Study Group: "What is Orthodox Marxism?" by Georg Lukács

The first of our hopefully quite profitable and educational study groups on dialectical materialism will be on the essay What is Orthodox Marxism? by the Hungarian Marxist theoretician Georg Lukács (Biography), the first of the essays collected in his most famous work, History and Class Consciosness. It's a pretty quick read, but there's a lot to digest.

What is Orthodox Marxism?

I'll start reading this again at once so I can post my observations asap.

And... go!

My altogether inadequate thoughts on the opening paragraphs and section 1:

He first seems to give a brief summary of the significance of Marxist theory in dialectical terms:

“It will then 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.” Only when consciousness stands in such a relation to reality can theory and practice be united. But for this to happen the emergence of consciousness 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. Only when a historical situation has arisen in which a class must understand society if it is to assert itself; only when the fact that a class understands itself means that it understands society as a whole and when, in consequence, the class becomes both the subject and the object of knowledge; in short, only when these conditions are all satisfied will the unity of theory and practice, the precondition of the revolutionary function of the theory, become possible.

Also, this seems to touch on the themes he develops in the other essays, most especially the development and significance of class consciousness.

Lukacs leaps right into a defense of the role of Marxist theory (which has its base in dialectics). He defends the dialectical method from Engels, who he believes has simplified it to the extent of removing its revolutionary element:

Engels’ arguments in the Anti-Dühring decisively influenced the later life of the theory. However we regard them, whether we grant them classical status or whether we criticise them, deem them to be incomplete or even flawed, we must still agree that this aspect is nowhere treated in them. That is to say, he contrasts the ways in which concepts are formed in dialectics as opposed to ‘metaphysics’; he stresses the fact that in dialectics the definite contours of concepts (and the objects they represent) are dissolved. Dialectics, he argues, is a continuous process of transition from one definition into the other. In consequence a one-sided and rigid causality must be replaced by interaction. But he does not even mention the most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves. Yet 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 recognise 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.

Maybe I should read the Anti-Duhring again to see exactly what he's getting at.

He also defends it from Bernstein:

Marx formulated it even more precisely. “In the study of economic categories, as in the case of every historical and social science, it must be borne in mind that ... the categories are therefore but forms of being, conditions of existence ....” [6] If this meaning of dialectical method is obscured, dialectics must inevitably begin to look like a superfluous additive, a mere ornament of Marxist ‘sociology’ or ‘economics’. Even worse, it will appear as an obstacle to the ‘sober’, ‘impartial’ study of the ‘facts’, as an empty construct in whose name Marxism does violence to the facts.

This objection to dialectical method has been voiced most clearly and cogently by Bernstein, thanks in part to a ‘freedom from bias’ unclouded by any philosophical knowledge. However, the very real political and economic conclusions he deduces from this desire to liberate method from the ‘dialectical snares’ of Hegelianism, show clearly where this course leads. They show that it is precisely the dialectic that must be removed if one wishes to found a thorough-going opportunistic theory, a theory of ‘evolution’ without revolution and of ‘natural development’ into Socialism without any conflict.

Now if I recall correctly, Bernstein's reformism was to a greater or lesser extent based on his rejection of the dialectical method. His famous saying "the movement is everything, the final goal, nothing" is an example of this, because he separates the movement and the final goal (revolution) where they should be dialectically linked. I think it's significant that the first theorist of reformism came to his conclusions by rejecting the dialectic.

Sigh. Hopefully some others in the group will be a bit more insightful than me...

What does this mean? Was Engels mistaken not to emphasize this point? Perhaps. Though, given all of the particular examples given throughout "Anti-Duhring" in terms of the natural sciences and mathematics, I think Engels got straight to the point of how the dialectic worked in motion and did not introduce the theme in the general sense. Probably Lukacs is trying to drive some kind of wedge here between Marx and Engels in terms of their assessment of dialectics, that many revisionist tendencies and autonomist tendencies have attempted over the years.

Well, I think there definitely is a difference between Marx's and Engels' views of the dialectic, at least inasmuch as Marx limited its application to human society where Engels expanded it into nature as well. I don't know if Marx ever contributed his thoughts on the dialectics of nature. Nor do I think we should be afraid of "driving a wedge" between Marx and Engels if we find differences that indeed exist. Though I do heavily disdain "back-to-Marx" revisionism that attempts to make Engels the guy who distorted the great man's thought with all his nonsense about dialectics.

What Lukacs is doing here (I think) is attacking the Second International view of Marxism and DM. That view was rife with determinism and positivism. For example, Kautsky and Plekhanov denounced the October Revolution as adventurist because it violated some sacred "laws of development". Lukacs seems to associate Engels' universal laws of the dialectic with the Second International's mechanical materialism. I suppose to a certain extent he is correct in doing so, because Engels kept stressing the continuity of natural evolution and human history.

I'm not quite sure about the dialectic in nature myself, but I think it would be safe to say that Lukacs along with Sartre and others didn't think that it worked.

I agree. The purpose of the article is to address the weaknesses of 2nd International Marxism and assert the fidelity to Marx's original use of the dialectic in the actions of the Bolsheviks. In answer to the question What is orthodox Marxism? the answer, for Lucaks is: not Kautskyism but Leninism.

Yes. I think this is also what he is talking about in the opening paragraphs (part of which I appropriated for my signature):

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 all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. 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. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.

During the Second International's golden years, Kautsky was seen as the "Pope of Marxism" because of the close relationship he had with Marx and Engels. He was the guy everyone looked to when interpreting Marxism, and he upheld all of Marx's conclusions without fundamentally understanding the dialectical method which led him there. What Lukacs is doing is seizing the label of "orthodox Marxism" back from Kautsky and his mechanical materialism by re-emphasizing the method over the conclusions drawn from it.

I'll read part 2 now and post my observations soon...

Part 2 seems to be mostly a critique of reformists' "Marxism". They have taken isolated facts and economic trends in capitalism (namely those that point to stabilization) and separated them from the totality of the capitalist system, which includes facts and trends that point to destabilization and the same contradictions which Marx and Engels saw.

But this tendency in capitalism goes even further. The fetishistic character of economic forms, the reification of all human relations, the constant expansion and extension of the division of labour which subjects the process of production to an abstract, rational analysis, without regard to the human potentialities and abilities of the immediate producers, all these things transform the phenomena of society and with them the way in which they are perceived. In this way arise the ‘isolated’ facts, ‘isolated’ complexes of facts, separate, specialist disciplines (economics, law, etc.) whose very appearance seems to have done much to pave the way for such scientific methods. It thus appears extraordinarily ‘scientific’ to think out the tendencies implicit in the facts themselves and to promote this activity to the status of science.

I think what he's saying here is equating the methods of the revisionists with the 'scientific method' of bourgeois science. They abandon dialectics for the bourgeois view of separate facets of the economy, separate disciplines of human knowledge and so on which are not linked to each other, where dialectics would view each fact or discipline as part of a totality.

And he provides the rebuttal here:

The historical character of the ‘facts’ which science seems to have grasped with such ‘purity’ makes itself felt in an even more devastating manner. As the products of historical evolution they are involved in continuous change. But in addition they are also precisely in their objective structure the products of a definite historical epoch, namely capitalism. Thus when ‘science’ maintains that the manner in which data immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific conceptualisation and that the actual form of these data is the appropriate starting-point for the formation of scientific concepts, it thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of ‘science’.

... we must detach the 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. It is necessary because of the historical character of the facts, because they have grown in the soil of capitalist society. This twofold character, the simultaneous recognition and transcendence of immediate appearances is precisely the dialectical nexus.

The reformists' abandonment of the dialectic, as he already implied in Part 1, led them straight to rejecting revolution and rejecting the entire Marxist paradigm:

The crudeness and conceptual nullity of such thought lies primarily in the fact that it obscures the historical, transitory nature of capitalist society. Its determinants take on the appearance of timeless, eternal categories valid for all social formations. This could be seen at its crassest in the vulgar bourgeois economists, but the vulgar Marxists soon followed in their footsteps. The dialectical method was overthrown and with it the methodological supremacy of the totality over the individual aspects; the parts were prevented from finding their definition within the whole and, instead, the whole was dismissed as unscientific or else it degenerated into the mere ‘idea’ or ‘sum’ of the parts. With the totality out of the way, the fetishistic relations of the isolated parts appeared as a timeless law valid for every human society.

And so, because of their ignorance of dialectics, capitalism becomes a stable system that can endure in perpetuity, therefore it's not worth the effort to revolt against it.

Brilliant, here's my impressions of section 3:

In this section he is focusing on the idea of totality as a central aspect of the dialectical method. He applies the totality to history, demonstrating the importance of dialectics within historical materialism:

Thus with the rejection or blurring of the dialectical method history becomes unknowable. This does not imply that a more or less exact account of particular people or epochs cannot be given without the aid of dialectics. But it does put paid to attempts to understand history as a unified process... The opposition between the description of an aspect of history and the description of history as a unified process is not just a problem of scope, as in the distinction between particular and universal history. It is rather a conflict of method, of approach. Whatever the epoch or special topic of study, the question of a unified approach to the process of history is inescapable. It is here that the crucial importance of the dialectical view of totality reveals itself. For it is perfectly possible for someone to describe the essentials of an historical event and yet be in the dark about the real nature of that event and of its function in the historical totality, i.e. without understanding it as part of a unified historical process.

And in economics, where the orthodox Marxist view is vindicated and the vulgar Marxist view decimated:

We repeat: the category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity. The apparent independence and autonomy which they possess in the capitalist system of production is an illusion only in so far as they are involved in a dynamic dialectical relationship with one another and can be thought of as the dynamic dialectical aspects of an equally dynamic and dialectical whole. “The result we arrive at,” says Marx, “is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they are all members of one totality, different aspects of a unit. . . . Thus a definite form of production determines definite forms of consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different elements.... A mutual interaction takes place between these various elements. This is the case with every organic body.” [19] But even the category of interaction requires inspection. 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. This is the case with the vulgar materialists with their one-way causal sequences (or the Machists with their functional relations). 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 interaction we have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwise unchanging objects. It must go further in its relation to the whole: for this relation determines the objective form of every object of cognition. 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.

He also touches on the concept of reification of economic relations under capitalism:

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. Therefore, when the dialectical method destroys the fiction of the immortality of the categories it also destroys their reified character and clears the way to a knowledge of reality.

I think my biggest problem with the essay at this point is that Lukacs is more concerned with listing the errors one can make without the dialectical method. He doesn't really seem to go in depth to why the bourgeois view of "separate disciplines of knowledge" is incorrect outside of insisting on the totality. I personally would be happier if he gave some examples to that end. Obviously this essay is designed as an apology for orthodox Marxism, but in my view it can fall into the trap of all apologetic writings in that if you do not accept the author's premises the apology doesn't work. He does not devote time to explaining why the dialectical method is preferable to the bourgeois scientific method and why one would choose the former, outside of insisting that the dialectic is the road to truth.

Part 4 coming soon, I'd like to get this wrapped up soon so we can move on to something else.

Okay, it seems I've let this discussion stagnate. My apologies. Does anyone else have comments on the essay? I'd like to move onto something else pretty quick.