The Marxism of his time

Georg Lukacs and the philosophy of revolution

Sandra Bloodworth 26 January 2010

Georg Lukacs in 1913 Georg Lukacs was the son of one of Budapest’s wealthiest bankers, and was only briefly associated with genuine revolutionary Marxism. He was inspired to join the revolutionary movement at the time of the Russian revolution of 1917, which he described as a “window into the future”. He wrote that he and his philosophical circle “saw – at last! at last! – a way for mankind to escape war and capitalism”. He was only active in the movement of genuine Marxism for a brief 10 years of his life after 1918. And in the Hungarian revolution of 1919 he was associated with the ultra-lefts of whom Lenin was extremely critical. By 1929 he had accommodated to Stalin. He retreated into literary criticism and academic philosophy. So why does his work remain relevant for Marxists today? In those 10 years Lukacs produced a trilogy in which he provided a philosophical restatement of some of Marx’s most important ideas, and which is one of the high points of Marxist intervention into philosophy. History and Class Consciousness, written between 1920 and 1923, is a materialist explanation of why workers accept capitalist ideas and how they can break with them. Lenin, written soon after Lenin’s death in 1924, is a philosophical argument for a revolutionary party. In 1926, under fire from Stalin’s cronies, he wrote In defence of History and Class Consciousness, tailism and the dialectic which is a restatement of the principles argued in the first two, but clarifying and consolidating them. A British Marxist, reviewing In defence of History and Class Consciousness, only published in English in 2000, summed up why it is so important: “[it] represents from beyond the grave…a valuable tool for those seeking to pick up the thread of authentic Marxism broken by Stalin in the 1920s”. History and Class Consciousness (hereafter History), published in English in 1971, was an inspiration to young revolutionaries at the time. Chris Harman, a British Marxist from that generation, recalled: “[it] was a philosophical clarion call, echoing over the years since the early communist international to a new generation of revolutionaries trying to find their way to a Marxism free from Stalinist distortions.” Following Marx, Lukacs grounded his explanation of why capitalist ideas find a resonance among workers in the material reality of workers’ lives. Under capitalism, instead of workers producing goods that they, their families and their community need and use, they produce commodities for the market. They often can’t afford them themselves, or in the case of nuclear weapons, have no use for them. They don’t know where or to whom they will be sold and used. And so social relations between people appear as relations between things. An essential point is the fact that labour power (our ability to work) is a commodity on the market also. This induces in workers the sense that they are individual atoms whose fate is subject to the market over which they have no control. It seems as if we’re powerless, dominated by the market, the state and capitalist industry. Marx argued that “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour”, i.e. that feeling of being dominated by them, obscures the fact that society and its institutions “are just as much the products of humans as linen, flax, etc.” “The objects of labour”, argued Lukacs, “appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature.” In other words, institutions created by humans take on the appearance of being “natural” and timeless, which induces a sense that the very institutions created by humans in the first place control our lives. Lukacs called this the process of reification; Marx called it commodity fetishism or alienation. And it’s true, when workers are just trying to survive as individuals – holding down a job, with no control over wages and conditions – we do have little control over our own lives. So workers don’t accept capitalist ideology because they’re mindless, empty vessels that can be filled up with any tripe, or alternatively filled up with socialist ideas. They don’t accept ideas that are opposed to their class interests because they’re stupid or uneducated. The ideas gain some acceptance because they reflect at least some basic and important aspects of workers’ lives, for example that you need a boss to run the workplace. But also, feelings of powerlessness give rise to habits of deference to authority figures or to bureaucracy, and perhaps to illusions in religion, so people accept the ideas propagated by these authority figures and institutions. Lukacs argues that this process of reification, or alienation, affects every aspect of our lives: education, intellectual life, culture, ideas and opinions all become commodities. Lukacs was famous for his attack on the “lack of conviction” promoted by the journalism profession as the “most grotesque” manifestation of reification: “Here it is subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that 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…The journalist’s prostitution of his/her experience and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.” Our thoughts, feelings, personal relations are subject to this alienation: “The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly objectivity’ cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. it stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man.” He takes the example of marriage and how Kant, the bourgeois philosopher, described it: “Marriage…is the union of two people…with a view to the mutual possession of each other’s sexual attributes…” But if workers accept capitalist ideas, if the true nature of capitalism is hidden from our consciousness, then how does anyone ever rebel? How do workers become genuinely class conscious? Capitalism is a system of continual change and the system repeatedly descends into crisis. The experience of the chaos caused by, in Marx’s words, “the constant revolutionising of production” and by crisis can begin to reveal the true nature of the system: “the pretence that society is regulated by ‘eternal, iron’ laws…is finally revealed for what it is: a pretence.” Think how the global financial crisis has discredited neoliberalism. Secondly, workers’ position as the creators of profits means there is continual conflict with their bosses over the way they are exploited – hours worked, wages, conditions. So whatever the ideas in workers’ heads, they are continually pushed to resist the injustices they endure. In his defence of History Lukacs quotes Marx from 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 the question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.” Lukacs refers repeatedly to a question posed by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach: who educates the educator? And his answer: actually, people educate themselves. Their actions, such as strikes and protests,can tear the veil of mystification aside. In activity workers can begin to see the total picture, and as they resist workers can begin to discover within themselves the potential to change the course of history: “By dissolving the fetishistic objects into processes that take place among men…at the conceptual level the structure of the world of man stands revealed as a system of dynamically changing relations in which the conflicts between man and man (in the class struggle etc.) are fought out.” So workers’ consciousness is shaped by two contradictory but very material experiences: the alienation which flows from being treated like a commodity, and the impulse to resist because they have to sell their labour power on the market. This analysis forces us to focus on class struggle, the social reality, the state of the economy, rather than an exclusive emphasis on the state of class consciousness and propaganda. It shows that ideas do not on their own drive workers’ actions, and that those actions can leap ahead of ideas, changing attitudes and political or theoretical understanding rapidly in the struggle. But this can lead to a wrong response in the opposite direction to the propagandists who think all socialists have to do is fill workers’ heads with new ideas. Some people, once they see the importance of struggle, then tend to ignore the effects of the institutions which do influence working-class ideas and organisation such as trade unions, political parties etc. They conclude that the struggle is everything, an end in itself. Lukacs argues that ideas and the material world can only be separated in theory – we can talk of an objective social situation; on the other hand, we can separate out the influence of the ideas of political parties or groups of workers such as the ALP, or the Greens as the subjective element. But in practice, the subjective – the ideas propagated by various political parties – are part of the objective reality that has to be taken into account. Take today: we have a world in crisis which is creating widespread cynicism and distrust of the institutions of capitalism. But on the other hand, there’s the idea that socialism has been tried and failed, the idea that we can’t win reforms any more; these and many more interact with the actual pressures for people to resist. So, in spite of the negative ideas, millions have protested against the war in Iraq and millions have been involved in strikes and mass protests over immediate economic issues in Europe in the last few years. At key points in the struggle – “moments” in the process of historical development – ideas and organisation can be the critical factor determining the outcome. The role of organisations and the ideas that masses of people bring into the struggle are of immense importance at such a point. “Development does not occur, then, as a continuous intensification, in which development is favourable to the proletariat, and the day after tomorrow the situation must be even more favourable…and so on. It means rather that at a particular point, the situation demands that a decision be taken and the day after tomorrow might be too late to make the decision.” As Lenin argued to the Bolsheviks in Russia in October 1917, “history would never forgive the revolutionaries if they hesitated when today they could win…while tomorrow they could lose so much, indeed everything.” So to complete Lukacs’s theory of class consciousness we need to look at his defence and development of Lenin’s theory of the revolutionary party. There is no gradual, inevitable development of class consciousness of all workers “without frictions and setbacks” just because they struggle. Workers are still subject to all the influences of bourgeois ideas, including reformism. His starting point is the fact of uneven consciousness. There are always some workers who are more class conscious than others – it might be because of traditions, organisations, the nature of the workplace, whatever. This uneven consciousness means that a party which aims to organise the whole of the working class will always have to cater to a low common denominator: “The prevailing disunity, the differing degrees of clarity and depth to be found in the consciousness of the different individuals, groups and strata of the proletariat make the organisational separation of the party from the class inevitable.” Where does this leave the central proposition of Marxism – that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself? The party needs to organise the most class conscious, advanced workers, but must “constantly pay heed tactically to the level of consciousness of the largest and most retrograde sections of the masses”. And “the communist party does not function as a stand-in for the proletariat even in theory.” However, the “uninterrupted dialectical interaction between theory, party and class, this concentration of theory upon the immediate needs of the class does not by any means imply that the party is absorbed into the mass of the proletariat.” In Lenin the party is “the tangible embodiment of proletarian class-consciousness. The problem of their organisation is determined by their conception of the way in which the proletariat will really gain its own class-consciousness and be itself able to master and fully appropriate it.” Drawing on the dialectical understanding he took from Marx, Lukacs says that the party is both the product of and the active agent in the mass movement. In other words, the party members are trained and learn how to lead, how to recognise the true interests of the working class, and how to fight for them by being part of the struggle. At the same time, the actions they take and the arguments they make influence that struggle and at key points can make a crucial difference between victory or defeat. So, he argues, Lenin’s practice of building a vanguard party is the solution to the contradiction between the more advanced, class-conscious workers and the mass of less conscious, more hesitant workers. The arguments in Lukacs’s trilogy are an essential weapon in the struggle for liberation. They are vital for understanding how workers become class conscious. He developed the most complete philosophical explanation of the potential of the working class to overthrow capitalism. They provide an alternative to the passive focus on ideas which is so common. They are a foil to the elitism of those who think workers just have to be educated by some enlightened elite. They are, on the other hand, the answer to much of post-structuralism, in which historical forces and objective social structures supposedly determine the nature of humans, and the possibility of a liberating struggle is dismissed. Lukacs arms us with a philosophical explanation of why workers are not just oppressed and exploited, not just dominated by capitalist ideology, but are capable of leading a revolution to overthrow capitalism. His philosophical conclusion that the proletariat is both the object and the subject of history was one of the main reasons why Lukacs inspired young revolutionaries in the 1960s. However it’s not just a question of being inspired by a great thinker, but of taking up that thread of authentic Marxism broken for so long by Stalinism and using the ideas to build the kind of revolutionary party Lukacs advocated with such philosophical depth. In the late 1960s Lukacs opposed the monstrous Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe; and some of the last words he wrote before his death in 1969 showed the way forward: “Both systems in crisis. Authentic Marxism the only solution.” ____________________________________ George Novack's footnote of Lukacs: Georg Lukács (1885-1971) - Hungarian Communist philosopher and cultural critic, best known for his book History and Class Consciousness (1923). Principal inspirer of the Hegelian current in 20th century Marxism, stressing the revolutionary will over objective conditions. The young Lukács rejected dialectical materialism as a general theory of reality, while in social analysis he placed major emphasis on alienation and cultural phenomena at the expense of productive relations as determinants of social change. He renounced his views in 1933 and grudgingly conformed to Stalinism. In his later years he became a dissident in Stalinist circles in Hungary and returned partially to the orthodox Marxist teachings on dialectical materialism. _____________________________________ Lukacs on You Tube