Notes on History and Class Consciousness

I found this book, History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, London, Merlin Press 1971-1990, very enlightening, confirming my interest in Marx and consolidating the idea to inquire the possibility of working with dialectical materialism as a methodology for my PhD. Thus I have transcribed copious notes from this book, interspersed with a few notes to myself where further to look, in terms of the continuity of this type of thought, as well as its critique. Publishing those notes in this group may or may not be of value to anyone else, I do it nevertheless. As publishing it as a research journal entries removes all the italics and other formatting, I also attach it as open office document.

More Lukacs Online
On Existentialism
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1949/existentialism.htm
Lukacs as literary critic
http://othervoices.org/blevee/lukacs.php

In the Preface to the Second Edition (1967) Lukacs undergoes self-critique. As it is necessary to have read the book beforehand, I will return to those notes later.

In the original Preface, the second preface of the book Lukacs points out that the main underlying "premise here is the belief that in Marx's theory and method the true method by which to understand society and history has finally been discovered. This method is historical through and through. It is self-evident, therefore, that it must be constantly applied to itself". p xliii

What is Orthodox Marxism? pp. 1-26

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." Marx: Theses on Feuerbach

This text is in large parts dedicated to methodology. Lukacs claims that even if all of Marx's individual theses had been disproven by scientific research, an orthodox Marxist would not have to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment, because Marxism is not the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx' investigation or the belief in this or that thesis, the orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. (p. 1 abbreviated transcription)

"dialectical materialism is the road to truth" p.1

Materialist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic. p.2

"theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses" Lukacs quoting Mar, p.1 The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in Early Writings, edited by T.B. Bottomore, London 1963, p.52

Refers to Engels' Anti-Dühring, saying that according to Engels "in dialectics the "definite contours of concepts (and the objects they represent) are dissolved. Dialectics, he argues, is a continuous process of transition from one definition into the other. In consequence, a one-sided and rigid causality must be replaced by interaction." p. 3

Lukacs argues that Engels failed to mention that this dialectical relationship between subject and object needs to be placed in the historical process. The difference between the dialectical method and 'metaphysics' is that in the latter "the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical," p.3

For dialectical materialism, the central problem is to change reality. "If this central function of the theory is disregarded, the virtues of forming 'fluid' concepts become alltogether problematic: a purely scientific matter." pp.3-4

Lukacs then goes on to argue, in a long and rather complicately structured sentence, which I will try to disentangle, that an undialectical scientific method reinforces the view that reality, with its 'obedience to laws' is impenetrable, fatalistic and immutable. This undialectical science Lukacs calls 'contemplative materialism' p.4

Machism, Lukacs says, can equally give birth to a bourgeois voluntarism. According to Lukacs, fatalism and voluntarism are not mutally contradictory, they are necessarily complementary opposites, intellectual reflexes clearly expressing the antagonisms of capitalist society. p.4

I guess Lukacs refers to Ernst Mach, an Austrian scientist who identified the speed of sound, and who also wrote a book on scientific methodology which is praised a lot by Paul Feyerabend.
(Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung. Ernst Mach, Edition: 2
Published by J. A. Barth, 1905 it seems there exists no English translation, which is odd, because this is considered a classic, as it gave name to the "trial and error method", favourite slogan of all tinkerers)

Quoting again Marx, Lukacs emphasises that "the categories are therefore but forms of being, conditions of existence ..." p.4 Lukacs quoting Marx from A Contribution to the critique of Political Economy, translated by N.I.Stone, London 1904. In footnote 6 Lukacs explains that it had been Engels' mistake to apply this also to nature. Lukacs insists that "the crucial determinants of dialectis - the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, [...] - are absent from our knowledge of nature." (Footnotes 6) This, however, is a crucial question and I understand Lukacs later changed his mind.

Lukacs then attacks Revisionist literature, namely a certain Bernstein, on the question of scientific facts.

It goes without saying that all knowledge starts from the facts. The only question is: which of the data of life are relevant to knowledge and in the context of which method?
The blinkered empiricist will of course deny that facts can only become facts within the framework of a system - which will vary with the knowledge desired. He believes that every piece of data from eocnomic life, every statistic, every raw event already constitutes and important fact. In so doing, he forgets that however simple an enumeration of 'facts' may be, however lacking in commentary, it already implies an 'interpretation'. Already at this stage the facts have been comprehended by a theory, a method; they have been wrenched from their living context and fitted into a theory. p.5

This lengthy quote appears to be the foundation of what four decades later would become Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigm changes and Paul Feyerabend's critique of the scientific method. I am discovering Lukacs as foundational for an anti-positivist theory and philosophy of science. This is not so surprising, given that Lukacs wrote this in Vienna in 1922, at the height of scientific positivism as expressed by the Vienna Circle. Lukacs must certainly have been aware of this discourse. Anticipating critique, he writes:

More sophisticated opportunists would readily grant this despite their profound and instinctive dislike of all theory. They seek refuge in the methods of natural science, in the way in which science distills 'pure facts' and places them in the relevant contexts by means of observation, abstraction and experiment. They then oppose this ideal model of knowledge to the forced constructions of the dialectical method. p.5

Yet he retorts:

If such methods seem plausible at first this is because capitalism tends to produce a social structure that in great measure encourages such views. But for that very reason we need the dialectical method to puncture the social illusion so produced and help us glimpse the reality underlying it. The 'pure' facts of the natural sciences arise when a phenomenon of the real world is placed (in thought or in reality) in an environment where its laws can be inspected without outside interference. This process is reinforced by reducing phenomena to their purely quantitative essence, to their expression in numbers and numerical relations. Opportunists always fail to recognise that it is in the nature of capitalism to process phenomena in this way. pp.5-6

But this tendency in capitalism goes even further. The fetishistic character of economic forms, the reification of all human relations, the constant expansion and extension of the division of labour which subjects the process of production to an abstract, rational analysis, without regard to the human potentialities and abilities of the immedeate producers, all these things transform the phenomena of society and with them the way in which they are perceived. In this way arise the 'isolated' facts, 'isolated' complexes of facts, separate, specialist disciplines (economics, law, etc.) whose very appearance seems to have done much to pave the way for such scientific methods. It thus appears extraordinarily 'scientific' to think out the tendencies implicit in the facts themselves and to promote this activity to the status of science. p.6

The historical character of the 'facts' which science seems to have grasped with such 'purity' makes itself felt in an even more devastating manner. As the products of historical evolution they are involved in continuous change. But in addition they are also precisely in their objective structure the products of a definite historic epoch, namely capitalism. Thus, when 'science' maintains that the manner in which data immedeately present themselves is an adeqaute foundation of scientific conceptualisation and that the actual form of these data is the starting point for the formation of scientific concepts, it thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist science. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of 'science'. p.7

To counter this tendency, Lukacs demands that the facts must be "subjected to a historical and dialectical examination". p.7

Quoting Marx, Lukacs goes on to say that "the finished pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface in their real existence and consequently in the ideas with which the agents and bearers of these relations seek to understand them, is very different from, and indeed quite the reverse of and antagonistic to their inner, essential but concealed core and the concepts corresponding to it." pp.7-8 Capital III, p.797

Marx's dictum: "The relations of production of every society form a whole" is the methodological point of departure and the key to the historical understanding of social relations. p.9 footnote (13) The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow.n.d. p.123

Here, Lukacs introduces the concept central to his interpretation of Marx, and also so central to the critique of Marxism by post-modernists: the dialectical conception of totality. p. 10
Lukacs admits that the dialectical conception of totality might appear to construct reality very 'unscientifically'. This, however, is a result of capitalist science failing to understand the 'internal antagonism between the forces and relations of production' p.10 which characterises capitalist society.

The methodology of the natural sciences which forms the methodological ideal of every fetishistic science and every kind of Revisionism rejects the idea of contradiction and antagonism in its subject matter. If, despite this, contradictions do spring up between particular theories, this only proves that our knowledge is as yet imperfect. p.10 According to Lukacs, capitalist science explains this away and defers solutions to a later stage where they must be "transformed and subsumed under even wider theories in which the contradictions finally disappear." p.10

Lukacs, to the contrary, maintains that "these contradicitions are not a sign of the imperfect understanding of society; [...] they belong to the nature of reality itself and to the nature of capitalism.p.10 When the totality is known they will not be transcended and cease to be contradictions. Quite the reverse, they will be seen to be necessary contradictions arising out of the antagonisms of this system of productions. When theory (as the knowledge of the whole) opens up the way to resolving these contradictions it does so by revealing the real tendencies of social evolution. For these are destined to effect a real resolution of the contradictions that have emerged in the course of history. p.10

What Lukacs means by that is, to put it simply: revolution, the overturning of the existing relationships of production. The problem does not get solved theoretically but in theory and practice at the same time. Therefore, the 'conflict between the dialectical method and that of criticism [...] is a social problem'. p.10

When the ideal of of scientific knowledge is applied to nature it simply furthers the progress of science. But when it is applied to society it turns out to be an ideological weapon of the bourgeois. p.10

As necessary as this statement is as a critique of social sciences as ideologic, it fails to address the question inhowfar the natural sciences are no less ideological. Lukacs asserts that for the bourgeoise it is 'a matter of life and death to understand its own system of production in terms of eternally valid categories: it must think of capitalism as being predestined to eternal survival by the eternal laws of nature and reason.' p.10-11

As later Marx influenced scholars of science have shown, the construction of nature as an object of science, lifeless and purely passive, is itself a social construct that arose under historically specific circumstances. FIXME sources.

Lukacs returns to the contradictions inherent to capitalism. Quoting again Marx he writes, it is evident that "the bourgeois mode of production implies a limitation to the free development of the forces of production". p.11 quote from Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, Stuttgart 1905, II, II, pp 305-9

Thus, with the rejection or blurring of the dialectical method history becomes unknowable. p.12

For it is perfectly possible for someone to describe the essentials of an historical event and yet be in the dark about the real nature of that event and of its function in the historic totality, i.e. without understanding it as a unified historical process. p.12

Lukacs insists that "the category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity" p.12.

Marx interpreted society as an "organic body" where "a mutual interaction takes place between these various elements" (production, distribution, consumption) p.13 from Marx A Contribution to Political Economy, pp 191-2

Lukacs then qualifies the nature of those interactions, using the metaphor of the 'interaction' of billiard balls: The interaction we have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwise unchanging objects. p.13

As the 'objective forms of all social phenomena change constantly in the course of their ceaseless dialectical interactions with each other' 'only the dialectical conception of totality can enable us to understand reality as a social process'. p.13

The cause of the problem is 'the fetishistic forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of production' p.13 ... Lukacs here introduces the 'fetishistic forms' without explaining the reason for this fetishism. He refers to commodity fetishism without explaing where it comes from, the concealment of labour in the shape of the commodity because of the properties of the circulation of money, what Marx describes in Capital, Volume I as C-M-C (commodity-money-commodity) which, once capital has been accumulated, becomes M-C-M. These 'objective forms' which an undialectic method identifies are 'objects of knowledge, but the object which is known through them is not the capitalist system of production itself , but the ideology of its ruling class. p.14

Only when this veil is torn aside does historical knowledge become possible. For the function of these unmediated concepts that have been derived from the fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make the phenomena of capitalist society appear as suprahistorical essences. p.14

The fetishistic illusions enveloping all phenomena in capitalist society succeed in concealing reality, but more is concealed than the historical, i.e. transitory, ephemeral nature of the phenomena. This concealment is made possible by the fact that in capitalist society man's environment, and especially the categories of economics, appear to him immedeately and necessarily in forms of objectivity which conceal the fact that they are the categories of the relations of men with each other. p.14

Lukacs then explains how Marx arrived at this very fundamental insight (his critique of his contemporaries in The German Ideology who distilled, according to Lukacs, the reactionary content in Hegel ging back to Kant, p.17)

Marx urged us to understand the 'sensuous world', the object reality, as human sensuous activity.
p.19 This, Lukacs explains, was one of the achievements of capitalism as it destroyed previous social orders:

In its [captalism's] universe there is a formal equality for all men; the economic relations that directly determine the metabolic exchange between men and nature progressively disappear. Man becomes, in the true sense of the word, a social being. Society becomes the reality for men. p.19

Thus, the recognition that society is reality becomes possible only under capitalism, in bourgeois society. But the class which carried out this revolution did so without consciousness of its function; the social forces it unleashed, the very forces that carried it to supremacy seemed to be opposed to it like a second nature, but a more soulless, impenetrable nature than feudalism ever was. p.19 my emphasis

The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg pp.27-45

The two fundamental studies which inaugurate the theoretical rebirth of Mraxism, are, according to Lukacs, Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital and Lenin's State and Revolution, and 'both use the approach adopted by the young Marx'. p. 34-5

To ensure that the problems under consideration will arise before us dialectically, they provide what is substantially a literary-historical account of their genesis. They analyse the changes and reversals in the views leading up to the problem as it presents itself to them. They focus upon every stage of intellectual clarification or confusion and place it in the historical context conditioning it and resulting from it. This enables them to evoke with unparalleled vividness the historical process of which their own approach and their own solutions are the culmination.p. 35

Bourgeois science, Lukacs states, since it is based on a distinction between history and theory, "leads to the disappearance of the problem of totality in the interests of greater specialisation. As a result, the history of a problem becomes mere theoretical and literary ballast. It is of interest only to the experts who inflate it to the point where it obscures the real problems and fosters mindless specialisation." p.15 This appears to me as an adequate description of much of contemporary media theory and media history writing.

Great Marx quote: The proletariat carries out the sentence which private property passes upon itself by its creation of a proletariat. The Holy Family, Chapter 4

Marx's writing is frequently rising to such polemic pointedness which encapsulates the essence of dialectic thinking in the language itself.

Great passage of Lukacs the writer, the messianic utopianism as which he will later denounce himself:

Knowledge becomes action, theory becomes battle slogan, the masses act in accordance with the slogans and join the ranks of the organised vanguard more consciously, more steadfastly and in greater numbers. The correct slogans give rise organically to the premises and possibilities of even the technical organisation of the fighting proletariat. p.42

Above passage is also very Leninist as it does not trust the proletariat to find its own voice. The inspired leadership of the organised vanguard, i.e. bourgeois intellectuals like himself or Lenin write the theory which imbues the masses with revolutionary thought. This is in contrast to how Marx and Engels thought. cf Eleanor Marx, a biography, by Yvonne Knapp

Class Consciousness

The essence of scientific Marxism, consists, then, in the realisation that the real motor forces of history are independent of man's (psychological) consciousness of them. p. 47

A difficult postulate as it appears to say that man is not master of her fate at all.

Reasons about the origins of social institutions p.6 Says bourgeois sociology is incapable of understanding them; impossible to advance beyond the mere individuality of epochs. p.48

again about society as a concrete totality. p.50

These relations are not those between one individual and another, but between worker and capitalist, tenant and landlord. etc. Eliminate these relations and you will abolish the whole of society; your Prometheus will then be nothing more than a spectre without arms or legs ... p. 50 quoting Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p.112

Class consciousnness is different from "the empirically given and from the psychologically secribable and explicable ideas which men form about their situation in life". p 51

The bourgeois was quite unable to perfect its fundamental science, its own science of classes: the reef on which it foundered was its failure to discover even a theoretical solution to the problem of crises. p.53-4

Because, Lukacs explains further, to 'solve' this problem would have meant that the bourgeois would have to accept that capitalism needed to be overturned and the classless society introduced. My interpretation.

Speaking about pre-capitalist societies, Lukacs claims that the true sociological meaning of these struggles lay in economic interests which would be revealed doubtlessly to be the "decisive factor in any explanation". 58 I find this quite not so doubtless, because pre-capitalist societies were not ruled by economic interests to any extent as capitalism which is exactly what distinguishes it. Lukacs moves a bit back and forward on this question, this remains ambivalent and not convincing. This means that economic interest would always have been the decisive factor, and that this would may be only hidden by other factors such as feudal bonds and religion.

Describes the petty bourgeoisie as a "transitional class in which the interest of the two other classes become simultaneously blunted" p.59 This somehow goes together with Hobsbawm's explanation that fascism, in its early days, ahd its most fervent supporters in the petty bourgeoisie and not the working class. FIXME check reference

The contradictions created by the bourgeoisie: it endowed the individual with an unprecedented importance, but at the same time that same individuality was annihilated by the eocnomic conditions to which it was subjected, by the reification created by commodity production. p.62

The tragedy of the bourgeoisie is reflected historically in the fact that even before it had defeated its predecessor, feudalism, its new enemy, the proletariat, had appeared on the scene. Politically it became evident when, at the moment of victory, the 'freedom' in whose name the bourgeoisie had joined battle with feudalism, was transformed into a new repressiveness. p 61

NOTE: valuable quote for the REAL REVOLUTIONs 45 RPM version two, club mix.

Another famous contradiction: stock companies characterised by Marx as the "negation of the capitalist mode of production itself". p.63 Capital III p.438

"the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself" p.64 Capital III p.245

In this way the objective limits of capitalist production become the limits of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. [...] The fact that it must necessarily remain in ignorance of the objective economic limitations of its own system expresses itself as an internal dialectical contradiction in its class consciousness. p.64

Claims that the "dialectical contradiction in the 'false' cosnciousness of the bourgeoisie became more and more accute over time". In its struggle to "achieve control of society' the borgeoisie had to develop a "coherent theory of economics, politics and society" "and also to make conscious and sustain its faith in its own mission to control and organise society. The tragic dialectics of the bourgeoisie can be seen in the fact that it is not only desirable but essential for it to clarify its own class interests on every particular isse, while at the same time such a clear awareness becomes fatal when it is extended to the question of the totality. The chief reason for this is that the rule of the bourgeoisie can only be the rule of a minority. Its hegemony is exercised not merely by a minority but in the interest of that minority. (Consider here the theory of the state that stands 'above' class antagonisms, or the notion of an 'impartial' system of justice). pp.65-6

For the proletariat the truth is a weapon that brings victory. p.68

Only the consciousness of the proletariat can point to the way that leads out of the impasse of capitalism. p.76

The reified consciousness must also remain hopelessly trapped in the two extremes of crude empiricism and abstract utopianism, p.77

We must now go on to see utopianism as characteristic of the internal divisions within class consciousness.

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat
p.83 - 222

I The Phenomenon of Reification

problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also as a subjective stance corresponding to it. p.84

how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences ale to influence the total outer and inner life of society? p.84

We are concerned above all wth the principle at work here: the principle of rationalisation based on what is and can be calculated. p.88

Without explicitely naming it, refers to Taylorization of the work process: (1) in the first place the mathematical analysis of the work processes denotes a break with the organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product. p.88

Explains that in order to be able to predict all the resulots to be achieved, every complex has to be broken down into its elements, and the laws governing the production of that specific part need to be studied
"rationalisation is unthinkable without specialisation". p.88

(2) In the second phase, this fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject. p.89

Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. p.89

Here too, the personality can do no more than look helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system. On the other hand, the mechanical disintegration of the process of production into its ccomponents also destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still 'organic'. In this respect too, mechnaisation makes them isolated abstract atoms whose work no longer brings them together directly and organically. p.90

which may be true but does not explain working class solidarity, comraderie, socialisation; this may be an extreme point made by a bourgeois.

The internal organisation of a factory could not possibly have such and effect - even within the factory itself - were it not for the fact that it contained in concentrated form the whole structure of capitalist society. p.90 my emphasis

The atomisation of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the 'natural laws' of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that - for the first time in history - the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process ... p.92

NOTE: In this maybe already the roots of the social factory, cf. Tronti FIXME reference

"Private property alienates not only the individuality of men, but also of things. The ground and the earth have nothing to do with ground-rent, machines have nothing to do with profit. or the landowner, ground and earth mean nothing but ground-rent; he lets his land to tenants and receives the rent - a quality which the ground can lose without losing any of its inherent qualities fertility." p.92 quoting Marx from Der heilige Max, Dokumente des Sozialismus III Lukacs points out that close to that passage there are also fine passages about alienation in language.

Thus, we get a fetish form of capital and the conception of fetish capital. in M-M' we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree ... p.94

Mentions Simmel's the Philosophy of Money as an interesting and perceptive work in matters of detail, but misses historicity p.95

a description of this "enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur Le Capital and madame La Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time as mere things." p. 95 Marx, Capital III, p.805

Thus, capitalism has created a form for the state and a system of law corresponding to its needs and harmonising with its own structure. p.95

Lengthy quote from Max Weber, state as "business concern"

What is specific to modern capitalism as distinct from the age old forms of capitalist aquisition is that the strictly rational organisation of work on the basis of rational technology did not come into being anywhere within such irrationally constituted political systems nor could it have done so. max Weber, gesammelte politische Schriften, Munich 1921, pp 140-4

NOTE: reminds me of Castoriadis critique of 'rational mastery' and the irrationality of it.

The need for exact calculation, Lukacs explains, required systematisation and abandonement of empiricism, tradion and material dependence. "However, this same need requires that the legal system should confront the individual events of social existence as something permanently established and exactly defined, i.e. as a rigid system. p.97

The more closely we scrutinise this situation and the better we are able to close our minds to the bourgeois legends of the 'creaticity' of the exponents of the capitalist age, the more obvious it becomes that we are witnessing in all behaviour of this sort the structural analogue to the behaviour of the worker vis-a-visthe machine he serves and observes, and whose functions he controls while he contemplates it. The 'creative' element can be seen to depend at best on wether these 'laws' are applied in a - relatively - independent way or ina wholly subservient one. p.88

NOTE: It is easy to see how this universalised notion of rationalisation possibly has influenced Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, in particular how this extends to the critique of the culture industry.

It is not only a question of the completely mechanical, 'mindless' work or the lower echelons of the buerocracy which bears such an extraodrinarily close resemblance to operating a machine and which indeed often surpasses it in sterility and uniformity. It is also a question, on the one hand, on the way in which objectively all issues are subjected to an increasingly formal and standardised treatment and in whihc there is an ever increasing remoteness from the qualitative and material essence of the 'things' to which buerocratic activity pertains. [...] Marx's comment on factory work that "the individual, himself divided, is transformed into the automatic mechanism of a partial labour" and is thus "crippled to the point of abnormality" is relevant here too. And it becomes all the mroe clear, the more elevated, advanced and 'intellectual' ist the attainment exacted by the division of labour. p.99

NOTE: This is, in core form, a precursor to the critique of The One-dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse.

This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their 'owner' and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist's 'lack of convictions', the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification. p. 100 (reference to an article by Fogarasi in Magazine Kommunismus, Jahrgang 2)

Talks then about sex also, quoting Kant. p.100

Lukacs says that because of the disregard of the concrete aspects of the subject matter of the laws, upon which their authority as laws is based, makes itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact. This incoherence becomes particularly egregious in times of crisis p.101

Engels defines the 'natural laws' of capitalism as the laws of chance. p.101

the bonds uniting its various elements and partial systems are a chance affair even at their most normal. So that the pretence that society is regulated by 'eternal iron' laws which branch of into different special laws applying to particular areas is finally revealed for what it is: a pretence. p.101

NOTE: Like a description of a Frankenstein society.

This same principle rules also the eocnomy:

The capitalist process of rationalisation based on private economic calculation requires that every manifestation of life shall exhibit this very interaction between details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance. It presupposes a society so structured. It produces and reproduces this structure insofar it takes possession of society .p.102

this enables the artificially isolated partial functions to be performed in the most rational manner by 'specialists' who are specially adapted mentally and physically for the purpose. This has the effect of making these partial functions autonomous and so they tend to develop through their own momentum and in accordance with their iown special laws independently of the other partial functions of society. As the division of labour becomes more pronounced and more rational, this tendency naturally increases in proportion p.103

NOTE: is this schizophrenic capitalism 50 years befoe anti-oedipus? Or systems theory long before Luhmann? Or a description of an assemblage of software programs? Inhowfar did a society so structured necessarily create the computer?

The more intricate a modern science becomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more resolutely it will turn its back on the ontological problems of its own sphere of influence and eliminate them from the realm where it has achieved some insight. The more highly developed it becomes and the mroe scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will the find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle beyond its grasp. p.104

NOTE: extremely lucid criticism of modern science, the problems of positivism, but also post-structuralism and the general loss of reality.

This is matched in economics with a situation where "the use-value as such lies outside the sphere of of investigation of political economy" p.104 quoting Marx A contribution to the critique of political economy p.21

In moments of crisis the use-value of the 'things' that lead their live beyond the purview economics as misunderstood and neglected things-in-themselves, as use-values, suddenly becomes the decisive factor. p. 105

A synthesis of this fragmented situation is impossible in capitalist society, claims Lukacs. ..."a radical change in outlook is not feasible on the soil of bourgeois society. Philosophy can attempt to assemble the whole of knwoledge encyclopedically (see Wundt). Or it may radically question the value of formal knowledge for a 'living life' (see irrationalist philosophies from Hamann to Bergson). p.110

The formalistic conceptualisation of the special sciences becomes for philosophy an immutably given substratum and this signals the final and despairing renunciation of every attempt to cast light at the reification that lies at the root of this formalism. The reified world appears henceforth quite definitely [...] as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed to us humans. Wether this gives rise to ecstasy, resignation or despair, wether we search for a path leading to 'life' via irrational mystic experiences, this will do absolutely nothing to modify the situation as it is in fact. p.110

II The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought

From systematic doubt and the Cogito ergo sum by Descartes, to Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz there is a direct line of development whose central strand, rich in variations, is the idea that the object of cognition can be known by us for the reason that, and to the extent of which, it has been created by ourselves. p. 112 (footnote 3: reference to Tönnies and Cassirer)

The question why and with what justification human reason should elect to regard just these systems as constitutive of its own essence (as opposed to the 'given', alien, unknowable nature of the content of those systems) never arises. It is assumed to be self-evident. Whether this assumption is expressed (as in the case of Berkeley and Hume) as scepticism, as doubt in the ability of 'our' knowledge to achieve universally valid results, or whether 8as with Spinoza and Leibniz) it becomes an unlimited confidence in the ability of these formal systems to comprehend the 'true' essence of all things, is of secondary importance in this context. p.112

Lukacs tries to "sketch the connection between the fundamental problems of this philosophy and the basis in existence form which these problems spring...p.112

...the whole evolution of philosophy went hand in hand with the development of the exact sciences. These in turn interacted fruitfully with a technology that was becoming increasingly more rationalised, and with developments in production. p.113 (footnote 4: Capital I, p.486)
Lukacs states that rationalism had existed at widely different times and in the most diverse forms. "What is novel about modern rationalism is its increasingly insistent claim that it has discovered the principle which connects up all phenomena which in nature and society are found to confront mankind. Compared with this, every previous type of rationalism is no more than a partial system" p.113

mentions Hindu asceticism and its rationalism, which is delimited by and surrpounded by the irrational world, so that because of this partiality the irrationality creates "no technical problem for the rational system itself." p.114

The situation is quite different when rationalism claims to be the universal method by which to obtain knowledge of the whole of existence. In that event the necessary correlation with the principle of irrationality becomes crucial: it erodes and dissolves the whole system. This is the case with modern (bourgeois) rationalism. p.114

then talks about Kant and the thing-in-itself: from there to Fichte:

What is at issue, he says, is "the absolute projection of an object of the origin of which no account can be given with the result that the space between projection and thing projected is dark and void;" p.119, quoting Fichte, Die Wissenschaftslehre, Lecture XV, Werke IV, p.218 1804

Only with this problematic does it become possible to comprehend the parting of the ways of modern philosophy and with it the chief stages in its evolution. p.118

The unconditional recognition of this problem, the renouncing of attempts to solve it leads directly to the various theories centring on the notion of fiction. It leads to the rejection of every 'metaphysics' (in the sense of ontology) and also to positing as the aim of philosophy the understanding of the phenomena of isolated, highly specialised areas by means of abstract rational special systems, perfectly adapted to them and without making the attempt to achieve a unified mastery of the whole realm of the knowable. (Indeed any such attempt is dismissed as 'unscientific') pp.119-120

NOTE: this is a short and precise description of the problem of positivistic philosophy (he mentions Mach, Poincare, Vaihinger and Avenarius)

And the fact that these sciences are 'exact' is due precisely to this circumstance. Their underlying material base is permitted to dwell inviolate and undisturbed in its irrationality ('non-createdness', 'giveness') so that it becomes possible to operate with unproblematic, rational categories in the resulting methodically purified world. These categories are then applied not to the real material substratum (even that of the particular science) but to an 'intelligible' subject matter. p.120

Philosophy -consciously-refrains from interfering with the work of the special sciences.It even regards this renunciation as a critical advance. p.120

Lukacs identifes this as a tendency of "refusal to understand reality as a whole and as existence...". This exposition, summarises Lukacs as 'the double tendency characteristic of bourgeois thought'. On the one hand, it acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand it loses - likewise progressively - the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualifications for leadership. p121

"Classical philosophy," Lukacs writes, and by that he means German philosophy of the classical period, from Kant to Hegel to Feuerbach, "mercilessly tore to shreds all the metaphysical illusions of the preceding era, but was forced to be as uncritical and as dogmatically metaphysical with regard to some of its own premises as its predecessors had been towards theirs. [...] it is the - dogmatic - assumption that the rational and formalistic mode of cognition is the only way of apprehending reality [...] in contrast to the facts which are simply given and alien to 'us'. p.121

the grandiose conception that thought can only grasp what it has itself created strove to master the world as a whole by seeing it as self-created. However, it the came up against the insuperable obstacle of the given, of the thing-in-itself. If it was not to renounce its understanding of the whole it had to take the road that leads inwards. p.121-2

This 'move' in philosophy, Lukacs pointed out, made it overlook the possibility of finding a solution in the practical. Lukacs proposes, as a way out of that dilemma, 'praxis'. But "praxis can only be be really established as a philosophical principle if, at the same time, a conception of form can be found whose basis and validity no longer rest on that pure rationality and that freedom from every definition of content." p.126

we can [...] see how, with the aid of the principle of praxis, the attempt could be made to resolve the antinomies of contemplation. p.126

Theory and praxis in fact refer to the same objects, for every object exists as an immedeate inseparable complex of form and content. However, the diversity of subjective attitudes orientates praxis towards what is qualitatively unique, towards the content and material substratum of the object concerend. As we have tried to show, theoretical contemplation leads to the neglect of this very factor. 126

... the ideal of knowledge represented by the purely distilled formal conception of the object of knowledge, the mathematical conception and the ideal of necessary natural laws all transform knowledge more and more into the systematic and cosncious contemplation of those purely formal connections, those 'laws' which function in -objective-reality without the intervention of the subject. But the attempt to eliminate every element of content and of the irrational affects not only the object but also, to an increasing extent, the subject. The critical elucidation of contemplation puts more and more energy into its effort to weed out ruthlessly from its own outlook every subjective and irrational element and every anthropomorphic tendency; it strives with ever increasing vigour to dirve a wedge between the subject of knowledge and 'man' and to transform the knower into a pure and purely formal subject. p.128

For, on the one hand, men are constantly smashing, replacing and leaving behind them the 'natural', irrational and actually existing bonds, while, on the other hand, they erect around themselves in the reality they have created and 'made', a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier on with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the social relations which appear in this form). "To them, their own social action", says Marx, "takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them." p.128 (no source for Marx quote given)

After Hegel had clearly recognised the bourgeois character of the 'laws of nature' (Hegel, Werke IX, p.528) Marx pointed out that "Descartes with his definition of animals as mere machines saw with the eyes of the manufacturing period, while in the eyes of the Middle Ages, animals were man's assistants" (Capital I, 390, footnote); pp.130-131

Kant, who set out from the most advanced natural science of the day, namely from Newton's astronomy, tailored his theory of knowledge precisely to this science and to its future potential. For this reason he necessarily assumes that the method was capable of limitless ecxpansion. His 'critique' refers merely to the fact that even the complete knowledge of all phenomena would be no more than a knowledge of phenomena (as opposed to the things-in-themselves). Moreover, even the complete knowledge of the phenomeny could never overcome the structural limits of this knowledge, i.e. in our terms, the antinomies between totality and content. p.132

p. 132 critique of Engels which is probably wrong; describes scientific experiment as 'contemplation at its purest'

The impossibility of comprehending and 'creating' the union of form and content concretely instead of as the basis for a purely formal calculus leads to the insoluble dilemma of freedom and necessity, of voluntarism and fatalism. The 'eternal, iron' regularity of the processes of nature and the purely inward freedom of individual moral practice appear at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason as wholly irreconcilable and at the same time as the unalterable foundations of human existence. p.134

on Rosseau: And with a revearsal of meanings that never becomes apparent, nature becomes the repository of all these inner tendencies opposing the growth of mechanisation, dehumanisation and reification. p.134

ON ART

This is not the place to investigate the ever-increasing importance of aesthetics and the theory of art within the total world-picture of the eighteenth century. As everywhere in this study, we are concerned solely to throw light on the social and historical background which thre up these problems and conferred onto aesthetics and upon consciousness of art a philosophical importance that art was unable to lay claim to in previous ages. This does not mean that art itself experienced an unprecedented golden age. On the contrary, with a very few exceptions the actual artistic production during this period cannot remotely be compared to that of past golden ages. What is crucial here is the theoretical and philosophical importance which the principle of art acquires in this period.
This principle is the creation of a concrete totality that springs from a conception of form oriented towards the concrete content of its material substratum.In this view form is therefore able to demolish the 'contingent' relation of the parts to the whole and to resolve the merely apparent opposition between chance and necessity. p.137

Continues with Schiller who "defines the aesthetic principle as the play instinct (in contrast to the form-instinct and the content-instinct) pp. 138-9...

quoting Schiller: "For it must be said once and for all that man only plays when he is a man in the full meaning of the word, and he is fully human only when he plays." Lukacs, p. 139 quoting Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 15th Letter

For, if man is fully human "only if he plays", we are indeed enabled to comprehende all the contents of life from this vantage point. And in the asethetic mode, conceived as broadly as possible, they may be salvaged from the deadening effects of the mechanism of reification.But only in so far as these contents become aestehtic. That is to say, either the world must be aestheticised, which is an evasion of the real problem and is just another way in which to make the subject purely contemplative and to annihilate 'action'. Or else, the asethetic principle must be elevated into the principle by which objective reality is shaped: but that would be to mythologise the discovery of intuitive understanding. pp.139-140

On the mythologisation of creation:

From Fichte onwards it became increasingly necessary to make the mythologising of the process of 'creation' into a central issue, a question of life and death for classical philosophy; all the more so as the critical point of view was constrained, parallel with the antinomies which it discovered in the given world and our relationship with it, to treat the subject in the like fashion and to tear it to pieces (i.e. its fragmentation in the objective reality had to be reproduced in thought, accelerating the process as it did so). p 140

On this point art shows us, as we have seen, the two faces of Janus, and with the discovery of art it becomes possible either to provide yet another domain for the fragmented subject or to leave behind the safe territory of the concrete evocation of totality and (using art most by way of illustration) tackle the problem of 'creation' from the side of the subject. The problem is then no longer -- as it was for Spinoza -- to create an objective system of reality on the model of geometry. It is rather this creation which is at once philosophy's premis and its task. This creation is undoubtedly given [...]. But the task is to deduce the unity -- which is not given -- of this disintegrating creation and to prove that it is the product of a creating subject. In the final analysis then: to create the subject of the 'creator'. p. 140

The reconstitution of the unity of the subject, the intellectual restoration of man has consciously to take its path through the realm of disintegration and fragmentation. p.141

The genesis, the creation of the creator of knowlegde, the dissolution of the irrationality of the thing-in-itself, the ressurection of man from his grave, all these issues become concentrated henceforth on the question of dialectical method. For in this method the call for an intuitive understanding (for method to supersede the rationalistic principle of knowledge) is clearly, objectively and scientifically stated. p.141

Lukacs explains in which ways the dialectical method now distinguishes itself from other schools of thought. Trying to break down this long wounded argument, I identify
- the attempt to break out of the limits imposed by rationalism is connected clearly and firmly to the problem of the logic of the content, to the problem of irrationality
- the subject is neither the unchanged observer of the objective dialectic of being and concept, nor the practicalm manipulator of its purely mental possibilities (NOTE: useful for a critique of post-modernism and its language games)
- Lukacs proposes that the dialectical method implies the interpenetration of subject and object, where "the true" is not only substance but also subject, and also where the subject is both producer and product of the dialectical process so that as a result p.142

"the subject moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antithesis of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved. p.142

It is only in history, in the historical process, in the uninterrupted outpouring of what is qualitatively new that the requisite paradigmatic order can be found in the realm of things. p.144

NOTE: It is quite fascinating to watch how, on these pages, Lukacs slowly reveals the 'truth' that he has found, as the argument develops and slowly rises to its conclusion ... to identify the historic subject the 'we':

For the unity of subject and object, of thought and existence which the 'action' undertook to prove and to exhibit finds both its fulfilment and its substratum in the unity of the determinants of thought and of the history of the evolution of reality. But to comprehend this unity it is necessary both to discover the site from which to resolve all these problems and also to exhibit concretely the 'we' which is the subject of history, that 'we' whose action is in fact history. However, at this point classical philosophy turned back and lost istelf in the endless labyrinth of conceptual mythology . p.145

At this point Hegel's philosophy is driven inexorably into the arms of mythology. Having failed to discover the identical subject-object in history it was forced to go beyond history and, there, to establish the empire of reason which has discovered itself. From that vantage ppoint it became possible to understand history as a mere stage and its evolution in terms of "the ruse of reason". History is not able to form the living body of the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in the 'absolute spirit', in art, religion and philosophy. pp. 146-147

In consequence, as Marx has emphasised in his criticism of Hegel, the demiurgic role of the 'spirit' and the 'idea' enters the realm of conceptual mythology. Once again [...] thought relapses into the contemplative duality of subject and object. p 148

Part III The Standpoint of the Proletariat

Mentioning Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

"When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the previous world-order it does no more than reveal the secret of its own existence, for its represents the effective dissolution of that world order." p 149
The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore the simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. p.149

Quoting Marx: The property owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognises alienation as its own instrument and in it it possesses the semblance of human existence. the latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence. p. 149 (Marx, Holy Family, Chapter 4)

Lukacs goes on to explain that although "the objective reality of social existence in its immedeacy [was] the same for both proletariat and bourgeoisie [...] this does not prevent the specific categories of mediation [...] from being fundamentally different, thanks to the different position occupied by the two classes within the 'same' economic process. p. 150

NOTE: the term of mediation in Lukacs concept deserves further attention, as this is linked with a 'reflective' or 'mirror' function of art in society, which would become the point of departure of the critique of dialectic materialism by (post)structuralists.

Thus, Lukacs criticises bourgeois thought, because in it the "impact of the category of mediation upon the picture of the world is merely 'subjective', i.e. is no more than an 'evaluation' of a reality that 'remains unchanged'," which falls back ultimately to the Kantian problem of objective reality which has once more the character of the thing-in-itself. p. 150

Refers to "important historians of the 19th century, Riegl, Dilthey and Dvorak" whose combined message according to Lukacs is that "the essence of history lies precisely in the changes undergone by those structural forms which are the focal points of man's interaction with environment at any given moment and which determine the objective nature of both his inner and outer life." p.153

p. 154 the road beyond immedeacy and 'change'

... historical reality can only be achieved, understood and described in the course of a complicated process of mediation. p. 155

followed by short critique of phenomenology p. 155 and more of critique on immedeacy till p. 159

The historical knowledge of the proletariat begins with knowledge of the present, with the self-knowledge of its own social situation and with the elucidation of its necessity (i.e. its genesis). p.159

Hegel: Dialectics is the immanent process of transcendence, in the course of which the one-sidedness and the limitation of the determinants of the understanding shows itself to be what it really is, namely their negotiation. p.177 Hegel Encyclopädie §15

The great advance over Hegel made by the scientific standpoint as embodied in Marxism lay in its refusal to see in the categories of reflection a 'permanent' stage of human knowledge and in its insistence that they were the necessary mould both of thought and of life in bourgeois society, in the reification of thought and of life. With this came the discovery of dialectics in history itself. Hence dialectics is not imported into history from outside, nor is it interpreted in the light of history (as often occurs in Hegel), but is derived from history made conscious as its logical manifestation at this particular point in its development.
It is the proletariat that embodies this process of consciousness. Since its consciousness appears as the immanent product of the historical dialectic, it likewise appears to be dialectical. [...] The proletariat "has no ideals to realise". When its consciousness is put into practice it can only breathe life into the things which the dialectics of history have forced to a crisis; p.177

Quoting Marx (without reference): The working class has only to liberate the elements of the new society that have already grown within the womb of the disintegrating society of the bourgeoisie. p.178

In addition to the mere contradiction - the automatic product of capitalism - a new element is required: the consciousness of the proletariat must become deed. [...] we can see once more in greater concreteness the character of proletarian dialectics as we have often described it: namely, since consciousness here is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self-consciousness of the object the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object. p.178

The dialectics of the Eliatic philosophers certainly lay bare the contradictions underlying movement but the moving object is left unaffected. Whether the arrow is flying or at rest its objective nature as an arrow, as a thing remains untouched amidst the dialectical turmoil. It may be the case, as Heraclitus says, that one cannot step into the same river twice; but as the eternal flux is and does not become, i.e. does not bring forth anything qualitatively new, it is only a becoming when compared with the rigid existence of the individual objects. As a theory of totality eternal becoming turns out to be a theory of eternal being; behind the flowing river stands revealed an unchanging essence, even though it may express itself in the incessant transformations of the individual objects. p. 180
(further comments on Heraclitus in footnote 40)
Lukacs, quoting again Marx, points out the transformative power of capitalist accumulation. He then summarises:

Thus the knowledge that social facts are not objects but relations between men is intensified to the point where facts are wholly dissolved into processes. But if their Being appears as a Becoming this should not be construed as an abstract universal flux sweeping past, it is no vacuous durée réelle but the unbroken production and reproduction of those relations that, when torn from their context and distorted by abstract mental categories, can appear to bourgeois thinkers as things. p.180

This throws an entirely new light on the problem of reality. if, in Hegel's terms, Becoming now appears as the truth of Being, and process as the truth about things, then this means that the developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical 'facts'. p.181

Moreover, the 'laws' of the reified reality of capitalism in which the bourgeoisie is compelled to live are only able to prevail over the heads of those who seem to be its active embodiments and agents. The average profit rate is the paradigm of this situation. Its relation to individual capitalists whose actions are determined by this unknown and unknowable force shows all the symptoms of Hegel's 'ruse of reason'. The fact that these individual 'passions', despite which these tendencies prevail, assume the form of the most careful, farsighted and exact calculationsdoes not affect this conclusion in the least; on the contrary, it reinforces it still further. For the fact that there exists the illusion of a rationalism perfected in every detail - dictated by class interest and hence subjectively based - makes it even more evident that this rationalism is unable to grasp the meaning of the overal process as it really is. p.182

The difference between fact and tendency has been brought out on innumerable occasions by Marx and placed in the foreground of his studies. After all, the basic thought underlying his magnum opus, the retranslation of economic objects from things back into processes, into the changing relations between men, rests on just this idea. p.183

...only his analysis permits us to investigate the concept of the 'fact' in a truly concrete manner, i.e. in the social context in which it has its origin and its existence.p. 183

Thus only when the theoretical primacy of the facts has been broken, only when every phenomenon is recognised to be a process, will it be understood that what we are wont to call 'facts' consists of processes. Only then will it be understood that the facts are nothing but the parts, the aspects of the total process that have been broken off, artificially isolated and ossified. p. 184

And the nature of history is precisely that every definition degenerates into an illusion: history is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of men.p.186

On Feuerbach: ... by transforming philosophy into 'anthropology' he caused man to be frozen in a fixed objectivity and thus pushed both dialectics and history to one side. And precisely this is the great danger in every 'humanism' or anthropological point of view. [...] without making man himself dialectical, then man himself is made into an absolute and he simply puts himself in the place of those transcendental forces he was supposed to explain, dissolve and systematically replace. At best, then, a dogmatic metaphysics is superseded by an equally dogmatic relativism. pp.186-7

This dogmatism arises because the failure to make man dialectical is complemented by an equal failure to make reality dialectical. Hence relativism moves within an essentially static world. [...] The weakness and half-heartedness of such 'daring thinkers' as Nietzsche or Spengler is that their relativism only abolishes the absolute in appearance. p.187

ON RELIGION

Religion, Marx says, in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, "is the realisation in phantasy of the essence of man because the essence of man does not possess any true reality." And as this non-existent man is to be made the measure of all things, the true demiurge of history, his non-being must at once become the concrete and historically dialecticical form of critical knowledge of the present in which man is necessarily condemned to non-existence. The negation of his being becomes concretised, then, in the understanding of bourgeois society. p. 190

It is here that Marx's 'humanism' diverges most sharply from all the movements that seem so similar to it at first glance. Others have often recognised how capitalism violates and destroys everything human. p.190

Lukacs goes on to say that the opposition to this destruction of everything human coming from metaphysics and myth "presents the problem in a confused form and certainly does not point the way to a solution." p. 190 Descriptions of the problem from this angle "will inevitably succumb to the dilemmas of empiricism and utopianism, of voluntarism and fatalism, even though it may give an accurate account of matters of detail." p.191 This is especially the case, Lukacs says, with systems that appear to try to "liberate" man inspired by "Christianity and the Gospels". p.191

For as long as society, as it is, is to be declared sacrosanct it is immaterial with what emotional force or what metaphysical and religious emphasis this is done. p.191

Lukacs then identifies two utopian counterparts to this essential conservative function of religion, the Apocalypse and the utopian view of man as "saint who can achieve an inner mastery of the external reality that cannot be eliminated." Yet this view, Lukacs states, is "forced to deny humanity to the vast majority of mankind and to exclude them from the 'redemption' which alone confers meaning upon a life which is meaningless on the level of empirical experience. In so doing it reproduces the inhumanity of class society on a metaphysical and religious plane, in the next world, in eternity - of course with the signs reversed, with altered criteria and with the class structure stood on its head. p.191 (my emphasis)

But the 'revolutionary' utopianism of such views cannot break out of the inner limits set to this undialectical 'humanism'. Even the Anabaptists and similar sects preserve this duality. On the one hand they leave the objective structure of man's empirical existence unimpaired (consumption communism), while on the other hand they expect that reality will be changed by awakening man's inwardness which, independent of his concrete historical life, has existed since time immemorial and must now be brought to life - perhaps through the intervention of a transcendental deity. p.192

That this is the consequence of their historical situation is self-evident. It was necessary to emphasise it only because it is no accident that it was the revolutionary religiosity of the sects that supplied the ideology for capitalism in its purest forms (in England and America). For the union of an inwardness, purified to the point of total abstraction and stripped of all traces of flesh and blood, with a transcendental philosophy of history does indeed correspond to the basic ideological structure of capitalism. p. 192

NOTE: possibly a reference to Max Weber whom Lukacs had met while studying in Germany.

p. 194 more on why mythology fails: mythology inevitably adopts the structure of the problem whose opacity had been the cause of its own birth. my emphasis

FINAL ATTACK

The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immedeacy together with the bourgeoisie. With the growth of social democracy this thread acquired a real political organisation which artificially cancels out the mediations so labouriosly won and forces the proletariat back into its immedeate existence where it is merely a component of capitalist societyv and not at the same time the motor that drives it to its doom and destruction. p.196

Lukacs explains that "social democracy must inevitably remain in the weaker position. This is not only because it renounces of its own free will the historical mission of the proletariat to point to the way out of the problems of capitalism that the bourgeoisie cannot solve; nor is it because it looks on fatalistically as the 'laws' of capitalism drift towards the abyss. But social democracy must concede defeat on every particular issue also. For when confronted by the overwhelming resources of knowledge, culture and routine which the borugeoisie undoubtedly possess and will continue to possess as long as it remains the ruling class, the only effective superiority of the proletariat, its only decisive weapon is its ability to see the social totality as a concrete historic totality; to see the reified forms as processes between men; to see the immanent meaning of history that only appears negatively in the contradictions of abstract forms, to raise its positive side to consciousness and to put it into practice. pp.196-7

Reification is, then, the necessary, immedeate reality of every person living in capitalist society. It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total devleopment. p.197

p. 199 returning to Kant: if existence were a true predicate, then "I could not say that precisely the object of my concept exists."

...from the standpoint of the proletariat the empirically given reality of the object does dissolve into processes and tendencies; this process is no single, unrepeatable tearing of the veil that masks the process but the unbroken alternation of ossification, contradiction and moevment; and thus the proletariat represents the true reality, namely the tendencies of history awakening into consciousness. p.199

NOTE: this is the point where dialectical materialism itself runs danger of becoming a matter of faith, a belief into a Hegelian Weltgeist lurking behind this phrase about the tendencies of history awakening into consciousness, as, in my humble interpretation, this would appear to turn history into a subject capable of consciousness.

Lukacs continues to discuss the problem of reality being 'reflected' in thought which still relies on the basic duality between reality and thought, the philosophical problem which Kant was unable to overcome. (p.200 paraphrased)

As long as thought and existence persist in their old, rigid opposition, as long as their own structure and the structure of their interconnections remain unchanged, then the view that thought is a product of the brain and hence must correspond to the objects of the empirical world is just such a mythology as those of recollection and the world of Platonic ideas. p.202

Hence, only by overcoming the - theoretical - duality of philosophy and special discipline, of methodology and factial knowledge can the way be found by which to annul the duality of thought and existence. Every attempt to overcome the duality dialectically in logic, in a system of thought stripped of every concrete relation to existence, is doomed to failure. For every pure logic is Platonic: it is thought released from existence and hence ossified. Only by conceiving of thought as a form of reality, as a factor in the total process can philosophy overcome its own rigidity dialectically and take on the quality of Becoming. p. 203

NOTE: yet this concrete historical becoming is only possible by integrating the class consciousness of the proletariat.

But it must never be forgotten: only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat possesses this ability to transform things. p.205

NOTE: and this is where the trouble begins. I find the proposal very interesting, that the dialectical method would allow to overcome the duality between thought and existence, between theory and practice. This, however, is linked firmly by Lukacs to the class consciousness of the proletariat, which would overcome and dissolve those dualities by ending capitalism. As we know know, 87 years later, it has not happened. Lukacs is considered, together with Gramsci and Korsch, as one of the founders of Western Marxism. In particular this book was of considerable influence on the Frankfurt School and on the critique of science and technology emerging from there, but also on Operaio and especially the early Negri (FIXME, check source). As those dualities can only be overcome by theory becoming action, this gives us an idea why Negri in his early writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s was so desperately in search of the revolutionary class. It also explains, why with similar intensity, the multitude is talked up as the new revolutionary class by Negri, Virno et al. Without a revolutionary class which, by becoming conscious, trasnforms itself into a subject of history, no dialectical materialism, I am tempted to say. And I simply cant see the 'cognitariat' or the 'class of the new' or the 'creative class' as being this new working class, waiting in the wings to catch up with the Weltgeist (sorry, my innate drive for irony taking over here) and bringing down capitalism. I nevertheless wonder, if something can be rescued from here, namely the possibility to consider the dialectical method viably for artistic practice, for bringing together practice and theory. Doing this individually - in my own theory-practice for instance - does of course go against the grain of what Lukacs is saying, as this would almost inevitably become just another form of 'contemplation' or s desperate sort of utopianism. I will, nevertheless, follow this line of inquiry for a bit longer. What remains of course, on the level os theory, is dialectics as a way of looking at history, understanding it as a totality. It cant be wrong to follow this clue, except of course, that I may turn into a terrible dogmatist and economic determinist any minute;-)