who assemble iPhones and precarious workers in the West, who presumably will enjoy input from below in the multiple minimum wage jobs they work to make ends meet. Following Marcuse, Feenberg even suggests a new aesthetic principle which might be extended to nature and technology: the idea of ‘letting be’. By what sleight of hand have we have shifted from the exquisite ascetic tragedy of Lukács’s 1920s philosophy of praxis to Paul McCartney (who was admittedly a great songwriter)? Feenberg further cites Japanese Zen Buddhist poetry as well as the integration of plant life into architecture to illustrate what he has in mind.34 In place of a profound inner experience of emptiness (either for the proletariat or the theorist) we are offered Eastern religion for Western consumption and an architectural style that is gaining popularity in corporate buildings worldwide. With praxis like this, who needs contemplation? Further details, at this point, would not add greatly to our understanding of Lukács. Similarly, while Feenberg’s curious silence on contemporary politics could be discussed, a purely political critique would also miss the point. The point is that in his attempt to save Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, notwithstanding his invaluable defences of Lukács against those who misread him, Feenberg transforms praxis into the kind of moralistic humanist-naturalist utopianism that Lukács associated more with Feuerbach and Moses Hess. Of course, Feenberg is not as radical as Feuerbach of Hess. Yet, as with these two, this rendering of praxis also conceals a reification of reality – one based on the utopian or qualitative aspect of reification and the contemplative stance. The critical concern behind Feenberg’s transformation of Lukács (namely, the failure of revolutionary praxis) is quite legitimate. However, without an attendant philosophical critique of praxis, the danger is that the praxis-oriented theorist relapses into the separation between logic and genesis, and ultimately, into the sterile and moralistic counter position between is and ought. If something can be saved of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, this is not the way to go about it. 1.2 Liberal Empiricism: Tom Rockmore Rockmore’s engagement with Lukács is perhaps the opposite of that of Feenberg. His critique is much more explicitly philosophical and significantly more hostile. It commenced with two articles: ‘Lukács on Modern Philosophy’ in Lukács Today and ‘Lukács and Marxist History of Philosophy’ in Georg Lukács.35 Rockmore’s book Irrationalism continued this engagement, considering His-

34 35

Feenberg 2014, pp. 217–18. Rockmore 1988, 1989, 1992.

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tory and Class Consciousness at length before turning to Lukács’s later works.36 More recently, he contributed an essay to Georg Lukács Reconsidered, largely returning to themes he had explored in the late 1980s and early 1990s, although in a tone significantly more hostile to Marxian thought as a whole. This article casts Lukács as a Fichtean while denying that his philosophy of praxis produces a space for philosophy within Marxism. Of course, I disagree that Lukács fails to produce a space for philosophical reflection within Marxism. Which of us is right will have to be left to the judgement of others. Nevertheless, in this most recent article, Rockmore regards Lukács essentially as a pathway back to Marx, who in turn, is portrayed not as a Marxist, but as a German Idealist. Rockmore defends this version of Marx against Marxism as a whole.37 This very idiosyncratic view is certainly not without merit. However, given that it depends on a critique of Marx, an extended discussion of it will not extend the argument here. Overall, Rockmore brings a uniquely analytic tone to the discussion. This is no doubt partly why Löwy described him as a ‘liberal empiricist’ critic of Lukács.38 However, his analytic training is useful in that it makes for an exceptionally clear and lucid presentation. Rockmore’s argumentation is systematic, clearly evidenced and even handed. This means that both his disagreements and his agreements with Lukács emerge undistorted by prejudice. This said, his rigorously formal and analytic approach at times places him on sharply different terrain from that of Lukács. Unlike Feenberg, Merleau-Ponty, Goldmann and other sympathetic commentators, Rockmore is not working from a position of sympathy with the philosophy of praxis, taking instead a more strictly philosophical point of view inspired by a close reading and defence of German Idealism. Hence, a detailed examination of his whole argument would both demand a separate treatment and would not contribute to the argument at hand. Nevertheless, a number of his views can be condensed and discussed without doing injustice to his work. These also serve to highlight weaknesses in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. The first aspect of Rockmore’s argument is his critique of Marx, Engels and Lukács’s relationship with philosophy as such, as well as their treatment of German Idealism. He objects to the argument most clearly presented by Engels (also maintained by Lukács) that philosophy as such ended with Hegel and that the workers’ movement is the proper bearer of the tradition of German 36 37 38

As Lukács’s later works fall outside the scope of this study, these comments are limited to Rockmore’s engagement with Lukács’s views in the 1920s. See Rockmore 2011. Löwy 1979, pp. 176–7.

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Idealism. This classically Marxist approach might take passing interest in Kant, Fichte, Hegel and others, but it sees them effectively as stepping stones towards Marx and Marxism.39 Lukács, in Rockmore’s opinion, works more than any other Marxist thinker to substantiate this otherwise dogmatic claim, and this is the basis for much of Rockmore’s sympathy with him. Unlike other Marxists who attack philosophy in a doctrinaire fashion, Lukács was deeply acquainted with German Idealism. However, Lukács’s substantiation of the claim that German Idealism is necessarily supplanted by Marxism relies broadly on two interrelated arguments. Firstly, Lukács must prove that the antinomies of bourgeois thought – as summed up in the problem of the thing-in-itself – are in fact philosophical sublimations of the problem of commodity fetishism and the reification of labour. Lukács, as has been demonstrated, critically appropriates Hegel’s solution to this by historicising philosophy, revealing its social bases. Yet notwithstanding Lukács’s in depth exploration of economic themes in Hegel’s work, particularly his early work and The Phenomenology of Spirit, Lukács does not believe that Hegel is capable of an adequate solution to the interrelated problems of commodity fetishism and the reification of labour. Thus, secondly, despite his nuance Lukács effectively repeats the standard Marxist critique of Hegel which casts him as an idealist, posits the superiority of materialism and nominates the proletariat as a real world, empirical substitute for Hegel’s spirit, which is held to be a speculative and mythological construct. This is related to Lukács’s lifelong argument that Hegel’s method – which is dialectical and revolutionary – must be separated from his system, which tends towards speculation (in a pejorative sense) and mythology. Rockmore’s presentation of his argument is excellent and it raises a genuine tension in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis – one that I have noted above. Yet he does not adequately demonstrate that this tension must be resolved in favour of German Idealism. In short, Rockmore’s critique of Lukács’s treatment of Hegel and German Idealism is largely valid and has much in common with Kilminster’s critique, but it does not necessarily invalidate Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. A more robust philosophy of praxis – for which Lukács may be read as laying the foundation – could simply revise the above three claims as follows. Firstly, Hegel’s system and method are only in tension because of the impossibility of any resolution in Hegel’s day. Hegel himself clearly rejected any such separation between method and system (as Lukács acknowledges). In fact, it is just this aspect of Hegel that pushes him in a radical direction. Key aspects of his concrete analysis of the world (as has been shown) are precisely what

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Rockmore 1988, p. 230.

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allow him to develop the method associated with speculative philosophy and vice versa. A strong critique of Hegel’s system is therefore not necessary for the philosophy of praxis. Rather, much of Hegel’s work may be included within a philosophy of praxis, even if his philosophy as a whole is outside this (for better or worse). Lukács’s earliest Marxist writings on Hegel seem to push in just this direction, as has been emphasised throughout this study. It would then be possible to produce a more accurate Marxian account of Hegel, on the basis of Lukács. Whatever the virtues of such a hypothetical exercise, the point is that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis does not rise or fall strictly on his critique of Hegel. This leads to the second point about the relationship between idealism and materialism. Although Marxian philosophy (including, at times, Lukács) has tended to absolutise this opposition, no such absolute counter position is necessary for Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Crude materialism, characterised by a base and superstructure model, a belief in the primacy of the economic motives in history and a reliance on an epistemology borrowed from uncritical natural science is, in Lukács’s estimation, equally abstract, antihuman and as contradictory a framework as vulgar idealism. In fact, crude, metaphysical materialism is a form of idealism, albeit one that is debarred from recognising itself as such. So, while Lukács (like Marx) occasionally resorts to the terminology of materialism, his positions should be seen as quite distinct from those associated with Engels and the Second and Third Internationals. Lukács’s concept of labour is the third term that reconciles the antinomy between idealism and materialism and furnishes an understanding of the role of human activity in shaping its world and concepts. His criticisms of ‘reflection’ epistemology and his explicit association of praxis with Hegel’s absolute further substantiate the validity of this alternative reading. This raises the third and final point. Lukács at times clearly indicates his view that philosophy came to an end with Hegel. While he is wrong to do so, his philosophy of praxis, unfolded as it has been above, in no way relies on this claim. As we have seen, his argument is that philosophy exists as a result of the estrangement between thought and practice. This estrangement is bound up with universal individualisation which in turn, in modern times, results from the universalisation of commodity production. It is experienced by the individual subject as an immediacy. Thus, individual subjectivity and its consciousness are divided between a theoretical and practical consciousness. This situation is a precondition for philosophy.40 The philosophy of praxis not 40

While Lukács’s work is the starting point for this view, it is best generalised by Sohn-Rethel (Sohn-Rethel 1978).

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only criticises this dualism, but aims at its real world overcoming. Yet, in an era outside actual historic praxis, the reality and truth of our estranged situation is undeniable. In other words, we live in a world of real abstractions wherein that which is false has power and actuality. So, the philosophy of praxis is, regardless of what it aspires to be, a form of critical philosophy. It is unique in that it aims simultaneously at its own self-completion and its own overcoming. Put simply, the philosophy of praxis raises the overcoming of philosophy as a programmatic demand. To confuse a demand for an accomplished historic fact is a mistake. Concretely speaking, this reformulation of Lukács’s view has important consequences for the philosophy of praxis; namely, that the elaboration of a philosophy of praxis is a task which cannot be completed until such time as actual praxis arises historically. Philosophy of praxis can therefore be said to stand in a relationship of perpetual criticism with philosophy as such. In short, the critique of German Idealism that Marx and Lukács undertook must be perpetually renewed, and not merely with reference to that tradition, but with reference to all philosophy, contemporary philosophy included. Thus, Lukács’s brusque dismissal of post-Hegelian philosophy is reversed. To be clear, while the above three points – about the relationship between method and system in Hegel, the relationship between idealism and materialism, and the relationship between the philosophy of praxis and philosophy as such – are found clearly articulated in Lukács’s work from the 1920s, a number of more ambiguous or incorrect formulations can also be found. Given this, Rockmore’s critique of Lukács is perceptive and productive. Yet, as I have shown, a full rejection of the philosophy of praxis is not a necessary consequence. Unfortunately, however, this is Rockmore’s aim. Indeed, his vantage point is so deeply opposed to philosophy of praxis as to make engagement relatively fruitless. After all, Rockmore desires a philosophy free from political bias (although he does not deny that philosophy has a political aspect) and he disagrees with all class-based social epistemology, especially the view of the proletariat as a subject-object in becoming.41 Amongst other things, he believes that in most cases the general lack of education and free time amongst members of the proletariat precludes their comprehension of totality.42 In contrast with Hegelian philosophy, he believes that there is no way to scrutinise a philosophical position from within.43 Indeed, at one point, Rockmore rejects the existence of a specifically capitalist form of rationality tied up with commodity production. Without batting 41 42 43

Rockmore 1992, pp. 95–109. Rockmore 1992, p. 139. Rockmore 1992, p. 134.

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an eyelid, in the very next sentence, he asserts the primacy of methodological individualism, arguing that the philosopher may only consider ‘… individuals who, for various reasons, some of which may be economic, represent different points of view’.44 These are only a few of the many issues Rockmore takes with Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Without disclaiming his right to posit these objections, it must be said that a full interrogation of these arguments would lead to a lengthy and sterile extrinsic critique, which would detract from the task at hand. It is to Rockmore’s credit that his criticisms force philosophy of praxis to confront unacknowledged tensions and blind spots. It is hoped that the counter arguments suggested here are vindicated below. Nevertheless, with this I feel entitled to take a page out of Feenberg’s book and let be this liberal empiricist critic of Lukács. 1.3 Shallow Immanent Critique: Richard Kilminster One of the most important critiques of Lukács is contained in Richard Kilminster’s Praxis and Method. Yet, with only one or two exceptions, it seems to have gone unnoticed by most Lukács scholars. Kilminster’s overall argument is dense and multilayered, so these comments will be limited to his evaluation of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. To begin with, his approach has a number of important virtues. Firstly, although he agrees with Lichtheim and Kołakowski’s conclusions that Lukács’s philosophy is more Leninist than official Leninism, he is by no means hampered by their hostile and polemical tone. He makes it clear that external, heresy-hunting approaches to Lukács, whether from the left or the right, have been a barrier to understanding his work and its widespread influence. Kilminster reserves special scorn for Stedman-Jones, superbly highlighting his inattention to what Lukács actually wrote.45 In this defence, Kilminster exonerates Lukács from the charge of idealism and observes that there is nothing inherently antiscientific in using the contemplative stance as a framework for understanding the scientific method. Most importantly, Kilminster highlights Lukács’s concept of mediation and makes a convincing case for its Hegelian roots.46 In these senses, Kilminster’s treatment, despite its brevity, resembles that of Feenberg. Beyond this, however, he strikes out in quite unique directions. Firstly, he defends Hegel extensively against Lukács’s reading of him. Secondly, he outlines a challenging and ultimately successful critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis which rests on a detailed and critical reconstruction of the main arguments in History and Class Consciousness. Yet, 44 45 46

Rockmore 1992, p. 96. Kilminster 1979, p. 72. Kilminster 1979, pp. 72–82.

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to grasp and respond to Kilminster’s main point does not necessitate that we reconstruct his reconstruction. The accuracy or acuity of his reading is not in question, and for this reason, his contribution is already in a separate class to most commentary on Lukács. To begin with, Kilminster is highly critical of Lukács’s treatment of Hegel while at the same time believing it to be broadly in continuity with Marx’s approach. In this sense, he agrees with Rockmore. This defence of Hegel, he argues, is not the ‘protest of an outraged Hegelian’. Rather, he believes it bears on the conclusions and limitations of Lukács’s position.47 Essentially, Lukács (and Marx before him) present their views as the culmination and sublation of Hegelian philosophy. Specifically, regardless of Lukács’s emphases, appropriations and acknowledgments, the arguments that he presents in History and Class Consciousness, his essay on Moses Hess and The Young Hegel, hold that Hegelian philosophy is essentially limited and self-contradictory. Despite attaining limited insight and rising on occasion to a grasp of the concrete, the Hegelian dialectic is said to relapse into a ‘… dialectic of concepts, of thought over and against the world …’48 Thus, while Hegel’s methodology might be salvaged, his system as a whole must be discarded as an idealist conceptual mythology. Lukács (once more, following Marx) accuses Hegel of failing to perceive the real nature and origin of real contents, which are formed by real, material activity, not merely the actions of spirit. This critique is closely bound up with Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which is held to be a philosophical imposition on reality whose necessary result is an apology for the reactionary Prussian state. Thus, in Kilminster’s summary (which is broadly compatible with that outlined above), Lukács contends that Hegel’s absolute is cast out beyond any tangible or historical reality and stands in contradiction with the vitality and dynamism of his method.49 Kilminster skilfully counters all of these points, drawing on considerable textual support from a variety of works by Hegel. His counter critique is well evidenced and convincing. Indeed, this weakness of Lukács indicates a potential blind spot in his philosophy of praxis which is related to the critique of Lukács outlined in Chapter 9, below. Indeed, it might be suggested that the general paucity of Marxist treatments of Hegel is revealing. Beyond these issues, Kilminster makes a number of more detailed criticisms. For instance, he argues that Lukács reads his own subject/object dialectic into Hegel, which renders the latter’s much more flexible and open ended subject/substance dialectic 47 48 49

Kilminster 1979, p. 56. Kilminster 1979, p. 58. Kilminster 1979, p. 164.

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finite and closed. These specific claims may be interrogated. After all, the ontological openness of Lukács’s concept of praxis has been emphasised. Yet, as acknowledged, the overall argument is persuasive and penetrating. One of the great achievements of Lukács’s work, for Western Marxism, was to reopen the question of Hegel and to redirect attention to his writing. Yet, in light of a serious reading of Hegel, the shallowness and limitations of Marx and Lukács’s critiques are readily apparent. Kilminster is entirely justified to draw attention to this and it is a topic which merits further exploration in its own right. The viability of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, however, as suggested above, does not rest on the accuracy of Lukács’s reading of Hegel. Similarly, it must be conceded that if Marx misinterpreted Hegel, his error was one of the most productive in intellectual history. Therefore it is not necessary to follow Kilminster when he draws upon Lukács’s misreading of Hegel to make his own criticisms of Lukács. At any rate, these criticisms stand on their own merits. Kilminster’s sociological critique of Lukács is much deeper. He argues that Lukács has created a closed philosophical system which, in advance, assumes its own superiority to others. By virtue of the standpoint of the proletariat – which submits ultimately only to the test of practice – Lukács reserves for himself the right to subsume any other worldview under his own, or to discard it as reactionary. This both insulates Lukács from standard philosophical objections or empirical criticism, and requires that he postulate a future premise upon which truth may be elaborated: namely, the advent of praxis. Kilminster writes: For Lukács, during the period of the pre-history of mankind leading up to the victory of the proletariat, actual proletarian thought is ‘merely a theory of praxis which only gradually … transforms itself into a practical theory that overturns the real world’. In theory this consciousness, in the possession of the theoretician today, is identical with that of its future concretisation by the proletariat but in an abstract less mediated form.50 This future orientation, Kilminster contends, is an essentially mythological worldview that tends towards abstraction and the rejection of reality, constituting a self-validating scholasticism. He writes: ‘Lukács’s arguments are more or less held not to be subject to empirical refutation or modification because of their future-orientation and assumption about the higher reality over and

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Kilminster 1979, p. 88.

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above the facts towards which society is tending’.51 This, Kilminster argues, is redolent of Hegel’s ‘belief in the higher order of truth embraced in a tendential totality leading towards itself through a world-historical process of progressive dis-alienation …’ He also relates this point to Lukács’s famous comment that Marxist orthodoxy refers ‘exclusively to method’.52 In Kilminster’s argument, this in turn leads Lukács to excesses of abstraction. For example, Kilminster criticises Lukács’s characterisation of reified immediacy as hopelessly overgeneralised and incapable of yielding concrete insight. Similarly, he criticises Lukács for referring to ‘man’ as the foundation and producer of historical dialectics, citing Marx’s view that this is an overly abstract and ultimately ‘theological’ category.53 Regrettably, Kilminster does not also cite Lukács when the latter writes that the category ‘species’ is ‘no more than an individual who has been mythologised and stylised in a spirit of contemplation’.54 Finally, Kilminster argues that Lukács’s position had already been inhabited by the Young Hegelians – most clearly August Von Cieszkowski. The consequences of this position are not so much politically reactionary as they are tragic; Kilminster believes that this messianic viewpoint, lacking the expected revolution, results in a resigned nihilism. Notwithstanding his own criticisms of Marx, Kilminster argues that he at least possessed the virtue of pushing in the other direction, towards a respect for empirical reality.55 Kilminster’s critique is often weak on details. For example, we have already extensively reproduced Lukács’s criticism of humanism as ultimately moralising and theological. It is equally clear that Lukács only views ‘man’ as the producer of historical dialectics in the most general sense – he obviously demands deeper and more concrete categories than this. Similarly, as was shown in the adaptation of Lukács’s critique of Cieszkowski, Lukács was quite aware of the dangers of erecting a philosophy ‘of the future’ in opposition to the present. Despite these occasional weaknesses, like the most perceptive criticisms of Lukács’s work, Kilminster’s critique forces the philosophy of praxis to clarify itself. The key to this is already contained in the quote reproduced above. Kilminster cites Lukács arguing that ‘… during the period of the prehistory of mankind leading up to the victory of the proletariat, actual proletarian thought is “merely a theory of praxis which only gradually … transforms

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Kilminster 1979, p. 90. Quoted in: Kilminster 1979, p. 88. Kilminster 1979, pp. 94–5. Lukács 1967a, p. 193. Kilminster 1979, p. 94.

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itself into a practical theory that overturns the real world” ’.56 From this, he jumps to the conclusion that the philosophy of praxis – the possession of the theorist – is ‘identical’ to its future concretisation by the proletariat. He qualifies this by adding that it will be less abstract and more mediated (which calls into question how ‘identical’ it can be). But this qualification aside, the argument is consistently maintained throughout; Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is truthful because it is a perfect or near perfect anticipation of a dereified proletarian praxis. So, Kilminster writes: ‘Lukács’s sophisticated theory claimed that in Lukács himself (and in the consciousness of any others who also embraced the potential consciousness of the proletariat before its full concretization in praxis) history was effectively conscious of itself’.57 A little later, he argues similarly that by claiming to understand the full realisation of the immanent tendencies in reality itself, Lukács reaches an unassailable and closed philosophical position.58 Yet, Lukács strained against precisely this type of closure. This is already indicated in the quote cited by Kilminster where Lukács outlines clearly that prior to revolution, proletarian thought may only be ‘merely’ a ‘theory’ of praxis which must transform itself into a theory of practice. This is not where the argument ends. If, as has been summarised above, theory may only exist as an independent position in a situation of alienation from practice, the upshot is that theory itself must be impoverished. Insofar as theory validates itself by reference to immanent tendencies in the present, in whose culmination it predicts a higher truth, theory must acknowledge that it makes an open ended and largely abstract prediction. Theory, then, is a hypothesis. Merleau-Ponty’s words to this effect were quoted extensively in Chapters 6 and 7. So philosophy of praxis may be acknowledged to constitute a recollection and generalisation of past praxis. Consequently, like all philosophy, it is reified. Yet, theory made self-aware by self-critique (or, in Feenberg and Bernstein’s preferred terminology, by metacritique) via the standpoint of the proletariat, may perceive its own abstract character and orient itself towards the practical overcoming of that abstract character. To aim, however, at selfovercoming is to say that all philosophy – philosophy of praxis included – is false, albeit relatively false. Thus, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is a negative, critical hypothesis about the immanent tendency of reality. This is also why the philosophy of praxis – as with every other variety of Marxism – has never been able to say anything concrete about a dereified society; the idea of communism has always been a negative reflection on the present. As has been outlined, 56 57 58

Kilminster 1979, p. 88. Kilminster 1979, p. 91. Kilminster 1979, pp. 92–3.

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Lukács is well aware of this fact – it informs his critique of utopianism and his emphasis on history conceived of as a present unfolding of the new. If the possibility of such a radically sceptical philosophy of praxis exists, as has hopefully been demonstrated, then Kilminster’s argument must be taken as refuted. All of this said, Kilminster is ultimately justified in his view that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis involves a wager on the future which insulates it from real history. This argument will be explored in the next section of this part. 1.4

Adorno as an Alternative to Lukács: Timothy Hall (with Support from Gillian Rose) Although Adorno’s critique of Lukács is all too brief, his overall philosophy stands as a potentially powerful alternative. Prior to considering Timothy Hall, it is worth nothing that Rose has also explored this possibility. The most succinct summary of her adaption of Adorno’s critique of Lukács is contained in The Melancholy Science. She writes: According to Adorno, Lukács’s concept of reification presupposes the reconcilement of subject and object and thus relapses into idealism, and fails to found a truly materialist dialectic … Lukács’s concept of reification presupposes a subject/object dichotomy in several senses. He criticises the division of labour under capitalism and the consequent fragmentation of the commodity into an ‘alien thing’, in a way which, according to Adorno, verges on a criticism of ‘thingness’ as such. As a critique of philosophical consciousness, it implies that the dichotomies of bourgeois thought can simply be eliminated. As a theory of class struggle, it claims that the proletariat is the subject/object of history and the privileged carrier of such knowledge. Adorno charged Lukács with thus accepting the idealist vision of reconcilement as the goal of history, but also as its origin. For when the subject/object dichotomy is posited as characteristic of capitalism, it implies that in pre-capitalist society a non-coercive harmony prevailed. Adorno seems to think that Lukács’s theory of capitalism has more in common with nostalgic Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft antitheses than with a typology of modes of production. Lukács himself, in his 1967 ‘Preface’ to the new edition of History and Class Consciousness, concedes that the book is marred by his having equated objectification and alienation. ‘Alienation’ does not occur much in the book, but Lukács is presumably referring to his use of reification. Nor is Lukács’ recantation necessarily to be given much credit. However, he does veer in the book from a simplistic subject/object ontology to a more complex theory of mediation. In any case the point supports Adorno’s argument. Adorno

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considered that a further effect of Lukács’ dichotomy was that reification appears to be a fact of consciousness, and that Lukács’ approach is grounded in philosophical subjectivity. Above all, Adorno feared that the work was haunted by the old ambition of philosophy: to tolerate nothing which is unassimilable to its concepts – the will to identity. Adorno’s differences with Lukács were political as well as theoretical, but they can all be derived from the difference in their concepts of reification.59 The reading of Lukács proposed in this work has disputed this interpretation by stressing the element of openness and non identity in Lukács’s understanding of the subject-object relation and in his meaning of praxis. Hall, discussed shortly below, has also noted this aspect of Lukács’s thought. This said, Rose is right in her conclusion – that Lukács’s philosophy was grounded in philosophical subjectivity – although it is difficult to grasp what she means by this, especially given her criticism is made with characteristic brevity. However, as is argued in Chapter 9, it is more productive and truer to Lukács’s words to see his philosophy as a failed attempt at overcoming the subjectivity of the theorist. So, while Rose is right in her conclusions, she is not correct to reproduce Adorno’s analysis. Moreover, in doing so she deprives herself of the opportunity of identifying precisely where Lukács’s concept of praxis becomes mythological. In effect, hers and Adorno’s critique read Lukács’s mistake as a kind of original sin, rather than as a necessary, albeit reified, philosophical expression of a new historical reality. However, a recent defence of Adorno’s critique of Lukács by Timothy Hall stands out as a notable improvement on the original. Unlike Adorno, Hall successfully refers his critique to the work being criticised and imagines possible replies that might be made from a Lukácsian point of view. Basic intellectual generosity such as this makes one wonder if its absence in Adorno doesn’t belie a certain residual resentment. This aside, Hall notes that to accuse Lukács of romanticism and to argue that his philosophy represents an abstract negation of reification is implausible. As Lukács made clear in his essay ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’, historical materialism is the selfunderstanding of capitalism. This theory might be retroactively applied to historic societies, but this a very different thing to founding theory in romanticised images of pre-modernity. Hall notes in connection with this that Lukács’s critique was avowedly immanent and modernist.60 This said, he still finds that

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Rose 1978, pp. 40–1. Hall 2011b.

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Lukács’s theory fails to live up to the radical historicism of this definition. After all, if historical materialism is the self-knowledge of capitalism, nothing precludes the emergence of new social forms and corresponding forms of knowledge which will in turn render historical materialism obsolete. This conflicts with Lukács’s idea of the proletariat as subject-object of history. He writes: ‘If the proletariat, as identical subject-object, understands itself and its social world exhaustively, how can this not preclude the emergence of new social forms? If truth is defined in idealist terms as the adequation of concept and object how can different social structures with different categories and systems of truth emerge?’61 In response to this criticism, Hall suggests two possible directions Lukácsian theory might take. The first would be to downgrade the reconciliation of subject and world and the concept of totality to the status of a regulative idea. This apparently neo-Kantian strategy resembles Feenberg’s path. The second direction would be to abandon absolute historicism and preserve an absolute identity of subject and object which would effectively end history. Hall notes that both these options fall back into the idealist antinomies that Lukács intended to escape.62 This entrapment within idealism has consequences; primarily a failure to comprehend the present. Thus, Hall argues that Lukács failed to notice the key qualitative change occurring in society: ‘… the emergence of the increasingly totalized and integral society’.63 This change means that ‘… the task is not to distinguish between an old, regressive culture in its terminal stages and a progressive new one – a task that is ever present in Lukács’s aesthetics from this time onward – but to raise the question of the very possibility of art and philosophy as forms of critique, under these new conditions’.64 Hall, therefore, agrees with the Frankfurt School, that capitalism had found a way to mediate the Marxian concepts of class consciousness and class politics to which Lukács had turned, and that Lukács failed to account for this.65 Consequently, unlike Adorno’s ‘permanent meta-critique’, which can account for structural limitations on subjectivity, Lukácsian Marxism is at risk of continually overstating the power of the subject of praxis.66 These are strong charges and it is certainly true that following his departure from politics in 1929, Lukács ceased producing the type of philosophy that

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Hall 2011b, p. 79. Hall 2011b, p. 79. Hall 2011b, p. 79. Hall 2011b, p. 79. Hall 2011b, p. 80. Hall 2011b, p. 81.

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made History and Class Consciousness an epochal achievement. Yet, Hall’s central critique fails to imagine a Lukácsian response. As summarised above, he notes the tension between the absolute historicism of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and the principle of a subject-object of praxis that can comprehend the social totality. When he suggests two answers to this paradox (a Kantian answer, in which totality and the unity of subject and object become regulative principles and a Fichtean, idealist answer which discards historicism) he fails to note the existence of a possible third path. If theory is conceived of as abstract truth, partly a recollection of past praxis and partly an anticipation of future praxis, then there is no demand that theory might acquire total or exhaustive knowledge of totality. Indeed, as was summarised in Sections 8.2 and 8.3, Lukács explicitly argued that the elaboration of a full conceptual knowledge of aspects of the totality, including sophisticated economic mechanisms (as well as art, nature, and so on), could only be produced in a dereifying (presumably communist) society. And even so, he did not suggest that this would foreclose on the possibility of discovering further new truths, including ones which might necessitate a paradigm shift. Indeed, in suggesting that historical materialism is the self-consciousness of capitalism, Lukács equally suggests that it will become superannuated by post capitalism. Prior to this, Lukács knew that every totality comprehended by theory will, to some extent, be abstract. In light of this self-critique, rather than flinching from totality, theory must conceive of itself as a practice, albeit an abstract one. This is more than a Kantian position in which praxis and totality become regulative principles because it is capable both of self-awareness and of comprehending the conditions necessary for the overcoming of its own abstraction. Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, in its strongest articulation, aspires to a radicalised Hegelian path that he believed is represented by Marx. Prior to revolution, philosophy of praxis might view itself as a necessarily limited yet constant practice of critique. On the other hand, the emergence of a real historic subject of praxis is a concrete historic process that may occur only in a revolution. This collective subject comprehends and alters the totality as it alters history and overthrows reified social relations. The consciousness held by this collective subject will necessarily vastly outstrip anything that is comprehensible to an individual or to theory. For a people to deconstruct and create social relations, they must acquire a consciousness of those relations. But nothing in this demands that they have an exhaustive knowledge of totality. Rather, the knowledge of a collective subject-object of history is also a process of construction and the practice of radical democracy. This praxis – which is only possible during what Lukács terms the actuality of revolution – allows for the supersession of theory as abstract truth; thus theory becomes embodied in a mass move-

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ment and transcends its narrow isolation. Again, nothing in this demands an exhaustive or complete knowledge of totality. All that is necessary is to acknowledge that praxis is the creation of the new. In short, we cannot anticipate the content of communism. Thus, we can allow for the emergence of radically new truth in a post-capitalist society. Historical materialism, then, has self-negation as its ultimate aim. In this fashion, Lukács’s absolute historicism is preserved by comprehending theory, totality and the subject-object of history in more Hegelian terms, as processes of mediation towards an end point which is itself dialectically open. All this said, by pushing Lukács’s philosophy of praxis to a radically sceptical position, Hall (not to mention the other interlocutors discussed) helps prepare the groundwork for the critique to which we will now turn.

2

The Critique from History Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practiced. He always had hope. Only the man of goodwill carried always in his heart the capacity for damnation. Graham Greene67 The past and the future hinder the wholesome effect of affliction by providing an unlimited field for imaginary elevation. That is why the renunciation of past and future is the first of all renunciations. Simone Weil68

As has been indicated throughout, not only was Lukács’s philosophy of praxis articulated at a distance from the praxis which inspired it, but Lukács himself was well aware of this fact. By 1923, the revolutionary tide of the October Revolution had begun to recede. Lukács experienced this retreat very immediately, as a series of disasters, defeats and setbacks for the communist movement to which he had dedicated himself scarcely five years prior. Consequently, his philosophy of praxis had been intended to underpin theoretically his political intervention into the Third International. Although he retreated somewhat from a philosophical or theoretical defence of his positions, Lukács contin-

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Greene 2004. Weil 2002, p. 19.

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ued to fight politically until at least 1928. This also failed; no communist party attained the degree of self-consciousness or self-criticism that he felt had been essential to the victory of Lenin’s party in Russia. Nor did any party embrace the conception of socialist strategy which Lukács placed at the heart of his philosophy of praxis. Nor did proletarian revolution triumph in any country other than Russia. Rather, the tendency in the workers’ movement was entirely in the other direction – towards bureaucratisation and conservatism, albeit at times under the guise of bureaucratic voluntarism. Lukács’s own Hungarian Communist Party was no exception. In 1928, its congress rejected his ‘Blum Theses’, coercing him into political silence.69 This situation bore profound philosophical consequences. Isolation from actual praxis means that philosophy of praxis must maintain itself in isolation from that which gives it its truth; as an antiphilosophy and as deeply self-aware of its own limitations. This historical situation gives rise to the first self-contradiction within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. As has been shown, for Lukács, praxis, in the modern world, is exclusively to be found in political class struggle at the highest level of historic possibility. Praxis in this sense is the third term which reconciles genesis (of which the proletariat is the highest bearer) and logic (embodied in the party) through the deep interrelation of these two aspects. This mediation between genesis and logic occurs both consciously and in the present; the perspective of the party (which must submit to the deep historicisation and relativisation of its own theory) makes itself persuasive to the proletariat which in turn grasps the party as its own estranged consciousness, which it freely chooses. In making this choice, the proletariat brings the weight of history to theory. This renders history rational and knowable while allowing theory to escape abstraction. Here, in the revolutionary apex of this dialectical interaction, history itself is elevated to self-consciousness. Although this is a leap, Lukács was at pains to demonstrate that it was not an irrational or messianic leap, but rather, the dialectical emergence of the subject-object of history

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For readers unacquainted with the twists and turns of 1920s Comintern strategy, I refer to the declaration in 1928 of the ‘third period’ by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern. This declared the need for a new round of revolutionary offensives. While these concluded disastrously, the bureaucratic impetus which inspired them forbade any critical discussion, let alone a process of learning or genuine self-criticism. Moreover, the bureaucratic voluntarism and moralism associated with this turn undoubtedly contributed to Lukács’s political marginalisation, given his defence in the ‘Blum Theses’ of a more moderate, realist policy (Lukács 1972a). For a political overview of Lukács’s career in the 1920s, including the ‘Blum Theses’, see also Le Blanc’s article ‘The Spider and the Fly: The Leninist Philosophy of Georg Lukács’ (Le Blanc 2013).

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which alone is capable of grasping the new. For Lukács, praxis was the absolute brought from heaven to earth. Intellectually, it heralded no less than the completion of German Idealism, Marxism and, indeed, philosophy as such. Noting the imminent suffocation of this divine fire, Lukács gathered its ashes before they had ceased smouldering. These he bore to the mountain of philosophy, nurturing them, in the hope that the world might once more feel the heat and see the light of emancipation. As has been shown, the view that praxis alone may bear the weight of truth formerly carried by the absolute was crucial to Lukács’s 1920s critique not only of Hegel, but also of the Young Hegelians. Only praxis may illuminate a truth beyond the antinomies of bourgeois thought and life. So, Lukács argues that any undialectical theory of praxis (or, for that matter, Hegelian philosophy) founders in the gap between antinomies such as the is and the ought, the past, and the future, quantity and quality and so on. In short, without praxis as the absolute, the entire dialectical-logical hierarchy of categories that makes up Lukács’s philosophy of praxis falls apart, reinstating immediacy. This reopens the dark and yawning hiatus irrationalis characteristic of reified thought. Although a number of strategies for navigating this situation are available to defenders of a Lukácsian philosophy of praxis, none are viable. All involve fatal self-contradiction and all deform theory and philosophy, reducing them to conceptual mythologies. This section will demonstrate that this fate is unavoidable. It will do so by pushing Lukács’s key terms, severed from history, to their most extreme logical limits. With the closure of the actuality of revolution and the relative marginalisation of communist forces, the pernicious chasm of reification must necessarily reopen. As this section proposes to criticise Lukács immanently from the standpoint of history as he understands it, it is worth recalling the essential points of his argument. The reified view of history reduces historical time to quantity and sees the present as Heraclitus’s river; that is, as an eternal, quantitative unfolding of the self-same. Insofar as this reified view is projected into the past or the future, the present – along with its forms of objectivity – is eternalised. The antithesis to this view declines to project the present into the past or future. As we have seen, Lukács associated this more ‘historicist’ view with neo-Kantian and pre-Hegelian thought. He faulted it because, viewed in absolute separation from the present, the past and the future must become domains of the irrational. This too corrupts the present, implying that there is no logic in history and that reason is, in the final analysis, dependent on an irrational act of violence. What unites these two antinomic approaches is that both degrade the qualitative and the new. In the quantitative view, the interruption of the qualitative and the new is seen as either catastrophic or miraculous (depend-

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ing on the preference of the theorist for or against his contemporary society). Yet, this places newness beyond comprehension. In the irrationalist or qualitative view of history, the new is by definition supposed to exist beyond comprehension. Consequently, this too transforms change into an incomprehensible catastrophe or a miracle – or both. So, the reified view of history presents historical novelty as a thing-in-itself and ultimately as an abstract negation of the present. And yet, as we have seen, abstract negativity – which in Lukács’s view depends ultimately upon the commodity form – is the essence of reification. And so, both of these views of history merely represent an estranged knowledge of the present. In elevating praxis to the status of the absolute, Lukács hoped to escape this imprisonment in blindness. To him, political praxis was supposed to mediate between the quantitative logic of reification and the irrational emergence of quality. Thus, the quantitative logic of history would find a path beyond formalism and selfsameness while the qualitative would be desublimated and demythologised, making it conscious, known and free. This is how Lukács wished to see history elevated to a non-messianic process of human creation. In place of creation ex nihilo, Lukács imagined that the proletariat would become the inheritor of world spirit, capable of freely and knowingly making the new world. Indeed, as has been shown, he believed that this concept of praxis both superseded and completed Hegel’s absolute. In this way, Lukács hoped that Heraclitus’s river might be bridged; the true infinite, the knowing unity of the finite and the infinite, would be brought to earth in the form of a dereifying communist society. Absent this sense of praxis, Lukács maintained that although irrationalism or relativism may exercise an attraction, absolute idealism was the only coherent alternative: ‘… as long as the absolute survives in a system (even unconsciously) it will prove logically stronger than all attempts at relativism. For it represents the highest principle of thought attainable in an undialectical universe, in a world of ossified things and a logical world of ossified concepts’.70 Although this is a summary, Chapter 8 has presented considerable textual evidence for this interpretation, which follows naturally from Lukács’s rejection of Kantian or Fichtean approaches to mediation, totality, genesis and praxis. This chapter will demonstrate that his words were true – and that they apply as much to his own philosophy as any other. Thus, Lukács’s philosophy finds itself with two options. The first is to preserve the truth of praxis at the price of increasingly grotesque irrationalism. This leads to irrationalism and to the abandonment of the truth that praxis was supposed to repres-

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Lukács 1967a, pp. 187–8.

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ent. The second option is to abandon the truth of praxis in favour of grasping the absolute, which not only survived in his system but, as he predicted, proves logically stronger. This second path, as will be shown, is the only way whereby praxis may be recovered, although relieved of the weight of the absolute. Lukács’s argument, reproduced above, gives us a hint as to where this critique should start. If its meaning is strictly observed (and indeed, Lukács did attempt to observe it through the 1920s, as is shown by his critique of the Young Hegelians), then its logic would appear to trap philosophy of praxis by sheer virtue of its being a philosophy in Heraclitus’s infamous river. This is to say, a philosophy of praxis in exile from actual praxis cannot hope to express the qualitative and new in history as a conscious and creative presentist-unfolding. Yet, to salvage something from the ruins of Lukács’s system, it is necessary to see precisely how it breaks down when exposed to history. So, we will proceed by presuming the desire to preserve Lukács’s philosophy of praxis in light of the historic absence of praxis. It seems to me, then, that only four strategies are available. Each of these are associated to some extent with positions taken by philosophers working after Lukács. All of these strategies do violence, to Lukács and result in self-contradiction and a return to contemplative theory. These four strategies for the preservation of praxis against history all refer to different instantiations of the antinomy between genesis and logic. The first sacrifices both terms, reducing praxis to mediation. The second sacrifices genesis on the altar of logic, preserving a schematic theoretical system outside of history. Here praxis is dehistoricised and either subsumed under reason or excluded altogether and forgotten. The third strategy sacrifices logic in order to preserve an image of genesis. It finds, as a result, that history may only attain its redemptive character if philosophy acquiesces to the irrational. Thus, praxis is reduced to a messianic aesthetic, moreover, one which excludes reason and freedom. The fourth strategy – also the most extreme and barren – attempts to maintain logic and genesis in a tragic and critical awareness of their constitutive emptiness. This strategy finds itself most deeply in the abyss – and consequently, allows absolute negativity to enter mediation, genesis and logic. In so doing, the fourth strategy both produces the most rigorously and properly theological philosophy of praxis and paves the way for a further, philosophical critique of Lukács. The self-contradictions within all of these strategies represent the violence wrought by history on theory that simultaneously insists the truth must be present while holding the present to standards that are recalled from the past. It will be shown that insofar as philosophy of praxis refuses to let go of its insistence on praxis as the absolute, history takes revenge.

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The consequence is intellectual (and sometimes political) barrenness. All the same, it will be shown that there exists an immanent conceptual path out of this dead end. 2.1 Praxis as Mediation: Trotsky and the New Left As stated, four strategies are available for preserving a philosophy of praxis outside the praxis which founds it. The first systematically overestimates the present in order to discover praxis as a continually existent possibility and reality waiting to be actualised. This was not Lukács’s strategy in the 1920s – his deep running realism precluded it. According to Merleau-Ponty however, this was Leon Trotsky’s path. For his part, Lukács had, by the late 1920s, distanced himself from Trotsky.71 Fairly or unfairly, he typically came to see Trotsky as the ultra-left antithesis to Stalin and in some respects a comparable historical figure to Lassalle.72 At the outset, it may be objected that Trotsky was no philosopher of praxis. After all, Merleau-Ponty caustically noted, ‘Trotsky was not a philosopher; and when he speaks philosophically it is by taking up again as his own the most banal naturalism’.73 Nevertheless, as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, as a practitioner of the dialectic and as a political leader, Trotsky embodied the practical-political side of philosophy of praxis. So, while he did not reflect on his practice philosophically, his trajectory and writing post 1917 – both insightful and dogmatic – can be read as being predicated upon the same praxis that inspired Lukács’s philosophy. In a work like the History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky’s limits are only present implicitly and do not fatally undermine what is surely a profound labour of recollection.74 Yet, insofar as Trotsky sought to preserve a politics and 71 72

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See Lukács 1926b. Lukács makes this comparison in one of his last interviews, published in the New Left Review, in 1971 (see Lukács 1971a). His comments on Trotsky elsewhere – notwithstanding one or two favourable references from the 1920s – reinforce the association. Given this, it is interesting to reread Lukács’s essay on ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of idealist Dialectics’ as a parabolic approach to criticising the various alternatives within post-Lenin Comintern politics. Indeed, Lukács (as was noted above) criticises Lassalle for his attempt to preserve a rational concept of law outside of history, and of consequently seeing himself in grandiose terms, as the bearer of spirit. This critique is very similar to that which I make here (with Merleau-Ponty’s help) of Trotsky. If my critique and Lukács’s comparison between Trotsky and Lassalle are upheld, then it might be inferred that Lukács himself anticipated and rejected this strategy for the preservation of the truth of praxis following revolution. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 74. Trotsky 2008. Nevertheless, insofar as Trotsky ascribes the October Revolution’s success to Lenin’s genius for the art of insurrection, he inadvertently discloses the originary mytho-

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a theory of revolution based around Bolshevik praxis of 1917, he did so by counterposing the ‘sublime’ moment of the October Revolution to the degeneration and counter revolution which followed it. As Merleau-Ponty wrote: One is then at that sublime point which we have mentioned several times. Trotsky always draws his perspectives from these perfect moments. He emphasizes the fact that constraint is then barely necessary, because the will to change the world finds confederates everywhere and because, from the fields to the factory, each local demand is found to concur in the general action. He always remembered with happiness the days of the October insurrection, when the proletariat took power practically without bloodshed. Such is the miracle of the revolutionary flow, of negativity embodied in history. But can one conceive of a continued, of an established, flow, of a regime that would live at this level of tension, of a historical time which would be constantly agitated by this critical ferment, of a life without lasting attainments and without rest? Permanent revolution is this myth, the underground work of the negative which never ceases, especially not in the revolutionary society.75 Merleau-Ponty argues persuasively that such a mythologisation of October demonstrates the practical-political limits of praxis. As Trotsky built a political current premised on an undaunted faith in international revolution on the Bolshevik model, he attempted to preserve the politics of praxis against history and without philosophy. The result was sectarian and utopian. Perhaps the most egregious statement of this sectarian-utopian preservation of praxis is Trotsky’s infamous ‘Transitional Programme’ which argued, in an almost grotesque caricature of Lukács, that the entire world crisis of the late 1930s could be understood as a crisis of the political leadership of the proletariat.76 Lukács did, of course, propose that the actuality of revolution entails an ideological crisis in the proletariat – and therefore, a crisis of leadership. Yet, outside the actuality of revolution, this crisis is at best latent. To declare such a crisis decisive outside of the actuality of revolution merely conceals uncritical ethical dogmatism of a sect. Indeed, rereading the ‘Transitional Programme’, one recalls Lukács’s words about sectarianism; namely, that a sect may extravagantly overestimate the movement or that it might, with equal

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logical moment upon which the political theology of the Bolshevik Revolution rests. See Ch. 43, ‘The Art of Insurrection’. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 90. See Trotsky 1977.

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extravagance, overestimate its own importance as the leadership of that movement.77 Characteristically, Trotsky spared no extravagance. He overstated both sides. As Lukács argued, such an approach sacrifices any criteria whereby historical reality might be judged. Both logic and genesis are subsumed under the sect’s ethical commitment to the abstract idea of praxis.78 Trotsky’s attempt to preserve the politics of praxis in schema proceeded under the watchword of permanent revolution. Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of this is cutting. In order to comprehend the failure of new revolutions modelled on October 1917, Trotsky would have had to comprehend the internal failure of that revolution itself. He would have had to admit to its limits by confessing that the suppression of capital by a proletarian state did not automatically entail a classless society. ‘This, for Trotsky, would have been to disavow his Marxist action. He preferred to recreate this action in the realm of the imaginary – in a skeletal Fourth International – since he could go no further in the real world’.79 Thus, Trotsky was to the Russian Revolution as the nineteenth century imitators of the Jacobin Club were to the Great French Revolution; sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, but at all times incapable of learning from the movement of history. Theory becomes a dogmatic schema and his77

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As Lukács wrote: If on the other hand, it [the sect] attempts to merge entirely with the spontaneous instinctive movement of the masses, it is forced into making a simple equation between the class consciousness of the proletariat and the momentary thoughts and feelings, etc., of the masses. In consequence it sacrifices every criterion by which to judge correct actions objectively. It succumbs to the bourgeois dilemma of voluntarism and fatalism. It adopts a vantage-point from which neither the objective nor the subjective stages of the course of history can be effectively judged. Hence it is led to the extravagant overestimation of organisation, or else to the no less extravagant underestimation of it. It is forced to treat the problem of organisation in isolation from the general questions of historical praxis and equally from the problems of strategy and tactics (Lukács 1967a, p. 322). It should be noted that there are interpreters of Lukács shaped by the Trotskyist movement, including Rees, Perkins and Lanning (who were mentioned briefly above), who defend a more moderate and at times more critical version of this basic strategy. Yet, by building theories of revolution and history (which are at times detailed and insightful) on Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, they assume that the political truth of his philosophy may be maintained well after the historical period which produced it has closed. While their readings of Lukács and the concept of praxis are generally more moderate and less schematically sectarian, they still implicitly fetishise the October Revolution as a timeless model of revolutionary socialist transformation. Insofar as they keep the question of future praxis open, at best they imply a role for theory which, while more provisional and modest, is nonetheless still reified by virtue of its dependence on a passed event (see Perkins 1993, Rees 1998, Lanning 2009). Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 88.

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tory ceases to produce anything new. Underlying this disposition is the abstract negativity of the ethical rejection of the present. This is why all practical, political and theoretical intellectual developments within the Trotskyist movement were purchased by exchanging this or that orthodoxy in return for insight into the new. A less radical version of this strategy for preserving a philosophy of praxis after praxis may be observed in some of Lukács’s New Left critics and defenders. As we saw in the section defending the standpoint of the proletariat, Jameson, Postone, Larsen, Chari and others seek to preserve a sense of Lukács’s concept of praxis outside the actuality of revolution. Consequently, they are all pushed towards an overestimation of the movements of the present and towards nominating a new, metaphysical subject or subjects of history. Among these thinkers, all of whom relate in some way to the post-1968 New Left, Feenberg is the most important, not least of all due to his defence of Lukács. Indeed, his example is instructive (and superior to that represented by Trotsky) because he is capable of meeting Lukács on his most radical level: that of philosophy. As we have seen, Feenberg preserves a modified Lukácsian philosophy of praxis by retaining only the concept of mediation and by discovering praxis in fragmented social movements and the reform of technology, among other things. Feenberg himself is quite clear about the modifications that must be made to Lukács’s philosophy in order to consistently pursue this strategy. The most important is that the standpoint of the proletariat is sacrificed.80 Of course, Feenberg is entirely within his rights to endorse Marcuse’s substitution of the movement of the New Left for the proletariat. However, by attempting to recover Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on this basis, he diminishes the latter’s critical edge and commits himself to a sharp separation between logic and genesis. After all, absent a totalising subject, totalising dereification cannot be imagined. Absent this, the logic of genesis fragments and becomes disunited. Consequently, Feenberg suggests that praxis consists in the permanent mediation of the antinomies of reified life. Yet, this permanent mediation conceals permanent antinomies. These Marcusian alternatives were outlined above: the ‘great refusal’ and the ‘long march through the institutions’.81 Of course, both sides have an appeal. Reforms can improve lives while heroic (if impotent) hyperrevolutionary opposition may at least posit the beginnings of a totalising critique. Yet, by virtue of their being antinomies, neither can claim lasting (let alone absolute) truth. Both conceal a dependence on the opposite

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See for example Feenberg 2014, p. 211. Feenberg 2014, p. 220.

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for their truth. Hegel showed as much in The Phenomenology of Spirit in the dialectic between the law of the heart and the way of the world. Thus, praxis as permanent mediation, at least in this articulation, becomes ideological. The two antinomic strategies proposed by Feenberg disclose a fetishisation of either force or consent. These are the essential categories of political power. As noted above, Feenberg prefers the latter side of the antinomy, that is, the long march through institutions. However, as is readily apparent, if the former strategy (the great refusal) represents an abstract, qualitative and mythological negation of reification, then Feenberg’s alternative represents the basically reformist or liberal alternative. This reduces praxis to incremental, quantitative change. This further explains my disagreement with Feenberg over the nature of reification, discussed in Chapters 2 and 4. While he is correct to suggest that the reification inherent in science, bureaucracies and other domains cannot be abolished wholesale, he also vitiates any qualitative sense of dereification. Of course, the permanent mediation he proposes may encounter or even produce qualitative change within the forms of objectivity of bourgeois society, in the same way as the Kantian understanding – according to Lukács – may encounter novelty at the expense of the principle of systematisation. Yet, without a totalising subject, Feenberg necessarily excludes the more radical sense of creation as a conscious overcoming of the antinomies of bourgeois life, towards which Lukács undoubtedly aspires. Praxis is thus deuniversalised, or at least, it becomes an abstract universal, comprising multiple particular praxeological projects and movements. Consequently, the reformulation of praxis as permanent mediation renders it unconscious and fragmentary and, in so doing, precludes a knowing or lasting reconciliation between quantity and quality. This requires, as with the sectarian-utopian alternative, an overestimation of the present. This is nowhere more clearly in evidence than towards the end of Feenberg’s The Philosophy of Praxis, where he argues that praxis may no longer aspire towards revolution and that it must embrace fragmentation, horizontalism and the pursuit of modest reforms.82 As was noted above, his suggestions for what might constitute the content of a new praxis are at times quaint.83 Even where he cites social movements as exemplary of his concept of praxis, none of those he points to have endured beyond a few years, let alone effected lasting changes. Thus, Feenberg’s proposals are far too easily faulted as a lionisation of the fragmenting logic of neoliberalism, as it is reflected in social movements.

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Feenberg 2014, p. 202. See Feenberg 2014, p. 217.

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Moreover, Feenberg is revealingly silent on the question of state power, the occluded foundation for his preferred strategy and the problem upon which Lukács’s politics founders, as will be shown shortly.84 Consequently, Feenberg does not help us advance beyond Lukács’s position. Trotsky’s strategy practically preserves praxis against history in sectarianutopian fashion. Feenberg’s alternative also preserves praxis against history, albeit in a more theoretical liberal-utopian manner. He replaces permanent revolution with permanent mediation. Whatever the virtues of this in its own terms, from the standpoint of Lukácsian philosophy of praxis as we have reconstructed it, Feenberg relapses into the contemplative stance, with its attendant divide between ethics and reality. The consequence is moralism. In Trotskyist or other sects, this becomes a harsh moralism, while in the New Left and social movements, this moralism hits a more liberal and pluralistic note. Lukács anticipated this. In his discussion of Christian sects, Lukács noted that reconciliation with the world may proceed under the signs of stoic resignation, indignant condemnation, self-reform or outwardly oriented, yet abstract, activity.85 What is common to these variants is that the essentially ethical truth of the contemplative theorist or practitioner is projected onto a mythologised proletariat or ersatz proletariat/s. The sectarian-utopian version freezes the soul of the theorist-practitioner, sacralising a recollection of praxis that is degraded into a fixed programme, a schematic and a series of ‘lessons’ learned from history and recalled faithfully by a self-appointed ‘memory of the class’. Yet, as argued in chapters 6 and 7, these attitudes are barriers that genuine praxis must overcome. Under the cover of memory the sect forgets praxis. Only by breaking with its memory and defetishising its view of history may a sect encounter the new or genuine praxis. The more liberal alternative strategy for preserving praxis outside of history, in comparison, has the advantage of being less hidebound (not to mention less miserable). Cheerfully, then, totality and genesis are simply removed from the equation. This makes it possible to greet fragmented, impotent and deeply confused movements as embodiments of non totalising and horizontal praxis. This, however, degrades the category of mediation. Recall that mediation, for Lukács, is only concrete insofar as it discovers a determinate and real link between the particular and the whole. Mediation is not just a methodological device; it is a structural component of reality, albeit one that is hidden by

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The author of this work has noted elsewhere Feenberg’s telling silence on politics. See Lopez 2018. Lukács 1967a, p. 193.

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the immediacy of reification. The task of theory, then, is not to mediate indiscriminately, but to discover the real mediations that structure the social totality. Denying totality does not make it go away. Instead, it just deprives mediation of its power of concrete and determinate negativity and relapses into simple abstract negativity. This also devalues praxis. In Lukács’s theory, praxis is both born out of totality and genesis and gives them their truth. Stripped of totality and reduced to an impoverished form of mediation, praxis loses its critical power. Praxis is reduced to endless change which can be judged only according to an externally derived ethic. Raised to the level of theory, this may give praxis a Kantian inflection.86 The extent to which this reproduces the contemplative stance should be readily apparent. In this articulation, the theorist may not be as hidebound as in the hard sectarian version. At least, however, in fetishising history, the sectarian only reconciles with reality under duress. In the liberal-utopian version of praxis, the reconciliation with reality is far more comfortable. 2.2 Praxis as Logic: The Elder Lukács As we have seen, the first strategy for preserving praxis outside history (in its liberal and sectarian variants) sacrifices both logic and genesis, and in so doing, degrades the concept of mediation. The second strategy for preserving philosophy of praxis sacrifices genesis on the altar of logic. This is, in fact, far closer to 86

I would like to thank Aaron Jaffe for suggesting to me the possibility of a more radical ‘Kantian’ articulation of philosophy of praxis. According to his suggestion, it is conceivable to envisage a philosophy of praxis which stresses permanent mediation while maintaining the proletariat as a hypothetical subject-object of history in becoming. Totality may be regained as a regulative ideal. Such a radical Kantian philosophy of praxis may well generate a more critical politics than that which Feenberg prefers and a more grounded politics than was usually associated with twentieth century Trotskyism. So far however, it would appear that no such articulation of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis has been attempted. Nevertheless, a pre-emptive critique may be suggested. The idea of the proletariat as subject-object of history can only be rationally sustained on the basis of the recollection of the 1917 revolution or on a theoretical (and therefore, logical and abstract) analysis of the proletariat’s situation under contemporary capitalism. Thus, faith in the proletariat is a wager, although not as stark a wager as that which will be discussed below in Sub-Section 9.2.4. Consequently, absent present day praxis, such an approach to the proletariat retains a utopian character. In this sense, the radical Kantian reading of philosophy of praxis can be regarded as a halfway house between the first strategy (discussed above) and the fourth, tragic strategy, outlined below. While this fourth strategy is arguably the most self-critical instantiation of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis outside actual praxis, due to its reliance on recollection and anticipation, the more it relies on faith, the more it imprisons itself within irrationalism, contemplative philosophy and ultimately, nihilism.

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the intellectual strategy that Lukács himself chose. As a result, it requires a less drastic modification of his work – although it does require that the most radical understanding of his philosophy of praxis be discarded. As outlined in Part 2, the most radical reading of the standpoint of the proletariat suggests that only when elevated to praxis is it capable of bringing the seal of truth to theory. The possessors of the standpoint of the proletariat (theorists of a proletarian party) can only elevate their theoretical insight to the status of a living truth insofar as they are capable of acknowledging the abstraction of their theory and submerging it in the genesis of the present. And this, in turn, is only possible insofar as the actual proletariat – the bearer of genesis – rises to meet the party. In this manner, the truth of philosophy (that is, logic in its highest, most dialectical development) is rendered deeply historically contingent. Strictly speaking, the truth can only emerge in the moment of praxis – that is, Lukács’s augenblick. Any logical truth prior to this is poorer. In Lukács’s writings from the late 1920s, an unconscious shift away from this radically historicist view of the truth is evident. He began to rely on the view that the social position of the proletariat, even when reduced by reification to a mute and passive object of history, is always capable of sustaining the absolute truth of Marxist philosophy. Although this still asserts a relationship between truth and history, it is a more rigid one that privileges and dehistoricises theory, if not in all of history, but following the advent of capitalism. By dehistoricising the standpoint of the proletariat, Lukács suggests that the truth of history was revealed at the moment in which the proletariat emerged as a modern class, and has remained essentially unchanged since. This truth was first discovered by Marx at some point in the 1840s, when he discovered the standpoint of the proletariat. The ongoing task of Marxism, then, is to preserve this essentially unchanging truth, of course while also extending its scope and grasp of the details of the world. This changes the originary moment of truth. Instead of linking the truth of Marxism with a revolutionary event, Lukács increasingly linked it with Marx’s intellectual breakthrough. One by-product of this is that it obliged Lukács to focus his attention on the specificity of Marx’s break with Hegel and his contemporaries, primarily the Young Hegelians. This explains Lukács’s fascination, from the late 1920s onwards, with the Young Hegelians and with Marx’s relationship with Hegel. One may conjecture that insofar as Althusser (or Korsch, following the 1920s) also sought to capture Marx’s moment of scientific breakthrough, he may be understood in broadly similar terms. This version of Marxism is capable of applying its scientifically discovered ‘laws’ retroactively, to precapitalist societies (which, owing to their difference, also become objects of fascination). In this manner, Marxist science – while possess-

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ing a determinate historical origin – becomes ahistorical and eternal. Such a Marxism is, of course, applicable to and grounded within the present which is subject to continual analysis. Indeed, within this viewpoint, what constitutes science is changeable; cruder versions may fetishise natural science or reify the base/superstructure antinomy, while more sophisticated ones might rely on a quasi-Hegelian methodology cobbled together from Marx’s various manuscripts. Even more sophisticated versions (and again, I have in mind Althusser) are comfortable with suggesting that Marx initiated a science. Thus, his epistemological breakthrough is rendered capable of continual methodological enrichment. Of course, given his famously hostile view to post-Marxian philosophy and social thought, this was not the elder Lukács’s preferred articulation of historical materialism. Still, there is a moralism underpinning the idea of Marxism as science; namely, that this science can be only be understood by those theorists who have broken most resolutely with the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. The more bourgeois the ‘scientist’, the more moral fortitude is required for such a break.87 In this manner, the absent subject of the classic scientific method reappears. It should be readily recalled that Lukács was hostile towards this kind of intellectual conjuring trick. Worse, by predicating the philosophical truth of Marxism upon the social being of the proletariat, Lukács suggests that the historical role of non-Marxist philosophy is over. Of course, it is granted that prior to the advent of the proletariat, non-Marxist philosophy worked heroically to resolve the problems of bourgeois life in thought. Yet, if these problems were decisively and finally resolved by Marx, post-Hegelian philosophy must be viewed as increasingly decadent and degenerate and a barrier to the truth. We saw this historical narrative about bourgeois philosophy reproduced above, in Lukács’s comments on the Young Hegelians. If Marx is the only possible resolution to Hegel and if the proletariat is the only inheritor to German Idealism, any nonMarxian philosophy will necessarily relapse into a pre-Hegelian or, at best, a Hegelian position. It must be admitted that the seeds of this view are present in History and Class Consciousness. This much is evidenced by the periodisation of bourgeois thought into heroic, intermediate and degenerate eras.88 As has been shown, however, the more radical aspects of that work connect absolute truth firmly with the actuality of revolution and thus cut sharply in the other direction. 87 88

For example, such a self-castigating moralism is very clearly in evidence in Lenin and Philosophy (Althusser 2001). In addition to the material cited above, in which Lukács suggests that the perspicuity of German Idealism was based on its existing at the juncture between precapitalism and capitalism, see Lukács 1967a, pp. 65–7.

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Further, as has been suggested, the example of Lukács himself discredits this less radically historicist rendering of the standpoint of the proletariat. After all, he was from a bourgeois background and was educated in a highly academic bourgeois tradition of philosophy. Supposing we decline to mythologise Lukács’s genius, it could be retorted that Lukács purchased the high price of admission to the truth demanded of someone with his background through the suffering and inner turmoil of his pre-Marxian, proto existentialist period. Yet, this concedes too much. In conceding that Lukács’s breakthrough was facilitated by post-Hegelian philosophy, we concede that his narrative about the decline and degeneracy of philosophy is wrong. Of course, Lukács was typically far less generous to his immediate philosophical predecessors than to those belonging to the German Idealist tradition. But this makes sense. After all, in failing to grasp the standpoint of the proletariat, Hegel committed no moral offense. The proletariat had yet to enter the stage. However, any failure to grasp the truth of the proletariat from the 1840s on was increasingly, to Lukács, a sign of decadence and a basic reconciliation with capitalism. As we have seen, Lukács applied this judgement to theorists as radical as Nietzsche and as critical as Simmel. Nevertheless, Lukács’s almost always hostile comments on his contemporaries should not be taken too seriously. Kavoulakos and others have proven that prior to his becoming a Marxist, Lukács learned profoundly from his intellectual milieu. The key thinkers of fin-de-siècle Europe, and in particular the key figures of neo-Kantian philosophy, must be said to have exerted just as much an influence on Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as the classical tradition. This indicates that post-Hegelian ‘bourgeois’ philosophy was capable of generating new truths about history and being. As conceded, the historical schema – in which the advent of the proletariat is the advent of the scientific truth of historical materialism – is only embryonically present in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. As I hope to have demonstrated, the more radically historicist alternative rises easily to the fore. Additionally, the presence of this mistake, even in undeveloped form, cannot be blamed for Lukács’s eventual decision, taken under extreme duress, to cohabit with the Stalinised communist movement. This decision was surely the result of a complex of factors, including his own political defeat. Still, as a resolutely honest intellectual, Lukács (unlike, for example, his 1920s cothinkers, Béla Fogarasi and József Révai) was utterly incapable of hypocritically renouncing his former philosophy in favour of a knowing lie or a simple flip into uncritical orthodoxy. Thus, he needed to effect an intellectual reconciliation by developing upon one strand of his 1920s thought to the detriment of others. Consequently, while the idea of historical materialism as a transhistoric truth may be found in this or that quote within Lukács’s 1920s philosophy, it only became a leitmotif

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following the defeat of praxis. The narrative of the endless degeneration and decadence of post-Hegelian bourgeois thought is a subterranean theme in History and Class Consciousness. In The Destruction of Reason, it is exaggerated to a parodic and intellectually tragic extent.89 Even in far more sensitive works such as The Young Hegel, the same narrative is clearly in evidence; Hegel is radical only insofar as he anticipates and approaches the discovery of Marx’s concept of the commodity.90 Equally, it can be suggested with good reason that this basic narrative informs Lukács’s famously conservative view of modern literature. Congruent with this analysis of Hegel, Lukács increasingly built his grasp of Marxism upon economic categories. After all, the historical advent of the proletariat did not eventuate in successful revolution. It did, however, inspire Marx’s critique of political economy. As has been argued, the Marxian critique of political economy is entirely compatible with Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, even at its most radical. Yet, for the critique of political economy to act as guarantor to philosophy of praxis, an immanent path must be charted between the commodity and the standpoint of the proletariat as it is actualised in praxis. In turn, praxis can settle its accounts with political economy by generating a higher, more historicised truth which vindicates critical political economy. Thus, as this work as demonstrated, there is a circularity to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis at its most radical; even though it begins with an analysis of the commodity, this starting point is given by its highest culmination. The absence of actualised political praxis and the actuality of revolution breaks this circular self-reinforcement of the truth. One consequence of this is the return of an intellectual contradiction between means and ends. As regards ends, without the actuality of revolution, Marxist philosophy is forced to either evade or defer the question of de-reification or to posit it as an abstract and distant goal. Instead, attention is turned to the analysis of estranged economic relationships. As suggested above, this makes it possible to elaborate a logical system. Yet, for all its radical insight, such a system is destined to remain descriptive. Although this system might be historical in the sense that it grasps the historical origins of political economy, because praxis is a distant end goal, the system cannot be subjected to the test of genesis. That is to say, Marxism qua political economy cannot envisage the remaking and dereification of the relationships of political economy. Consequently, this tends to depoliticise Marxism and reduce it to the system-

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Lukács 1980. Lukács 1975.

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atic critique of political economy. In turn, this critique becomes an endless intellectual labour of essentially quantitative conceptual expansion. This mirrors the endless expansion and development of the market. After all, as was noted above, the principle of formal systematisation is inherent in Kantian philosophy and corresponds with the assumption that reality is in principle knowable by way of the extension of calculable reason. Given this, what of the ends of knowledge? In a lesser thinker, the ends of knowledge may have been infinitely deferred. With Lukács, however, this was not an option. So, absent praxis and in light of his reformulation of historical materialism as a transhistoric science, he found it necessary in his later years to return to the study of ethics and aesthetics as such.91 He also retained a basically ethical commitment to radical democracy without, however, advancing his exploration of the problem of politics beyond the impasse within which it found itself in the 1920s. Even where such a dehistoricised and scientific version of historical materialism professes to the dialectical method, it reduces method to formalism. As we saw in Lukács’s argument regarding nature, there exist higher and lower dialectical categories. Lukács argued that the subjective categories of the dialectic are higher than the objective categories, whose dynamic proceeds unconsciously.92 Among these subjective categories are the antinomies of bourgeois politics, theory and practice, and ultimately philosophy. To the latter, objective category of dialectical categories belong the dialectics of nature as well as those infamous ‘laws’ of the dialectic, such as the unity of opposites or the transition of quantity to quality. To be sure, there is more subjectivity in the economy than in nature. Still, even though Lukács discovered the theory of commodity fetishism in the first chapter of Capital, that masterpiece is nonetheless relatively silent on questions of class consciousness or praxis. This is precisely why Lukács argued, in 1924, that Lenin’s great achievement was to have brought the practical essence of Marxism to completion. He argued that this was made possible by his grasp of revolutionary politics and the actuality of revolution, and that only this made it possible to theoretically complete Marx’s labour.93 Consequently, at his most radical, Lukács argued that the validity of the objective categories of the dialectic (upon which political economy relies) are dependent upon fully actualised praxis. Shy of this, without a conscious reflection on

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I pass no comment on these investigations which both merit detailed study in their own terms and are well outside of the scope of this work. To be clear, here I am using Lukács’s categorisation of the structure of dialectical thought and not that of Hegel. The latter would place economics within objective spirit and the ideas of theory, practice and philosophy within absolute spirit. Lukács 1967b, pp. 11–13.

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philosophy – made possible by the historical unity of subject and object in praxis – the dialectic is shorn of its subjective dimension and can only survive as a clever formalism. Indeed, this is exactly the fate Lukács suggested that Hegel’s own dialectic encountered, given its inability to unite subject and object in anything but mythological terms. Strictly speaking, according to his 1920s philosophy, outside a living unity of subject and object (that is, genesis), dialectic cannot rise above method. Genesis supplies the living content for a system of which the dialectical method is only the form. According to this argument, only genesis made it possible to sift between what was living and dead in Hegel. Absent praxis, then, the dialectical method must degenerate into a system of dead forms and a conceptual mythology. Consequently, the tensions between method and system and between form and content recur. Hence, the torturous and endlessly recurrent debate about what Marx took from Hegel’s method and how (as though a method can be abstracted from the content of a system, ala bourgeois science). Hence the return of smug, thought-ending banalities about standing Hegel on his head. At least Lukács himself accorded the old man more respect than this. Still, it was not for nought Hegel expressly forbade any attempt to separate the method of philosophy from its content.94 Thus, it becomes impossible to reconcile between form and content or between method and system. After all, as we saw in Chapter 8, the unity of these antitheses is only realised insofar as they are grasped as having been made, both in the past and in the present. That is, system is completed by a knowledge of history understood as conceptual and as a presentist unfolding. In other words, logic requires genesis in order to demonstrate the practical validity of the mediations that it discovers and in order to transcend the distance between the object and its logical-systematic representation. Without this, every intellectual cognition of totality remains an aspiration towards totality. Yet, genesis demands the theorist nominate a subject of genesis. As we have seen, Lukács disdained Hegel’s proposed solution, namely, World Sprit

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In the preface to the first edition of the Science of Logic, Hegel wrote: The essential point of view is that what is involved [in the present work] is an altogether new concept of scientific procedure. Philosophy, if it would be science, cannot, as I have remarked elsewhere [preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit], borrow its method from a subordinate science like mathematics, any more than it can remain satisfied with categorical assurances of inner intuition, or employ arguments based on grounds adducted by external reflection. On the contrary, it can be only the nature of the content itself which spontaneously develops itself in a scientific method of knowing, since it is at the same time the reflection of the content itself which first posits and generates its determinate character (Hegel 1991c, p. 27).

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and ultimately, (where thought is concerned), the philosopher. He also disdained the modest value-neutral individual, proposed as the subject of knowledge (in the sense of ‘producer’) by critical neo-Kantian sociology. Yet, without an alternative subject of genesis, Marxism – as the inheritor of Hegel’s logic – can only fall back on an abstract definition of logical form and, consequently, on the endless elaboration of a formal and descriptive system. While a system such as this may be able to incorporate a vast array of content, it can never escape this basic antinomy. Such a system will remain a representation and will be afflicted, therefore, by lacunae and a commensurate temptation to dogmatize the system. Once more then, Marxism is thrust back into the antinomies of bourgeois social science which Lukács criticised as they appeared in the work of Weber and Simmel. Interestingly, just as overemphasis on the scientific status of Marxism often conceals moralism, an overly objective articulation of dialectic often conceals an all-too-immediate and moralistic approach to subjective dialectics and especially to questions of politics and class consciousness. In Lukács’s case, this weakness where politics is concerned is explicable by reference to circumstance. Yet, it also seems to afflict theorists associated with Wertkritik Marxism, some of whom were discussed above in Chapter 3. Insofar as this tradition proposes a subject of genesis (with which to complete the dialectical system of political economy), they typically argue that capital itself ought to be seen as the subject of history. Although this is a valuable insight, it doesn’t depart the terrain of objective dialectics. After all, according to this interpretation, capital moves with a ghostly and trans human logic. Insofar as these theorists seek a counter subjectivity, or a way out of capitalism, they typically relapse into an immediate and essentially romantic political radicalism that has more in common with autonomism or anarchism. Larsen’s critique of Postone and Trenkle has been cited. His tentative hypothesis – that society may become subject – is the closest Wertkritik Marxism has come to proposing a subject-object capable of replacing the proletariat as emancipatory subject of history.95 Not only is this proposal a far cry from the detail sustained by more immediately political Marxisms (for example, Gramscian), this suggestion is weakened by its lack of a serious philosophical foundation. If society is to become subject, by virtue of what standpoint, event or method does the theorist discover this? After all, Lukács’s proletariat is known by the praxis-oriented philosopher. Hegel’s world spirit is known by the philosopher. Society as subject, in addition to its vagueness, lacks a foundation in what Lukács called subjective dialectics.

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At any rate, as Larsen astutely observes, it is more common to redress the subjective deficit with a redefinition of the proletariat as the radical other (ala Hardt and Negri or Žižek) and resistance to neo-liberalism as an abstract cry of negation (ala John Holloway).96 We find ourselves returned to Marcuse’s ‘great refusal’, namely, an abstract, ethical and utopian negation of what is. Perhaps the overemphasis on method has something to do with this apparent reversal from purely objective dialectics to immediately subjective ethics. While many Wertkritik theorists defend Hegel’s centrality to Marx’s political economy, to reduce truth to logic or method necessarily devalues the absolute. After all, Hegel’s philosophy is deeply saturated with subjectivity. This is why he so clearly stated his goal as expressing ‘substance … equally as subject’.97 In The Phenomenology of Spirit, the standpoint of absolute knowledge emerges only as the apex of the dialectic of consciousness that traverses sense-certainty, inter-subjectivity, nature, civil society, history, politics, art, religion and philosophy. Thus, spirit as a whole knows itself through a process of estrangement and reappropriation. Of course, this is undergirded by an account of nature and objective being. But these aspects of the world don’t crown Hegelian philosophy. Indeed, from a Hegelian point of view, to suggest that the absolute may be grasped on the basis of the critique of political economy alone is to make of it a bad infinity. From a Lukácsian (of the 1920s) point of view, outside of praxis which renders the critique of political economy concrete and practical, formalism reappears, and theory is reduced to a never-complete aspiration to totality. Once more, the basically Kantian structure of this intellectual problematic is apparent. Indeed, as Lukács conceded in the context of his discussion of Hegel (reproduced above, in Section 8.2), our comprehension of the dialectical interrelation of the concepts of political economy can only be completed in light of a dereified society. Prior to this, we are left with endless quantitative expansion; that is, counting. As always, quantity conceals quality. What motivates the counting is an often unconscious ethic. Moreover, it is natural (but by no means inevitable) that exhaustion with this type of formalism gives rise to moralism, a search for qualitative spheres of experience or even messianism, be it optimistic or pessimistic. And so, the logic of the commodity makes itself felt in theory. To return to Lukács then, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of his development following the 1920s captures the price he paid for elevating logic (under a dehistoricised standpoint of the proletariat and political economy) at the expense

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Larsen 2011, p. 92. Hegel 2018, §. 7.

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of genesis. Insofar as he increasingly approached truth from the point of view of being (as opposed to becoming), the radicalism of his concept of praxis was sacrificed to a Leninist orthodoxy that relied intellectually upon positing a strict identity between being and thought. Lukács’s 1967 defence of the ontological priority of nature, his rejection of the theory of reification, his endorsement of a labour-based anthropology and his claim to know a non-pathological form of objectification, and finally, his defence of the reflection theory of knowledge, so sharply at odds with the critique of Engels and dogmatic Marxism in History and Class Consciousness, is sufficient proof that Merleau-Ponty was not only correct, but capable of predicting Lukács’s trajectory.98 After all, Adventures of the Dialectic was published in 1955. It will be recalled that in Lukács’s argument (summarised above, in connection with Hegel), the highest and most concrete level or strata of reality can only be perceived in light of a collective subject which submits the unconscious mediations of capitalism to control and understanding. Shy of this, even the strictest realism can only approximate totality endlessly. If this seems Kantian, the alternative is worse: namely, a dogmatic realism which proclaims the basic identity of being and thought. If the first path fetishises the thing-initself, the second makes it the devil – albeit under the cover of obliterating any tension between the thing-in-itself and the thing for us. While making crucial concessions to the second option, Lukács chose the first path. It constituted, as we have seen, the basis upon which he criticised his younger self. This satisfied neither guardians of party orthodoxy nor Lukács. As Merleau-Ponty wrote: Orthodoxy does not allow for critical reflection, even if the purpose is to base it in reason and in dialectic. Orthodoxy does not want to be a higher truth or true for reasons which are not its own; it claims for itself the truth of the thing itself. Lukács’s history is that of a philosopher who believed it possible to wrap realism in the dialectic, the thing itself in the thought of the thing. The blade wears out the sheath, and in the end no one is satisfied, neither the philosophers nor the powers that be.99 Or, as MacIntyre put it, ‘… the declining quality of his [the elder Lukács’s] writing suggests that time has done its work, that the face behind the mask has taken on the aspect of the mask’.100 98 99 100

Lukács 1967c, pp. xvi–xix. Merleau-Ponty 1973b, pp. 71–2. MacIntyre 2008, p. 327.

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2.3 Praxis as Genesis: The Baroque Melancholia of Walter Benjamin The third strategy for preserving praxis after its twilight is the antithesis to the second; instead of fetishising logic and declaring Marxism a science, this approach seeks to hold on to a sense of genesis outside and against logic. If logic represents form, elevated to the standpoint of a philosophical system, then genesis, as we have seen, is the highest manifestation of the suppressed qualitative content of history. In Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, the proletariat is the bearer of genesis. This fact makes it possible for the praxis-oriented theorist to perceive the conceptuality of history and articulate this back to the class. Ideally, then, as class struggle advances, logic may be historicised and genesis may be made rational and knowable. This is how, as we have seen, Lukács escapes the historical antinomy between, on the one hand, the liberal view of history as an endless process of quantitative progress and on the other, the emergence of the qualitative in history as catastrophic or messianic. Without a subject-object of history whose praxis makes it possible to grasp reason in history as it unfolds, genesis is forced back into either of these antinomies. Whoever wants to hold on to a concept of praxis that depends upon genesis in such a historical condition is faced with stark alternatives. While it may be possible to resort to the liberal idea of history as quantitative progress, this reduces history to banal and ideological narrative. Genesis is thus deradicalised and sheds its emancipatory character quickly. Although such an impoverished concept of genesis degrades logic, rendering it formal, abstract and dehistoricised, such a compromise doesn’t require that logic be jettisoned. Such an instantiation of Marxian philosophy resembles Second and Third International Marxism more than anything. For obvious reasons, this was not an appealing theoretical prospect to radical Marxist intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. There exists a more cryptic and intoxicating alternative, indeed, one that was formed in deep hostility to such a conservatised Marxism. Shorn from revolution, praxis may be saved if the qualitative is preserved as an aesthetic principle which renders genesis meaningful but not rational. This concession to the irrational demands the sacrifice of systematic dialectical logic. That is, the Hegelian absolute is traded for a very different, aesthetic absolute. In return, such a philosophy of praxis wins the hope that it might endure the closure of a revolutionary situation. Such a philosophy of praxis found a most beautiful and profound expression in the work of Walter Benjamin, in his vision of history as catastrophe and redemptive messianic advent. As a preface to this discussion, it ought to be acknowledged that Benjamin is of a profoundly different calibre to other theorists discussed in this section so far, with the partial exception of Merleau-Ponty. That he was influenced by Lukács is bey-

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ond doubt.101 Yet, unlike Adorno, it would appear that he did not complete his apprenticeship as an ‘unorthodox Lukácsian’.102 So, his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (as well as the paralipomena to them) represent simultaneously a deeply sympathetic reflection on Lukácsian philosophy of praxis, a meditation on its limits and an attempt to reclaim a vision of salvation outside of the actuality of revolution.103 In short, Benjamin’s work represents a remarkably self-conscious attempt to preserve the emancipatory, universal and redemptive value of revolution and praxis without premising either on a synthesis between logic and history. Instead, Benjamin proposes a messianism that is not properly theological, but rather borrows from theology an aesthetic principle. Thus, Benjamin accelerates one aspect of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis while decisively rejecting its other, more Hegelian, aspects. This is in evidence nowhere as clearly as in Benjamin’s famous use of Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ as an image of history. Here, he very clearly inhabits one side of the antinomies of history, as Lukács delineated them, albeit in the tragic,

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For example, Benjamin refers to Lukács’s Theory of the Novel favourably in his essay ‘The Storyteller’, praising Lukács particularly for his observation that time is among the constitutive principles of the novel. Specifically, Benjamin quotes Lukács as arguing that time attains its importance as a consequence of the loss of a ‘transcendental home’ and that given this, the novel constitutes a ‘struggle against the power of time’ and that the epic experience of time insists on restoring ‘hope and memory’ in order to present a ‘creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it’. In this manner, the novel achieves a ‘duality of inwardness and outside world’ which makes it possible for the subject to approach the ‘divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life’ (Benjamin 2007, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 99). On the basis of the above, as well as what follows, it is suggested that Lukács and Benjamin were concerned with a broadly similar problematic; namely, a desire to find a pathway from history as flat and quantitative time back to qualitative and creative time. Following the publication of History and Class Consciousness, and the ensuing debate, Benjamin sided firmly with Lukács against his dogmatic critics philosophically, if not necessarily politically. Elsewhere, as late as 1929, Benjamin referred to History and Class Consciousness in extremely favourable terms: The most finished [geschlossenste] philosophical work of Marxist literature. Its singularity lies in the assurance with which it has grasped, on the one hand, the critical situation of the class struggle in the critical situation of philosophy and, on the other, revolution, now concretely due, as the absolute precondition, if not indeed the absolute fulfilment and completion, of theoretical knowledge (quoted in Löwy 2005, p. 8). On the other hand, the undeniable differences between Benjamin and Lukács will be discussed shortly. That the two disagree with each other sharply with respect to aesthetics during the 1930s is widely known. Kavoulakos 2018a, p. 3. For further discussion of Benjamin’s connection with revolutionary Marxism, Lukácsian and otherwise, see Fire Alarm by Michael Löwy (Löwy 2005).

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salvific and poetic manner indicated above. In place of regarding history as a quantitative chain of events, Benjamin’s angel sees only one unfolding catastrophe. While the angel wishes to ‘… awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’, he is propelled blindly into the storm of history, which is called progress.104 This is redemptive messianism; it wishes to preserve totality and passed history by presenting a vision of qualitative becoming as a counter-quantitative rupture that is radically, even violently, opposed to being. As this concept is by its nature ineffable, it is depicted with a vision of a transhistoric saviour, an absolute interruption and an utterly new foundation for being. Certainly, Benjamin was quite clear about what he was proposing. In his ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History” ’, he makes clear his views. He suggests, for example, that reading Marx’s idea of classless society as the endpoint of historical development both misconstrues Marx and commits whoever makes this mistake to faith in a ‘… “revolutionary situation” which, as we know, has always refused to arrive’.105 In place of this, Benjamin suggests that: ‘A genuinely messianic face must be restored to the concept of classless society and, to be sure, [is] in the interest of furthering the revolutionary politics of the proletariat itself’.106 Later in the same notes, Benjamin suggests that universal histories need not be reactionary, provided that they possess a ‘… structural principle …’ or, ‘… in other words, a monadological principle …’ that may be found in ‘… salvation history’.107 He puts the same point with more force later, writing that only ‘… in the messianic realm does a universal history exist’.108 In ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’, Benjamin reiterates this point, explaining: ‘The authentic concept of universal history is a messianic concept. Universal history, as it is understood today, is an affair of obscurantists’.109 In the same text, Benjamin further clarifies his meaning, with reference to dialectics and the concept of image: It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation

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Benjamin 2007, Thesis IX, pp. 257–8. Benjamin 2003, Thesis XVIIa, pp. 403–13. Benjamin 2003, Thesis XVIIa, pp. 403–13. Benjamin 2003, New Theses H, p. 404. Benjamin 2003, New Theses K, p. 404. Benjamin 1999, Aphorism N18,3, p. 485.

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of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. – Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.110 If it will be granted that one fragment may be used to explain others, I read this passage in the following way. Image, as Benjamin proposes that we understand it, mediates between past and present in ‘a flash’ which, in the now, forms a new constellation. Precisely because this flash is instantaneous, ‘… image is dialectics at a standstill’. The relationship of past to present itself is ‘purely temporal’ and continuous, and therefore, capable of sustaining dialectics. Thus, the genuine image is dialectical. This, as an aside, is a distinction that allows Benjamin to assert the inauthenticity of any image that does not redeem the past (and in so doing, sustain universal history). Given the extent to which fascism aestheticises politics, this caveat is important. In order to reconcile the dialectical nature of the authentic image with his previous statement, that image is ‘dialectics at a standstill’, Benjamin suggests that one encounters dialectical images in language. So, while messianism is a borrowed aesthetic and an image, its authenticity (as the bearer of a non-linear, redemptive and universal history) is tested in language and then expressed in philosophy. Thus, in contrast to a version of historical materialism premised on the idea of progress (which is to be ‘annihilated’) Benjamin proposes an aestheticised and messianic historical materialism.111 What this means for Benjamin’s philosophy of praxis and how this bears on Lukács will be suggested shortly. For now, it is crucial to point out the extent to which Benjamin preserves some of Lukács’s most essential ideas by holding on to the qualitative significance of genesis even in the face of despair. Indeed, Benjamin preserves the meaning of praxis by endowing it with a non systematic and non-logical, but rather, philosophically aesthetical form. Oblique, passing reference has been made throughout this work to the subterranean presence of a left-Nietzschean streak in Lukács. This can be glimpsed in his desire to escape the eternal return through the revolutionary action of the superman qua proletariat. Of course, Lukács himself would have denied this side to his thought. Shortly, I will suggest why this might be so. For now, the point is relevant because in a sense, by producing a philosophy of history whose unifying logic is aesthetic and whose ethic is absolutely transformative and divinely violent, Benjamin unleashes the left-Nietzschean superman that

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Benjamin 1999, Aphorism N2a,3, p. 462. Benjamin 1999, Aphorism N2,2 p. 460.

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is latent in Lukács, of course, while borrowing from Jewish messianism.112 It should be added, however, that in acting as the redeemer of history, Benjamin’s messiah differs from Nietzsche’s superman in that the latter is beyond pity and in no way desires to redeem the suffering of those who have died unjustly. Perhaps this is further reason why Benjamin distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic disruptive images. Nevertheless, in recasting praxis in these terms, Benjamin produces something like the philosophical-aesthetic intuition of praxis that Lukács attributed to Schiller. The key difference is that Schiller’s representation was an anticipation and was therefore optimistic and a bridge to the rational concept of genesis found in Hegel. Benjamin’s representation of praxis is a mythological recollection and prophecy which, for obvious reasons, possesses a deeply tragic character. The image adds to that which it depicts, both revealing hidden contours and placing differences between the image and that which is depicted in stark relief. Praxis, to Benjamin, is both more and less than it was to Lukács. So even when Benjamin draws closest to Lukács’s concept, his proximity reveals a chasm. A further consideration of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ will help to explain what I mean. In Thesis I, with the famous image of a clockwork chess playing Turk, Benjamin grasps the sense in which Lukács proposes that historical materialism represents the self-consciousness of capitalism itself. Historical materialism is the spirit inside the machine, a hunchback who can only play its role by virtue of its deformity. More than this however, his suggestion that this so-called science gains its power from theology indicates an awareness of the crisis of Marxian theory in both his and Lukács’s time.113 This

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This is certainly not to suggest that Benjamin owes his reading of Nietzsche to Lukács. After all, Nietzsche was in the air. Both Lukács and Benjamin were students of Simmel whose work was deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s cultural relativism (Benjamin 2003, fn. 11, p. 113). Benjamin’s own Nietzscheanism is, of course, far less concealed and more thoroughgoing than that of Lukács. Benjamin 2007, Thesis I, p. 253. Moreover, Benjamin’s hunchback is redolent of the buffoon that jumps over the tightrope walker, causing him to fall to his death in the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as well as the hunchback that confronts Zarathustra immediately before the latter encounters and faces the eternal return (Nietzsche 2003b, pp. 47–8, 176–80). Both of these figures, in my reading, represent Zarathustra’s estranged negativity, the power that allows him to make himself into the prophet for the superman and which simultaneously imprisons him within resentment for the present and, consequently, within pity, both of which are utterly alien to the creative joy of the superman. Only by confronting these aspects of himself and reconciling with them can Zarathustra find joy in the eternal return, although this is hardly a definitive liberation. Although it is impossible to extend upon this compressed analysis here, I believe – with Stanley Rosen – that this represents something like the Hegelian concept of reconciliation, albeit presen-

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may be read as suggesting – similarly to Bloch, who forms part of the theoretical link between Lukács and Benjamin – that historical materialism requires theology to give it a moral force.114 However, Benjamin speaks of this theology as ‘wizened’ and states the need to ‘keep [it] out of sight’.115 Bloch’s theology was anything but concealed. Perhaps then, like Bloch, Benjamin detected something theological in History and Class Consciousness and suggested that it was precisely this which gave Lukács’s work its moral force. Benjamin was not the only one to note this; Bloch did too. Perhaps in response to the critical comments Lukács had directed at him in History and Class Consciousness, in his 1924 review, Bloch indulged in a sly jab of his own. While he praises Lukács’s theorisation of praxis, he nevertheless describes Lukács’s position as a ‘… peculiar agnosticism … which is only concerned with the transcendent insofar as the concrete dialectical mediation is ripe to manifest this concretely’.116 He then goes on to compare Lukács’s position to Calvin’s: Calvin brought the underworld to consciousness by means of the doctrine of predestination; Lukács, as a theoretician of constitutive praxis, achieves the same thing by means of a quite unique combination of innerworldly asceticism and Hegel’s pure concretional dialectic. The deepest meaning of this heroic, temporary and dialectical agnosticism, however,

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ted in an aesthetic, mythological and irrational form (Rosen 2004, p. x). If I am right, this potentially transforms the impact of Benjamin’s metaphor; to expose the hunchback that powers historical materialism is to liberate it from both the bad infinity of liberal progress and the commensurate reliance on theology and eschatology. If this is possible, it clears a way to encountering a salvific yet non-messianic present. Such an achievement would represent the elevation of historical materialism to the standpoint of speculative philosophy, which is the aim of this work as a whole. Of this, Lukács was critical: When he [Bloch] then conceives of economics as a concern with objective things to which the soul and inwardness are to be opposed, he overlooks the fact that the real social revolution can only mean the restructuring of the real and concrete life of man. He does not see that what is known as economics is nothing but the system of forms objectively defining this real life. The revolutionary sects were forced to evade this problem because in their historical situation such a restructuring of life and even of the definition of the problem was objective impossible. But it will not do to fasten upon their weakness, their inability to discover the Archimedean point from which the whole of reality can be overthrown, and their predicament which forces them to aim too high or too low and to see in these things a sign of greater depth (Lukács 1967a, p. 193). Benjamin 2007, Thesis I, p. 253. Bloch 2019.

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is undoubtedly timidity before what is hidden, a responsible attitude before what is secretive, a strict need for its limitation, for its undistracted imposition against all apparent concretion or premature abstract constriction.117 Thus, Lukács’s overemphasis on the social sphere and his restriction of the subject-object problem to the domain of political practice, in Bloch’s view, resulted in a ‘timidity’ before deeper problems, including the ‘polyrhythmic’ structure of history and the ‘… the artistic, religious, metaphysical production of the secret transcendental human being [which] is a thinking of being, of a new deep relationship of being’.118 Nevertheless, in the conclusion to his review, Bloch suggests that against Lukács’s wishes, his philosophy of praxis nevertheless draws close to revealing these problems. As the unity of subject and object under the sign of praxis grows near, the ‘… overall metaphysical theme of history is thus discovered in Lukács via another route’. Precisely because of Lukács’s agnosticism, his ‘… arch-responsible obstruction of transcendence …’ and his ‘… aversion … to every hastily naming, rightly self-constructing metaphysics’, the problems of metaphysics return in the form of what is not said in Lukács’s philosophy. Or, in Bloch’s words, insofar as the present moment, the ‘now’ demanded by Lukács remains incomplete, it is precisely here that the form of the inconstruable question appears, an entirely related respect takes effect for the not only for-us, but therefore also for-itself really disclosed secret of the We, which is the secret of the world. Actuality and utopia are not in contradiction, but the Now is ultimately the only theme of utopia, whenever one grasps it as the constant demand for the removal of masks, ideologies, mythologies of being-in-transit, as the intimation of both the tendencies driving in the now as well as the authenticity hidden within it, of the adequation of the process. ‘It will then become plain’, writes Marx in a sentence that recalls Malebranche on the problem of knowing the object, ‘that the world has long dreamed of something of which it only needs to become conscious to possess it in reality’. This sentence, which lends to human thought the highest constitutive power, at the same time the highest responsibility for the world, the task of the seventh day of creation, connects Lukács in the last instance and the meta-

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Bloch 2019. Bloch 2019.

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physics of the cosmic interpretation of dreams, evocation of God. Here as there, the lived moment, the We-subject emerges as real from among the flowers of false consciousness and into the ever less deviating selfobjectifications of its own proximity. Under this, and under no other sign will the proletariat triumph, if the pre-history of humanity is completed and existence finally becomes real.119 Notwithstanding his typically dense (but nevertheless rich and expressive) prose, I take this critique of Lukács to suggest, in ironic manner, that insofar as Lukács’s philosophy is incapable of effecting the absolute closure of being under the sign of praxis, it implies a gap into which the secret, metaphysical problems of the world flood. To grasp this gap is to grasp those problems, albeit negatively. If this is the case, it refutes Lukács’s claim to have abolished the utopian. Indeed, this gap, in Bloch’s analysis, renders Lukács’s utopianism that much more powerful, causing him to – in the manner of Marx – task the proletariat with completing God’s work on the seventh day of creation. Bloch approved of this and it allowed him to detected a hidden messianic aspect to Lukács’s thought. In contradistinction to Lukács’s crude critics, he deigned to point out precisely where it occurs and why. We will return to this point below, in Section 9.3. Although we cannot be sure that Benjamin was influenced by Bloch’s commentary on History and Class Consciousness, this nevertheless adds to the provenance of the claim that Benjamin’s messianicaesthetic philosophy of praxis was a legitimate outgrowth of Lukács’s philosophy. To continue the comparison between Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, Theses III, V and VI speak of redemption as that which gives meaning to history, of the impermanence of every image of history, of the deep reliance of history upon the present and of the danger posed to ‘even the dead’ should there fail to be Messiah who ‘comes not only as the redeemer’ but ‘as the subduer of Antichrist’.120 Again, in addition to establishing parallels between Lukács and Benjamin, these points push Lukács further. These metaphors and aphoristic reflections express the con-

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Bloch 2019. Benjamin 2007, Theses III, V, VI; pp. 254–5. Bloch, too, speaks of violence in the transition between capitalism and communism: ‘This activity of class consciousness is thus a violent force: just as capitalist society itself came into being violently, indeed as its law by means of which capitalist society maintains itself even after its ‘transition’ from feudalism, is only a latent violence, so too can only acute violence release the new society from the old’ (Bloch 2019).

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sequences of the failure of the proletariat and the reopening of a rift between genesis and logic. If praxis is redemption and salvation, then in its absence, and without recourse to any universal logic, history becomes an absolute contest between all and nothing, in which nothing less than the entire past is at stake. In suggesting the need to redeem all history as well as warning of the danger posed to all meaning by fascism, Benjamin may well have been influenced by Lukács’s argument (outlined above) that communism will restore to life the meaningfulness of the domains of absolute spirit, such as art, religion and philosophy. Following Lukács’s argument, although these areas have ceased to play their historically progressive role, they will nevertheless furnish a free future with truth about our relationship with being. Indeed, Lukács suggested, as has been shown, that even our knowledge of history may only be completed in light of a historical materialism whose role has been transformed by the victory of the proletariat.121 In his philosophy of praxis, these promises are like a surfeit of spirit; they are an overflowing of revolutionary enthusiasm. This is why they are less often taken seriously. In Bloch’s reading, these promises betray the negative shape of a legitimate, metaphysical question that Lukács’s responsibility and agnosticism declined to answer and disclose a covert utopianism. In Benjamin, the fact of the proletariat’s failure inverts the character of the promise. What was a promise becomes the horror of an end to all meaning in history and the nihilism of the thought that all suffering is and always has been utterly in vain. Further parallels with Lukács are readily apparent. For example, in Thesis VIII, Benjamin refers to a state of emergency (drawing upon Schmitt) in order to make a point similar to that made by Lukács with regards to the irrational and violent underpinnings of law.122 Indeed, Benjamin at times approaches Lukács’s most radically democratic arguments. For example, he argues in Thesis XII that not ‘… man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge …’123 Nevertheless, proximity also highlights contrast. The key differences between Lukács and Benjamin concern the nature of historical time and memory. For example, Benjamin writes that: ‘History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty rime, but time filled by, the presence of the now …’ and that this now is the site of the redemptive ‘… leap in the open air of history …’ which is both ‘… the dialectical one …’ and ‘… how Marx understood the revolution’.124 Indeed, he associates 121 122 123 124

See ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’ in Lukács 1967a. Benjamin 2007, Thesis VIII, p. 257. Benjamin 2007, Thesis XII, p. 260. Benjamin 2007, Thesis XIV, p. 261.

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revolutionary transformation both with a new, rich institution of time (i.e., the revolutionary calendar of the Great French Revolution) as well as a liberation from the tyranny of quantified time. Hence his reference to insurrectionaries who shot out the clock faces of Paris during the July uprising.125 Slightly earlier, he suggests that in opposition to bourgeois history, historical materialism relies on a mournful recollection of the sufferings, defeats and injustices of the past, while slightly later, he argues that Marxism may only oppose universal and quantitative (or, as he says, ‘additive’) history with a ‘… Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed …’ only where it approaches a ‘… historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad’.126 The last of these points is ambiguous. In a sense, Lukács approaches the proletariat as a monad – that is, as a class in and for itself. Yet, Lukács also stresses the heterogeneity of the class (that is, its ideological crisis) as well as its tension with the revolutionary party, as it makes itself into the subject-object of history. As we will see shortly, when Benjamin refers to a historical subject who is a monad, it is not at all clear that he is referring to any group of real people. Still, the two points preceding it can only fit with Lukács if his explicit argument against messianism is deliberately excised and if we ignore the sense in which, as I have outlined, the standpoint of theory sublates recollection as it leads the advent of the conscious creation of the new and the realm of freedom. Praxis in Lukács requires that theory remember in order to free itself of the weight of recollection. As I argued in response to Žižek, Lukács strains with all of his intellectual resources against any irrationalist understanding of the moment or augenblick. This is because he seeks a world of self-transparent rational meaning, not the annihilation of meaning by sublime feeling. Similarly, although a spirit of opposition to quantitative time surely did possess Lukács in his preMarxist days, and even in his pre-History and Class Consciousness writings, in his mature philosophy of praxis there is no desire to annihilate quantitative time, but rather, to see it consciously mediated with its other. Bloch may well be right that an unacknowledged gap exists in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis into which metaphysics and messianism can flow. Yet it is quite different for these themes to enter via the back door than via the front, as they do in Benjamin. One does wonder then, why Lukács’s detractors have rarely been as incensed by Benjamin or Bloch.

125 126

Benjamin 2007, Thesis XV, pp. 261–2. Benjamin 2007, Theses VII, XVII; pp. 256–7, 262–1.

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I point to these differences not in order to weigh Benjamin in the balance and find him wanting. These differences are of a more revealing nature; in aesthetically representing the sense of genesis as it is severed from history, Benjamin both expresses the limits of philosophy exiled from the redemptive moment of praxis and aesthetically intuits an inner truth of and limits to Lukács’s position. This is to say, Benjamin’s tragic aestheticisation of a praxis shorn from logic anticipates, albeit in a beautifully ambiguous, philosophically aesthetic manner, one of the ultimate consequences of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. I will return to this point shortly. For now, however, Benjamin’s philosophy, if it is taken as developing upon Lukács in a particular manner, can through an exploration of its limits gesture towards a subterranean truth in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and suggest at where its own inner limits might be encountered. That is to say, the limit encountered by Benjamin suggests the inner failure of a philosophy of praxis that preserves praxis through a messianic aestheticisation of genesis. To reveal these limits, I now turn to Rose’s critique of Benjamin qua Derrida. In her essay ‘The comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of modern philosophy’, Rose identifies the inner contradiction of Benjamin’s position with characteristic precision and elegance. In the context of a critique of Derrida’s lecture entitled ‘Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International’, she suggests that in his account of Marx, there is no materialism and nothing of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Thus, she identifies in Derrida a hostility towards systematic logic. Although in Derrida, this was borne of a postmodern scepticism towards reason, this maps well against Benjamin’s Nietzschean scepticism with respect to any non aesthetic unifying logic in history. Given this absent logic, Derrida’s Marx requires a revolutionary impetus that must be derived from elsewhere. So she writes: The messianism of Derrida’s call for the New International emerges as the correlate of this missing impetus. The New International has no body: so how can it have any members? It has no law, no community, no institutions. The spectral idea of internationalism represents the most explicit emergence of the anarchic utopianism at the heart of postmodern thinking: it is the very antithesis of Marx’s ‘scientific socialism’, but it is this antithesis because it projects a science of laws, a determinism, onto Marx’s thought which seems utterly ignorant of the debt to Hegel in Marx’s method.127

127

Rose 1996, p. 68.

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The call for a new International, severed from Marx’s materialism and Hegel’s logic and turned against the idea of universal law, is messianic: ‘… for what is prior to memory, law, event, assignment, but the covenant between God and His chosen people – the Hebrews – which is the origin of their sacred and of their historical relationship? And what is promised – the promise of promises, originary and deferred – but the Messiah?’128 With this, Rose unmasks from whence Derrida has ‘borrowed’ a revolutionary impetus to replace that which he has excluded from Marx: namely Benjamin. She refers to his ‘Messianic political theology of divine and law-founding violence’, and specifically to his ‘… last great Trauerspiel or mourning play: the thirty-six “Theses on the Philosophy of History”’.129 In Rose’s description, these theses lead seamlessly from the baroque Christianity of Benjamin’s exposition of the mourning plays of the Counter-Reformation to his later Judaic Messianism, in which the only alternative to fascism (an alternative which social democracy utterly failed to produce) is a ‘… counter-state of emergency, which would suspend all law and history as it erupts: total, bloodless violence is to assuage and redeem all the partial and bloody violence of history’.130 Gillian Rose is not enraptured by Derrida’s borrowing. Of it, she writes: This is no work of mourning: it remains baroque melancholia immersed in the world of soulless and unredeemed bodies, which affords a vision that is far more disturbing than the salvific distillation of disembodied ‘spirit’ or ‘spectre’. For if all human law is sheer violence, if there is no positive or symbolic law to be acknowledged – the law that decrees the absence of the other, the necessity of relinquishing the dead one, returning from devastating inner grief to the law of the everyday and of relationships, old and new, with those who live – then there can be no work, no exploring of the legacy of ambivalence, working through the contradictory emotions aroused by bereavement. Instead, the remains of the dead one will be incorporated into the soul of the one who cannot mourn and will manifest themselves in some all too physical symptom, the allegory of incomplete mourning in its desolate hyper-reality.131

128 129

130 131

Rose 1996, pp. 68–9. Rose 1996, p. 69. Rose also refers to other texts, including Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and The Origin of German Trauerspiel. Further discussion of these texts would encumber the argument at hand. Rose 1996, p. 69. Rose 1996, pp. 69–70.

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Rose is correct. Her words, of course, are no condemnation of Benjamin, for whom the restoration of law came far too late for there to be any thought of mourning. A truth that was produced in Benjamin by tragic despair becomes postmodern self-indulgence in Derrida. Of Derrida, she writes: ‘… where Marxism is concerned, far from rescuing some quintessential “spirit”, this approach reduces Marxism (in the ordinary sense of diminution, not in the philosophical sense of abstention) to a sub-rational pseudo-Messianism, while disqualifying both critical reflection and political practice. It is a counsel of hopelessness which extols Messianic hope’.132 While her sharp condemnation does not apply to Benjamin (whose work was central to her own), Rose is quite correct about the baroque melancholia that resides in any attempt to preserve the meaning of genesis – ultimately, the emergence of the qualitative in history – shorn of logic and after the time of revolution. It was Benjamin’s tragic achievement to produce a messianic aesthetic of praxis on the basis of melancholia for the lost rational praxis of Lukács’s philosophy. The messianic aestheticisation of genesis is no way to preserve a sense of praxis as absolute. As Rose indicates, any attempt at this path bears a fatal selfcontradiction and, indeed, a hypocrisy. To refuse to mourn in this manner is to insist on bearing the remains of the lost one (in this case, praxis) indefinitely. Corpses do not remain beautiful for long. Unmourned, the corpse of praxis will surely drag a philosopher of praxis down into a shared grave.133 It will do so by becoming identical with the soul of the philosopher until such a time as the sense of concrete love and being at home with the other that gave Lukács’s philosophy its impetus is utterly absorbed by nihilistic solipsism. It doesn’t matter whether this solipsism takes the form of an embrace of the void or a desperate flight from the void, effected by the projection of a mythological aesthetic over it. Both are trapped within a sense of genesis as absolutely negative and the present as an era of absolute sin. Indeed, Lukács won the space within which to refound Marxism precisely by leaving this type of thing behind. In joining the Communist Party, he left behind his youthful ‘world of soulless and unredeemed bodies’, his ‘desolate hyper-reality’ and his ‘all too physical symptom[s]’.134 Indeed, a failure to mourn blocks redemption if that term is understood in the radically democratic sense with which Lukács invested it. It is an important moment, for the theorist, to experience the inner emptiness 132 133

134

Rose 1996, p. 70. Zarathustra knew this, which is why he bore the corpse of the fallen tightrope walker to a hollowed tree, where he left it to rejoin nature while he proceeded to replenish his spirit and seek companions (Nietzsche 2003b, pp. 51–2). Rose 1996, pp. 69–70.

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of the loss of praxis. However, to preserve this loss eternally in the form of a political theology gives the dead power over the living. Rose accuses Heidegger, for whom being towards death was so central, of just such an unwillingness to mourn. This is partly why she argues that within his philosophy, ‘… the nothingness of death founds human freedom’.135 This is precisely the negative freedom that Lukács sought to overcome with his concept of praxis. What path, then, exists within this baroquely melancholic aestheticisation of genesis towards a higher standpoint? Or, to put it in Rose’s terms, how may we commence the work of mourning? When Benjamin argues that, ‘In the idea of classless society, Marx secularised the idea of messianic time’, he opens an escape route, or better, pulls an emergency brake.136 Yet, to take this escape route, instead of preserving the messianic element within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, it must be unmasked and overcome. Although his argument is opaque, in his ‘Theological-Political Fragment’, Benjamin further exposes the face that is concealed by this messianic mask. He writes: Only the Messiah himself completes all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic. For this reason, nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende]. Therefore, the secular order cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only a religious meaning.137 Following this, Benjamin considers the opposition between the secular order and the divine kingdom. He argues that the desire for happiness is the principle upon which the secular order is built and that ‘… in happiness all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in happiness is its downfall destined to find it’. He continues, suggesting that although the ‘… immediate messianic intensity of the heart, of the inner man in isolation passes through misfortune as suffering …’, it nevertheless serves to introduce immortality and the ‘… spiritual restitutio in integrum …’ which ‘… corresponds to a worldly restitution that leads to an eternity of downfall …’138 To paraphrase then, for Benjamin, the desire 135 136 137 138

Rose 1996, p. 134. Specifically, Rose argues that Heidegger steadfastly refused to mourn for the Holocaust, with which he was spiritually and intellectually complicit. Benjamin 2003, Thesis XVIIa, p. 401. Benjamin 2002, p. 305. Benjamin 2002, pp. 305–6.

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for happiness (which we might interpret as a desire to affirm the particular), insofar as it is a desire for the earthly and the intransigent, is just as much a desire for one’s downfall. This discloses an affinity with the private and suffering messianism of the intensely alienated individual, who also desires his or her passing away and downfall. Thus, in the extremes of particularity and finitude, in happiness and messianic sadness, we encounter the eternal as the endless passing away of all that is determinate. This is Benjamin’s understanding of our connection with the ‘… eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality …’ It reveals that the ‘… rhythm of messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive for such a passing away-even the passing away of those stages of man that are nature-is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism’.139 This is to say, the desire for downfall is the key to eternal life and happiness, which is also a reunification with nature and a discovery of its genuine character – and this is the task of world politics, which is nihilism. Of course, it could be disputed whether or not this fragment, read alongside the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, can be taken to imply a coherent philosophy. But this is beside the point. As Benjamin makes clear, suffering messianism and secular politics (which is founded upon the desire for happiness) coincide in nihilism. This is a nihilism and a will to death writ large; it is a longing for the cessation of particularity. There seems to be less Nietzsche here than Schopenhauer. This is indeed a bad infinity raised to the level of ‘baroque melancholia’. Perhaps, then, Benjamin may be read as the most important twentieth century antecedent to the nihilistic technological utopianism accelerationism of our day, with the essentially minor difference that the accelerationists wish humanity to be subsumed under a dead second nature, while Benjamin wishes us to be subsumed under an eternally passing away first nature. Benjamin is not a theologian proper. He only derives an aesthetic principle from messianism. Yet, by opening up the question of Marxism as a messianic political theology, he makes it possible to critique messianic nihilism on an immanent, theological basis. Firstly, I will produce such a criticism by reference to theology proper – specifically by drawing upon the Book of Job.140 This will highlight the subjective self-contradiction in such nihilism. Following this, 139 140

Benjamin 2002, pp. 305–6. The source for the following is the Book of Job as reproduced in the Authorized King James Bible (see Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, pp. 607–40). Except when quoting directly, I will not burden my summary with references.

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I will suggest a way in which logic qua philosophy might make good on the rational deficit in Benjamin. This will begin the work of mourning called for by Rose – although this cannot be regarded as complete until the historical and philosophical critiques of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis have been brought to a conclusion. Job stages the tragedy of a good man whose life is utterly devastated by the divine. As is well-known, it opens with a pact between Satan and the Lord in which the two agree that Job, the most devout and upright servant of the Lord, is to have his faith subjected to a test. The Lord places the entirety of his powers at the service of Satan, using them to utterly ruin Job: his property, his house and his family are destroyed with fire. Job is afflicted with horrible disease. And yet, this upright man refuses to condemn the Lord. He condemns instead the day of his birth and laments that: ‘Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow, and all my members are as a shadow’.141 Not only is Job utterly severed from joy in the Lord’s creation, but he has found himself in the same dim and shadowy realm in which clear vision is no longer possible. Still, in the midst of his despair, he confesses faith in his salvation and resurrection: Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me. Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh? Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.142 Having permitted Job a suitable period of mourning – for it would be utterly callous to demand that a ruined man immediately assume a joyful countenance – his companions tire of comforting him and instead rebuke him. Zophar the Naamathite confronts Job with the inscrutability of the Lord’s judgement, accusing Job of having questioned His justice. Job replies acknowledging that while the wicked sometimes prosper, the Lord is the judge of the most high, and that for this reason, no one can question His justice. Eliphaz the Temanite accuses Job of diverse sins, suggesting to him that his fate has been just, even if he knows not why. Job professes a conviction in his innocence but also

141 142

Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 17:1–2, 7. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 19:21–6.

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concedes that: ‘Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him …’143 Thus, Job declines again to place himself on the same level as the Lord and accepts his judgement. Next, Bildad the Shuhite confronts Job with the limits of human knowledge, suggesting that the Lord’s armies are numberless and that even the stars and moon do not shine purely in His sight. Job, however, reverses the rebuke, stating that: ‘My lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit. God forbid that I should justify you: till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me’.144 He continues, asserting that the Lord has created and valued all nature, including the mountains and the seas and that all wealth depends upon His provenance. Following this, Job reflects upon his fate. This is where his honour is turned into extreme contempt. He declares himself to be ‘… a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep’.145 This is the turning point in the book. Job sins only when he reflects upon his fate and despairs. It is his despair that transforms his honour into extreme contempt. Elihu, the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram, observing that Job is his elder, waits for him to have spoken his piece before rebuking him thus: I am young, and ye are very old; wherefore I was afraid, and durst not shew you mine opinion. I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom. But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding. Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgment … For Job hath said, I am righteous: and God hath taken away my judgment. Should I lie against my right? My wound is incurable without transgression … Yea, surely God will not do wickedly, neither will the Almighty pervert judgment. Who hath given him a charge over the earth? Or who hath disposed the whole world? If he set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust.146

143 144 145 146

Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 23:8–9. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 27:4–5. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 30:28–31. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 32:6–9, 34:5–6; 12–5.

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Thus, Elihu concludes his speech: ‘Job hath spoken without knowledge, and his words were without wisdom. My desire is that Job may be tried unto the end because of his answers for wicked men. For he addeth rebellion unto his sin, he clappeth his hands among us, and multiplieth his words against God’.147 Perhaps the most important phrase in this rebuke is: ‘My wound is incurable without transgression’. Despair was Job’s ultimate sin. His redemption was not possible until he had committed this sin. It is despair – not a flight from the void – that prepared his soul for redemption. Hearing the wisdom in his words, Job accepts entirely the justice of Elihu’s rebuke and makes a full confession. Finally, the Lord himself appears in a whirlwind to answer Job. Now, the Lord himself confronts Job with the poverty of human knowledge, demonstrating his power in the Leviathan. The Lord asks Job: CANST thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? … His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves … Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.148 Job is humbled, and confesses: ‘Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes’.149 At this the Lord forgives Job before accusing his companions of not having prostrated themselves thusly. So, following his commission of the sin of despair and his full repentance, the Lord restored to Job his property, doubled, and his family, granting him fortune and prosperity until the end of his days. What are we to make of this? I will leave any consideration of the symbolism – for example, of Leviathan – to actual theologians. We should also overlook, for the time being, that technically speaking Satan won his bet. After all, as Hegel notes in The Phenomenology of Spirit, revealed religion cannot bear

147 148 149

Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 34:35–7. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 41:1–4; 24–5; 33–4. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 42:6.

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the knowledge the divine can only come to be through evil, for this would introduce evil into God himself.150 Hence, also, the sleight of hand at the beginning of Job, in which Satan appears as quickly as he disappears, apparently subsumed under the Lord. So, too, will we overlook the transactory relationship between the Lord and his Children, whereby Job’s property is restored, doubled. Rather, the significance of Job for the argument at hand is that in this text, the Judaeo-Christian tradition issues a challenge to nihilism – namely, to be consistent and to apply the principle of negativity to itself. This is to say, it is quite possible to despair at the numberlessness of the stars (or, of that matter, the economy) or at the arbitrariness of justice in the face of suffering and the powerlessness of humanity in the face of fate. Until such a time as we live freely, we will remain in this condition, although of course, we are no longer in the presence of a God who speaks to us directly from a whirlwind or who recompenses us following satisfactory repentance. To despair at this fate is a profound sin. In confronting Job with this vanity, Elihu exposed the state of Job’s own soul; it was precisely his despair that severed him from the divine. In his despair, he placed himself on an equal footing with the divine. And yet, this despair was the last act of self-emptying, the missing negation of Job’s finite being required for his salvation. Thus, he was only saved when he turned his abhorrence against himself and saw that in so doing, he had placed himself on the level of the divine. Thus, he reconciled himself with the fate that was chosen for him. Absolute abnegation clears a subjective pathway to the divine. A truly consistent nihilism does not take comfort in messiahs or promises of redemption, but rather steels itself to encounter the void, including that aspect of the void which lies within. Benjamin was right, then, that suffering and happiness, insofar as they emanate from particularity and finitude, aim at the same goal; namely, downfall. Yet, this coincidence may be realised within this life. Moreover, this realisation is always the realisation of a particular. To imagine that one knows the divine – even in the form of a messiah – is to reduce the infinite to the particular. This is sin. Why, then, would we suppose that a coming messiah, even if it were to redeem history, would redeem those

150

As Hegel writes: The other aspect [of the process of the coming to be of the divine, by way of its estrangement into nature an man], that of evil, is taken by representational thought to be an event alien to the divine essence. To grasp evil within the divine essence itself as the divine essence’s wrath is the supreme and most severe effort of which representational thought, wrestling with itself, is capable, an effort which, since it lacks the concept, remains a fruitless struggle (Hegel 2018, §. 777).

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who presumed to know its ways? Thus, messianic nihilism only goes half of the way, and in so doing, condemns itself. With consistent nihilism, which may also be borrowed from theology, there is no need for an afterworld; the infinite is encountered here and now. Zarathustra also encountered this truth, realising that in order to become who he was – the teacher of the eternal return – it would be necessary to abandon pity and resentment, and to affirm the recurrence of everything, low and high, noble and base. ‘Existence begins in every instant; the ball There rolls around every Here. The middle is everywhere. The path of eternity is crooked’.151 With this insight, Nietzsche himself demonstrated the immanent limit of the philosophical aestheticisation of becoming in a messianic key. At any rate, too much theology is, in the age of the death of God, an indulgence. Theology also resists conscription in the service of philosophy. As Weber said, referring to the younger generation, of which Benjamin was a part: This fact is that the prophet for whom so many of them yearn simply does not exist. I believe that the inner needs of a human being with the ‘music’ of religion in his veins will never be served if the fundamental fact that his fate is to live in an age alien to God and bereft of prophets is hidden from him and others by surrogates in the shape of all these professorial prophets. The integrity of his religious sensibility must surely rise up in rebellion against this.152 Perhaps this is why Benjamin only borrowed an aesthetic from the messianic tradition, using it as collateral against deficits in praxis and genesis. Perhaps this is why he referred to the theological aspect of historical materialism as wizened and well concealed. Nevertheless, by exposing some of what is messianic in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, Benjamin performed a great service. Rose contributed (as she will again later) by revealing the subjective origin of this nihilism as an inner, spiritual weariness and an inability to mourn. This made it possible to imagine a theological rebuke to Benjamin and Lukács (qua Elihu’s rebuke to Job). This, in turn, points towards a philosophical rebuke. This is to say, it anticipates the argument that is to follow. The final critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis from the point of view of history will push his terms even further in order to generate the most radical and universal nihilism they can sustain. This is necessary both in order to totally exhaust the possibility for

151 152

Nietzsche 2003b, ‘The Convalescent’, p. 234. Weber 2004, p. 28.

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maintaining a philosophy of praxis after philosophy and to demonstrate the moment at which Lukács’s subjective mistake coincides with his objective, conceptual mistake. 2.4 Praxis as Tragic Theology This final attempt to maintain a philosophy of praxis in the face of history is the most radically mythological. It does not just borrow an aesthetic or image from messianism, but finds itself within political theology proper, transforming all of the terms of Lukács’s philosophy. As a consequence, it is both the most intellectually impoverished strategy and the most revealing. While I am not aware of any theorist who has produced work on the basis of this worldview, it will be demonstrated that it is the outermost possibility of Lukács’s philosophy. Given this, it brings us closest to grasping fully the contradiction between history and Lukács’s philosophy of praxis while also producing the groundwork and impetus for the logical-philosophical critique which is the subject of the following section. For the purposes of this discussion, I will argue that this version represents a consistently tragic theology of praxis.153 Although the path represented by Benjamin was tragic, this tragedy was not taken to its most extreme possible conclusion. This was for two reasons. Firstly, the aestheticisation of praxis qua genesis allows for both flashes of profound insight and a fleeting redemptive joy. The resultant aestheticised philosophy of praxis threatens, therefore, to expand into a fictionalisation of history as such. Secondly, the aestheticisation of genesis simply discards the systematic logic that Lukács held to be co-constitutive of the highest sense of praxis as the absolute. By contrast, this strategy for preserving praxis as the absolute mythologises not just genesis, but logic also. In a sense, this is a more rigorously critical approach because it steadfastly faces all the consequences of preserving praxis outside of history. If Benjamin’s philosophy of praxis committed (as I argued) the sin of presuming to know the messiah that will redeem genesis, this approach attempts to face the consequences of its own constitutive estrangement from the praxis that gives it truth. This is to say, this version of philosophy of praxis attempts the abstract recollection of praxis in full knowledge of its own abstraction. This standpoint attempts to maintain a commitment to two absolutely contradictory propositions. The first is the most radical and extreme definition of truth in Lukács’s work; only praxis, as the class struggle at its highest objective possibility, can traverse the antinomies of bourgeois thought,

153

This designation is loosely inspired by Goldmann’s perceptive identification of a tragic theme which recurs throughout Lukács’s oeuvre. See Goldmann 1967.

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uniting mediation, logic and genesis in order to create the new. Absolute truth is thus resolutely invested in an event. The second proposition is that this truth has died. The following doctrine results from this combination. Absolute truth is said to have existed for a brief and sacred moment following 1917, during which the reconciliation between party and class under the sign of praxis existed as a living truth. Yet, following the death of this living unity, praxis was relegated to memory, the intellectual recollection of which is the duty of the philosopher of praxis. This is different to the utopian-sectarian philosophy of praxis associated with Trotsky in that it rests on a hypostatisation of theory and not political practice or programmes. Consequently, no systematic overvaluation of the present is necessary. That the present forms a pernicious chasm between past and future is freely conceded. This chasm is bridged, on the side of the past by grief for the loss, and on the side of the future by a hope that praxis will rise again and will once more become the salvation of the world and the philosopher who will once more be able to submerge his truth in a living reconciliation higher than all the antinomies. So, the full consequences of living in an era both after and prior to praxis are acknowledged. The tragic, theological philosophy of praxis confesses that it, too, is a form of reified thought, and is afflicted by abstraction and therefore falsity. Thus, the task of the philosopher of praxis is, on the one hand, to preserve the truth unchanged and, on the other, to engage in self-criticism in order to confront and negate the pernicious intellectual consequences of a reified society. These tasks are necessary in order to perceive and be prepared to meet praxis when it occurs again. Kilminster, discussed above, seems to have intuited this version of the philosophy of praxis, insofar as he suggested Cieszkowski as a parallel for Lukács in the 1920s, observing that this articulation of praxis leads to a resigned nihilism.154 Kilminster, however, suggested that this version of philosophy of praxis fails because it purports to know the future perfectly and because it premises its truth on this knowledge. This is not necessarily the case. This articulation of philosophy of praxis, which might also be called melancholic insofar as it betrays an inability to mourn, may very well concede that its concept of future is merely the abstract negation of the present; a utopian moment of what exists. This not only fits with Lukács’s argument, but absolves itself of the charge that it knows the content of the future or the new. All it knows is its melancholic recollection by which the present, the philosopher included, may be measured and found eternally wanting.

154

Kilminster 1979, p. 88.

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Still, this articulation of the philosophy of praxis does enjoy a relationship with the future; the past and future are mediated in the present by virtue of faith and duty. Lukács himself reserved scorn for those critics who perceived the persistence of faith in Marxism, writing: Every word and gesture betrays the despair of the best of them and the inner emptiness of the worst: their complete divorce from the proletariat, from its path and from its vocation. What they call faith and seek to deprecate by adding the epithet ‘religious’ is nothing more nor less than the certainty that capitalism is doomed and that – ultimately – the proletariat will be victorious.155 Given the way things turned out, there is a little too much bluster in these words. Even in 1923, how can such a certainty in the victory of the proletariat – which Lukács acknowledged could easily be derailed by poor leadership – be regarded as anything other than faithful? His hyperbolic indignance is therefore a little revealing. Suspicion is vindicated by his continued polemic, in which he asserts that the certainty of Marxism cannot be proven methodologically, but only materially: ‘A Marxist who cultivates the objectivity of the academic study is just as reprehensible as the man who believes that the victory of world revolution can be guaranteed by the “laws of nature”’. His explanation of this assertion also appears to concede too much: The unity of theory and practice exists not only in theory but also for practice. We have seen that the proletariat as a class can only conquer and retain a hold on class consciousness and raise itself to the level of its – objectively given – historic task through conflict and action. It is likewise true that the party and the individual fighter can only really take possession of their theory if they are able to bring this unity into their praxis. The so-called religious faith is nothing more than the certitude that regardless of all temporary deeds and setbacks, the historical process will come to fruition in our deeds and through our deeds.156 If this faith was relatively healthy and appropriate in 1923, one hundred years later it is not so robust. Before expanding on this, however, it is crucial to note that Lukács’s words, as quoted, already concede to a gap between present and

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Lukács 1967a, p. 43. Lukács 1967a, p. 43.

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future, a gap bridged by faith. This should illustrate that although the standpoint developed here is taken to an absurd extreme, it is a conceptual possibility within Lukács’s 1920s works. Indeed, Bloch, in his 1924 review of History and Class Consciousness (quoted above) also perceived the gap between present and future, using it as a basis on which to criticise Lukács’s overly socialpolitical exclusion of metaphysics and theology (among other questions). So, too, did József Révai, Lukács’s comrade and co-thinker, and one of the few to respond to History and Class Consciousness intelligently and positively. Indeed, in an enthusiastic review of History and Class Consciousness also from 1924, Révai inadvertently let the theological cat out of the bag. In so doing, he also implicated the past, thus connecting the argument at stake with Benjamin’s redemptive vision of praxis. He notes that while the proletariat as subject-object in becoming is not the ‘Subject of ancient and feudal society’, it still ‘grasps these epochs as its own past as steps leading up to it …’157 So, while the redeemer of history and the key to historical knowledge, the proletariat as subject-object in becoming may not draw content for the future from there. In addition to this, the standpoint of the proletariat refuses Feuerbach’s absolutisation of man as he is, in the present. And yet, he argues that the … proletariat, which has conceived the non-existence of man the man of all class societies through its own inhumanity, still presupposes some ‘existent’ man, i.e., some merely negatively determined for whom being governed by the natural laws of society is not part of his ‘nature’, whose realization by the proletariat is the aim of the historical process and must therefore be assigned to the historical process and who must therefore be assigned to the historical process as a mere Subject-correlate inhabiting it transcendentally.158 Révai goes on to clarify this extremely perceptive reading of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. What is remarkable is that he fully accepts the consequences of having asserted that the goal of praxis is a transcendental ought and a negative reflection of the present. Indeed, he accepts that this transforms the philosophy of praxis into a conceptual mythology, while justifying the necessity and irrationalism of this:

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Révai 1971, p. 28. Révai 1971, p. 28.

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‘Man’, not Feuerbach’s man, but the man to be realised by the proletariat, is a conceptual mythology too. But an inevitable conceptual mythology. This mythology proves necessary for the proletarian standpoint, because the latter is at the turning point of two world epochs and can therefore see the future as well as the past. But the future is still necessarily empty and the past carries with it, precisely as a totality, an indelible trace of irrationality. Both create the conceptual mythology, as an expression of ‘the inability to penetrate the object itself’. But this conceptual mythology is already something different in principle from that of bourgeois rationalism. For the latter is a matter of a mental expression of the inconceivability of its own historical reality, while for the former it arises only on the basis of knowledge and revolution themselves. The reproduction of the Hegelian antinomies of the dialectic points forward, not backwards.159 Révai concludes by suggesting that this insight draws Marx and Hegel closer than had been supposed, even in Lukács’s original argument. Notwithstanding that this implicated Hegel – something with which I disagree, as will be shown – this is a startlingly far sighted concession. Moreover, it is not issued in a spirit of irony, but of enthusiasm. If Lukács had any inkling of this failure in his philosophy, he surely suppressed it, as the quotes reproduced above demonstrate. As mentioned, in 1924, this gap was not yet particularly wide. Yet, logically and conceptually speaking, a gap is a gap; the existence of any hiatus irrationalis between philosophy and praxis, or between the present and the future, is utterly fatal for a truth which seeks to radically transcend the antinomies of bourgeois life and thought. Like cracks in an edifice built on a shifting foundation, gaps such as these widen with the passage of time. Still, to the tragic philosophy of praxis, the promise of redemption by future praxis provides the motivation for the continual labour of criticism and self-criticism. Perhaps a gap is admitted. But is it not the work of philosophy to orient a practical-theoretical effort to overcome it? Or, to put the issue in Lukács’s more philosophical register, the incompleteness of genesis (that is, the absence of a proletariat whose practice rises to praxis in itself ) motivates a labour of logic. If theory always tends towards schematism, and if philosophy is at its highest point of development the thought of form organised in a dialectical system which strains towards its content (namely, genesis), then what else is there to be done? Thus, to the tragic and theological philosophy of praxis, a gap is impetus to further intellectual

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Révai 1971, pp. 28–9.

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work. Precisely because of the scope and complexity of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis – and opportunity for dialogue between it and Marx, not to mention other theorists and philosophers, both bourgeois and proletarian – such a labour of theory cannot run out of subject matter until it is finally superseded by the advent of new praxis. However, if absolute truth only exists on the other side of a chasm, the crossing of which requires faith, by what criteria can critical theory be assessed? Of course, reference may be made to the practice of the proletariat. However, outside of praxis, this practice (as was discussed in Part 2) will inevitably remain within reified political forms – for example, reformism and trade unionism. If this is granted – and the only alternative is to mythologise a deficient practice, a path that has been discarded – then not only does this attitude make a fatal concession to the very ahistoricism that Lukács sought to overcome, but also, strictly speaking, it must prohibit the making of any qualitatively new conceptual discoveries. To suppose it were possible to make a conceptual discovery outside of the historical advent of absolute truth would be to return philosophy of praxis to a superseded stage of development. This is to engage in ideological speculation and to merely affirm what is under the cover of a transcendental ought. Révai did not seem to realise this. Yet, in light of this realisation, philosophy of praxis must limit itself to repetition and to non conceptual extension, for example, by refuting this or that inevitably ideological deviation. Indeed, if the radicalism of Lukács’s concept of praxis as the absolute is maintained, it must be admitted that any present not illuminated by praxis is constitutively opaque. Thus, the tragic and theological philosophy of praxis looks at its world as through a glass darkly.160 Although he put it in less Christian terms, Lukács admitted this, going so far as to note that prior to praxis, there may even exist a tendency for the world to become less transparent and knowable.161 This fits well with Lukács’s view that bourgeois thought becomes

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Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Corinthians I, 13:12. As quoted in Chapter 8, Lukács illustrates this point with reference to Lassalle’s summary of Hegel: Hegel used to say in his old age that directly before the emergence of something qualitatively new, the old state of affairs gathers itself up into its original, purely general, essence, into its simple totality, transcending and absorbing back into itself all those marked differences and peculiarities which it evinced when it was still viable … on the one hand, there is the increasing undermining of the forms of reification – one might describe it as the cracking of the crust because of their inner emptiness – their growing inability to do justice to the phenomena, even as isolated phenomena, even as the objects of reification and calculation. On the other hand, we find the quantitative increase of the forms of reification, their empty extension to cover the whole surface

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more decadent and impoverished as capitalism ages. Given this, the only genuine guarantor of truth is praxis. And yet, praxis died. Still, hope may be preserved by the reflection that if praxis arose once, it may yet arise again. Here, the past and future are forced into an undialectical identity which locates its truth prior to and after the present. Praxis thus becomes an afterworld which is known only via recollection and whose return is prophesised. Of course, signs may be sought for the return of praxis. This also gives the tragic philosopher of praxis a criterion by which to criticise the present. For example, philosophy of praxis in this stance may observe the state of crisis, the workers’ movement, or the political parties associated with it in order to assess the extent to which they traverse the conceptual mediations on the road to praxis. This is the essential difference between this approach to philosophy of praxis and the first strategy discussed. The first strategy for maintaining praxis overstates present praxis, reducing it to simple mediation. Yet it forgets logic and genesis. The tragic philosophy of praxis does not do this, insisting instead on the need to face the present realistically. It acknowledges the abstraction and constitutive incompleteness of its aspiration to totality and admits that genesis can only be known partly and impractically. Indeed, memory, hope and faith are maintained on this very basis; the more the present is found to be lacking, the more attractive the promised world becomes. A continued conviction in praxis as the absolute is purchased by exiling the absolute to the past and future; that is, to an afterworld. Communism, conceived of as the realisation of the absolute following praxis, is precisely this afterworld. What, then, is the content of this afterworld? Strictly speaking, nothing should be said about it. Yet, while Lukács – in orthodox fashion – is tight lipped about the content of communism, at certain key moments, he does put his cards on the table. Again, this was noticed by Bloch, as suggested above. This is also why, on every ontological and historical level of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, a utopian residue may be detected. As noted in Chapter 4, Lukács viewed love and solidarity as the foundational ethics of communism.162 Chapter 4 also outlined Lukács’s view that the dereification of science may proceed only under communism, as humanity reappropriates a hypostatised apparatus of scientific concepts.163 Similarly, when Lukács argues that the Communist Party prefigures the end of political alienation by replacing a formal polity, based on rights and duties, with a community of freedom in solidarity, he suggests the

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of manifest phenomena. And the fact that these two aspects together are in conflict provides the key signature to the decline of bourgeois society (Lukács 1967a, p. 208). Lukács 1991a. Lukács 2002, p. 117.

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political content of a dereified society.164 In criticising the division of labour as fragmenting the labourer and in proposing the human faculty of labour as that which creates quality and ontological novelty, albeit in estrangement to itself, he suggests the essential productive content of a dereified society.165 Further, such a society, in knowingly reappropriating and rendering dialectical the categories of political economy, in an expanding system of collective knowledge, might dereify the economy, abolishing crisis.166 Thus, the status of the social totality as a second nature may be ended. Lukács implied that this would lead to the creation of an organic, unified and denaturalised social totality.167 This would allow us, in turn, to defetishise nature itself, both averting ecological disaster and enriching the aesthetic experience of nature.168 Finally, a society intent on dereification may turn its attention to history and culture, both completing our knowledge of the past and making good on Lukács’s early promise to make culture the goal of a post economic society.169 Following Lukács’s endorsement between objective and absolute spirit, this process of dereification may finally extend to the spheres of art, religion and philosophy. Art, as the aesthetic representation of the absolute, might divest itself of its partial and irrational appearance. The mystified truths of religion and philosophy could be preserved and made to give up secrets about our relationship with being. Such a society may even discover precisely where, in the sequence of categories in the Science of Logic, Hegel ceases to grasp historical reality. Recall Lukács’s rather cryptic distinction between Hegel’s ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ dialectics, outlined in Chapter 8. Recall also his argument that this question, as well as a final organisation of both the levels of reality (being, existence, reality, etc.) and the faculties of experience and knowledge with which we grasp knowledge (including intuition, representation and concept), may only be resolved under communism.170 Indeed, such a dramatic reorganisation of 164 165

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Lukács 1967a, p. 315. This has many aspects, including an overcoming of the fragmentation between sectors within the economy, within the production chain of one commodity and within a workplace. For details, see Chapter 2 of this work. As regards labour, see Chapter 3. As Lukács wrote (as quoted above, in Chapter 8): … even the objects in the very centre of the dialectical process can only slough off their reified form after a laborious process. A process in which the seizure of power by the proletariat and even the organisation of the state and the economy on socialist lines are only stages (Lukács 1967a, p. 208). Lukács 1967a. Lukács refers to this as the final severance of the umbilical cord between society and nature (Lukács 1967a, p. 237). See Lukács 1970, 1967a, ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’. Lukács 1967a, p. 207.

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life and knowledge may be expected to bear deep and even ontological consequences. After all, if, as Lukács says, commodity production reduces time to space, the overcoming of the commodity form will restore to time its flowing and qualitative nature, ending the dominance of form over content.171 Thus, our basic perception of reality might be liberated. Such a society could focus its energies on the cultivation of goodness, rendering the ethical crises of the contemplative stance passing moments, ending oppression and transforming politics into a genuinely universal and rational pursuit. The estrangement of man and woman as well as nation from nation would be ended. Lukács’s reticence to make humanity an absolute even suggests a post human vision. One could probably expand on this list. It should be clear, however, that Lukács had in mind a radical vision of communism as the non identitarian overcoming of all antinomies in life and thought. Presented in stark relief like this, the abstract, utopian and at least to some extent theological nature of his vision becomes apparent. As beautiful as all of this sounds, if it is eschatology that one is after, then it is better to go to the source. There is not one point listed above for which a scriptural or theological antecedent cannot be found – except perhaps the one about completing the Science of Logic.172 This is because all of this speculation as to the contents of communism rests on a negative judgement of the present. Because political praxis leads this transformation, it is a political theology. As Lukács noted in 1914, at least early Christianity possesses a greater mythic power than the workers’ movement.173 As Rose notes in The Melancholy Science, in the context of comments on Lukács’s essay ‘The Old and the New Culture’, the belief in a future liberated from or separate to capitalism is not only made possible by capitalism, but constitutes part of its power.174 Similarly so, without wishing to endorse his conservatism, we may venture that Schmitt was not wrong to view Lukács as one of the most consistent representatives of the absolutisation of the friend/enemy distinction upon which politics rests.175 As demonstrated, Lukács imagined a world in which the category of friend, born by the proletariat, is universalised to the point where it abolishes its enemy, namely the bourgeoisie. It is hard to

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Lukács 1967a, p. 90. After all, it could well be argued that the Science of Logic needs no completion. As Hegel said: ‘It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind’ (Hegel 1991c, p. 50). Lukács 1998, p. 372. Rose 1978, p. 36. Schmitt 2007, p. 63. This said, in my view Schmitt was wrong to see Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as the logical continuation of Hegel’s philosophy of politics. See also: Schmitt 2005.

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see how this results in anything aside from an imagined end to all political contradictions, that is, in a political theology according to Schmitt’s definition.176 Lukácsian philosophy of praxis warns us to exercise caution in the presence of all utopias. His advice is just as valuable when recalled in the presence of his own utopianism. Notwithstanding Lukács’s cultivated restraint and agnosticism, what, after all, distinguishes a final overcoming of all antinomies from a dogmatic, violent and irrationalist closure of the antinomies? The vagueness of possible answers to this question has already been alluded to in response to Andrew Feenberg’s definition of praxis as the permanent mediation of the antinomies. If, as an alternative to this, we propose to overcome the antinomies using a radicalised concept of Hegelian sublation, it becomes very difficult to discover precisely what content this overcoming will produce. Between subject and object, society and nature or between theory and practice, what new, concrete third term will appear as mediator? Or, is the overcoming of the antinomies regarded instead as the knowing practice of being at home with the other? Both options render the qualitatively new constitutively unknowable. Even the proposal that historical materialism itself will be superseded by a new truth runs aground on the same reef. Indeed, if we follow Lukács in his argument that all utopias reflect a hypostatisation of the present, then we can only conclude that in such communist eschatology, every conceptual level of the present – from interpersonal relations (ethics, love) to nature (science, art) to economics, politics, culture and philosophy – makes its way back into Lukács’s philosophy, in reified and utopian form, as a promise to be fulfilled after the coming of a new saviour. In this manner, communist eschatology reproduces the basic structure of ideology. The present is transformed into an afterworld which is projected into the past and future and then counterposed to the present. Indeed, such a structure is, as Lukács has been shown to explain, built directly into the commodity, with its attendant contradiction between use and exchange value. On this basis, we can point to the first self-contradiction of the tragic and theological philosophy of praxis. It stakes its virtue on the memory of praxis and Lukács’s reflection on this memory. However, to preserve praxis as a mythology makes it necessary to forget praxis. As Simone Weil said: ‘There is as it were a phagocytosis in the soul: everything which is threatened by time secretes falsehood in order not to die, and in proportion to the danger it is in of dying.

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These observations should not be taken as an endorsement of Schmitt’s deeply pessimistic view of politics. While politics may well be a necessary and permanent part of humanity’s relationship with itself, not all political contradictions and divides are equal or necessary.

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That is why there is not any love of truth without an unconditional acceptance of death. The cross of Christ is the only gateway to knowledge’.177 These words from Weil anticipate the solution to this impasse. We will return to this point. For now, the fact that this version of the philosophy of praxis is obliged to forget itself in order to remember implies its deepest selfcontradiction. In other words, taken to its logical extreme, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis destroys itself, contradicting itself utterly and reducing its truth to impoverished theological ruins. The ultimate cause of this is the constitutive gap that runs through his entire philosophy of praxis. This gap was indeed noticed by his most perceptive readers as early as 1924. The immanent critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, in which each of his terms was pushed to its absolute conclusion in light of history, was designed to highlight this gap. Thus, we can say now that his concept of praxis as the absolute always entailed a conceptual mythology. How, then, are we to proceed further? Mythologies are, as I have already quoted Lukács as explaining, born where two terminal points are encountered, beyond which it is impossible to discover any further concrete mediation. Mythology both discloses a hiatus irrationalis and ‘… inevitably adopts the structure of the problem whose opacity has been the cause of its own birth’.178 Reduced to a political theology and therefore shorn of genesis, logic and even concrete mediation, what is left but a gap? The terms that are supposed to bridge this gap may be mythological – but they do indeed adopt the structure of the problem whose opacity was the cause of their birth. The fact that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is, in the final analysis, a theology which devalues the present in the name of an identical past and future which are hypostatised as an afterworld suggests the problem. Absent concrete mediation, recollection, faith, hope and longing are the bridges to this afterworld. Yet, Zarathustra warned about afterworldsmen: ‘It was suffering and impotence – that created all afterworlds and that brief madness of happiness that only the greatest sufferer experiences. Weariness, which wants to reach the ultimate with a single leap, with a death-leap, a poor ignorant weariness, which no longer wants even to want: that created all gods and afterworlds’.179 Or, as Merleau-Ponty observed, ‘… there is a “revolutionary spirit” which is nothing more than a way of disguising the state of one’s soul’.180 Lukács himself anticipated this, writing that: ‘… the union of an inwardness, purified to the point of total abstraction and stripped of all traces of flesh and blood, with 177 178 179 180

Weil 2002, p. 57. Lukács 1967a, p. 193. Nietzsche 2003b, p. 59. Merleau-Ponty 1973a, p. 5.

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a transcendental philosophy of history does indeed correspond to the basic ideological structure of capitalism’.181 Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, in its tragic and theological form, is unable to avoid these accusations. They suggest that Lukács’s unacknowledged subjectivity – specifically, the persistence of a tragic worldview – constituted one side of his conceptual mythology. This side of the critique may be taken as a philosophical-psychological criticism or as a subjective criticism. In short, into the gap between his viewpoint and history, Lukács projected a subjective concept of praxis. For the subjective truth of the philosopher of praxis to overdetermine the truth of praxis itself entails a fatal ethical self-contradiction which undermines the deepest foundation of philosophy of praxis. As has been shown, the overcoming of the contemplative stance proposed by Lukács requires that the individual who is oriented towards theory mediate their egotism. As we saw in Chapter 4, however, Lukács proposed two quite different approaches to this process of mediation. With Gertrúd Bortstieber, I am convinced that Lukács found genuine love and the opportunity to be at home in the presence of the other without reproducing the formal ethics of civil society or one subsuming the other, as with his earlier relationships. Yet, as was argued following MacIntyre, Lukács’s conversion to communism possessed a distinctly religious and Kierkegaardian character; it was a leap of faith. While Lukács’s love conditioned the possibility of this leap, it is also clear that it was a leap of faith, and as a result, left an irrational remainder. We will speculate of what this might have consisted shortly. For now, the point is that the more philosophy of praxis relies on faith, as it must after the closure of the actuality of revolution, the more faith comes to corrupt its formerly rational conceptual framework. To relate to the other on the basis of faith is dangerous for all involved. To build love on faith alone is to love the other only insofar as the other saves one from oneself. To explore what this means, recall that the Marxian theorist of praxis escapes the tragedy of contemplative ethics by freely subsuming his individuality under the standpoint of the proletariat. Yet, if the standpoint of the proletariat is acknowledged to be a purely abstract critical hypothesis, in what sense is this possible? Absent anything resembling proletarian praxis, insofar as the tragic philosopher of praxis claims to have genuinely overcome abstract individuality by subsuming it under the standpoint of the proletariat, what is there to distinguish this position from a grotesque egotism that proclaims: ‘I would that God’s will be done, and not mine’? As has been argued, there is nothing wrong with adopting the

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Lukács 1967a, p. 192.

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standpoint of the proletariat as a hermeneutical device, or, a mask, so to speak. ‘Everything profound loves the mask’, says Nietzsche. Yet, as he continues, ‘… the profoundest things of all hate even image and parable. Should not nothing less than the opposite be the proper disguise under which the shame of a god goes abroad?’182 Thus, a philosopher of praxis has two options. The first is to confess that the standpoint of the proletariat is a mask. This would confess to not knowing praxis fully, but only representing it. Yet, how then could praxis act as a saviour and bear the weight of the absolute? To confess that behind the mask of praxis stands the philosopher would be to abandon philosophy of praxis – and we are not ready to take this step yet. The second option is to deny the presence of anyone else behind the mask. Such asceticism conceals a shameful egotism which projects its own nihilist ideal on the present, devaluing it by way of a hypostatised past and future, accessible to faith. Yet, faith is a wager and wagers are not bought cheaply. Ascetic faith in praxis conceals nihilistic ethical individualism. Behind this type of thing, one senses a pathological inability to act or take responsibility for one’s action. As Kierkegaard said, with respect to Hegel’s unhappy consciousness: ‘For the unhappy person is he who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, his real nature in some way or other outside himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future’.183 By too rigidly holding onto its truth, tragic philosophy of praxis damages it. Because the future is available to faith alone, the logic of the present may only be grasped as a ceaseless motion of the self-same. Insofar as the past is a measure of the present, ontological novelty and creation are sacrificed or at least posited as undiscoverable in the present. Hegel anticipated this. As he wrote about the situation encountered by early Christians, after Christ: Faith can only unify a group of the group sets an actual world over against itself and sunders itself from it. Hence the opposition [to the rest of the world] became fixed and an essential part of the principle of the group, while the group’s love must always have retained the form of love, of faith in God, without being alive, without exhibiting itself in specific forms of life, because every form of life can be objectified by the intellect and then apprehended as its object, as a cut-and-dried fact. The group’s relation to the world was bound to be one of a dread of contacts with it, a fear of every

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Nietzsche 2003a, §. 40. Kierkegaard 1992, p. 214.

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form of life, because every form exhibits its deficiency (as a form it is only one aspect of the whole and its very formation implies fixed limits), and what it lacks is part of the world.184 Lukács found himself in just such a desperate situation. Although it was necessary to push his terms to their limit by building a philosophy on the basis of faith, the tragic philosophy of praxis devalues all the essential concepts that gave it life in the first place. Discovering that its loved object – praxis – cannot be found fully in any part of the world or history, the philosophy of praxis finds itself sundered from the world, trapped within only itself. While they might desire the new, adherents of such a philosophy only have themselves to blame for a failure to encounter it. To blame history for this is to convert the once rich concept of genesis into a fig leaf. With this, the concept is lost. The dialectic is consequently reduced to an abstract methodology whose connection with history exists only in the past. The tragic philosopher of praxis is forced back into an ‘ancient’ dialectics which reduces to stasis. Thus, dialectical logic is lost too. Even mediation is replaced by abstract negativity that looks upon the world only in order to reject it. Even basic Marxian commitments to immanence and material analysis are lost. In their place, the philosophy and politics of 1917 are an eternally recurrent cold comfort, wrenched from their time. Insofar history or tradition speak at all, they become a macabre séance in which the spirits of the dead – of course, with no cynicism whatsoever on the part of their summoners – confirm the already assumed truth of the philosopher. The ghosts of Hegel, Marx, Lenin and the masses who made up the soviets are summoned in order to make a candle flicker twice to let us know that despite certain setbacks, praxis will return. This is no way to give the dead their due and less still a way to raise them to eternal life. Moreover, to intellectually project such a subjectively-founded distancing from life and commensurate desire for redemption and reconciliation onto an estranged universal saviour betrays authoritarian egotism. This makes praxis into a graven image. In so doing, the tragic philosophy of praxis commits idolatry in the name of its idol. The devaluation of the present renders it impossible encounter even a partial dereifying practice. What is left of this except the tragic philosopher of praxis who conceals his vanity with a false absolute? As Elihu rebuked Job: ‘Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty regard it’.185 This is to say, there is no surer way for a philosopher

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Hegel 1971, pp. 287–8. Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Job, 35:13.

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of praxis to render themselves unfit for new praxis. The consequence of theology is hypocrisy and intellectual sterility. What growth could occur in such a barren wasteland? As has been noted, a conceptual mythology is born at the point at which thought terminates, incapable of grasping any further concrete mediation between itself and the present. Of course, the foregoing critique intensifies the mythological and theological character of Lukács’s philosophy preserved after praxis. As we have seen, he himself did not attempt to preserve his philosophy on this basis. Regardless of the price Lukács paid in choosing a different path, his decision may be commended insofar as it allowed him to avoid a desperate cul de sac. Still, as I hope to have demonstrated, the conceptual possibility of this form of philosophy of praxis exists in the original. The point of driving it to an extreme is to prepare the conditions for its overcoming. To do this, it must be first criticised precisely as a nihilistic theology. Hegel’s critique of Christianity in the penultimate section of The Phenomenology of Spirit contains a model for such a critique. This might appear to violate the demand for conceptual immanence by proposing an extrinsic critique. However, as I have argued, in the 1920s, Lukács’s philosophy did consciously approach the shape of the Hegelian absolute, although it did so by representing the absolute as praxis, that is, in estrangement. From this, it follows that something of the absolute must persist, even in such a degraded standpoint. If this is true, there ought also to exist an immanent pathway towards reconciliation and the standpoint of speculative philosophy. This is disclosed by the strong conceptual affinity between tragic philosophy of praxis and what Hegel refers to as revealed religion. Without suggesting they are the same (a key difference will be proposed later), both consciousnesses possess the absolute in the form of a theological representation. They also possess a similar relationship to being – the nature of which both standpoints are unaware. This much is implied, at any rate, by the theological terms which were used to describe this articulation of philosophy of praxis. A detailed reading of the moments of the dialectic Hegel presents there are beyond the scope of this study. It will suffice to mention that the Christian consciousness devalues itself, regards itself as inessential, and represents its redemption in the figure of Jesus, the divine universal individual. This redemption is closely tied with death: the son of God, the direct mediator between humanity and the divine, was crucified for our sins. In the contemplation of the death of Christ, the Christian consciousness feels itself to be forsaken: That death [of Christ] is the painful feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself has died. This harsh expression is the expression of the

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inmost simple-knowing-of-oneself, the return of consciousness into the depth of the night of the I=I which no longer distinguishes and knows anything external to it. This feeling thus is in fact the loss of substance and of the substance taking a stand against consciousness.186 In this midnight of consciousness, a new truth already exists, even if it is not grasped. Consciousness, stripped of substance, attains the pure form of subjectivity, namely the moment of absolute self-identity; the ‘depth of the night of the I=I’. Because this formalism utterly abolishes substance, it absolutely identifies itself with substance: ‘This knowledge is therefore spiritualization, as a result of which the substance becomes subject, its abstraction and lifelessness have died, and it become[s] actual, simple, and universal self-consciousness’.187 Here we can perceive the new development; this consciousness has become, in itself, a spiritual self-consciousness. That is, the religious community has become the objective bearer of unity with the divine; a substantial spirit represented in its most alienated universal form. As Weil said, we ‘… have to be nothing in order to be in our right place in the whole’.188 It might seem counterintuitive to apply this insight to philosophy of praxis. Still, this is not the first time that absolute negativity has been encountered in the conceptual progression outlined in this work. In Part 1, the standpoint of the proletariat was activated, in the first place, by a consideration of the worker’s experience of reduction to a pure object. In Part 2, the standpoint of theory encountered a subjective crisis resulting in the same inner emptiness. By exposing the standpoint of theory to the practice of the proletariat and to the genesis of history in the actuality of revolution, a further emptiness was effected, on a higher level. This was a necessary precondition for the advent of praxis. In a sense, then, absolute negativity has operated behind the scenes the whole time. Now, on the level of philosophy, the tragic and theological philosophy of praxis finds itself absolutely estranged from its substance and proposes to bridge this gap by positing an absolute identity between subject and substance, under the sign of spiritual knowledge. That is to say, finding its world and itself valueless in the absence of praxis, the theological philosophy of praxis produces an afterworld which is none other than itself, and proclaims a faithful identity between itself and this afterworld. With this, the theological philosophy of praxis has elevated its power of negativity – its abstract subjective will – to the absolute.

186 187 188

Hegel 2018, §. 787. Hegel 2018, §. 787. Weil 2002, p. 36.

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So, the essential moments traversed by the tragic philosophy of praxis and Hegel’s Christian consciousness are identical. These are, firstly, the consciousness of reification and the ethical idea of praxis as redemption of both the world and the philosopher. The second is the acknowledgment of the death of praxis and its recollection, which involves the submission of the subject to historical knowledge. Finally, while this insight feels itself to be drawn from the past, in truth its real basis and actuality exist in the present which is utterly devalued owing to its faith. This leads to a forgetting, opening a void into which spirit may flow. However, awareness of this last step is still blocked by the view of the present as an era of absolute untruth. A truth unaware of itself is incomplete. At this stage in Hegel’s account, the Christian community is in itself the bearer of a consciousness which unites subject and object. However, it does not yet possess this consciousness for itself. ‘This spiritual religious community also does not have a consciousness about what it is; it is spiritual self-consciousness, which, in its own eyes, is not this object, that is, does not develop into a consciousness of itself; rather, insofar as it is consciousness, it has those representational thoughts that have been examined’.189 Yet the grounds for the transformation of this representation of the absolute into a self-knowing knowledge of the absolute are laid in the self-emptying and confession of the religious consciousness. Consequently, in order to rise from revealed religion to philosophy, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis must achieve what Hegel calls spiritual self-consciousness. The starting point for further development in the Christian consciousness is its own feeling of being devoid of the divine essence; that is, the feeling of the distance and remoteness of the divine. In light of this, the Christian consciousness becomes ascetic. By emptying the self, which is inessential, limited, particular and natural, the Christian consciousness draws closer to what is essential, infinite, universal and divine. Yet, this heightens estrangement between the human and the divine: ‘Its own reconciliation therefore enters into its consciousness as something remote, something far away in the future, just as the reconciliation which the other self [Jesus] achieved appears as something remote in the past’.190 This is to say, the religious community, situated in its own time, is itself the truth and ground for its idea of redemption, yet this idea of redemption is cast into the past – in the Gospels – and into the future, in the messianic idea of the second coming of Christ. As has been shown, these

189 190

Hegel 2018, §. 787. Hegel 2018, §. 787.

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essential moments are the fate of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, insofar as it is maintained in acknowledgement of the death of the praxis upon which it was founded. We might say, then, that praxis is a rope fastened between the past and the future – a rope over an abyss. What matters, however, is not so much the rope as the tightrope walker who traverses it.191 Of course, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, built as it is on the foundation of Marx’s political economy as well as a century of revolution culminating in October 1917 is, in content, in advance of what Hegel described. Marxian philosophy does also differ insofar as it is loath to commit itself to the belief in a transcendental afterword. In this sense, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is a secular and this-worldly theology, or better, a political theology appropriate to an era in which God has died. Nonetheless, Hegel’s argument is an accurate conceptual anticipation and refutation. As with the Phenomenology as a whole, further development proceeds via experience. The religious community must exhaust itself of the self-negating, ascetic and hopelessly abstract search for redemption via an alien other: Not until it has abandoned the hope of sublating that way of being alien in an external, i.e., alien, manner, and because the sublated alien manner is itself the return into self-consciousness, does that consciousness in itself turn to itself, turn to its own world and present time, and discover that world to be its own property. When it has done this, it will have taken the first step to climb down from the intellectual world, or, to a greater degree, to spiritualize the abstract element of the intellectual world with the actual self.192 What is interesting here is that Hegel describes the world of religious estrangement as an ‘intellectual world’ and that he proposes the ‘spiritualization’ of its ‘abstract element … with the actual self’. So, the experience of the philosopher of praxis who attempts to maintain Lukács’s philosophy of praxis after the fact might, through an exploration of his or her own self-imposed inner emptiness, come to grasp the necessity of this critique. To conclude this section, then, I will first outline the general manner in which this might be achieved. Secondly, I will outline what may have been necessary for Lukács himself to have encountered such a spiritualisation of his intellectual world by way of his actual self. Both of these sides are necessary; the former illustrates the univer-

191 192

To say nothing of the one who chases and leaps over him. (Nietzsche 2003b, pp. 47–8). Hegel 2018, §. 803.

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sality of Lukács’s experience while the latter reveals the particular origin of the contradictions that, as I have shown, were implicit in his philosophy. These two moments will conclude the historical and subjective critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. To begin generally, recall that Lukács viewed the victory of the proletariat as the desublimation of all religion and mysticism, philosophy included. This representative thought, if it confronts the death of its God, might be driven to examine itself. This is the universal side of the confession that was demanded above, in response to Benjamin. Yet, the tragic philosophy of praxis esteems itself insofar as it remembers its dead God – so, more is necessary than a simple acknowledgement of the death of praxis. Recall further that the standpoint of the proletariat was immediately divided between the in itself and the for itself. Here, philosophy of praxis is also divided between an in itself and a for itself; to become in and for itself, a fully self-critical philosophy of praxis must negate its abstract and subjective element prior to reclaiming its estranged, spiritual content. This is to say, it must despair of ever reuniting with this estranged spiritual content; hope and faith must be abandoned. Despair, too, was Job’s salvation – yet, this was the salvation of an individual. Here, it is confessed not only that God died, but that his death was necessary and is irrevocable. Finally, recall once more that the standpoint of the proletariat involved an experience of pure objectivity, although this was mediated by the standpoint of the proletariat. Here, the tragic philosophy of praxis, if it is consistent in its demand and its right to regard praxis as the absolute, must experience a similar self-emptying which occurs this time for the theorist. This self-emptying is an experience with absolute negativity. Abstract negativity is nought but the power of the subject. In a conceptual sense, following Hegel, abstract negativity is the absolutisation of the will and the reflection of the ‘I’ into itself, in opposition to all contents. It is a limitless infinity and an absolute abstraction. If this nihilistic logic is lived to a personal extreme, it leads to suicide. On the level of politics, it results in terrorism.193 Indeed, as we have seen, Lukács endorsed this analysis, suggesting that the quantitative formalism of commodity production produces the abstract freedom which undergirds it. Yet, Lukács and Hegel part company on the topic of philosophy. After all, Lukács was desperate to leave what he regarded as the most reified form of existence; hence his leap into politics. Yet, he never ceased to be a philosopher. Rather, he was an antiphilosophical

193

Hegel 1991a, §. 5.

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philosopher. In the same way as the fetishism of illegality betrays ongoing intellectual domination of the law, or the creation of a utopia displays a covert imprisonment in the present, the unwillingness of a philosopher to confront the presence of his or her own absolute negativity implies that they are terrorised by it. Thus, the gap in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was filled by his own unacknowledged subjectivity. By constantly identifying the grounds of his philosophy as outside of himself and to the radical exclusion of his own subjectivity, Lukács inadvertently produced a philosophy which was, in this regard, uncritical, unfree, egotistical and ideological. In short, it was a theology and a conceptual mythology. If, however, as I have argued, the tragic and theological philosophy of praxis possesses philosophy in itself, then the ground is laid for a reconciliation with philosophy. If absolute negativity is raised to the level of philosophy, as Hegel argues, it represents a figure of consciousness that possesses the absolute in itself, that has yet to negate its abstract negativity and become for itself. In the 1831 introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel comments upon the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to make a methodological remark that helps us understand what he means. He suggests that before consciousness can reach the standpoint of science, that is, of absolute knowledge, it must go through a penultimate stage in which its power of negativity is unleashed. We have seen this stage play out phenomenologically, in Hegel’s argument about the Christian consciousness. That is, negativity must be given free and absolute reign in order for the consciousness to recognise that this power is its own. For this to occur, Hegel writes: All that is necessary to achieve scientific progress – and it is essential to strive to gain this quite simple insight – is the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive, or that what is selfcontradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, and therefore the result essentially contains that from which it results; which strictly speaking is a tautology, for otherwise it would be an immediacy, not a result. Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation, it has content. It is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite. It is in this way that the system of Notions as

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such has to be formed – and has to complete itself in a purely continuous course in which nothing extraneous is introduced.194 The crucial insight in this passage is not that the logical principle of negativity is immediately positive; this much is far more rigorously proven in the first chapter of the same work. Rather, the crucial point is that in order to attain to absolute knowledge, consciousness must not stop at the moment of resolving negativity into an abstract nothingness. Rather, consciousness must take a further step, realising that every negation is the negation of a particular content or subject matter. It must apply its negativity to itself. Lukács was unable to take this step. Doing so would have required the negation of the two concrete and particular contents that formed the dual terms of his conceptual mythology. That is, he would have had to critique the conception of praxis as the absolute upon which he built his philosophy and the subjective reasons which caused him to flee from his own abstract negativity. Yet, the path that Hegel points to is open for us. Undoubtedly, a distance of almost one hundred years from the praxis upon which Lukács built his philosophy makes it easier for us to negate the first concrete content. The negation of the particular content that has led the philosopher to absolutely hypostatise negativity is the final waystation prior to speculative philosophy. This, too, provides an impetus for a deeper self-criticism and confession than we have had occasion to encounter. Here, the confession extends to the conceptual totality of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis and struggles to divest it of egotism entirely, not by abolishing the subject, but by acknowledging its persistence. This is the only consistent way to maintain the ethical impulse with which philosophy of praxis began; one cannot reconcile with the other if the purpose of the other is the salvation (or obliteration) of the one. Moreover, if successful, this self-emptying might exclude what was formerly an overly subjective approach to praxis. If Lukács imposed a subjective truth on praxis, then this implies that he did not fully know the praxis upon which his philosophy was built. By reappropriating this subjective truth, the philosopher is allowed to grasp the genuine, underlying truth of praxis itself, both past and present, which may finally be approached, divested of the impossible burden of the absolute. Yet, for this to be successful, a logical-philosophical critique of praxis itself is needed – which will be the subject of the next section of this chapter.

194

Hegel 1991c, p. 54.

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However, what about the inner, subjective and psychological barrier that prevented Lukács from transforming his philosophy of praxis into a philosophy? Accounting for this – even if some speculation (in the non-Hegelian sense) is required – allows us to complete our historicisation of Lukács. Here, the unexamined personal subjectivity of Lukács himself must be encountered. As has been suggested, Lukács’s experience of romantic love, as a reconciliation between self and other, was necessary to his formulation of a philosophy of praxis. Lukács only ever reflected upon this biographically – and even then in fragments that were composed late in life when he was already dedicated to a very different conception of Marxism. He did not reflect on his path to the philosophy of praxis psychologically or philosophically during his radical years, at least not that we know of. This is partly why there exist traces of Lukács’s youthful melancholy and his will to death in his philosophy of praxis. Lukács, too, it seems, housed wolves in his cellar. While it was necessary for him to find a way beyond his deathly aspect in order to encounter love, he freed himself only incompletely. So, it is still necessary to face and overcome what is deathly about Lukács’s philosophy of praxis in order to reflect on the possibility for rebirth and living truth that he might offer us. In this regard, I agree once more with Gillian Rose who has argued that while death in general may well be thought of as nothing, ‘that this particular death is not nothing’.195 Those who consider death unthinkable give it power over life. It is true that death in general is a beyond and a vast indifference. A particular death, however, is not. To confront the death of the particular is to mourn for the loss of a finite. But without this, there can be no approach to the infinite. In making this point, Rose is reproducing, on the level of subjective reflection, Hegel’s comments from the 1831 introduction to the Science of Logic which were quoted above. Namely, for consistent and absolute negativity to produce positivity, it must only negate what is particular and determinate, in order to gain access to the infinite. In his early theological writings, Hegel argued that ‘[r]eligion is any elevation of the finite to the infinite, when the infinite is conceived as a definitive form of life’.196 Consequently, to grasp the true infinite, to maintain the finite in the infinite, and to sublate religion, it is necessary to let go of any finite that has been elevated to the level of infinite and made into a form of life, or a deadening mask. To return to Rose, this requires a work of mourning for that specific finite and particular being, in order to find meaning in their particular death.

195 196

Rose 1996, p. 146. Hegel 1971, p. 317.

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Applied to Lukács, this achieves two things. Firstly, by recognising the necessity with which he produced a conceptual mythology, we understand the necessity of the death of Lukács as he was in the 1920s. This liberates him from the necromancers and the slayers of the undead who wish, respectively, to reanimate him unnaturally or to put his corpse back in the ground. Secondly, by reconciling with the inner, particular and finite truth of his philosophy of praxis we allow Lukács to live again, for us, and to converse with us, not as a servant or a revenant, but as a friend. By renouncing a belief in the resurrection, Lukács might live again, not in his particular being, but universally and for us. Is this not our final goal when we read a philosopher who has passed? More will be said shortly about what this might entail for Lukács himself. Yet, if we are successful, in addition to demonstrating the objective existence of speculative philosophy within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, this will open, on the basis of his words, a subjective path to it that we his readers may walk. Insofar as we experience the love, heroism and pathos of Lukács’s philosophy, if we mourn his death and that of his conceptual work, we experience the absolute negativity I described above. As I have shown, this experience is always one for us – that is, it is particular. And so, in saying farewell to Lukács, we mourn for a part of ourselves and in so doing, affirm the negative as our possession and encounter the positive. Thus, we may touch the infinite. Despair turns to happiness and we may grasp, intuitively as well as rationally, the religious aphorism that joy is to know God in all things. In other words, mourning makes it possible to escape theological nihilism and enact a return to life. With this, we hope to gain entry into the circle of philosophy. This is the subjective completion of the ethical demand upon which Lukács built his philosophy. In this way, we continue his work even where he failed. Moreover, this realisation is the living and present reconciliation of the tragic opposition between a bad infinity of endless quantitative motion on the one hand and stasis on the other. That is, the reconciliation between infinite and finite, conditioned by mourning and a confrontation with death, allows us to experience the present as it is now, as an unfolding of the qualitatively new. The truth of praxis is not in an afterworld but is in this world. This, as I will argue in the next chapter and in the conclusion, is Hegel’s philosophical alternative to nihilism. As suggested, our work of mourning also bears on Lukács himself, even though what remains of him is a literary legacy. Specifically, the reconciliation between finitude and infinity as described above allows us to finally desublimate religion which – to repeat Hegel’s definition – consists in the elevation of the finite to the infinite. So, we do not just criticise Lukács for producing an objectively theological system, but for bearing the subjective grounds

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for this mistake in his soul. I believe that Bloch correctly identified some of these grounds when he described Lukács’s ‘inner worldly asceticism’.197 This rendered Lukács incapable of psychological or philosophical introspection which, in typically dialectical fashion, gave his subjectivity an undue and unacknowledged power over his thought. This is the most important truth that Nietzsche (who looked more deeply into himself than any of his contemporaries and in so doing, opened a space for psychology) can speak to Lukács. After all, Lukács expected that praxis, in creating a higher, living truth, would also serve as the salvation of the theorist whose duty it was to remain, until that dawn, trapped in the world of forms. This suggests that he never freed himself from the self-imposed grey world of forms imposed on the critic. Yet, the question remains: what barred his pathway back to life? Hegel’s words concerning the early Christians were quoted earlier. To paraphrase him, their love for their lost saviour was preserved, in their small circles, by a faith which set them against the world, devaluing it. Shortly after, in the same text, he expands on this idea, suggesting that since ‘… something dead here forms one term of the love relationship, love is girt by matter alone, and this matter is quite indifferent to it. Love’s essence at this level, then, is that the individual in his innermost nature is something opposed [to objectivity.]’198 How can this speak to Lukács, whose elaboration of philosophy of praxis was conditioned by his – very alive – love for Gertrúd Bortsteiber? Recall also his dramatic conversion, his Kierkegaardian leap of faith and his decision to, for possibly the first time in his life, take decisive, meaningproducing and yet irrational action. In this, one detects a desperate flight from the void. If this leap was to bridge a gap, what was on the side that Lukács leaped away from? If the leap both possessed an irrational content and left an irrational remainder, and if we refuse to see the irrational as inexplicable, then what contents were concealed by this form? The Voyage of Saint Brendan, recounts a sea voyage undertaken by the eponymous ninth century Irish Christian mystic. At one point, Saint Brendan encounters a monastery illuminated by perpetually burning lamps which are lit, every night, by a divine spirit. He asked the elder: ‘How can an incorporeal Light burn corporeally in a corporeal creature?’ The elder replied: ‘Have you not read of the bush burning at Mount Sinai? Yet that bush was unaffected by the fire’.199 Following his conversion, an incorporeal light burned similarly in Lukács’s corporeal body, lit by the divine. And yet he was unaffected by the fire. 197 198 199

Bloch 2019. Hegel 1971, p. 303. O’Meara 1981.

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In Spirit of Utopia, Bloch wrote: ‘… since one never completely forgets a first love, since one’s memories of her are framed as enduring images, and indestructible places within them, this apprenticeship in love has for the better man a constantly flowing, wistfully fruitful beauty which nothing can replace, let alone dismiss’.200 Perhaps Irma Seidler – who desired above all else habitable institutions populated by beautiful people, but who was nonetheless unable to find a path to them – was the source of György Lukács’s incorporeal light. Despite her aching affirmations of love, Lukács found himself incapable of the ethical, creative and loving act she implored of him. Did he leap into communism as penance and solatium for her lost love? Perhaps Lukács was unaffected by his incorporeal light because his mourning for Irma Seidler was incomplete.

3

The Critique from Philosophy The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in the recognition that the finite is not truly an existent. Every philosophy is essentially idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is carried out. This applies to philosophy just as much as to religion, for religion, no less than philosophy, will not admit finitude as a true being, an ultimate, an absolute, or as something nonposited, uncreated, eternal. The opposition between idealistic and realistic philosophy is therefore without meaning. A philosophy that attributes to finite existence, as such, true, ultimate, absolute being, does not deserve the name of philosophy. G.W.F. Hegel201

The above historical critique of the tragic philosophy of praxis leads to a second, more properly philosophical critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. As Hegel argued of the Christian community, its truth is present in itself, albeit as an estranged representation that projects this truth into a past and future which are savagely separated from a devalued past. The overcoming of the Christian consciousness proceeds via a realisation of this fact (which, in fact, is a deeper confession of sin and abstraction than any which can be made before an estranged God or proletariat). The same holds for Lukács’s philo-

200 201

Bloch 2000, p. 208. Hegel 1991c, p. 124.

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sophy of praxis. Insofar as it expressed the truth of praxis, it did so via representation; that is, in an estranged way. As has been stressed, Lukács’s philosophy was formed at a distance from the practice upon which it purported to base itself. At no point did Lukács attempt to make himself the spokesperson for any other praxis. Thus, a pernicious chasm existed between philosophy of praxis and praxis. The above section illustrated the violence wrought by history on Lukács’s philosophy as penalty for this chasm; the ensuing degradation of praxis qua the absolute demonstrates the consequences of such an estranged relationship with the truth. Yet, a new and higher truth has only been implied negatively. The purpose of this section is to reassemble the positive determinants of this truth. This will not break with the injunction to criticise immanently. Indeed, if this Hegelian critique is correct, not only does the standpoint of philosophy exist implicitly in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, but through its metacritique, we will discover the truth regarding genesis and logic, as he confronted them in the 1920s, that his philosophy was insufficient to grasp and which therefore became hypostatised as a conceptual mythology. In short, the metacritique of Lukács ought to disclose a deeper truth about the historical reality he reflected upon. Indeed, turning Lukács’s literary-historical method of metacritique on himself represents the completion of his philosophy and the satisfaction of his demand that historical materialism become self-conscious, at least, as it is applied to his articulation of historical materialism. Given they are rendered in estrangement, both terms philosophy and praxis must contain an element unknown to each other. We have looked at the subjective basis for this aporia. What then was the actual, objective basis for it? Simply, Lukács expressed the truth of an ethical community: the party. It has been shown above that the commitment of an individual to a revolutionary party is essentially ethical. Lukács was quite explicit that only through voluntary self-subordination to a communist party might an individual find concrete freedom and a path between his individuality and praxis. Moreover, to be clear, what is meant here by the ‘truth of a party’ is not necessarily the truth of the party as a ruling party, but rather, the truth of the party in its heroic period in which it genuinely strove to express the class interests of the proletariat. This is also the sublime moment of revolution, to which Merleau-Ponty was quoted as referring to above. For now, the consequence of this admission is that it must alter the content of praxis itself. In fact, this admission categorically delinks praxis from the absolute. While, like all philosophical categories, praxis depends upon the absolute and leads to it, on its own, it cannot rationally sustain the absolute. This implies two things. Firstly, that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was founded on a philosophical overestimation of the praxis of 1917; he held that praxis solved philosophical problems which it did not. Secondly, to

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the extent that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis represents a breakthrough made possible by 1917, it is necessary to reclaim its truth against itself. If this is successful, then precisely by demythologising the praxis of 1917 we might discover new attributes in it and in Lukács’s philosophy. In short, divested of the burden of the absolute, praxis might be permitted to speak on its own terms. This – in addition to the subjective reflections outlined above – is what allows the philosophers to account for themselves while aspiring to knowledge of the absolute. Thus, this section will conclude with a proposal for how the standpoint of speculative philosophy might be won, from within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. 3.1 The Occluded Political Truth of Praxis Clearly, Lukács was aware of the danger of producing a conceptual mythology. He suggested that Fichte, as well as other of the Young Hegelians, fell into this trap. His words to this effect were quoted above. The argument at present is that the term praxis represents just such a conceptual mythology in Lukács’s 1920s thought. We have seen this from the point of view of history, yet, as much is also indicated in some of the determinants he attributes to praxis. As has been shown, the two concrete terms which lead to praxis are party and class. Yet at no point does he suggest a concrete third term between these two. Instead he refers to praxis, the creation of the new, the outpouring of history as conscious creation, the emergence of qualitative concrete freedom in history, substance knowing itself as subject, and so on. Yet, Lukács was unable to nominate concretely what new content praxis expressed.202 Of course, Lukács acknowledged that praxis must be situated in a reading of the contemporary political landscape, but this is effectively a knowledge of the past as it impacts on the immediate present. Moreover, praxis is clearly irreducible to this knowledge. So, notwithstanding his occasional speculation about the knowledge of a dereified society, the highest concrete concept in Lukács’s dialectic of praxis is that of class struggle at the highest level of objective pos-

202

Feenberg notices that Lukács suggested no solution to the problem of politics in the USSR, aside from proffering somewhat vague speculation about the possibility of the institutional coexistence of soviets and party (Feenberg 2014, p. 118). So, Feenberg notices a similar problem to that which is suggested here. However, he does not draw any philosophical consequences from it, instead suggesting that a stronger understanding of socialist constitutionality or an anticipation of Stalinism might have averted the catastrophe. Indeed, since he suggests that the absence of such insight represented a failure of ‘theory and imagination’, he would appear to miss the point entirely (Feenberg 2002, p. 69). This aspect of Feenberg’s critique of Lukács was noted in a footnote to Chapter 7. For now, the point is that Lukács’s failure must be read as a necessary and mythological expression of a new historic reality which we may only understand in retrospect.

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sibility. This would indicate that the entire truth of history exists not in an institution or concrete situation, but in a successful mass action which occurs as the result of a decision ultimately taken by a party.203 Although Lukács was at pains to define the decision as one taken by the proletariat, it is equally clear that the decision he had in mind was the one taken by Lenin to initiate the October Revolution. While, as has been stressed, Lukács is eager to suggest that such a decision must be taken in light of a full knowledge of the conjuncture, and that it must be approved by the proletariat, it remains nonetheless the decision which produces a new political truth. Thus Lukács’s position was closer to Schmitt’s ideas of the sovereign and the state of exception than he might have cared to admit. It is true, of course, that Lenin’s decision did produce a new truth – but not one that was grasped by a self-reflexive, dereifying humanity. As Merleau-Ponty observes, to render as the bearer of truth such a sublime moment in history belies a fetishism of becoming over being (or, of negativity over positivity). He writes: Thus Marxism could not resolve the problem that is presented and from which we started. It could not maintain itself at that sublime point which it hoped it could find in the life of the Party, that point where matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, past and future, discipline and judgement; and therefore the opposites which it was to unite fall away from each other.204 If praxis is not the absolute, namely, the overcoming of the opposition between being and becoming via conscious creation, then Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, contrary to its intention, fetishises the moment of becoming, that is, negation. This fits well with the subjective and historical critique of Lukács outlined above; if Lukács was dominated by his own abstract negativity, then it stands to reason that he hypostatised the moment of negation in history. Yet, as Merleau-Ponty explains, the negativity of becoming conceals a positivity: ‘The Party which works to put the proletariat in power can take advantage of this negative force [the idea of the negation immanent in history, embodied

203 204

Lukács 2002, p. 56. As he continues: ‘Someone will say that it is difficult to enter into the positive and to do something while keeping the ambiguity of the dialectic. The objection confirms our reservation because it amounts to saying that there is no revolution which is critical of itself. Yet it is through this program of continual criticism that revolution earns its good name. In this sense the equivocalness of the revolution would be the equivocalness of communist philosophy writ large’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973b, pp. 72–3).

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in the proletariat], and the society which the Party prepares is, by definition, permanently self-critical – a classless or true society. Unfortunately, a government, even a revolutionary one, a party, even a revolutionary party, is not a negation’.205 As he continues to explain, a party which seeks to hold government – even one constituted within the soviets – must exist positively, that is, by establishing an order of facts. Moreover, to attempt this provisionally or doubtfully would have courted disaster. Rather, a positive order was established as an absolute and impassable fact. From this it follows: Even should the Party and the revolutionary society remain as close as possible to the proletariat, the proletariat as ‘suppression of itself’ is not to be found: one finds only proletarians who think and wish this or that, who are exuberant or discouraged, who see correctly or incorrectly, but who are in any case always in the world. The Party – animated in principle by the class which suppresses itself, justified in principle for the single reason that it is this class, organised – returns to the positive, as does the class itself, and then the historical representatives of negativity assert themselves ever more strongly in the name of positivity.206 To be clear, this does not necessitate an aversion to revolution or even Bolshevism as such. Merleau-Ponty goes on to note that there were in fact times when the party and the class enjoyed the relationship described by Lukács’s dialectic; this is this historical sublime. In its fleeting moment, the unity of theory and practice exists.207 In the reconciliation between the acting and judging consciousness, according to Hegel, God appears.208 However, by virtue of its sublimity, such moments are fleeting, incapable of sustaining absolute, dereified truth permanently. Having thus unburdened October 1917 from the demands made on it by Lukács, it becomes possible to suggest what new content its praxis really did produce. This is also necessary in order to demonstrate the concealed positivity in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. In short, in the antinomy between party and class in 1917, the party triumphed. To evidence historically this hardly controversial observation is not necessary. At no point did the proletariat exercise meaningful or independent sovereignty. The second All-Russian Congress of Soviets did enthusiastically endorse the insurrection, but this was the day after. 205 206 207 208

Merleau-Ponty 1973b, p. 89. Merleau-Ponty 1973b, pp. 89–90. Merleau-Ponty 1973b, p. 90. Hegel 2018, §. 671.

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It was the party – and Lenin – who made themselves sovereign, with the approval of the class. That no one understood this should not be surprising; who yet has understood the truth of any profound historical moment as it unfolds? Indeed, concealing the nature and source of power is part of all political theology and, arguably, an essential problem for political philosophy. Just as the Israelites asked Moses to speak with the Lord for fear that they may be destroyed, and just as Moses himself was incapable of looking upon the face of the Lord, as a political theology, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis necessarily obscured the decision of the sovereign upon which the new state was founded.209 This insight also casts light on the truth concealed by Lukács’s conceptual mythology; that is, it begins to demonstrate the conceptual content upon which his philosophy foundered and signified in estranged form, in itself but not for itself. Firstly, as has been discussed, Lukács’s leap of faith into the communist movement was the product of a sharp either/or decision. The essential irrationality of his leap permitted him to create a vast horizon of meaning upon which he elaborated during the 1920s. And yet, its origins and contents were obscure to Lukács. Such a leap is the subjective, ethical and philosophical equivalent of the decision of a sovereign which also creates a new field of meaning. In this regard, MacIntyre is entirely correct to view it as a religious conversion, indeed, one perfectly suited to the age of God’s death.210 As this decision initiated Lukács’s entire philosophy of praxis, it served as the source of his mythologisation of praxis and his theological reading of 1917. Of course, Lukács was well aware (following Hegel and Weber) that the relationship between the individual and society is, in modernity, mediated by personal ethics. By virtue of his unconsciously ethical over determination of praxis, however, he produced an ethically over determined and therefore ultimately subjective and inconsistently rational philosophy. Secondly, this point allows us to understand Lukács’s philosophy of praxis as an expression of the utopianism of the universal modern state, turned against a positive, historical and only partly-modern state. Merleau-Ponty’s words regarding the sublime moment of revolutionary negativity make this clear: Such is the miracle of the revolutionary flow, of negativity embodied in history. But can one conceive of a continued, of an established, flow, of a 209

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Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Exodus, 33:20. While the reference to Carl Schmitt here is intentional, this is not the place to explore further the consequences of this reading of the October Revolution (Schmitt 2005). MacIntyre 2006, pp. 158–60.

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regime that would live at this level of tension, of a historical time which would be constantly agitated by this critical ferment, of a life without lasting attainments and without rest? … In principle, therefore, it is only in privileged moments that negativity actually descends into history and becomes a way of life. The rest of the time it is represented by bureaucrats … Revolution is a realized or indefinitely reiterated negation, and there is no pure or continued negation in things themselves. Marx was able to have and to transmit the illusion of a negation realized in history and in its ‘matter’ only by making of the noncapitalistic future an absolute Other. But we who have witnessed a Marxist revolution well know that revolutionary society has its weight, its positivity, and that it is therefore not the absolute Other.211 The October Revolution was the sublime moment in a process after which history, in its brute material positivity, reasserted itself. Yet, it does not follow from this that what occurred after the October Revolution was a mere repetition of what had come before. Rather, the party acted upon and actualised the logic of the state more radically than had ever taken place hitherto. In much the same way as the great bourgeois revolutions were liberating, in its heroic moment, so too was the October Revolution. In the same way as the great bourgeois revolutions absolutised the concept of absolute freedom in the realm of politics, so did the October Revolution. The fact that it instituted a more extreme and statist reified logic is also quite apparent. This was necessary and it represented the quantitative expansion of reification, as it manifests in the bureaucratic logic of the state, in accordance with a more developed historical period. Indeed, notwithstanding the passing reference to state capitalism in Lenin, it is significant that Lukács himself remained largely uncritical of this, as Hall, discussed above, notes.212 After all, one might have expected Lukács – armed as he was with an analysis of reification, bureaucracy and calculable rationality – to have developed an early account of the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union. Yet he did not.213

211 212 213

Merleau-Ponty 1973b, p. 99. Hall 2011b, p. 79. As has been noted in connection with Lenin – A Study in the Unity of His Thought, Lukács did imply some awareness of the degeneration of revolutionary democracy in the post 1917 period in the USSR. Thus may be explained his defence of soviet democracy and his assertion, following Lenin, that the revolution had established state capitalism. Equally, Lukács’s comments on bureaucracy in History and Class Consciousness may be taken as the starting point for a critique of the bureaucratisation of the October Revolution.

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As Merleau-Ponty wrote: ‘Passivity towards the Party is the stance that discipline and centralism take when the Party ceases to be democratic’.214 So it was on account of the inner logic and constitution of his philosophy of praxis – a constitution opaque to Lukács himself – that he found himself intellectually disarmed as the party hardened over and became sclerotic. Lukács’s resort to Marxist ‘science’, suggested above, was the intellectual reflection of this hardening over. As we have seen, Lukács argued that German Idealism was able to resolve the antinomies of bourgeois life only in thought. Since this thought did not connect with reality and its own class basis, ‘… it did not manage to do more than provide a complete intellectual copy and the a priori deduction of bourgeois society’.215 Lukács’s critique of this failure rested on his historicisation of German Idealism, as situated on the cusp of capitalism and the possibility for a new truth. If this historicisation is rejected, then two observations follow. Firstly, philosophy does not exhaust its historical role; rather, provided conditions for its existence, philosophy permanently possesses the capacity to render the problems of its context in thought. Secondly, if philosophy does this without comprehending its own relationship with the historical context, it will reproduce that context in thought, mythologically. This is precisely what Lukács’s philosophy of praxis achieved. Moreover, if the real connection between philosophy and its genesis is identified – as Lukács’s metacritique of bourgeois thought shows – then the immediacy of the historical period in question is revealed in its objectively existing but hitherto hidden mediations. This is what makes Lukács’s philosophy of praxis uniquely suited as a starting point for comprehending not only the October Revolution, but its aftermath and, indeed, Marxian thought in general. The above metacritique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is bolstered by the uneasy status of the state and the political in his work from the 1920s. As has been argued, on the one hand there exists both an implicit theory of the state in his work and occasional groundwork for an explicit theory of the state. This is visible in his remarks on legality, on the antinomies of bourgeois jurisprudence or on the logic of bureaucracy. Yet, nowhere is this elaborated seriously or systematically. As has been illustrated by this work, the praxis he describes only unfolds at the level of politics. The political – which is the domain of the state and of sovereignty – is the apex of the chain of conceptual mediations he describes between immediacy and fully actualised praxis. As has been mentioned, this equally implies a structured or hierarchical view of the social

214 215

Merleau-Ponty 1973b, p. 85. Lukács 1967a, p. 148.

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totality in which the state exists in antinomic relationship with civil society and in which the political is that moment from within which the social totality might be fundamentally transformed by the creation of a workers’ state. This, of course, is entirely in line with classical Marxism and Leninism. What is interesting about it, however, is that Lukács only articulates this theory of the state insofar as it is relevant to the praxis of the proletariat. That is to say, in Lukács’s account the revolutionary workers’ movement forms itself by traversing the mediations of bourgeois society and the antinomies of bourgeois politics, and not by rejecting them absolutely as does anarchism (or the romanticism of illegality) or by submitting to them, as does reformism. The workers’ movement, as Lukács repeated, following Marx, has no transhistorical goals to realise. Rather, its goals are immanent to capitalism itself. This also explains why, in History and Class Consciousness as well as in Lenin, Lukács suggests that state-planned capitalism, the result of both a general trend within monopoly capitalism and World War One, furnishes a ready-made economic basis for socialism. The transformation of a state capitalist economy into a socialist one, if this argument is taken seriously, is reduced to a purely political matter. Consequently, Lukács may be read as suggesting that socialism consists of a state capitalist economy with proletarian political leadership.216 This point, if true, presents a possible resolution to twentieth century debates about the nature of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist countries. In that debate, conducted primarily within Trotskyism, theorists who saw Russia as state capitalist contended with those who saw it as some form of a ‘degenerated workers state’. A third camp suggested a new theory, namely, bureaucratic collectivism. The metacritique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, by suggesting that socialism is identical with state capitalism and represents an extension of the bureaucratic 216

In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács writes: ‘If we compare that with the current attempts to harmonise a ‘planned’ economy with the class interests of the bourgeoisie, we are forced to admit that what we are witnessing is the capitulation of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie before that of the proletariat’ (Lukács 1967a, p. 66). In Lenin, he writes, quoting Lenin: The dialectic of history is such that war, by extraordinarily expediting the transformation of monopoly capitalism, has thereby extraordinarily advanced mankind towards socialism. Imperialist war is the eve of socialist revolution. And this is not only because the horrors of war give rise to proletarian revolt – no revolt can bring about socialism unless the economic conditions for socialism are ripe – but because state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs. … socialism is merely state-monopoly capitalism which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly (Lukács 1967b, p. 76).

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and reified logic of the state, presents a possible solution in which the one sided truth possessed by every camp is upheld. This, however, raised a more essential question about the difference between capitalism and socialism. Lukács, at least during his 1920s period, would doubtless have replied that the difference exists in the self-consciousness and free self-institution of the latter. Yet just as no state has ever attained the selfknowledge demanded of it in the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, no party (and therefore, no proletariat) ever attained the self-knowledge demanded of it by Lukács.217 This is true of Lenin himself, who when all is said and done, was a revolutionary politician and not the embodiment of absolute spirit. This is to say, Lenin too found his actions subject to the ruse of reason. Hence the glaring contradiction between the almost libertarian Marxist vision of State and Revolution and the policies he found himself compelled to enact, once in power. This deficit of self-reflection was even more apparent in the communist parties of Western Europe. Given this, we have to reject the idea that any genuinely self-reflexive and freely self-instituting form of socialism has existed. But if this is the case, in what manner does the October Revolution differ from other bourgeois revolutions? And, more generally, how does socialism essentially differ with capitalism? I would answer these questions as follows. By traversing the mediations of bourgeois politics and by upholding the immanent political logic or telos of capitalism against itself, the revolutionary praxis of 1917 in fact fought to realise the bourgeois political project against the empirical bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution, then, was a worker-led bourgeois revolution. It must be admitted, however, that these terms are ambiguous. After all, this would seem to link our analysis of capitalism and state forms to the rule of the empirical bourgeoisie too rigidly. Perhaps it would be better to say, then, that the logic of modernity is a reified formalism that expresses itself in a determinate and interrelated manner in the state and in civil society, which together form a totality. Insofar as the proletariat has led revolutionary transformations, these have hitherto never broken with this essentially reified logic, and in some cases, have strengthened it. Moreover, this does not deny a heroic and emancipatory character to proletarian revolutions; all revolutions possess this moment, to varying degrees. To push the point further, if we refuse to understand the future in transcendental, utopian or messianic terms, and instead see it as an immanent moment of the present, then socialism, as an oppositional or revolutionary movement, is none other than the immanent political utopianism of modernity. Thus, in com-

217

Hegel 1991a, ‘Introduction’.

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mitting himself to communism, and particularly to an extremely libertarianBolshevik vision thereof, Lukács made himself a partisan of radical democratic political utopianism. This observation explains Lukács’s lifelong defence of the soviets as the institutions in which the concrete democracy, both promised and denied by liberal capitalism, might be realised. Yet, utopian projects do not survive contact with reality unscathed. So, in Russia, the party represented the moment of sovereignty and decision in antithesis to the moment of radical democracy and discussion. The party, of course, triumphed (just as The Directorate and eventually Napoleon triumphed over the Paris Sections). And well that it did. Without the Bolshevik Party in power, the Russian Revolution would have been an unmitigated historical disaster. Clearly, this descriptor also applies to Stalin. But better disasters that start as heroic successes from which we can learn. And at any rate, if we refuse to hypostatise the future, we ought to extend the same courtesy to the past; debates about what should or could happen bear strictly no meaning for the past, but only for the present. The future is a realm of abstract freedom, while the past is a realm of absolute unfreedom. Concrete freedom only exists in the present. Seen in this light, the Russian Revolution was not as radically distinct from the bourgeois revolutions as Lukács imagined. Rather, it was their inheritor and continuator, led by a different class, a class born of capitalist society and capable of sustaining and extending the universality of capitalism into the essentially quantitative, egalitarian and rationalist logic of state socialism. Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, then, ultimately expressed then the historical-political logic of reification by way of the state and the mediation of the party.218 In acknowledging this, it must be conceded that the Wertkritik Marxism-aligned critics of Lukács have a point. They argue the proletariat cannot function as a subject-object of history given its status as a class produced, hegemonised and totally enmeshed within the logic of capitalism. It is clear that this critique, as it applies to history at least, is vindicated. More will be said on the concept of labour shortly. Still, the Wertkritik critique of Lukács fails – as I have argued – to notice that the philosophical depth and radicalism of Lukács’s failed solution to the problem creates a space for real philosophical and political development in Marxism. By posing the political problem of workers’ revolution sharply, this may force Marxism to develop a more robust political philosophy. 218

The practical-radical side of this political utopianism and theology of the state, in the twentieth century, was preserved by those revolutionary sects which sought to recreate the Bolshevik revolution. They were therefore analogous to the re-enactors of Jacobinism in the nineteenth century for whom Marx reserved such scorn.

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To be clear, none of this precludes the fact that we may learn from Lukács’s philosophy of praxis or the Russian Revolution. Nor should it be taken to imply a one sided hostility to the state, as with libertarianism or anarchism. The most important consequence that flows from this analysis is that twentieth century ‘really existing socialism’ simply expressed a one sided, quantitative and formal logic that fell far short of the radical sense of communism as the absolute that both Marx and Lukács clearly entertained. Lukács, in one of his most bleak moments following the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, is said to have suggested that perhaps Kafka was a realist after all.219 In this admission, perhaps there is a glimmer of recognition of the critique above. Indeed, an incipient critique of bureaucracy might also be found in those sections of The Young Hegel which discuss Hegel’s critique of Christianity as a state religion.220 In discussing the bureaucratisation and hardening over of Christianity, Lukács in this text speaks quite transparently to the abysmal circumstances within which he found himself in Russia in the 1930s and 1940s. His comments may even be interpreted to imply some budding awareness that Marxism had itself become theological and dead. This represents a possible point of dialogue with Marx. In addition to Marx’s comments on bureaucracy in his A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx also anticipated the possibility of state socialism in a rather opaque and frequently overlooked section of The 1844 Manuscripts. In these passages, he describes ‘Crude Communism’, the immediate annulment of private property, as follows: In its first form only a generalisation and consummation of it [of this relation]. As such it appears in a twofold form: on the one hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants

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220

Of this, Löwy writes: … one can mention a curious story told by Lukács himself to his disciples. After the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Lukács was imprisoned by the Soviet authorities, together with Imre Nagy and other dissident communists, in a Romanian fortress. While waiting to be judged he had no idea of the accusations weighing on him; indeed, it is not clear even now under which authority he was to be tried: A Soviet Court? The new Hungarian authorities? The KGB? One day, during this long and disquieting period which lasted several months, from the end of 1956 to the spring of 1957, on the occasion of a walk in the prison’s courtyard, György Lukács turned to his wife and made the following remark: ‘Kafka war doch ein Realist’ (After all, Kafka was a realist) (Löwy 2011, p. 183). Lukács 1975.

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to disregard talent, etc., in an arbitrary manner. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical possession. The category of the worker is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things … This type of communism – since it negates the personality of man in every sphere – is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation … How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it. The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital – by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality – labour as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community … The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism – is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system.221 As Marx continues, to the extent that communism is still political in nature (be it democratic or despotic), the abolition of the state is incomplete. Communism as the ‘positive transcendence of private property [and] human estrangement’ represents a humanity returned to itself as social, and therefore, a humanity which has reappropriated its human essence. This communism is equally a fully developed naturalism and a reconciliation of the antinomies of alienated life, between existence and essence, objectification and selfconfirmation and between freedom and necessity. It is ‘… the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution’.222 This expresses well the radical and utopian sense of communism – undoubtedly also the sense which Lukács entertained in contradistinction to really existing socialism. I propose that if this concept of ‘genuine communism’ is to be divested of its status as a utopia or a transcendental regulative ideal, it is necessary for Marxism to develop a far stronger philosophy of politics and the state and, by virtue of this, a far stronger self-comprehension. It would appear that all intuitions, representations or deductions of ‘true communism’, in which the state has withered away,

221 222

Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 294–6. Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 296–7.

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merely represent the moment of political theology within Marxism as a whole. In almost every case, movements dedicated to this theology have reinforced and often reproduced the bureaucratic logic of the state. This is indeed a problem to be overcome. This said, to pursue this line of thought further would take this discussion far beyond the scope of a book on Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Nevertheless, it can be surmised from the above that if we wish to establish a better, more liberated socialism than that which was established by the Russian Revolution, a richer and more developed praxis will be required. Perhaps when he suggested that different forms of praxis pertained to different moments in history (in the context of his comments on Moloch and the Delphic Apollo, quoted above) Lukács indicated the possibility for this.223 Political praxis might be regarded as a necessary, albeit insufficient precondition for genuine liberation. Additionally, this points towards the need for philosophy of politics: if Marxism depends on a political theology, then philosophy might offer a vantage point from within which this problem can be grasped and resolved. 3.2 With what Should Philosophy of Praxis End? This turns the discussion to the final, philosophical critique of Lukács’s concept of praxis. In what follows, I will elaborate on the need to divest praxis from the absolute, in light of the above critique, as well as some of the conceptual consequences that flow from this divestment. Additionally, the critique of Lukács herein presupposes a higher vantage point than the one occupied by Lukács in the 1920s. If this vantage point is not supplied by a newer and more radical praxis, what then can justify it? We have begun to take stock of the answer to this question in the last part of Section 9.2. The first part of the answer is that Lukács himself produced a philosophical space from within which his philosophy of praxis might be subjected to criticism. This was outlined negatively and critically above, where the demands that Lukács made of German Idealism, of Hegel and of the Young Hegelians (namely, the demand to comprehend mediation, totality and genesis in their dialectical unity and reconciliation under the category of praxis qua the absolute), were turned against Lukács. Lukács’s concept of praxis categorically fails these demands, as has been shown, and this failure devastates these four concepts, reducing them to abstract negativity.

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Similarly, if the absolute is delinked from politics, Bloch’s suggestion that it might be discovered elsewhere (religion and art) is upheld (Bloch 2019).

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It is difficult to imagine some rearrangement of Lukács’s conceptuality that could survive severance from history. Of course, one could take a bush mechanic’s approach to the problem, by trying to fuse Lukács with this or that other theorist – say, Gramsci, Foucault or Althusser. But this is hardly likely to get us anywhere. And at any rate, this would not only violate the demand for immanent reconstruction and critique that is so vital to Lukács’s method, but it is hard to see how it would fare any better severed from history. Rather, it is my conviction that Lukács can only enter into social-theoretical, political and philosophical dialogue with our present if his philosophy is shown to give rise to insights that grasp the absolute, and in so doing, transcend their historical immediacy. Of course, there is no philosophy outside of history. Still, Hegelian philosophy does claim to appear after history, or more accurately, as the logical overcoming of viewpoints which locate their principle within past history. Thus, Hegel’s absolute consists in a return to the present. I will argue that only this may preserve the terms mediation, totality, genesis and praxis and only in this manner, may Lukács take up his place in the pantheon of philosophy and speak to the concerns of the present without anachronism. As has been stated, the failure of Lukács’s philosophy can be read as productive insofar as it affords us an opportunity to subject it to a dialectical critique. We have also argued that Lukács’s philosophy of praxis possesses philosophy in itself and that given this, it already possesses the determinants of philosophy in and for itself. Yet, one final stage must be traversed: that of philosophy for itself. This is to say, Lukács’s philosophy must explore the consequences of its isolation from praxis. Perhaps Adorno is the theorist whose work most resembles this standpoint, that of philosophy in self-aware estrangement from praxis. Discussing briefly the potential for a dialogue between his philosophy and a Hegelianised Lukácsian position is warranted, not only due to Adorno’s debt to Lukács, but because his philosophy – as noted before, in the context of Timothy Hall’s work – is one of the most persuasive and attractive alternatives to Lukács’s. In his essay ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis’, Adorno outlines his clearest critique of any attempt to link philosophy or theory with praxis. While this is not directed against Lukács himself, but rather, against radicals associated with the New Left, Maoism, Trotskyism and other 1968 currents, it clearly bears upon problems that Lukács encounters. Chiefly, Adorno warns against an impatient or overblown concept of praxis and against transforming praxis into an overarching goal. He argues that in a world devoid of genuine praxis, such an enterprise can only result in the fetishism of practice. In his argument, such impatient or fetishistic praxis too easily degenerates into a ‘busyness’ or ‘actionism’ which has no true object except for itself. Actionism subordinates theory

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to pragmatism and conceals its affinity for authoritarian and reified thought under a moralising cover. Genuine praxis is the creation of a concrete universality that reconciles the individual with the collective via radical democracy. Impatient or actionistic praxis, on the other hand, appears to sublate the individual while in actuality it enshrines the latter in an ascetic, dogmatic, moralising or authoritarian form. Praxis, having thus become a fetish, forms a barrier to its own goal; whoever poses emancipation in terms of a hostility to theory as such and in the form of an orientation towards practice at all costs, reveals their unfreedom as much as the detached and indifferent observer. Clearly, with these comments (and the many extending upon them) Adorno had in mind student radicals of the 1960s. The critique is harsh but largely well founded. This, however, is not particularly relevant to Lukács’s philosophy of praxis which was founded on a rejection of such a moralising and sectarian immediate unity between theory and practice. What makes Adorno’s critique of praxis relevant, however, is that he did not wish to outline a superior form of practice or praxis; his alternative is theory that maintains itself in knowing estrangement from praxis. It might be argued that this strays dangerously close to a theory that withdraws into itself.224 Equally, it may be taken to indicate an unconscious dependence on praxis. After all, what trouble should a philosophy that is confident in its own independent foundation encounter, in analysing and engaging in dialogue with a deficient and authoritarian concept of praxis. Despite these reservations, aspects of his characterisation of the culture and consequences of the theoretical primacy of praxis are perceptive. In fact, to assert the primacy of praxis (either in theory or practice) in the absence of real praxis is, in reality, to hypostatise the divorce between theory and practice under the cover of an abstract and ultimately idealist notion of praxis. This compromises the non identity upon which praxis must be founded (and upon which Lukács founded his philosophy). Indeed, as has been shown, theory and practice, in relative separation from each other have an independent role to play; to leap over this or ignore it is dangerous. Hence, Adorno’s critique of ‘actionism’ is in reality a critique of a radical pragmatism which hides its conservatism under the concept of praxis and which in so doing blocks the mutual

224

Feenberg also notices the occasionally ridiculous nature of Adorno’s theory as estranged from praxis: for instance, his critique of Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1956 discussion of the possibility for a new communist manifesto is quite incisive (see Feenberg 2014, pp. 168– 71).

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interaction of theory and practice.225 In concluding his essay, Adorno suggests an alternative approach to praxis, which refuses to reify the term: ‘Just as the division of subject and object cannot be revoked immediately by a decree of thought, so too an immediate unity of theory and praxis is hardly possible: it would imitate the false identity of subject and object and would perpetuate the principle of domination that posits identity and that a true praxis must oppose’.226 Essentially, in order to identify and engage with any emergent new praxis, theory must refuse to presume or presuppose its comprehension of or identity with praxis. In this manner, what is new and non identical in praxis might be encountered. This is an argument for both philosophy and for praxis. Genuine praxis depends on a true comprehension of its object; it must respect the ‘primacy of the object’, to borrow Adorno’s turn of phrase. This is achieved not by the subject adapting itself to the object as per the contemplative stance, but by a knowledge of the social totality which bestows meaning upon the object. This kind of knowledge can only be won through theory. As an aside, Adorno suggests that this might be the reason why Marx never elaborated on the concept of praxis that was the foundation for his 1840s viewpoint and that he declared in his famous ‘Eleventh Thesis’ on Feuerbach. Instead, Marx turned to political economy. This aside, Adorno writes: ‘Praxis without theory, lagging behind the most advanced state of cognition, cannot but fail, and praxis, in keeping with its own concept, would like to succeed. False praxis is no praxis’.227 From this it can be seen that in Adorno’s view, practice and theory must be regarded as neither immediately identified (as in the fetishisation of praxis) nor as absolutely different. For theory to engage with a practice that is capable of elevating both to the totalising comprehension of praxis, both sides are required to learn and to modify themselves. This is, after all, the dialectic that Lukács perceives in Leninism. To be reproduced, it will necessarily be reproduced in a radically different and updated form. To limit ourselves to the philosophical recollection of Lenin’s praxis would be, in fact, to fall short of that praxis and to reify it: ‘The relationship between theory and practice, after both have once distanced themselves from each other, is that of qualitative reversal, not transition, and surely not subordination. They stand in a polar relationship. The theory that is not conceived as an instruction for its realization should have the most hope for 225 226 227

In making this critique, Adorno quite cuttingly captures the asceticism and hypocrisy discussed above, associated with a sectarian-utopian articulation of the philosophy of praxis. Adorno 1998a, p. 265. Adorno 1998a, p. 265.

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realization …’228 In this conception, ‘[d]espite all of its unfreedom, theory is the guarantor of freedom in the midst of unfreedom’.229 It may well be said that this strays too far into the framework of a neoKantian or tragic worldview. Such a worldview inadvertently gives rise to its opposite; namely, the kind of practical messianic utopianism which Lukács fought in vain to overcome and which Adorno is correct to disdain. Moreover, in maintaining both a relative separation between theory and praxis and a concept of reification that is in large part indebted to Lukács (albeit it significantly developed and ontologised), this raises questions about Adorno’s philosophical project in toto – well outside the scope of this work. Yet, Adorno does give the occasional hint as to the answer. For example, while he does not typically propose to borrow from messianism or millenarianism in order to aestheticise genesis, like Benjamin, he is not above the latter’s baroque melancholia or expressing utopian, redemptive and salvific hopes. The final aphorism in Minima Moralia is an example: At the end. – The only philosophy which would still be accountable in the face of despair, would be the attempt to consider all things, as they would be portrayed from the standpoint of redemption. Cognition has no other light than that which shines from redemption out upon the world; all else exhausts itself in post-construction and remains a piece of technics. Perspectives must be produced which set the world beside itself, alienated from itself, revealing its cracks and fissures, as needy and distorted as it will one day lay there in the messianic light. To win such perspectives without caprice or violence, wholly by the feel for objects, this alone is what thinking is all about. It is the simplest of all things, because the condition irrefutably calls for such cognitions, indeed because completed negativity, once it comes fully into view, shoots [zusammenschiesst] into the mirror-writing of its opposite. But it is also that which is totally impossible, because it presupposes a standpoint at a remove, were it even the tiniest bit, from the bane [Bannkreis] of the existent; meanwhile every possible cognition must not only be wrested from that which is, in order to be binding, but for that very reason is stricken with the same distortedness and neediness which it intends to escape. The more passionately thought seals itself off from its conditional being for the sake of what is unconditional, the more unconsciously, and thereby catastrophically, it

228 229

Adorno 1998a, p. 277. Adorno 1998a, §. 2.

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falls into the world. It must comprehend even its own impossibility for the sake of possibility. In relation to the demand thereby imposed on it, the question concerning the reality or non-reality of redemption is however almost inconsequential.230 Here, Adorno approaches a nihilistic realisation that the fallenness of the world compromises even our ability to think, and that in light of this, only the ‘standpoint of redemption’ can shine a light on all things. And yet, as completed negativity, Adorno suggests that this viewpoint is impossible because it presupposes a standpoint at a remove. This represents a curious alternative to Benjamin’s aestheticisation of genesis under the category of messianic time. Genesis – as the unity of history as passed and history as it unfolds, grasped according to its immanent, conceptual logic – is a hard-won intellectual achievement within the framework of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, especially given the antinomies of history that we discussed above. Given this, and as the term immediately prior to praxis, it may also be said to be more susceptible to mythologisation than totality. So, for Adorno to propose a messianic concept of totality, especially given that he does so knowingly and in light of its impossibility, does not necessarily entail the same extent of irrationalism that Benjamin’s view does. Rather, insofar as it represents a modest approach to theory, it would appear that Adorno risks straying into the kind of partial rationalism, and consequently, more moderate relativism that Lukács noticed in Simmel, for example. This potentially bears consequences; at the least, it would seem to return philosophy to a basically neo-Kantian partial rationalism, or a constant mediation of antinomies. Yet, in such a situation, the absolute will still exercise a power over thought, precisely because, as Lukács saw, it ‘… represents the highest principle of thought attainable in an undialectical universe …’231 Yet, Adorno might reply that the standpoint of redemption is to be located precisely and impossibly in this absolute that vanishes as soon as it is known, and which empowers thinking insofar as it is not. As he wrote, perhaps autobiographically: ‘A man who is sorrowful and yet unbowed resembles the crinkled little old lady gathering wood, who meets the Good Lord without recognizing Him, and is blessed with bounty, because she helped him’.232 Lukács, read at his most radical, might be regarded as inhabiting the standpoint of philosophy in itself. On the other hand, presuming that he permits us 230 231 232

Adorno 2005, §. 153. Lukács 1967a, pp. 187–8. Adorno 2005, §. 52.

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to temporarily categorise his stance within a framework with which he disagrees, Adorno could be said to represent the antithesis: philosophy for itself. In both cases, I presuppose an essentially Hegelian definition of philosophy. I do concede that while this does not impose an external standard on Lukács, it does where Adorno is concerned. His attitude towards Hegel was complicated and far from positive. Nevertheless, as this work is dedicated to Lukács, we will assume that license is granted. By developing towards philosophy in itself, Lukács has entered the shape of philosophy, but has done so unconsciously. Thus, while the absolute powers his most profound insights, it does so unconsciously and it risks relapsing – if taken to its logical limit and extracted from history – into a nihilistic political theology. In the latter case, of philosophy for itself, Adorno accepts both his role as a philosopher and the limits imposed upon philosophy by the absence of praxis. There is a higher degree of subjective reconciliation. Yet, if philosophy in itself possesses its principle, but unconsciously, then surely philosophy for itself does not possess its principle, but merely aspires to it. This is surely in part what gives Adorno’s philosophy its note of lamentation. Indeed, by conceding to the need for a ‘standpoint of redemption’, Adorno would appear to knowingly establish a transcendental viewpoint whereby things can be understood. It is hard to see how this differs from more garden-variety utopianism or transcendentalism in which every false absolute bears the mark of the contemplative stance or the scent of a hypostatised utopia. Adorno’s final essay, which ranks among the most eloquent, gentle and warm examples of the format, also belies something of his redemptive longing, yet does so in a manner that helps to resolve our question. Contrasting critical theory with the approach favoured by administrators and ‘actionists’, Adorno writes: By contrast the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in … The utopian moment in thinking is stronger the less it – this too is a form of relapse – objectifies itself into a utopia and hence sabotages its realization. Open thinking points beyond itself. For its part a comportment, a form of praxis, it is more akin to transformative praxis than a comportment that is compliant for the sake of praxis. Prior to all particular content, thinking is actually the force of resistance, from which it has been alienated only with great effort. Such an emphatic concept of thinking admittedly is not secured, not by the existing conditions, nor by ends yet to be achieved, not by any kind of battalions. Whatever has once been thought can be suppressed, forgotten, can van-

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ish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives. For thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and powerless thought. Whoever thinks is not enraged in all his critique: thinking has sublimated the rage. Because the thinking person does not need to inflict rage upon himself, he does not wish to inflict it on others. The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity. The universal tendency of oppression is opposed to thought as such. Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned.233 There is little trace of messianism – let alone the resentment that it almost always conceals – in these lines. Admittedly, Adorno’s sentiments express a soft and quiet faith in redemption. This seems justified by his suggestion that the power of thought rests in its universality; for what else could guarantee that a thought will necessarily be encountered more than once, by different people, with no connection. While Adorno’s suggestion that critical thinking always points beyond itself and that it represents a form of praxis could be read as implying a bad infinity of endless quantitative progress, one feels that the comment bears a rather different sense. Indeed, by arguing that critical thought resists compliance for the sake of praxis, sublimates rage and may reach (particular) happiness through the universal unhappiness, Adorno expresses the personal and subjective side of reconciliation necessary for the practice of philosophy. We have already suggested the consequences that a failure to achieve such reconciliation might entail for philosophy of praxis. Indeed, Rose, as we have seen, accused Benjamin of an inability to confront death and an inability to mourn. I have accused Lukács of the same. With what spiritual strength can we be expected to better their efforts, especially given the extremity of their experience? Here, Adorno begins to give us an answer. Having sublimated violence, refused to sacrifice criticism and by having grasped the universality of our particular thoughts (including while we acknowledge the necessity of death and the inherent precariousness of critical thought), we can begin to be at home with our power of negativity. Failing this, negativity too easily terrifies us into denying, representing or estranging it, all of which cause it to return, pathologically strengthened.

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Adorno 1998b, pp. 292–3.

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Of course, this is hardly a conclusive or comprehensive account of Adorno who surely ranks equal to or greater than Lukács, with regards to his contribution to knowledge. Far more could be said, for example, with regards to their theories of reification. Yet the point has not been to compare Lukácsian and Adornian philosophy. Rather, the point is as it has always been: to develop a higher standpoint from within Lukács’s philosophy of praxis that may preserve it in its determinate negation. If Adorno represents philosophy for itself, then by demonstrating to Lukács – that theorist of practice – what the practice of philosophy looks like and what kind of self-renunciation it entails, Adorno may help Lukács reappropriate what is already his unconscious possession. This is to say, all Lukács must do to reach the standpoint of philosophy is to grasp what he possesses unconsciously, in the position of philosophy in itself, and to make it his. Given this, one final standpoint remains to be suggested: Hegel’s own standpoint, that is, philosophy in and for itself. To detail fully this standpoint, in which philosophy comprehends itself as substance rendered spirit and in which philosophy has returned from history to itself, is clearly impossible in a work such as this. Nevertheless, an outline will be given. It is proposed that such a standpoint is capable of maintaining the ontological openness demanded by Lukács and Adorno, as well as the ethical commitment which philosophy of praxis tries and fails to actualise. While philosophy appears after history (as Hegel outlines in the final section of The Phenomenology of Spirit or in the preface to the Philosophy of Right), it is neither severed from history nor unconscious of its distance. Philosophy, in Hegel, is the meaning of history grasped conceptually. As he famously wrote: What lies between reason as self-conscious spirit and reason as present actuality, what separates the former from the latter and prevents it from finding satisfaction in it, is the fetter of some abstraction or other which has not been liberated into [the form of] the concept. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to delight in the present – this rational insight is the reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants to those who have received the inner call to comprehend, to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, and at the same time to stand with their subjective freedom not in a particular situation, but in what has being in and for itself. This is also what constitutes the more concrete sense of what was described above in more abstract terms as the unity of form and content. For form in its most concrete significance is reason as conceptual cognition, and content is reason

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as the substantial essence of both ethical and natural actuality; the conscious identity of the two is the philosophical Idea …234 With these lines, Hegel suggests that philosophy – by virtue of its ability to liberate abstractions and render them conceptual – might encounter reconciliation and therefore, the absolute, in the present. This represents the preservation of the particularity and subjectivity of the philosopher in the face of what is substantial and universal. This is effected not by the denial of the subject, but by the full exploration of subjectivity, in its universal determinants. This viewpoint does not project the reconciliation between subject and object into a distant future, but proclaims that it may be known now. The upshot of this is that the present is already and always witness to reconciliation, as well as estrangement. If entry to this standpoint is made possible by mourning, then surely most of this labour of the negative is now complete. We have already said our farewell to the specific category with which Lukács represented the absolute, while also exposing those aspects of history and his subjectivity that exercised an unconscious power over his mind. Now, then, mediation, totality, genesis and the absolute may be grasped undivided between form and content, but rather, as rational knowledge whose foundation exists objectively in the world and subjectively in the figure of the philosopher. Lukács, of course, faulted Hegel for placing philosophy beyond history. Yet, he had his reasons. As Hegel wrote: A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm.235 This has been read as conservative. Yet it has been shown that by burdening praxis with the absolute, Lukács is trapped precisely in the sense of history he sought to overcome; history as an eternal recurrence of the self-same. So, Lukács’s philosophy, even while it issued instructions to the world, found itself

234 235

Hegel 1991a, pp. 22–3. Hegel 1991a, pp. 22–3.

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after history, in the grey of dusk. Lukács’s philosophy of praxis simply failed to recognise its own distance from history. By comprehending this fate, it is at least possible to think the situation; if Heraclitus’s river cannot be dammed or redirected, at least it might be comprehended. This implies the ‘inwardising recollection’ of history of which Hegel spoke in the last pages of the Phenomenology.236 Instead of the involuntary forgetting that must take place to preserve all of the degraded forms of philosophy of praxis, Hegelian inwardising recollection preserves the experience of history both in light of its having come to an end (in the present) and in light of its movement towards the absolute. Because past history is acknowledged as a realm of unfreedom, over which we can exercise no control but towards which we can chose our comportment, it no longer threatens to return, pathologically. This is, as Hegel argues, conceptually grasped history – or, the maintenance of the unity of genesis and logic by philosophy. It is both the work of mourning for a lost history, littered with cruelty and dashed hopes (and therefore, the Golgotha of spirit) and the actuality and truth of history preserved, alive, as it is for us. The Hegelian, speculative philosopher has no particular duty to find his world agreeable or to justify its irrationalism. Upon this basis, a great deal of radicalism – and a more thoroughgoing radicalism – may be built. Yet, it is far more conservative and dangerous to elevate a finite category to the status of the infinite, as Lukács did with praxis. In addition to producing a far more profound barrier to praxis than philosophy, this approach makes of it an idol before which we bow. If a dead idea is promoted so, is it any surprise if this reveals something deathly about the philosophy that has promoted it? In place of this, out of mourning and inwardising recollection, as Hegel famously suggests, quoting Goethe, emerges the true infinite.237 The Hegelian philosopher thus meets the world in order to contribute to the realisation of reason and freedom within it. As a phenomenology of praxis, Lukács’s philosophy itself pushes in this direction. But Lukács’s effort can only be saved and completed by its admission that it has allowed reification to enter its core. If this occurs, it might represent an opening, in thought, within the broad tradition of historical materialism in which the subject learns to think substance without becoming its instrument by imposing a particular truth on the universal. Once more, nothing about this solution implies passivity or conservatism. Quite the contrary; by recognising

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Hegel 2018, §. 808. Hegel 2018, §. 808.

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that all subjectively radical oughts conceal a hypostatisation of the is, a genuine road towards understanding the immanent development of the present is identified. By confronting the negative and making it ours – and importantly, by applying it consistently, including on the level of personal and psychological reflection – we exorcise the resentments and deformities that, in time, become monsters which terrorise us into authoritarianism, dogmatism or nihilism. Clearly, this solution raises as many questions as it answers. Some of these suggest directions for further research which will be outlined in the conclusion to follow. Finally, then, given the above critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, it would appear that Gillian Rose’s objection to Lukács (that he reduces Marxism to method and relies on a messianic proletariat) is upheld after all. Yet, Rose’s argument, presented in the final section of Hegel Contra Sociology, concerns Marxism as a whole. It is beyond the scope of this work to assess her claims with reference to such a vast theoretical object and culture. Yet, as Lukács’s philosophy of praxis is a branch of Marxism, her judgments apply to it and are vindicated by this critique of Lukács. This is especially true insofar as Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, despite its best intentions, resorts to something like a Fichtean position. After all, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis was a failed attempt to grasp the absolute. As Rose writes: Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought. If we cannot think the absolute this means that it is therefore not our thought in the sense of not realised. The absolute is the comprehensive thinking which transcends the dichotomies between concept and intuition, theoretical and practical reason. It cannot be thought (realised) because these dichotomies and their determination are not transcended. Once we realise this we can think the absolute by acknowledging the element of Sollen in such a thinking, by acknowledging the subjective element, the limits on our thinking the absolute. This is to think the absolute and to fail to think it differently from Kant and Fichte’s thinking and failing to think it.238 As Rose concludes, these insights, applied to Marxism, might yield the project of a critical Marxism – and generate a Reformation, in the full religious connotation of the term. Elsewhere, particularly in Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose presents a sublimely moving and sophisticated reflection on what she

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Rose 2009, p. 218.

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names the ‘broken middle’. That is, she presents us with a model for reconciliation that envisions neither flat identity with the other (which results in the nihilistic abolition of difference) nor ceaseless inessential movement, nor a tragically Kantian eternalisation of the antinomies. Given her radicalism and the extent to which her work is immersed in political philosophy, I suggest Rose as the contemporary philosopher who speaks most clearly to the concerns raised by my critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. Finally, I wish to make four reflections that I believe flow from the method of criticism I have used to reconstruct and overcome Lukács. Firstly, while it might be assumed, given I have criticised Lukács for his theology, that the alternative I propose has no truck with those sublimely beautiful redemptive ideas expressed in religion, both secular and theistic. This is not so. To the contrary, speculative philosophy is the most devoted of any philosophy to the truth of religion. For this reason, speculative philosophy takes the biblical injunction against false idols and graven images more seriously than any religion, believing that any representation of the divine is idolatry. Idolatry does not sin by elevating a false one. Idolatry sins because it denies the divinity of man and forgets that God may know himself only through us. False infinites bar divine knowledge. So, the critic’s labour is not foreign to theology. The critic mourns in order to stage a resurrection. Mourning affirms the necessity of death and works through its content, assuaging the restless dead. Resurrection brings the subject of criticism to the present, atoning for sins and allowing them to live, for us. If the critic succeeds in this, we may say, with reference to the subject of criticism: ‘So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’.239 Yet, criticism which makes of its subject a sacred shrine or which is overanxious that the dead stay dead fails to adhere to its concept. Instead, criticism must follow its principle as far as it can go, presupposing nothing and showing no fear at the prospect of being lost amidst death in the midnight of absolute negativity. This is criticism’s wager and faith. ‘Spirit only wins its truth when it finds its feet within its absolute disruption’.240 Without this, no intellectual practice equal to mourning and to enduring the brokenness of the middle is possible. This is also how the critic should resist becoming cynical or bitter; only by facing and owning our evil can we make it good. Thus prepared, we

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Carroll and Prickett (eds.) 1997, Corinthians, 15:54. Hegel 2018, §. 32.

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may repeat a psychological maxim favoured by both Marx and the devil that appears to Ivan Karamazov: ‘Nothing human is alien to me!’241 Since the critic is human, in order for this to be true, they must hold nothing from themselves. self-reflection is demanded of the critic who aspires to the truth. Thus, a personal past and future must also be brought, under the sign of reconciliation, into a dynamised present, which is met with no trace of resentment around the mouth. Not an end in itself, this prepares us to encounter the other and be at home with them; for every other to us is a beyond and an infinite that we know only through our finitude. Love does not demand identity or flee from contradiction. Concrete love is our connection to the universal and absolute. It makes possible a third reflection, with which tragic worldviews are overcome: ‘To love God is to feel one’s self in the all of life, with no restrictions’.242 With this speculative dawn comes the happy realisation that for those who are wise and who raise others to goodness and life, there is no final death because we will be carried and cared for by the living even once we have returned to the infinite. These reflections express the essence of what I have sought to do for Georg Lukács. No longer horrified by the infinite, we may cross Heraclitus’s river without stopping to check if it is flowing or not. Instead, we may visit him at his house: The story is told of something Heraclitus said to some strangers who wanted to come visit him. Having arrived, they saw him warming himself at a stove. Surprised, they stood there in consternation – above all because he encouraged them, the astounded ones, and called to them to come in, with the words, ‘For here too the gods are present’.243 241 242 243

Marx 2019, Dostoyevsky 2003. Hegel 1971, p. 247. Aristotle 1992, p. 18.

Conclusion – Nihilism or the Virtuous Republic Spirit is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case when we say of something that it is nothing or that it is false, and then, being done with it, go off on our own way to something else. No, spirit is this power only when it looks the negative in the face and lingers with it. This lingering is the magical power that converts it into being. – This power is the same as what in the preceding was called the subject … G.W.F. Hegel1

∵ When I was in Rome recently, my partner Viktoria shared a story from the news with me. It was about a midranking government official whose young daughter had died in the influenza epidemic of the early 1920s. This civil servant was so in love with his daughter that he employed a renowned embalmer to preserve her body. The work was so skilled that notwithstanding a terrifying aura of the uncanny, the girl still looks alive today. In the photograph I saw, her black hair appeared to be slicked onto her forehead by sweat. It is even reported that optical illusions cause those who view her to sometimes see her eyes blink. In addition to this being utterly sinister, her father’s choice to preserve her struck me as a total annihilation of their love. A rationalist who, strictly speaking, regards death as transcendental, unknowable and therefore meaningless, sees only the subjective horror in this. However, from the speculative standpoint of redemption and resurrection, one may grasp the universal horror of this utter failure to mourn. Death properly faced and mourned is a bridge to the infinite. It is the path to life. This applies to the dead as well as the living; after all, the death of a loved one is always a death for us. It is always a particular death. In dying, one should hope, then, that death bears a meaning that resonates with one’s life. I don’t know, but I imagine that the poor child loved her father, who in turn must have been utterly doting. In working through death, we should find the strength to affirm the particularity of what is lost as it existed for us. In so doing, we may return to

1 Hegel 2018, §. 32.

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life, strengthened. This is as much immortality as any of us receive. In fact, it is quite a lot. Any more than this would threaten life. So, in embalming her, that civil servant annihilated the life of his daughter, his love for her and her love for him. He condemned her memory to infinite immaculate death, both refusing to give her departed soul his love and steadfastly refusing to accept hers, even if it was just a memory. If this were raised to the level of world history, it would be to place a corpse on the throne. Was it something like this that Heraclitus had in mind, when he said that the ‘… living, though they yearn for consummation of their fate, need rest, and in their turn leave children to fulfill their doom’?2 I have raised this example because it speaks to the intellectual situation in which Marxism sometimes finds itself. Such extreme grotesqueries are uncommon. And yet, it is not so easy to escape this kind of thing intellectually. As we have seen, Lukács sought to preserve the truth of an event. To preserve a truth outside of its moment is to embalm it. This gives death power over life. To sacralise Leninism so is to collaborate with Stalin in embalming his body. However, mourning is easier said than done. As I have argued, historical or philosophical mourning requires us to acknowledge the necessity of the death in question, both in itself and for us, and to work through the love and violence of moving on with life. So, when thinking through events that belong to the past, we must be cognisant of their lifelessness. This must be criticised if the past will deliver to us a still-living truth. This also goes for philosophers of the past. Of course, philosophical truth endures the ravages of time somewhat better than events or leaders. But still – to imagine that Lukács can be preserved unscathed is offensive to the man’s memory, not to mention to us. So, in this conclusion, I will outline what I believe to be ‘living and dead’ in Lukács, so to speak. I will then use this as a springboard from which to discuss Gillian Rose’s call for a Reformation within Marxism. It would be naïve to suggest that delinking Lukács’s concept of praxis from the absolute does not shock his system to its core, causing us to question even his most fundamental categories. Yet, there are signs of life, at least for those with the eyes for them. Ernst Bloch suggests a few. In his review of History and Class Consciousness, Bloch summarises Lukács’s critique of utopianism, especially with respect to art and nature, noting that the latter deferred a solution to the antinomies underpinning their interpretation until after the proletarian revolution. Bloch called this a ‘… peculiar agnosticism … which is only concerned with the transcendent insofar as the concrete dialectical mediation is

2 Heraclitus 2001, Fragment 86.

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ripe to manifest this concretely’.3 This is an astute observation. He then goes on to compare Lukács’s position to Calvin’s: Calvin brought the underworld to consciousness by means of the doctrine of predestination; Lukács, as a theoretician of constitutive praxis, achieves the same thing by means of a quite unique combination of innerworldly asceticism and Hegel’s pure concretional dialectic. The deepest meaning of this heroic, temporary and dialectical agnosticism, however, is undoubtedly timidity before what is hidden, a responsible attitude before what is secretive, a strict need for its limitation, for its undistracted imposition against all apparent concretion or premature abstract constriction.4 In this manner, Bloch suggests that by privileging political praxis, Lukács defers any answer to the problems of art and nature (and, later, he adds religion and metaphysics) until after the revolution. This, he suggests, undermines Lukács’s ability to grasp the polyrhythmic structure of reality and debars Lukács from deep insight into life and nature, whose ‘eccentric contents’ elude the ‘dianoetically related processes of comprehension’ that Lukács favours. He concludes his critical review, suggesting: History is much more, quite apart from all the demands of the omnia ubique, a polyrhythmic structure, and not only the social extraction of a still hidden social humanity, but also the artistic, religious, metaphysical production of the secret transcendental human being is a thinking of being, of a new deep relationship of being. Certainly these various deep relationships and their objects are not sharply delineated from one another, but rather stand in a dialectical exchange, almost ceaselessly intersecting, mixing, merging, establishing the precision of the lower stage of being again and again in the higher one. But with the restriction of homogenisation to purely social matter (which for Lukács governs, despite all the will to totality), one will adequately grasp neither life nor nature nor even those nearly always eccentric contents of the dianoetically related processes of comprehension.5

3 Bloch 2019. 4 Bloch 2019. 5 Bloch 2019.

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As I understand him, Bloch astutely peers into voids and chasms that Lukács would rather leap over. Of course, the fact that Lukács privileged political praxis is what made his philosophy so important. Nevertheless, Bloch is quite right in suggesting that this compresses time, destroying its polyrhythmic structure, while also betraying an agnostic and all-too disciplined fear of any domain in which the utopian or the metaphysical might burst forth. All of this, Lukács said, would be dealt with after the revolution. What if we deal with these concepts and tensions now, in the present? Imagine, if you will, a model of Lukács’s conceptual organisation of being, as it has been reconstructed in this work. At the greatest level of generality, logic organises the breadth of this model, taking in the entire totality of being, divided between society and nature. Central here are Lukács’s most ontological claims; namely, that capitalism depends on a formalism that reduces time to space and quality to quantity. And at the crux of this logical model is the commodity, which in turn, structures a social totality riven by class divides and divided into fractured spheres. At the apex of this model stands philosophy, as a moment of reflection on the whole. Somewhere under this stands culture, and slightly below that, the sphere of politics, in which praxis might hope to actualise itself. Of course, this whole model is simply a representation – and so, at an equally great level of generality, it must be temporalised, by genesis. Now, then, every aspect of this logical model, including those I have not mentioned, is set into motion. The whole model is dynamised. What ought to result is a fourdimensional representation. As Lukács would have it, the meaning of this entire system of concepts exists only in political praxis. The other categories of the absolute have ceased to play their role. As for objective spirit, praxis is its culmination. This completes the logic of history. As we have seen, this wager on the future was made by a subject very ill at ease with his present. Praxis was the incorporeal light shining from Lukács’s eyes that revealed messianic and salvific meaning where only harsh form and quantity once were found. Yet, there was something eerie about this light. Although fuelled by real historical events, it burned incorporeally in this corporeal man’s body. This light was his ought, emanating from the void and fuelled by profound melancholy and inexhaustible intellectual energy. Yet, this light illuminated the divine, revealing the circle of the Hegelian absolute. Lukács was incapable of understanding what he saw precisely because he was incapable of mourning for the loss of praxis as the hope of the world, and for the loss of Irma Seidler, the one-time hope of Lukács’s grey world of reified forms. As long as he laboured under the concept of praxis, Lukács never found a way to face the void from which his divine light emanated. Consequently, his light distorted everything

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it touched, casting sublime, beautiful, good, loving and meaningful objects in a grey and disenchanted aura. Praxis itself was illuminated in far too stark a relief, casting long shadows over the world from an ever-growing remove. The light of the void, if it is not mediated by the light of a particular, is the light of nihilism. What, then, if we shine a different, speculative light on the conceptual model I described above? It would reveal a new content and value for every category within Lukács’s system. Every antinomy would reopen, not in order to replace praxis with endless mediation, but in order that, as Bloch suggested, the shimmering and metaphysical question shines through everywhere, and most importantly, in the present. While effecting only a ‘small shift in the accent of the unfinished now’, Bloch suggests that such a change illuminates ‘the darkness of the lived moment’, revealing ‘the therein hidden being of reality as such’ and in so doing, it replaces Lukács’s ‘arch-responsible obstruction of transcendence’ and ‘aversion … to every hastily naming …’ In place of these forms of blindness there is revealed the ‘… rightly self-constructing metaphysics, [with which] the form of the inconstruable question appears …’ As Bloch stresses, this entails a change in both the ‘for us’ and also the ‘for-itself really disclosed secret of the We, which is the secret of the world’.6 In other words, a once dead system now teams with life. We need only list a few concepts to grasp the impact. Praxis, for example, divested of the absolute may live and breathe in its many domains. This would restore the importance and specificity of varieties of praxis that are less than everything, but which are still something. Goodness, truth and meaning would be reclaimed from an estranged future and past, and restored to the present. This would make it possible to discover meaning in every part of culture, religion, philosophy, politics, and interpersonal life – and so on. This is not to idealise the present; Lukács’s time was a violent one in which many virtues were strangled and extinguished. And even at the best of times, all things exist to a greater or lesser extent alongside their opposites. Rather, the point is that by cultivating the ability to grasp that the true and the good are only ever found in the present, philosophy is capable of generating far more radical insight than the most determined, bleakly messianic nihilism. Thus, the elevation of Lukács’s standpoint to the self knowing absolute opens up a rich totality of concepts in many more domains than he imagined. All of the eschatological elements of his philosophy I assembled above, as I was outlining the final historical critique, may now be rediscovered in the present. Hav-

6 Bloch 2019.

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ing returned from its inwardising recollection, as Hegel said, the spirit knowing itself as spirit finds that, from its chalice, infinity foams forth.7 Of course, nihilism may return. If one desires a love that admits no ambivalence, in which the other is a saint and untainted by evil, then disappointment might result. Love does not grow well in abstract souls. Still, the realisation that within such fantasies there dwells a resentment, a bitterness and a fear is a powerful one. Having pushed Lukács’s terms to their limit, we have extracted a confession of evil; namely, that his nihilistic side desires absolute identity. Sincere confessions are moving and not easily rescinded. The change in perspective from praxis to the absolute also effects a radical transformation in the way we grasp time. Simmel, to whom Lukács was never sufficiently kind, grasped this: As long as past, present, and future are separated with conceptual precision, time is unreal, because only the temporally unextended (i.e., the atemporal present) moment is real. But life is the unique mode of existence for whose actuality this separation does not hold; the three tenses in their logical separateness are applicable to it only through subsequent analysis, following the mechanistic model. Time is real only for life alone … This mode of existence does not restrict its reality to the present moment, thereby pushing past and future into the realm of the unreal. Instead, its unique continuity is sustained outside of this separation – its past actually exists into its present, and its present actually exists out into its future. This mode of existence is what we call life.8 Without returning to a rich and living present, Lukács’s philosophy cannot overcome the irrational time of Benjamin or of theology proper. With the standpoint of the absolute on the other hand, the present may be freed from the domination of abstract time, allowing quality and newness to flow again. So, Lukács’s viewpoint approaches what Bloch referred to as polyrhythmic time. This is to say, instead of demanding that conceptuality flow in only one direction, a polyrhythmic approach to historical time regards the movement of a complex social-historical totality like a piece of music. One part comes to the fore now and another part speeds up. A third part recedes into the background while a fourth soars over the age. Nothing in this precludes crescendos or tranquil passages; less still does it outlaw dissonance or atonality, without which sweetness and resolution are impossible. After all, the philosopher is not the band leader of history. Still, such a view can only enliven and enrich the sense of 7 Hegel 2018, §. 808. 8 Simmel 2010, p. 8.

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history with what might be called the ‘simultaneity of the concept’. Instead of forcing time to pass through one concept, now time may live and breathe; its conceptuality no longer need be compressed or separated, but may pulsate in harmony or dissonance. At any rate, these comments are primarily suggestive. What does all of this entail for historical materialism? Some points, primarily political ones, were noted above. Admittedly, these revisions cut quite deep. Yet, this was necessary. From the critique of Lukács’s philosophy as a political theology, it follows that the Leninist concepts of the primacy of politics, the standpoint of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the proletariat must be demoted. I don’t mean by this that class struggle has no role to play, and less still do I wish to propose some new totalising subject-object of history. Nor do I wish to downplay the importance of politics. After all, if the social totality is to be transformed – as indeed it should be in order to accelerate the process of dereification – this requires a universal political project. There is no candidate for this task other than socialism, notwithstanding its limits and aporias. To imagine that socialism can have an impact without class struggle is naïve. Yet, what I propose is to deabsolutise the concepts of labour and the resultant standpoint of the proletariat. They should play their role in civil society, as principles upon which to organise and democratise industry, and suitably mediated, as a basis – but not an exclusive basis – for the socialist political project. Beyond this, the abstract opposition between reform and revolution should also be bridged. In historical circumstances that produce revolution, it becomes an ethical duty to fight. In these cases, the temporality of history does culminate in an augenblick. Yet we should not wish that this be so lightly, for fear that fantasies about redemptive violence might creep back in. Ultimately, however, the problem with the principle of revolution is that to project the advent of goodness, truth or even the superman onto a predicted revolutionary event impoverishes the present. Indeed, this type of thing is by no means the domain of the left; accelerationism today represents such a nihilism. It is totally immaterial whether the annihilation of humanity by a divinely powerful system of computerised quantitative form manifests as a vengeful destruction, emotionless efficiency or as a rapture that lifts us up toward eternal love. All of these fantasies are a theological projection of a present day sickness of the soul into the future. Instead of nihilism, a Marxian speculative philosophy ought to stand for the creation of a virtuous republic, not in one fell swoop, but as the progressive building up of habitable institutions populated by reflective people. This is to say, we should fight for a culture and a civilisation that cultivates the ability to mediate the brokenness of the middle, as Rose puts it. As she explains in Mourning Becomes the Law, the Jewish tradition gives us an example of this

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type of practice, which has four moments.9 Firstly, between two antinomies, the truth of either side must be grasped and embraced, in concrete interrelation. For example, in the sphere of politics, both force and consent must be navigated. In the sphere of political meaning, the moments of theology and of formal expansion of norms must be traversed. To do this, however, each side must be allowed to express itself absolutely in its time, even to the exclusion of the other. Yet, in order to prevent this breaking apart or becoming violent, the further moments of philosophical and historical reflection must be added. Thus, by instituting a culture of knowing doing and by cultivating the ability among political actors to reflect on the constitutive antagonisms of politics, we can cultivate virtue and social autonomy. In short, those who do politics must know politics, as rationally – and therefore, as speculatively – as possible. This is not an argument for the rule of philosopher kings. Rather, it is an argument for the cultivation of philosophical knowledge in society as a whole, in all of its determinate spheres and aspects. I admit that this proposal possesses a utopian character. However, it is possible to suggest an essential historical and ontological ground. This is not, as in determinist teleology of revolution, ageing capitalism. This implies history as a descent culminating in a final revolution. Rather, it seems to me that the reign of reification is always approaching the actualisation of its concept. When he wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel declared that with the French Revolution, the new concept – the product of a long and unconscious historical development – had burst on the scene, fully formed but simple in appearance and in need of philosophical elaboration.10 Well, he may have been right. But the development of this concept according to itself has taken longer than he imagined. As an aside, I would suggest this as the reason for both the collapse of the Hegelian system and its contemporary renaissance. So, today, I suggest that the development of the concept according to itself might make it possible for the world to become more philosophical. Specifically, by generalising, magnifying and intensifying the crises and traumas of subjective experience, capitalism makes available extreme conceptual experiences to vast numbers of people that were hitherto the domain of an elite. For example, Lukács was in his day part of a minute avant garde. Today, millions might experience similar problems and torments. They will also find at hand far richer intellectual resources. Indeed, this point may better be explained with Nietzsche. His overwhelming virtue was his willingness and ability to look more deeply into himself and to make more out of his almost 9 10

Rose 1996, Ch. 4. I make no attempt to reproduce the complexity of Rose’s analysis, which also depends on a detailed knowledge of the Jewish tradition. Hegel 2018, §. 13.

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endless personal suffering than any other philosopher of his age. In so doing, he not only created a space for psychology, but produced a mythological doctrine, the eternal return, that closely approaches Hegel’s absolute. Yet while Nietzsche inaugurated the era of philosophical psychology (that is, psychoanalysis), we are now well and truly in the thick of it. It is not hard to see how the more intense isolation and fragmentation that accompanies neoliberalism and reification will subject more people to abysses similar to those that Nietzsche stared into. Greater numbers will find themselves confronted by death and will look it in the face. If such a moment is a propaedeutic to philosophy – as I have argued – the deepening and intensification of subjective experience may make this more common.11 Ultimately, if we do find ourselves in a world more capable of and in need of philosophy, this may power the Reformation of Marxism I have discussed. So, finally, I will outline my understanding of what this consists in, and why it is necessary. To put it starkly, every movement within Marxism, either practical or intellectual, has failed. Marxism is a house divided into a thousand minute currents and subcurrents. A house so divided cannot stand. Constant debates and an endless chatter of interpretation masks an almost complete lack of intellectual innovation. No movement has won meaningful or lasting success and indeed, most of the socialist countries of the past were not exactly desirable places to live. Marxism, as a movement, is deeply sick. I believe that this is partly due to the fact that the political theology in Lukács afflicts Marxism as a whole, although obviously, in determinate ways. So, there exists a constitutive conceptual tension and crisis within Marxism, in desperate need of a solution. Yet, to produce a solution, it is necessary to find a standpoint that is both within and outside of Marxism, from which it is possible to grasp the truth of Marxism that is hidden to itself. I believe that the critique of Lukács elaborated here serves as a model for such a task. Rose makes an argument that expands on mine concerning political theology. She writes: … Marxism is especially susceptible to re-formation. For revolutionary consciousness is subjective consciousness, just as natural consciousness is, that is, it is a determination or re-presentation of substance, ethical 11

The opposed, objective side of the question also warrants a mention. The twentieth century witnessed the absolutisation of the logic of the state (in the form of socialism/state capitalism) and the absolutisation of the logic of the market (in the form of neo-liberalism). Perhaps it was necessary for these pure moments to appear in absolute externality to each other, in order that the problem of politics be posed clearly.

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life, actuality, in the form of an abstract consciousness. An abstract consciousness is one which knows that it is not united with ethical life. It is determined by abstract law to know itself as formally free, identical and empty. It is only such an abstract consciousness which can be potentially revolutionary, which can conceive the ambition to acquire a universal content or determination which is not that of the bourgeois property law which bestowed universality and subjectivity on it in the first place.12 She is quite right to suggest that Marxism possesses an abstract consciousness; this is a corollary of the devaluation of the present in the name of an estranged, transcendental future. Indeed, I am aware of no variety of Marxist thought that does not find itself stranded on the reefs between past, present and future. To be sure, some intellectuals are more alive to this question. Others work on problems that complement this one. Yet, I believe that Marxism possesses its concept outside of itself and that it elevates one of a number of finite categories (depending on the variety of Marxism) to the status of the infinite. This forms a barrier to mourning for the failure of the left project. Rose, once more: ‘The very notion of Marxism, that is, that Marx’s ideas are not realized, implies that Marxism is a culture, the very thing of which it has no idea’.13 Intellectually, then, I submit that my critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis both vindicates Rose and recommends that we carry forward her project of a Hegelian reformation of Marxism. This is no ‘return’ to Hegel staged purely in order to abscond with a formal methodology. Rather, I believe that it is necessary to systematically turn Marx on his head and to sort between what is speculative and what is crudely idealist (materialist) in his work. That this would be of benefit to Hegelian thought also seems obvious. At any rate, as Hegel wrote: ‘The philosophy of Kant and Fichte sets up the ought as the highest point of the resolution of the contradictions of Reason; but the truth is that the ought is only the standpoint which clings to finitude and thus to contradiction’.14 What would it mean for Marxism to acknowledge the element of ought in its thinking? In the first place, it would entail a confession to the persistence of political theology; the moment of ought writ large. It would mean a refusal to entertain any notion of communism as an afterworld while also resisting the opposed moralism, which demands the sacrifice of all genesis and telos in the name of endless particularism or a postmodern

12 13 14

Rose 2009, p. 234. Rose 2009, p. 234. Hegel 1991c, p. 136.

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hostility towards universality. To go deeper, however, would require a subjective work of mourning – mourning for a lost century. Mourning for the death – acknowledged or not – of every current within Marxism, both intellectual and practical. Moreover, as we have seen, to mourn means to affirm the love for the lost particularity while also uncovering the necessity of the loss, in order that the living are not weighed down by a corpse. But this is crucial. Neither the importance nor the urgency of this philosophical task can be overstated. For Marxism to live again, it must be first laid to rest, alongside its countless heroes, theoreticians, leaders and foot soldiers. This, then, is the moment of sollen in my own thought, the one with which I will conclude this critical reconstruction of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. To fly from the negative or to lack the courage and integrity to see darkness through to daylight belies poverty of spirit. If those few geniuses like Lukács failed, then we have to acknowledge that their burden was so much greater than our own and they had so many fewer friends, living and dead, to advise them on their path. In our own time, we can make good on their failures, solving the problems that were their ruin. To return one last time to scripture, in a particularly beautiful Apocryphal book of the Bible, the Prophet Esdras questions (not a common thing for Old Testament prophets!) Uriel, the angel sent by the Lord. Esrdas demands to know why it was the fate of the Israelites to fall from the Lord’s favour and be expelled from their promised kingdom. Esdras demands to know why evil exists. Uriel responds with the words: ‘And we pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, and our life is astonishment and fear, and we are not worthy to obtain mercy’. Lukács always seemed to me to be an Apocryphal figure, with one foot in cannon and one foot in heterodoxy. He questioned his Lord steadfastly. He contributed to the kingdom of truth, even if he did not esteem or understand his own contribution. Lukács deserves better than the fate with which Uriel describes to Esdras. Although the words are beautiful, Lukács knew all too well that beauty is cold comfort absent the divine grace of love. In this work, I hope to have shone a speculative light upon Lukács’s lonely road. With our appreciation and admiration, this sorrowful and yet unbowed man might yet walk alongside us into the arms of his saviour, history.

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Index absolute spirit 220, 241, 314, 417, 426–27, 430, 442, 515, 547, 573 Adorno, Theodor 19, 24–25, 29, 31, 45, 51, 57, 66, 257, 374–75, 430, 479–80, 495–97, 578–85 aesthetics 17, 98, 189, 199–201, 412, 459, 521 alienation 69, 78, 81, 84–85, 96–97, 99, 103, 123–24, 126, 348–49, 351, 465, 467–69, 475, 494–95 Althusser, Louis 15, 102–3, 266, 511–12, 578 bad infinity 45–46, 166, 172, 207, 210, 212, 359, 409, 433, 435, 518, 525, 534, 562, 584 Badiou, Alain 325–26, 472 Bauer, Bruno 451–52 being-for-itself 91, 206, 232, 250 Benjamin, Walter 27, 66, 139, 398, 418, 520– 25, 527–35, 538–40, 543, 558, 581–82, 584, 596 Bergson, Henri 70–71, 101, 438 Berman, Marshall 27, 304 Bernstein, J.M. 54, 199, 257, 264, 304, 494 Bloch, Ernst 1, 5–6, 22, 190, 199, 301, 438, 441, 525–29, 543, 546, 563–64, 577, 592– 96 Blum Theses 16, 394, 500 Bolshevik Party 44, 61, 158, 279, 321, 325, 334, 391, 574 bourgeois hegemony 112, 242, 255, 260, 282, 287, 361, 368 Breines, Paul 6, 14, 21, 25, 27, 39, 87–88, 99, 112, 124, 155, 204, 303, 313–16, 322 Budapest School 27–28, 310 Bukharin, Nikolai 12, 127, 236, 265–68, 278, 293 Burkett, Paul 14, 218 Calvin, John 1, 525, 593 Chari, Anita S. 159–60, 170, 313, 507 Christianity 1, 45, 78, 303, 437–38, 554, 575 civil society 64, 114, 153, 197, 252, 260, 281, 294, 329, 476, 518, 551, 572–73, 597 class 150–54, 238–39, 241–42, 245–46, 277–80, 286–91, 295–96, 298, 307–9,

333–36, 338, 340–42, 344–48, 366–72, 568–69 class consciousness 13–17, 20–25, 50–53, 96–98, 100–103, 155–57, 235–38, 244– 46, 248–51, 303–7, 333–35, 338–40, 353–54, 375–76, 390–92 imputed 39–40, 123–24, 285–90, 296– 300, 304, 307–8, 317, 326, 328–29, 337, 340, 345, 347, 359, 362 class struggle 147, 150–53, 243, 245, 248–49, 259, 278–79, 287–88, 337, 353, 355, 358, 392, 394, 597 Colletti, Lucio 103, 218 Collingwood, R.G. 234 Comintern 10, 15–16, 21, 236, 379, 390–91, 450, 473, 479, 500 commodity fetishism 69, 76–77, 79, 81, 84, 96, 99, 193, 402, 471, 487 commodity form 75, 81–82, 86, 128, 142, 144, 171, 401, 433, 439, 502, 548 communism 2, 4–5, 105–6, 148–49, 211–13, 215–16, 373, 410, 432, 436, 460–61, 527– 28, 546–48, 551, 574–76 Communist Manifesto 19, 247, 287, 450 communists 5–7, 50, 104, 151, 216, 297, 301, 456, 498 conceptual mythology 315, 374, 381, 396–97, 439, 442, 474, 491, 543–44, 550–51, 554, 559–60, 562, 565–66, 569 concrete freedom 13, 300, 330, 359, 565, 574 concrete mediations 57–58, 67, 71, 164–65, 172–73, 175, 290, 292, 311, 313, 315, 317, 470, 474, 550 council communism 281, 367 crisis 36, 38, 87–88, 116–19, 152, 190–91, 239– 40, 262–63, 270, 272–73, 339–40, 356, 448, 505, 598–99 critical theory 24, 28–29, 149, 545, 583 Deborin, Abram 22, 224–25, 231, 236–37, 268, 301, 376 dereification 86–87, 100, 104–6, 141, 150, 153, 219, 223, 229–31, 237, 375, 444–45, 480, 483–84, 546–47 Derrida, Jacques 530–32

index dialectic 44, 57–59, 143, 223–24, 226, 237, 264–65, 267, 310–11, 376–77, 421–22, 515–19, 522–23 negative 51, 446–47, 547, 603 objective 146, 224, 270, 280, 282, 313, 360, 517–18 subjective 147, 282, 313, 360, 517 idealist 15, 77, 82, 283, 450, 504 dialectical method 41, 54, 63, 65–66, 137, 414, 417–19, 426–27, 429, 515–16 economics 59, 62, 64, 71, 98, 111, 114, 117, 257–58, 260, 279, 281, 293–94, 366, 525 emancipation 87, 139, 159, 162, 231, 315, 349, 460, 501, 579 empiricism 54–56, 68, 70, 72, 93 Engels, Friedrich 19–21, 62, 79–80, 135, 151, 197, 226–28, 332, 370, 410–11, 442–43, 452–53, 460–61, 486 Enlightenment 77–78, 239, 244, 324, 442, 467–68 estrangement 11, 13, 78, 99, 203, 211–12, 296, 314, 335–36, 348–50, 419, 488, 538, 547– 48, 554 ethics 12, 17, 52, 64, 108, 113–14, 188–89, 191, 199, 203–4, 215–16, 251, 406–7, 468 exchange value 68, 75, 78–80, 86–87, 111, 115, 117, 171, 192, 253, 404, 466, 549 February Revolution, Russian 279–80 Feenberg, Andrew 14, 27–29, 36, 106–8, 124, 128–29, 131, 218–19, 229–30, 271, 304–5, 334–35, 371–75, 475–86, 507–10, 566 Feuerbach, Ludwig 64, 357, 397, 439, 450, 460–62, 465, 485, 544, 580 theses on 19–20 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 50, 66, 130, 133–34, 138, 141, 314, 403, 405–7, 412, 421, 451– 53, 456, 458–59, 462 finitude 172, 207–8, 210, 212–13, 435, 534, 538, 562, 564, 590 formalism 72, 74, 76, 145, 147, 387–88, 401– 2, 407, 409, 429, 433, 452, 460, 515–16, 518 Foucault, Michel 90, 156, 578 Frankfurt School 14, 24, 26, 28, 51, 108, 271, 345, 477–79, 497 French Revolution 364–65, 454, 466, 598

617 German Idealism 43–44, 130–31, 133, 392, 399–400, 402–3, 405, 408, 415, 419, 486–87, 489, 512, 571, 577 Goldmann, Lucien 21, 141–42, 199, 204, 235, 238, 486, 540 Gramsci 20, 23, 50, 102, 114, 202, 243, 245, 264–65, 280, 288, 351, 375, 478 Habermas, Jürgen 24, 29, 107, 344–45 Hall, Timothy 45, 51, 105, 107–8, 129, 145, 398, 473, 496–99, 570 Hegel, G.W.F. 74–79, 135–38, 142–43, 228– 29, 252–54, 400–404, 412–20, 422–31, 440–42, 446–62, 464–74, 486–93, 511– 16, 552–61, 585–87 Science of Logic 33, 137, 172, 207, 229, 314, 401, 415, 469, 516, 547–48, 559, 561 hegemony 109, 202, 243, 245, 272, 277, 279, 337, 339, 361, 366, 368, 370, 375 Heidegger, Martin 128, 533 Heller, Agnes 6, 28, 204, 207–8, 310 Heraclitus 132, 210, 432, 435, 503, 590, 592 Hess, Moses 450–51, 455–58, 460–61, 485 historical materialism 20, 92, 126–27, 177, 235–37, 243, 247, 266–68, 275, 429, 496–97, 512–13, 523–25, 528– 29 History and Class Consciousness 13–17, 21–25, 27–28, 43–44, 50–53, 96– 98, 100–101, 103, 123–24, 151–52, 155–57, 235–38, 248–49, 303–5, 390– 92 Holloway, John 150, 152 Honneth, Axel 29, 40, 106–8, 158, 196 Hungarian Communist Party 2, 6, 8, 10, 16, 248, 333, 391, 394, 500 Hungarian Revolution 50, 235, 311, 338, 391, 575 identical subject-object 97, 122, 134, 141, 168, 178, 219, 302, 314, 406–7, 417, 419, 426, 497 identity politics 157, 317 ideology 55, 57, 85, 87–89, 147, 193, 200, 202, 217, 235, 242, 246, 256 critique of 234–35, 237, 239, 241, 243, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 269–71

618 immediacy 34–36, 52–53, 55–59, 61–63, 67–69, 73–75, 81–82, 161–65, 167–68, 172–74, 289–92, 296–97, 439, 462–64, 469–70 Jacoby, Russell 21, 236, 334 Jameson, Fredric 26, 42, 155–57, 159–60, 173, 175, 199, 356, 507 Jay, Martin 24–25, 96, 122, 128, 140–42, 155, 303, 316, 472 Kafka, Franz 575 Kant, Immanuel 66, 88, 103, 130–31, 133, 138, 171, 403, 405–7, 409, 411–12, 419, 421, 458, 462 Kautsky, Karl 235, 262–64, 268, 334, 339 Kettler, David 2–3, 5, 51, 201 Kierkegaard, Søren 50, 101, 205–6, 212, 247, 552 Kilminster, Richard 43, 102, 304, 398, 473, 490–95, 541 Kolakowski, Leszek 57, 292, 301 Korsch, Karl 14, 20, 22, 24–25, 102, 236, 334, 511 Larsen, Neil 42, 108, 122, 142, 148–55, 157, 170, 175, 313, 507, 517–18 Lassalle, Ferdinand 88–89, 196, 258, 312, 397, 450–55, 458, 504, 545 Lefebvre, Henri 21, 27, 198 Lenin, Vladimir 7–9, 16–17, 234–36, 268, 270, 274–78, 293–95, 324–25, 334–36, 366–67, 371–72, 391, 569–70, 572–73 Leninism 17, 28, 31, 38, 216, 235, 270, 281, 300, 302, 317, 322, 376, 572, 580 Löwy, Michael 2, 5, 8, 13–15, 17, 24, 26, 101, 103, 189–90, 204, 303, 363, 450, 486, 521, 575, 609 Luxemburg, Rosa 12, 33–34, 38, 59, 79, 158, 235, 239, 258, 272, 278, 280, 320, 339, 363–64, 371 MacIntyre, Alasdair 53, 199, 212–14, 330, 435–36, 519, 551, 569 Marcuse, Herbert 24, 28, 31, 479–83, 485, 518 Marx, Karl 19–21, 67–69, 79–80, 126–28, 142–44, 151, 249–50, 430, 452–54, 459– 62, 486–89, 491–93, 511–12, 574–76

index Marxism 65, 101–3, 234–35, 241–42, 266–69, 297–99, 310–12, 431–33, 486–87, 511–12, 574–77, 588, 599–601, 606–8 Wertkritik 124, 127, 142, 148, 517 Western 21, 204, 313, 492 materialism 20, 102, 124, 196–97, 226, 232, 305, 324–25, 391, 462, 487–89, 530 mathematics 75, 130–31, 135, 401, 516 mediation 56–58, 79–83, 124, 162–69, 182– 83, 187–89, 289–93, 296–97, 311–13, 347–48, 351–54, 380–83, 462–65, 469– 71, 509–10 Menshevism 255, 269, 323–24, 367, 376, 455 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 20–21, 23, 27, 44, 127, 129, 180–81, 297–300, 341–43, 504– 6, 518–20, 565, 567–68, 570–71 messianism 518, 521, 523, 529–30, 534, 540, 581, 584 Mészáros, István 28, 286, 305, 310–12, 316, 318 metacritique 41, 55, 58, 67, 79, 89, 99, 112, 130, 163, 244, 392, 394, 455, 565 Negri, Antonio 150, 518 Nietzsche, Friedrich 49–50, 217, 383, 434– 36, 438, 441, 524, 532, 534, 539, 550, 552, 598–99, 605 nihilism 211, 314, 510, 528, 534, 538–39, 562, 588, 591–601 October Revolution 50, 61, 135, 153, 158, 160, 235, 286–87, 422, 430, 499, 505–6, 567, 569–71, 573 parliamentarianism 7–8, 89, 338, 366 party 6–7, 9, 15–16, 39, 43–44, 277–78, 285–303, 307–9, 317–25, 327–47, 361–62, 378–81, 500, 565–71, 573– 74 Perkins, Stephen 24, 43, 158, 479, 506 philosophy of praxis 18–21, 27–29, 389–91, 393–96, 418–24, 429–31, 438–40, 448– 50, 474–77, 488–89, 493–95, 498–500, 540–42, 550–55, 560–63 Piccone, Paul 27, 96, 123–25, 127, 151, 303, 310–13 Plato 53, 443 Plekhanov, Georgi 235, 277, 291, 334, 411

index political economy 69, 71–72, 79–80, 84, 95, 99–100, 123, 126–27, 129, 245, 353–54, 440, 442, 514–15, 517–18 political theology 154, 244, 472, 505, 531, 533–34, 540, 548–50, 557, 569, 577, 583, 597, 599–600 Postone, Moishe 42, 122, 124, 128–29, 142– 55, 158, 170, 313, 507, 517 precapitalist societies 62, 91–92, 94, 114, 127, 243, 511 Prickett, Stephen 37, 109, 269, 534–37, 545, 553, 569, 589 proletarian revolution 87, 263, 275–76, 281, 287, 291, 363–66, 375–76, 419, 449, 453, 476, 482, 573, 592 proletariat 121–25, 137–63, 165–75, 177–82, 247–52, 276–83, 285–89, 295–302, 313– 19, 334–40, 346–50, 353–62, 366–71, 443–48, 510–14 standpoint of the 105, 169 pseudo-Hegelian 106 Realpolitik 10, 259, 306, 453 reification 73–74, 81–87, 94–97, 99–100, 103–9, 113–19, 148–49, 157–59, 221–22, 230–31, 318–19, 374–75, 411–13, 447–49, 482–85 critique of 28, 71, 74, 130, 150, 154, 387, 471 logic of 114, 116, 146, 274, 290, 315, 357, 440 reification and totality 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111 relativism 227, 230, 410, 434, 457, 502 religion 114–15, 413, 417, 426, 438, 442, 537, 539, 547, 556, 558, 564, 589, 593, 595 revolution 2–3, 271–73, 275–76, 278, 280, 287–88, 320–22, 361–64, 366–68, 371– 72, 376–79, 476, 478–80, 567–68 Rickert, Heinrich 103, 133, 163–64, 226, 400, 438 Rockmore, Tom 304, 398, 456, 473, 485–87, 489–91 Rudas, Laszlo 9, 22, 224–25, 231, 236, 268, 301, 340, 376, 381 Schiller 135–36, 138, 201, 222, 403, 411–13, 524 Schmidt, Alfred 204, 316–17, 322

619 Schmitt, Carl 50, 89, 244, 441, 528, 548–49, 569 Second International 52, 63, 196, 219, 232, 234, 237, 259–60, 278, 324, 334 sectarianism 235, 247–48, 252, 255, 258–59, 261, 270, 274, 289, 312, 393, 505 Seidler, Irma 1, 204, 206–8, 210–11, 564, 594 self-consciousness 78, 161–62, 176–77, 187– 88, 195, 229–30, 237, 305–7, 314–15, 348, 350–52, 357, 395, 430, 500 Shandro, Alan 277, 334, 614 Simmel, Georg 68, 72–76, 79, 101, 103, 166, 190, 193–94, 316–17, 435–36, 438, 513, 517, 596 slavery 77, 127, 174, 266–67, 350 social democracy 139, 248, 256, 258–59, 262, 280, 293, 306, 320, 367, 436, 531 socialism 4, 19, 200, 215, 274–75, 370–71, 375, 448, 454, 484, 572–73, 576, 597 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 110, 142, 148, 488 soviet democracy 41, 272, 321–22, 373, 570 soviets 16, 41, 43, 270, 274–75, 279, 281, 311– 12, 317–22, 334, 363–64, 366–71, 374, 566, 568 speculative philosophy 30, 33, 56, 212, 215, 396, 398, 431, 488, 554, 560, 562, 566, 589, 597 Stalinism 23, 26, 51, 128, 141, 301–3, 366, 373, 566 state capitalism 145, 153, 270, 373, 570, 572 Stedman Jones, Gareth 101–3, 140 subjectivism 15, 97, 171, 376, 379, 397, 450 subjectivity 143, 147, 149–50, 168, 262, 349– 50, 353, 376, 378–79, 464, 467, 496–97, 515, 518, 586 superman 383, 436, 441, 523–24, 597 left-Nietzschean 523 Taylorism 110, 114, 274 theology 419, 521, 524–25, 534, 539, 543, 550, 554, 557, 559, 574, 577, 589, 596, 598 Third International 38, 224, 230–31, 235–37, 255, 262, 264, 268, 286, 288, 392 Tönnies, Ferdinand 219–20 totalitarian 14, 236, 271, 315, 366 totality 56–63, 82–85, 97–101, 111–21, 132– 34, 140–41, 146, 187–89, 241–43, 289–93, 295–98, 354–57, 359–61, 403–5, 497–99 historical 63, 288, 294, 348, 351

620 reified social 84, 190, 196, 400, 444, 446 representation of 201, 291 and genesis 62, 122, 138, 163, 165, 180, 235, 290, 296, 347, 352, 380, 393, 397, 509– 10 unity of 63, 345, 355, 422 Trenkle, Norbert 149–50, 152–53, 155, 517 Trotsky, Leon 23, 277, 288, 373, 436, 504– 6 Trotskyism 23–24, 255, 572, 578 use value 78–81, 86–87, 111, 117, 125, 171, 192, 253, 353, 404 USSR 17, 26, 302–3, 334, 371, 422, 566, 570 utopia 71, 170, 172, 358, 380, 457, 464, 526, 549, 559, 564, 576, 583 value theory 142, 149, 434, 440

index violence 9, 35, 40, 114, 128, 197, 213, 239, 262–63, 280, 338, 429, 501, 503, 527 voluntarism 15, 22, 52, 170, 252, 312, 376–77, 506 Weber, Max 74, 87, 163, 190, 199, 202, 238, 266, 307, 325, 331, 392, 437, 517, 539 world history 314, 417, 432, 456, 469, 592 Young Hegel 78, 115, 302–3, 357, 450, 470, 491, 514, 575 Zarathustra 49, 362, 383, 524, 532, 539, 550, 613 Zinoviev, Grigory 14–15, 236, 479 Žižek, Slavoj 41–42, 292, 304, 322–28, 366, 472, 518, 529