Letter Lukacs and the party

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List troops in Búdapest, 1956 Sartre's renegacy is part of a wearily familiar story. But the true tragedy of Jean-Paul Sartre is not the visions of absurdity of Being and Nothingness.

It is the tragedy of an important Marxist theoretician who, while at his best (fiercely hostile to Stalinism, could find no alternative to counterrevolution except Maoist delusions or a regresi sion to bourgeois individualism and idealism.

The genuine alternativeTrotskyism-is merely dismissed in The Communists and Peace as a species of "idealism' Nevertheless, Sartre provided Marxism with some crucially significant ammunition in its struggle against Stalinist dogmatism.

The whole thrust of his Marxist theory is directed against the dead, scelerosed abstractions which pass for 'Marxist philosophy' under Stalinism, and towards a recovery of concrete revolutionary practice.

Concrete

It is here that Sartre's existentialism, for all its individualism and idealism, is relevant. • For existentialism 1 1S above all a practical, concrete, activist philosophy, concerned not with abstractions like 'human nature' but with the living situation of men and women in history.

It is for this reason that it lends itself so easily to art; Sartre's plays and novels are in this sense an integral part of his theoretical work.

In the introductory volume to his massive Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre attempts to themselves.

contributions to Marxist theory?

a full evaluation of their work. combine Marxist and existentialist methods-to grasp history by the analytic methods of historical materialism, but also to recreate it as a 'lived' reality, as a concrete process of human transformation rather than as a mere movement of abstract laws.

Any such synthesis between Marxism and existentialism is in the fullest sense impossible, The basic assumptions of the two philosophies are in many ways mutually antagonistic.

But if existentialism' is taken in a broader sense, to mean a concern with lived, •concrete experience, it can play a vital role in revolutionary theory and practice.

• In a famous phrase, Sartre commented of the French poet Paul Valery that 'Valery is a petty bourgeois, no doubt about it; but not every petty bourgeois is Valery?. For Stalinism, nothing needs to be sala about Valery other than that he was a petty bourgeois; it is enough to mechanically "reduce his work to a mere 'expression' of the class struggle, or of the mode of production.

Sartre, while endorsing the overall judgement, wants to examine what is unique and specific to Valery, or indeed to any cultural product, which is never just a 'symptom' or 'expression' of the class It is for this reason that one of his latest works has been nothing less than a three thousand page study of the French novelist Gustav Flaubert (L'Idiot de la Famille, 1970-72), which judging by the pages I have managed to plough through) tries to unite within a single analysis an account of the class struggle in Flaubert's time, psychoanalytic exploration of Flaubert himself, and a densely detailed criticism of his fiction.

This ingenious energy might well have been put to better use elsewhere; but it is a useful example of Sartre's method.

The strengths and errors of that method can best be seen in Sartre's most important theoretical work, the Critique .of Dialectical Reason (1960).

Blocked

With astonishing originality, Sartre examines here the very structures of social practice, the formation of classes and groups, the dialectic whereby individuals 'totalise' nature and history into a 'project' , only to discover their free development blocked by the alien products they create.

In some ways, the book is a kind of materialist version of the early Being and Nothingness; the isolated consciousness has noW become subjective płactice, the absurd world is now seen as the society of violence, scarcity and alienation produced by capitalism.

Whereas, in the earlier book, consciousness and reality were eternally separated, the link can now be made. It is nothing less than the revolutionary process itsell, by which numan practice transforms history into the realm of freedom.

Yet that freedom, for Sartre, is still a brief, precarious moment.

At points of historical crisis, a class which was previously 'serialised' (negatively bound together) can become what Sartre calls 'fused'- positively united by revolutionary struggle.

But it is a moment only: the chances are that such freedom will petrify into a new inertia and enslavement.

Obvious

Sartre's remaining petty-bourgeois tendencies are nowhere more obvious than in this.

The endless dialectic of freedom-through-practice and consequent alienation is seen almost as a law of nature.

The concrete historical causes of bureaucratisation are mainly ignored. For Sartre, it is just somehow in the nature of the material world that it gets in your way, frustrates your drive to "pure' freedom, all of his work rests upon a profound duality between consciousness and matter which is inherited: from bourgeois philosophy, and is simply unacceptable to Marxism.

Moreover, brilliant as the Critique's analysis of social processes are, they remain for the most part interpersonal processes: the transactions between individuals in football crowds or at busstops beloved of bourgeois sociology.

Overlooked

They are not analyses of the fundamentally determining laws and structures of class society.

Sartre, ask a 'Marxist humanist' , is able to illuminate the ways in which individuals act, produce and transform reality; but he largely overlooks the central Marxist insight that class society operates by laws indepedent of such action, laws which, as Marx pointed out, , go on 'behind the backs' of individuals. It was this insight, in greatly distorted form, which the so-called 'structuralist' Marxists of the 1960s tried to develop; and the rise of structuralist Marxism signalled the waning of Sartre's influence.

Trotskyist revolutionaries can feel content neither with the 'Marxist humanism' of a Sartre or Georg Lukacs, or with the 'Marxist structuralism' of a Louis Althusser.

It rémains to develop a Marxist theory rich and rigorous enough to analyse the laws of class society in an objective way, yet to incórporate also Sartre's crucial concern with the "lived experience' of history.

Whatever other value his work may have, it at least has the value of alerting'us to that as yet unsolved problem. Dear Comrade, Your series of articles on the 'Founders of Modern Marxism' will prove very valuable if it prompts further discussion among Trotskyists on Marxist theory and philosophy in the context of the revolutionary action of which they are a part.

In the light of this I would like to domment on Cde. Eagleton's article on Lukacs, believing it important that we arrive at a correct understanding of the political/philosophical writings of his all too few years as a Bolshevik.

This understanding is all the more important-and difficultbecause of the contradictory attacks that have been made on Lukacs.

We have, for example, ultra-leftists accusing History and Class Consciousness of justifying the Stalinist party, while others (most notably, of late, the Althusserian Stalinists) suggest that it argues 'Luxembourgism' and voluntarism!

This latter argument is one which Cde. Eagleton, though a Trotskyist, seems to support.

And while this was undoubtedly Lukacs' position until about 1921, in History and Class Consciousness (the final two essays, for example), Lenin and other works of the early twenties he specifically argues against, it, stressing the need for a Leninist party.

This is a vital counterpart to a dominant theme of History and Class Consciousness: that the proletariat, and only it, is a revolutionary class; the emergence of proletarian class consciousness-i.e. revolutionary consciousness-though, requires conscious Marxist leadership.

The stress on the 'subjective factor' is part of Lukacs' fight against second International orthodoxy which saw socialism emerging through the development of iron 'laws' , and hence saw Marxism as merely the theory of those laws' Lukacs saw that historical laws are social, not natural laws and that the revolution has to be made by men and womenthe working class.

Nonetheless it is not correct to say as Cde. Eagleton does that:

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

Certainly Lukacs sees Marxist theory as the expression of the needs and consciousness of the revolutionary class, as the counterpart of revolutionary action, and not as a tool for value-free", "scientific' academic research.

Certainly he saw its value as being in its ability to lead the working class to revolution.

But that is surely not idealism-it is the reason for the WSL, for Socialist Press, and for Cde. Eagleton's arțicles.

It is precisely because Marxism is the 'expression' of the revolutionary class that it has 'scientific status'-though not in the Second International's sense of 'science' Lukacs acknowledges this status: he says, for example, that historical materialism:

"is no doubt a scientific method by which to comprehend the events of the past and to grasp their true nature.

"In contrast to the historical methods of the bourgeoise, however, it also permits us to view the present historically and hence scientifically so that we can penetrate beneath the surface and perceive the profounder historical forces which in reality control events.

"Historical materialism has, therefore, a much greater value for the proletariat than that of a method of historical research It is one of the most important of * all its weapons." (p.224).

Comrade Eagleton correctly points out the presence of Hegel in History and Class Consciousness-but rather oversimplifies matters when he suggests that the book is a rewriting 1.01 Hegel's 'scheme'.

What Lukacs got from Hegel..: he was largely inspired to get by his reading, of Marx. And he got what Marx himself repeatedly claimed to get from Hegel-the dialectic, although that dialectic becomes (for both Marx and Lukacs) materialist rather than idealist.

It is partly for the stress which Lukacs placed on the dialectical nature of historical reality and on the analytical importance of the Marxist dialEtic bustess that History and Class Consciousics. remains an important weapon of the proletariat in its struggle for human liberation.

For this reason, and for its development of the Marxist theory of alienation and reification, for its theoretical understanding of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat and the role of the party, for its stress on Marxism as a revolutionary theory and practice, History and Class Consciousness deserves and demands the attention of the Trotskyist movement.

Yours fraternally, London Lukacs

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