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MARXISM has always had a complex, not to say conflicted, relationship with philosophy, whose ultimate source
derives from uncertainty and indeed ambivalence about its own status as a form of theoretical discourse. Marx
himself was indubitably a philosophical child of German classical idealism: his conceptual vocabulary and
intellectual preoccupations are unintelligible outside the whole complex movement from Kant to Hegel. But the
painful process through which Marx, alongside Engels, worked through left Hegelianism and began to develop a
distinctively different theoretical project pulled in two conflicting directions.1 This project involved, of course, the
two collaborators political judgement that communism, which they identified with the struggle of the working class
to liberate itself from its plight in capitalist society, represented the only acceptable solution to the conflicts of
European modernity in the era following the French Revolution. But Marx and Engels (p. 211) did not see
communism primarily as an ideology or a moral and political doctrine, but rather as a historical process arising from
the material and social conditions of capitalist society but tending towards a radically different form of society
based on the sovereignty of those whom Marx in Capital calls the associated producers.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the existing state of things, Marx and Engels declare in
The German Ideology.2 Accordingly this text, written in the mid-1840s, develops the first outline of Marx's theory of
history, according to which (as he more concisely stated it in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy) systemic social transformations are a consequence of the tendency of the productive forces to
come into conflict with the prevailing social relations of production. The transition from capitalism to communism
therefore will develop as a result of the economic crises that are the specific form taken by this conflict under
capitalism and of the class struggles between capital and labour that these crises will intensify.3 But where did this
leave the philosophical tradition, critical engagement with which had allowed Marx to develop this theory of history
and the political project that was (for him at least) indissociably connected? Marx himself famously wrote in the
eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it.4
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Lukcs's Revolution
It was in this context that Georg Lukcs effectively inaugurated Marxist philosophy as a distinct intellectual
discipline by publishing History and Class Consciousness in 1923. But although this collection of essays was an
immensely partisan work, in which a sophisticated aesthetic philosopher intimate with the leading figures in German
social theory justified the political choice he had made to rally to the Bolshevik cause, this is not the main (p. 217)
reason why History and Class Consciousness remains such a compelling work. Its brilliance lies in the rigour and
lan with which Lukcs cuts the Gordian knot, resolving the tensions we have been surveying by embracing
Marx's Hegelian heritage with enthusiasm. In the central essay of History and Class Consciousness, Reification
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, Lukcs radicalizes and historicizes Hegel's critique of Kantian formalism.
Surveying the antinomies of bourgeois thought from Descartes to Dilthey, he situates them within the logic of
capitalist society, and more specifically within the comprehensive commodification of social life inherent in this
logic. Lukcs here develops Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, arguing that commodification implies a process
of reification in which, in the one hand, social relations are fragmented through the progressive specialization of
productive activity, and, on the other, the mediation of interactions by market exchanges promotes the reduction
of social processes to natural objects, eternal and unamenable to change. The scission that Max Weber identifies
in Economy and Society between formal and substantive rationality, and the implication that modern reason allows
human beings to ascertain the most effective means of achieving their goals, but not to identify what these goals
should be, is an instance of the irrationality of capitalism as a distinctive social form, where individual parts of
society may be purposively regulated, but the whole remains beyond either comprehension or control. The same
unattainability of a rational totality also, according to Lukcs, structures post-Cartesian philosophy: the great merit
of Hegel is to have grasped the problem, but his own solutionthe reconciliation of subject and object in Absolute
Spiritmaintains the separation that Hegel himself denounces between thought and history since it is achieved
through the retrospective contemplation of the process by philosophy. It is only in Marxism that these antinomies
including that between fact and value, with which Lukcs had struggled in his pre-Marxist philosophical writings
are definitively resolved by comprehensively demolishing the oppositions between thought and the world and
subject and object. The proletariat is the identical subject-object of history: its reduction to an object, that is, the
transformation of labour-power into a commodity, is the presupposition of the commodification and reification with
which bourgeois thought has struggled unavailingly because it takes for granted the legitimacy and perpetuity of
capitalist society. It is therefore only by assuming the class perspective of the proletariat (which may well not be
the same as the actual class consciousness of the proletarians themselves) that capitalism becomes an intelligible
objector rather a totality (p. 218) structured by the exploitation of wage-labour, the pivot on which the entire
society rests. But this rational understanding is precisely not it is not the detached contemplation of the
totality. It is only through active engagement in the class struggle that, on the one hand, Marxist theory can obtain
a real grasp of the contradictions of capitalist society, and, on the other hand, workers forge themselves into the
self-conscious collective subject that, as long as bourgeois normality prevails, they are only in potentia. The
privileged locus for the further development of the critique that Marx inaugurated is therefore a revolutionary party
on the Bolshevik model that can mediate between the theoretical understanding of capitalism and the practice of
class struggle.12
Lukcs intended his tour de force as a philosophical counterpart to the political break that Lenin and the infant
Communist International were making with the timid reformism into which European social democracy had (they
believed) degenerated: just as socialist political practice needed to be reoriented around the theme of the
actuality of the revolution, so the naturalistic positivism of the Second International had to be replaced by a theory
of class subjectivity.13 But, instead of being welcomed, History and Class Consciousness was comprehensively
denounced by the leadership of the Third International. In large part this reflected the process of Bolshevization
through which the Communist parties were increasingly transformed into disciplined instruments of Soviet foreign
policy. But the dogmatic and unthinking character of the predominant Communist reaction to History and Class
Consciousness should not be allowed to conceal the presence of more substantive issues. The most obvious
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Moving On
What is striking about this survey of contemporary versions of critical theory, whether Marxist or post-Marxist, is
the extent to which, despite the progress that many would think was achieved by the anti-humanist critique of the
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Notes:
(1) Three relevant French studies of Marx's early development are G. Labica, Marxism and the Status of
Philosophy (Brighton, 1980); E. Renault, Marx et lide de critique (Paris, 1995); and S. Kouvelakis, Philosophy
and Revolution (London, 2003).
(2) K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols. (London, 1975-), v. 49.
(3) See above all G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2000).
(4) Marx and Engels, Collected Works, v. 5.
(5) Ibid. v. 236. The stress on individuals in The German Ideology, not repeated in later texts, reflects the pressure
Marx and Engels felt from Max Stirner's anarcho-individualism in The Ego and its Own, a philosophical bombshell
directed at Feuerbachian humanism. The naturalistic materialism they expound in response is one of the main
themes explored by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (New York, 1994).
(6) See especially N. Geras, The Controversy about Marx and Justice, New Left Review, I/100 (1985), and S.
Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford, 1985).
(7) See A. Callinicos, Marxism and Anarchism, in T. Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870
1945 (Cambridge, 2003).
(8) The best commentary on these aspects of Capital remains I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
(Detroit, 1972), but see A. Saad-Filho, The Value of Marx (London, 2002) for a state-of-the-art discussion.
(9) Good discussions of this dimension of Marx's thought include J. Rancire, Le Concept de critique et la critique
de lconomie politique ds les Manuscrits de 1844 au Capital, in L. Althusser et al. (eds.), Lire le Capital, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1973); N. Geras, Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Marx's Capital, New Left Review, I/65
(1970); Renault, Marx et lide de critique; M. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 6; and H-G.
Backhaus, Some Aspect of Marx's Concept of Critique in the Context of his Economic-Philosophical Theory, in W.
Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis (eds.), Human Dignity (Aldershot, 2005). An English translation of Rancire's essay
has been published in a useful selection of articles on related issues: A. Rattansi (ed.), Ideology, Method and Marx
(London, 1989).
(10) Michael Rosen offers a definitive discussion of the philosophical issues in Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism
(Cambridge, 1982). The best treatments of Marx's method in Capital include E. V. Ilienkov, The Dialectics of the
Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital (Moscow, 1982); R. Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's Capital (London,
1977); G. Dumnil, Le Concept de loi conomique dans Le Capital (Paris, 1978); J. Bidet, Que faire du Capital?, 2nd
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