TwentiethCentury Marxism

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Twentieth-Century Marxism

• Lecture Four Lukács and reification

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Georg Lukács

• 1885-1971
• Hungarian / German
• early romantic anti-capitalism
• 1917 becomes a Marxist
• 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic
• 1923 History and Class Consciousness
• Western Marxism?

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Reification 1

• Capital, vol. 1, chapter one, 4 The fetish
  character of the commodity and its secret
• contains within itself the whole of historical
  materialism (RIII2/170)
• Reification and the Consciousness of the
  Proletariat
• reification Verdinglichung

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Reification 2

• a world of objects and relations between things
  springs into being (the world of commodities and
  their movements on the market). The laws
  governing these objects confront man as
  invisible forces that generate their own power.
  (RI1/87)
•  
• subject to the non-human objectivity of the
  natural laws of society (RI1/87)

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Reification 3

• This rational objectification reification
  conceals above all the immediate qualitative
  and material character of things as things.
  When use-values useful products appear
  universally as commodities they acquire a new
  objectivity, a new substantiality which they do
  not possess in an age of periodic exchange and
  which destroys their original and authentic
  substantiality. (RI2/92)

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Reification 4

• a mans own activity, his own labour becomes
  something objective and independent of him,
  something that controls him by virtue of an
  autonomy alien to man (RI1/86-87).

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Reification 5

• a continuous trend towards greater
  rationalisation, the progressive elimination of
  the qualitative, human and individual attributes
  of the worker the process of labour is
  progressively broken down into abstract,
  rational, specialised operations so that the
  worker loses contact with the finished product
  and his work is reduced to the mechanical
  repetition of a specialised set of actions.
  (RI1/88)

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Reification 6

• he is a mechanical part incorporated into a
  mechanical system (RI1/89) 
• The capitalist process of reification both
  over-individualizes man and objectifies him
  mechanically. The division of labour, alien to
  the nature of man, makes men ossify in their
  activity, it makes automata of them in their jobs
  and turns them into the slaves of routine
  (MO5/335).

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Reification 7

• the workers specific situation is defined by
  the fact that his labour-power is his only
  possession. His fate is typical of society as a
  whole in that this self-objectification, this
  transformation of a human function into a
  commodity reveals in all its starkness the
  dehumanised and dehumanising function of the
  commodity relation. (RI1/92)

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Status of the proletariat

• Everyone is reified, but this is more apparent in
  the case of the proletariat.
• Also the case that the proletariat is less
  reified than e.g. the bureaucrat or journalist.
• Proletariat in an epistemologically privileged
  position ability to see society from the
  centre, as a coherent whole (CC4/69).
• (See additional passages on website.)

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Class consciousness

• imputed class consciousness (CC1, 5)
• the consciousness of the proletariat is still
  fettered by reification (CC5/76)
• large sections of the proletariat remain
  intellectually under the tutelage of the
  bourgeoisie even the severest economic crisis
  fails to shake them in their attitude (MO2/304)

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Crises?

• revolutionary struggles have failed to yield any
  conclusive evidence that the proletariats
  revolutionary fervour and will to fight
  corresponds in any straightforward manner to the
  economic level of its various parts (MO2/305)
• MO2/304 cited on the previous slide
• the ideological crisis of the proletariat
  (MO2/310)

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The revolutionary party

• The struggle of the Communist Party is focused
  upon the class consciousness of the proletariat.
  Its organisational separation from the class does
  not mean in this case that it wishes to do battle
  for its interests on its behalf and in its place.
  (This is what the Blanquists did, to take but
  one instance.) Should it do this, as occasionally
  happens in the course of a revolution, then it is
  contd

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The revolutionary party (contd)

• ... not in the first instance an attempt to fight
  for the objective goals of the struggle in
  question (for in the long run these can only be
  won or retained by the class itself), but only an
  attempt to advance or accelerate the development
  of class consciousness. The process of
  revolution is on a historical scale
  synonymous with the process of the development of
  proletarian class consciousness. (MO4/326)

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Dangers for the party

• dilemma of opportunism and Putschism (MO5/332)
  
• the Communist Party is to lead the proletariat
  correctly into battle in pursuit of a goal to
  which it itself aspires if not with full
  awareness of the fact (MO4/330)

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The theorys four purposes

• it tell us whats wrong with capitalism
• why the workers will revolt against it
• but also why they dont
• why a revolutionary party is necessary.

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Four questions about the theory

• is it Marxist (or just German sociology)?
• is it too Marxist (blaming capitalism)?
• is it too Marxist (relying on the proletariat)?
• is it accurate?