MAKERS OF MO 4. Georg Lukacs

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From the 1920s to the present day, major contributions to Marxist theory have been made by thinkers indifferent or implacably opposed to the revolutionary heritage of Trotskyism.

From George Lukacs to Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci to Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Korsch to Herbert Marcuse, a powerful body of 'Western Marxist' theory has been developed, which has yet to receive full critical assessment by Trotskyists How are the Stalinist or revisionist politics of these writers to be weighed against their theoretical In this series, Terry Eagleton examines the work of the theorists named above, as an introduction to Hungarian Red Army men fight counter-revolutionary troops, 1919 Georg Lukacs, hailed by many as one of the greatest Marxist theorists of the twentieth century, was born in Budapest in 1885, and in his early life came under the influence of German idealist philosophy.

Two early works, The Soul and its Forms (1911) themselves.

and The Theory of the Novel (1914-15), reflect this idealism. contributions to Marxist theory?

• In the first, Lukacs sees a tragic contradiction between 'authentic' human values and a sordid actual a full evaluation of their work.

world. In the second he views the very form of the novel as a fruitless search to rediscover that unity of authentic value and real life which he claims, disappeared with the Greekepic.

Plunged into despair b he tirst imperialist work war, haunted by irrationalist philosophies, Lukacs dis •covered a spiritual turning-point in the Bolshevik revolution.

Proletariat Here, at last, 'authentic value had transformed real history, in the shape of the revolutionary proletariat.

One year later, Lukacs joined the Hungarian Communist Party, and became deputy commissar for education and culture in the ill-fated Hungarian soviet republic of Bela Kun. He escaped to Vienna when the republic was crushed, and began writing what was. to become his major theoretical work, History and Class Consciousness (1923)

That work must be placed in its political and intellectual context. Lukacs had moved from Romantic idealist to Marxist; but in me ways he had simp inslated the one into t working class. The working other. subject' of history, but does class is the 'universal The proletariat embodied universal, authentic. value, not know it. Because of its alienation, as suCh was to hold itself aloof from it cannot recognise itself as mise with sordid bourgeois the subject of history, and reality. has become instead the ultimate object-a pure com"Spontaneity" modity.

Landinssit But once the working class realises its enslaved this idealism talism results ra «The situation as a pure object, it somewhat Luxem burgist leftism, syndicalism and WelC able to liberate itself from will in the same moment be this condition. faith in working class 'spon- There are many curious taneity'-positions for aspects to this viewpoint. which Lukacs earned For one thing, to speak of justified rebuke in Lenin's social classes as 'subjects' at Infántile Disorder. Left-wing Communism: An into historical materialism. all is to transplant idealism In History and Class Consciousness, the proletarClass struggle iat becomes essentially Marxist' version of Hegel's The proletariat is not Absolute Spirit: some kind of collective For Hegel, the riddle ‹ individual' creating history;

story is solved when th what creates history is not a Spirit, which "alienates' 'class-subject' but the class itself in objective reality, comes to recognise that Moreover, the working such reality is in fact its class is not central to own creation. history in the first, place Lukacs rewrites f this because of its consciousness; scheme in terms of the this too is an idealist error. -Lukacs Its world-historic significance comes from its objective place within the capitalist mode of production. If this is forgotten, then it is easy to ślide, like Lukacs, into political voluntarism: the belief that all that is finally necessary is that the working class •asserts its collective consciousness and seizes state power.

Ignored

The objective material problems involved in that process are merely ignored. It is not surprising that there is much in History and Class Consciousness about 'consciousness' and the 'universal subject' , but little about the concrete material institutions-the state, the ideological apparatuseswhich for a Marxist go to make up actual class society.

One result of Lukacs's idealism is his refusal to acknowledge the scientific status of Marxism.

Reacting against the mechanical materialism of much Second International 'orthodoxy' he regards Marxism as little more than the 'expression' of revolutionary working class consciousness. Its value lies not in its objective, cognitive power; it lies simply in its ability to further the historical interests of the proletariat.

Relative

Its truth is thus relative to those interests; and Lukacs is able to escape from the worst consequences of such relativism only by a breathtaking bit of mental gymnastics. Marxism may be relative to the standpoint of the working class; but the working class iș the 'universal subject; a universal subjectivity is therefore objective.

Lukacs's hostility to Marxism as science goes hand-in-hand with • his Romantic, irrationalist suspicion of science itself.

His critique of capitalism is focused much less on the facts of exploitation than on what he calls 'reification' -the fact that, because of the fetishism of commodities' ', social life under capitalism is fragmented into mechanistic processes, of which scientific analysis is one.

Rationality itself becomes form of bourgeois 'false consciousness, breaking • up the 'wholeness' of truly human life into artificial compartments.

Against this Lukacs offers the 'totalising' movement of truly dialectical consciousness, which will grasp the interrelations of society as a whole.

It is true, of course, that dialectical thought goes beyond the . reified categories of: bourgeois society.

Purely objective

indeed much of what Lukacs has to say of the 'Tetishism of commodities' which in capitalism prevents men and women from grasping the real, underlying relations of the society, is of considerable value.

So is Lukacs's attempt to Bela Kun restore the active nature of consciousness, as against those species of vulgar Marxism for which dialectios is a purely objective process excluding the human subject.

But all this in early Lukacs is inseparable from a nostalgic idealism which at times sees the true enemy, not as capitalism, but as 'rational'. technological society itself.

In this sense, Lukacs stands in a long tradition of German Romantic-conservative thinkers who: turn distastefully from the 'specialisation' and 'mechanisation' of modern society to some more 'organic' society of the past.

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