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George Lukacs
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The ‘Dialectical Laws of History
and Nature’ is a confusing and often daunting concept for new socialists to get
their head around. In reading about this, people are often put off by the
apparent rigidity and determinism of these ideas. Out of this misunderstanding,
a whole school of pseudo-Marxist thought has developed, which plays a
pernicious role in planting ideas alien to the labour movement by seeking to
dumb-down or restrict Marxism. The name of Georg Lukács crops up as the hero of
this petit-bourgeois reformism and cultural-criticism of ex-Marxists for having
apparently restricted Marxism and taken it down a more limited,
easier-to-swallow and somewhat less revolutionary juncture. Young students of
Marxism can be led astray by his ‘humanism’ and emphasis on culture and the
implied role of the individual. But in decapitating Marxism by removing its
objective, scientific emphasis, its revolutionary role and practicality is blunted
and turned into a tool fit only for petit-bourgeois sociology and cultural
criticism. For these reasons this tendency must be combated.
The influence of these ideas
began with Lukács’ History and Class
Consciousness, published in 1923. Intended as an attack on ‘reification and
reified thought’ (reification meaning his own understanding of alienation), it
criticized Engels’ Anti-Duhring for
attempting to show that dialectical laws applied to nature as well as human
society. At the time, the book made little impact – the counter-attack of
Zinoviev and others simply forced Lukács and his ideas underground. But ever
since Stalinism’s victory and increased influence over Europe through the
Warsaw Pact countries post World War Two, these ideas have made a comeback via
the ‘humanist’ ‘western Marxism’ of various petit-bourgeois intellectuals.
These well-fed interlopers sought to deny the importance of the working class
struggle, reacting against the unfortunate burden of taking objective reality
into account as well as the compulsion to live in the real world, as was
implied by Engels’ theories, preferring to speak only of ‘culture’ and the need
to change our spirit of thought before dealing with reality. Lukács’ theory’s
influence over recent ‘Marxist’ thought in philosophy is akin to the
‘two-stages’ theory in politics, and must be shown to be alien from the genuine
ideas of Marxism and the working class.
Lukács’ claim that the
dialectical laws of human society and thought cannot be applied to nature is
strange – it has no precedent in dialectical thought. Dialectics was originally
developed by Ancient Greeks who thought, in a brilliant stroke of naïve
intuition, that the forms of the natural world must be similar to those of
their own thought; this tradition was continued by Hegel, who attempted to show
that dialectics and science were compatible. This idea naturally sat well with
Marx and Engels, who attempted to extract the ‘rational kernel’ from Hegel’s
mysticism, to the extent that Engels wrote an entire book on this theme (Dialectics of Nature). The idea that
dialectical laws have no reference to the objective world is therefore external
to the history of dialectics itself.
Because Lukács and others wish to
turn Marxism down a subjectivist, ‘cultural’ route, they must deny the
objective orientation of Marxism. They can only do this by pointing to Engels
works on science, because Engels lacks the authority of Marx (after all, it is
called ‘Marxism’ not ‘Engelsism’!) and Marx did not write on these topics. But
parts of Dialectics of Nature and all of Anti-Duhring were
edited by Marx. However his direct influence over the former work is small, as
he died as it was being written. Thus the materialist thesis of the book was
finally proved correct when even this greatest of minds found itself at the
mercy of the exacting reality of the material world! This irony is lost on the
Lukácsians and other ‘humanists’ who try to show that because Engels, and not
Marx, wrote about dialectics in nature, Marx must have been some old romantic
interested only in society and culture! They forget that this is only because
Marx was busy proving the importance of the material world by succumbing to it!
The idea that dialectics is a
purely subjective logic has no basis in Marxism or the very real, objective
experiences of the working class. It is a sudden break, not properly explained
by Lukács. Rather he simply states it, not daring to bring out its essential
idealist logic because it is one alien to Marxism. But despite its limitations
(i.e. complete lack of any explanation or elucidation from Lukács) the idea
caught on because it resonates with the idealist prejudices of the
petit-bourgeois professors.
Lukács’ Adoption of Marxism
Georg Lukács was a Hungarian,
born (in 1885) and brought up in Budapest, though his first language was
German. He then moved to Germany to study in 1906, being taught sociology by
Simmel and Weber (the former a petit-bourgeois sociologist and cultural critic,
who incorporated aspects of Marxism, the latter a bourgeois sociologist and
apologist for imperialism). Weber, who was consciously opposed to Marxism,
exerted considerable influence on Lukács through his idealist (though not
entirely useless) concept of the ‘ideal type’, and most particularly the idea
that the laws of human society are determined fundamentally by ideas, which
have no parallel or determinant in the natural world.
Lukács’ political consciousness
in Hungary was from a young age that of the petit-bourgeois radical – he was
the son of a wealthy banker, but the stultifying nationalism and chauvinism of
the Austro-Hungarian regime led him to "reject them entirely and from an early
age felt strongly opposed to ‘the whole of official Hungary’" (Parkinson,
G.H.R., Georg Lukács, 1977, p.2).
Because of the dynamics of the class struggle, this hatred inevitably led him
into the arms of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party of
Hungary when it was set up in 1918, and of course the ideas of Marx and Engels.
However, as a young petit-bourgeois intellectual he "did not immediately take
the decisive step of becoming a Communist". The events of the First World War
radicalised him further, but because of his petit-bourgeois outlook they drove
him into "a mood of acute depression", regarding "the prospect of ultimate
victory by Germany as a nightmare" (Ibid, p.4).
Of course, at this stage Lukács
was still relatively young (during the First World War he was 29-33) and moods
of despair, as well as indecision over whether to adopt Marxism, are perfectly
understandable. However, Lukács, even when a Communist, never departed from
this despairing mentality at the ‘decline of Western Civilization’, writing in
1952 the book The Destruction of Reason.
His adoption of Marxism after the collapse of the Habsburg regime was sudden
and suggests a sense of desperation and nowhere else to turn. His friend Anna
Leznai said of Lukács’ conversion "Between one Sunday and the next, Saul became
Paul." (D. Kettler, 1971, p.35). This would suggest that there was little
intellectual precedent for his sudden change, which is backed up by the
moralistic, idealist basis of his earliest articles on Bolshevism – Bolshevism as a Moral Problem (1918), The Moral Basis of Communism (1919), Tactics and Ethics (1919), The Role of Morality in Communist Production
(1919) and The Moral Mission of the
Communist Party (1920).
All of these articles were
written at the same time as, or only 1-3 years before, the articles that make
up his criticism of Engels in History and
Class Consciousness. He characterises the choice between reformism and
revolution primarily as "a moral dilemma" (Parkinson, op. cit., p.5). Lukács
openly stated that his motives for joining the Communists were ethical, and
emphasised the Party’s ideals of brotherhood rather than its link to the
material working class struggle. History
and Class Consciousness‘ criticism of Engels is based not on the actual
traditions of Marxism and the working class, but on his own particular interest
in German Idealism, or ‘modern philosophy’, as he approvingly puts it,
"Modern
philosophy sets itself the following problem: it refuses to accept the world as
something that has arisen independently
of the knowing subject [my emphasis] and prefers to conceive of it instead
as its own product…the whole of modern philosophy has been preoccupied with
this problem…there is a direct line of development whose central strand, rich
in variations, is the idea that the object of cognition can be known by us for
the reason that, and to the degree in which, it has been created by ourselves."
(Lukács, op. cit. pp.111-2)
So he objects
to Engels’ Dialectics of Nature
because it does not pay enough attention to Lukács’ interest in philosophy’s
preoccupation with ‘knowing the object’, but only ever objects we have created.
But are we not in turn created out of a pre-existing nature?
This is a classic approach to
Marxism from the perspective of the petit-bourgeois intellectual who has not
quite managed to escape the narrow outlook of his class – Marxism solves
interesting philosophical questions, rather than ‘solving’ the class struggle
and basing its philosophy on this. This is why Lukács is talked up so much by
the professors of Philosophy. In later life Lukács correctly (if a little
exaggeratedly) referred to his views circa History
and Class Consciousness as ‘messianic utopianism’. The political journal Kommunismus, which he edited as he wrote
History and Class Consciousness,
"proclaimed a total break with all institutions which stemmed from the bourgeois
world…Lukács said that Communists should not participate in bourgeois
parliaments…the same messianic utopianism was expressed by his book History and Class Consciousness" (Ibid,
p.7).
This mechanical break from
bourgeois society forgets that the working class also lives in bourgeois
society, and reminds one of the naïve revolutionary idealism of Anarchist
students, and should not be confused with a serious Marxist philosophy, as it
often is (to the extent that Lukács is often touted with being a superior
Marxist to Engels!). Lukács’ commitment to Communism was genuine, and he
honourably engaged in warfare to defend the brief young Hungarian Soviet state
from the Romanian invasion. However, his attack on Engels does not come from a
genuine Marxist approach.
Following the initial criticism
the book engendered from Zinoviev, Lukács immediately fell silent and ended up
halting all political philosophy, concentrating on Literary Criticism. He heavily recanted his previous work, just as
he recanted his (mild) revolutionary activities during the 1956 Hungarian
uprising. He also refused criticism of Stalin and Stalinism, later admitted
that although he did not agree with the censorships, ‘Leninism’ and the USSR
were isolated and under threat from Fascism, and so any open criticism of
Stalinist policies would lead directly into the hands of Fascism. This
conformity directly parallels the Stalinist madness of declaring all other
tendencies to be variations of Fascism (Trotskyist-Fascism, Social Fascism
etc.). He even claimed that he could not leave the Communist party or stray
from its line because staying in it was the only way to fight Fascism, when in
fact the opposite was the case.
But the fact that his book History and Class
Consciousness was criticised by apparent
‘hardliners’ and Stalinist ‘dogmatists’ like Zinoviev, and also the fact that
it strays from Engels’ traditional Marxist scientific position, which is
sometimes falsely associated with the dogmatic nature of Stalinism, lends support to the fantasy that
Lukács’ argument that dialectics is purely human and not natural is some sort
of innovative and open-minded advance for Marxism. But as we have seen, his
view has its basis in his petit-bourgeois ‘intellectual’ prejudice that Marxism
is fundamentally a moral theory that solves German Idealism on the grounds of
idealism. This ‘messianic utopianism’ and misreading of Marx and Engels leads
directly to his conformism to Stalinism, because both are based on the
prejudices of the petit-bourgeoisie. Hence the similarity between his ‘total
break’ from bourgeois parliaments, and Stalinism’s ‘total break’ from Social
Democracy as apparently fascist, a position Lukács endorsed.
Commodity Fetishism and Reification
Lukács’ theory of ‘reification’,
inspired by Marx’s idea of ‘Commodity Fetishism’, forms the theoretical basis
for his criticism of Engels. We will need to understand the subtle differences
between Marx and Lukács’ theories to clearly see the flawed basis for his
attack on Engels.
Marx considered economics to be
reducible to social relations. But in capitalist society social relations take
the form of class relations based around producing commodities, that is
products of human labour intended for exchange rather than consumption. Marx
claims that out of this a false or distorted world outlook is created,
"This
Fetishism of commodities has its origin…in the peculiar social character of the
labour that produces them. As a general rule articles of utility become
commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private
individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently
[my emphasis] of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private
individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not
come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products,
the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself
except in the act of exchange…therefore, the relations connecting the labour of
one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations
[my emphasis] between individuals at work, but as what they really are,
material relations between persons and social relations between things." (Marx,
K. Capital, 1995, p.44)
Therefore, the
fetishism of commodities consists of this: that the ‘aggregate labour of
society’ cannot be theoretically, harmoniously unified. Marx clearly defines
production as social – commodity production necessitates social production, or
rather the social nature of production gives rise to commodity production. But
seeing as the areas of production are carried on ‘independently of each other’
the social nature of production is not expressed directly, but is rather
expressed through objects, specifically commodities. This distorted or indirect
social production is the basis for the famous conclusion that in capitalist
society the relations between people, as expressed in the ruling ideas of
capitalism, appear distorted, and determined by the social relations between
inhuman objects. If we then consider that Marx thinks labour to be the chief or
even sole means by which we assert our relationship to the objective world, it
becomes clear that seeing as each individual producer produces only a small part
of an object – and is therefore not able to feel like he/she has any complete
relationship to this object – they have almost no role whatsoever in the
‘aggregate labour of society’ and has had no part in the labour of the various
objects he/she consumes.
We create
capitalist society with all its social relations and economic laws, but it
appears to us as something entirely separate from us. We do not realize that, because humanity created it, we can
abolish it in favour of a better society.
In explaining the fetishism of commodities, Marx uses the analogy of
religion. We create the gods, but we
are not self-conscious of this fact and consequently conceive of them as
distinct from us and as, ironically, our creators. In contrast, bourgeois thought tries to convince us that capitalist
society is natural and consequently cannot be changed.
Therefore, the
theoretical result of commodity production, according to Marx is that mankind’s
theoretical knowledge, his conscious being, cannot be directly connected to the
world of objects through labour. Theories of the objective world based on these
premises therefore present objective, natural laws as independent of man in such a way that we cannot as a whole
society adapt our practical, labour based behaviour to the theories’ results.
Although
Lukács agrees on the nature of the social base for this problem, in
contradistinction to Marx and Engels’ conclusion, Lukács believes "the reified
subject of practice [i.e. the alienated individual] treats the product of its
combined action with other similar subjects as a law-governed, objective reality." (Feenberg, A. op. cit., p.125, my
emphasis). The difference between the two theories is that whereas Marx and
Engels depict alienated theories as unable to grasp the connection between man
and the objective whole of society, Lukács considers alienated or reified
theories as flawed because they treat the objects of our labour as
‘law-governed’ and constituting an ‘objective reality’.
One of the correct conclusions
that Lukács draws from commodity fetishism is that the radicalised
petit-bourgeoisie can find no way out, because it cannot grasp the whole
movement of society. To this Marx and Engels would add that they feel alienated
from the objective, natural world, which is in fact the fundamental condition
for their existence. Lukács adds that this social position leads to idealist
theories and an idealist response to the crisis of capitalism. Petit-bourgeois
responses to capitalism, in which Lukács includes Anarchism, Utopianism,
Reformism, Sectarianism and Opportunism, are characterised by either some sort
of utopian, heavily moralistic or even mystical hope for a future, but one
which has no worked out connection with today, or alternatively nihilistic,
lonely and hopeless despair.
This characterisation is broadly
correct, but it misses the larger point – the reason the petit-bourgeoisie
swings from one extreme to another is because of its position in society – the
individual (and the petit-bourgeoisie is an individualist, atomistic class) is
determined by the vast objective world, but as an individual has no necessary role in this objective world.
He/she needs the objective world, but the world does not need him/her. The
idealist response of the petit-bourgeoisie not only cannot grasp the workings
of capitalism, but also its relationship to nature which determines society.
Thus the impotence and idealism
of their views. Idealism expresses the contradiction between individual
experience of the material world, and the general, social ideas the individual
has acquired. These ideas, such as morality, appear in the mind of the
petit-bourgeois individual as powerful and yet detached from day-to-day
experience of nature and society. For example, there are several
petit-bourgeois responses to environmental problems which mystify the idea of
nature in a ‘green’ society as some sort of abstract supreme conscious being,
but on the basis of their ideology there is no clear way to get to this
abstract ‘green’ society from ours. Thus the problem Lukács points out can only
be understood if the petit-bourgeoisie is placed in the context of all of
society and the objective world. Because he disagrees with doing this, because
he sees dialectical materialism as only describing social laws and not that
these laws are derived from those of nature, his theory cannot fully grasp the
nature of petit-bourgeois activism.
The Entirely Mysterious ‘Identical Subject-Object of History’
It is the great irony of Lukács’
theory, and others like it, that in making the noisiest claims to overcoming
petit bourgeois thought, it surrenders to it. It is like the man who hides
something from his enemy in his enemy’s very house. ‘Perhaps if I spend half of
my book belittling the petit-bourgeoisie, no one will notice the
petit-bourgeois character of the whole book?’
Lukács criticises Engels’ attempt
to show that dialectical laws are present in nature, because he thinks it
treats nature as a separate entity to humanity, making us alienated from it.
This is a strange view – evidently for dialectical logic, which after all is
based on difference and contradiction, something can be different from
something whilst also being fundamentally interconnected with it and a part of
the same wider whole. Unsurprisingly, this strange turn of logic comes from
Lukács’ principal interest in the development of German Idealism. In his mind,
Hegel almost completed German Idealism by trying to solve its central
contradiction – the unification of thought and being, or subject and object as
Lukács puts it (I prefer thought and being because subject-object implies some
sort of absolute difference between the two, whereas for Marxism the subject is
an object, or is derived from objects). According to Lukács this unification
must be achieved by ‘discovering’ the ‘identical (!) subject-object (?!) in
history’, something which Hegel failed to do.
This is the sort of abstract
jargon that today’s post-modern ex-Marxists love. What is this
‘subject-object’, and how is it ‘identical’? Identical to what? Does this mean
that the subject (i.e. human thought, or as with Lukács the class-conscious
proletariat) is identical to ‘the object’? What is the object then? If he means
any one object, then he is making the proletariat ‘identical’ with particular
objects, which is absurd. Presumably he means by object the whole of objective
society, which would make the class-conscious proletariat at one with all of
society. So it would be the only class, i.e. we would have a classless society.
Therefore the proletariat would not actually exist as the proletariat (more on
this contradiction later). But then, surely what lends society objectivity is
that it is a part of the objectivity of nature, and conditioned by it? Surely
therefore, the ‘identical-subject-object of history’ would be able to draw the
correlation between its own laws, and the other objective laws of nature, which
is exactly what Engels is doing?
Once again, Lukács’ criticism of
Engels rests upon not Marxism but his own interest in solving the problems of
German idealism as he sees it. Engels is wrong, not because he contradicts
Marxism or the interests of the working-class, but because he does not pay his
dues to the ‘identical-subject-object’ of idealism. Furthermore, Hegel never
actually spoke of any ‘identical-subject-object of history’ anyway.
This theory that the class
conscious proletariat represents the ‘identical-subject-object of history’ is
particularly interesting because it shows the correlation between Lukács’
idealist, ‘humanist’ rejection of Engels, and his Stalinism. It is clear that,
for Lukács, this ‘identical-subject-object of history’ means that the
proletariat realises the truth of human existence, and it becomes fully self
conscious. But because of Lukács’ idealism, this does not mean recognising our
conditions of existence and consciously controlling them, but simply
recognising that there are no conditions for our existence,
The idea that
we have made reality loses its more or less fictitious character: we have…made our own history [my emphasis] and
if we are able to regard the whole of reality as history (i.e. as our history, for there is no other [my emphasis]), we shall
have raised ourselves in fact to the position from which reality can be
understood as our ‘action.’" (Lukács, G., 1971, p.145)
The freedom or
liberation of the proletariat therefore means absolute, abstract freedom,
freedom to make history as we wish without any conditions, "what is not
necessary is that the proletariat should act rationally. Whether or not it does
so depends on its own free decision." (Parkinson, op. cit., p.52). Here
necessity is seen as something that corresponds to ‘law-governed, objective
reality’ and not to the working class, that is to say the working class’
behaviour is seen as not a part of the objective world. Lukács clearly defines
freedom as something independent of necessity, of objective laws.
"Nature is a
societal category…nature’s form, its content, its range and its objectivity (my emphasis) are all
socially conditioned." (Ibid, p.234). The objective world is seen as incapable
of being independent of thought. Of course, for Marxists what society means by
nature is socially conditioned, and the nature we know is only ever the nature
we have altered in relation to our interests. But this ignores the most fundamental
point – that our interests are in the first place conditioned by nature. In a
sense we could say that for Marx and Engels nature conditions society to
condition nature.
This
contradiction between the materialism of Marx and Engels and Lukács’ apparent
subjectivism has not been lost on commentators. According to Feenberg "Lukács’
discussion of the principle of practice leans towards an idealistic concept of
production as creation of the object. On these terms, the identity of subject
and object implies the radical preeminance [sic] of the subject in the
theoretical system." (Feenberg, A., op. cit., p.124). Mészáros agrees "the
thread of an unresolved duality leads, in one form or in another, through
Lukács’ entire development." (Mészáros, I., Lukács’
Concept of Dialectic, 1972, p.93) From the perspective of dialectical
materialism, this leads to absurdity, because, as Lukács admitted 44 years
later ‘objectivity is the primary material attribute of all things and
relations’ (Lukács, 1967 Preface, xxxvi) and reality consists of the
‘interconnectedness of everything’. Therefore anything which interacts with
this objective reality must be a part of it, and be interconnected with,
dependent on and determined by other aspects of objective reality. This absurdity
of Lukács’ position from the perspective of dialectical materialism is shown by
Feenberg,
"One would
have to imagine [in overcoming reification as Lukács describes it] an identical
subject-object the actions of which would have no unintended consequences and
which would encounter no contingencies in its environment requiring it to
adjust and transcend the given. With the complete abolition of reification, no
law of appearance would arise from the subject’s practice, which would,
therefore, be able freely to create the (social) world according to its undetermined will." (Feenberg, A., op.
cit., p.242)
This absurdity
is then shown by Marx and Engels also, who argue that without prior objective
conditions, all action and thought become unnaturally bound to the object,
"Speculation
on the one hand apparently freely creates its object a priori out of itself and, on the other hand, precisely because it
wishes to get rid by sophistry of the rational and natural dependence on the object, falls into the most irrational
and unnatural bondage to the object"
(Marx, K. and Engels, F. The Holy Family,
1975, p.70)
The Political Results of Lukács’ subjectivism
Lukács’
understanding of the working class, then, is very much removed from reality. It
is this freeing of the working class struggle from objective determinants that
has made him so popular with petit-bourgeois reformists and revisionists. But
what are the practical, political consequences of such an idealist position?
As we can see,
this identical-subject-object represents an abstract philosophic conception of
the class conscious and revolutionary working class. Not only this, it
represents the working class when it has fully overcome all reification of
thought through the total socialisation of the means of production, leading to
a classless society – as reification comes about through the alienating effects
of commodity production, class society and the division between mental and
manual labour, the transcendence from reification requires a completely classless
society with no divisions between mental and manual labour.
So any
‘identical-subject-object’ will have to correspond to the broad mass of the
classless society. Only this ‘identical-subject-object’ can freely create
history and natural laws, which is what Lukács understands by overcoming
reification, because the working class as an actually existing class corresponds to reified conditions
(i.e. wage labour, commodity production). So how does this reified class, which
cannot ‘freely create history’, become this ‘identical-subject-object’ if it,
being composed of alienated wage labourers, cannot ‘freely create history’ but
only succumb to what is perceived as a ‘law-governed, objective totality’? How
does a class that lives and is determined by the real, physical world, suddenly
liberate itself from objective reality and freely construct its own subjective
one?
This is the
problem of idealism described above by Marx and Engels – in trying to escape
the limitations of the objective world, it creates an abstract, subjective
world, that cannot be connected to the real world, therefore it remains stuck
in the real world, being blindly blown along by events, because it cannot
connect the free world of its thoughts with the actual physical world.
This
is exactly what happened to Lukács – he self-censored and bowed down to the
Stalinist hierarchy. Summing up Lukács’ Stalinism, Kolakowski points to several
of his later criticisms of Stalinism that clearly show he never diverted from
the logic of bureaucratic centralism, even when attacking Stalin,
"In
principle, Stalin was right as against Trotsky, but Stalin himself subsequently
pursued a Trotskyist (!!!) policy instead of (!) a Leninist one" (Kolakowski,
1978, p.301) "he declared [in ‘Mein Weg
zu Marx‘] that although he thought Stalin wrong on many points he did not
engage in opposition…because any opposition could easily have degenerated into
support for Fascism [despite the fact that Stalin’s policies evidently aided
the rise of Fascism]" (p.303)
Unable to understand the objective course of
events, and how this may lead to revolution, his subjectivist theory had to put
its faith in the will of the subject – the Stalinist party. In History and Class Consciousness Lukács
explicitly states that, according to his theory (and we must admit here that
his logic is consistent with itself) the working class can never attain more
than a ‘Trade Union consciousness’, and therefore needs the guiding hand of the
revolutionary party, "It [the proletariat] cannot travel unaided." (Lukács, op.
cit. p.197). So much for the ‘identical-subject-object’ of the non-reified
class conscious proletariat! Lukács, while spending most of his time
exaggerating the role of the class-conscious working class into some sort of
all-seeing-eye, then in practice reduces its role to that of a passive,
localised and historically short sighted class.
The only way
Lukács can unify this passive working class with his abstract
‘identical-subject-object’ is to assign the latter to the revolutionary party.
Now we are beginning to see the political results of subjectivism in Marxism –
arguing that dialectics cannot apply to nature, far from leading us away from
the ‘dogmatic’ and ‘mechanically deterministic’ world of historical
materialism, actually takes us right into the heart of Stalinist dogmatism.
Lukács often
correctly criticizes Hegel for seeking some sort of idealist absolute – ‘World
Spirit’ – to solve the problems of history instead of doing this materially and
concretely. As a result, Lukács says, his theory is ultimately botched because
its solution cannot be connected with actual, concrete history in any way.
Often Lukács’ criticisms of idealist philosophy are very good. He is not all
bad! But Lukács makes this same mistake, only with Marxist terminology, by
‘finding’ the solution to alienation in the abstract consciousness of the
perfectly class-conscious proletariat. But this could only conceivably exist in
a classless society, and is thus cut off from solving the problems of the
proletariat here and now.
And this also
mirrors Stalinism. Just as Stalinism was forced to maintain the public
ownership of the means of production, but ultimately its own logic and social
position eventually lead to the restoration of capitalism, so Lukács’ own idealist
interpretation of Marxism, although correctly defending Marxism against its
enemies, ultimately led to the development of the ‘Frankfurt School’ and the
open capitulation to capitalism.
Lukács quite
clearly and correctly states the political consequences of his subjectivism
some years later,
"He [Lukács in
1933] said that the book’s [i.e. History
and Class Consciousness] approach to its problems was that of philosophical
idealism, not of materialism; it was also tainted with ‘subjectivist activism’,
which means roughly that it assumed that revolutionary fervour could achieve
anything, irrespective of social conditions. In 1934…he criticized the work
still more severely, saying that the work’s idealism was not only theoretically
false but also practically dangerous." (Parkinson, op. cit. p.10)
In case anyone
were in any doubt as to the similarity between the inherent subjectivism
(coupled with its mechanical determinism, flipsides of the same coin) in
Stalinism, and the subjectivism of the liberal-left ex-Marxists and
post-modernists, Lukács’ own confession , lost in the deluge of the very same
post-modern revisionism he here attacks, should leave one in no doubt,
"I sincerely
did believe that History and Class Consciousness was mistaken and I
think that to this day. When, later on, the errors enshrined in the book were
converted into fashionable notions, I resisted the attempt to identify these
with my own ideas and in this too I believe I was in the right." (Lukács, 1967
preface, xxxviii)
His class-substitutionalism
flows directly from his subjectivism straight into the Stalinist opportunism
and popular-frontism, resulting in the victory of Hitler. Lukács’ logic is that
of the petit-bourgeoisie’s lack of confidence in the working-class.
What Marx and Engels Really Thought
"The fact that
our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws,
and hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in
their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical
thought." (Engels, F. Dialectics of Nature, 2007, p.270)
For Marx and
Engels, the working class is the true revolutionary class precisely because it
can take stock of its dependence on nature as a whole by socialising the
productive forces. This explains the above statement – the working class cannot
‘transcend’ the objective world, but can understand how its behaviour and needs
are determined by and dependent on the natural world. Hence the importance for
Engels of writing the Dialectics of
Nature. Above all else, the revolutionary working class must be
sober-headed and objective in taking stock of its situation, it cannot afford to think it can ‘create’
history without due respect to the objective conditions,
"Bourgeois
revolutions like those of the eighteenth century storm more swiftly from
success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things
seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day- but they are
short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer
[crapulence] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results
of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian
revolutions like those of the nineteenth century constantly criticize themselves,
constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently
accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the
half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to
throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the
earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly
from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals — until a situation is
created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves
call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! [‘Here
is Rhodes, jump here‘, meaning ‘here is the difficulty, or ‘this is how
we take power’]" (Marx, K. The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)
In the same work, Marx points
out that "Men make their own history but they do not make it under conditions
of their own choosing; they make it under circumstances directly transmitted
from the past". In case our Lukács inspired post-modernist cultural theorists
are not quite clear on how Marx and Engels thought all human existence to be,
let us quote one of their more striking comments on the question of human
freedom,
"As
a natural, embodied, sentient, objective being he [man] is a suffering,
conditioned and limited being, like animals and plants. The objects of his
drives exist outside himself as objects independent of him, yet they are
objects of his needs, essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise
and confirmation of his faculties." (Marx, K. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1959 p.204)
But
just because mankind finds itself constantly limited by nature, this does not
make humanity some sort of mindless cipher being pushed and pulled by fixed
laws.
"To me there could
be no question of building up the laws of dialectics into nature, but of
discovering them in it and evolving them from it." (Engels, F. Anti-Duhring,
1947, p.19)
Engels is not
subjectively creating laws to supposedly control and limit reality and human
understanding of the natural laws that govern it, in the proscriptive manner of
Judicial Laws, but is simply saying that objective laws describe rather than
proscribe reality. Their ‘eternality’ derives from the fact that, if nature is
objective, it must always behave in the same way only if given the same
circumstances,
"We know that
chlorine and hydrogen, within certain limits of temperature and pressure
and under the influence of light, combine with an explosion to form
hydrochloric acid gas, and as soon as we know this, we know also that this takes
place everywhere and at all times where the above conditions are present,
and it can be a matter of indifference, whether this occurs once or is repeated
a million times." (Engels, F. Dialectics of Nature, 2007, pp.237-8, my
emphasis)
Thus Engels’ task as
he sees it is not to find laws which determine a never ending repetition of the
same events, but simply to show that given the same conditions we will always
get the same outcome. Without this principle, human knowledge slips into the
particular, and the regularity between and predictability of events appears
fortuitous. Marx applies exactly the same method in analysing capitalism –
without this principle, the course of development of capitalist society would
appear arbitrary and unpredictable. It is for these reasons that Engels said he
did not attempt to ‘build up the laws of dialectics into nature’. Instead he
believes that to understand the necessary eternality of natural laws it is
necessary to look at the particular conditions in each case to determine if
certain laws apply, and how,
"In a manner exactly
fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur
by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion." (Ibid,
p.64, my emphasis)
The
working class, in struggling for and winning freedom, is actually gaining
knowledge of how it is determined by nature. Without this sober approach, the
proletariat will never come to power, or at the very least would not be able to
remould society and labour in accordance with natural laws,
"At every step we are reminded
that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people,
like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and
brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it
consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of
being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." (Ibid, p.183)
Hence the fact that both Marx and
Engels sought the liberation of humanity not in heaven but in consciously
controlling the means of production for all of society’s ends,
"This regulation [of the
natural world], however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It
requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and
simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order." (Ibid,
p.184)
Consistent with the
principle that humanity is a part of nature and determined by it, Engels has
characterised freedom neither as pure, unlimited freedom, nor as non-existent.
For Engels, humans are not passive, unconscious vessels for nature’s ‘eternal
laws’, but conscious, active, practical beings, who, through labour, can grasp,
master and exploit the laws of nature to their own ends.
In conclusion, Engels’ attempt at a
dialectics of nature, that shows how the laws of human thought and society
reflect those of nature, is based on the Marxist principle that nature
precedes, determines and conditions mankind. Therefore according to the Marxist
approach the only way for mankind to free itself is to uncover all of the
hidden principles of nature and master them as a whole so that human society is
no longer at the mercy of the blind laws of nature but in the hands of free,
conscious humans. But freedom is not simply a matter of understanding the laws
of nature. That is a necessary element,
but not sufficient. Humans must also
revolutionize society, get rid of capitalism, and establish a socialist society
where people consciously and collectively determine their policies. In other
words, within capitalist society we have gone a long way towards identifying
the laws of nature, but we are hardly free since we do not control our own
social relations but instead let them be determined by the laws of the market,
etc.
Lukács’
Subjectivist Revisionism
We can now
analyse how and why Lukács’ criticism of Engels differs fundamentally from the
principles of dialectical materialism. Whereas a premise of this is that
humanity or ‘subject’ is a part of
the whole of nature (note that this
is not to say that ‘subject’ is the same
as nature, for nature constitutes all its various parts, such as planets,
oceans, trees etc. as well as humanity; from the former things the ‘subject’
evidently differs) Lukács assumes at the outset that the ‘subject’ and the
‘object’ are two different things, as if standing side-by-side. In criticising
Engels, Lukács claims that dialectical laws cannot be applied to nature as
independent of ‘subject’ because dialectics is necessarily founded upon the
interaction of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, "he [Engels] does not even mention the
most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject
and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it
deserves." (Lukács, G. op. cit.,
p.3) Lukács makes this point even clearer in the notes to the essay quoted from
above,
"The
misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main
be put down to the fact that Engels…extended the method to apply also to
nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics – the interaction of
subject and object…are absent from our knowledge of nature." (Ibid, p.24)
The
implication of the above must be that the ‘subject’ is in some way different
from nature, otherwise we could not isolate a dialectics of society from an
attempted dialectics of nature, i.e. Lukács is simply assuming that the
‘subject’ is different and not a part of nature in speaking about a fundamental
difference between the interaction of subject and object and the interaction of
two objects. But if humanity is a part of nature, then its interaction with
other objects of nature is not absolutely different in principle from the
interaction of two objects independent of humanity. Lukács’ language here
equivocates from the principles of dialectical materialism in a subtle way.
Whereas, as Lukács admitted 44 years later in his 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, Marx
stated that "objectivity was the primary material attribute of all things and
relations" (Ibid, xxxvi) Lukács speaks about ‘the subject’ as if it were not a
part of this objectivity. But Marx shows that, as with Engels, dialectical
materialism necessitates that mankind itself is an object,
"Man lives from nature – i.e., nature is his body – and he
must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that
man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is
linked to itself, for man is a part of
nature." (Marx, K. Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1959,
my emphasis)
From one extreme to the other
A fundamental
characteristic of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois thinking is to create false,
absolute and mechanical dichotomies out of genuinely existing interrelated
opposites, and then to swing from one side of this false dichotomy to the
other. In reaction to the barbarism of Stalinism, such thinkers have falsely
associated the dogmatism that goes with this with the materialism of Marx and
particularly Engels. But the naïve response is equally dogmatic – to
automatically flinch and recoil in a strange sort of intellectual snobbery from
the realism and objectivism of Marxism. But if Stalinism was dogmatic because
it did not understand nor want to understand genuine Marxism, only to repeat
its stock phrases, sapping energy from its authority amongst the Russian
people, then the stupid dogmatism of petit-bourgeois idealists who also do not
want to understand genuine materialism is Stalinism’s mirror image.
In fleeing
from the mechanical interpretation of Marxism, Lukács and his followers have
done a great disservice to Marxism by pretending that their idealism represents
the real meaning of Marx’s philosophy. Because their philosophy is at heart
idealist and represents the outlook of petit-bourgeois intellectuals, the logic
of their thoughts can ultimately only lead in one direction – capitulation to
capitalism. Hence that those directly influenced by Lukács (particularly the
Frankfurt School) have done exactly this, and spoke of the need to change one’s
mind and ‘spiritual values’ before creating a new society. But we change the
world and our ideas by labouring on the basis of necessity, not the ideological
whims of professors.
Lukács said that the proletariat must not "take the
world as it is" (Kolakowski, L. Main Currents of Marxism: The Breakdown,
1978, p.276). In the sense that for dialectics, no object remains as it is,
this is true. But what is not true is that dialectical materialism considers
‘objective reality’ to be a subjective concept that can be bent at the will of
the united and class-conscious proletariat. In order to overcome the limited
and strictly ‘here-and-now’ psychology of an atomised capitalist society, the
proletariat must grasp the world as it really is – the interconnection and
constant flux of every objective thing based on definite objective laws.
Furthermore, it must grasp its place amongst these laws of relations of
objects, and show in practice that the whole of society is an expression of
these laws, by consciously connecting mankind’s objective needs and wants with
the material world and using those laws to suit its ends.
