(The following article is from the June 15 issue of The Red Mole, a revolutionary-socialist fortnightly published in London.]
The death of Georg Lukacs* breaks one more link with the Europe that existed at the time of the Russian Revolution. Like Amadeo Bordiga, who also died recently, Lukas was a living representative of the disputes which, in its revolutionary period, took place in the Third International.
However, unlike Bordiga, we cannot simply say of Lukacs that despite wrong theories, he nevertheless re mained absolutely faithful to the proletarian revolution. We are regretfully forced to conclude that, no matter what his subjective intentions may have been, Lukacs became, by 1935 at any rate, an opponent of the working-class revolutionary movement. He became a dazzling theoretical appendage of Stalinism.
But in exactly the same way that Lenin always maintained that much was to be learned from Plekhanov, despite his counterrevolutionary political positions, so we must critically examine Lukacs's work to see if anything is to be taken from it.
Marxism did not spring fully formed out of nowhere. Neither did Marx de velop his ideas in a vacuum. On the contrary, the formation of Marx's ideas would have been inconceivable without the background of the economics of Ricardo, the philosophy of Hegel, the ideas of Owen and the Utopian socialists, etc. Nevertheless, Marx did not just take these ideas and fit them together in some sort of easy synthesis. On the contrary, it was only by restructuring these theories totally, adding new discoveries of his own and refuting elements in previous theories, that Marx was able to produce a logically internally consistent and coherent theory, which broke radically with all previous socialist theories.
At various times, other Marxists have engaged in the same sort of activity. Lenin, for example, recast entirely, but utilized many of the ideas of, bourgeois theories of imperialism such as those of Hobson and Hilferding.
However, no one has ever tried to incorporate into Marxism so many bourgeois insights as Lukacs. In fact, in one sense we can see his entire life's work as an attempt to combine Marxism and some of the ideologies and accomplishments of the bourgeoisie. It is this aspect of Lukacs which of course made him, or at least some of his writings, the idol of those, like Lucien Goldmann, who wish to strip Marxism of its proletarian revolutionary content and turn it into a shallow theory of Humanism. However, Lukacs cannot be entirely blamed for the sins of his "followers."
If at times Lukacs succeeds in re structuring Marxism so as to make it acceptable to the petty bourgeoisieand this is particularly the case in books such as The Historical Novel, and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism - nevertheless, in other areas and at other times, Lukacs succeeds in enriching Marxism by his restructuring of bourgeois insights.
The bourgeois theories with which Lukacs was battling when he wrote the famous collection of essays that became History and Class Consciousness were those of Hegel and Sorel. From Hegel, Lukacs took the concept of "totality," which he counterposed to the economic determinism of Kautsky, Bernstein, Adler, and the other theorists of Social Democracy.
In doing this, it would appear that Lukacs was only following in the footsteps of Plekhanov who, in his essay "On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Death of Hegel," had himself counterposed the concept of totality to that of economic determinism. However, the resemblance to Plekhanov - or even to the Lenin of the early writings on economics, which also deal with the question of the relation of the economic and the totality - is only superficial.
When Plekhanov and Lenin, in their early works, used the concept of totality, they were emphasizing that in Marxism the political, the economic, the social, etc., are merely differing types of abstraction and are not separate levels of analysis. For Lukacs, however, "totality" refers not to the total of all aspects of "reality," but to a particular way of structuring that reality so that it can never constitute anything but a totality.
This method of logical structuring is what Lukacs defined as Marxism. This is made clear in perhaps his most famous single passage, his definition of Marxism in History and Class Consciousness. He wrote:
"It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts, is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science."
The analysis that led Lukacs to this conclusion represents perhaps the significant question asked in most Marxism, outside the writings of Lenin and Trotsky. What Lukacs in effect did was to ask: How does the logical structure of a proletarian conception of reality differ from that of the bourgeoisie?
We may well not agree with the answer that Lukacs gave, but then in Marxism, as in any other science, it is frequently not those who give the right answer who are the most impor tant, but rather those who think of the right questions. Lukacs, by showing that such a question existed, settled at least two points that had previously bedeviled Marxism.
On the one hand, he showed that the differences with Adler, Kautsky, etc., were questions of method and not of "fact" or interpretation, and in so doing he raised the whole polemic against reformism to a qualitatively more profound level. On the other hand, Lukacs solved the problem of the relation of Marxist and bourgeois theory.
Before History and Class Consciousness there had been a tendency to fall into one of two traps. Either the difference between Marxism and academic theories was held to be in the conclusions they reached, which reduced the difference between the two to a pure question of "fact," with Marxism bound to lose, as the bourgeois concept of fact was accepted in the initial premises, or there was a tendency to assimilate Marxism to bourgeois theory in those areas which Marx himself had never dealt with.
This latter tendency is particularly marked in the case of Hilferding. Because bourgeois research was making remarkable strides in many subjects, it was believed by the Social Democrats that these results could simply be incorporated, as they stood, into Marxism. However, because these bourgeois theories logically followed from theories which dealt with areas Marx had touched on, a contradiction grew up between the parts of bourgeois theory accepted by the Social Democrats and those parts which conflicted with Marxism.
Faced with this problem, the Social Democrats either retreated into dogmatism, abandoned themselves to July 12,1971
eclecticism, or renounced Marxism altogether.
Lukacs solved the problem once and for all by showing that the incompatibility of Marxism and bourgeois theory lay not at the level of data but at the level of logical structure. Even if his conception of the nature of the difference involved is incorrect, the way Lukacs posed the question was precisely correct and establishes his claim to be noted among major Marxist theorists.
After History and Class Consciousness-which was at the time condemned by the Comintern and which Lukacs himself later renounced — Lukacs never wrote anything of equal intellectual power. His book on Lenin is thought-provoking, and its concept of "The Actuality of the Revolution" is a key one; but, unfortunately, the book is marred by being based on a series of statements that are straightforward lies-such as, for example, the statement that Lenin was initially alone in opposing the first world war from a revolutionary-defeatist position.
Unfortunately, from the late 1920s onward, Lukacs's writings also be came tinged with another theme, which was to lead to intellectual decay and compromise with Stalin and the bourgeoisie. This was the theory of phe nomenal, as opposed to structural, realism in art, which is made most explicit in The Historical Novel. This theory was used in an attempt to show how the products of high bourgeois art and the art of Stalinist Russia, with its "socialist realism," its threnodies to departed tractors, the struggle for production on a collective farm, etc., could be combined.
Through the development of these types of ideas, Lukacs must be held responsible for giving ideological backing to much of the staleness and barrenness of Marxist artistic criticism, despite the fact that his own particular studies are interesting and, in an episodic way, brilliant.
From 1924 onward, Lukacs came to support the Stalin faction inside the Russian Communist party. He did this on the worst possible basis, by accepting the totally ridiculous theory that it was possible to exceed the standard of living provided by the entire capitalist economies simply on the basis of the economic resources of the Soviet Union. This was the notorious theory of "socialism in one country."
From then on, with remorseless logic, Lukacs's theories and ideas degenerated.
Lukacs's failures at the theoretical level were compounded by what can only be described as political cowardice. For example, he notes of an inner party struggle that although he firmly believed he was correct, "When I heard from a reliable source that Bela Kun was planning to expel me from the Party as a 'Liquidator', I gave up the struggle, as I was well aware of Kun's prestige in the International, and I published a 'Self-Criticism'."
This was to be the first of many such "confessions" which at various times led Lukacs to denounce any number of his works. Lukacs was, of course, far too intelligent to accept all the grosser aspects of Stalinism, but all he was prepared to do about it was to keep up an irregular sniping fire at some of its aspects in the aesthetic field.
To those who eulogize Lukacs and his ilk, we can unhesitatingly say that the struggle of even the most obscure Left Oppositionist against Stalinism contributed infinitely more to the cause of the proletarian revolution than did the entire output of Lukacs in this period.
It is easy to become a communist, as Lukacs did, at a time when the enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution was sweeping the world. What is infinitely more difficult is to remain a communist in a period of twenty years of defeat, and by that criterion, Lukacs, for all his brilliance, failed miserably.
This failure extended even to his short reentry into polities in 1956. Here he sided not with the workers' councils and the fighting proletariat of Budapest, but with the reformist Stalinist government of Nagy, which would have been swept away along with the Russian tanks, if only the Hungarian workers had been victorious.
Marx once remarked that some people believe that an intellectual can soar above all classes. In so doing, he noted, they only reveal that they are the petty bourgeoisie, tossed helplessly back and forth between the working class and the bourgeoisie. This statement could be applied not only to Lukacs himself but also to those who will undoubtedly use the occasion of his death to try to glorify his undoubted intellectual achievements while ignoring his political activities. We should ignore neither and, instead, try to do what Lukacs himself was an advocate of-namely, try to re structure his own (bourgeois) ideas so as to enrich Marxism.
The only difference is that revolutionaries must understand that this cannot be done as Lukacs tried to do it-in opposition to the interests of the working class and in abstraction from revolutionary practice.
Notes
* June 5 in Budapest, Hungary, at the age of eighty-six.