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Review: Proletarian Meditations: Georg Lukcs' Politics of Knowledge Author(s): John Flores Review by: John Flores Source: Diacritics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 10-14+16-21Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464596Accessed: 16-03-2015 11:39 UTC

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10 John Flores

PR?&e4C qC/A9Aft Me.% Y 74iW .9T4 T9SQcI4' Pt/di t G d .?4 Georg Lukiics, History and Class Con-

sciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialec- tics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. 356 PP.

The name Georg Lukics stands at the cross- roads of modern literary criticism. In a way un- paralleled by any of the other options surfacing from the polemical turmoil of the sixties, Marxist criticism is associated with the writings of one man, whose death a year ago serves as a further signal of his exemplary, classical stature in an era drawing visibly to a close. For despite that baffling admixture of iconoclasm and eclecticism, of revolutionary claim and patrician temperament, and despite the many vehement and often justified disclaimers which have resounded unabatingly from every corner of the Marxist arena, Lukics' work has held up as the sturdy backbone of a full-fledged tradition of 20th- century critical method. It doubtless takes greater perspicacity to recognize that it is precisely the tra- ditionalism of Lukaics, his compulsive quest for normative codification rooted in an evidently out- moded field of possibilities, which constitutes his most awesome challenge to all contending directions of contemporary critical theory and practice. Lukaics' intellectual biography spans what has been lived of the century, and his life-work embraces the entire formative development of Marxist aesthetics. As a result, recorded personal history so remarkably overlapping with the genesis and conventions of a methodology, Lukics has assured Marxist criticism its appropriate place not merely as an abundant reservoir of enticing ideas, but as a comprehensive legacy which for the sake of survival no other approach can afford to dismiss.

Furthermore, and of still greater consequence, classical Marxist criticism contends to have already passed conclusive verdict on the present-day free- for-all over the "ontological status" of criticism itself. Casting aside this stone of Sisyphus, it declares outright that, like it or not, both "criticism itself" and "literature itself" are sullied to the core of their being by "politics itself" and, alas, by "economics itself," and that rather than consume its efforts scrub- bing itself clean, criticism might as well meet its task head on by probing the essential marks of inter- penetration. To learn from Lukaics, therefore, means to be open to all intrusions, to such an extent that a book on political ideology, in which there is not a mention of literature, can be studied as the most important and valuable work by a major literary critic. This is a severe intellectual challenge, under- taken with the recognition that until he has come to grips with History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, no modern critic is in a position to discard the literary interpretations of Georg Lukics.

John Flores teaches German literature at Stanford.

Above and beyond this more oblique significance to literary criticism, of course, History and Class Consciousness is a book with a history, and its availability to readers in the contemporary United States, fifty years after its original publication, prom- ises to open the chapter in which it may be put to its most decisive test. Written in the dawning years of Bolshevik victory, it extols throughout "orthodox Marxism" as the only method with which adequately to understand and solve the predicament of modern man in society. Analogically speaking, at the least, it is to the October Revolution what Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind was to the French Revolu- tion. Yet far from becoming a scripture of Soviet self-legitimization, the book was subjected to one of the most scathing barrages of rejection accorded a single work of philosophy in those years by Com- munist theoreticians and ideologues inside and outside of the Soviet Union. But neither this official disavowal, nor the ceaseless volleys of controversy and self-criticism which surround the book's exten- sive international reception, have managed to shake the original testimonial authority of its central argument. For by illuminating the dimension of class consciousness, the meta-critical task to which Marx never returned once he had plunged into his monu- mental critique of political economy, Lukaics opened up a perspective on human history which continues to offer a firmer basis than any other extension of Marx to date for asserting the priority of class as the ultimate structural lever of social transformation. History and Class Consciousness is the document of this singular achievement, which makes it the historical cornerstone, the germinal source, of all of Lukaics' works and of all Marxist philosophy in this century.

History and Class Consciousness is a collection of eight essays written between the years 1919 and 1922. The unity of the compilation, according to Lukdics in his preface to the original edition (1923), is to be found in the "sequence" of the essays, which, for this reason, he advises reading in the order in which they appear. Indeed, the sweep of his argument, from definitional to practical, organizational considerations of the dialectical method, provides the most evident sense of unity to the book. From his opening studies, "What is Orthodox Marxism?" and "The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg," to the later chapters on "Legality and Illegality," "Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg's 'Critique of the Russian Rev- olution' " and "Towards a Methodology of the Prob- lem of Organization," Luki.cs proceeds to apply Marxist theory more and more directly to the immi- nent, practical needs of proletarian revolution. His philosophical attention moves, step by step, from the theoretical foundations of Marxism to the complex of questions raised and most satisfactorily answered by Lenin, the latter set of Lukics' essays constitut- ing a valuable clarification and extension of the con- clusions drawn in What Is to Be Done? and "Left- Wing" Communism.


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But Lukaics also suggests, by way of further prefatory advice, that readers "unversed in philosophy" leave to the end the long chapter on reification which occupies the middle section of the book, and comprises nearly one-half of the text. Quite aside from its sheer difficulty and commanding length, the three-part essay "Reification and the Con- sciousness of the Proletariat" clearly stands out as both the centerpiece and final statement of the entire book. The collection as a whole, in fact, leaves the overall impression of a dense philosophical trea- tise around which are clustered somewhat more occasional articles of subordinate weightiness. It is true that these companion pieces, such as "Class Consciousness," "Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization," and the two essays on Rosa Luxemburg, often exhibit the greatest precision and most compelling line of argument, and most ef- fectively synthesize the theoretical threads running through the full work. Thus, the individual essays and their sequence do afford the readiest access to the overall thrust of the collection. Nevertheless, the centrality of the analysis of reification, radiating a philosophical force which confers deeper significance upon the chapters which precede and follow it, af- fords clear precedence to that section in a serious critical examination of the work.

To go one step further, what Lukaics actually sets forth in History and Class Consciousness is a Marx- ist epistemology, in particular a theory of knowledge for proletarian revolutionary practice. The full ap- propriateness of this subject for "studies in Marxist dialectics" is clear from a statement like Lenin's in his Philosophical Notebooks: "Dialectics is the theory of knowledge of [Hegel and] Marxism [... ]. It is not 'an aspect' but the essence of the matter" (Col- lected Works, 45 vols. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960-70, vol. 38 [1967]; p. 362).1 Running deeper, then, than the evident structural features of the book-the unity of "sequence" and the theoretical centrality of the reification essay- the current of thematic categories of materialist dialectics unifies even further the varieties of context and levels of philosophical approach. The guiding principles of the new social consciousness, such as "totality," "objective possibility," "mediation," and "identity of the historical subject and object," under- lie and incorporate the functions of both theoretical and practical organizational method. In this meta- structural dimension of class epistemology, the cognitive process appears to encompass even the ontological phenomenon of reification and its historical opposition, since "de-reification" as a collective social act remains essentially the complex act of negation, whereas proletarian knowledge in its fullest sense involves, as Aufhebung, preservation and transformation, the primacy of assertive affirmation. With this ultimacy of epistemological considerations Lukics does not intend to place in question, or in any way di- minish, the fundamental priority of the "material substratum." Rather, he is only emphasizing and clarifying the most suggestive thought of historical dialectics: that the consciousness of the proletariat, because its history comprehends its roles both as an- tagonist and as protagonist, and spans the "realm of necessity" and the "realm of freedom," must consti-

tute a "total" knowledge both of its own historical situation and of its very capacity to arrive at such knowledge as well. In the closing sentences of the essay "Class Consciousness," Lukaics describes this dynamic, uncompromising character of proletarian self-knowledge: The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle. The struggle for this society, in which the dic- tatorship of the proletariat is merely a phase, is not just a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie. It is equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself: against the devastating and degrading effects of the capitalist system upon its class consciousness. The proletariat will only have won the real victory when it has overcome these effects within itself (p. 80).

The Marxist theory of knowledge developed by Lukaics emerges from his social ontology, the most definitive feature of which is clearly the "phenomenon of reification" (Verdinglichung). Significantly, "reification" is not to be mistaken for a variant of Marx's "alienation" (Entfremdung) of the Economic- Philosophic Manuscripts, a work completely un- known until some years after the publication of History and Class Consciousness. Despite the remarkable parallels in conception, it is primarily the differences between Entfremdung and Verdinglichung which illuminate the particular qualities, and limitations, of Lukics' analysis. His notion of "reification" is derived from that brief philosophical interlude, or plane of transition, in the first volume of Capital, "The Fetishism of Commodities." Lukics contended that this chapter "contains within itself the whole of historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletariat seen as the knowledge of capitalist society" (p. 170). LukSacs' interpretation bears the mark of that shift in emphasis detectable in Marx's development from the idea of alienation to the notion of commodity fetishism (Warenfetischismus) since the concept of reification does lay stress on the factor of attribution of quality to the completed product and productive activity, rather than on the process of detraction of quality from a more primary human condition. It is of some ideological consequence that, in Lukaics' conception, unlike that of Marx, this departure from the phenomenon of addi- tive bourgeois distortion was not prefigured by an analysis of the reductive aspect of capitalist de- humanization.

Lukaics begins with the specific passage in which Marx describes the "mystery" of commodities:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the pro- ducers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same

1 Valuable reading on this subject is provided by the recent collection of essays, Beitriige zur marxistischen Erkenntnistheorie, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt, 1969); an introductory discussion of Marxist epistemology is to be found in Maurice Cornforth, The Theory of Knowl- edge (New York: International Publishers, 1955).

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diacritics/Fall 1972



IP time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses [...]. It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things (quoted p. 86).

Luk~cs proceeds to work through this insight toward the intention of the original inspiration. Re-introduc- ing some terms of Hegelian methodology, seldom employed though never explicitly abandoned by Marx after his early writings, he extends Marx's descriptive characterization by elevating it to the status of an encompassing social phenomenology with both basic and superstructural, or objective and subjective, aspects. As he formulates his conception, "the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them" (p. 83). Further on, and pointing to the epistemological consequences of the commodity-structure which are of most compelling interest in the book, Lukaics writes:

The commodity can only be understood in its undis- torted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity-relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men's consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their at- tempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servi- tude to the "second nature" so created (p. 86).

The substructural, or "economic," dimension of reification is not the subject of History and Class Consciousness; here Lukics cedes to what he regards as the "completeness" of Marx's analysis and its (in Lukaics' sense) "orthodox" up-dating in The Accumulation of Capital. He would, I suppose, regard his own book as the partner volume to Rosa Luxemburg's magnum opus, the faithful thinking- through of The German Ideology written to comple- ment that true-to-spirit continuation of Capital. At any rate, Lukaics clearly concentrates on concep- tualizing the superstructure of economic reification, the relationship between social existence and social consciousness, the essential, dialectical features of which he describes in the following terms:

The objective reality of social existence is in its immediacy "the same" for both proletariat and bourgeoisie. But this does not prevent the specific categories of mediation by means of which both classes raise this immediacy to the level of consciousness, by means of which the merely immediate reality becomes for both the authentically objective reality, from being fundamentally different, thanks to the different position oc- cupied by the two classes within the "same" economic process. It is evident that once again we are approach- ing-this time from another angle-the fundamental problem of bourgeois thought, the problem of the thing-in-itself (p. 150). The most consequential effect of capitalist reification, and the real meaning of bourgeois "mystifica- tion," is that it divides human existence in society,

as well as all social knowledge, into two mutually contradictory "realities." This phenomenon of "doubling" (Verdoppelung), the expression of reification in the realm of conceptuality, is rendered clear and concrete in the metaphorical antithesis between the shell (Hiille) and the inner core (Kern), surface and deeper substance, of social reality. The outer surface of historical existence, the immediate appearance of phenomena, presents a reality ruled by things, divested of all human content and participation. The layer of.knowledge which corresponds to this reality is, on the one hand, accurate and reliable cognition, since it draws verification from objective, perceivable social facts "identical" for all contemporary observers regardless of their position in society. For all members of bourgeois society, reification is the "truth," the Urphiinomen, of their social existence, since reification is but the universal category abstracted from the concrete economic relations, the "commodity-structure," determinative of all social activity.

On the other hand, because men exercise different functions and participate differently in this "same" economic order, the process by which they convert the given objectivity into a factor of cognitive apprehension must differ correspondingly. For the bourgeoisie, in whose experience the "things" of reality are in fact objects distinctly detached from subjectivity, conceptualization is a process of reflection; bourgeois consciousness can only mirror back the surface of immediate social appearance in the form of "laws" which affix historical phenomena as "eternal" and "natural." The role of the proletariat in the commodity-structure, however, is essentially a contribution of subjectivity. The bourgeois social process, of which it is the objectively necessary product, transforms its definitive quality, productive activity, into an object of quantifiable calculation. The proletarian act of cognition, therefore, must not only negate the "laws" resulting from bourgeois reflection; it must also, in order to accomplish this negation, proceed in the reverse direction from that of the governing social process itself. That is, the proletariat raises the immediate objectivity of social phenomena to consciousness by returning "things," the components of the commodity-structure, to their origin in human subjectivity. Proletarian knowledge penetrates the reified surface of social reality, and demonstrates its ultimate falsity as a criterion of validation, by detecting the inner, human core of all economic relationships. Lukaics defines this method of conceptualization, with its characteristic insistence that commodity relations, are in "authentically objective reality," relations among men, as "mediation."

The term "mediation" (Vermittlung), a category of Hegelian logic adapted by Lukics to Marx- ist philosophy, is really the pivotal concept of His- tory and Class Consciousness. Its epistemological meaning, the process of consciously breaking through the confines of bourgeois "immediacy," is only its most basic, rudimentary signification. For the dialectical corollary to the cognitive penetration to the "human core" of social reality is the emergent class self-awareness of the proletariat. The unique capacity of the proletariat to "mediate" between the



realities of objective appearance and subjective essence involves, as both cause and effect, its ability to identify itself as a class, that is, to "mediate" between its own subjective and objective reality as a social entity. By seeing in itself the subject of the "same" reality of which it appears a product, the proletariat recognizes itself as the object of its own knowledge. It is this argument which leads Lukaics to his controversial definition of the proletariat as the "identical subject-object" of history and historical cognition. His crucial qualification, which does indi- cate conclusively that he is putting this Hegelian terminology to Marxist use, is that the proletarian category of mediation between subject and object must be understood as involving not only the accurate representation of objective reality, but its transformation through the very insight into its changeability.

Here, with the introduction of the notion of practice and historical transformation as itself a component latent within the proletarian theory of knowledge, Lukics clearly distinguishes between his own conception of "doubling" and the dualism in- herent in all previous epistemology. "The belief," he writes, "that the transformation of the immediately given into a truly understood (and not merely an immediately perceived) and for that reason really objective reality, i.e. the belief that the impact of the category of mediation upon the picture of the world is merely 'subjective', i.e. is no more than an 'evaluation' of a reality that 'remains unchanged', all this is as much as to say that objective reality has the character of a thing-in-itself" (p. 150). The proletariat, on the other hand, not only experiences a change in its own standpoint with regard to reality; its process of cognitive mediation allows it to recognize the objective possibility of a reality other than the one which is both "given" and "truly understood." Mediation, therefore, unlike bourgeois "reflection" with its inevitable dualist limitations, places the knowing subject, as well as the object of his knowledge, in the context of the historical process as a totality.

Lukaics' central category of totality, as a function in his overall epistemological analysis, lends the process of mediation its most consequential theoretical significance.2 For the development of proletarian class consciousness constitutes more than a penetration to the human core of reified social existence, and the resultant subjective-objective recognition of class identity. Proletarian knowledge takes on full scope by proceeding out from that de-reified social core to an understanding of the concrete totality of history as a force at work within the given historical reality. Here again, because of the concrete prac- ticality and class specificity of his conception, Lukics draws an unmistakable distinction between his own and the inevitable bourgeois notion of uni- versality: For history as a totality (universal history) is neither the mechanical aggregate of individual historical events, nor is it a transcendent heuristic principle opposed to the events of history, a principle that could only become effective with the aid of a special discipline, the philosophy of history. The totality of history is itself a real historical power--even though one that has not hitherto become conscious and has therefore gone unrecognized--

a power which is not to be separated from the reality (and hence the knowledge) of the individual facts with- out at the same time annulling their reality and their factual existence. It is the real, ultimate ground of their reality and their factual existence and hence also of their knowability even as individual facts (pp. 151-152). Even that objective "sameness" of immediate social existence is therefore altered by dint of the known totality of the historical process. Proletarian mediation, in this sense, assumes its specific temporal function; it is a factor of present reality which can truly "mediate" between past and future only when "grasped" by the proletariat. Lukaics makes this point in a startling passage in which he draws heavily on Ernst Bloch's philosophy of genesis and antici- pation: When the concrete here and now dissolves into a process it is no longer a continuous, intangible moment, immediacy slipping away; it is the focus of the deepest and most widely ramified mediation, the focus of decision and of the birth of the new. As long as man concentrates his interest contemplatively upon the past or future, both ossify into an alien existence. And between the subject and the object lies the unbridgeable "pernicious chasm" of the present. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth (pp. 203-4).

The real brilliance of Lukics' formulation of a class theory of knowledge, and proof of its fidelity to the meaning of his Marxist source, lies in his re- fusal to abandon the Platonic and Kantian epistemological design. On the contrary, his own set of contrasts between social existence and essence, appearance and reality, immediacy and mediated totality, shells and core, deliberately retain the familiar structural antinomy of images and Ideas, or phenomena and noumena. It is by taking these recog- nizable dualistic constructs as the starting-point and confronting them head-on, not by sketching out totally new categories on some hypothetical tabula rasa, that the ascendancy of proletarian thought is finally assured. "Just because its practical goal is the fundamental transformation of the whole of society, it conceives of bourgeois society together with its intellectual and artistic productions as the point of departure for its own method" (p. 163). All determinants of reflection must collapse, and all bourgeois coordinates of validation be encompassed and an- nulled, if the categories of proletarian mediation and historical totality are to serve as a material revolutionary force. Lukics most clearly achieves this unity of criticism and transcendence, the Aufhebung of the category of reflection, when he states that "thought and existence are not identical in the sense that they 'correspond' to each other, or 'reflect' each other, that they 'run parallel' to each other or 'coincide' with each other (all expressions that con- ceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are 2 On totality in his works of literary criticism, see Roy Pascal, "Georg Lukdcs: The Concept of Totality" in Georg Lukfics: The Man, the Work and his Ideas, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 147-71.

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14 aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process. What is 'reflected' in the consciousness of the proletariat is the new positive reality arising out of the dialectical contradictions of capitalism" (p. 204).

Such is the philosophical substance of History and Class Consciousness when distilled to its most salient train of analysis. The relationship called to mind by the title is identifiable as the antinomy between being and thought, matter and mind, which has been the cardinal preoccupation of philosophy throughout its history. Only with the advent of secular bourgeois society could this duality be recognized as essentially social and historical; only then, history having become the sole receptacle of reason, could the crisis of knowledge emerge as a theoretical crisis specific to man. Yet because the very foundation of bourgeois society constituted the extraction of humanity from both history and reason, the categories of human self-understanding necessarily remained fixed in the mutually exclusive terms of philosophical dualism. The emergence of the proletariat represented the resolution of this dualism not, primarily, because it bore with it new "ideas," but because it signaled the practical need to differentiate the category of "being" one step further. History as a for- mal concept, as the locus of human existence, was still inaccessible to human thought; it had to provide testimony not only that men are, but that they act, before it could constitute a force capable of concrete mutual interaction with human cognition. The thrust of Lukics' argument is that Marxist dialectics, by identifying class struggle as the specific differential of history, introduces a corresponding differentiation in the modalities of knowledge. Class consciousness, then, is the epistemological correlative to history understood as class struggle. But since the proletariat is the only class which, as a class, can understand history in this way, it is the only class for which class consciousness is the appropriate mode of knowledge. "Class," the ontological specification of both history and reason, therefore serves as the medium of their concrete mutuality, and as the conclusive resolution of the dualistic antinomies of bourgeois thought.

As far as it goes, this argument at no point contradicts or distorts the original Marxist formulation; in its own terms, it stands as the most pene- trating yet faithful elucidation and extension of the "materialist conception of history" to date. The most remarkable irony about History and Class Conscious- ness, however, is that in all its "orthodoxy" and dialectical profundity it misrepresents the most basic component of dialectical materialism, man's relation to nature, as thoroughly as is conceivable. At several crucial points in the book Lukics insists upon the need to draw a clear separation between the dialectics of social history and the dialectics of nature, and to single out the former as the true domain of the Marxist method. Early in his opening essay, for example, he remarks: It is of the first importance to realize that the method is limited here to the realms of history and society. The misunderstandings that arise from Engels' account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels-following Hegel's mistaken lead--extended the

method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics-the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc.-are ab- sent from our knowledge of nature (p. 24). Later on in the book he carries the point even further:

Nature is a societal category. That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e. nature's form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned (p. 234). For Lukaics, the dialectics of nature is a process of movement and flux which stands over against man as an object of contemplation, forbidding his active participation. Nature appears, consistently, as a force ultimately inaccessible, unintelligible, and even in- imical to man, much the way society and the historical process present themselves to bourgeois apperception.

This image of nature is so clearly alien to and misrepresentative of the basic tenets of dialectical materialism that it is unnecessary to cite the many passages from the "Theses on Feuerbach," the Grundrisse, the Critique and Capital, not to mention the 1844 Manuscripts, Engels' Dialectics of Na- ture and Anti-Diihring and Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in which it is described and de- cisively refuted. Lukics himself came to an early recognition of his offense "against the very roots of Marxian ontology," a deviation so fundamental that among all the trends and threads of Marxism, with its vast array of heretics, mavericks and vulgarizers, Lukaics can point only to the quaintly mixed com- pany of Lunacharsky and Sartre as having pursued the same erroneous course. Lukacs' Hegelian Marxist contemporaries, Karl Korsch and Ernst Bloch, also intent on preserving "historical reason" as the con- ceptual framework of Marxism, never failed consistently and emphatically to explain nature as the ultimate field of materialist dialectics.3

In his self-critical Preface of 1967, Lukics sums up at some length the theoretical consequences of his misconception. He points, first of all, to the virtual absence of the category of labor, and to the resultant misunderstanding of the meaning of economics, such that "the most important real pillars of the Marxist view of the world disappear." "Marx's great insight," he goes on to remark, "that 'even production means nothing more than the development of the productive energies of man, and hence

3See Korsch, "Der Standpunkt der materialistischen Geschichtsauftassung" (1922) in Marxismus und Philoso- phie (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), pp. 137-164, especially pp. 157-160; Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt: Erliuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1962). On the subject of the Marxist dialectics of nature, see the excellent study by Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1962), English tran. The Concept of Na- ture in Marx (London, 1970). For a current Marxist discussion of thle dialectics of nature, see the chapter "Na- ture and Revolution" in Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolu- tion and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 59-98.



16 the development of the wealth of human nature as an end in itself' lies outside the terrain which History and Class Consciousness is able to explore." Lukics concludes, "my account of the contradictions of capitalism as well as of the revolutionisation of the proletariat is unintentionally colored by an overrid- ing subjectivism" (pp. xvii-xviii). A Marxist repudi- ation of History and Class Consciousness must be no less far-reaching than that which Lukics sets forth. For by presenting nature as a "societal category," and subsuming its movement under the laws of the science of history, Lukics is performing the decidedly retrogressive act of turning Marxism back on its Hegelian head. What he offers by way of elucidating the "dialectical method," therefore his entire epistemological construct, is really only a torso, or, more precisely, only a bas-relief version of the rounded body of Marxism. All of the categories to which he has recourse-totality, objective possibility, mediation, and so forth-are acceptable, likewise, only when subjected to substantial qualification.

An analysis of the reasons for this lapse in interpretation lies largely in the realm of speculation. Certainly part of the explanation is Lukics' quite justifiable reaction against the tradition of "Marxist" scientism, what Korsch termed "naturalist dialectics," which relied heavily on the exaggerations and often misplaced emphases in Engels' later works and which clearly emerged as the theoretical backdrop of political revisionism and vulgar "Marxism" alike. In this respect, Lukaics' philosophical undertaking and line of argumentation corresponded to those of Korsch, Gramsci, Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks, and other leading theoreticians who argued for a re- emphasis on the Hegelian background of Marxism. The other plausible explanation involves Lukics' ideological development, that is, the prolonged dis- sociation from his youthful leanings toward the anti- dialectical, ahistorical thinking of Kierkegaard and George Sorel, and, somewhat later, his absorption of neo-Kantian metaphysics and Weberian sociology. In both cases-the battle against "scientism" and the overcoming of his own origins-it is clear that, at least by 1923, the author's turn to Hegel was significantly more momentous in effect than his cele- brated "road to Marx" (Mein Weg zu Marx, an autobiographical sketch written in 1933). Seen in this light, History and Class Consciousness is more a work of transition than the first document of a qualitatively new position. For in rejecting the dialectics of nature Lukics shows that he was still more intent on attacking bourgeois irrationalism and empiricism than on toppling the entire edifice of bourgeois ideology. The weapon appropriate to the task was the blunt tool of Hegelian rationalism, not the cut- ting edge of dialectical materialism.

Most revealing of all among the apparent reasons for the peculiar philosophical mutation of His- tory and Class Consciousness is Lukics' motivation for embracing the Marxist world-view. He recapit- ulates this development in 1967:

Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen the internal contradictions for the time being but in the long run it will lead to their resolution. Thus my ethics tended in the direction of praxis, action and hence towards politics. And this led in turn to economics, and

the need for a theoretical grounding there finally brought me to the philosophy of Marxism [... .. My last hesita- tions before making my final, irrevocable choice, were marked by a misguided attempt at an apologia fortified with abstract and Philistine arguments. But the final decision could not be resisted forever. The little essay Tactics and Ethics reveals its inner human motivations (p. xi). Lukics came to Marxism by personal ethical choice, and not through the imperative of direct, practical interaction with material reality. His Marxist life be- gan, therefore, on the theme of moral justification, a field in which he had recourse only to a politicized version of the Kantian imperative and categories from the Philosophy of Right. The early essay "Tak- tik und Ethik" (Friihschriften II. Neuwied: Luchter- hand, 1968, pp. 45-53) is a rather tortured treatment of "violence unto others," ending with an impassioned, Biblical-sounding quote from Hebbel's Judith! And the direct continuity from this essay to the terminology and assumptions of History and Class Con- sciousness is obvious. The personal point of departure for Lukacs' Marxist discourse is secular Christian morality, which he himself would doubtless recognize-ideologically-as the real root of bourgeois ethics. The irreconcilable antagonism, however, between such an ethical premise and the deeper implications of the Marxist dialectics of nature represents a dilemma the magnitude of which, from all evidence, persisted in escaping his awareness.

It was Hegelian historical rationalism and neo- Kantian ethics, the ideological and personal motivations of Lukics' turn to Marxism, which blinded him, in History and Class Consciousness, to the revolutionary Marxist conception of nature. To be sure, he claims to have corrected this elemental flaw in all of his subsequent writings, pointing to his major theoretical works Der junge Hegel (1938) and the Ontologie, published in part as Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins (1972), as evidence of this ideological rectification. But there is ample indi- cation that his entire development as a Marxist over fifty years never fully erased these marks of origin, and that he never really came to ground his critical application of Marxism in the basic dynamic relationship between man and nature. Thus, even as late as his 1967 Preface, he failed to carry his self- criticism to the acknowledgment that his insistence

4 For example, Lukdcs' programmatic essay "Marx and Engels on Aesthetics" in Writer and Critic (New York: Grosset, 1970), pp. 61-88, contains the following statement: "Marxist economics actually relates the categories of economics, the basis of social life, back to where they appear in reality, as human relationships and past these to the relationship of society and nature" (p. 69, my emphasis). But the very next sentence ("Yet Marx simultaneously demonstrates that under capitalism all these categories appear absolutely reified so that their true essence, men's relationships, are obscured") and the entire passage on capitalist reification which immediately follows conspicuously omits the interplay of society and nature. Lukadcs' failure really to investigate this deeper penetration of Marxist dialectics, and consistent substitu- tion of the more acceptable term Wiederspiegelung for the valuable notion of Vermittlung from History and Class Consciousness result in the rigid aesthetic theory of this essay and nearly all of his later writings on art and literature.



on regarding nature as a "societal category" was itself an expression of reified ideology; nowhere does he illustrate clearly his practical understanding of the Marxist position that social history develops through a process of ongoing mediation with the dialectical movement of nature. The persistence of this dwarfed inversion of Marxism had its constricting effects on all of Lukaics' analysis, such that he remained pathetically insensitive to some of the most revolutionary expressions of contemporary life.

One such specific theoretical failure resulting from his general misrepresentation of nature, and which he never came to rectify, is already evident in History and Class Consciousness; it concerns the relationship between class consciousness and psychology. On the one hand he argues at some length, as part of his effort to distinguish it from "public opinion surveys" and to confer upon it an "indis- putably practical objectivity" (p. xviii), that class consciousness "has no psychological reality" (p. 75). On the other hand he delineates the crucial difference between capitalism and earlier societies in terms which are saturated with psychological implications; capitalism, he states, is a period "where economic factors are not concealed 'behind' consciousness but are present in consciousness itself (albeit unconsciously or repressed). With capitalism, with the abolition of the feudal estates and with the creation of a society with a purely economic articulation, class consciousness arrived at the point where it could become conscious" (p. 59, emphasis in original). Had

LukSacs been able to accept fully the notion that by "material reality" Marx meant first and foremost the reality of the natural environment, he would not have been content even with merely asserting the "psychological reality" of class consciousness. He also would have been able to recognize the immense practical potential of such an assertion in the cause of raising revolutionary consciousness, that is, the profound analogy between the dialectical method and the method of psychoanalysis.

Wilhelm Reich defined this analogy, and the theoretical lessons that Marxism can learn from the discoveries of psychoanalysis, in his landmark essay "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" (1929). The psychoanalytic method and its dialectical theory of instincts, Reich observes, can serve to reveal the "intermediate stages" between the economic conditions and the formation of ideology. Psychoanalysis proves that the economic structure of society does not directly transform itself into ideologies "inside the head." Instead it shows that the instinct for nourishment (self-preservation instinct), the manifesta- tions of which are dependent upon given economic conditions, affects and changes the workings of the sexual instinct, which is far more plastic (i.e. malleable). In limiting the aims of sexual needs, this constantly creates new productive forces within the social work process by means of the sublimated libido. Directly, the sublimated libido yields working capacity; indirectly, it leads to more highly-developed forms of sexual sublimation, e.g., religion, morality in general and sexual morality in particular, etc. This means that psychoanalysis has its proper place within the materialist view of history at a very specific point: at that point where psychological questions arise as a result of the Marxian thesis that material existence transforms itself into "ideas inside the

head" ("Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis," Studies on the Left, No. 6, July-Aug. 1966, pp. 5-46; quote from pp. 36-37). The psychoanalytic method, therefore, in its penetration to the natural basis of human existence, can furnish a vital mediational lever between the economic reality of the proletariat and its mental response; it can, in Lukaics' terms, illuminate ways in which the "unconscious or repressed" class consciousness "can become conscious."

Lukaics did not accept this analogy, nor its carry-over into the even more promising area of group psychology as it is applied by Reich in his Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)." Instead, his intellectual response to National Socialism, The De- struction of Reason (Die Zerstiirung der Vernunft, first published in Hungarian in 1953), is unquestion- ably his weakest book, and contains the same un- differentiated rejection of psychology as History and Class Consciousness. The insights of psychoanalysis, insofar as Lukaics even finds it necessary to consider them, remained inextricably enmeshed in the tradition of German irrationalism which culminated in Hitler. Freud was, by implication at least, merely a continuation of Nietzsche and Dilthey and a contemporary of Bergson, all exponents of an empiricist vitalism and philosophy of spontaneity against which pristine proletarian enlightenment had to be on constant guard. Even a cursory understanding of Rosa Luxemburg, and of Lenin, reveals how crucial it is for revolutionary Marxists to avoid the sterility of such a position. Furthermore, because Lukaics' work lacks virtually all psychological dimension, it contains hardly a mention of social sexuality, the role of the family, or the position of women; his concept of the modern class struggle rarely extends beyond the charted terrain of political ideology.

As for a more fruitful Marxist attitude toward psychoanalysis and other discoveries of "bourgeois" natural science, Lukaics might have done well to learn, by analogy, from Marx's comment on Darwin in the first volume of Capital: Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Tech- nology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for outstanding life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them (New York: The Modern Library, 1906, p. 406).

Psychoanalysis, as Reich states, "is not a world philosophy, nor can it develop such a philosophy," and can therefore "neither replace nor supplement the materialist conception of history." But as a "psychological method using the means of natural science for describing and explaining man's inner life as a specific part of nature," for illuminating

s See also, for a fascinating contrast with Lukdcs, Reich's "heretical" pamphlet Was ist Klassenbewusstsein? (Co- penhagen, 1934).

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18 "neurotic phenomena, disturbances in man's working capacity or in his sexual performance," and as an "auxiliary science to sociology [...] in the form of social psychology" (Dialectical Materialism and Psy- choanalysis," pp. 6-7), it is an invaluable tool which Marxism must adopt, critically, if it is to probe fully the realities of modern life.

The same passage from Capital may also help to reveal the restrictive and indeed un-Marxist assumptions underlying Lukics' theoretical rejection of artistic "modernism," most prominently the innovations of Brecht and Kafka. In History and Class Consciousness Lukics accepts Hegel's differentiation in the superstructure between "forms of the objective spirit (economics, law and the state) which shape social, purely human interrelationships," and those of the absolute spirit (art, religion and philosophy) which are "essentially, although in ways that differ from each other, involvements of man with nature, both with the nature that surrounds him and that which he finds within himself" (p. 234). Art, in particular, he calls "above all a dialogue between man and nature" (p. 235). At the same time, however, because he is compelled at this very point in his argument to qualify nature as a "societal category," and to insist that its "form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned," he clearly inverts Marx's understanding of technology. For that reason, he fails to grasp the vital interaction intended in Marxist theory between art and technology as direct "involvements" between man and nature. That is, the development of technology itself "conditions" and "qualifies" the determinant of social history, class struggle, a factor to which art must remain acutely sensitive.

This issue constitutes the real crux of the extended polemic between Lukics and Brecht. The position of Lukaics toward modern literature, most succinctly presented in Realism in Our Time (Wider den missverstandenen Realismus, 1958), focuses on the relation of "literature and the class struggle" (the subtitle of that book). He draws a sharp ideological distinction between "modernism" and "critical realism" in modern bourgeois art, and proceeds to reject the former as a source of socialist art because of its fundamental reliance on the technological devices introduced by 20th-century capitalism and the "ideology" which accompanies such a reliance. The task of proletarian art, therefore, is to provide socialist "perspective" to the tradition of critical realism as represented by Balzac, Tolstoy and Thomas Mann. Brecht, on the other hand, en- deavored to point out in theory and practice that although the ground-rules of class struggle remain the same, its concrete environment has been qualitatively altered as a result of sheer technological ad- vance. His continual appeal for an "art of the scien- tific age," therefore, is not intended to blunt the dynamics of class struggle, but to sharpen it by tac- tically exploiting the detectable changes in the mode of human perception introduced by modern science and technology, even though they continue to be socially regulated by the bourgeoisie. Lukics would probably agree, therefore, with the starting-point of Brecht's analysis, as he expresses it in the "Short

Organum for the Theatre" (1948): The new sciences may have made possible this vast alteration and all-important alterability of our surround- ings, yet it cannot be said that their spirit determines everything that we do. The reason why the new way of thinking and feeling has not yet penetrated the great mass of men is that the sciences, for all their success in exploiting and dominating nature, have been stopped by the class which they brought to power-the bourgeoisie- from operating in another field where darkness still reigns, namely that of the relations which people have to one another during the exploiting and dominating process (Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, p. 184). But because his assessment of modern art remains within the categorical confines of social history, Lukics is unable to pursue Brecht's argument to its revolutionary conclusion: "We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and im- pulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself" (Brecht on Theatre, p. 190).

A productive Marxist evaluation of the poten- tials of modern art is exemplified in the extension of Brechtian theory by Walter Benjamin. The preface of Benjamin's famous essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) is a quote from Valery's "Pieces sur l'art." Valery describes the immense changes in the nature and function of art which have resulted from the growth of modern knowledge and power. The "physical components" of all the arts, the techniques at the dis- posal of the artist, are deeply affected by these technological advances. "We must expect," he concludes, "'great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art" (Walter Benjamin, Illu- minations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969, p. 219). Benjamin then provides this "modernist," only abstractly historical statement of Valery with an explanation in the terms of historical materialism:

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon (pp. 217-218).

The "theses" which make up the body of Benjamin's essay serve to shatter, conclusively, the rigid aver- sion implied in an aesthetics such as that of Lukics toward the "intrusion" of photographic reflection and mechanization into the domain of art. Benjamin, on the contrary, points up the momentous potential of technical innovation in the fight for social revolution, as well as its deep interconnections with the discoveries of psychoanalysis. He argues that me-



chanical reproduction of art introduces the possibility of a progressive mass participation in artistic cre- ativity, since it allows for the "direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert." Benjamin calls attention to the social significance of such a fusion, and of the characteristic alteration in man's relation to mechanical equipment and, "by means of this apparatus," to his environment.

The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which has seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception (p. 237).6 Both of these fields of investigation, and their mutual complementarity, were essentially closed to Lukaics, whose work of literary and cultural criticism, with all its unsurpassed brilliance on the subjects of Goethe, Balzac and Thomas Mann, will never really be of germinal service to observers of 20th-century art.

As for Kafka, insofar as he represents the most profound among modernist critics of contemporary society not expressly aligned with the socialist "perspective," it is clear that Lukracs' parameters of analysis do not encompass his world. Lukatcs only gets so far in his appreciative interpretation of Kafka's technique of abstracting and crystallizing the emptiness of human existence in modern society, being again bound within the span of socially pre- scribed historical reason. Lukaics' summary statement about Kafka is the passage from Realism in Our Time. While granting him a keen sense of observation, "an extraordinary evocative power," and a "unique sensibility," Lukaics concludes with a con- demnation of Kafka's art because its typically modernist "allegorical approach" conflicts directly with the normative method of fictional representation derived from the 19th-century realist tradition. "This allegorical transcendence," he writes, "bars Kafka's way to realism, prevents him from investing observed detail with typical significance. Kafka is not able [...] to achieve that fusion of the particular and the general which is the essence of realistic art [...]. Specific subject-matter and stylistic variation do not matter; what matters is the basic ideological deter- mination of form and content. The particularity we find in Beckett and Joyce, in Musil and Benn, various as the treatment of it may be, is essentially of the same kind" (Realism in Our Time, trans. John and Necke Mander. New York: Harper and Row, 1964, p. 45). Brecht's own statements about Kafka, it is true, go little further than to regard him as a "great humorist," although his parabolic technique and practice of "de-familiarizing the familiar" (Verfrem- dung) clearly draw from the same profound current of insight and sensibility as Kafka's unique fictional method. But Benjamin really pointed to the enormity of Kafka's range of vision, in contrast to even the

broadest horizon of Lukacs, in a passing comment on the tenth anniversary of Kafka's death: "Georg Lukics once said that in order to make a decent table nowadays, a man must have the architectural genius of a Michelangelo. If Lukics thinks in terms of ages, Kafka thinks in terms of cosmic epochs" (Illuminations, p. 113). In a word, it is vitally necessary for Marxists to recognize in Kafka the author whose work has penetrated most deeply of all, more deeply than that of Thomas Mann despite Lukics' arguments to the contrary, to the core of bourgeois society, in this sense expanding vertically, as it were, on the panorama first presented in horizontal fictional decor by Balzac. It is also necessary, therefore, to insist that Kafka's opus, the fragmentary epic of Verdinglichung, has something indispensable to teach, and some invaluable techniques to supply, to socialist artists, whose primary creative and political aim must admittedly be to help combat and conquer that society which can only see its own human substance mirrored back at it as a nightmarish world of objects. But Lukaics never arrived at this full dialectical understanding-whence his consistent, often pathetic failure, in assessing modern artistic directions, to keep up with the prominent cultural innovations of our age.

Finally, the limitations of Luk6.cs' Marxism extend to his overall political position. Here again, the inadequate corrective to his initial undialectical view of nature persisted in dulling his sense of the real human possibilities opened up by Marxism. The issue in the case of political analysis and strategy has to do with the question of "unevenness" or "gradations" in the development of revolutionary proletarian consciousness. In History and Class Con- sciousness Luktcs remarks that "there are not merely national and 'social' stages involved but there are also gradations within the class consciousness of workers in the same strata" (p. 78). He goes on, then, to explore the causes, features and possible rectification of the latter phenomena of differing levels within the proletariat, the "degrees of distance between the psychological class consciousness and the adequate understanding of the total situation." But he never returns to the differentiation resulting from "national and 'social' stages." It is on this point, the "interference" of national awareness and identity in the formation of "objective" class consciousness, that there emerges the real interplay between "natural" or "psychological" and directly economic determinants of collective historical motivation. Luk.cs' failure, in History and Class Consciousness, to pursue this dialectical interplay, the key to an understanding of revolutionary struggle in the age of im-

6 For an adaptation of these theories to more contemporary economic and technological conditions, see Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," New Left Review, no. 64 (Nov.-Dec. 1970), pp. 13-36. Benjamin applies his thesis directly to the field of literary art in his remarkable, still untranslated essay, "Der A utor als Produzent," Versuche eiber Brecht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), pp. 95-116. Lukdcs' insensitivity to this entire field of analysis shows most clearly in his crude conception of artistic "technique" in "Art and Objective Truth," Writer and Critic, pp. 25-60, especially pp. 58-59.

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20 perialism, may forecast the revisionist position he held in the last years of his life.

In his fine monograph Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (originally published in 1924) Lukics addresses himself clearly to the relationship between colonial wars of national liberation and proletarian internationalism. He recognizes Lenin's theory of imperialism to be "simultaneously [...] a theory of the different currents within the working- class movement in the age of imperialism" (Lenin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971, p. 53). "The oppressed nations' struggle for national independence," he explains, "is an undertaking of the greatest revolutionary self-education, both for the proletariat of the oppressing nation, which overcomes its own nationalism by fighting for full national independence of another people, and for the proletariat of the oppressed nation, which in its turn transcends its own nationalism by raising the corresponding slogan of federalism-of international proletarian solidarity" (Lenin, pp. 49-50). Lukfics states the choices confronting the proletariat of the oppressor nations, "either to kill its class comrades in other countries for the monopolistic interests of the bourgeoisie by force, or to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie by force," and proceeds to restate the Leninist strategy: "If the proletariat wants to escape [...] ultimate on- slaught, it must [...] itself take up arms against this apparatus, undermine it from within, turn the weapons the bourgeoisie was forced to give to the people against the bourgeoisie itself, and use them to destroy imperialism" (Lenin, pp. 52-53).

Such is Lukics' political prescription for eve- ning off gradations of class consciousness resulting from the relative differences among nations, and it remains the tried and incontestable revolutionary formula for the proletariat within the imperialist nations. The historical alternative which he omits from consid- eration, and which he never came to recognize as the most striking political reality of our time, is that it is the oppressed peoples and nations, and not the indus- trial proletariat within imperialist society, who in- itiate and lead the military attack against imperialism. That is, Lukaics is true to the analysis of Marx (in the Communist Manifesto) which recognizes in the "uncivilized," colonized peoples the objects of capitalist expansion; but he remained insensitive to the dialectical implications of Lenin's argument that they would increasingly show themselves to be the most revolutionary subjects acting against world capitalism. In fact, the relative primacy of the proletarian role in the worker-peasant alliance even diminished qualitatively after Lenin's strategic modification of Marxist class solidarity, such that Mao Tse-tung could report, in "The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party" (1939): "The peasantry constitutes approximately 80 per cent of China's total population and is the main force in her national economy today [...]. The poor peasants in China, together with the farm labourers, form about 70 per cent of the rural population. They are the broad peasant masses with no land or insufficient land, the semi-proletariat of the countryside, the biggest motive force of the Chinese revolution, the natural and most reliable ally of the proletariat and the main contin- gent of China's revolutionary forces" (Selected

Works, 4 vols. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1961- , II, 1967, pp. 323-324). This primarily non- proletarian constituent alliance rising in opposition to modern capitalism and the substantial feudal rem- nants that it perpetuates is not the exception but the rule in all major revolutionary show-downs of the present epoch.

This shift in the fronts of revolutionary ascendancy from the European and North American proletariat directly engaged in modern industry to the national, "popular" aspirations of the largely land- based colonial reserve army of labor means that the "identical subject-object" of history manifests less of a specifically proletarian class identity than was intended in Lukics' formulation. For, first of all, the face of the exploiter is distinguishable from this vantage-point by a complex of more "irrational" features than those customarily attributed to the classical bourgeois capitalist mongering his material profit, which is what leads Frantz Fanon, for example, to the observation: "When you examine at close quar- ters the colonial context, it is evident that what par- cels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem." "The natives' challenge to the colonial world," he goes on to emphasize, "is not a rational confrontation of points of view" (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963, pp. 40-41). Moreover, the means of production and labor-power of which the rural van- guard wrests control are not the machinery of ad- vanced industry and the dehumanized activity conditioned by it, but the natural environment itself, and the psyche and culture expressive of a victimized peoples' identity. The subject of revolutionary knowledge is the landed toiler turned soldier-patriot, and its object the variegated admixture of human demands which propel the process of decolonization. "Dereification," that conscious arrival at the human core of society and simultaneous grasp of the historical totality, is less directly a matter of class self- assertion than the argument of Lukaics suggests, which does not mean that it is any less precisely describable. Fanon, in fact, is actually applying the terms of Lukics' analysis when he fills in the recog- nizable features of contemporary class struggle:

Decolonization never takes places unnoticed, for it influ- ences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality in- to privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the "thing" which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself (Wretched of the Earth, pp. 36-37).

How far is Lukics' sense of proletarian mediation, also, from the thought of George Jackson, that strik-



ing subject of pre-revolution in the contemporary United States, the offspring of slave history, fighting for ghetto survival, turned black urban guerrilla, mur- dered springing his prison bars. The American proletarian revolution must gather initiative from that psyche, that culture, and that perspective of anger and pride, if it is to pierce through to a total vic- torious analysis.

The failure on Lukics' part ever to take adequate philosophical note of this variable in the formation of proletarian consciousness leads to the ob- jectionable political position he held in old age. In his writings and statements of the 1960's, he pro- posed the major tasks of that period to be furthering and accelerating the process of "de-Stalinization" and evading global war through "peaceful co-existence."' Thus, while Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Revolution were at work leaping forward from the "methods of Stalin" and superseding them, in theory and practice, in the Great Proletarian Cultural Rev- olution, LukLcs was still heralding the wisdom of Khrushchev and the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956; while in three colonized continents the battle- lines were being drawn against the international class enemy, Lukaics was busy devising an appropriate tete-a-tete between the two "universally interwoven" systems, all the while admitting, unashamedly, his virtual ignorance of the basic relations of production in Africa. Long, hard life-experience may provide texture and personal veracity to the considered cau- tion of his last years; but final testimony to the tragic detachment of his Marxism from the real currents of modern political history is embodied in the di- vergence of his biography from that of his exact Communist contemporary, Ho Chi Minh.

An assessment of History and Class Conscious- ness, as of the entire work of Georg Lukics, may depend for its balance and finality on a still greater distance in history, particularly insofar as it will clearly require the thorough intellectual digestion of his most testamental treatises, the Asthetik and the Ontologie. For the time being, at least, judgment of the book can only be ambivalent, weighing its strengths off against its shortcomings and emphasizing the one or the other according to the inadequa- cies and excesses of the particular context of historical reference. In the contemporary United States, for example, the Hegelian rationalist backbone of Marxism, of which History and Class Consciousness is surely the most probing elucidation available to date, could stimulate that much needed undertaking of philosophically amplifying and substantiating the intellectual tenets of American criticism. Lukics' class epistemology, with its rigorous and coherent examination of "false consciousness," provides a ground- work of methodological premises which, if satisfactorily explored, could well fuse the diverse strains of radical critique into an integral body of revolutionary analysis. His elaborate endeavor to understand history in its concrete totality, as a process propelled by the immanent objective possibility of qualitative

transformation, is as timely in America today, and for similar reasons, as it was in the years of its initial pronouncement."

Yet even the less astute observer of contemporary reality must recognize the bare spots in Lukics' account of objective totality. And to the participant actively engaged in its dynamics it is clear that Lukaics, by force of some remarkable feat of omis- sion, has managed to extract the very guts from the vital process of history, especially when perceived with the full vision of revolutionary Marxism. This criticism, which will surely accompany History and Class Consciousness throughout its own unsteady history, was first voiced by the thinker who perhaps worked in greater proximity than any other to Lukaics' original conception. In "Actuality and Utopia," a review of the book written in 1924, Ernst Bloch propounded this standing objection with his inimitable flair:

It is enormously impressive how much this thinker has learned from his constant reference to practical possibility and reality. But because of a certain simplistic in- clination toward homogenization, in particular toward an almost exclusively sociological homogenization of the process, too great a price may have been paid for this practical concreteness. History is rather, in spite of all claims of the omnia ubique, a polyrhythmic configura- tion; and not only the social attainment of a still un- covered societal Man, but also the artistic, religious, metaphysical attainment of a secret transcendental Man, is a conception of being, of a new depth-relation of being. Clearly, these different depth relations and their objects are not sharply distinguishable from one another but stand in constant dialectical intercourse, almost unabatingly overlapping, blending, passing over and over and again establishing in the higher level of being the precision of the level below. But with the restriction, or homogenization, down to purely social material (which reigns supreme in Lukaics, despite all striving for totality), neither life nor nature, nor even the almost invariably excentric contents of the dianoetically seated process of comprehension, can be adequately understood (Philoso- phische Aufsiitze zur objektiven Phantasie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 618).

Quite appropriately, Ernst Bloch's early critical res- ervations were prophetic, since they stand, still today, as the final and most reliable word on History and Class Consciousness. Reading Lukaics continues to evoke the same reverent appreciation, and the same disquieting impulse to supplement and qualify, as was recorded on the spot by his most sympathetic Marxist critic.

7 See Gespr~iche mit Lukics, ed. Theo Pinkus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1967) and Lukdcs' Marxismus und Stalinismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970).

8 Two recent books of American Marxist theory, Fredric Jameson's Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Di- alectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1971) and Bertell Ollman's Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cam- bridge University Press, 1971) reveal the explicit impact of History and Class Consciousness.

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Article Contentsp. 10p. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21

Issue Table of ContentsDiacritics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 1-60Front Matter [pp. 1-44]Review ArticlesReview: Sade, or Text as Fantasy [pp. 2-9]Review: Proletarian Meditations: Georg Lukcs' Politics of Knowledge [pp. 10-14+16-21]Review: Must One be Metacritical [pp. 22-24]Review: Larvatus Prodeo [pp. 25-29]Review: Octavio Paz & the Critique of the Pyramid [pp. 30-34]

Interview: Octavio Paz [pp. 35-40]Work in ProgressThe Discourse of the Maxim [pp. 41-43+45-48]

Book into Motion PictureBlow-Up: The Forms of an Esthetic Itinerary [pp. 49-54]

Polemic [pp. 55-60]Back Matter

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