Treading a Fine Line

 “History and Class Consciousness–Studies in Marxist Dialectics” by Georg Lukács. 1971 English translation with a 1967 preface by the author

This is a ‘non-review.’  Sometimes you come across a book that is partly or mostly impenetrable.  One great thing about Marxism is that it brings ‘philosophy’ down to earth, demolishing various intellectual ‘castles in the air’ constructed of words and not much else.  Lukács, especially in a long, central essay here called “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” shows his mastery of bourgeois philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Spinoza, etc.  For the life of me I can barely follow this essay.  I do not have a deep background in Kant or Hegel because I never thought it useful.  I've forgotten what I knew about their terminology.  I am unworthy!  Others I’ve talked to in the Marxist Discussion Group on FB have had much the same experience. 

These essays were written between 1918 and 1922. Lukács was the People’s Commissar for Culture and Education in the Hungarian Council Republic of 1919.  After the Horthyite counter-revolution succeeded, he fled to Vienna.  In the 1930s while visiting the USSR for a second time, he was sent into internal exile by Stalin.  Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Council Republic, was executed for ‘Trotskyism,’ along with many other Hungarian émigrés.  Kun was a follower of Zinoviev according to Lukács.  He had differences with Kun which is perhaps why he survived.

Soviet troops occupied Budapest in 1945 after crushing the Nazis and Arrow Cross and Lukács returned to Hungary.  In 1955 he was appointed head of the Hungarian Writers Union and in 1956 he became a minister in Imre Nagy’s socialist but anti-USSR government.  When that was overthrown by Warsaw bloc tanks he was deported to Romania by the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. He later returned to Budapest and became a somewhat loyal member of the Party until his death in 1971.  At the same time, he knew Stalin was ‘not a Marxist.’ “The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil” he said. Yet he adopted some of the language of that strata, perhaps to stay unmolested or perhaps because he believed it.  I've been told the Party could not get rid of him because he knew more Marxism than they did.  Lukács actual record vacillates with the pressure of events as he walked a fine line. 

Lukács was one of the most prominent intellectuals in Hungary and a leading philosophy professor.  His apartment and extensive archive in an apartment block on the banks of the Danube was closed by the Viktor Orban government and the manuscripts ‘taken.’  Orban was one of the student leaders of the Hungarian counter-revolution in ‘89, shouting about ‘freedom.’  Since his election Orban has imposed an authoritarian capitalist regime in Hungary - virulently anti-communist, nationalist, Catholic and money-grubbing.

Republic of Councils in Hungary - 1919

The book has a long 1967 preface written by Lukács which makes self-critical apologies while also illuminating his relations with various other Marxists.  Lukács apologizes for ‘messianic utopianism;’ an ‘abstract and idealist conception of praxis;’ ‘overriding the priority of economics’ and says that ‘those parts of the book that I regard as theoretically false…have been most influential.” This was not his first self-criticism by the way.  He says the essays are “his road to Marx,” as prior to this he was a neo-Kantian and then an existentialist.

This explains why the book is mostly a Marxist argument against idealist philosophy, as well as against reformism.  Parts of his works were criticized by Lenin and Zinoviev in the 1920s.  As a literary theorist, his later work supported Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Walter Scott and ‘realist’ bourgeois literature against modernism like Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, etc. This led to his support of socialist realism – that and pressure from the Party, that is.

Here are my gleanings of relevant points made in the book:

1.     Marxism and the proletariat take up society as a totality, while bourgeois thought cannot and will not do that.

2.     Facts are important, but processes / tendencies are key.  Until facts synthesize into a pattern, they remain isolated.

3.     Labor is a decisive economic force, so when labor is ready to take power, it is unnecessary to wait for the ‘development of the productive forces’ as claimed by what Lukács calls ‘vulgar Marxists.’

4.     Violence is inevitable in the change from capital to socialization, just as it was in the change from feudal relations to capital relations.  I.E. ‘the state’ is not something to take over, but to overcome.

5.     ‘Reification’ is his word for alienation.  He was one of the first to concentrate on alienation.

6.     He argues against both the ‘romanticism of illegality’ and the ‘cretinism of legality.’

7.     He supports and criticizes various positions by Luxemburg.  He was against her very odd support for a Russian “Constituent Assembly’ over and against soviets.  He also polemicizes against her opposition to the role of a party or ‘organization.’ At the same time he praises her for her analysis of imperialism and the limitations of capital accumulation. 

8.     The ‘peasant question’ bedeviled the first Hungarian Council Republic and also Luxemburg – both basically didn’t know how to handle the revolution in the countryside.

9.     Orthodox Marxism is a method, not a ‘belief.’ Defeats are preludes to victory.

10.  “In pre-capitalist societies of castes and estates … economic elements are inextricably joined to political and religious factors.”

11.   “Status consciousness … masks class consciousness.”

12.   “One of the elementary rules of class warfare was to advance beyond what was immediately given.”

13.   “Every proletarian revolution has created workers’ councils.”

14.   “The factory…contained in concentrated form the whole structure of capitalist society.”

15.   He even makes fun of journalists’ ‘lack of convictions.’

16.  Unsold overstock hides in every store and is an example of overproduction. (Check the stores you visit.)

17. “Organization is the mediation between theory and practice.”

18.   He indicates that loose opportunist organizations with hardened leadership groups will downgrade theory because they tail the masses.  On the other hand, he thinks sectarianism arises when the views of even the most backward workers are not taken into account.

Lukács discusses dialectics and historical materialism, Luxemburg and Leninism, philosophy and party organization in these essays.  Much of it is a familiar polemic against enemies of revolution and Bolshevism, and as such a bit dated.  He makes almost no open comment on the events of the Hungarian Council Republic, which is quite odd given his experience and theoretical grasp.  He opposed the concept of ‘human nature,’ unlike Marx and Engels, seeing human nature as purely a social product.  His focus on alienation and culture became important for later ‘western’ Marxists. 

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “All Power to the Councils,” “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “The Structural Crisis of Capital”(Meszaros); “Marx and Human Nature,” “The Ghost of Stalin”(Sartre) or the word “Hungary.” 

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent used/cutout section!

Red Frog

February 24, 2021