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Apotheosizing the Party: Lukcs's "Chvostismus und Dialektik"
Author(s): Lee Congdon Source: Studies in East European Thought,
Vol. 59, No. 4 (2007), pp. 281-292Published by: SpringerStable URL:
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Stud East Eur Thought (2007) 59:281-292 DOI 10.1007/s
11212-007-9039-2
Apotheosizing the Party: Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik
Lee Congdon
Published online: 11 October 2007
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract Georg Lukcs's recently discovered defense of Geschichte
und
Klassenbewusstsein, written in 1925 or 1926 in reply to critical
attacks by Lszl Rudas and Abram Deborin, is of a piece with that
earlier work and his Lenin of 1924. In its emphasis on the pivotal
role and absolute authority of the Communist
Party as the incarnation of the class consciousness of the
proletariat, it is Leninist to the core. For many contemporary
Marxist theorists, including the Lukcs disciple Istvn Mszros, such
an apotheosis is precisely what is dead in Lukcs's thought.
Keywords Alienation Class consciousness Communist Party
Dialectic of nature - Dialectics Leninism Mediation Tailism
Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik
One week after Hitler ordered his armies into Soviet Russia, the
NKVD arrested
Georg Lukcs. It would be two months before the eminent Marxist
theorist walked
out of Lubyanka, cleared, for the moment, of charges that he
spied for Hungary's
political police and orchestrated the activity of Hungarian
agents in the U.S.S.R.1
During one of the lengthy interrogations to which he was
subjected, he was asked if he knew Lszl Rudas, another, though less
sophisticated, Hungarian Marxist who had served time in a Soviet
prison in 1937-1938. As Lukcs undoubtedly surmised,
the NKVD had already taken Rudas into custody, alleging that he,
Lukcs, and other
Hungarians had organized a Trotskyite espionage ring.2 Lukcs
denied any
1 Sziklai (2000: 35).
2 Hajdu (2000: 18).
L. Congdon (E3)
Department of History, James Madison University, Harrisonburg,
VA 22807, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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282 L. Congdon
wrongdoing, but resisted the temptation to even scores with
Rudas; long years in the
Party had taught him that denunciations could boomerang.3 The
temptation must, however, have been great because Rudas had by then
made
it his primary mission in Ufe to discredit Lukcs as a Marxist
and Party loyalist. The same age as his bete noire, who was born to
wealth, Rudas was one of ten children
raised by poor working-class parents. At 18, he entered the
socialist movement and soon joined the editorial staff of the
socialist daily Ne'pszava (Voice of the People). After brief
service in World War I, he undertook to deepen his understanding of
Marxism and subsequently helped to establish the Hungarian
Communist Party. During the short-lived Soviet Republic of 1919, he
edited V'ros jsa'g (Red Gazette), and when the government of Bla
Kun collapsed he fled to Vienna, where he sided with the Jen
Landler (anti-Kun) faction and popularized the views of
Lukcs, chief ideologist in the Landler camp.4 In 1922, Rudas
left Austria for the Soviet Union, where he launched a many
sided research and teaching career. With an eye to his political
future, he shifted his
allegiance to the Kun faction and, as proof of his sincerity,
published a scathing attack on Lukcs's brilliant, but
controversial, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein
(1923). His countryman, he charged, was guilty of the sin of
idealism, an evil to which he inclined as a result of his prewar
associations with Max Weber, Emil Lask, and Heinrich Rickert.5 As a
result, he had had the temerity to criticize Engels for
holding that the dialectic operated in nature as well as
history/society, and hence that Marxism was a science governed by
natural laws. According to Lukcs, Rudas
concluded, "the dialectic is not an objective lawfulness
independent of men, but a
subjective lawfulness of men"the essence of what he
characterized as "subjective
idealism."6 A similar criticism was leveled at Lukcs by the
Russian philosopher Abram
Deborin. A former Menshevik and follower of Georgi Plekhanov,
Deborin, like
Lukcs, had been profoundly influenced by Hegel. In fact, he was
shortly to become the leader of the so-called Dialecticians, who
wagedand by 1929 wonan
ideological war against the Mechanists, who maintained that
science had rendered
philosophy superfluous. Nevertheless, Deborin adopted a tone of
righteous indignation while condemning Lukcs for his alleged
idealist heresies and his effort to play a sophisticated Marx off
against a simple-minded Engels.
Deborin claimed to be appalled by Lukcs's rejection of the
dialectic of nature,
which he saw as a logical consequence of his repudiation of
materialism. After all,
he wrote, "from the standpoint of dialectical materialism,
nature is dialectical in itself."7 This, Deborin said, was not only
the view of Engels, but also of Marx, for the two men had always
worked closely together; they had never had any
fundamental disagreement. Only "an idealist from head to foot"
could argue to the
3 See the transcript (in Hungarian translation) of the NKVD's
interrogation of Lukcs, July 13, 1941 in
Sziklai (2002: 71-75). 4
Feitl (1985: 6), and Erzsbet Andics in Rudas (1950: 5-9). 5 Lszl
Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, I (1981: 191). 6
Lszl Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, I (1981: 203). 7 Deborin
(1924: 627).
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Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik 283
contrary.8 The most subversive aspect of Lukcs's idealism,
Deborin argued, was his identification of subject and object, of
thought and Being. On such a view,
thought was as important as material existence, a heresy that
Lenin had condemned
in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Lenin's Party
As far as anyone knew, Lukcs never replied to Rudas and
Deborin's attacks. The
recent discovery in Moscow of Chvostismus und Dialektik, a
spirited rejoinder and defense of Geschichte und
Klassenbewusstsein, was therefore totally unexpected.
Lukcs seems to have written it in 1925 or 1926, a year or two
after his critics' review essays appeared in Arbeiter-Literatur.
Not without reason, he chose a title
that would buttress his claim to be a true Leninist whose
antagonists were "tailists,"
from the Russian word "khvost" (tail). Lenin had chosen that
word to characterize his Party opponentsthe Mensheviks and
"Economists"in What Is to Be Done?
In that famous tract, Lenin had taken up the question "of the
relation between consciousness and spontaneity," or
"unconsciousness."9 His adversaries, he
charged, held the quietistic view that the working class would
develop a
revolutionary (he called it a Social-Democratic) consciousness
on its own
spontaneouslyas a result of economic evolution. Such a view was
"tailist" because it relegated the Party to the tail end of the
movement, transforming its leaders into mere followers of the
masses, passive observers of an automatic and
guaranteed advance.
That, Lenin argued, was a serious misreading of Marx's theory.
By their own
effort, workers could develop only trade-union consciousness;
they could recognize the need to combine in unions in order to
secure higher wages, shorter hours, and
greater benefits. But they could not achieve true class
consciousness, by which he
meant recognition of their assigned historical role, which was
to overthrow the class rule of the bourgeoisie and usher in a
classless society. That was why the Party and
bourgeois intellectuals turned revolutionaries had to intervene.
By some means Lenin did not say whatintellectuals such as Marx and
Engels (and he himself) intuited the proletariat's true, as opposed
to its merely empirical, will. Like
Rousseau's General Will, the class consciousness of the
proletariat was not an
awareness of what workers actually want, but what they ought to
want and would
want if they were fully conscious of their historic mission. It
followed, according to Lenin, that class consciousness had to be
brought to the
workers from without, "imputed" to them by the Party, which is
to say Party leaders. At times, in fact, the Party had to force the
workers to be free. It had, at
whatever the cost, to awaken them to the necessity of a total
reconstruction of
society; small, even large, improvements in working conditions
would only weaken
revolutionary resolve.
8 Deborin (1924: 622).
9 Lenin (1929 [1902]: 31, 44).
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284 L. Congdon
That was the Lenin whom Lukcs memorialized in a small book of
1924, and to whom he had deferred in the early 1920s, after the
Bolshevik leader criticized one of his essays: "G. L.'s article is
very left-wing and very poor. Its Marxism is purely verbal... it
gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical
situations; it takes no account of what is more essential."10 From
the moment he accepted that
criticism to the day he died in 1971, Lukcs was a dedicated
Leninist.
Thus, when he wrote Chvostismus und Dialektik, the Marxist
master was
defending not only himself but the man whom he had come to
idolize. In a sense, he was rewriting What Is to Be Done? in an
effort to combat a new generation of
Mensheviks (Deborin) and tailists (Rudas). In tilting against
"subjectivism," for
example, Rudas and Deborin were, in Lukcs's judgment, waging war
against Bolshevism itself. Like Mensheviks and tailists of old,
they sought to reduce Marxism to a bourgeois sociology with
trans-historical laws, a theory that ruled out action on the part
of human beings; revolution would come about mechanically, as the
end result of unconscious economic forces.
Lukcs did not, of course, deny that there was an objective
historical
development, but he insisted that at various key "moments,"
human beingsor
to be more specific, the class-conscious proletariathad to take
conscious and decisive action. That did not mean that the
subjective "moment" was divorced from the objective process that
occasioned it. That would be true only if one viewed them
separately, apart from their dialectical reciprocity," their
unity in revolutionary praxis. Rightly regarded, the subjective
moment was objective as well; upon "inserting" itself into the
objective sequence, it became a member of it. The
argument was clever, for it managed to portray objective
circumstance and decisive
action, necessity and freedom (fully conscious action), as one.
And if the price of
calling particular attention to the latter weakened the sense of
historical
inevitability, so be it; it helped to explain the receding of
the revolutionary wave and to rescue faith in the future.
Mediation
As a philosophically more learned Lenin, Lukcs insisted that
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein had hinged on "the role of the
Party in the Revolution."12 That
role was to induce the proletariat to carry out its
revolutionary tasks. Unfortunately,
as Lenin had pointed out, the proletariat could develop no more
than trade-union
consciousness because it was deceived into thinking that
bourgeois society was
stable and permanent. In order to ensure success, therefore, the
Party had to impute
class consciousness to workers, attribute to them the thoughts
and feelings that they
would have were they fully conscious of their, and hence
humanity's, true interest
and historic mission. In plain language, the Party had the
right, indeed the duty, to
coerce workers for their own, and History's, good.
10 V.l. Lenin in Lukcs (1975: xvi-xvii).
11 Lukcs (1996: 14). 12
Lukcs, (1996: 8).
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Lukcs's Chvosttsmus und Dialektik 285
Perhaps because he came from a working-class background, Rudas
had taken
exception to that idea. In "Die Klassenbewusstseinstheorie von
Lukcs," he had
complained that "in the best (or worst?) case the 'imputed'
consciousness of Comrade L. is a hypostatised consciousness-very
similar to a divine conscious ness."13 As far as he was concerned,
individual workers or the proletariat as a whole could become class
conscious; there was no other possibility. However far he was from
matching Lukcs's intellect, he recognized that his so-called
comrade's class consciousness was an ideal class consciousness
contemptuous of what workers
actually thought. As the custodian of authentic class
consciousness, Lukcs had
maintained, the Party alone possessed truth and the authority to
see that it prevailed. He had never bothered to explain how we know
that the Party incarnates the true
will of the proletariatother than to say that Marxism proclaimed
it. No more than Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein itself is
Chvostismus und
Dialektik a work of philosophy; it is the systematization and
explication of a faith. Just as a Christian dogmatics constitutes
an effort to elucidate the truths and
implications of a prior commitment, so Lukcs's Marxism is a
rendering of that
political faith to which he had converted in 1918. No evidence
can be adduced to
disprove the dogma, which is internally consistent and
self-certifying. We can know the truth, according to Lukcs, by
adopting the standpoint of the proletariat, which can be done only
by participating actively in the communist movement. Those who
remain outside the Party cannot possibly know the truth, because it
is nothing but the self-awareness of the movement.14
It angered Lukcs that there remained within the Party some, like
Rudas, who failed to recognize its indispensability. One of his
critic's fundamental errors, he
believed, was his naive belief that proletarian class
consciousness was a mechanical
product of the immediate economic situation of the workers.15
Rather like
Protestants who believe that one may have direct dealings with
God, unmediated by church or clergy, Rudas missed completely the
Party's role as an agent of
mediation; his tailist ignorance served to point up the pressing
need "to abandon
immediacy."16
That was a restatement of the argument Lukcs made in section
three of the most
famous essay in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, "Die
Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats." Only
bourgeois thinkers, he insisted there, viewed
the world in its immediacy; for them, reality was immediately
given, natural, the unalterable object of contemplation. They could
not regard the world and the social
order as anything other than the sum of eternal, isolated
"facts." Were they to
abandon abstract, formal rationality, they would have to
recognize that bourgeois class dominance was a temporal, not an
eternal, phenomenon. To be sure, the best
bourgeois thinkers were not willfully and cynically obtuse, but
they possessed a
consciousness that distorted ultimate reality in the interest of
their class.
13 Lszl Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, II (1981: 26). 14
Congdon (1991: 61). 15
Lukcs had already condemned such a belief in Lukcs (1967 [1924]:
28). 16 Lukcs (1996: 25).
Springer
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286 L. Congdon
The privileged epistemological standpoint of the proletariat was
also a function
of class interest. Precisely because it was not in that class's
interest to view reality in
its factual immediacy, it was capable of achieving a mediated
view for which facts
derived their meaning from their relation to the whole, or the
totality, of history. What for bourgeois thinkers were static,
isolated "things" were for the proletariat
dynamic aspects of processes, immanent tendencies and
possibilities. Rightly understood, reality was not, it became;
hence, the proper cognitive relationship to
reality was not contemplation, but action. "The philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways," Marx had
written. "The point, however, is to change it."17
Mediation was Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein's most important
concept. It
provided Lukcs with a theoretical weapon to use against
"tailism" and against the
utopianism by which, as a younger man, he had been led astray.
"Comrade Rudas," he wrote with obvious irritation in Chvostismus
und Dialektik, "knows very well
that I have broken completely with my past, not only socially
but philosophically as
well."18 The concept of mediation was the key to the
revolutionary realism that he
learned from Lenin and that viewed the socialist future not as
yet to come, but as
already present in each "moment" of the revolutionary movement,
mediated by that
movement in its totality.19
Lukcs returned again and again to the crucial mediating function
of organiza tional forms, the Party first and foremost.20 Marx, he
pointed out, was not only the
author of Das Kapital, but the founder of the Communist League
and the
International, while Lenin founded the Russian Communist Party
and the Third
International. Such organizations mediated between the
proletariat's real situation
and its consciousness; for one part of the working class, they
brought the latter into
line with the former by working out "practical measures from the
correct knowledge
of the historical process as a whole, from the totality of its
economic, political,
ideological, etc. moments."21
The dialectic of nature
"In the previous considerations," Lukcs wrote in the section of
Chvostismus und Dialektik devoted to the dialectic in nature, "we
came up repeatedly against the
problem of mediation."22 Rudas and Deborin had been highly
critical of what
theyand many otherstook to be Lukcs's rejection of the idea that
the dialectic
operated in nature as well as society/history. According to
Rudas, "there is only one
single lawful regularity (in nature as well as in society): the
dialectic, and
17 See the dense, but not incomprehensible, section three, "Der
Standpoint des Proletariats" in Lukcs
(1970/1923: 267-355), and Congdon (1991: 60-61). 18 Lukcs (1996:
44). 19
See the chapter "Revolutionre Realpolitik" in Lukcs (1967/1924).
20 See the essay "Methodisches zur Organisationsfrage" in Lukcs
(1970/1923). 21 Lukcs (1996: 34). 22 Lukcs (1996: 44).
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Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik 287
everything that happens in the world, everything is subject to
the natural laws of the dialectic."23 Rather surprisingly, Lukcs
protested that he did accept the idea that the dialectic determined
nature's development. How, after all, could anyone doubt that
nature and its lawfulness existed before there was any society,
that is before there were human beings? But he quickly added that
social development could
produce new, equally objective forms of movement24a necessary
move if he
wished to avoid having to accept a scientific determinism.
Moreover, Lukcs continued, what he had written in Geschichte und
Klassenbewusstsein was that the dialectic of nature could not be
known directly. And that was indeed the case; he had faulted Engels
for "extending the dialectic method to the knowledge of nature as
well."25 For good political and philosophical reasons, however, he
chose not to pursue the matter further. In Chvostismus und
Dialektik he did. "Our consciousness of nature," he wrote, "that
is our knowledge of nature, is determined by our social being."26
What men and women took to be
nature in its immediacy was in fact nature as viewed from a
particular class
standpoint, nature as mediated by a person's social being. At
first blush that would seem to imply relativism, but Lukcs denied
that it did
because some standpoints, some angles of vision, were better
than others. For him,
that is, it was not the discovery of new facts that yielded
deeper theoretical insights. It was something external to
scientific research: economic change that resulted in
social change. Thus it was no accident that under capitalism,
the most advanced
socio-economic system prior to the advent of socialism, science
reached its zenith
(thus far). Would, then, those in possession of the class
consciousness of the
proletariat arrive at the correct theoretical understanding of
the natural world in the
same way that they did of the historical worldby simultaneously
changing it? Can nature be changed as history/society can? Lukcs
sidestepped the issue:
To what extent all knowledge of nature can ever be transformed
into historical
knowledge, that is whether there are material facts in nature
that never change their structure (or only do so over such periods
of time that they cannot be
considered changes for human knowledge) cannot be raised here
because even
when it seems to us that historical developments have taken
place, their
historical character cannot be clearly grasped.27
Unable to resolve the dilemma, Lukcs simply reiterated that a
clearer vision of
social development produced a superior understanding of
nature.
For what my critics call my agnosticism [or relativism] is
nothing other than
my denial that there is a socially unmediated, that is an
unmediated
relationship of humans, to nature in the present stage of social
development and naturally I decline to argue about Utopian
possibilities of the future. I am
23 Lszl Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, II (1981: 48).
24 Lukcs (1996: 51).
25 Lukcs (1970/1923: 63n). 26
Lukcs (1996: 49). 27
Lukcs (1996: 63).
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288 L. Congdon
of the opinion, therefore, that our knowledge of nature is
socially mediated
because its material foundation is socially mediated; and thus I
remain true to
the Marxian formulation of the method of historical materialism;
"it is social
being that determines consciousness."28
It follows from that that non-communist scientists, though they
may obtain valid
scientific results, remain oblivious to the fact that their
interpretations of those
results are mediated by their social identity. Nor do they
notice that their attitude is
merely contemplative, not "practical" in the historical
materialist sense.29 Hence
they never place their findings in the service of History's
movement toward a truly human society. Only communist scientists,
men such as J. D. Bernal and J. B. S.
Haldane, could, as historical materialists and Party members,
adopt the correct
practical attitude toward their researches.
Does this make them better scientists? Lukcs would probably have
answered
yes; they consciously transform nature from an "in itself' to a
"for us." But despite
the Hungarian's genius for obfuscation, it is difficult to see
how such politically committed scientists could create truth about
nature in the process of discovering it
(unless 'truth,' even concerning nature, is only what advances
the communist
cause). And it is equally difficult to believe that Chvostismus
und Dialektik will
erase the suspicion that dialectical thinking, as Lukcs
practiced it, is a slippery business.
Against Lenin's Party
Those who were and are sympathetic with Lukcs's Marxism can, to
be sure, benefit
from a close reading of his recently discovered workif they
focus their attention
on his concept of mediation. Even without having read
Chvostismus und Dialektik, for example, Istvn Mszros had placed the
concept at the center of his updated
version of Marxism. One of Lukcs's best students and most
faithful disciples, he
has nevertheless distanced himself from the Communist Party.
Born in Budapest in 1930, Mszros is, like Rudas, of poor working
class origin. As a young factory worker, he discovered Marx and
Engels and soon began to read
Lukcs. Thanks to personal determination and the requisite social
background, he
gained admittance to the University of Budapest's prestigious
Etvs College in
1949, a year after the communists consolidated power in Hungary.
By then the so
called "Lukcs Debate" was in full swing; once again Lukcs found
himself the
target of a Party inquisition, and once again Rudas played the
role of Torquemada.30
Fearful studentsthis was the time of the Purge Trial of Lszl
Rajktreated Lukcs, then a professor, as though he had contracted
the plague. Mszros was
among the very few who were willing to risk contagion, and as a
result he was
nearly expelled from the University. He managed, however, to
complete his degree
28 Lukcs (1996: 53-54). 29 Lukcs (1996: 70). 30 See Ambrus
(1985).
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Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik 289
in 1953, and two years later earned a doctorate in philosophy at
East Germany's Friedrich Schiller University. The following year,
1956, he accepted an appointment as Associate Professor of
Philosophy in the University of Budapest and joined the reform
movement that helped pave the way for the fall Revolution. When
Soviet forces crushed that great popular uprising, he decided to
emigrate, and did so
legally. Eventually, Mszros found his way to the University of
Sussex, where he taught
until his retirement in the early 1990s. Despite his academic
career, however, he has
always identified more closely with the working class into which
he was born than with the intellectual class by which he was
co-opted. "Intellectuals of bourgeois
origin, like Lukcs," he has written rather pointedly, do not
share the workers'
experience of life and thus they "know/ar less about 'what is to
be done'" to make socialism a reality.31
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein did, Mszros thinks, present a
realistic rather than a Utopian approach to the presentand to the
future it contained.
Socialism, he has learned from his experience in Stalinist
Hungary, cannot be summoned into existence overnight by an act of
political will. On the other hand, reforms that are treated as ends
in themselves, unrelated to the ultimate goal of a
fully socialist societyin a word, revisionismcan only prolong
capitalism's existence. What are needed, he concludes, are
mediationstransitional stepsthat
never lose sight of the final goal, that are socialism in the
process of its realization. It was with that Lukcsian conviction in
mind that Mszros set to work on the
book that first established his reputation in England, Marx's
Theory of Alienation.
Following Marx, he argued there that alienated, that is wage,
labor was the root cause of all other forms of human alienation. In
order to create genuine human
relationships between "social individuals"those who, while
maintaining their
individuality, fulfill their identity in cooperative and equal
association with others
proper forms and institutions would have to act as mediations.
"To do away with all
mediation," Mszros argued, "is the most naive of all anarchist
dreams." It
represented the denial of "first order mediation"productive
activity (labor)that is "ontologically necessary" to human
existence as such.32 Labor, that is, was the
means by which one could objectify and realize one's "species
essence."33
Marx and Lukcs were right to see, Mszros concluded, that "it is
not mediation
itself which is at fault but the capitalistic form of reified
second order mediations."34 Among those second order mediations
Mszros listed private
property and division of labor; they "interpose themselves
between man and his
activity and prevent him from finding fulfillment in his labor,
in the exercise of his
productive (creative) abilities, and in the human appropriation
of the products of his
activity."35 They were alienated, historically specific, and
therefore transcendable
31 Mszros (1995: 396). 32
Mszros (1972 [1970]: 79, 285). 33
Mszros learned this from Lukcs; see the latter's introduction to
Lukcs (1970 [1923]). 34
Mszros, (1972 [1970]: 285). 35 Mszros (1972 [1970]: 78).
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290 L. Congdon
forms of human labor. And those forms had to be
transcended/negated if alienation
was to be overcome.
Prime examples of the kind of first order mediations Mszros had
in mind were
so-called "workers' councils" that operated effectively and
independently of self
appointed leadership vanguards like the Communist Party.36 Such
spontaneously
organized, grassroots councils have appeared on the historical
stage in various
places and at various times: France in 1871; Russia in 1905 and
February 1917;
Germany in 1918-1919; and, most important to Mszros, Hungary in
1956. In
every case they were suppressed, but that only adds to the
Romantic aura that
surrounds them.
Mszros was quick to note that Lukcs, even though he ultimately
opted for the
Party and its dictatorship, had himself spoken in praise of
workers' councils in
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein.
The Workers' Council [Lukcs had written] is the
politico-economic conquest of capitalist reification. In the
situation after the dictatorship, it ought to
overcome the bourgeois separation of legislative, executive and
judiciary;
similarly, in the struggle for power it is called upon to end
the spatio-temporal
fragmentation of the proletariat, and also to bring economics
and politics
together into the true unity of proletarian activity, and in
this way to help reconcile the dialectical opposition of immediate
interest and ultimate aim.37
In his magnum opus, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of
Transition, Mszros
declined to say precisely what form restructured social
institutions/first order
mediations should eventually assume, but once again he called
attention to workers'
councils as among "the most important potential organs of
material and political mediation in the age of transition from
capital's rule over society to a socialist
order."38 He continues, that is, to champion the
self-organization of the workers and
to reject any Party claim to speak or act in their name.
Precisely on that issue he
asserts his theoretical independence. Even in Demokratisierung
Heute und Morgen, written at the time of the Soviet
suppression of the "Prague Spring," Lukcs could not, according
to Mszros,
break with his dogmatic outlook.
In 1968, after nearly seventy years of Lenin's What Is to Be
Done? (which also
means five decades of Soviet power), Lukcs still has to idealize
the strategy of successfully introducing, one fine day, socialist
consciousness "from
outside" into the working class ... ["From outside" means:] from
the vantage
point of some self-perpetuating hierarchy ruling society from
above.39
36 Mszros (1972 [1970]: 287).
37 Lukcs (1970 [1923]: 168-169). Cited in Mszros (1972 [1970]:
287). I have modified Mszros's
translation slightly. 38 Mszros (1995: 371). 39 Mszros (1995:
399).
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Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik 291
For Lenin's Party
Mszros's rejection of Lukcs's theory of imputation is all the
more telling because
it comes from a lifelong disciple and a Marxist who has known
life under Party rule.
As he has reason to know, neither Geschichte und
Klassenbewusstsein nor
Chvostismus und Dialektik can be read today as though nothing
has happened since
the 1920s. One cannot divorce Lukcs's ideas from the record of
Communist parties in power; Lukcs himself refused to do so. By the
time he sat down to write his
defense of his famous book, he could already see that Stalin was
likely to succeed
Lenin as Party leader and he therefore hastened to call
attention to the Man of
Steel's ideological acuity.40 Throughout the years that Stalin
ruledand afterLukcs submitted to the
Party's will and discipline; hence, while he sometimes had
reservations concerning
Party policy, he never contemplated apostasy. By thinking
"dialectically," he knew
that he could justify anything to himself and to others. One is
reminded of Albert Camus's words: "The dialectic miracle is the
decision to call total servitude freedom."41
It is not surprising, then, that Lukcs eventually repudiated his
defense of
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein; that almost certainly
accounts for the fact that
he never made mention of Chvostismus und Dialektik in any of his
later writings or interviews. During his first sojourn in Moscow,
1929-1931, David Ryazanov showed him Marx's unpublished
Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. On reading them, he was gratified
to have confirmed his claim in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein
that the problem of alienation was central to Marxism. At the
same time, however, the manuscripts convinced him that his
earlier work was in fact
idealist and hence fundamentally un-Marxist. He would have to
begin anew from a
properly Marxistthat is, materialiststandpoint42 Lukcs may in
fact have recognized that he simply could not maintain the
position he defended in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein after
he had accepted, or been obliged to accept, the dialectic of
nature. "The idea of the unity of subject and object," Leszek
Kolakowski has pointed out, "cannot survive if the dialectic
relates to external nature."43 Moreover, the logic of his belief
that the Party alone
possesses truth dictated that he remain a member whatever the
price. And so he
committed himself to ideas he had once rejected: the dialectic
of nature and the
"theory of reflection."
Lukcs made that commitment public in his essay of 1933, "Mein
Weg zu
Marx," and in the 1934 lecture that he delivered to members of
the Soviet Academy
of Sciences, assembled to commemorate the 25th anniversary of
the publication of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. "My battle
against the theory of reflection and the Marx-Engels conception of
the dialectic of nature was," he said on that
occasion, "a typical manifestation of that 'subterranean
idealism'" that (an
40 Lukcs (1996: 27).
41 Camus (1956 [1951]: 234). 42
On this matter, see Congdon (1991: 180-184). 43
Kolakowski, m (1981: 274).
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292 L. Congdon
undialectical) Lenin had condemned in his major work of
philosophy.44 He was, after all, guilty of the sins with which
Rudas and Deborin had charged him a decade
before. And if he retained any doubts, he kept them to himself,
because for him
there was neither truth nor life outside of the Party.
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44 Georg Lukcs, "Mein Weg zu Marx" in Lukcs (1970 [1933]:
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Springer
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Contentsp. [281]p. 282p. 283p. 284p. 285p. 286p. 287p. 288p. 289p.
290p. 291p. 292Issue Table of ContentsStudies in East European
Thought, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2007) pp. 261-346Front
MatterTotalitarianism and the problem of Soviet art evaluation: the
Lithuanian case [pp. 261-280]Apotheosizing the Party: Lukcs's
"Chvostismus und Dialektik" [pp. 281-292]Iconic wonder: Pavel
Florensky's phenomenology of the face [pp. 293-308]In pursuit of a
historical tradition: N. A. Rozhkov's scientific laws of history
[pp. 309-346]