Abstract
This article aims to bring to the surface the philosophical background of Georg Lukács’s democratic theory by investigating his philosophy of dialectics in depth. It presents an innovative interpretation of his understanding of the role of the general committee of the Communist Party in the transition to socialism, and his support of Stalinism. Its aim is to investigate, in a far more rigorous way than has been done before, the relation of his theory of dialectics to the Frankfurt School’s theory of dialectics. Thus, for the first time in the literature, Lukács’s understanding of the role of the party is analysed by relating it to Max Horkheimer’s understanding of the role of the traditional intellectual.
Introduction
One of the central figures in traditional Marxist theory is Georg Lukács. Although many articles and books have been written on his political philosophy, very few have attempted to analyse his theory of democracy by drawing a connection between his dialectics and his theory of the state, the role he ascribes to the party in the transition to socialism, and the way in which he believes class consciousness is formed. A philosophical analysis of these parts of his social theory requires an examination of Lukács’s use of the main notions that comprise dialectical theory, such as materialism, totality, negativity, non-identity thinking, the dialectic between content/essence and form/appearance, and fetishism. The focus here will be not only to identify the obvious uses of these notions in Lukács’s main political writings, but also to unearth their implicit use.
My analysis will attempt to bring to the fore a new aspect of Lukács’s relation to the Frankfurt School’s theory of dialectics by showing the extent to which his theory can be viewed as belonging to the bourgeois identity-thinking tradition. Thus, my analysis differs from the majority of the interpretations of Lukács presented to date, which attribute Lukács’s support of Stalinism to an error in his political tactics, or to the ‘sleight of hand’ he employs in assigning a central role to the Communist Party. I will argue not only that the reasons for Lukács’s Stalinism lie deep within his theory of dialectics, but, more specifically, I will provide a foundation for the conclusion (a conclusion that, in terms of the existing literature on Lukács, is ‘heretical’) that despite his harsh criticism of the philosophy of German idealism, Lukács does not succeed in disengaging himself from the framework of liberal methodology.
The paper’s goal is to offer a coherent view of Lukács’s democratic theory by showing the practical repercussions of his use of the notions that comprise dialectical theory, as well as their connections to one another. Therefore, I hope the paper will be of interest not only to philosophers but also to political scientists. As we are living in an era of crisis in which people are searching for new ideas that may help them fight for human dignity, and since all the ideological armoury of socialist philosophy is therefore being put to the test, an effort to better elaborate on the core ideas of the classics of socialist philosophy should be seen as a valuable exercise. Considering that we are witnessing intense social unrest, just as Lukács was in his time, the questions his philosophy posed and the problems it tried to resolve are not dissimilar from those we face today.
This article is structured as follows. First, I will investigate Lukács’s writings that deal with aspects of the history of philosophy, including his reading of Marx’s materialism and dialectics and the notion of labour in The Ontology of Social Being. In the subsequent section, I will explore his understanding of totality and the formation of consciousness that underpins his theory of the party and state in History and Class Consciousness and in his book on Lenin. Finally, via an exploration of the democratic deficit in Lukács, the differences in his approach and that of the Frankfurt School toward the notion of negativity will be become clear.
Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism in Georg Lukács’s ontology
Before investigating Lukács’s theory of democracy and the party in the third and fourth sections, it is first necessary to explore his reading of Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophies as his social theory follows and expands on Marx’s dialectical materialism in particular. Rather than putting the contrast between the tradition of materialism and that of idealism at the centre of his reading of the history of philosophy, as is usually the case, Lukács instead places the contrast between the tradition of irrationalism and the tradition that follows dialectical methodology at the centre of his analysis.
‘Irrationalism … hardens the limitations of perception governed by understanding into perceptional limitations as a whole’ (Lukács 1980b: 97). He accuses the irrational tradition of rejecting dialectics and fetishising reality, since it ‘begins with this discrepancy between the intellectual reflection and the objective original’ (Lukács 1980b: 99). It is thus shackled within the framework of dualism between thought and reality, for it sees reality as being ‘an area beyond reason’ (Lukács 1980b: 99). Although expressed differently, Lukács’s position is similar to what Horkheimer has to say about the undialectical nature of philosophy from Descartes until Hegel: it is undialectical because it treats reason as ostensibly neutral, and is therefore unable to reveal the collision of interests lying hidden at the core of reality.
The philosopher Lukács most admires for making an effort to dispel this dualism is Hegel, because for him, appearance ‘contains law but more besides’ (Lukács 1980b: 98). For Lukács, dialectical thinkers like Hegel and Marx endeavoured to identify the essence of reality by defetishising appearance, and sought to ‘fathom the laws governing the course of history and socio-historical progress, to discover … the reason behind the autonomous movement of collective history’ (Lukács 1980b: 125).
According to Lukács, the remarkable thing in Hegel’s philosophy was that he treated ‘the questions of subject and object, ego and world, consciousness and being, as historical problems … as forms of the historical development of human consciousness’ (Lukács 1972a: 211). The phenomena that Hegel analysed were, for Lukács, not abstract philosophical notions, but forms of consciousness for the Germany of his time (Lukács 1972a: 212). For Hegel, philosophical notions such as alienation were not external to appearance, but rather part of it. Even more crucial is that ideas in Hegel’s philosophy do not represent forms of consciousness as they exist, but instead expose them ‘in their contradictoriness: as moments of a process in which … the contradictions … produce the objective possibility of the … sublation of the contradictions’ (Lukács 1972a: 214).
According to Lukács, Hegel is the most important dialectician before Marx because he ‘managed to lay the foundations of knowledge of a complex, dynamically contradictory reality, consisting of totalities’ (Lukács 1978a: 78). Through the notion of mediation, which is the ‘categorical summarization of all the forces, processes, etc. that objectively determine the coming into being, the functioning, and the facticity of a complex’ (Lukács 1978a: 89), Hegel attempts to proceed from immediacy to the contradictions that lie deeper within reality and thus to connect the aforementioned totalities dialectically. However, the dialectical process in Hegel ‘finally petrifies to yield a metaphysical, non-dialectical object’ and ‘thereby abolishes itself as a process’ (Lukács 1972a: 215). For Lukács, Hegel’s social philosophy does not succeed in moving beyond the ‘historical prejudices of his time’ (Lukács 1978a: 110), remaining imprisoned within the plane of the fetish-form, and is therefore unable to defetishise reality fully. According to Lukács, however, Hegel’s inability to transcend the fetish-form in his philosophy occurs to a lesser extent than with the other major figures of the philosophical tradition before Marx. 1
We should now turn to how Lukács adjudges Marx to have succeeded in defetishising the forms that appear as fetishes in the capitalist mode of production. After setting out Lukács’s ideas, I will evaluate and critique them. According to Lukács, the bourgeois conception of economics ‘isolates the so-called phenomena of pure economics from the total inter-relations of social being as a whole’ (Lukács 1978b: 12), and is thus unable to provide a picture of totality. Marx’s breakthrough in the study of materialism was ‘the discovery of the ontological priority of the economy’ (Lukács 1978b: 10) to the study of the totality of social being. For Marx, the economic is the ‘prominent moment’ (Lukács 1978b: 18) in his treatment of reciprocal action, since ‘extra-economic transformations are in the last instance economically determined’ (Lukács 1978b: 67).
In Marx’s materialism, as in the wider tradition of materialism, Lukács believes that being has ontological priority over consciousness, meaning that ‘the forms of consciousness are thus conditioned by the process of social, political and intellectual life’ (Lukács 1978b: 31).
The way in which Lukács interprets materialism is unavoidably strongly connected to the way he understands Marx’s dialectics. He contends that dialectics in its Marxian sense refers to an interaction between economic and extra-economic phenomena in social life (Lukács 1978b: 34). However, since the economic moment is predominant, ‘Extra-economic moments … emerge with a necessity that is dictated by the law of value itself’ (Lukács 1978b: 35). Similarly, Lukács holds the view that in Capital, one encounters the continuous interaction ‘between the strictly law-like character of the economic, and … the relations … of the extra-economic’ (Lukács 1978b: 36).
In Lukács’s understanding of the dialectical relation between form/appearance and essence/content, ‘the essence of the ontological development consists in the economic progress … and … the ontologically necessary and objective contradictions involved in this are its forms of appearance’ (Lukács 1978b: 47). Lukács is clear that the innovative aspect of Marx’s dialectical method is that ‘abstractions and thought experiments are not determined by epistemological or methodological … standpoints, but by the thing itself’ (Lukács 1978b: 49). For Lukács, Marxian dialectics reveals the different reified forms that the economy takes because it considers the economic dimension of reality ‘the primary dynamic centre of social being’ (Lukács 1978b: 49), and ‘the Marxist ontology of social being assigns priority to production’ (Lukács 1978b: 59).
Lukács also stresses that the totality formed by the dialectical and contradictory unity of society should not be understood as ‘a unity that emerges as the end product of the interaction of … heterogeneous processes’ (Lukács 1978b: 60). He emphasises the open character of the Marxian dialectic, in contradistinction to the closed Hegelian dialectic. Lukács attempts to make the open character of his interpretation of Marx’s dialectics more evident by highlighting that although productive relations are predominant in the last instance, this does not mean that we should reduce non-economic relations to their dependence upon technology. To do so would lead to a fetishised and reified view of productive relations, and for Lukács, therefore, production also has a socioeconomic character (Lukács 1978b: 66).
The discussion should now turn to the meaning of mediation in Lukács’s thinking, since this is the term used to express and clarify the connection between the different dimensions of reality. In Lukács’s view, the base and superstructure have a dialectical relation to each other because labour, ‘as the original form of practice’ (Lukács 1980a: 23), is the essence of reality. He stresses that Marx’s materialism is not mechanical, because men are able to change the course of the dialectic of nature through their labour, and that Marx differentiated himself from earlier materialism by putting labour at the centre of the relation between theory and practice (Lukács 1980a: 54). For Lukács, human beings’ mediation to nature must take place through labour because only through it can man consciously transform natural causality. Therefore, the immanent tendency of the economy to develop into a closed system is neutralised (Lukács 1980a: 87). By attributing an ontological priority to the economic dimension of reality, Lukács contends that people’s ability to intervene in the immanent tendencies of the economy is of primary importance, and considers that he has therefore succeeded in attributing an open character to the dialectical development of his philosophical categories.
According to Lukács’s reading of the history of philosophy, idealism fetishised phenomena because in its framework, ‘Only those forms of social practice that are far removed from the metabolism between society and nature are taken into account’ (Lukács 1980a: 68). He therefore believes that by making labour the basis of one’s social theory, the social character of the philosophical categories comes to the fore.
Closely related to the notion of mediation is that of antithesis. For Lukács, ‘The most acute antithesis’ in the capitalist mode of production is that ‘between objective economic progress … and its human consequences’ (Lukács 1980a: 91). This antithesis refers to the collision between the values that stem from economic development and those that stem from the protection of human needs. The heterogeneity and opposition of these values leads to ‘the uneven clarity of meaning of the overall socio-historic process’, and to the fact that this entire process is a ‘dynamic totality’ (Lukács 1980a: 97). In his thinking, the collision of values is responsible for the fetishisation of the forms; that is to say, for the fact that it is difficult to penetrate the essence that lies hidden inside the immediate appearance of forms.
Lukács attempts to protect himself from any accusation of determinism by indirectly contending that class struggle is not a mere reflection of productive relations, but ‘is always a synthesis of economic law and extra-economic components … it is a question here of whether and to what extent moments of chance intervene in the functioning of economic laws’ (Lukács 1978b: 97). While he may stress that, in his philosophy, scientific laws are nothing else but tendencies (Lukács 1978b: 103), it appears that Lukács regards class struggle as taking place in an extra-economic dimension, thus raising the suspicion that Lukács retains the idea of the separation of structure and agency encountered in traditional liberal identity thinking.
This suspicion grows with Lukács’s contention that ‘Marx correctly ascribed economic regularities a similarly general validity to that of natural laws’ (Lukács 1978b: 149). Throughout his chapter on ontology in Marx, he reiterates the argument that although the superstructure is an autonomous entity, an autonomous dimension, its existence presupposes the process of economic reproduction. Despite this, Lukács’s economy and consciousness (the superstructure) remain two different entities, two different dimensions, however strongly interrelated they may be.
This anti-dialectical separation of structure and agency can also be seen towards the end of his chapter on Marx in The Ontology of Social Being, where he argues that Marx regards socialism as the ‘necessary product of the internal dialectic of social being, of the self-development of the economy … as well as of the class struggle’ (Lukács 1978b: 159). The economic is ‘a second nature … an objectivity completely independent of individual alternative acts’ (Lukács 1978b: 160). In one of his last interviews, Lukács stated that ‘Nature – organic as much as inorganic nature – runs its course … according to its own dialectic, independent of the teleological projects of men’ (Pinkus 1975: 74).
Before moving on to examine Lukács’s account in History and Class Consciousness, some further criticisms should be made. Contrary to Lukács’s analysis, nowhere does Marx identify materialism with the pre-eminence of the economic dimension or of the forces of production. In The Holy Family, Marx distinguishes his materialism from the French materialism of the 18th century by stressing that the latter ‘will be defeated forever by materialism, which … coincides with humanism’ (Marx 1975a: 125). At the heart of humanism is the fact that men, by drawing all their knowledge from experience, from the significance of industry or enjoyment, are able to assert their true individuality, which presupposes the coincidence of true human interests and the interest of humanity (Marx 1975a: 130-131).
In his criticism of Hegel, Marx emphasises that criticism of speculative philosophy should focus upon practice: Theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root of the matter is man himself. (Marx 1975b: 182)
The centrality of human practice to Marx’s materialism is reiterated in his ‘Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach’ 2 (Marx 1976a: 8). Lukács’s interpretation that the economy or productive forces fully define or express Marx’s meaning of practice appears unsustainable.
In fact, the interrelation between the economic and the political on which Lukács focuses is not a distinctive characteristic of Marx’s philosophy, but rather a typical feature of liberal philosophy. It could be argued that Adam Smith had a materialist 3 philosophy of history, since he explicitly assessed progress in terms of the extent to which every stage of civilisation promoted the division of labour. Smith adjudged those countries with ‘the highest degree of industry and improvement’ as having progressed further than those in which ‘the separation of different trades and employments from one another’ did not take place (Smith 1999: 111). He also pointed to the inextricable connection between consciousness and labour by stressing that ‘the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments’ (Smith 1937). J.S. Mill made the same connection, as can be seen by the subtitle of his main work on economics, Principles of Political Economy, as well by the title of its fourth book. 4
Hegel had a more insightful appreciation of the social decomposition that the capitalist mode of production inevitably causes than perhaps any other liberal thinker, because he put labour at the centre of his philosophy. He held that in the capitalist mode of production, the ethical principle of the business class (the class that Marx would call ‘capitalists’ a few years later) vanishes, and that a part of this class succumbs to barbarism. ‘This happens most necessarily, or rather immediately, through the inner constitution of the class’ (Hegel 1979: 171, 491§). He also considers possession of property so important that he asserts that ‘Not until he has property does the person exist as reason’ (Hegel 1991: 73, 41§).
Contrary to such liberal thinking, Marx’s dialectic of essence/content and form/appearance seeks to show that the constituted forms under which we live – such as value as money, the bourgeois parliamentary system, or the state – are forms constituted by the way in which people come into contact with each other and with nature in order to satisfy their elementary human needs, meaning that these forms are nothing but forms of human social practice. Marx’s critique ‘charges that this practice exists against itself as a mere personification of economic objectivity in the form of capital’ (Bonefeld 2001), and by doing this, it defetishises the forms by revealing their essence, their human content, the human practice that lies hidden in them.
Form-fetishes, such as the state or value as money, are the mystified appearance of the topsy-turvy world; that is, the irrational way in which people come into contact with each other in order to satisfy their basic human needs. The irrationality stems from the fact that this contact takes place via the subordination of our ‘doing’ to the logic of capital, the logic of ‘time is money’. This results in the irrational fact that people’s daily practice does not fulfil the initial goal of their actions – that is, to satisfy their needs – but rather satisfies the need of money to multiply itself. Thus, thinking in materialist terms does not mean that we should attribute priority to the economy or that we should deem it the predominant moment in the last instance, as Lukács believes.
Moreover, in Open Marxism, which has its basis in the Frankfurt School theory and is the interpretation of Marxian thought that I follow, thinking in dialectical terms does not mean that we should strive to connect the economic and the extra-economic dimensions of reality, as Lukács’s analysis attempts to do. Rather, dialectical thinking signifies our awareness of the irrationality of having organised our existence under the logic of ‘time is money’, a logic that gives rise to many different forms that appear rigid and natural. This is why Marx states in Capital Volume III that we live in ‘an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’ (Marx 1998: 817) that is in its essence contradictory.
The contradiction of opposed class interests that promote different values is hidden behind every form-fetish. The contradiction is that between, on the one hand, the values that underpin the logic of the capitalist system – accumulation of wealth, competition, hard work, and ‘time is money’; and on the other hand, the values that protect human dignity, such as solidarity and putting people’s needs above profits. This contradiction lies in the content, the essence of reality, and appears as all these different reified fetish-forms.
In the single reality in which we live, the economic dimension cannot be separated from the extra-economic dimension, as such a view would necessitate the existence of two realities rather than one. Value or money is not a purely economic form, as Lukács contends, but a social relation, a fetish, a reified form of appearance of the logic according to which we have organised our daily existence. Therefore, the essence that produces the many different reified, perverted fetish-forms is not that of only one dimension of reality (in Lukács’s thinking, this would be the economic), but the way we have organised our life in order to satisfy our most elementary needs.
When the above is considered, it is clear that Lukács remains shackled to an undialectical separation of reality into structure and agency, logic and history. The economic dimension of reality does not have a separate internal dialectic that can be modified by people’s consciousness or class struggle, which ostensibly occur in another dimension. On the contrary, the economic, the political, ideology and ethics are mediated to each other; they exist through each other; they are separate in unity, being forms of the same essence, of the most important relationship in society, namely, the way people connect their doing in order to satisfy their most basic needs. Class struggle takes place in the essence of reality, a reality that appears as many form-fetishes, and all the forms of appearance are forms of expression of the class struggle. Society is class struggle. When this is taken into consideration, we are able to move beyond the trivial notion that all forms are interrelated, or that a specific dimension of reality is always predominant in the last instance.
Lukács’s understanding of contradiction is closer to liberal methodology than to the critical-dialectical perspective. Liberal philosophers like Hegel or J.S. Mill would concur with Lukács’s idea that, after a certain point, the values that stem from economic development run counter to the protection of human needs. This explains why they adopt a lukewarm attitude toward the values of accumulation of wealth and competition. For them, it is the state’s responsibility to restrict the excesses of capital accumulation and to promote ‘capitalism with a human face’. J.S. Mill goes so far as to suggest that after a point, economic growth would no longer be necessary, and that people would no longer be pushed to become Marx’s ‘vampires of capital’. 5
Merely diagnosing the incompatibility of the two value systems does not make a methodology dialectical, and nor does it explain either the ‘uneven clarity of meaning of the overall … process’ (Lukács 1980a: 97) to which Lukács refers (that is, the mystified, perverted form that essence takes), or the dynamic character of totality. Totality is dynamic and inherently contradictory because a ‘tension characterizes all the concepts of the critical way of thinking’ (Horkheimer 2002: 208). Forms are the mystified way in which the contradiction is being expressed. This contradiction means that, on the one hand, we have to act as ‘vampires of capital’ haunted by the logic of the accumulation of wealth and hard work in order to survive; but on the other, this subordination perpetuates the existence of the fetish forms that dominate us.
For the Frankfurt School theory, contradiction is immanent in the reified form, since the form is an expression of the class conflict that lies within the essence of reality. Form-fetishes are in their essence modes of appearance of the class struggle, of the collision of values that promote opposing class interests. As a result, forms and categories are open because they are products of the historical struggle between the opposed value systems.
Lukács’s theory of dialectics differs radically from the above interpretation. He contends that his dialectic can be considered open because people are able to change the course of development of the economy. In the interaction between the economic and the extra-economic realms, the latter can cause a change of course in the former. This does not mean, however, that Lukács succeeds in dereifying or denaturalising form-fetishes. An optimistic liberal such as J.S. Mill might follow Lukács in agreeing that people can transform the economy so that their basic needs are finally met. Nevertheless, forms such as the state, the bourgeois-democratic parliamentary system, or abstract labour that must be transformed into money retain their validity and existences in such thinking, remaining rigid, fetishised and naturalised no matter what changes are made to the way in which the economy functions. This is identity thinking, since the content of the forms is exhausted in their current form: forms have been transformed into transhistorical entities because, despite dereification, they retain their existence. Considering the above, it seems that totality for Lukács is not open after all, as the basic structure of bourgeois identity thinking about democracy remains untouched in his theory.
In the following section, I will attempt to show in greater detail how this occurs in Lukács’s theory. I will expand on how the democratic deficit in his thought is the result of his adopting an understanding of the notion of contradiction that, as previously mentioned, liberal philosophers would have no problem consenting to.
Totality and the formation of class consciousness in Lukács’s Marxism
Now that Lukács’s understanding of dialectical materialism has been briefly explored, it is time to investigate the practical repercussions of his theory of totality and dialectics by focusing on how class consciousness is formed.
Lukács’s main goal in History and Class Consciousness is to set out what it means for someone to have class consciousness, and to analyse how this is formed. For Lukács, having class consciousness equates with being able to dereify, to defetishise reality. But what does it mean to defetishise the plane of immediate appearance? Since Lukács does not regard contradiction as existing inside the form, then the form (such as the state) cannot be defetishised. For Lukács, the form is not a perverted, mystified mode of appearance of an essence that lies deeper within it. Rather, mystification, or the ‘uneven clarity’ (Lukács 1980a: 97) that Lukács refers to, is caused by the heterogeneity and opposition/contradiction of values to each other, values that lie outside the form.
Mystification, which is caused by the phenomenon of the topsy-turvy world, is caused in its turn by the fact that the human content from which the form stems appears as something different than it really is. The undemocratic, perverted way with which people come into contact with each other in capitalism to satisfy their most elementary needs under the logic of time is money causes the collision of class interests – the essence that appears as many fetishised forms. The many different fetishised forms are forms of appearance of class struggle. Therefore, fetishism is not caused by a collision of economic and non-economic values, as in the view held by liberals and Lukács, but by the fact that the contradictory way in which we as a society have organised our time does not become immediately apparent.
In Lukács’s theory, defetishisation takes place when one has a theory of the whole and thus becomes aware of the real tendencies of the whole process (Lukács 1971: 10). ‘To comprehend it is to recognize the direction taken (unconsciously) by events and tendencies towards the totality. It is to know the direction that determines concretely the correct course of action at any given moment’ (Lukács 1971: 23). To have class consciousness means to be able to ‘develop a dialectical contradiction between its immediate interests and its long-term objectives, and between the discrete factors and the whole’ (Lukács 1971: 71); ‘it means to advance beyond what is immediately given’ (Lukács 1971: 72). Only those who make the distinction between ‘the momentary interest and the ultimate goal’ (Lukács 1971: 72) can become conscious ‘of the historical role of the class’ (Lukács 1971: 73), and thus have class consciousness.
For Lukács, those who have authentic class consciousness are capable of showing that although immediacy appears objective, it is the product of man. In this way, the economic structure of society is revealed (Lukács 1971: 159), ‘the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve’ (Lukács 1971: 168), and the proletariat is ‘able to point out the road along which the dialectics of history is objectively impelled’ (Lukács 1971: 197).
Class consciousness is equated to the dialectic which is a specific kind of knowledge that, through a diagnosis of the immanent tendencies of capitalism, leads to the knowledge of the totality of the social process and thus can indicate to the proletariat the necessary strategy. Dialectics is a method that can be applied after it has been taught. Once taught the dialectic, one can learn to ‘observe the perpetually new phenomena constantly produced under the laws of historical development; … to find in historical necessity the moment of activity’ (Lukács 1997: 88).
As expected, Lukács holds that only a very few are able to acquire this special knowledge. ‘Some sections of the proletariat have quite the right instincts as far as the economic struggle goes’, but ‘when it comes to political questions they manage to persist in a completely utopian view’ (Lukács 1971: 78). There is a ‘distance that separates the consciousness of even the most revolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat’ (Lukács 1971: 80). The result of this is that ‘In the absence of a real understanding of the interaction between politics and economics a war against the whole economic system … is quite out of the question’ (Lukács 1971: 78). The very few who have authentic class consciousness, a view of the totality, must ‘unite the spontaneous discoveries of the masses, which originate in their correct class instincts, with the totality of the revolutionary struggle, and bring them to consciousness’ (Lukács 1997: 88). This knowledge is brought to the working class ‘from outside’ (Lukács 1997: 99; Pinkus 1975: 87).
The gap between the elite and the mass of the proletariat is so large that the elite, as the bearer of true class consciousness, is able ‘to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess … the interests arising from it’ and their impact ‘on the whole structure of society’ (Lukács 1971: 51). Lukács therefore differentiates between empirically given thoughts and the ‘imputed class consciousness’ that comes from outside and must be learnt by the masses (Lukács 1971: 51). Because ‘the objective economic situation is not immediately apparent in its objective correctness, then the guidelines … must be found deliberately’ (Lukács 2000: 71), that is, they must be learnt from those who have imputed consciousness, 6 from those who know the laws-tendencies that are immanent in the economy but are not apparent in immediacy.
One can infer from the above that ordinary workers, who by their daily activity are forced to perpetuate the social relation of capital via the surplus-value they produce, cannot play any part in the process of dereification, denaturalisation, or defetishisation of the forms, but only accept the decisions that come from above, from the elite, from the labour aristocracy that possesses the authentic truth.
In Lukács’s social philosophy, form-fetishes are not expressions of the contradiction within which every worker is forced live in order to sustain his or her existence. 7 This contradiction means that the worker is haunted by the logic of ‘time is money’, and is forced to transform his or her concrete labour into abstract labour (that is, into money) in order to survive, and in so doing, to produce and reproduce the entire social structure and the reified forms that are necessary for the accumulation of money by money, through competition, to take place. Since for Lukács this contradiction lies outside the reified forms, they are not understood, as they are by Marx, as perverted, mystified, inherently contradictory expressions of the topsy-turvy world.
By employing traditional bourgeois identity thinking rather than attempting to penetrate through the ‘fact’, and inside the form, Lukács classifies the form and compares it to similar forms. In so doing, he accepts the existence of the form-fetish, and dogmatically asserts its actuality without explaining its existence. He presupposes the existence of that which must be explained and thus naturalises it. He falls ‘victim to the illusion that property and profit no longer play a key role’ (Horkheimer 2002: 236) in the formation of the reified forms, since the conflict of values is not in their essence. To put it another way, for Lukács, reified forms, such as the state, do not stem from the logic according to which we, as a society, have chosen to spend our time – the logic of ‘time is money’, the logic upon which the capitalist mode of production depends.
If the contradiction under which the ordinary worker is forced to live in his or her everyday life does not play any role in the process of fetishisation/reification, then solving this contradiction cannot play a role in the process of dereification/defetishisation. If fetishism is caused by the collision of economic and extra-economic values, as Lukács maintains, then only those who possess the true understanding of the immanent tendencies of the economy can point the way towards dereification/defetishisation. For Lukács, then, class struggle presupposes the possession of a specific kind of knowledge that only an elite few can have. When this aspect of Lukács’s reasoning is acknowledged, the democratic deficit in his theory becomes clear.
As previously noted, Lukács gives the false impression that he adopts an open dialectic similar to that of the Frankfurt School. For example, he stresses that ‘dialectics is not imported into history … but is derived from history made conscious as its logical manifestation at this particular point in its development’ (Lukács 1971: 177), and that ‘every phenomenon is recognized to be a process’ (Lukács 1971: 184). However, when Lukács’s words and philosophy are viewed through the analytic prism that I have presented in this article, a different conclusion must surely be reached.
The fact that Lukács’s reading of fetishism does not stem from Marx’s dialectic of the topsy-turvy world explains why Lukács does not regard class struggle as taking place every time ordinary workers pit their human dignity against the rule of money. For Lukács, class struggle occurs only when workers attempt to control the totality by retaining the fetish-form that they wish to abolish at some undetermined stage in the future. Since totality can be known and controlled, he ignores the ‘untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived’, the remainder that is left when objects ‘go into their concepts’, the ‘sense of non-identity’ (Adorno 1973: 5), ‘the chaotic … that which has not been included’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2011: 27).
‘The chaotic’ refers to the fact that we cannot predict beforehand what form the decision-making process will take if people choose to organise their daily means of subsistence by a different logic to that of capital, to that of ‘time is money’. We are thus destined to live in and against the uncertainty that the chaotic causes. Any claim to certainty leads to identity thinking, to a closed dialectic, to a prediction of human action, and thus to a limitation of human creativity. The dialectical materialist cannot have faith in any certainty, much less the privileged knowledge of totality that Lukács presupposes, since no knowledge can provide us with a conclusive image of reality (Horkheimer 1993: 239) or of human creativity. The materialistic dialectic has an open-ended character that ‘does not regard the “rational” as completed at any point in history’ (Horkheimer 1978a: 437-438). Instead, because ‘the rational is never totally deducible’ (Horkheimer 1978b: 107), the dialectic is open and negative.
Lukács’s abandonment of the critical open-ended character of dialectics is also apparent from his reading of class in Marx. Lukács interprets Marx’s phrase ‘class for itself’ as meaning that ‘the class struggle must be raised from the level of economic necessity to the level of conscious aim and effective class consciousness’ (Lukács 1971: 76). However, this interpretation does not accurately reflect Marx’s meaning in The Poverty of Philosophy, which Lukács cites. Here, Marx highlights that although the mass of workers has common interests and is ‘already a class as against capital’, it is only ‘In the struggle … [that] this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests’ (Marx 1976b: 211). Nowhere in his writings does Marx presuppose a specific knowledge, such as that of the whole or of long-term objectives, that could be considered a ‘true class consciousness’ (Lukács 1971: 76) or an ‘authentic class consciousness’ (Lukács 1971: 80) that might make the class struggle effective. For Lukács, then, class is a closed category. In Marx, however, we see that class is an open category that forms its content during the process of the struggle, and thus cannot have a presupposed ‘authentic content’. 8
Defetishising the Party: Negativity in Lukács and Frankfurt School theory
Because Lukács regards the attainment of class consciousness as possible ‘only gradually and after long, difficult crises’ (Lukács 1971: 259), with the proletariat having ‘to suffer before it achieves ideological maturity, before it acquires a true … class consciousness’ (Lukács 1971: 76), the power of negativity is essentially postponed until the future. For Lukács, since ‘The proletariat’s real productive energy can only awaken after its seizure of power’ (Lukács 1997: 68), defetishisation and negativity can come to the fore only when this has been achieved, since ‘the mental achievements essential to the conduct of the economy and the state will only become apparent to large sections of the proletariat after it has come to power’ (Lukács 1971: 267). In Lukács’s reasoning, then, dereification can occur only at a point sometime in the future, because ‘Until the objective crisis of capitalism has matured and until the proletariat has achieved true class consciousness and the ability to understand the crisis fully, it cannot go beyond the criticism of reification’ (Lukács 1971: 76; see also Lukács 1971: 70).
This does not mean, however, that the proletariat should patiently wait for the crisis to develop by itself. In such a case, ‘”the natural laws” governing the economic process … would not lead to the simple downfall of capitalism or to a smooth transition to socialism’ (Lukács 1971: 306). Instead, the proletariat must accelerate the development of the existing tendencies through its conscious action (Lukács 1971: 250; see also Lukács 1997: 32) and provoke the crisis, since ‘crisis always signifies a point of – relative – suspension of the immanent laws of capitalist evolution’ (Lukács 1971: 243). After the crisis has begun to develop, the economy will presumably be consciously directed (Lukács 1971: 251).
For Lukács, the elite of the labour movement, those with the requisite understanding of the dialectical method so as to be able to make the most accurate diagnosis of the dialectical development of the immanent laws, must assume leadership of the proletariat in the form of the vanguard party. ‘The Party is assigned the sublime role of bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the conscience of its historic vocation’ (Lukács 1971: 41), and must be ‘always a step in front of the struggling masses, to show them the way’ (Lukács 1997: 35).
Considering that the class consciousness of the masses is likely to develop slowly even under the guidance of the vanguard elite, the party: is sometimes forced to adopt a stance opposed to that of the masses; it must show them the way by rejecting their immediate wishes. It is forced to rely upon the fact that only post festum, only after many bitter experiences will the masses understand the correctness of the party’s view. (Lukács 1971: 329) Its politics may not always accord with the empirical reality of the moment … But the ineluctable course of history will give it its due. (Lukács 1971: 42)
Given the aforementioned gap between the consciousness of the elite and the masses and ‘the stratification of consciousness within the class’ (Lukács 1971: 326), the detachment of the Communist Party from the rest of the proletariat – its ‘temporary isolation’ (Lukács 1997: 35) – is a risk that Lukács considers unavoidable.
However, Lukács stresses the fact that the party must not impose its views on the masses from above in a one-dimensional way, but must have the ability to be self-critical, to learn from the spontaneous creativity of the masses and not ‘function as a stand-in for the proletariat’ (Lukács 1971: 327). However, no matter how good the party’s disposition toward the masses, ‘Party organization must … be of the utmost severity and rigour in order to put its ability to adjust into practice’ – an adjustment that ‘is impossible without the strictest party discipline’ (Lukács 1997: 35; see also Lukács 1971: 316).
What happens if there is a disagreement between the masses and the vanguard party? Can the masses stand up to the decisions of the party and reveal their opposition? Although Lukács does not pose the question directly, what emerges from his analysis is, I believe, a negative answer, and any scope for disagreement is therefore eliminated. The masses must subordinate themselves to the ‘conscious collective will’, which for Lukács could not be other than the Communist Party (Lukács 1971: 315). Furthermore, since ‘history will give it [the party] its due’ (Lukács 1971: 42), the masses must succumb to the rule of the party, accept their intellectual inferiority, and patiently wait for time to reveal the correctness of the party’s decisions. In every instance where the ideas of the party and the masses diverge, therefore, the masses are to be considered wrong in advance, because as we have seen, the party can predict the ideas that the masses would have if they were ideologically mature. Thus, contrary to Lukács’s contention, a dialogue that might prove stimulating for all cannot exist because one of the two participants, the general committee of the party, holds the one and only truth. The ordinary worker can participate in perceiving the totality only by accepting the ideas of the party, of those who hold the authentic truth, or as one might say, the monopoly of class consciousness. The ideas that can lead to a transformation of the world are not those of the ordinary worker, but those of the party.
Lukács’s democratic deficit becomes even more evident when it is noted that even his avowed support for the role of workers’ councils is essentially hollow, since they must act ‘under the leadership of the Communist Party’ (Lukács 1972b: 63).
Unfortunately, thus far none of the above observations have been made by Lukács’s interpreters. For instance, for one of the best-known interpreters of the democratic deficit in Lukács, István Mészáros, there is an ‘unrealistic overemphasis placed on political and ideological factors’ in Lukács that ‘goes hand in hand with fatefully underestimating capital’s power of recovery and continuing rule’ (Mészáros 1995: 316).
Thus ‘the neglect of the material factors’ (Mészáros 1995: 320) and an ‘uncritical attitude towards the concept of the class itself’ (Mészáros 1995: 324) leads Lukács to the ‘hypostatization of class consciousness and collective will in the form of an idealized party’ (Mészáros 1995: 324).
Along similar lines, Andrew Feenberg contends that Lukács ‘confused emergency measures taken in the shadow of a revolution in a backward country with fundamental changes in the nature of the public sphere under socialism’ (Feenberg 2002: 69). As a result, he ‘underestimated the validity of the classical teachings concerning the political and legal preconditions of democracy’ (Feenberg 2002: 69).
In contrast to these interpretations, I have reached the conclusion (one that is ‘heretical’ in terms of the existing literature on Lukács), that Lukács’s support of Stalinism and overestimation of the role of the party was not for reasons of political strategy, as he himself claims and as Mészáros and Feenberg believe, but for reasons that are deeply embedded in his understanding of contradiction and its role in the formation of class consciousness.
Paul Piccone supports the view that because in Lukács ‘the interaction between the whole and part remains again limited to the domain of the self-objectifying Spirit and proceeds a priori’ (Piccone 1972: 115-116), his materialism ‘never penetrates to the living dimension and, as a result, ends up with an imposing metaphysical system’ (Piccone 1972: 126). Thus ‘he slides in the romantic totality in articulating his theory of political organization’ (Piccone 1972: 127). Contrary to the reasoning of Piccone and others, 9 I do not believe that the problems in Lukács’s philosophy have their origin in his leanings toward Hegel’s dialectics, although they are of course related to it. The problem in Lukács is not that he was led astray by Hegel’s spirit and therefore overestimated the role of the party; the problem is bigger and much more deeply ingrained in his social philosophy. As shown in the analysis thus far, Lukács’s problem stems from his liberal identity-thinking reading of contradiction, with the consequence that he is unable to retain the logic of the topsy-turvy world in his theory of defetishisation.
Very few studies have attempted to take on board this viewpoint. Guido Starosta’s reading of Lukács is one of the most recent and stimulating. In Starosta’s analysis, the ‘gap between empirical and imputed class consciousness persists’ (Starosta 2003: 57) in Lukács because his dialectic was a ‘too general and vague’, and does not provide ‘a clue about the actual determinations of the existence of the proletariat’ (Starosta 2003: 56). This is because ‘for Lukács the revolutionary consciousness of the working class is not an alienated consciousness that becomes aware of its own alienation … but an abstractly free consciousness’ (Starosta 2003: 56). Starosta’s analysis closely follows Simon Clarke’s reading of Lukács, which observes that ‘Lukács did not derive the ideological form of the fetishism of commodities from the alienation of labour, but if anything the other way round’ (Clarke 1991: 315), with the result that he was led ‘to an inverted interpretation of Marx’s theory of alienation, according to which the alienation of labour is not the source of mystified and estranged social relationships’ (Clarke 1991: 317).
In advance of these readings, I have attempted to add a broader scope to the analysis of Lukács’s philosophy in order to highlight how its imprisonment in identity thinking leads to a social theory that suppresses the core of dialectics; that is, the negative element, and to a position in which the abolition of the irrationalism that forces people to live as personifications of economic categories must be postponed to an indefinite time in the future. As Adorno aptly underlines, dialectics in Lukács ‘are paid lip-service … all has been decided in advance … The core of his theory remains dogmatic’ (Adorno 1977:154). As a result, Lukács’s thinking mirrors the main characteristic of bourgeois identity thinking: ‘When called to act independently, we cry for patterns, systems, and authorities’ (Horkheimer 2004: 126).
Lukács’s theory of the state also demonstrates that negativity has been suppressed in his theory. In Lukács, the state has not been defetishised; it is not an unavoidably perverted form, an expression of the irrationality under which we live in our topsy-turvy world. ‘It is perfectly possible that a balance of economic power between two classes in competition may produce a state apparatus not really controlled by either … so that the economic structure is by no means simply reflected in the state’ (Lukács 1972c: 135). For Lukács, the state is not an inherently undemocratic form that will immediately be abolished when its real content has been overthrown, when people have organised the satisfaction of their basic needs in a different way to the irrationality of ‘time is money’. As a result, Lukács’s state appears as a neutral institution that takes its class character from the class that succeeds in occupying it. Its abolition is therefore postponed to an indefinite point in the future.
For Lukács, the state is ‘relatively autonomous’ 10 (Lukács 1978b: 146), and after the proletariat comes to power, it still needs to use the state to ‘overcome by education the inertia and the fragmentation of these strata[11] and to train them for active and independent participation in the life of the state’ (Lukács 1997: 67). Lukács needs the state in order to control totality, 12 to guarantee certainty, the implementation of another pattern. ‘The function of the proletarian state is to lay the foundations for the socialist, i.e. the conscious organization of the economy’ (Lukács 1971: 281). Although it is not mentioned by Lukács, it goes without saying that the state, at least in the first stages after its control passes to the proletariat, will be run not by the masses, but by those who have authentic class consciousness, that is, the general committee of the party. The self-confidence that Marx considers essential if society is to be transformed into a democracy is discarded (Marx 1975c: 137).
In retaining the form of the political state in his theory, Lukács therefore ‘assumes that reason has been realized’ (Marx 1975c: 143). However, precisely because categories are open in dialectical theory, ‘the rational is never totally deducible’ (Horkheimer 1978b: 107), and the ‘view that philosophical concepts must be pinned down, identified, and used only when they exactly follow the dictates of the logic of identity is a symptom of the quest for certainty’ (Horkheimer 2004: 113). In Lukács, then, we encounter an inverted configuration of the authoritarian-bourgeois theory of the state, or in Horkheimer’s words, the ‘revolutionary movement negatively reflects the situation which it is attacking’ (Horkheimer 1978b: 99). Horkheimer’s comment, ‘State socialism is the most consistent form of the authoritarian state’ (Horkheimer 1978b: 101) could equally apply to Lukács’s state socialism.
Contrary to Lukács’s perspective, the abolition of irrationality does not presuppose a kind of knowledge that can be obtained before the occupation of the state, 13 nor a change in the elite who run the fetish form of state. Negativity does not presuppose that the knowledge of totality can be obtained only by the very few – the elite – beforehand. ‘Self-criticism (critical philosophy)’, Marx stressed, should ‘be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires’ (Marx 1975c: 145). ‘We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle’ (Marx 1975c: 144).
The fight for human dignity starts ‘dialectically, but not with a dialectic understood as interaction but rather as the negative restlessness of our misfitting’ (Holloway 2010: 85) to the rule of money, ‘which unfolds in our power to say No!’ (Holloway 2010: 19). ‘In the beginning is the scream’ (Holloway 2002: 1), not a specific kind of knowledge. The fight for dignity cannot wait until the proletariat has precipitated the capitalist crisis (Lukács’s first stage) in anticipation of its occupation of the state (his second stage), so that the contradiction under which we live can then be solved.
Conclusion
In a very short chapter about Lukács in Negative Dialectics, Adorno focuses on what I have attempted to expand on here; that is, how Lukács’s theory dispenses with negativity (Adorno 1973: 189-192). Adorno wants to make clear to the reader the closed character of Lukács’s dialectics, and the fact that the categories in his dialectics have nothing else to reveal about themselves because the chaotic, the uncertain, the not-yet-known element that constitutes their content, their non-identity character, is discarded. For Adorno, Lukács’s focus only on reification foresees the end of contradictions, a reconciliation that subsumes the alien and thus abolishes the core of dialectical thinking; that is, negativity (Adorno 1973: 191).
By contrast, in the dialectic between essence/content and form/appearance, the essence that constitutes the content of the form-fetishes (that is, the fact that we do not know in advance exactly how people will decide to come into contact with each other in order to satisfy their basic needs) is alien to us because it ‘remains what is distant and different, beyond … that which is one’s own. The tireless charge of reification resists that dialectics’ (Adorno 1973: 191).
Lukács did not succeed in revealing the open character of Marxian dialectics, and consequently misinterpreted the Frankfurt School theory, 14 accusing it of being ‘a kind of interesting academism … a secessionist academism’, a theory that ‘is contradictory in the sense that there is nothing to be learned from it’ (Pinkus 1975: 100). In my view, however, Lukács’s conception of the party has all the characteristics that Horkheimer attributes to the intellectual who follows traditional theory. 15
Contrary to Lukács’s interpretation, dialectics is not merely a method of classification different from that of the bourgeois-liberal static view of categories. Dialectics make us aware of the human content of the forms, their inherently inverted, contradictory character, and, by extension, the fact that we cannot impose on reality any ideas or long-term projects constructed in advance by an elite that purports to hold an authentic and true knowledge. Defetishisation requires that we reject subordinating our doing to the demands of the accumulation of wealth now, without having a pre-prepared plan in place. Through turning the topsy-turvy world on its head, through non-identity thinking, we propel a class struggle that can overturn capitalist logic by opening cracks in it, even though we cannot know with certainty where these cracks will lead us. Non-identity thinking ‘only gives voice to the mystery of that reality’ (Horkheimer 2002: 217), and in so doing brings negativity to the fore. This is the mystery that identity thinking seeks to eliminate. I hope to have shown how this happens in Lukács by explaining the inherent connection between Lukács’s theory of contradiction and dialectics and the democratic deficit in his social theory. Given this, it is hoped that my non-mainstream interpretation of Lukács – that his political philosophy does not follow Marx’s dialectical materialism, but could be considered a radical version of traditional liberal identity-thinking – has been justified in this article.