Review: Proletarian Meditations: Georg Lukcs' Politics of Knowledge

Author(s): John Flores

Review by: John Flores
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 10-14+16-21
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464596
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10

John Flores

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Georg Lukiics, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. 356
PP.
The name Georg Lukics stands at the crossroads of modern literary criticism. In a way unparalleledby any of the other options surfacingfrom
the polemical turmoil of the sixties, Marxistcriticism
is associated with the writings of one man, whose
death a year ago serves as a further signal of his
exemplary,classical stature in an era drawingvisibly
to a close. For despite that baffling admixture of
iconoclasm and eclecticism, of revolutionary claim
and patrician temperament, and despite the many
vehement and often justified disclaimerswhich have
resounded unabatingly from every corner of the
Marxist arena, Lukics' work has held up as the
sturdy backbone of a full-fledgedtradition of 20thcentury critical method. It doubtless takes greater
perspicacityto recognize that it is precisely the traditionalism of Lukaics, his compulsive quest for
normative codification rooted in an evidently outmoded field of possibilities, which constitutes his
most awesome challenge to all contending directions
of contemporarycritical theory and practice. Lukaics'
intellectual biography spans what has been lived of
the century, and his life-work embraces the entire
formativedevelopmentof Marxistaesthetics.As a result, recorded personal history so remarkablyoverlapping with the genesis and conventions of a methodology, Lukics has assuredMarxistcriticism its appropriateplace not merely as an abundantreservoir
of enticing ideas, but as a comprehensive legacy
which for the sake of survival no other approach
can affordto dismiss.
Furthermore,and of still greater consequence,
classical Marxist criticism contends to have already
passed conclusive verdict on the present-day freefor-all over the "ontological status" of criticism itself. Casting aside this stone of Sisyphus, it declares
outright that, like it or not, both "criticism itself"
and "literatureitself" are sullied to the core of their
being by "politicsitself" and, alas, by "economicsitself," and that rather than consume its efforts scrubbing itself clean, criticism might as well meet its
task head on by probing the essentialmarks of interpenetration.To learn from Lukaics,therefore, means
to be open to all intrusions, to such an extent that
a book on political ideology, in which there is not
a mention of literature, can be studied as the most
important and valuable work by a major literary
critic. This is a severe intellectual challenge, undertaken with the recognition that until he has come to
grips with History and Class Consciousness:Studies
in Marxist Dialectics, no modern critic is in a position to discard the literary interpretationsof Georg
Lukics.
John FloresteachesGermanliteratureat Stanford.

Pt/di G

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.?4

Above and beyond this more oblique significance to literary criticism, of course, History and
Class Consciousness is a book with a history, and its
availability to readers in the contemporary United
States, fifty years after its original publication, promises to open the chapter in which it may be put to its
most decisive test. Written in the dawning years of
Bolshevik victory, it extols throughout "orthodox
Marxism" as the only method with which adequately
to understand and solve the predicament of modern
man in society. Analogically speaking, at the least, it
is to the October Revolution what Hegel's The
Phenomenology of Mind was to the French Revolution. Yet far from becoming a scripture of Soviet
self-legitimization, the book was subjected to one of
the most scathing barrages of rejection accorded a
single work of philosophy in those years by Communist theoreticians and ideologues inside and outside of the Soviet Union. But neither this official
disavowal, nor the ceaseless volleys of controversy
and self-criticism which surround the book's extensive international reception, have managed to shake
the original testimonial authority of its central argument. For by illuminating the dimension of class consciousness, the meta-critical task to which Marx
never returned once he had plunged into his monumental critique of political economy, Lukaics opened
up a perspective on human history which continues
to offer a firmer basis than any other extension of
Marx to date for asserting the priority of class as the
ultimate structural lever of social transformation.
History and Class Consciousness is the document of
this singular achievement, which makes it the historical cornerstone, the germinal source, of all of
Lukaics' works and of all Marxist philosophy in this
century.
History and Class Consciousness is a collection
of eight essays written between the years 1919 and
1922. The unity of the compilation, according to
Lukdics in his preface to the original edition (1923),
is to be found in the "sequence" of the essays, which,
for this reason, he advises reading in the order in
which they appear. Indeed, the sweep of his argument,
from definitional to practical, organizational considerations of the dialectical method, provides the most
evident sense of unity to the book. From his opening studies, "What is Orthodox Marxism?" and "The
Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg," to the later chapters
on "Legality and Illegality," "Critical Observations
on Rosa Luxemburg's 'Critique of the Russian Revolution' " and "Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization," Luki.cs proceeds to apply
Marxist theory more and more directly to the imminent, practical needs of proletarian revolution. His
philosophical attention moves, step by step, from the
theoretical foundations of Marxism to the complex
of questions raised and most satisfactorily answered
by Lenin, the latter set of Lukics' essays constituting a valuable clarification and extension of the conclusions drawn in What Is to Be Done? and "LeftWing" Communism.

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But Lukaics also suggests, by way of further

prefatory advice, that readers "unversed in philosophy" leave to the end the long chapter on reification which occupies the middle section of the book,
and comprises nearly one-half of the text. Quite
aside from its sheer difficulty and commanding
length, the three-part essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" clearly stands out as
both the centerpiece and final statement of the entire book. The collection as a whole, in fact, leaves
the overall impression of a dense philosophical treatise around which are clustered somewhat more
occasional articles of subordinate weightiness. It is
true that these companion pieces, such as "Class
Consciousness," "Towards a Methodology of the
Problem of Organization," and the two essays on
Rosa Luxemburg, often exhibit the greatest precision
and most compelling line of argument, and most effectively synthesize the theoretical threads running
through the full work. Thus, the individual essays
and their sequence do afford the readiest access to
the overall thrust of the collection. Nevertheless, the
centrality of the analysis of reification, radiating a
philosophical force which confers deeper significance
upon the chapters which precede and follow it, affords clear precedence to that section in a serious
critical examination of the work.
To go one step further, what Lukaics actually sets
forth in History and Class Consciousness is a Marxist epistemology, in particular a theory of knowledge
for proletarian revolutionary practice. The full appropriateness of this subject for "studies in Marxist
dialectics" is clear from a statement like Lenin's in
his Philosophical Notebooks: "Dialectics is the theory
of knowledge of [Hegel and] Marxism [... ]. It is
not 'an aspect' but the essence of the matter" (Collected Works, 45 vols. Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1960-70, vol. 38 [1967]; p. 362).1
Running deeper, then, than the evident structural
features of the book-the unity of "sequence" and
the theoretical centrality of the reification essaythe current of thematic categories of materialist dialectics unifies even further the varieties of context
and levels of philosophical approach. The guiding
principles of the new social consciousness, such as
"totality," "objective possibility," "mediation," and
"identity of the historical subject and object," underlie and incorporate the functions of both theoretical
and practical organizational method. In this metastructural dimension of class epistemology, the cognitive process appears to encompass even the ontological phenomenon of reification and its historical
opposition, since "de-reification" as a collective social
act remains essentially the complex act of negation,
whereas proletarian knowledge in its fullest sense involves, as Aufhebung, preservation and transformation, the primacy of assertive affirmation. With this
ultimacy of epistemological considerations Lukics
does not intend to place in question, or in any way diminish, the fundamental priority of the "material
substratum." Rather, he is only emphasizing and
clarifying the most suggestive thought of historical
dialectics: that the consciousness of the proletariat,
because its history comprehends its roles both as antagonist and as protagonist, and spans the "realm of
necessity" and the "realm of freedom," must consti-

diacritics/Fall

tute a "total" knowledge both of its own historical

situation and of its very capacity to arrive at such
knowledge as well. In the closing sentences of the
essay "Class Consciousness," Lukaics describes this
dynamic, uncompromising character of proletarian
self-knowledge:
The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and
transcending itself, by creating the classless society
through the successful conclusion of its own class
struggle. The struggle for this society, in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is merely a phase, is not just
a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie.
It is equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself:
against the devastating and degrading effects of the capitalist system upon its class consciousness. The proletariat will only have won the real victory when it has
overcome these effects within itself (p. 80).
The Marxist theory of knowledge developed by
Lukaics emerges from his social ontology, the most
definitive feature of which is clearly the "phenomenon of reification" (Verdinglichung). Significantly,
"reification" is not to be mistaken for a variant of
Marx's "alienation" (Entfremdung) of the EconomicPhilosophic Manuscripts, a work completely unknown until some years after the publication of
History and Class Consciousness. Despite the remarkable parallels in conception, it is primarily the
differences between Entfremdung and Verdinglichung
which illuminate the particular qualities, and limitations, of Lukics' analysis. His notion of "reification"
is derived from that brief philosophical interlude, or
plane of transition, in the first volume of Capital,
"The Fetishism of Commodities." Lukics contended
that this chapter "contains within itself the whole of
historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge
of the proletariat seen as the knowledge of capitalist
society" (p. 170). LukSacs'interpretation bears the
mark of that shift in emphasis detectable in Marx's
development from the idea of alienation to the notion of commodity fetishism (Warenfetischismus)
since the concept of reification does lay stress on
the factor of attribution of quality to the completed
product and productive activity, rather than on the
process of detraction of quality from a more primary
human condition. It is of some ideological consequence that, in Lukaics' conception, unlike that of
Marx, this departure from the phenomenon of additive bourgeois distortion was not prefigured by an
analysis of the reductive aspect of capitalist dehumanization.
Lukaics begins with the specific passage in
which Marx describes the "mystery" of commodities:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears
to them as an objective character stamped upon the
product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented
to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is
the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same
1 Valuable reading on this subject is provided by the recent collection of essays, Beitriige zur marxistischen
Erkenntnistheorie,ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt, 1969);
an introductory discussion of Marxist epistemology is to
be found in Maurice Cornforth, The Theory of Knowledge (New York: International Publishers, 1955).

1972
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1I

IP

time perceptible and imperceptibleby the senses [...]. It

is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation
between things (quoted p. 86).
Luk~cs proceeds to work through this insight toward
the intention of the original inspiration. Re-introducing some terms of Hegelian methodology, seldom
employed though never explicitly abandoned by
Marx after his early writings, he extends Marx's
descriptive characterization by elevating it to the
status of an encompassing social phenomenology with
both basic and superstructural, or objective and subjective, aspects. As he formulates his conception,
"the problem of commodities must not be considered
in isolation or even regarded as the central problem
in economics, but as the central structural problem
of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this
case can the structure of commodity-relations be
made to yield a model of all the objective forms of
bourgeois society together with all the subjective
forms corresponding to them" (p. 83). Further on, and
pointing to the epistemological consequences of the
commodity-structure which are of most compelling
interest in the book, Lukaics writes:
The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category
of society as a whole. Only in this context does the
reification produced by commodity-relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of
society and for the stance adopted by men towards
it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for
the subjugation of men's consciousness to the forms in
which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against
its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servitude to the "second nature" so created (p. 86).
The substructural, or "economic," dimension
of reification is not the subject of History and Class
Consciousness; here Lukics cedes to what he regards
as the "completeness" of Marx's analysis and its
(in Lukaics' sense) "orthodox" up-dating in The
Accumulation of Capital. He would, I suppose, regard his own book as the partner volume to Rosa
Luxemburg's magnum opus, the faithful thinkingthrough of The German Ideology written to complement that true-to-spirit continuation of Capital. At
any rate, Lukaics clearly concentrates on conceptualizing the superstructure of economic reification,
the relationship between social existence and social
consciousness, the essential, dialectical features of
which he describes in the following terms:
The objective reality of social existence is in its immediacy "the same" for both proletariat and bourgeoisie.
But this does not prevent the specific categories of mediation by means of which both classes raise this immediacy to the level of consciousness, by means of
which the merely immediate reality becomes for both
the authentically objective reality, from being fundamentally different, thanks to the different position occupied by the two classes within the "same" economic
process. It is evident that once again we are approaching-this time from another angle-the fundamental
problem of bourgeois thought, the problem of the
thing-in-itself (p. 150).
The most consequential effect of capitalist reification, and the real meaning of bourgeois "mystification," is that it divides human existence in society,

as well as all social knowledge, into two mutually

contradictory "realities." This phenomenon of
"doubling" (Verdoppelung), the expression of reification in the realm of conceptuality, is rendered clear
and concrete in the metaphorical antithesis between
the shell (Hiille) and the inner core (Kern), surface
and deeper substance, of social reality. The outer
surface of historical existence, the immediate appearance of phenomena, presents a reality ruled by
things, divested of all human content and participation. The layer of.knowledge which corresponds to
this reality is, on the one hand, accurate and reliable
cognition, since it draws verification from objective,
perceivable social facts "identical" for all contemporary observers regardless of their position in society.
For all members of bourgeois society, reification is
the "truth," the Urphiinomen, of their social existence, since reification is but the universal category
abstracted from the concrete economic relations, the
"commodity-structure," determinative of all social
activity.
On the other hand, because men exercise different functions and participate differently in this
"same" economic order, the process by which they
convert the given objectivity into a factor of cognitive apprehension must differ correspondingly. For
the bourgeoisie, in whose experience the "things" of
reality are in fact objects distinctly detached from
subjectivity, conceptualization is a process of reflection; bourgeois consciousness can only mirror back
the surface of immediate social appearance in the
form of "laws" which affix historical phenomena as
"eternal" and "natural." The role of the proletariat
in the commodity-structure, however, is essentially a
contribution of subjectivity. The bourgeois social
process, of which it is the objectively necessary product, transforms its definitive quality, productive activity, into an object of quantifiable calculation. The
proletarian act of cognition, therefore, must not only
negate the "laws" resulting from bourgeois reflection; it must also, in order to accomplish this negation, proceed in the reverse direction from that of
the governing social process itself. That is, the proletariat raises the immediate objectivity of social
phenomena to consciousness by returning "things,"
the components of the commodity-structure, to their
origin in human subjectivity. Proletarian knowledge
penetrates the reified surface of social reality, and
demonstrates its ultimate falsity as a criterion of
validation, by detecting the inner, human core of
all economic relationships. Lukaics defines this
method of conceptualization, with its characteristic
insistence that commodity relations, are in "authentically objective reality," relations among men, as
"mediation."
The term "mediation" (Vermittlung), a category of Hegelian logic adapted by Lukics to Marxist philosophy, is really the pivotal concept of History and Class Consciousness. Its epistemological
meaning, the process of consciously breaking through
the confines of bourgeois "immediacy," is only its
most basic, rudimentary signification. For the dialectical corollary to the cognitive penetration to the
"human core" of social reality is the emergent class
self-awareness of the proletariat. The unique capacity of the proletariat to "mediate" between the

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realities of objective appearance and subjective essence involves, as both cause and effect, its ability
to identify itself as a class, that is, to "mediate" between its own subjective and objective reality as a
social entity. By seeing in itself the subject of the
"same" reality of which it appears a product, the
proletariat recognizes itself as the object of its own
knowledge. It is this argument which leads Lukaics
to his controversial definition of the proletariat as
the "identical subject-object" of history and historical
cognition. His crucial qualification, which does indicate conclusively that he is putting this Hegelian
terminology to Marxist use, is that the proletarian
category of mediation between subject and object
must be understood as involving not only the accurate representation of objective reality, but its
transformation through the very insight into its
changeability.
Here, with the introduction of the notion of
practice and historical transformation as itself a
component latent within the proletarian theory of
knowledge, Lukics clearly distinguishes between his
own conception of "doubling" and the dualism inherent in all previous epistemology. "The belief," he
writes, "that the transformation of the immediately
given into a truly understood (and not merely an
immediately perceived) and for that reason really
objective reality, i.e. the belief that the impact of
the category of mediation upon the picture of the
world is merely 'subjective', i.e. is no more than an
'evaluation' of a reality that 'remains unchanged',
all this is as much as to say that objective reality has
the character of a thing-in-itself" (p. 150). The proletariat, on the other hand, not only experiences a
change in its own standpoint with regard to reality;
its process of cognitive mediation allows it to recognize the objective possibility of a reality other than
the one which is both "given" and "truly understood." Mediation, therefore, unlike bourgeois "reflection" with its inevitable dualist limitations, places
the knowing subject, as well as the object of his
knowledge, in the context of the historical process
as a totality.
Lukaics' central category of totality, as a function in his overall epistemological analysis, lends the
process of mediation its most consequential theoretical significance.2 For the development of proletarian
class consciousness constitutes more than a penetration to the human core of reified social existence,
and the resultant subjective-objective recognition of
class identity. Proletarian knowledge takes on full
scope by proceeding out from that de-reified social
core to an understanding of the concrete totality of
history as a force at work within the given historical
reality. Here again, because of the concrete practicality and class specificity of his conception,
Lukics draws an unmistakable distinction between
his own and the inevitable bourgeois notion of universality:
For history as a totality (universal history) is neither
the mechanical aggregate of individual historical events,
nor is it a transcendent heuristic principle opposed to
the events of history, a principle that could only become
effective with the aid of a special discipline, the philosophy of history. The totality of history is itself a real
historical power--even though one that has not hitherto
become conscious and has therefore gone unrecognized--

a power which is not to be separated from the reality

(and hence the knowledge) of the individual facts without at the same time annulling their reality and their
factual existence. It is the real, ultimate ground of their
reality and their factual existence and hence also of
their knowability even as individual facts (pp. 151-152).
Even that objective "sameness" of immediate social
existence is therefore altered by dint of the known
totality of the historical process. Proletarian mediation, in this sense, assumes its specific temporal
function; it is a factor of present reality which can
truly "mediate" between past and future only when
"grasped" by the proletariat. Lukaics makes this
point in a startling passage in which he draws heavily on Ernst Bloch's philosophy of genesis and anticipation:
When the concrete here and now dissolves into a process
it is no longer a continuous, intangible moment, immediacy slipping away; it is the focus of the deepest and
most widely ramified mediation, the focus of decision
and of the birth of the new. As long as man concentrates
his interest contemplatively upon the past or future,
both ossify into an alien existence. And between the
subject and the object lies the unbridgeable "pernicious
chasm" of the present. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this
will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs
to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is
to create the future can see the present in its concrete
truth (pp. 203-4).
The real brilliance of Lukics' formulation of
a class theory of knowledge, and proof of its fidelity
to the meaning of his Marxist source, lies in his refusal to abandon the Platonic and Kantian epistemological design. On the contrary, his own set of
contrasts between social existence and essence, appearance and reality, immediacy and mediated totality, shells and core, deliberately retain the familiar
structural antinomy of images and Ideas, or phenomena and noumena. It is by taking these recognizable dualistic constructs as the starting-point and
confronting them head-on, not by sketching out
totally new categories on some hypothetical tabula
rasa, that the ascendancy of proletarian thought is
finally assured. "Just because its practical goal is the
fundamental transformation of the whole of society, it
conceives of bourgeois society together with its intellectual and artistic productions as the point of
departure for its own method" (p. 163). All determinants of reflection must collapse, and all bourgeois
coordinates of validation be encompassed and annulled, if the categories of proletarian mediation
and historical totality are to serve as a material revolutionary force. Lukics most clearly achieves this
unity of criticism and transcendence, the Aufhebung
of the category of reflection, when he states that
"thought and existence are not identical in the
sense that they 'correspond' to each other, or 'reflect'
each other, that they 'run parallel' to each other or
'coincide' with each other (all expressions that conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are
2

On totality in his works of literary criticism, see Roy

Pascal, "Georg Lukdcs: The Concept of Totality" in
Georg Lukfics: The Man, the Work and his Ideas, ed.
G. H. R. Parkinson (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson,
1970), pp. 147-71.

diacritic /Fall 1972

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13

14

aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process. What is 'reflected' in the consciousness of the proletariat is the new positive reality
arising out of the dialectical contradictions of capitalism" (p. 204).
Such is the philosophical substance of History
and Class Consciousness when distilled to its most
salient train of analysis. The relationship called to
mind by the title is identifiable as the antinomy between being and thought, matter and mind, which
has been the cardinal preoccupation of philosophy
throughout its history. Only with the advent of secular bourgeois society could this duality be recognized
as essentially social and historical; only then, history
having become the sole receptacle of reason, could
the crisis of knowledge emerge as a theoretical crisis
specific to man. Yet because the very foundation of
bourgeois society constituted the extraction of humanity from both history and reason, the categories
of human self-understanding necessarily remained
fixed in the mutually exclusive terms of philosophical
dualism. The emergence of the proletariat represented the resolution of this dualism not, primarily,
because it bore with it new "ideas," but because it
signaled the practical need to differentiate the category of "being" one step further. History as a formal concept, as the locus of human existence, was
still inaccessible to human thought; it had to provide
testimony not only that men are, but that they act,
before it could constitute a force capable of concrete
mutual interaction with human cognition. The thrust
of Lukics' argument is that Marxist dialectics, by
identifying class struggle as the specific differential
of history, introduces a corresponding differentiation
in the modalities of knowledge. Class consciousness,
then, is the epistemological correlative to history understood as class struggle. But since the proletariat
is the only class which, as a class, can understand
history in this way, it is the only class for which class
consciousness is the appropriate mode of knowledge.
"Class," the ontological specification of both history
and reason, therefore serves as the medium of their
concrete mutuality, and as the conclusive resolution
of the dualistic antinomies of bourgeois thought.
As far as it goes, this argument at no point
contradicts or distorts the original Marxist formulation; in its own terms, it stands as the most penetrating yet faithful elucidation and extension of the
"materialist conception of history" to date. The most
remarkable irony about History and Class Consciousness, however, is that in all its "orthodoxy" and dialectical profundity it misrepresents the most basic
component of dialectical materialism, man's relation
to nature, as thoroughly as is conceivable. At several
crucial points in the book Lukics insists upon the
need to draw a clear separation between the dialectics of social history and the dialectics of nature, and
to single out the former as the true domain of the
Marxist method. Early in his opening essay, for example, he remarks:
It is of the first importance to realize that the method
is limited here to the realms of history and society. The
misunderstandings that arise from Engels' account of
dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that
Engels-following Hegel's mistaken lead--extended the

method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial

determinants of dialectics-the interaction of subject
and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories
as the root cause of changes in thought, etc.-are absent from our knowledge of nature (p. 24).
Later on in the book he carries the point even
further:
Nature is a societal category. That is to say, whatever is
held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e. nature's
form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all
socially conditioned (p. 234).
For Lukaics, the dialectics of nature is a process of
movement and flux which stands over against man as
an object of contemplation, forbidding his active
participation. Nature appears, consistently, as a force
ultimately inaccessible, unintelligible, and even inimical to man, much the way society and the historical process present themselves to bourgeois
apperception.
This image of nature is so clearly alien to and
misrepresentative of the basic tenets of dialectical
materialism that it is unnecessary to cite the many
passages from the "Theses on Feuerbach," the
Grundrisse, the Critique and Capital, not to mention the 1844 Manuscripts, Engels' Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Diihring and Lenin's Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism, in which it is described and decisively refuted. Lukics himself came to an early
recognition of his offense "against the very roots of
Marxian ontology," a deviation so fundamental that
among all the trends and threads of Marxism, with
its vast array of heretics, mavericks and vulgarizers,
Lukaics can point only to the quaintly mixed company of Lunacharsky and Sartre as having pursued
the same erroneous course. Lukacs' Hegelian Marxist
contemporaries, Karl Korsch and Ernst Bloch, also
intent on preserving "historical reason" as the conceptual framework of Marxism, never failed consistently and emphatically to explain nature as the ultimate field of materialist dialectics.3
In his self-critical Preface of 1967, Lukics
sums up at some length the theoretical consequences
of his misconception. He points, first of all, to the
virtual absence of the category of labor, and to the
resultant misunderstanding of the meaning of economics, such that "the most important real pillars
of the Marxist view of the world disappear." "Marx's
great insight," he goes on to remark, "that 'even
production means nothing more than the development of the productive energies of man, and hence
3See Korsch, "Der Standpunkt der materialistischen
Geschichtsauftassung"(1922) in Marxismus und Philosophie (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), pp.
137-164, especially pp. 157-160; Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt:
Erliuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1962). On the subject of the Marxist dialectics of nature,
see the excellent study by Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der
Natur in der Lehre von Marx (Frankfurt: Europaische
Verlagsanstalt,1962), English tran. The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, 1970). For a current Marxist discussion of thledialectics of nature, see the chapter "Nature and Revolution" in Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 59-98.

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16

the development of the wealth of human nature as

an end in itself' lies outside the terrain which History
and Class Consciousness is able to explore." Lukics
concludes, "my account of the contradictions of
capitalism as well as of the revolutionisation of the
proletariat is unintentionally colored by an overriding subjectivism" (pp. xvii-xviii). A Marxist repudiation of History and Class Consciousness must be
no less far-reaching than that which Lukics sets
forth. For by presenting nature as a "societal category," and subsuming its movement under the laws
of the science of history, Lukics is performing the
decidedly retrogressive act of turning Marxism back
on its Hegelian head. What he offers by way of
elucidating the "dialectical method," therefore his
entire epistemological construct, is really only a torso,
or, more precisely, only a bas-relief version of the
rounded body of Marxism. All of the categories to
which he has recourse-totality, objective possibility,
mediation, and so forth-are acceptable, likewise,
only when subjected to substantial qualification.
An analysis of the reasons for this lapse in
interpretation lies largely in the realm of speculation.
Certainly part of the explanation is Lukics' quite
justifiable reaction against the tradition of "Marxist"
scientism, what Korsch termed "naturalist dialectics,"
which relied heavily on the exaggerations and often
misplaced emphases in Engels' later works and which
clearly emerged as the theoretical backdrop of political revisionism and vulgar "Marxism" alike. In this
respect, Lukaics' philosophical undertaking and line
of argumentation corresponded to those of Korsch,
Gramsci, Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks, and
other leading theoreticians who argued for a reemphasis on the Hegelian background of Marxism.
The other plausible explanation involves Lukics'
ideological development, that is, the prolonged dissociation from his youthful leanings toward the antidialectical, ahistorical thinking of Kierkegaard and
George Sorel, and, somewhat later, his absorption
of neo-Kantian metaphysics and Weberian sociology.
In both cases-the battle against "scientism" and
the overcoming of his own origins-it is clear that,
at least by 1923, the author's turn to Hegel was significantly more momentous in effect than his celebrated "road to Marx" (Mein Weg zu Marx, an
autobiographical sketch written in 1933). Seen in
this light, History and Class Consciousness is more a
work of transition than the first document of a qualitatively new position. For in rejecting the dialectics
shows that he was still more intent
of nature
Lukics
on attacking bourgeois irrationalism and empiricism
than on toppling the entire edifice of bourgeois
ideology. The weapon appropriate to the task was
the blunt tool of Hegelian rationalism, not the cutting edge of dialectical materialism.
Most revealing of all among the apparent reasons for the peculiar philosophical mutation of History and Class Consciousness is Lukics' motivation
for embracing the Marxist world-view. He recapitulates this development in 1967:
Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen
the internal contradictions for the time being but in the
long run it will lead to their resolution. Thus my ethics
tended in the direction of praxis, action and hence towards politics. And this led in turn to economics, and

the need for a theoretical groundingthere finally brought

me to the philosophy of Marxism [... .. My last hesitations before making my final, irrevocable choice, were
marked by a misguided attempt at an apologia fortified
with abstract and Philistine arguments. But the final decision could not be resisted forever. The little essay
Tactics and Ethics reveals its inner human motivations
(p. xi).
Lukics came to Marxism by personal ethical choice,
and not through the imperative of direct, practical
interaction with material reality. His Marxist life began, therefore, on the theme of moral justification,
a field in which he had recourse only to a politicized
version of the Kantian imperative and categories
from the Philosophy of Right. The early essay "Taktik und Ethik" (Friihschriften II. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1968, pp. 45-53) is a rather tortured treatment
of "violence unto others," ending with an impassioned,
Biblical-sounding quote from Hebbel's Judith! And
the direct continuity from this essay to the terminology and assumptions of History and Class Consciousness is obvious. The personal point of departure for Lukacs' Marxist discourse is secular
Christian morality, which he himself would doubtless
the real root of bourrecognize-ideologically-as
geois ethics. The irreconcilable antagonism, however, between such an ethical premise and the deeper
implications of the Marxist dialectics of nature represents a dilemma the magnitude of which, from all
evidence, persisted in escaping his awareness.
It was Hegelian historical rationalism and neoKantian ethics, the ideological and personal motivations of Lukics' turn to Marxism, which blinded
him, in History and Class Consciousness, to the
revolutionary Marxist conception of nature. To be
sure, he claims to have corrected this elemental flaw
in all of his subsequent writings, pointing to his major theoretical works Der junge Hegel (1938) and
the Ontologie, published in part as Zur Ontologie
des gesellschaftlichen Seins (1972), as evidence of
this ideological rectification. But there is ample indication that his entire development as a Marxist over
fifty years never fully erased these marks of origin,
and that he never really came to ground his critical
application of Marxism in the basic dynamic relationship between man and nature. Thus, even as
late as his 1967 Preface, he failed to carry his selfcriticism to the acknowledgment that his insistence
4 For example, Lukdcs' programmatic essay "Marx and
Engels on Aesthetics" in Writer and Critic (New York:
Grosset, 1970), pp. 61-88, contains the following statement: "Marxist economics actually relates the categories
of economics, the basis of social life, back to where they
appear in reality, as human relationships and past these
to the relationship of society and nature" (p. 69, my
emphasis). But the very next sentence ("Yet Marx
simultaneously demonstrates that under capitalism all
these categories appear absolutely reified so that their
true essence, men's relationships,are obscured")and the
entire passage on capitalist reification which immediately
follows conspicuously omits the interplay of society and
nature. Lukadcs'failure really to investigate this deeper
penetration of Marxist dialectics, and consistent substitution of the more acceptable term Wiederspiegelungfor
the valuable notion of Vermittlung from History and
Class Consciousness result in the rigid aesthetic theory
of this essay and nearly all of his later writings on art
and literature.

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on regarding nature as a "societal category" was itself an expression of reified ideology; nowhere does
he illustrate clearly his practical understanding of
the Marxist position that social history develops
through a process of ongoing mediation with the dialectical movement of nature. The persistence of this
dwarfed inversion of Marxism had its constricting
effects on all of Lukaics' analysis, such that he remained pathetically insensitive to some of the most
revolutionary expressions of contemporary life.
One such specific theoretical failure resulting
from his general misrepresentation of nature, and
which he never came to rectify, is already evident
in History and Class Consciousness; it concerns the
relationship between class consciousness and psychology. On the one hand he argues at some length,
as part of his effort to distinguish it from "public
opinion surveys" and to confer upon it an "indisputably practical objectivity" (p. xviii), that class
consciousness "has no psychological reality" (p. 75).
On the other hand he delineates the crucial difference
between capitalism and earlier societies in terms
which are saturated with psychological implications; capitalism, he states, is a period "where economic factors are not concealed 'behind' consciousness but are present in consciousness itself (albeit
unconsciously or repressed). With capitalism, with the
abolition of the feudal estates and with the creation of
a society with a purely economic articulation, class
consciousness arrived at the point where it could become conscious" (p. 59, emphasis in original). Had
LukSacsbeen able to accept fully the notion that by
"material reality" Marx meant first and foremost the
reality of the natural environment, he would not
have been content even with merely asserting the
"psychological reality" of class consciousness. He also would have been able to recognize the immense
practical potential of such an assertion in the cause
of raising revolutionary consciousness, that is, the
profound analogy between the dialectical method and
the method of psychoanalysis.
Wilhelm Reich defined this analogy, and the
theoretical lessons that Marxism can learn from the
discoveries of psychoanalysis, in his landmark essay
"Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" (1929).
The psychoanalytic method and its dialectical
theory of instincts, Reich observes, can serve to reveal the "intermediate stages" between the economic
conditions and the formation of ideology.
Psychoanalysis proves that the economic structure of
society does not directly transform itself into ideologies
"inside the head." Instead it shows that the instinct for
nourishment (self-preservation instinct), the manifestations of which are dependent upon given economic conditions, affects and changes the workings of the sexual
instinct, which is far more plastic (i.e. malleable). In
limiting the aims of sexual needs, this constantly creates
new productive forces within the social work process
by means of the sublimated libido. Directly, the sublimated libido yields working capacity; indirectly, it leads
to more highly-developed forms of sexual sublimation,
e.g., religion, morality in general and sexual morality in
particular, etc. This means that psychoanalysis has its
proper place within the materialist view of history at a
very specific point: at that point where psychological
questions arise as a result of the Marxian thesis that
material existence transforms itself into "ideas inside the

diocritics/Fall

head" ("Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis,"

Studies on the Left, No. 6, July-Aug. 1966, pp. 5-46;
quote from pp. 36-37).
The psychoanalytic method, therefore, in its penetration to the natural basis of human existence, can
furnish a vital mediational lever between the economic reality of the proletariat and its mental response; it can, in Lukaics' terms, illuminate ways in
which the "unconscious or repressed" class consciousness "can become conscious."
Lukaics did not accept this analogy, nor its
carry-over into the even more promising area of
group psychology as it is applied by Reich in his
Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)." Instead, his
intellectual response to National Socialism, The Destruction of Reason (Die Zerstiirung der Vernunft,
first published in Hungarian in 1953), is unquestionably his weakest book, and contains the same undifferentiated rejection of psychology as History and
Class Consciousness. The insights of psychoanalysis,
insofar as Lukaics even finds it necessary to consider
them, remained inextricably enmeshed in the tradition of German irrationalism which culminated in
Hitler. Freud was, by implication at least, merely a
continuation of Nietzsche and Dilthey and a contemporary of Bergson, all exponents of an empiricist
vitalism and philosophy of spontaneity against which
pristine proletarian enlightenment had to be on constant guard. Even a cursory understanding of Rosa
Luxemburg, and of Lenin, reveals how crucial it is
for revolutionary Marxists to avoid the sterility of
such a position. Furthermore, because Lukaics' work
lacks virtually all psychological dimension, it contains hardly a mention of social sexuality, the role of
the family, or the position of women; his concept of
the modern class struggle rarely extends beyond the
charted terrain of political ideology.
As for a more fruitful Marxist attitude toward
psychoanalysis and other discoveries of "bourgeois"
natural science, Lukaics might have done well to
learn, by analogy, from Marx's comment on Darwin
in the first volume of Capital:
Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants
and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for outstanding life. Does not the history of the
productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal
attention? And would not such a history be easier to
compile since, as Vico says, human history differs from
natural history in this, that we have made the former,
but not the latter? Technology discloses man's mode of
dealing with Nature, the process of production by which
he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode
of formation of his social relations, and of the mental
conceptions that flow from them (New York: The
Modern Library, 1906, p. 406).
Psychoanalysis, as Reich states, "is not a world
philosophy, nor can it develop such a philosophy,"
and can therefore "neither replace nor supplement
the materialist conception of history." But as a
"psychological method using the means of natural
science for describing and explaining man's inner
life as a specific part of nature," for illuminating
s See also, for a fascinating contrast with Lukdcs, Reich's
"heretical" pamphlet Was ist Klassenbewusstsein?(Copenhagen, 1934).

1972
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17

18

"neurotic phenomena, disturbances in man's working

capacity or in his sexual performance," and as an
"auxiliary science to sociology [...] in the form of social psychology" (Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis," pp. 6-7), it is an invaluable tool which
Marxism must adopt, critically, if it is to probe fully
the realities of modern life.
The same passage from Capital may also help
to reveal the restrictive and indeed un-Marxist assumptions underlying Lukics' theoretical rejection of
artistic "modernism," most prominently the innovations of Brecht and Kafka. In History and Class
Consciousness Lukics accepts Hegel's differentiation
in the superstructure between "forms of the objective spirit (economics, law and the state) which
shape social, purely human interrelationships," and
those of the absolute spirit (art, religion and philosophy) which are "essentially, although in ways that
differ from each other, involvements of man with
nature, both with the nature that surrounds him and
that which he finds within himself" (p. 234). Art, in
particular, he calls "above all a dialogue between
man and nature" (p. 235). At the same time, however, because he is compelled at this very point in
his argument to qualify nature as a "societal category," and to insist that its "form, its content, its
range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned,"
he clearly inverts Marx's understanding of technology. For that reason, he fails to grasp the vital interaction intended in Marxist theory between art and
technology as direct "involvements" between man
and nature. That is, the development of technology
itself "conditions" and "qualifies" the determinant
of social history, class struggle, a factor to which
art must remain acutely sensitive.
This issue constitutes the real crux of the extended polemic between Lukics and Brecht. The
position of Lukaics toward modern literature, most
succinctly presented in Realism in Our Time (Wider
den missverstandenen Realismus, 1958), focuses on
the relation of "literature and the class struggle"
(the subtitle of that book). He draws a sharp ideological distinction between "modernism" and "critical realism" in modern bourgeois art, and proceeds
to reject the former as a source of socialist art because of its fundamental reliance on the technological devices introduced by 20th-century capitalism
and the "ideology" which accompanies such a reliance. The task of proletarian art, therefore, is to
provide socialist "perspective" to the tradition of
critical realism as represented by Balzac, Tolstoy
and Thomas Mann. Brecht, on the other hand, endeavored to point out in theory and practice that
although the ground-rules of class struggle remain
the same, its concrete environment has been qualitatively altered as a result of sheer technological advance. His continual appeal for an "art of the scientific age," therefore, is not intended to blunt the
dynamics of class struggle, but to sharpen it by tactically exploiting the detectable changes in the mode
of human perception introduced by modern science
and technology, even though they continue to be
socially regulated by the bourgeoisie. Lukics would
probably agree, therefore, with the starting-point of
Brecht's analysis, as he expresses it in the "Short

Organum for the Theatre" (1948):

The new sciences may have made possible this vast
alteration and all-importantalterability of our surroundings, yet it cannot be said that their spirit determines
everything that we do. The reason why the new way of
thinking and feeling has not yet penetratedthe great mass
of men is that the sciences, for all their success in exploiting and dominatingnature, have been stopped by the
class which they brought to power-the bourgeoisiefrom operating in another field where darkness still
reigns, namely that of the relations which people have
to one another during the exploiting and dominating
process (Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, p. 184).
But because his assessment of modern art remains
within the categorical confines of social history,
Lukics is unable to pursue Brecht's argument to its
revolutionary conclusion: "We need a type of theatre
which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field
of human relations in which the action takes place,
but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself" (Brecht
on Theatre, p. 190).
A productive Marxist evaluation of the potentials of modern art is exemplified in the extension of
Brechtian theory by Walter Benjamin. The preface
of Benjamin's famous essay on "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) is
a quote from Valery's "Pieces sur l'art." Valery describes the immense changes in the nature and function of art which have resulted from the growth of
modern knowledge and power. The "physical components" of all the arts, the techniques at the disposal of the artist, are deeply affected by these technological advances. "We must expect," he concludes,
"'great innovations to transform the entire technique
of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself
and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change
in our very notion of art" (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York, Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1969, p. 219). Benjamin then provides this "modernist," only abstractly historical
statement of Valery with an explanation in the terms
of historical materialism:
The transformation of the superstructure,which takes
place far more slowly than that of the substructure,has
taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas
of culture the change in the conditions of production.
Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken.
Certain prognostic requirementsshould be met by these
statements. However, theses about the art of a classless
society would have less bearing on these demands than
theses about the developmental tendencies of art under
present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no
less noticeable in the superstructurethan in the economy.
It would therefore be wrong to underestimatethe value
of such theses as a weapon (pp. 217-218).
The "theses" which make up the body of Benjamin's
essay serve to shatter, conclusively, the rigid aversion implied in an aesthetics such as that of Lukics
toward the "intrusion" of photographic reflection
and mechanization into the domain of art. Benjamin,
on the contrary, points up the momentous potential
of technical innovation in the fight for social revolution, as well as its deep interconnections with the
discoveries of psychoanalysis. He argues that me-

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chanical reproduction of art introduces the possibility

of a progressive mass participation in artistic creativity, since it allows for the "direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the
orientation of the expert." Benjamin calls attention
to the social significance of such a fusion, and of
the characteristic alteration in man's relation to mechanical equipment and, "by means of this apparatus," to his environment.
The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian
theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more
or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip
have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation
which has seemed to be taking its course on the surface.
Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have
changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things
which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the
broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of
optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has
brought about a similar deepening of apperception
(p. 237).6
Both of these fields of investigation, and their mutual
complementarity, were essentially closed to Lukaics,
whose work of literary and cultural criticism, with
all its unsurpassed brilliance on the subjects of
Goethe, Balzac and Thomas Mann, will never really
be of germinal service to observers of 20th-century
art.
As for Kafka, insofar as he represents the most
profound among modernist critics of contemporary
society not expressly aligned with the socialist "perspective," it is clear that Lukracs' parameters of
analysis do not encompass his world. Lukatcs only
gets so far in his appreciative interpretation of
Kafka's technique of abstracting and crystallizing the
emptiness of human existence in modern society,
being again bound within the span of socially prescribed historical reason. Lukaics' summary statement
about Kafka is the passage from Realism in Our
Time. While granting him a keen sense of observation, "an extraordinary evocative power," and a
"unique sensibility," Lukaics concludes with a condemnation of Kafka's art because its typically modernist "allegorical approach" conflicts directly with
the normative method of fictional representation derived from the 19th-century realist tradition. "This
allegorical transcendence," he writes, "bars Kafka's
way to realism, prevents him from investing observed
detail with typical significance. Kafka is not able
[...] to achieve that fusion of the particular and the
general which is the essence of realistic art [...].
Specific subject-matter and stylistic variation do not
matter; what matters is the basic ideological determination of form and content. The particularity we
find in Beckett and Joyce, in Musil and Benn, various
as the treatment of it may be, is essentially of the
same kind" (Realism in Our Time, trans. John and
Necke Mander. New York: Harper and Row, 1964,
p. 45). Brecht's own statements about Kafka, it is
true, go little further than to regard him as a "great
humorist," although his parabolic technique and
practice of "de-familiarizing the familiar" (Verfremdung) clearly draw from the same profound current
of insight and sensibility as Kafka's unique fictional
method. But Benjamin really pointed to the enormity
of Kafka's range of vision, in contrast to even the

broadest horizon of Lukacs, in a passing comment

on the tenth anniversary of Kafka's death: "Georg
Lukics once said that in order to make a decent
table nowadays, a man must have the architectural
genius of a Michelangelo. If Lukics thinks in terms
of ages, Kafka thinks in terms of cosmic epochs"
(Illuminations, p. 113). In a word, it is vitally necessary for Marxists to recognize in Kafka the author
whose work has penetrated most deeply of all, more
deeply than that of Thomas Mann despite Lukics'
arguments to the contrary, to the core of bourgeois
society, in this sense expanding vertically, as it were,
on the panorama first presented in horizontal fictional decor by Balzac. It is also necessary, therefore, to insist that Kafka's opus, the fragmentary
epic of Verdinglichung, has something indispensable
to teach, and some invaluable techniques to supply,
to socialist artists, whose primary creative and political aim must admittedly be to help combat and
conquer that society which can only see its own human substance mirrored back at it as a nightmarish
world of objects. But Lukaics never arrived at this
full dialectical understanding-whence his consistent,
often pathetic failure, in assessing modern artistic
directions, to keep up with the prominent cultural
innovations of our age.
Finally, the limitations of Luk6.cs' Marxism
extend to his overall political position. Here again,
the inadequate corrective to his initial undialectical
view of nature persisted in dulling his sense of the
real human possibilities opened up by Marxism. The
issue in the case of political analysis and strategy has
to do with the question of "unevenness" or "gradations" in the development of revolutionary proletarian consciousness. In History and Class Consciousness Luktcs remarks that "there are not merely
national and 'social' stages involved but there are
also gradations within the class consciousness of
workers in the same strata" (p. 78). He goes on,
then, to explore the causes, features and possible
rectification of the latter phenomena of differing
levels within the proletariat, the "degrees of distance
between the psychological class consciousness and
the adequate understanding of the total situation."
But he never returns to the differentiation resulting
from "national and 'social' stages." It is on this point,
the "interference" of national awareness and identity
in the formation of "objective" class consciousness,
that there emerges the real interplay between "natural" or "psychological" and directly economic determinants of collective historical motivation. Luk.cs'
failure, in History and Class Consciousness, to pursue this dialectical interplay, the key to an understanding of revolutionary struggle in the age of im6 For an adaptation of these theories to more
contemporary economic and technological conditions, see Hans
Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituentsof a Theory of the
Media," New Left Review, no. 64 (Nov.-Dec. 1970), pp.
13-36. Benjamin applies his thesis directly to the field
of literary art in his remarkable,still untranslatedessay,
"Der A utor als Produzent," Versuche
eiber
Brecht
(Frankfurt:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), pp. 95-116. Lukdcs'
insensitivity to this entire field of analysis shows most
clearly in his crude conception of artistic "technique"in
"Art and Objective Truth,"Writer and Critic, pp. 25-60,
especially pp. 58-59.

diacritics/Fall 1972
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19

20

perialism, may forecast the revisionist position he

held in the last years of his life.
In his fine monograph Lenin: A Study on the
Unity of His Thought (originally published in 1924)
Lukics addresses himself clearly to the relationship
between colonial wars of national liberation and proletarian internationalism. He recognizes Lenin's
theory of imperialism to be "simultaneously [...] a
theory of the different currents within the workingclass movement in the age of imperialism" (Lenin.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971, p. 53). "The oppressed nations' struggle for national independence,"
he explains, "is an undertaking of the greatest revolutionary self-education, both for the proletariat of the
oppressing nation, which overcomes its own nationalism by fighting for full national independence of
another people, and for the proletariat of the oppressed nation, which in its turn transcends its own
nationalism by raising the corresponding slogan of
federalism-of
international proletarian solidarity"
(Lenin, pp. 49-50). Lukfics states the choices confronting the proletariat of the oppressor nations,
"either to kill its class comrades in other countries for
the monopolistic interests of the bourgeoisie by force,
or to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie by force,"
and proceeds to restate the Leninist strategy: "If
the proletariat wants to escape [...] ultimate onslaught, it must [...] itself take up arms against this
apparatus, undermine it from within, turn the
weapons the bourgeoisie was forced to give to the
people against the bourgeoisie itself, and use them
to destroy imperialism" (Lenin, pp. 52-53).
Such is Lukics' political prescription for evening off gradations of class consciousness resulting
from the relative differences among nations, and it
remains the tried and incontestable revolutionary formula for the proletariat within the imperialist nations.
The historical alternative which he omits from consideration, and which he never came to recognize as the
most striking political reality of our time, is that it is
the oppressed peoples and nations, and not the industrial proletariat within imperialist society, who initiate and lead the military attack against imperialism.
That is, Lukaics is true to the analysis of Marx (in
the Communist Manifesto) which recognizes in the
"uncivilized," colonized peoples the objects of capitalist expansion; but he remained insensitive to the
dialectical implications of Lenin's argument that they
would increasingly show themselves to be the most
revolutionary subjects acting against world capitalism. In fact, the relative primacy of the proletarian
role in the worker-peasant alliance even diminished
qualitatively after Lenin's strategic modification of
Marxist class solidarity, such that Mao Tse-tung
could report, in "The Chinese Revolution and the
Chinese Communist Party" (1939): "The peasantry
constitutes approximately 80 per cent of China's
total population and is the main force in her national
economy today [...]. The poor peasants in China,
together with the farm labourers, form about 70 per
cent of the rural population. They are the broad
peasant masses with no land or insufficient land, the
semi-proletariat of the countryside, the biggest motive
force of the Chinese revolution, the natural and most
reliable ally of the proletariat and the main contingent of China's revolutionary forces" (Selected

Works, 4 vols. Peking: Foreign Languages Press,

1961- , II, 1967, pp. 323-324). This primarily nonproletarian constituent alliance rising in opposition to
modern capitalism and the substantial feudal remnants that it perpetuates is not the exception but the
rule in all major revolutionary show-downs of the
present epoch.
This shift in the fronts of revolutionary ascendancy from the European and North American proletariat directly engaged in modern industry to the
national, "popular" aspirations of the largely landbased colonial reserve army of labor means that the
"identical subject-object" of history manifests less of
a specifically proletarian class identity than was intended in Lukics' formulation. For, first of all, the
face of the exploiter is distinguishable from this
vantage-point by a complex of more "irrational" features than those customarily attributed to the classical
bourgeois capitalist mongering his material profit,
which is what leads Frantz Fanon, for example, to
the observation: "When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given
species. In the colonies the economic substructure is
also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence;
you are rich because you are white, you are white
because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis
should always be slightly stretched every time we
have to do with the colonial problem." "The natives'
challenge to the colonial world," he goes on to
emphasize, "is not a rational confrontation of points
of view" (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove
Press, 1963, pp. 40-41). Moreover, the means of production and labor-power of which the rural vanguard wrests control are not the machinery of advanced industry and the dehumanized activity
conditioned by it, but the natural environment itself,
and the psyche and culture expressive of a victimized
peoples' identity. The subject of revolutionary knowledge is the landed toiler turned soldier-patriot, and
its object the variegated admixture of human demands which propel the process of decolonization.
"Dereification," that conscious arrival at the human
core of society and simultaneous grasp of the historical totality, is less directly a matter of class selfassertion than the argument of Lukaics suggests,
which does not mean that it is any less precisely
describable. Fanon, in fact, is actually applying the
terms of Lukics' analysis when he fills in the recognizable features of contemporary class struggle:
Decolonization never takes places unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It
transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's
floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into
existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new
language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the
veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes
nothing of its legitimacy to any supernaturalpower; the
"thing" which has been colonized becomes man during
the same process by which it frees itself (Wretched of
the Earth, pp. 36-37).
How far is Lukics' sense of proletarian mediation,
also, from the thought of George Jackson, that strik-

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ing subject of pre-revolution in the contemporary

United States, the offspring of slave history, fighting
for ghetto survival, turned black urban guerrilla, murdered springing his prison bars. The American proletarian revolution must gather initiative from that
psyche, that culture, and that perspective of anger
and pride, if it is to pierce through to a total victorious analysis.
The failure on Lukics' part ever to take adequate philosophical note of this variable in the formation of proletarian consciousness leads to the objectionable political position he held in old age. In
his writings and statements of the 1960's, he proposed the major tasks of that period to be furthering
and accelerating the process of "de-Stalinization"
and evading global war through "peaceful co-existence."' Thus, while Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese
Revolution were at work leaping forward from the
"methods of Stalin" and superseding them, in theory
and practice, in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, LukLcs was still heralding the wisdom of
Khrushchev and the Twentieth Party Congress of
1956; while in three colonized continents the battlelines were being drawn against the international class
enemy, Lukaics was busy devising an appropriate
tete-a-tete between the two "universally interwoven"
systems, all the while admitting, unashamedly, his
virtual ignorance of the basic relations of production
in Africa. Long, hard life-experience may provide
texture and personal veracity to the considered caution of his last years; but final testimony to the tragic
detachment of his Marxism from the real currents
of modern political history is embodied in the divergence of his biography from that of his exact
Communist contemporary, Ho Chi Minh.
An assessment of History and Class Consciousness, as of the entire work of Georg Lukics, may
depend for its balance and finality on a still greater
distance in history, particularly insofar as it will
clearly require the thorough intellectual digestion of
his most testamental treatises, the Asthetik and the
Ontologie. For the time being, at least, judgment of
the book can only be ambivalent, weighing its
strengths off against its shortcomings and emphasizing the one or the other according to the inadequacies and excesses of the particular context of historical reference. In the contemporary United States,
for example, the Hegelian rationalist backbone of
Marxism, of which History and Class Consciousness
is surely the most probing elucidation available to
date, could stimulate that much needed undertaking
of philosophically amplifying and substantiating the
intellectual tenets of American criticism. Lukics' class
epistemology, with its rigorous and coherent examination of "false consciousness," provides a groundwork of methodological premises which, if satisfactorily explored, could well fuse the diverse strains of
radical critique into an integral body of revolutionary analysis. His elaborate endeavor to understand
history in its concrete totality, as a process propelled
by the immanent objective possibility of qualitative

diacritics/Fall

transformation, is as timely in America today, and

for similar reasons, as it was in the years of its
initial pronouncement."
Yet even the less astute observer of contemporary reality must recognize the bare spots in Lukics'
account of objective totality. And to the participant
actively engaged in its dynamics it is clear that
Lukaics, by force of some remarkable feat of omission, has managed to extract the very guts from the
vital process of history, especially when perceived
with the full vision of revolutionary Marxism. This
criticism, which will surely accompany History and
Class Consciousness throughout its own unsteady
history, was first voiced by the thinker who perhaps
worked in greater proximity than any other to
Lukaics' original conception. In "Actuality and
Utopia," a review of the book written in 1924, Ernst
Bloch propounded this standing objection with his
inimitable flair:
It is enormously impressive how much this thinker has
learned from his constant reference to practical possibility and reality. But because of a certain simplistic inclination toward homogenization, in particular toward
an almost exclusively sociological homogenization of the
process, too great a price may have been paid for this
practical concreteness. History is rather, in spite of all
claims of the omnia ubique, a polyrhythmic configuration; and not only the social attainment of a still uncovered societal Man, but also the artistic, religious,
metaphysical attainment of a secret transcendentalMan,
is a conception of being, of a new depth-relationof being. Clearly, these different depth relations and their
objects are not sharply distinguishablefrom one another
but stand in constant dialectical intercourse, almost unabatingly overlapping, blending, passing over and over
and again establishing in the higher level of being the
precision of the level below. But with the restriction, or
homogenization, down to purely social material (which
reigns supreme in Lukaics,despite all striving for totality),
neither life nor nature, nor even the almost invariably
excentric contents of the dianoetically seated process of
comprehension, can be adequately understood (Philosophische Aufsiitze zur objektiven Phantasie. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 618).
Quite appropriately, Ernst Bloch's early critical reservations were prophetic, since they stand, still today,
as the final and most reliable word on History and
Class Consciousness. Reading Lukaics continues to
evoke the same reverent appreciation, and the same
disquieting impulse to supplement and qualify, as
was recorded on the spot by his most sympathetic
Marxist critic.
7 See Gespr~ichemit Lukics, ed. Theo Pinkus (Reinbek:
Rowohlt, 1967) and Lukdcs' Marxismus und Stalinismus
(Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970).
8 Two recent books of American Marxist theory, Fredric
Jameson's Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature(Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1971) and Bertell Ollman's Alienation:
Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge University Press, 1971) reveal the explicit impact
of History and Class Consciousness.

1972
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21