DIALECTIC AND MATERIALISM IN LUKACS

by

Paul Piccone

The recent rash of translations of History and Class Consciousness:1 French(1960), Italian (1967) and English (1971), along with the officialrepublication of the German original (1968), and the growing literature on thesubject, has reopened the debate, interrupted since the 1920's concerning thetheoretical foundations of Marxism. As Breines has already indicated,2 theresumption of such a debate at this time has been inextricably connected withthe resurgence of militancy in the West and the need to theoretically mediatewhat at first appeared as purely spontaneous insurgences into a coherent andoriented political movement — something that proved impossible to do bymeans of the empty slogans and manipulative politics that had been inheritedfrom the various communist parties as "orthodox Marxism." Thus, therenewed interest in the Lukacs of the early 1920's is part of the developmentof a New Left Marxism able to theoretically articulate the dynamics ofimperialism while simultaneously complementing a revolutionary politicalstrategy adequate to the new historical context.

With few notable exceptions, however, the reopening of such a theoreticaldebate does not seem to have yet gone beyond the level attained in the1920's prior to the capitulation of most official Marxists to the doctrine of"socialism in one country" and its concomitant Realpolitik. In fact, for themost part it has remained imprisoned in precisely those fossilized formulationsof ideologized Marxism that it was meant to transcend. It is therefore crucialto reexamine the political and philosophical implications of History and ClassConsciousness both within the immense corpus of Lukacs' theoreticalproduction and within the political problematic facing the New Left today.

Because of Lukacs' peculiar attitude towards his own works and the various

1. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1971),translated by Rodney Livingstone, The first essay, "What is OrthodoxMarxism? " had already been translated by Michael Harrington in The NewInternational, summer 1957, and several private translations of the whole bookhad been circulating for several years prior to the appearance of the officialtranslation. For the French translation, see Georg Lukacs, Histoire et Consciencede Classe (Paris, 1960), translated by Kostas Axelos and Jacquelin Bois. Thefirst chapter of the book had already appeared in Arguments, no. 3, April-May1957, while two more chapters were published later in nos. 5 and 11 of the samejournal. For the Italian translation, see Gyorgy Lukacs, Storia e Coscienza diClasse (Milan, 1967), translated by Giovanni Piana. The first chapter of the bookhad already appeared in Ragionamenti, May 1957. The German original isincluded in the second volume of Georg Lukacs, Werke: Fruhschriften II(Neuwied, 1968). A partial Japanese translation edited by Hozaburo Mizuti hadalready appeared in Tokyo in 1927 under the title Class Consciousness.2. Paul Breines, "Introduction to Lukacs," in Telbs no. 5, Spring 1970, pp.1-20. Cf. also Breines' reviews of books on Lukacs in the same issue as well as thefollowing one.

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self-criticisms that he has made during his long career, many ambiguities havearisen concerning the continuity or discontinuity between his early and lateworks. Embarrassingly enough, there are now at least four main schools ofinterpretation: the first one claims that there are two different Lukacs, theearly and the late, with the early one being theoretical dynamite and the laterone a political hack unreservedly committed to the apology of the U.S.S.R.;3

the second one still sees two Lukacs, but the reverse is the case: the earlyconfused idealist is followed after 1930 by the serious and mature Marxist;4

the third one sees only one Lukacs, the good communist who simply shiftedhis political and philosophical positions as the objective historical situationrequired;5 and the fourth one seeing only one Lukacs articulating throughouthis career positions based on dubious theoretical foundations.6 Yet, all ofthese interpretations are not necessarily contradictory and, when all is saidand done, they are based on two main theoretical issues: the Engels-Lenintheory of reflection, and the nature of the dialectic. The criterion separatingthe early from the late Lukacs is, for both the first and the secondinterpretations, the theory of reflection, while what differentiates the thirdfrom the fourth interpretation is whether one gives a positive or a negativeevaluation of Lukacs' notion of the dialectic. The following will attempt toshow that the theory of reflection and the dialectic which, as has often beenpointed out,7 are the determining criteria for both "diamat" as well as

3. This is the view shared by, among others, Merleau-Ponty, Kostas Axelos, andLucien Goldmann. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Western Marxism" in Telos no.6, Fall 1970, pp. 140-161 (this is the second chapter of his Les Aventures de laDialectique, originally published in 1955); Kostas Axelos, "Preface" to Histoireet Conscience de Classe, op cit., pp. 1-3; and Lucien Goldmann, "Introduzione"to Gyorgy Lukacs, Teoria del Romanzo (Milan, 1962), translated by F.S. Sardi,pp. 10-50.4. This, of course, is Lukacs' own view which is shared by all officiallyrecognized "dialectical materialists" of the Soviet school. See Lukacs, Historyand Class Consciousness, op. cit., pp. xxxvi ff.5. Kenneth A. Megill, The New Democratic Theory (New York and London,1970). See especially chapter 4, "An Example of Authentic Marxism", pp.49-64.6. Victor Zitta, Georg Lukacs' Marxism: Alienation, Dialectics, Revolution (TheHague, 1964). In the immense literature already available on Lukacs, this bookunquestionably deserves the doubtful distinction of being the worst. Its onlypossible saving feature is an extensive (but incomplete) bibliography prior to1962. Also adhering to a much more sophisticated version of this interpretationis Peter Ludz who, in his "Marxismus und Literatur - Eine Kritische Einftihrungin das Werk von Georg Lukacs" in Ludz, ed., Georg Lukacs: Schriften zurLiteratursociologie (Neuwied, 1961), after distinguishing five different periods inLukacs works, indicates a unifying continuity in methodology. For a similarunitary interpretation see also Istvan Meszaros, "Lukacs' Concept of theDialectic", in G.H.R. Parkinson, ed., Georg Lukacs, his Work and his Ideas (NewYork, 1970).7. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, "Western Marxism", op. cit.. and Lucio Colletti, //Marxismo e Hegel (Bari, 1969), pp. 350 ff.

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"Western Marxism", are fundamentally incompatible and that the wholetrajectory of Lukacs' theoretical development can be seen in terms of certainbasic misunderstandings concerning both the nature of the materialism that hewants to salvage through the theory of reflection, as well as the nature of theMarxist dialectic which is throughout his work identified with the Hegeliandialectic.8 In addition, since the debate concerning Lukacs' work is notmerely a scholastic exercise in Marxist archaeology and the whole issuerevolves around fairly well-defined political battle lines, i.e., whether Marxismis a "science" or a "critical theory" — an approach to reality constantlyconstituting and re-constituting itself in terms of the social praxis of which itis an integral moment - it will be necessary to investigate the frameworkwithin which the debate is taking place.

From the very beginning Lukacs' works exhibit what Asor Rosa has calleda "secret dialectic"9 whose fundamental theoretical framework remains in allthe later works. His book on the drama10 of 1909 already revolves around

8. In fact, not only was Lukacs' monumental work Der Junge Hegel writtenin order to specifically reiterate his conviction in the unbroken continuitybetween the Hegelian and the Marxist dialectic, but such a thesis is againreasserted in 1967. In different ways, this point has already been made byColletti, op. cit., pp. 367-370, and in ch. X, "Da Bergson a Lukacs", pp.317-356. Cf. also Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objelit. Erlduterung zu Hegel (Berlin,1951), p. 45; and Nicolao Merker, Le Origini delta Logica Hegeliana (Milan,1961), pp. 82-91. For a Stalinist critique of this general thesis, see Rugard D.Gropp, "Die Marxistische Dialektische Methode und Ihr Gegensatz zurIdealistischen Dialektik Hegels", in Deutsche Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie, 1954,pp. 69-112 and pp. 344-383. For Lukacs' own account, see his "Preface to theNew Edition (1967)" in History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., pp. xx-xxi.Meray and Aczel relate that in 1949, after Lukacs' most recent self-criticismfollowing Revai's attack, Lukacs was asked about it. His reply was that he hadnever made any retraction concerning the essential point, i.e., the continuity ofmethod between Hegel and Marx. Cf. Gyorgy Aczel and Tibor Meray, TheRevolt of the Mind (New York, 1959), pp. 57-80.9. Alberto Asor Rosa, "II Giovane Lukacs Teorico Dell'Arte Borghese" inContropiano, no. 1, 1968, p 66. As he put it, "it is an essential dialectic betweenbeing and becoming, between the absolute and the relative, between thepossibility of knowledge and skepticism, between lost faith in historical valuesand the search for a faith in values more general, more absolute, more abstract,but not devoid of a vital human charge." Ibid., p. 91, italics in the original. Fora very similar position, see also Tito Perlini, "Sul Concetto di Prospettiva inLukacs", in Nuova Corrente nos. 48-49, 1969, pp. 20-62, where he claims that:'The relation phenomenon-essence has tormented Lukacs from the verybeginning of his philosophical meditation. Already in the very early works it issomehow recognizable, but it acquires clarity and precise contours before itsunfolding in History and Class Consciousness . . . in Lukacs' two early works:The Soul and the Forms and The Theory of the Novel." (p. 25).10. Although this early work has never been translated from the Hungarian, thefirst introductory chapter appeared in German under the title "Zur Soziologiedes Modernen Dramas" in 1914, and has been partly reprinted in Peter Ludz,ed., Georg Lukacs. Schriften zur Literatursoziologie, op. cit., pp. 71-74 and pp.261-295.

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that separation which in History and Class Consciousness is identified as "thecentral, structural problem of capitalist society in all of its livingexpressions":11 reification. For Lukacs, bourgeois or modern drama is not aliving and integral part of culture as the Greek drama was, but because of thesplit society of which it is an expression, it is limited to a restricted audienceconsisting only of a minority. This is a result of "economic reasons"12 as wellas of its intellectualism which renders it incomprehensible to the masses.13 Assuch, the drama loses its universal character: the organic unity obtainingbetween the theatre, the drama, and the public breaks down and bourgeoisdrama ends up by eternalizing the problem of its age - bourgeois problems.Here we already find most of the themes of later works starting fromreification (Versachlichung)14 manifesting itself in every moment of existence,and the dialectic which, however, is from the very beginning an idealisticdialectic obtaining not between form and content, but between form andformed content. In fact, in introducing the German translation of the firstchapter, Lukacs apologizes for not having adequately clarified the two sets offorms.15 As in The Soul and the Forms shortly afterwards, here too whatstarts out as a living dialectic quickly evaporates into an idealistic dialecticbetween conceptual structures, thus excluding precisely that life andprecategorical existence which constitutes the "materiality" of the Marxistdialectic and without which the dialectic itself is condemned to an abstractand mystified interplay of forms, or the self-becoming of the Spirit. AlthoughLukacs was not yet a Marxist,16 and he was completely within the tradition

11. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 83. Since the Englishtranslation is inadequate, it will be modified whenever necessary.12. "Zur Soziologie des Modernen Dramas", in Ludz, op. cit., p. 273.13. Ibid., p. 217.14. Ibid., p. 288.15. Ibid., p. 261.16. As Arato has convincingly shown in his "Lukacs' Path to Marxism(1910-1923)" in Telos no. 7, Spring 1971, pp. 128-136, a kind of Marxistanalysis is already operative at this stage - even if it is mediated by Simmersphilosophy. As Lukacs himself reports in the "Preface to the New Edition(1967)", op. cit, p. ix, by 1908 he had already made a careful study of Marx'sCapital "in order to lay the sociological foundations" for his book on the dramain which he argued already that "economic circumstances determine the socialstratification" and that economic relations are "the fundamental facts[Grundtatsachen]" of modern society. Cf. Ludz, ed., op. cit, p. 74. Theproblem was that what passed for official Marxism offered no alternative to thecultural crisis: degraded to the reformism and the scientism of the SecondInternational, the mechanistic ideologies cranked out by Kautsky, Bernstein, andeven the pre-WWI Lenin (see Raya Dunayevskaya's article on "The Shock ofRecognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin" in Telos no. 5, Spring1970, pp. 44-57, for a detailed discussion of Lenin's pre- and post-WWI views),appeared more like additional manifestations of the problem than parts of itssolution. As an appropriate complement to their bankrupt politics, these"Marxists" advocated a philosophy which was but a second-rate variety of that

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of classical German philosophy, all of his writings reflected an acute awarenessof the social crisis of pre-WWI Europe, for which he could forsee no possiblesolution.

It is this crisis that The Soul and the Forms painfully expresses, and that iswhy, as Lukacs himself admits,17 he was so strongly attracted to Kierkegaard:abstract philosophy had to be balanced with Kierkegaard's "soul." Thisexplains why the entire book is torn by the antinomies of art and science, thenatural and the spiritual world, the Sein and the Sollen.16 Lukacs'problematic is characterized by the particularity and finitude of existence, andthe universality and infinity of the spirit. The tragedy is that, althoughexistence can only find fulfillment in the spirit, because of the cultural crisisthat splits the two, the inevitable result is self-annihilation. Thus, for Lukacs,"Kierkegaard's heroism consisted in being able to catch the point where it isnecessary to choose a path and follow it to the end. But his tragedy was inwanting to live what cannot be lived."19 In other words, self-realizationthrough self-determination is impossible precisely because of the split betweenthe cultural forms (which only in The Theory of the Novel will behistoricized) and the life within which one has to realize them. To the extentthat one can live a meaningful life only by realizing the spiritual forms in life,and this is impossible in bourgeois society, tragedy turns out to be the onlyauthentic mode of human existence. Here, Lukacs rules out any revolutionaryoption which would reintegrate the ruptured organic unity between form andcontent, spirit and existence: he could locate no social agency able and willing

positivism and crude evolutionism that had already run out of gas in theuniversities by giving way to neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism. To the extentthat Simmel, Bergson, Rickert, and their colleagues systematically attacked thepretentious positivist ideologies that passed for knowledge and cleared a logicalspace for a more fundamental level of lived experience, they certainly wereseveral steps ahead of most pre-WWI Marxists. As Lukacs put it in the 1962"Vorwort" to Die Theorie des Romans (Neuwied, 1963), p. 7, in referringspecifically to Dilthey, these works of the neo-Kantians and neo-Hegelians"seemed to break new ground. This appeared to us as a conceptual universe(Cedankenwelt) of grandoise syntheses, theoretical as well as historical." As ithas all too often been pointed out, it is from this intellectual context that Lukacsderived his major categories of analysis for History and Class Consciousnesswhich can be seen as a synthesis between embourgeoisified Marxism andneo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophy whose learned rejection ofmechanism, positivism and scientism was but one of the last creative gasps of abourgeois tradition in the process of being overwhelmed by a crisis that it couldnot resolve - even theoretically — and which was to lead to the massacres ofWW1.17. Thus, in 1967, he wrote: " . . . Kierkegaard had played a significant role inmy early development and in the immediate pre-war years in Heidelberg, I evenplanned a monograph on his criticism of Hegel." History and ClassConsciousness, op. cit., p. ix. Translation modified.18. Georg von Lukacs, Die Seele und die Formen (Berlin, 1911), pp. 6-7, andpp. 159-160.19. Ibid,, p. 88.

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to undertake and successfully carry out such a task. When asked about this inlate 1968 in relation to his other book, The Theory of the Novel, heattributed the despair of those years precisely to his inability to find analternative to the existing state of affairs. But as he put it, "October gave theanswer. The Russian Revolution was the world-historical solution to mydilemma."20

According to Goldmann, Lukacs discovers the true Kant in The Soul andthe Forms, the true Hegel in The Theory of the Novel, and the true Marx inHistory and Class Consciousness: thus he recapitulates the whole trajectory ofGerman idealism.21 Although it is not quite this simple, in The Theory of theNovel the previously fixed forms of The Soul and the Forms become dynamicand are seen themselves as objectifications of the spiritual subject: "We havediscovered the productivity of the spirit: this is why the archetypes have lostin our eyes, once and for all, their objective evidence, and our thought moveson an endless path of never fully realized approximation."22 In fact, thenovel itself is seen as the typical artistic manifestation of that crisis which hehad already articulated: the very structure of the novel is constituted preciselyby a split in the social order reflected in the hero whose driving tension, as inHegel's Phenomenology, aims at a final reintegration. But no real reintegrationis possible, and The Theory of the Novel remains open-ended. If the sociallyintegrated existence obtaining in, e.g., Greece or medieval Europe, cannot bere-established, then despair and tragedy are still the only remaining alternativesas had been the case in The Soul and the Forms. Self-annihilation andschizophrenia seem to be the only outcome for the artist in a situation wherebourgeois art exalts man throughout as an end in himself whereas social life is"a living negation of that very idea."23 Yet, Lukacs eventually manages atheoretical reconciliation.

What is crucial in these early works is not so much Lukacs' opting for theforms at the expense of life - something very common for bourgeoisintellectuals at that time24 - but the refusal to abandon life altogether and

20. "Lukacs on his Life and Works", in New Left Review no. 68, July-August1971, p. 53.21. Goldmann, "Introduzione" to Teoria del Romanzo, op. cit.22. Lukacs, Theorie des Romans, op. cit., p. 27.23. Georg Lukacs, "The Old Culture and the New Culture" in Telos no. 5,Spring 1970, p. 26.24. Thus, Lukacs writes: "True existence is always non-real: it is never possiblefor the empiricity of existence . . . It is an enrichment and a confusion: it cannotlast, it is impossible to adapt oneself to it, it is impossible to live in itsheights — at the heights of one's existence, of one's extreme possibilities. Wemust fall back in the darkness: we must negate existence in order to live."Lukacs, Die Seele und die Formen, op. cit., p. 320. "The form is the highestjudge of existence . . . The form is the only pure revelation of the most authenticexperiences . . . " Ibid., pp. 369-370. This is precisely the same kind of solutionthat Husserl sought through phenomenology: an ascent from the phenomena tothe purity of the essences. It is precisely what was contemplated by mostneo-Kantians and neo-Hegelians - a retreat from the impurity of life to the

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have it evaporate in the forms. As one of Lukacs' earliest reviewers noticed asearly as 1912: ". . . All questions that he asks lead beyond . . . The content(soul) threatens to destroy the form . . . " 2 5 And this is precisely what,according to Asor Rosa, distinguishes Lukacs from other garden varieties ofphilosophers of anguish: "the subterranean and maybe not explicit yet totalawareness on his part of the impossibility of reducing the condition of theproblematic man to a philosophical system, i.e., to entangle the changing,precarious, but mobile life of human existence in the framework of anabstractly totalizing reflection."26 As such, he succeeds in "re-establishingcommunication between the world of ideas in themselves (the abstractproductivity of the spirit) with 4he world of existence thus provoking anexplosion in the closed universe of Classical German philosophy."27 Yet, thisdialectic tends to quickly lose sight of the content which, transformed intocategories by the very nature of discursive expression, takes on the characterof forms leaving behind a chaotic and meaningless dimension of existence as amaterial residue (Hegel's "positivity") no longer susceptible to spiritualarticulation. As Asor Rosa again put it, "of this external reality Lukacs doesnot and cannot give any coherent description: he can only say that it is theanti-spirit, chaos and disorder."28 This is a problem that Lukacs does notopenly confront until much later, and even then his solution will simplyprecipitate him into objective idealism since the theory of reflection that heintroduces simply substitutes conceptual projections for the earlier chaos, thuscompletely obliterating even that extraneous life that made itself feltthroughout the early works: that precategorical dimension which, "side byside with existence and the forms, next to the soul and poetry, reappears as athird not indifferent interlocutor, living itself, empiricity, arbitrariness, thecasual, the crudely necessary."29

This fundamental unresolved ambiguity characterizes all of Lukacs' works

purity of ideal structures. The same applies to Wittgenstein who, as Lichtheimpoints out in his Lukacs (London, 1970), p. 55, developed within exactly thesame socio-historical context. Yet, whereas both Husserl and Wittgensteineventually rejected the ideal scientific language of the Tractatus or the esotericessences of the Logical Investigations in favor of mysticism and the Lebensweltrespectively, Lukacs, after a short period of revolutionary explosiveness, fizzledout by merely shifting from one kind of idealism to another: from the earlyKantianism of the forms to the later objective idealism of "diamat."25. Emma von Ritosk, "Georg von Lukacs, Die Seele und die Formen" inZeitschrift fur Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 1912, pp. 324-326.As quoted by Zitta, op. cit., p. 35.26. Asor Rosa, op. cit., p. 69.27. Ibid., p. 65.28. Ibid.29. Ibid., p. 78. Italics in the original. As Perlini put it, "life is always formedlife, it is itself a form, it is always historically determined life. The dualismlife-form at this point calls on a third element to function as a foundation to it.Below life, which cannot pose itself as something original since it is always insome way formed, there is the original stratum of being, underlying whateverhistorical determination." Op. cit., p. 30; italics in original.

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up to 1930, after which the dialectic flattens out against the methodologicalredundancy implicit in the uncritical acceptance of the projected categoriesprovided by the theory of reflection as "objective reality," while theextraneous living dimension that had illegitimately electrified the dialectic upto that point is completely suppressed. As already indicated, in the earlyworks the living dialectic between subject and object, life and culture, formand content, is readily over-intellectualized and the precategoricalnon-conceptual pole of the materialist dialectic becomes automaticallytransformed into another concept thus reducing the living tension into a deadidealistic dialectic of forms and concepts. Lukacs must have been aware ofthis ambiguity, for he sought to develop a phenomenology of artisticcreativity which would trace the genesis of the forms and of artisticproduction in general.30 But the analysis remains limited to the spiritualdomain of artistic production - a partial sane totality within the broaderinsanity and fragmentation of bourgeois society: "Considered from theviewpoint of the subject [the artistic experience] is an authentic materialtransformation . . . the natural subject.. . forms a living unity of plena of thecontent of living experiences comprising all which is human."31 But thisobtains only for the aesthetic subject which is sharply distinguished from theethical subject according to the whole-part dialectic which permeates all ofLukacs' theories. Since only the totality captures the truth, the reified part, e.g.,the ethical subject, remains forever restricted- to the false consciousness of apartial viewpoint. To the extent that the aesthetic subject can grasp thetotality - even if it is a totality of reified fragments and corrupt parts - itattains salvation within a context of "utter degradation." This salvation,however, is possible only for a privileged artistic minority, and this is whyAsor Rosa calls Lukacs the "theoretician of bourgeois art." In fact, evenwithin all the despair of The Soul and the Forms, the very mode ofexpression that Lukacs chooses, the literary essay, as he makes clear in theletter to Leo Popper - the introductory chapter of the book- is already anattempted reconciliation between the expression of life's immediacy (poetry)and abstract formal mediation (philosophy): it "is the typical form ofexpression of an age in which values no longer live directly in things."32 It isa reconciliation, however, which does not overcome the split, but rathersanctifies it as an acceptable state of affairs within which self-fulfillment isstill possible - even in the totality of the crisis. The artistic totality, in fact, is"only a global vision of the crisis, unable to actually resolve itself. . . it is apoint of arrival but such as to confirm and validate for always the initialdiscrepancy."33 Lukacs remains caught within the bourgeois viewpoint at least

30. Georg Lukacs, "Die Subjekt-Objekt Beziehung in der Aesthetik" in Logosvol. VII, 1917-1918.31. Ibid., p. 6. Both Ludz and Henri Arvon ( Lukacs ou le Front Populaire enLiterature, [Paris, 1968]) have emphasized this essay's importance in thedevelopment of Lukacs' thought.il. Asor Rosa, op. cit., pp. 68-69, and p. 71. As Lukacs himself put it: " . . . thepoet and the plalonist are two contraposed poles. Every platonist expresseshimself best when he writes about a poet." Lukacs, Die Seele und die Formen,op. cit.. p. 59.33. Asor Rosa, op. cit., p. 72. Italics in original.

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to the extent that he ends up by reiterating the individual aesthetician's "ownessential autonomy with respect to all the rest of reality . . . " 3 4 and eventhough "he is on the threshold of the crisis, he sees all its presuppositions andall the symptoms,... he still thinks it possible to contrapose to it a law and abehavior which, in its own absoluteness, could heal all wounds and ruptures ofexistence."35

This anti-climax, which is typical of all idealisms after they become awareof the unbridgeable gap that they have created between their visions and theactual state of affairs, is a reconciliation with precisely that much-hatedfacticity which allows the totalizing artist to survive at least as an exception.Already in The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs has defended this artistic evasionas the only alternative in a situation of unresolvable crisis. Discussing Balzac's"novel of disillusionment" he had written that: "such self-sufficiency ofsubjectivity constitutes its desperate and legitimate defense, the renunciationby interiority of every struggle for its own realization in the externalworld a struggle considered a priori without hope . . . " 3 6 This ultimatelyconciliatory attitude in Lukacs is a preview of his later capitulation toStalinism not as an act of opportunism or cynicism, or even asabandonment of his earlier philosophy, but as its only logical outcome. Whenthe idealistic dialectic gets lost in the clouds of the spirit, the only landingground turns out to be precisely the original starting-point. This explains,among other things, why in the early 20's Lukacs wavers between Lenin andLuxemburg until the International settles the question for him and Stalinismturns out to be the only alternative within the organized communistmovement.l!7

The same dialectic that allows the artist to escape the general state ofcorruption is generalized, after Lukacs became a Marxist, to cover all ofsociety when the proletariat is substituted for the artist. The dynamics areessentially the same. Rcification can still be overcome only through thetotality, i.e., the reintcgration of the creating subject with its reified createdobject, which can occur through the becoming aware (prise de conscience orSclhsterkeiiiiinis) by the proletariat of its own crucial role as the historicalagent of social change: the subject-object identical. The crisis is now thecapitalist crisis obtaining between culture and the productive order38 so thatthe social world appears as a "second nature," i.e., as a foreign andindependent domain confronting the subjects that originally created it assomething altogether extraneous to them and actually controlling their lives.

34. Ibid., p. 73. Italics in original.35. Ibid., p. 95. Italics in original.36. Lukacs, Tlieorie des Romans, op. cit., p. 116.37. For an excellent well-documented account of Lukacs' path to Leninism, seeLuciano Aniodio, "Tra Lenin e Luxemburg. Commentario al Periodo'listremistico'di Gcorg Lukacs(1919-1921)", in // Corpo vol. II, no 5. 1967, andby the same author, "II Passaggio di Lukacs al Leninismo" in Nuova Correntenos. 48-49, 1969.38. Lukacs, "The Old Culture and the New Culture", op. cit., p. 24.

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The ideology of atomized individuals with equal rights contradicts the classrealities of bourgeois and proletarian subjects. The economy is seen as theobjectified product of the generalized subject, while alienation is the result ofthe reversal whereby the economy (the object) comes to dominate culture(the domain of the creating subject). Here Lukacs is quite explicit:"Liberation from capitalism means liberation from the rule of economy."®*Alienation, as the separation of the subject from the object because ofbourgeois property relations, can be overcome when the alienated subjectcoincides with the alienated object. When the proletariat is reduced to thelevel of a commodity and its status is typical of bourgeois society, it becomesthe subject-object identical since it is both the producer as well as the productof the whole process. Thus, the very creation of the proletariat constitutes theprocess of overcoming alienation for, when the process of proletarianization iscomplete, subject and object coincide once again, class consciousness becomespossible as a totalizing approach to reality, and both capitalism and reification(the fragmentation of the totality into a multitude of self-containedproducers, and the fixation of social reality into a myriad of frozen "objects"completely separate from the producing subjects) are simultaneouslyovercome.

Without indulging here in discussing the famous Hegelian confusion of"alienation" and "objectification," F.ntfremdung with Ent'dusserung,i0 it isimportant to point out that serious problems develop when Lukacs attemptsto spell out the dynamics of the revolutionary process. To the extent thatLukacs' "proletariat" is not composed of men in flesh and blood engaged inthe historical process, but, rather, it is a Weberian ideal type derived fromMarx's works, revolution itself becomes a metaphysical deduction which onlyaccidentally corresponds to actual historical events. His dialectical accountdoes not include, even as an integral moment, a functional analysis of theobjective situation of the actually existing, historical proletariat, or aphenomenological analysis of the real consciousness of the "ascribed"revolutionary agencies. This is why he did not see that the process ofautomatic totalization necessitating the revolution had not yet come.According to his theory of class consciousness, "the active and practical sideof class consciousness, its true essence, can only become visible in itsauthentic form when the historical process imperiously requires it to comeinto force, i.e., when an acute crisis in the economy drives it into action."41

And once it comes into being, the class struggle is already decided as to itsoutcome42 for what determines this outcome is precisely the possession of classconsciousness: "the fate of the revolution . . . will depend on the ideological

39. Ibid., p. 22.40. For an excellent discussion of this see the last .chapter of Lukacs' own DerJunge Hegel (Neuwied und Berlin, 1967) - the eighth volume of theWerke - dealing with "Die 'Entausserung als philosophischer Zentalbegriff der'Phanomenologie des Geistes' ", pp. 656-693.41. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 40.42. Ibid., p. 52.

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maturity of the proletariat, i.e., on its class consciousness."43 Thus, thefailure of what he considered genuine class consciousness to come into beingshould have indicated to Lukacs that the process of automatic totalization ofcapitalist society through proletarianization may not have yet been completedas a result of, e.g., imperialist expansion which would both postpone thedevelopment of the proletariat as the subject-object identical in advancedindustrial societies while accelerating the coming into being of the same in theThird World. Furthermore, nowhere does Lukacs concretely analyze thedialectical relation between "ascribed" class consciousness as the determinedand objectively valid proletarian consciousness (reality), and its empirical orreified counterpart (appearance).44 Thus, he wholly missed the decisive shiftin class composition taking place around the 1920's from proletarians asprivileged skilled workers (aristocracy of labor), rooted in their occupationsand work-places - whose objective class consciousness was expressed in theWorkers' Councils and in the elitist Leninist party - to the unskilledmass-workers brought into being by the capitalist response (Fordism) topre-WWI revolutionary waves.45 Unaffected by practical considerations of thissort, Lukacs continued to articulate his Marxism as a mere variation ofHegelian philosophy with the result that, when he finally realized that a livingmaterial foundation was missing, he thought that he could leave everythingessentially as it was by merely attaching to his philosophy the theory ofreflection.

Thus, from the very beginning, the Achille's heel is precisely what wasclaimed to be the strongest part: the dialectic. As already indicated,notwithstanding Lukacs' persistent attempts to establish and keep open arapport between the soul and the forms, as in the first chapter of Hegel'sPhenomenology, the immediacy of the soul always turned out to be alreadymediated by precisely those forms to which it was contraposed. Consequently,only the artist who is in a privileged position to grasp the totality can findsalvation in a situation of crisis. When the dialectic of soul and forms givesway to the dialectic of culture and the economy, the interaction between

43. Ibid., p. 60. Italics in original.44. In his "Lukacs' Theory of Reification", in Telos no. 11 (Spring, 1972),Andrew Arato gives a brilliant philosophical reconstruction of Lukacs theory ofreification. To the extent that such a theory is merely presented as a theoreticaltool independently of its concrete socio-historical application, what remainsuninvestigated is precisely Lukacs' failure to use it in politically mediating hissocial reality by transforming it into a viable theory of organization. Instead,Lukacs preferred to simply underemphasize his theory of reification anduncritically accept the pre-WWI Leninist theory of organization.45. For an elaboration of this theme, see Mario Tronti, Ope mi e Capitate (Turin.1971), pp. 60-88: Sergio Bologna, "Composizione di Classe e Teoria del Partitoalle Origini del Movimento Consigliare", in the anthology Operai e Suio (Milan,1972), pp. 13-46: and, for what regards Lukacs specifically, Massimo Cacciari,"Sul Problema dell'Organizazione. Germania 1917-1921", in Gyorgy Lukacs,Kommunismusl920-I921 (Padua, 1972), op. 1-68.

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whole and part remains again limited to the domain of the self-objectifyingSpirit and proceeds a priori, independently of any concrete historicaldeterminations, until Lukacs realizes the theoretical void and seeks to remedyit by means of the theory of reflection. Lukacs' dialectic remains Hegelianthroughout precisely to the extent that it fails to penetrate immediacy,without which mediation makes no sense since it has nothing to mediate, or,as in the case of the idealistic dialectic, it mediates among other concepts andcategories which, being themselves already mediations, simply postpones onestep further the reductio ad absurdum. Meszaros, in his excellent essay onLukacs, comes to a roughly similar conclusion: "The problem of mediation,despite the recognition of the 'bad immediacy' of naturalism, symbolism, etc.,remains unresolved. And this is what defeats the young Lukacs in theend . . ,"46 Yet, this conclusion is reached in a different way, and whateventually turns out to be wrong with Lukacs' notion of mediation forMeszaros is not that it fails altogether to penetrate immediacy, but is due toLukacs' efforts, after 1930, to remedy it by an "unwarranted intrusion of'immediacy' into his general world-view."47 The problem with Lukacs is seenas the transposing of reified immediacies to the level of mediational elementsin the desperate effort to make his philosophy and his politics jive. But theproblem is more serious than that since Lukacs, after realizing its fundamentaldefect, sought to retain unchanged the idealistic dialectic by combining it withanother objective idealist accessory, the theory of reflection, which merelycompounded the problems. In this respect, Lichtheim, Merleau-Ponty, andColletti, among others, are wrong in ridiculing the self-contradictory characterof any "dialectical materialism" whereby what is meant by materialism is thiskind of objective idealism:48 an idealistic dialectic fits very well with anidealist theory of consciousness! What needs to be examined carefully inconnection with any critique of Lukacs, or anybody's "dialecticalmaterialism" is the very notion of materialism.

The problem with diamat is its contemplative, and therefore bourgeoischaracter which contraposes a passive subject to a fully constituted reality sothat the entire epistemological process is not seen as an active appropriationof reality, but as a passive reflection by the subject of the mediated immediacy,or what Kosik calls "pseudo-concreteness,"49 which presents itselfimmediately as objective reality. Since what is intellectually apprehended isalways a function of the conceptual framework consciously or unconsciouslyemployed in the process, diamat, to the extent that it refuses to recognize the

46. Meszaros, op. cit., p. 6947. Ibid., p. 75.48. Lichtheim, op. cit., pp. 57 ff.; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Pravda" in Telosno. 7, Spring 1971, pp. 112-121. (This is the third chapter of his LesAventures de la Dialectique); and Colletti, op. cit., p. 350 f.49. Karel Kosik, "Dialectic of the Concrete Totality" in Telos vol. 1, no. 2., Fall1968, pp. 21-37. This is the English translation of the first chapter of hisDialectic of the Concrete, originally published in Czech in 1963, but nowavailable in French, Italian, and German translations.

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logical priority of the concept over and above the precategorical content that itgives meaning to, and stubbornly seeks to ground the concept in the verycontent that concretely exemplifies it, always ends up in redundancy bye x p l a i n i n g the validity of accepted conceptual structuresthrough a content which has already been constituted by them. Thus, theprocess is always an apology for whatever system of concepts happens to beaccepted at any given time, and objectively functions as an obstacle to theovercoming of whatever shortcomings the conceptual structure might havesince such shortcomings are themselves projected, along with the concept, intothe apprehended object. Furthermore, to the extent that language and thoughtare always inextricably connected with human activity, they necessarilyexpress the class interests of the subjects with whose activities they areconnected unless, as in the case in which a certain class dominates andimposes its class-grounded cultural framework as the only acceptable one, aclass' cultural hegemony completely overshadows all others and forces even itsantagonistic classes to use the same modes of thought and communicationthus pre-empting the very possibility of even formulating radical alternatives.By grounding the validity of uncritically accepted concepts either transmittedby the tradition or necessitated by extraneous realpotitische reasons into theimmediacy that they immediately mediate, diamat ends up by sanctifying asscientifically sound whatever class intersts are embodied in the hegemonicconceptual structures that happen to predominate at the time. Since bourgeoiscultural hegemony has permeated almost every facet of modern thought, andthere is no significant alternative to it yet, diamat unwittingly ends up bysupporting precisely that mode of thinking that it claims to oppose - exceptwhen its own immediate class interests (i.e., those of the ruling bureaucracywhich it represents) are directly involved, in which case immediaterequirements are readily hypostatized to the level of historically necessary,and therefore, epistemologically primary, tenets in virtue of their postulationby that a-historical external mediator: the Party. Since the Party's interests,however, are those of the bureaucracy as a particular class with particularinterests, they are not qualitatively different from those of the bourgeoisie. Itis not surprising, therefore, that no internal conflicts arise within such anopportunistic and idealist viewpoint.

Marxist materialism has nothing to do with diamat's passive reflection, buthas as its basis what Marx in "The Theses on Feuerbach" called sensuoushuman activity (menschliche sinnlidw Tiitigkcit)50 as the alpha and omegawithin which the dialectic operates. It deals with the concrete humanoperations involved in the production and reproduction of life, as well as theconstitution of concepts and institutions as mediations between human needsand their satisfactions, between the present and the future, in a process meantto realize a universally valid teleology. It is only in a situation of alienation

50. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologic (Berlin. 1960), p.583.

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and reification, where the sole totality is constituted by capital's omnipotenceand omnipresence, that the universality of human goals is replaced by theparticularity of capitalist interests and the teleology ends up subverted. And itis precisely in such a situation — our modern predicament - that theconceptual mediations' character as means of human emancipation issubverted into a tool of class domination so that any epistemology such as adiamat's that does not constantly examine the class credentials of whateverconcepts or theories it employs, ends up itself being instrumentalized by thereification and alienation that it may even claim to oppose.51 Materialismtoday can only mean the primacy of living human activity over whateverobjectified structures, whether theories or institutions, constrain it, direct it,or control it. In other words, it must constantly employ a phenomenology ofconceptual structures and institutions able to relate mediations to theimmediacy that they are to mediate without falling into the perennial idealisttrap of substituting for immediacy the mediated immediacy orpseudo-concreteness which naturalizes it, thus occluding the very teleologythat had to be realized and which can be realized only if it is not collapsedinto the very means for its realization.52 Thus, materialism is not primarily anabstract theory, but a concrete mode of living within which thinking is notsubstituted for being, and retains its relative autonomy only by constantlyreexamining its material, i.e., preconceptual, determinations. So characterized,materialism no longer confronts dialectics as a metaphysical obstacle but,rather, it is dialectical in its very essence. And this is the only possiblemeaning of a dialectical materialism: not as the rhetorical articulation ofreified notions obtained through objective idealist reflection of projectedpreconstituted concepts, or through bureaucratic mandate, but as a livingmethodology dealing with the creation and recreation of mediations in thevery praxis so to guarantee the necessary continuity between human needsand their conceptual otherness — telos — in a context where the very activeintervention of the subjects constantly renders obsolete whatever earliermediations might have accomplished. Diamat theorists have always retortedthat without the theory of reflection the only remaining epistemologicalalternative is an idealism according to which the knowing subject is seen ascreating the object in the very act of conceptualizing it. This explains whydiamat philosophers love to discuss Berkeley - probably the only philosopherwho could ever fall into such an absurd stereotype - and why they see thedead issue of materialism versus idealism as the fundamental philosophicalissue. But to deny diamat's objective idealism, i.e., that the objective worldhas the same structure as our concepts and theories thereof, is not equivalent

51. For an elaboration of this point, see Karel Kosik, "Nase Nyneisi Krize" inLiterarny Listy, May 16, 1968. An English translation of this article is inpreparation.52. This is the "rational kernel" of G.E. Moore's "naturalist fallacy" whosemain intent, once freed of the conservative garb within which it is usuallyclothed, is precisely to vindicate the dimension of freedom andself-determination which distinguished human activities from all others.

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to denying that reality has its own structure independently of the preceivingsubject. What is at issue is not the independent existence of the world orwhether it has its own structure — scholastic questions — but whetherconceptual structures correspond to what they purport to describe, or whetherthe relation is one of efficacy connected to a class-grounded teleology. Thediamat defence of correspondence between thought and object reveals itsintrinsic conservative character and its theoretical capitulation and regressionin front of bourgeois pre-Kantian rationalism. Not only does it validate asuniversally adequate trie class-grounded teleology implicit in the acceptedtheoretical framework, but it also erases any qualitative differences betweenMarxism and bourgeois science by relegating all relevant differences to theephemeral ideological sphere. As such, it reveals itself as a moment of thatpolicy of convergence and peaceful co-existence which has been an officialSoviet position at least since Stalin's invention of the "infrastructure" as atheoretically neutral limbo between structure and supersturcture, in thefamous linguistic controversy of the early 1950's.53

The path of Lukacs' thought that led to his acceptance of the theory ofreflection proceeds from the deduction of the proletariat as the subject-objectidentical, to the deduction of the Party as the historical agency meant tocatalyze and direct the process. The shocking event was the sudden realizationthat the bourgeoisie could not only slow-down but altogether reverse theprocess of self-organization of the proletariat by developing into Fascism.Rather than performing an Althusserian coupure between the writing ofHistory and Class Consciousness, and Lenin, as it has been claimed byJones,54 Lukacs made no major revision in his philosophical apparatus in

53. For an excellent discussion of this issue which places proper emphasis onthe conservative and bourgeois implications of the Stalinist "solution", seeAlvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York,1970), pp. 453-455. Of course, all of this applies equally well to thatfashionable philosophical stalking-horse of Stalinism, Louis Althusser, who hasbeen busy reiterating all of these scientistic theses of embourgeoisifiedMarxism in a fuzzy structuralist system where history is made by "structures"and the whole defense of the "scientific" character of Marxism is ultimatelymeant to apologize for the Party's or bureaucracy's continued domination inallegedly "socialist" societies. For a good account but a weak assessment ofmajor Althusserian theses, see Norman Geras, "Althusser's Marxism: anAccount and Assessment" in New Left Review, January-February 1972, no.71, pp. 57-86.54. Gareth S ted man Jones, "The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: AnEvaluation" in New Left Review no. 70, November-December 1971, pp.56-57. In a nutshell, Jones naively sees Lukacs as administering that infamousepistemological karate-chop - the coupure - to his earlier idealism through hisacceptance of the Leninist concept of the Party, and the overloaded —oroverdetermined — theory of revolution. Notwithstanding the fact that Lukacshad already deduced the Leninist What is to be Done? theory of the party inthe essay on "Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist", which is the second chapter ofHistory and Class Consciousness and, as Lukacs himself admits, he did not

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1924, in 1930, or ever, other than simply mechanically appending to hisdialectic the theory of reflection. Whatever changes did take place, they weremerely quantitative. In politics he retreated from active involvement since, ashe himself admits, his efforts had proven to be quite useless,55 while inphilosophy he introduced the theory of reflection to provide anepistemological base to his dialectic that he suddenly saw as hanging in the airsince it had been held up by Weberian ideal types derived from Marx'stexts.56 Thus, that precategorical dimension that had eluded the youngLukacs' analysis of formed life, and that in History and Class Consciousnesshad been replaced by Marx's categories interpreted through Hegel, after 1930remained mystified and hidden behind the categorical projections substitutedfor it in the theory of reflection.

To be sure, in History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs had attacked theEngelsian theory of reflection.57 Such a theory had been located within aframework in which reality was seen as "by no means identical with empiricalexistence."58 But the difference between the two is problematic, and thefailure to clearly elaborate it eventually led Lukacs into an untenable position.

completely give up his book until after the rejection of the Blum theses andhis reading of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, theLassalle and Moses Hess essays of 1925-26 clearly show that, philosophically,Lukacs had changed very little. Overanxious to use the theoretical toys freshlyimported from French structuralism, Jones simply carries out a scholasticexercise of matching Lukacs against Althusserian positions. Thus, History andClass Consciousness is seen as "the first major eruption of the romanticanti-scientific tradition of bourgeois thought into Marxist theory" (p. 44).Furthermore, this residual romanticism "determines all the political errors andlacunae which thereafter derive from it" (p. 46). Having disposed of thedialectic by contraposing to it the dogma of Marxism as a science (preciselythe Kautskian nonsense that Lenin had the misfortune to outline in What is tobe Done? in a moment of political despair) Jones tries to salvage Lukacs as afootnote to Althusser. Such an amateurish account would ordinarily merit, atbest, a laugh, were it not but a bush-league version of a verywide-spread criticism developed in a much more articulate fashion by Badeschi,Colletti, and other more serious Marxists. Thus, it will be discussed later inmore detail.55. Cf. "Lukacs on his Life and Works", op. cit., p. 55; and History and ClassConsciousness, op. cit., pp. xxix-xxxi.56. In his "transitional" works of 1925 and 1926 — his essays on Lassalle andMoses Hess — Lukacs had already indicated his own concern with the gapbetween theory and reality. In fact, his main criticism of both Lassalle and Hesswas that they failed to properly develop dialectical categories out of theirconcrete reality, so that they had to fall back on the activism of Fichte in orderto "revolutionize" Hegel's reactionary standpoint. Needless to say, Lukacshimself, at this time, is struggling with this very problem whose solutioneventually was the theory of reflection. Both essays on Lassalle and Hess arenow translated into English in Telos nos. 10 and 11.57. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 199 ff. For a moredetailed discussion of this theme, see Celestino Vaiani, L'Abbild-Theorie inGyorgy Lukacs, (L'Aquila, 1971).58. Ibid., p. 203.

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This is a fundamental distinction which reappears in economics betweencapitalism as anarchic production and socialism as planned production:59

what distinguishes the two is that anarchic production is characterized byisolated, atomized, and self-contained components, while planned productioncomprises an organic totality which for Lukacs represents the real outcome ofthe capitalist crisis. In the same way that socialism is seen as the introductionof conscious planning into capitalism,60 reality is regarded as the unifiedtotality of the isolated elements of empirical existence.61 What Lukacs wantsto do is to apprehend reality not as fixed and frozen things, but as processes,and he assumes throughout that from the viewpoint of the totality this isprecisely what happens. Unfortunately, thinking does not take place throughfixed concepts and categories so that Lukacs' project cannot be carried outpurely on the conceptual level. It is only on the level of feeling and livingexperiences (Krlebnisse) that we always confront reality as a totalitycontaining fixed categories as moments thereof. To the extent that Lukacsnever penetrates this crucial living dimension and remains throughout withinthe categorical realm, his brilliant intuitions eventually fail. This is why thereified character of isolated facts that are universalized and dehistoricized bybourgeois ideology's insistence in apprehending them through a-temporalscientific laws cannot, in the long run, be remedied by Lukacs' idealisticdialectic. He does not propose a re-constitution of such facts through radicallydifferent theories (i.e., theories whose "onesided" character62 is determinedby class interests qualitatively different from those determining bourgeois

59. Thus he writes: "The conscious, the organized planning of the economycan only be introduced consciously and the organ that will introduce it isprecisely the proletarian state, the system of Soviets." Ibid., p. 282, translationmodified. And again: " . . . t h e complete knowledge of the whole [system]would vouchsafe the knower a monopoly that would amount to the virtualabolition of the capitalist society." Ibid., p. 102.60. Lukacs regards even the attempt by the bourgeoisie to introduce planninginto the economy as a "capitulation of the class consciousness of thebourgeoisie before that of the proletariat." Ibid., p. 67. Italics in the original.61. As Vacca has pointed out, the whole discussion of facts is carried out withinthe domain of consciousness, and Lukacs' critique "is not so much of thecontents of real consciousness, as of the fact of their partiality." GiuseppeVacca, Lukacs o Korsch (Bari, 1969), p. 60.62. All theory is, by its nature, onesided. As Kosik put it: "the very fact thatthought moves naturally in a direction which is opposed to the nature ofreality, that it isolates and 'kills', and that the tendency to abstract is foundin this natural movement does not constitute a peculiarity of thought, but itfollows from its practical function. Every act is 'onesided' since it aims at adeterminate goal and, as such, isolates some moments of reality as essentialfor that action, and, for the moment, it leaves others aside. Through thisspontaneous acting which points out the important determinate moments forthe attainment of a certain purpose, thought divides the unique reality, entersinto it, and evaluates it." "Dialectic of the Concrete Totality", op. cit., p. 25.The point is that all theory grasps only certain features of reality and what itdocs grasp and what it ignores — essence and phenomena — are not determineda priori, but by the interests of the perceiving subject, unless he is alienatedin which case he employs a theory whose "onesidedness" reflects interests ofclasses other than his own.

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theories), but by merely compounding these facts into a unified conceptualtotality. Lacking a phenomenology of concept-formation, he can only offer anabstract negation of bourgeois ideology which ultimately presupposes preciselywhat it wants to do away with. Thus, Lukacs remains, from the verybeginning, theoretically imprisoned in that reification that needs to beoverthrown: "Only |by seeing| . . . isolated facts of social life as moments of thehistorical process and integral [ingj them in a totality, is knowledge of thefacts possible as knowledge of reality."63 To the extent that they are notreconstituted, the atomi/.ed facts of bourgeois reification are transposed lock,stock, and barrel, over to the viewpoint of the totality which, by merelycollecting them together, bestows on them a revolutionary character.

What makes possible this mechanical epistemological transposition isLukacs' interpretation of the social world as an objectified spiritual domainwhose reified character is due primarily to its separation from the constitutingsubjects. This identification of objectification and alienation leads Lukacsto identify reification with specialization and, as positivist critics never tire topoint out, the overcoming of reification becomes identified with the veryovercoming of the division of labor.64 Given such a formulation of theproblem, it follows that the mere reintegration of the separate and objectifiedfacts of bourgeois science within a totality constitutes also the overcoming oftheir reified character. What is significant here is that neither "reality" nor"empirical existence" refers to that precategorical dimension where the subjectconfronts the object, not as an alienated part of itself to be reabsorbed, but asa world yet to be humanized and, as such, intrinsically other than itself.Again, Lukacs can do this precisely because, notwithstanding his neo-Kantianviews of nature, he is operating from the viewpoint of the Hegelian deist forwhich there is nothing but itself and its own objectifications, whosereintegration into the totality constitutes the attainment of the Absolute or,in Marxist terms, the classless society. This reintegration succeeds in freeingthe spiritual and subjective character of reified reality, thus even erasing theirobjective independence. In fact, • in History and Class Consciousness," . . . when the dialectic destroys the immortality of the categories, it alsodestroys their character as things {l)iiigliaJtigkeitsliiille)'"G5 and the resultingprocesses reveal themselves for what they always were, the very self-becomingof consciousness: "their identity is in that they are moments of one and thesame real historical and dialectic process."66

As already indicated, in order to understand the "late" Lukacs it is notnecessary to postulate any cynicism on his part, as Merleau-Ponty does whenhe claims that: "although |Lukacs| has generally accepted the lessons ofphilosophical Leninism and like everyone else he speaks the language ofreflective consciousness, thus leaving the door open for less comprehensibledetours and giving a free hand to the history makers, in principle he still

63. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 8. Translationmodified.64. This is the objection of, e.g., Vacca, op. cit., p. 72; Colletti, op. cit., andGiuseppe Badeschi, Introduzione a l.ukacs (Bari, 1970), pp. 39-43.65. Lukacs History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 14. Translationmodified.66. Ibid., p. 204. Translation modified.

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upholds the autonomy of truth, the possibility of reflection, and the life ofsubjectivity in a cultural realism where these cannot be subordinated to atactic or it will mean their death. Everything happens as if, having acceptedthe unavoidable in action and in historical engagement, he now attempts topreserve for the future the conditions necessary for a healthy culture."67

Interpreting Lukacs' aesthetics as a philosophical citadel where Lukacs retreatsafter having compromised everything else, Merleau-Ponty fails to reali/.c thatwhat Lukacs actually did in aesthetics was to merely return to his earlierpositions while making his general philosophy much more self-consistent thanit had ever been. The entire case for Lukacs' cynicism is built onMerleau-Ponty's inability to even conceive of a synthesis of the Leninistepistemology and the dialectic which he sees as fundamentally incompatible.What he does not realize is that it is an idealist dialectic supported bycategories which can very well be furnished by the objective idealism of thetheory of reflection. What Merleau-Ponty finds particularly indigestible is thehypostatization of the Party as the ultimate judge of truth or falsity: "no onecan hold this, least of all a philosopher and a writer like Lukacs."68 Yet, thisis precisely the position that Lukacs held already in History and ClassConsciousness where the distinction between ideology and knowledge hadalready been reduced to the contraposition of isolated to totalized facts, andwhere knowledge was seen as only possible from the viewpoint of the^otalityas: "the consideration of all partial phenomena as moments of the whole, ofthe dialectical process as the unity of thought and history."69 Such a totalitywas never the prerogative of the individual knower, but "can only be positedif the positing subject is itself a totality" so that "in modern society onlyclasses can represent the viewpoint of the totality as subject,"70 and "onlythe class can actively penetrate social reality and transform it in itstotality."71 Furthermore, "the form taken by the class consciousness of theproletariat is the Party" as the "conscience of its historical vocation."72

Thus, from the very beginning the Party had been regarded as the criterionof truth precisely because of its role as the totalizing part meant to integratethe fragmented whole, the proletariat, which was itself regarded as anothertotalizing part meant to integrate a broader fragmented whole (all of society).Although it is true that the Party "can only fulfill its destiny in this conflictif it is always a step in front of the struggling masses . . . but only one step infront so that it always remains leader of their struggle,"73 it remainsnonetheless "//ie tangible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness."74

67. Merleau-Ponty, "Pravda" in Telos, op. cit., pp. 117-118.'68. Ibid., p. 117.69. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 28. Translationmodified.70. Ibid. Translation modified.71. Ibid. p. 39. Translation modified.72. Ibid., p. 41.73. Georg Lukacs, I.enin, translated by Nicholas Jacobs (London, 1970), p.35. Italics in original.74. Ibid., p. 27. Italics in original.

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Through that very same dialectic between the alienated whole and thevindicating part obtaining between humanity and the proletariat, theproletarian class and the conscious party, and even the conscious party andthe leader,75 Lukacs systematically paints himself into a Stalinist corner. Thatsubstitutionism so often charged by Trotskyists whereby the proletariatsubstitutes itself for humanity, the party for the proletariat and the leader forthe party, receives in Lukacs its theoretical justification precisely in thoseworks that "Western" Marxism has always contraposed to his later Stalinistcontributions. The Zeitgeist that Hegel had already identified in Napoleon,Lukacs identifies in Lenin and, after his death, in whomever happened tofollow him precisely through the same idealistic dialectical methodology.Furthermore, the very same dialectic of whole and part reappears betweenindividual freedom and discipline, and whereas the first appears as part of thatfragmented bourgeois existence criticized throughout, only the latter can bringabout reintegration with the totality: "in contemporary bourgeois societyindividual freedom can only be corrupt and corrupting because it is a chase ofunilateral privilege based on the unfreedom of others. Thus the desire tochange this must entail the renunciation of individual freedom. It implies theconscious subordination of the self to the collective will that is destined tobring real freedom into being and that today is earnestly taking the firstarduous, uncertain and groping steps towards it. This conscious collective willis the Communist Party. . . . The unity of these moments is discipline."76 Toreiterate: Lukacs' Stalinism was not a political cop-out, nor an act ofcynicism, much less a radical revision of his early positions. Rather, it was thelogical consummation of his very philosophy which remained fundamentallyunaltered throughout his life.

In fact, even after his rejection of Stalinism in 1956, Lukacs retained hisHegelian dialectic without any major changes, and even his critique ofStalinism took the old dialectical form of fragmented whole versus totalizingpart. When, in the summer of 1967, he asked for and obtained readmissioninto the Hungarian Communist Party, he was interviewed concerning hisobjections to Stalinism. Lukacs' critique did not focus primarily on theusurpation of power by the bureaucracy, or the depoliticization of Sovietsociety, but he zeroed his criticism in on Stalin's substitution of the primacyof strategy (totalizing part) for tactics (fragmented whole).77 He does noteven see a need to criticize "the Stalinist methods of 'political commissars', ofuniversal control of all of society through the secrst police, etc." since all ofthis "at the time of Stalin's death had already been rendered historicallyobsolete by social development" and they were "brakes to the economic

75. Thus: "the process of fruitful interaction between party and class repeatsitself . . . in the relationship between the party and its members." Ibid., p. 38.76. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., pp. 315-316.Translation modified.77.Georg Lukacs, "L'Ottobre e la Letteratura", originally published in the Czechmagazine Palemn and in Italian in Contemporaneo-Rinascita, now reprinted in //Marxismo e la Coesistenza (Roma, 1968), pp. 52ff., and pp. 8Off.

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development"78 anyway. Nor does he even consider it necessary to give a newMarxist account of Stalinism other than by means of the old mechanistic andsociologistic argument that it was a necessary result of Russian backwardness,etc. The whole problem reduces to the old contraposition of the reified partstaking on, as already well described in History and Class Consciousness, anature of their own and thus becoming more important than the totalizingwhole within which alone they made sense.79

The very establishing of a methodological continuity between Hegel andMarx that Lukacs outlines as one of the main tasks of History and ClassConsciousness becomes highly problematic when, notwithstanding numerousqualifications, he ends up by separating the Hegelian method from theHegelian system in order to vindicate the Hegelian dialectic as Marx's ownmethodology: "Marx's critique of Hegel is the direct continuation andextension of the criticism that Hegel himself levelled at Kant andFichte . . . Marx's dialectical method continued what Hegel had striven for butfailed to achieve in a concrete form."80 But as Bloch has put it, "in Hegel themethod can be thought of as form, i.e., as an always valid representation; is itthen possible to always separate in Hegel the dialectical form (moredialectico) from the dialectical content? Doubtlessly, only where in thesystem there is something countless, i.e., artificial, constructed. Yet, this isabsolutely unthinkable concerning the main points of the Hegelian system,i.e., in the parts of the genuine domain of Hegel. The oi/ecrive-idealisticdialectic contained here is always an idealistic-objective dialectic, but not suchas to be conceivable without a real relation to content. . . And a dialecticalrelation as important as that of negation as alienation and of the negation ofthe negation as annihilation of alienation, acquires its full meaning primarilyand properly only as elaborated material participating in an evolution of asystematic order. The dialectical process possesses its material not in anabstract way and certainly not as the rhythm of an eternally equal triad'separate from the system'."81 Thus, it is impossible to separate the methodas fundamentally sound from the conservative and idealistic system since "inHegel method and system are inseparable; both of them suffer from

78. tbid., pp. 56-57.79. It is unnecessary here to deal with some of Lukacs' more dubiouspolitical positions such as his support for the Kennedy "Brain Trusts" as amode of organization suitable for socialist countries. Even though the intentwas to smash the power of the dogmatic bureaucracy, it is well known howpowerless these "Brain Trusts" were. Cf. Theo Pinkus, ed., Gesprdche mitGeorg Lukacs (Hamburg, 1967). For an excellent critique of these positions,see Meszaros, op. cit., pp. 81-85.80. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 17.81. Ernst Bloch, Ueber Methode und System bei Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.,1970), pp. 53-54. Bloch's criticism is directed at Engels, but it obviouslyapplies to Lukacs as well.

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panlogistic idealism . . . " 8 2 To be sure, there is a contradiction in Hegel'ssystem, "but the contradiction is not between the method and the system,but rather, both in the method as well as in the system: a contradiction bothin the form of the method as well as in the content of the system."83 ThusLukacs' attempts to present Marx as the fulfillment of Hegel in a continuousdevelopmental process must fail: a negation of Hegel's idealism implies adialectical discontinuity which cannot be properly dealt with by transposingHegel's method to Marx's categories. The whole-part dialectic, which, asalready indicated, is the corner stone of Lukacs' dialectic cannot remain, as inHegel, a dialectic between a totality of projected categories and their reifiedparticular manifestations, but must involve a living totality including bothconceptual categories as well as what these categories are categories of, andthe part seen as always mediated by the living subject. To the extent thatLukacs operates throughout at the level of consciousness and ideas, he neverpenetrates to the living dimension and, as a result, ends up with an imposingmetaphysical system only accidentally having anything to do with actualhistory.

A Marxist dialectic must dialecticize not only itself, but also the verycategories of analysis. Although Lukacs recognizes this,84 in practice heretains unchanged all of the Marxist categories which he mechanicallyproceeds to superimpose upon a reality that has at least partially outgrownthem. To the extent that Lukacs does not generate the categories employedfrom the concrete context of his historical situation, he ends up by deducing19th century consequences from the 19th century Marxism that heuncritically transposes over to 20th century realities. A Marxist articulation ofMarxist theory must give an analysis of all of its categories, understood not asPlatonic forms pre-givcn and universally valid, but as determined moments ofpraxis meant to capture reality in a certain way so to already build into thatvery apprehension something which is not-yet and which is precisely praxis'task to bring about.85 Thus the totality is crucial as a concrete totality whichis not an Hegelian unity of the objectifying subject and the reintegratedobjectified object, but the whole of being leaving behind no natural residue aseither "positivity" or as the anti-spirit. Although Lukacs claims verbaladherence to the concrete totality, in fact he wavers throughout History andClass Consciousness between the positivist and the romantic totalityunderstood respectively as a mechanical collection of isolated entities, and as ametaphysical whole obtaining above and beyond all the parts that constitute

82. Ibid., p. 69.83. Ibid., p. 58.84. In History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 228, he writes: "Historicalmaterialism both can and must be applied to itself."85. This is, again, a function of the radical difference between concept andobject, and of the fact that the character of the concept is never entirelydetermined by the object, but always also through the teleology of theperceiving subject.

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it. To the extent that processes cannot be conceptually apprehended asprocesses but must be reconstituted out of fixed and static components, thereis no way to theoretically guarantee the dynamicity of thought other than bycontinually subordinating it to the praxis of which it is only a moment. Thedialectical self-movement of concepts in Hegel is possible only through acontinual mediation with existence which reveals their onesidedness andnecessitates their negation in a process where existence itself is eventuallyreabsorbed as an objectified moment of the totalizing spirit. In a Marxist andmaterialist dialectic the movement is not only a function of the inadequacy ofthe concept, but the result of praxis in a process of self-becoming whosedomain is always human activity. Thus, although, in retrospect it is possible toshow the necessary interrelations and unfolding of all the various thoughtforms, in actuality the criterion of adequacy is never given a priori in theoryitself Hegelian or otherwise - but is a function of the realization of theprocess of which it is a moment.

This is why Luka'cs ends up with a positivist totality when he considerssocialism as the planning of capitalist society, or he sees proletarianclass-consciousness as the sum total of bourgeois scientific facts. Theindependent moments retain their essential identity in losing their isolationand separation. Similarly, he slides in the romantic totality in articulating histheory of political organization whereby the party ends up as the historicalreceptacle of class consciousness: only if the totality is prior and independentof the parts it is possible for a part to take on such a decisive role. The entirepolitical structure in History and Class Consciousness in fact, turns out to be ametaphysical deduction from an idealist part-whole dialectic where the deistfirst recognizes itself in the products of capitalist society, the proletariatwhich, to the extent that it produces, is also the subject, and then, through anextension of the same logic, ends up by posing Stalinism as the onlymeaningful outcome.

A Marxist interpretation of Marxism must start out by reducing thecategories transmitted by the Marxist tradition to the living reality whichoriginally gave rise to them, thus generating a three-dimensional dialecticalframework of: (1) the living reality that the categories mediate which, beinglargely precategorical. cannot be merely described by other categories, butmust be relived; (2) the categories understood as onesided conceptualdeterminations of the broader reality of which they arc an integral part: and (3)the projected not-yct-real state of affairs which satisfies those human needsoriginally appearing as the telos and determining the structure of the verycategories through whose mediation this not-yet-real state of affairs becomesreal. This preliminary unfolding of the theory is only a moment of adialectical understanding of Marxism which must now be reconstituted in thepresent in terms of the kind of future that they are meant to help bringabout. What results is a Kosokian dialectical matrix86 where all three of the

86. For an account of the dialectical matrix, see Michael Kosok, "TheDialectical Matrix" in Telos no. 5, Spring 1970, pp. 115-159; and his"Dialectics of Nature" in Telos no. 6, Fall 1970, pp. 48-103.

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indicated moments of Marx's own theory are re-constituted and negated.Interpretation here cannot mean mere transposition and superimposition ofthe original theory on reality, but must itself reproduce the three levels anewbecause, among other things, of the historical mediation that the totalitymight have undergone through the realization (or particularization) of theoriginal project. This also allows for a criterion to evaluate earliertheory which is now a function of the extent that the original categorieshave or have not succeeded in mediating the reality that they were meant tomediate. And this also alters the character of the driving needs which nowreimpose themselves precisely to the extent that they remain still collectivelyunsatisfied, or have been historically modified in the process. Here, thereconstitutive process unfolds again in the already described three-dimensionalstructure where the new categories, or the Marxist interpretation of Marxismnow yields a new set of categories which, among other things, explains thesuccess or failure of the original Marxist theory - itself in terms of a projectednot-yet-real state of affairs embodying the new telos which is continuous withthe first one at least to the extent that they were both concretely constitutedinto practical mediation structures meant to change reality by making historyin mediating the present, through an understanding of the past, towards aprojected future. Whereas the first level of this second-order interpretationalstructure presents itself as past (Marx's original context), the second levelappears as the living present which negates the sedimentations of the past(appearing as the given) in terms of the requirements of the future, itselfappearing as the third level whose bringing about is to be mediated preciselyby the concrete activity of the historical subjects who will succeed only to theextent that the projected mediation is concrete, i.e., rooted in objectivepossibilities. Thus, the third level turns out again to be the projected futurethat the historical negativity of living subjects, in the present, will be able tosediment in the past that confronts them as reified existence at every step ofthe way. At this third level of the nine-term matrix, the first moment (theprojected living existence) presents itself as meeting those needs whichdetermined the character of the categories at the second level; the secondmoment (the projected categorical structure) appears as Marx's unitary sciencewhich transcends - both rejecting and recuperating - all present conceptualstructures: while the third moment (the projected not-yet-real state of affairs)remains the classless society which, because of its very nature, will have toremain unspecified.

This matrix account appears necessarily formal and abstract since all thecontent has been left out. What it means, in a nutshell, is that Marx's owntheory is rooted in the needs of its times and captures theoretically problemswhich, 50 years later, might have changed, thus necessitating a theoreticalre-tooling. Whereas in the middle of the 19th century the proletariat was stilla nascent class whose very existence for Marx negated the universalpretensions of bourgeois society, by the turn of the century it had developedinto the aristocracy of labor that transformed the Second International andearly trade-unionism (AFL) into particular interest groups for whomrevolution was no longer an historical necessity. It is within this social context

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that Bernstein's and Kautsky's revisionisms come into being, Lenin devises hiselitist notion of the Party, and spontaneous class organizations take on theform of workers' councils. All of these phenomena are the theoretical,organizational, and strategic expressions of a new class structure in which theproletariat of advanced industrial societies has developed into an "aristocracyof labor" vis-a-vis the world working force in the age of imperialism.87 By theearly 1920's the class composition of the proletariat again changed as a resultof capitalism's response to the post-WWI revolutionary wave and thetheoretical-organizational tools of Leninism — allegedly adequate to the earlierperiod - became consequently obsolete. As Cacciari put it, "that workers'vanguard which was real in the Russia of the Leninist revolutionary plan, andtherefore actually determinate to organize itself for its own hegemony,necessitated to program its own struggle, is no longer so in the Germany ofWeimar: its position becomes a defensive and conservative one. Its time hasdefinitely passed."88 The historical irony here is that Lukacs moved fromLuxemburg's to Lenin's position precisely when the changing classcomposition demanded precisely the opposite. As already indicated, thisLukacsiancu/ de sac is the result of his theoretical inability to give a Marxistanalysis of Marxism. Rather than arising from a careful study of the existingstructure and of the totalizing forces at work, Lukacs' theoreticaldevelopments were essentially metaphysical deductions mechanicallysuperimposed to a reality which was growing increasingly more irreconciliableto it.

At any rate, the main point here is that it is fundamentally counter toMarxism to carry out the theoretical transposition of Marx's theory to a newsocio-historical context half a century removed from the sources of thetheory, without any significant modifications. Lukacs could do so precisely tothe extent that he saw Marxism as concretized Hegelianism, with the idealistdialectic remaining unchanged throughout. Although the main target ofHistory and Class Consciousness was that reified and scientific Marxism of theSecond International which in the early 1920's was slowly creeping back intothe theoretical formulations of the Third International, and Lukacs sought topreserve the revolutionary character of Marxism, the entire presentation of the

87. Tronti and the Potere Operaio group have stressed that, within such acontext, the Leninist line was the correct one since it was the only oneadequate to the specific class composition of the time. Cf. Tronti, op. cit.,Bologna, op. cit. Yet, it is doubtful whether bolshevism would ever havesucceeded in Russia without the catastrophy of World War I. Furthermore, itsfailure in Germany, Italy, and advanced industrial societies in general may betaken not as an indication of weak "leadership —as official communistexplanations would have it — but as the end of the industrial working class asa revolutionary historical agency. A dogmatic adherence to an uncritical andmetaphysical notion of "working class" prevents Tronti and the PotereOperaio group from drawing these conclusions from their otherwisepenetrating analyses.88. Cacciari, op. cit., p. 60.

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dialectic and his articulation of Marxism remained hopelessly caught withinprecisely that idealistic problematic that characterized his work both before aswell as after History and Class Consciousness. When, after 1930, Lukacsfinally realized the lack of foundations for his whole theoretical apparatus, hetacitly accepted the Leninist theory of reflection, thus "substituting aformal-logical reason for dialectical reason."89 But in so doing Lukacsregressed to a worn-out Enlightenment Weltanschauug: in his old age Naphtabecame Settembrini. It is unnecessary here to deal with the epistemologicalidiocies espoused by the old Lukacs in-, e.g., the fourth chapter of hisExistentialisme ou Marxisme? nor with his other major philosophical workThe Destruction of Reason, where Lukacs himself turns out to do the mostdestruction. The whole argument revolves around the defense of a formalreason • which, divorced from the dialectic, ends up by being anotherideological prop for the irrationality of the status quo. The old Lukacs can nolonger see in the revolt against reason as rationalism and scientism - the maintargets of History and Class Consciousness — anything progressive, thuspresenting a history of recent philosophy straitjacketed in categories whichcan hardly do justice to.it. His dialectic eventually did find a foundation, butat the price of giving up whatever' revolutionary character it had: that lifewhich electrified all the works of the. young Lukacs and thus prevented thedialectic from coagulating in any given structures disappears entirely from thescholastic apologies of the old Lukacs.whose work rates no better than therest of "administered" philosophy done in the Soviet block.

In today's political context when the issue has once again been posed as aconfrontation of Marxism as a science versus Marxism as critical theory,History and Class Consciousness has been rehabilitated as one of the mostpowerful weapons in the depleted theoretical arsenal of critical theory, whichincludes most Hegelian Marxists (Gramsci, Korsch, etc.), in the attempt toprevent Marxism from once again being degraded to the level of acontemplative science (according to which the classless society is presumablywritten in the stars and all that we need to do is sit and wait for its inevitablescientific debut). Thus, today when the official Marxism of the Soviet Unionhas long since proved itself inadequate at all levels, while Maoism seems tohave very little theoretical import for advanced industrial societies,90 the NewLeft is again confronted with the question of the meaning of Marxism. As inthe early 1920's, this is not merely a scholastic question but implies a wholeset of commitments ranging from political strategy and tactics all the waydown to the mode of production and reproduction of everyday life. The mainattacks against the Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness and HegelianMarxism in general have, consequently, come from positivist sources whosestress of "scientificity" in Marxism usually hides an apology for dogmatic

89. Vaianni, op. cit., p. 172.90. For an excellent analysis of the meaning of Chinese socialism, see MichaelKosok's review of E.L. Wheelwright and Bruce MacFarlane, The Chinese Roadto Socialism, in Telos no. 9, Fall, pp. 127-145.

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reiterations of obsolete political positions ranging from the defense of theLeninist concept of the party in What is to be Done? all the way to theAlthusserian defense of Soviet politics. Thus, it is worthwhile to brieflyexamine Colletti's criticism of Lukacs for, unlike most garden-variety adherentsto this new version of Second International ideology, Colletti has carefullystudied Hegel and deals with Lukacs on his own grounds.

As with all "scientific" Marxists, Colletti also approaches Marxism from abourgeois frame of reference which uncritically assumes, i.e., without anyjustification'— and therefore dogmatically — the validity of the principle ofnon-contradiction91 and the correspondence theory of truth: the two mainpillars of positivist thought. The whole analysis, therefore, readily locatesLukacs in the Romantic tradition which saw in science and technology thesources of all the evils of modern society.92 Since the worst Romanticism ispreferable to the best positivism, however, the attack on Lukacs fails preciselyto the extent that it is based on these dogmatic positivist assumptions. Thus,it does not help to connect Lukacs with Bergson (whose philosophy is seen asthe high point of the modern "idealist reaction against science"93), withWindelband's and Rickert's condemnation of naturalistic knowledge,94 or withSimmel's Philosophy of Money. If anything, these associations shouldstimulate, as Perlini has suggested,95 a re-examination of the relationshipbetween Marxism and Romanticism in order to ascertain what is salvageable inthe Romantic Tradition. At any rate, these arguments by analogy which seekto ascribe guilt by association carry weight only with "believers" who do notneed to be convinced anyway. When all is said and done, Colletti ends up bydefending all that is useless in positivism while discarding whatever is relevantin Marxism: the dialectic, the Hegelian critique of the understanding, thecritique of bourgeois science, and the critique of vulgar materialism. But all ofthis is precisely what makes History and Class Consciousness, notwithstandingall of its pitfalls, the kind of explosive text that it is. Colletti is correct whenhe claims that the book connects for the first time two hitherto separate linesof thought: "on the one hand, the critique of [vulgar] materialism, and on theother the analysis of reification or of estrangement and fetishism as developedby Marx in Capital in relation to the socio-historical conditions of moderncapitalist production of commodities."96 But from this it does not followthat "the scientific concept, and the reification allegedly connected with it, is

91. Colletti, op. cit., p. 350.92. Similar critiques of Lukacs can be found in Badeschi, op. cit., in MarzioVocatello, Lukacs (Florence, 1968), and in Pietro Rossi, Storia e Storicismonella Filosofia Contemporan-ea (Milan, 1960). It seems as if, having had toconfront Crocean and Gentilean idealism for so long, these people havebecome allergic to any mode of thought even remotely similar to Hegelianidealism. But in doing so, they have also become allergic to Marxism.93. Colletti, op. cit, p. 317.94. Ibid., pp. 325-326.95. Tito Perlini, Utopia e Prospettiva in Gyb'rgy Lukacs (Bari, 1968).96. Colletti, op. cit., p. 334.

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the cause and source of capitalist reification,"97 nor that "what is wrong isnot the capitalist use of the machine, but the very use of the machine."98

Both scientific concepts and the capitalist use of the machine aremanifestations of capitalist reification. Yet, it would be mechanical and naiveto assume that what is wrong with capitalist technology and capitalist sciencecan be entirely located in the "capitalist" attribute. The sharp separation ofbase and superstructure has been abandoned even by the most mechanicalStalinists. In a capitalist society, both science and technology come to reflect,in their very structure, capitalist relations.99 Thus, in a new society, theywould also have to undergo major qualitative modifications - at least asradical as were made by Newtonian over Aristotelean science.

It is amazing to find positivist Marxists defending obsolete theoreticalpositions that most positivists have long ago given up. Few positivists todayseriously hold the correspondence theory of truth, and logicians who want toretain the principle of non-contradiction are not only hounded by Godel'stheorem, but go to great pains to point out the purely formal, i.e.,contentless, character of their logic. Only by ignoring the implications of thesestone-age philosophical positions is it possible to consider "materialism" as anindependent givenness of a fully constituted world that consciousness,understood presumably as the content which some mysterious mirror locatedsomewhere between our ears., passively reflects. If this is Marxism, then it canbe very well done without. The only kind of revolution that this kind of 18thcentury theoretical junk will allow us to make is against Homer'smythology — and it is not all that obvious that the nuts-and-bolts inferno ofthe positivists is in any way preferable to the Homeric world.

What makes Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness so attractive isprecisely his critique of science as another expression of bourgeois reification,his transforming into processes of all fixed structures, and his attempt toreinstate the subject as the historical agent — even if he eventually fails indoing all this. What is needed is a reactiviation of the dialectic by supplying itwith what Lukacs did not have: a materialist foundation which will allow adialectic between subject and group, a phenomenolgy of concept formation,and possibly a functional analysis of social structures. The Freudian Marxismsthat developed during the half-century after the publication of History andClass Consciousness are precisely a reaction to Lukacs' inability to penetrateto the real world of real men. But whereas Freudian Marxisms attempt toremedy the shortcomings of Hegelian Marxism by simply attaching to it atheory of instincts to an otherwise unchanged idealist dialectic, thus

97. Ibid., p. 341.98. Ibid., p. 343.99. As Andre Gorz has shown, in the past couple of decades the capitalistdivision of labor has been so organized as to reproduce capitalist relations: thesuperstructure has penetrated the base. Cf. Andre Gorz, "Technique,Techniciens et Lutte de Classe" in I.es Temps Modernes, August-September1971, no. 301-302. A translation of this article is forthcoming in Telos no.12, Summer 1972.

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compounding the problems, what needs to be done is to reconstitute theentire dialectic on a materialist foundation which begins and ends withsubjects in flesh and blood. This is why Lukacs remains the Grand CentralStation of present-day Marxism.

The political issue behind the debate rotates around the problem ofcontinuity and discontinuity with the tradition understood as bourgeoisscience, ideology, philosophy, Stalinist organization, elitism, and bureaucraticRealpolitik. "Scientific" Marxism defends this continuity and reasserts, underdifferent guises, all of the tenets that it rhetorically discards: the Leninisttheory of the party, acceptance of bourgeois science as neutral, acceptance ofpresent technological rationality as fundamentally sound ("after the capitalistmanager has been replaced by the commissar), etc. What is needed, however, isa Marxism which will provide the theoretical tools to facilitate the creation ofalternative institutions, grass-root organizations free of centralizedmanipulation, a new science and a new culture fit for human beings. Thisimplies a discontinuity - or a dialectical A ufhebung with the past, bothbourgeois and Stalinist. It implies the articulation of a subjective andinter-subjective dialectic which will allow the constant re-elaboration of allinstitutions and all theory in the process of developing new modes of socialorganization and of political struggle. In this process only the dialectic remainsa useful weapon, not as a pure method, but as inextricably connected with allthe historical content which has made us what we are. So "dialecticized", thedialectic remains the only Marxist heritage worth retaining.