Die Neue Zeit
26th January 2013, 16:45
Though his key texts languished in obscurity for half a century, Georg Lukács re-emerged in the late 20th century with a reputation as one of the great Marxist thinkers. Leading members of the Socialist Workers Party eagerly declared themselves amongst his disciples. However, James Turley argues that his work constitutes an obstacle to revolutionary politics
This essay is probably best described as a ‘distant cousin’ of two talks I delivered last year: the first, entitled ‘Georg Lukács - philosopher of revolution?’, at Communist University; the second, ‘Class consciousness and party - towards a critique of the young Lukács’ at the Historical Materialism annual London conference.
My focus, there and here, is the work produced by Georg Lukács in the 1920s, in particular History and class consciousness, regarded by most as his magnum opus - a lengthy, dense argument for the centrality of Hegelian thought to Marxism, whose influence persists not only through direct reference, but also through certain shared assumptions that, within Hegelian Marxisms of all kinds, have acquired the character of an unspoken ‘obvious’ orthodoxy. Lukács produced a good deal of other work - much focused on questions of aesthetics and literary theory - but it is the grand thematic sweep and political urgency of History and class consciousness that has left a mark on leftwing thought.
A distant cousin, partly because on neither occasion was I able to cram in enough detail really to nail the coffin shut to my satisfaction; I also intend to flesh out what have been, up to now, somewhat vague indications as to the place of philosophy within Marxism. But also, the essay benefits from the debates and perceptive interlocutions that followed my rambling, ‘too long, yet too short’ openings - as well as the many arguments I provoked with increasingly frustrated Hegelian Marxists during my ‘year with Lukács’ outside of formal political and academic settings. In particular, I would like to thank comrades Marc Mulholland, Mike Macnair, Lawrence Parker, Laurie Rojas and Lucy Parker.
Finally, a note on sources: both out of necessity and for ease of source-checking, I have referred to the Marxist Internet Archive and other internet sources where possible (the former contains a fairly complete set of Lukács’s 1920s writings), using chapter and section headings where relevant.
I. Lukács in context(s)
It is a perfectly commonplace starting point in textual analysis to return a text to its context. Yet it is perhaps peculiarly necessary to do so with History and class consciousness for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is the problem that Lukács codifies, here a particular interpretation of his own context (the ‘vulgar Marxism of the Second International’), which stubbornly persists among the far left today, and as a consequence deforms the historical understanding of Lukács’s emergence as a thinker.
Related to this first problem is the second: while it is useful and necessary to historically specify Lukács as a product of, and an actor in, his own time - the birth of the communist movement, the establishment and degeneration of the USSR, the ill-fated Hungarian Soviet Republic, etc - this does not exhaust the question. For Lukács - as he survives for us today - has a ‘second life’, with the emergence of the 1960s-70s ‘New Left’. His persistence as a theoretical touchstone to this day is a product of the 1960s as much as the 1920s, not least because it is the 1960s generation of Marxists who are most clearly indebted to him.
The final issue raised has to do with Lukács’s theoretical framework itself. For he views theory as in a certain sense the crystallised self-consciousness of the historical moment (under capitalist society, at least). If Lukács misrecognises the historical constellation to which his text responds, then, we must ask whether his broader epistemological positions allow for a ‘sympathetic critique’ - that is, whether the philosophical tools exist to rectify mistakes within the universe of his thought, or whether it thereby descends into irresolvable antinomies that demand, instead, a thorough break with his whole problematic.
As far as the 1920s are concerned, we have to make a significant biographical point at the outset. Lukács was not politically active in the socialist movement prior to 1917. This makes him almost unique among the ‘marquee names’ of revolutionary Marxism we have inherited from his time. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were all active in the Russian movement by 1905. Rosa Luxemburg - to whom two of the essays in History and class consciousness are directed - came into the socialist movement in the 1890s. A young Antonio Gramsci, the figure perhaps most closely analogous to Lukács, joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1913, and even Karl Korsch briefly flirted (of all things) with Fabianism at roughly the same time.
Lukács’s background, rather, was mainly academic. Passing through universities at Budapest, Berlin and Heidelberg, his theoretical formation in the years prior to 1917 was primarily a deep engagement with German idealism, combined with the proto-existentialist thought of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Søren Kierkegaard. His peers during this time included two figures that haunt History and class consciousness - Georg Simmel and Max Weber. Both were to become influential sociologists (Weber most especially), but there is a particular commitment that appears in both in different forms, which is of particular significance to the discussion of Lukács.
Much of Weber’s work is concerned with the increasing rationalisation that pertains to modern capitalist society - the emphasis on rational calculation, a necessary condition from business to the law. His conclusions are essentially pessimistic: capitalist society is one in which predictable mediocrities rather than brilliant individuals will thrive. Simmel, meanwhile, produced an important book, The philosophy of money, whose argument turns on the idea that broader social relationships between individuals become objectified in monetary exchange, to the spiritual detriment of the individuals themselves. He called this process ‘reification’.
Lukács’s sympathies up to this point could be called radical-idealist, and he often moved in socialistic circles - he had read Georges Sorel and Luxemburg by the end of the war. The revolution of 1917 jolted him into Marxism proper; but, while the vast majority of footnotes in History and class consciousness direct us to Marx, its theoretical coordinates were plotted under the influence of a great deal of contradictory thought - in a situation of rapid and unpredictable political ferment.
In particular, the directly political content of History and class consciousness is indebted most heavily to the ‘mass action’ left of the socialist movement, which hit its moment of greatest plausibility during the post-war, post-October revolutionary wave which spread across Europe. Yet the book was published in 1922, at which time things were - to put it mildly - looking less rosy. This new situation led to retrenchment in the political strategy of Comintern, through the policy of the united front, and ultimately a break with its left wing - sealed by the closure of the left-dominated West European Bureau in Amsterdam and the publication of Lenin’s ‘Leftwing’ communism: an infantile disorder in 1920. A break with the increasingly delusional millenarianism of the ultra-left, however, failed to prevent the German Communist Party from embarking on the infamous 1921 ‘March action’ - a disastrous voluntarist stunt.
In Lukács’s native Hungary, meanwhile, things were equally looking grim. Having been propelled to power and formed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, the Communist Party rapidly ran into difficulties. A disastrous attempt to wage revolutionary war against Romania and Czechoslovakia, spearheaded by the quixotic voluntarist, Béla Kun, resulted rapidly in the regime’s downfall. It was those who learned nothing from the Hungarian debacle who drove through the March action in Germany.
In 1967, when his works of this period were finally republished in German, Lukács provided a sketch of the rather odd position all this left him in as a thinker:
My dilemma was made even more acute by the fact that opposed to me within the leadership of the Hungarian party was the group led by Zinoviev’s disciple, Béla Kun, who subscribed to a sectarianism of a modern bureaucratic type. In theory it would have been possible to repudiate his views as those of a pseudo-leftist. In practice, however, his proposals could only be combated by an appeal to the highly prosaic realities of ordinary life that were but distantly related to the larger perspectives of the world revolution. At this point in my life, as so often, I had a stroke of luck: the opposition to Béla Kun was headed by Eugen Landler.
Landler’s influence, which focused on the immense practical difficulties of building the Hungarian Communist Party under the conditions of generalised repression that followed the fall of the soviet republic, led to a particular cognitive dissonance for Lukács:
This became particularly obvious early in 1921. On the Hungarian front I followed Landler in advocating an energetic anti-sectarian line, while simultaneously at the international level I gave theoretical support to the March action. With this the tension between the conflicting tendencies reached a climax. As the divisions in the Hungarian party became more acute, as the movement of the radical workers in Hungary began to grow, my ideas were increasingly influenced by the theoretical tendencies brought into being by these events. However, they did not yet gain the upper hand at this stage, despite the fact that Lenin’s criticism had undermined my analysis of the March action.
History and class consciousness is often thought of as in some sense returning to an orthodox and revolutionary kernel in Marxism, stripping away the vulgar misreadings that had come to encrust it. In fact, this classic writing is unorthodox is the extreme, and our contemporary failure to see its eclecticism - a febrile mix of Marx and Engels, Simmel and Weber, Luxemburg and Sorel, Kant and Hegel - leads to many misunderstandings: in particular, its status as the expression of Lukács’s philosophical voluntarism, rather than his ‘realistic’ political activism, is not always recognised.
It is a misunderstanding to which the 1968 generation were especially prone. The New Left sought to escape the bureaucratic diktat and stale inertia of the ‘official communist’ movement, without succumbing to official social democracy. Many of them took things in the other direction, precisely towards a revival of the very same semi-anarchist, mass-action leftism that informed History and class consciousness.
Continued: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/946/supplement-the-antinomies-of-georg-lukács
This essay is probably best described as a ‘distant cousin’ of two talks I delivered last year: the first, entitled ‘Georg Lukács - philosopher of revolution?’, at Communist University; the second, ‘Class consciousness and party - towards a critique of the young Lukács’ at the Historical Materialism annual London conference.
My focus, there and here, is the work produced by Georg Lukács in the 1920s, in particular History and class consciousness, regarded by most as his magnum opus - a lengthy, dense argument for the centrality of Hegelian thought to Marxism, whose influence persists not only through direct reference, but also through certain shared assumptions that, within Hegelian Marxisms of all kinds, have acquired the character of an unspoken ‘obvious’ orthodoxy. Lukács produced a good deal of other work - much focused on questions of aesthetics and literary theory - but it is the grand thematic sweep and political urgency of History and class consciousness that has left a mark on leftwing thought.
A distant cousin, partly because on neither occasion was I able to cram in enough detail really to nail the coffin shut to my satisfaction; I also intend to flesh out what have been, up to now, somewhat vague indications as to the place of philosophy within Marxism. But also, the essay benefits from the debates and perceptive interlocutions that followed my rambling, ‘too long, yet too short’ openings - as well as the many arguments I provoked with increasingly frustrated Hegelian Marxists during my ‘year with Lukács’ outside of formal political and academic settings. In particular, I would like to thank comrades Marc Mulholland, Mike Macnair, Lawrence Parker, Laurie Rojas and Lucy Parker.
Finally, a note on sources: both out of necessity and for ease of source-checking, I have referred to the Marxist Internet Archive and other internet sources where possible (the former contains a fairly complete set of Lukács’s 1920s writings), using chapter and section headings where relevant.
I. Lukács in context(s)
It is a perfectly commonplace starting point in textual analysis to return a text to its context. Yet it is perhaps peculiarly necessary to do so with History and class consciousness for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is the problem that Lukács codifies, here a particular interpretation of his own context (the ‘vulgar Marxism of the Second International’), which stubbornly persists among the far left today, and as a consequence deforms the historical understanding of Lukács’s emergence as a thinker.
Related to this first problem is the second: while it is useful and necessary to historically specify Lukács as a product of, and an actor in, his own time - the birth of the communist movement, the establishment and degeneration of the USSR, the ill-fated Hungarian Soviet Republic, etc - this does not exhaust the question. For Lukács - as he survives for us today - has a ‘second life’, with the emergence of the 1960s-70s ‘New Left’. His persistence as a theoretical touchstone to this day is a product of the 1960s as much as the 1920s, not least because it is the 1960s generation of Marxists who are most clearly indebted to him.
The final issue raised has to do with Lukács’s theoretical framework itself. For he views theory as in a certain sense the crystallised self-consciousness of the historical moment (under capitalist society, at least). If Lukács misrecognises the historical constellation to which his text responds, then, we must ask whether his broader epistemological positions allow for a ‘sympathetic critique’ - that is, whether the philosophical tools exist to rectify mistakes within the universe of his thought, or whether it thereby descends into irresolvable antinomies that demand, instead, a thorough break with his whole problematic.
As far as the 1920s are concerned, we have to make a significant biographical point at the outset. Lukács was not politically active in the socialist movement prior to 1917. This makes him almost unique among the ‘marquee names’ of revolutionary Marxism we have inherited from his time. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were all active in the Russian movement by 1905. Rosa Luxemburg - to whom two of the essays in History and class consciousness are directed - came into the socialist movement in the 1890s. A young Antonio Gramsci, the figure perhaps most closely analogous to Lukács, joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1913, and even Karl Korsch briefly flirted (of all things) with Fabianism at roughly the same time.
Lukács’s background, rather, was mainly academic. Passing through universities at Budapest, Berlin and Heidelberg, his theoretical formation in the years prior to 1917 was primarily a deep engagement with German idealism, combined with the proto-existentialist thought of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Søren Kierkegaard. His peers during this time included two figures that haunt History and class consciousness - Georg Simmel and Max Weber. Both were to become influential sociologists (Weber most especially), but there is a particular commitment that appears in both in different forms, which is of particular significance to the discussion of Lukács.
Much of Weber’s work is concerned with the increasing rationalisation that pertains to modern capitalist society - the emphasis on rational calculation, a necessary condition from business to the law. His conclusions are essentially pessimistic: capitalist society is one in which predictable mediocrities rather than brilliant individuals will thrive. Simmel, meanwhile, produced an important book, The philosophy of money, whose argument turns on the idea that broader social relationships between individuals become objectified in monetary exchange, to the spiritual detriment of the individuals themselves. He called this process ‘reification’.
Lukács’s sympathies up to this point could be called radical-idealist, and he often moved in socialistic circles - he had read Georges Sorel and Luxemburg by the end of the war. The revolution of 1917 jolted him into Marxism proper; but, while the vast majority of footnotes in History and class consciousness direct us to Marx, its theoretical coordinates were plotted under the influence of a great deal of contradictory thought - in a situation of rapid and unpredictable political ferment.
In particular, the directly political content of History and class consciousness is indebted most heavily to the ‘mass action’ left of the socialist movement, which hit its moment of greatest plausibility during the post-war, post-October revolutionary wave which spread across Europe. Yet the book was published in 1922, at which time things were - to put it mildly - looking less rosy. This new situation led to retrenchment in the political strategy of Comintern, through the policy of the united front, and ultimately a break with its left wing - sealed by the closure of the left-dominated West European Bureau in Amsterdam and the publication of Lenin’s ‘Leftwing’ communism: an infantile disorder in 1920. A break with the increasingly delusional millenarianism of the ultra-left, however, failed to prevent the German Communist Party from embarking on the infamous 1921 ‘March action’ - a disastrous voluntarist stunt.
In Lukács’s native Hungary, meanwhile, things were equally looking grim. Having been propelled to power and formed the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, the Communist Party rapidly ran into difficulties. A disastrous attempt to wage revolutionary war against Romania and Czechoslovakia, spearheaded by the quixotic voluntarist, Béla Kun, resulted rapidly in the regime’s downfall. It was those who learned nothing from the Hungarian debacle who drove through the March action in Germany.
In 1967, when his works of this period were finally republished in German, Lukács provided a sketch of the rather odd position all this left him in as a thinker:
My dilemma was made even more acute by the fact that opposed to me within the leadership of the Hungarian party was the group led by Zinoviev’s disciple, Béla Kun, who subscribed to a sectarianism of a modern bureaucratic type. In theory it would have been possible to repudiate his views as those of a pseudo-leftist. In practice, however, his proposals could only be combated by an appeal to the highly prosaic realities of ordinary life that were but distantly related to the larger perspectives of the world revolution. At this point in my life, as so often, I had a stroke of luck: the opposition to Béla Kun was headed by Eugen Landler.
Landler’s influence, which focused on the immense practical difficulties of building the Hungarian Communist Party under the conditions of generalised repression that followed the fall of the soviet republic, led to a particular cognitive dissonance for Lukács:
This became particularly obvious early in 1921. On the Hungarian front I followed Landler in advocating an energetic anti-sectarian line, while simultaneously at the international level I gave theoretical support to the March action. With this the tension between the conflicting tendencies reached a climax. As the divisions in the Hungarian party became more acute, as the movement of the radical workers in Hungary began to grow, my ideas were increasingly influenced by the theoretical tendencies brought into being by these events. However, they did not yet gain the upper hand at this stage, despite the fact that Lenin’s criticism had undermined my analysis of the March action.
History and class consciousness is often thought of as in some sense returning to an orthodox and revolutionary kernel in Marxism, stripping away the vulgar misreadings that had come to encrust it. In fact, this classic writing is unorthodox is the extreme, and our contemporary failure to see its eclecticism - a febrile mix of Marx and Engels, Simmel and Weber, Luxemburg and Sorel, Kant and Hegel - leads to many misunderstandings: in particular, its status as the expression of Lukács’s philosophical voluntarism, rather than his ‘realistic’ political activism, is not always recognised.
It is a misunderstanding to which the 1968 generation were especially prone. The New Left sought to escape the bureaucratic diktat and stale inertia of the ‘official communist’ movement, without succumbing to official social democracy. Many of them took things in the other direction, precisely towards a revival of the very same semi-anarchist, mass-action leftism that informed History and class consciousness.
Continued: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/946/supplement-the-antinomies-of-georg-lukács