NRL joins Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ)

Business Announcement

NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY

 

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IMAGE: OVERVIEW OF KEY FEATURES THAT WILL INFLUENCE METEOROLOGY DURING THE JANUARY-MARCH SAMPLING PERIOD OF ASIA-AQ. BLACK CIRCLES ARE THE AIRBORNE SAMPLING SITES FOR ASIA-AQ. THE ORANGE BOX INDICATES THE OBSERVING DOMAIN FOR GEMS. THE BACKGROUND SHADED IMAGE IS THE ANNUAL AVERAGE NO2 FROM TROPOMI. THE LOCATION OF EACH ATMOSPHERIC COMPONENT IN THIS DIAGRAM IS AN EXAMPLE AND VARIES IN REALITY. (U.S. NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY)

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CREDIT: U.S. NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY

WASHINGTON  –  U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) meteorologists, in partnership with NASA, will join a team of international scientists to participate in the Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (ASIA-AQ) experiment beginning on February 2.
 
NRL’s collaborators, David Peterson, Ph.D., meteorologist, Theodore McHardy, Ph.D., American Society for Engineering Education postdoctoral researcher, Nicholas Gapp, Science Applications International Corporation and Lauren Porter, STEM Student Employment Program, will lead critical weather forecasting efforts for the duration of the experiment.
 
In partnership with team members at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), NRL will provide daily briefings for the science and flight planning teams summarizing meteorology, air quality and atmospheric composition forecasts. This information will identify opportunities for data collection, including airborne measurements of many local, remote, persistent, and episodic sources of pollution.
 
“ASIA-AQ is an exciting opportunity to investigate how different climates and weather patterns influence periods of hazardous air quality and reduced visibility in several regions of eastern Asia.” said Dr. Peterson. “Beginning in the Philippines, each phase will last for two weeks then move to South Korea, Malaysia and conclude in Thailand.”
 
The primary goal of ASIA-AQ is to improve understanding of air quality in and around several Asian megacities by evaluating the factors controlling variability in daily air quality. The comprehensive study will involve South Korea’s Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) which measures hourly to provide a new view of air quality conditions from space that both complements and depends upon ground-based monitoring efforts of countries in its field of view. To aid in the validation and interpretation of GEMS observations, a network of ground-based remote sensing instruments (Pandora spectrometers) is being established across the GEMS domain. Pandora spectrometers can provide continuous information on the atmospheric column trace gas amounts of compounds.
 
NASA will contribute two research aircraft to the study, with flights planned over urban and marine environments in five countries in eastern Asia. ASIA-AQ flights will be conducted in full partnership with NRL and local scientists and environmental agencies responsible for air quality monitoring and assessment. These partners will contribute to the design of the flight sampling strategies, participate in the execution of the study, and be involved in the analysis of observations collected.
 
Aircraft observations provide invaluable context to the satellite and ground-based perspectives that are used more routinely to inform air quality models for both forecasting and identification of specific sources of pollution. Satellites and ground monitors focus on only a small subset of relevant atmospheric constituents. For a more complete understanding, detailed atmospheric composition measurements throughout the lower atmosphere are needed to understand how emissions, chemistry and meteorology combine to affect ozone and particulate pollution.
 
 ASIA-AQ will be able to fully harness the combination of multi-perspective observations (satellite, ground, and aircraft) and models to improve understanding of the factors controlling air quality. This calls for an international collaborative effort that includes air quality scientists, government officials, and monitoring agencies working together.
 
“We look forward to working with weather forecasters and air quality scientists in the ASIA-AQ host countries to build collaborations and broaden the impact of our work.” said Peterson.
 
After the deployment, NRL will continue to support the aircraft measurement teams and the atmospheric simulations done by ASIA-AQ scientists by providing information on how ASIA-AQ measurements were influenced by specific weather patterns. NRL will use data collected during ASIA-AQ to evaluate Navy modeling applications in eastern Asia, with the goal of improved forecasts for hazardous visibility conditions that account for potential feedback of airborne pollutants on weather.
 

About the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

NRL is a scientific and engineering command dedicated to research that drives innovative advances for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps from the seafloor to space and in the information domain. NRL is located in Washington, D.C. with major field sites in Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Key West, Florida; Monterey, California, and employs approximately 3,000 civilian scientists, engineers and support personnel.

For more information, contact NRL Corporate Communications at (202) 480-3746 or nrlpao@nrl.navy.mil. 

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

 

Reaping agricultural emissions solutions

AI-backed model analyzes cropland ammonia emissions, identifies mitigation strategies

Business Announcement

DOE/OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

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ORNL CLIMATE MODELING EXPERTISE CONTRIBUTED TO AN AI-BACKED MODEL THAT ASSESSES GLOBAL EMISSIONS OF AMMONIA FROM CROPLANDS NOW AND IN A WARMER FUTURE, WHILE IDENTIFYING MITIGATION STRATEGIES. THIS MAP HIGHLIGHTS CROPLANDS AROUND THE WORLD.

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CREDIT: CREDIT: U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

A new computational framework developed in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Jiafu Mao provides a detailed assessment of ammonia emissions from global croplands and identifies practices that could curb release of the gas.

Croplands are the largest single source of atmospheric ammonia, emitted from fields treated with nitrogen fertilizer. Ammonia can harm human health, acidify soil and waterways and contribute to biodiversity loss, food insecurity and climate change. However, the international study found that emissions could be cut by 38% without altering total fertilizer inputs, as detailed in Nature.

Mao helped devise a machine learning approach to improve ammonia emission estimates from wheat, corn and rice fields. The model enabled the identification of local best practices that could mitigate emissions, even in a warming climate.

“This valuable model, backed by artificial intelligence tools, can also fine-tune biogeochemical cycling and greenhouse gas emissions in the Department of Energy’s Earth system model,” Mao said. —Stephanie Seay

 

A sleeker facial recognition technology tested on Michelangelo’s David

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY

 

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A NEW LENS-FREE AND COMPACT SYSTEM FOR FACIAL RECOGNITION SCANS A BUST OF MICHELANGELO’S DAVID AND RECONSTRUCTS THE IMAGE USING LESS POWER THAN EXISTING 3D SURFACE IMAGING SYSTEMS. 

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CREDIT: ADAPTED FROM NANO LETTERS, 2024, DOI: 10.1021/ACS.NANOLETT.3C05002

Many people are familiar with facial recognition systems that unlock smartphones and game systems or allow access to our bank accounts online. But the current technology can require boxy projectors and lenses. Now, researchers report in ACS’ Nano Letters a sleeker 3D surface imaging system with flatter, simplified optics. In proof-of-concept demonstrations, the new system recognized the face of Michelangelo’s David just as well as an existing smartphone system.

3D surface imaging is a common tool used in smartphone facial recognition, as well as in computer vision and autonomous driving. These systems typically consist of a dot projector that contains multiple components: a laser, lenses, a light guide and a diffractive optical element (DOE). The DOE is a special kind of lens that breaks the laser beam into an array of about 32,000 infrared dots. So, when a person looks at a locked screen, the facial recognition system projects an array of dots onto most of their face, and the device’s camera reads the pattern created to confirm the identity. However, dot projector systems are relatively large for small devices such as smartphones. So, Yu-Heng Hong, Hao-Chung Kuo, Yao-Wei Huang and colleagues set out to develop a more compact facial recognition system that would be nearly flat and require less energy to operate.

To do this, the researchers replaced a traditional dot projector with a low-power laser and a flat gallium arsenide surface, significantly reducing the imaging device’s size and power consumption. They etched the top of this thin metallic surface with a nanopillar pattern, which creates a metasurface that scatters light as it passes through the material. In this prototype, the low-powered laser light scatters into 45,700 infrared dots that are projected onto an object or face positioned in front of the light source. Like the dot projector system, the new system incorporates a camera to read the patterns that the infrared dots created.

In tests of the prototype, the system accurately identified a 3D replica of Michelangelo’s David by comparing the infrared dot patterns to online photos of the famous statue. Notably, it accomplished this using five to 10 times less power and on a platform with a surface area about 230 times smaller than a common dot-projector system. The researchers say their prototype demonstrates the usefulness of metasurfaces for effective small-scale low-power imaging solutions for facial recognition, robotics and extended reality.    

The authors acknowledge funding from Hon Hai Precision Industry, the National Science and Technology Council in Taiwan, and the Ministry of Education in Taiwan.

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The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.

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JOURNAL

Nano Letters

DOI

10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c05002 

ARTICLE TITLE

“Metasurface- and PCSEL-Based Structured Light for Monocular Depth Perception and Facial Recognition”

@ IS SELF ORGANIZATION

Plant groupings in drylands support ecosystem resilience

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SANTA FE INSTITUTE

Many complex systems, from microbial communities to mussel beds to drylands, display striking self-organized clusters. According to theoretical models, these groupings play an important role in how an ecosystem works and its ability to respond to environmental changes. A new paper in PNAS focused on the spatial patterns found in drylands offers important empirical evidence validating the models.

Drylands make up 40 percent of the Earth’s landmass and are places where water is the limiting resource for life. They often display a characteristic clustering of vegetation surrounded by bare soil — patterns that are easy to spot in aerial images. The new study, led by SFI External Professor Sonia Kéfi, who is a researcher at CNRS in France, finds that not only are these spatial patterns caused by the stressful environmental conditions of drylands, but they are also a critical adaptation that allows drylands to function in changing conditions. When a dryland ecosystem tips into a degraded state, the spatial patterns disappear.

“Many people have the idea that ‘interesting’ ecosystems are places like the Amazon, and that drylands are poor in some way,” says SFI External Professor Ricard Solé (Pompeu Fabra University), a co-author on the paper. “But they can be very rich. They are responsible for managing how water is being retained or not in these habitats, and are important for CO2 exchange.” Beyond their ecological importance, drylands are also home to one-third of the world’s human population, making them important economically and culturally.

In healthy dryland ecosystems, islands of vegetation create oases where conditions are a bit better than the rest of the landscape. There’s more water, more nutrients, and more shade. If an ecosystem’s climate becomes drier, those clusters tend to move further apart.

And this, says Kéfi, is a double-edged sword. While improving local conditions, these clusters also create spaces without vegetation — harsh places where a single plant would not survive on its own. If conditions become too harsh, the ecosystem can reach a tipping point into desertification.

Kéfi and her colleagues wondered if aerial images, and their evidence of changes in spatial patterns, could themselves indicate the health or level of degradation in a given plot of land.

“In theory, we could tell something about the ecosystem from the sky — that’s what the models predict, in very broad terms,” says Kéfi. To test this, the team paired aerial images with soil and vegetation data gathered from 115 dryland ecosystems across 13 different countries. “This on-the-ground data shows us where one ecosystem is healthier or functioning better than other ecosystems.” Using the two types of data, the team could test the predictions of the model against real-world observations.

“Our results represent a significant advance in the development of tools for the management and preservation of dryland ecosystems in a warmer, drier world,” says Kéfi. “More specifically, changes in spatial vegetation patterns (or the lack thereof) could be used as indicators of degradation.”

According to Solé, the study offers, for the first time, real validation that the model correctly predicts the nonlinear dynamics of what has been unfolding in dryland ecosystems. “The beauty of this work is that it reveals something that goes beyond the pattern-forming problem. You can talk about ecosystem health in ways that are not metaphoric, and it opens new interesting questions about how to address the future of these ecosystems,” he says.

The authors hope their work will make it easier to spot degrading systems that might be approaching a tipping point. And, because vegetation patterning seems to also be key in other natural systems, such as microbial communities or coastal wetlands, their results could have implications for systems beyond arid zones.

Read the paper "Self-organization as a mechanism of resilience in dryland ecosystems" in PNAS (February 2, 2024) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2305153121

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2305153121 

ARTICLE TITLE

Self-organization as a mechanism of resilience in dryland ecosystems

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Feb-2024

 

Potential to ‘save more lives than doctors’: Rice launches WaTER Institute to develop accessible clean water technology

Business Announcement

RICE UNIVERSITY

Forty-three million Americans lack access to municipal water, and 1 in 10 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water. Rice University’s new WaTER Institute, launched today, aims to address this and other complex water-related challenges.

“Clean water can save more lives than doctors,” said Pedro J. Alvarez , the institute’s director and the George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The institute’s researchers will also predict and prevent diseases by monitoring wastewater; decrease the amount of energy used to move and treat water in large municipal water systems; predict water-related natural disasters; extract high-value metals with high energy efficiency and low water consumption, and more.

The institute will lead cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research and technological innovation focusing on three key areas: public health, energy transitions and resilient infrastructure. Its full name is the Institute for Clean Water Technologies, Entrepreneurship and Research.

“Rice has strategically increased its investment in research that will positively impact the community, region, nation and world,” said President Reginald DesRoches, “As university president and a civil engineer, I am confident that Rice scientists will make discoveries that transform lives and communities through innovation.”

Researchers will tackle seven major challenges related to water:

• Safe water quality for a growing population
• Distribution between humans and their environment
• Water disaster protection
• Water infrastructure (distribution and collection)
• Enough food for all
• Water to produce energy
• Solutions for water conflicts and a fair share for all

“I’m excited to see how the WaTER Institute, drawing from the expertise of institutes and disciplines across campus, develops transformative solutions that economically produce clean water while minimizing energy and chemical requirements,” said Ramamoorthy Ramesh , executive vice president for research. “This institute brings together fundamental science, technological innovations and policy. It also promotes a culture of entrepreneurship around water.”

“The WaTER Institute builds on longstanding partnerships and existing strengths that Rice has in wastewater monitoring, water treatment, nanomaterials development and environmental research,” said Rafael Verduzco , professor and associate chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering and professor of materials science and nanoengineering.

For example, the Houston Health Department, partnering with Rice and Houston Public Works, is a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Wastewater Surveillance System Center of Excellence. The wastewater monitoring effort, led by Lauren Stadler, Rice assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; Loren Hopkins, chief environmental science officer for the Houston Health Department and a professor in the practice of statistics at Rice and Katherine Ensor, the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics, helps predict and prevent pandemics by detecting diseases in sewage. The center, dubbed Houston Wastewater Epidemiology, will provide training on wastewater epidemiology to other state and local health departments as well as research on developing statistical tools and metrics to enhance surveillance interpretation.

Qilin Li , one of the institute leaders, has been leading a collaboration with the city to develop decision-making tools to optimize water supply systems, including wastewater reuse for potable water supply to alleviate shortages. Rice scientists also plan to develop virtual testing to improve resilience, minimize energy requirements and prevent degrading water quality associated with water distribution through large, centralized systems.

“The Rice WaTER Institute will provide a much-needed platform for researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policymakers to work together toward a long-term vision for water management that is supported by sound technological solutions,” said Li, professor of civil and environmental engineering and co-director of the Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment with Alvarez.

The researchers will also protect public health through the technologies they are developing to remove contaminants such as endocrine disruptors and PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) or “forever chemicals” that are breaking through traditional water treatment systems.

“Like other toxic things in our water and environment, PFAS is not going away by itself,” said Mike Wong, a Rice researcher and one of the institute’s leaders. “We need better understanding and better solutions, but we also need better plans on how to get the technology off campus and into the homes, communities and businesses that need help the most. I am excited about all the ways the WaTER Institute can speed up our collective work to create low-cost, no-fuss methods to destroy PFAS.”

Wong is the Tina and Sunit Patel Professor in Molecular Nanotechnology, chair and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and professor of chemistry, materials science and nanotechnology, and civil and environmental engineering.

The institute will promote entrepreneurship, specifically startups, for water technologies, Alvarez said. Researchers will collaborate with the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and The Ion.

The WaTER Institute’s work will cut across the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and engineering and connect with Rice’s other research institutes . “Our collaborative structures and culture are a major competitive advantage,” Alvarez said.

This marks the fifth institute Rice has launched over the past year and the eighth to receive additional funding from the university. The other new institutes include the Rice Advanced Materials Institute, Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, Medical Humanities Research Institute and the Rice Sustainability Institute.

Farmers’ revolt in France

John Mullen

31 January 2024

Opinion

Demonstration of Occitan farmers, January 2024. 

Photo: Raymond Trencavel / Wikimedia Commons / CC0 1.0 DEED

Farmers in France are not a homogenous block, and the left needs to be able to unite with its more progressive elements to generalise revolt, argues John Mullen

As Macron’s government, under new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, moves ever further to the right, once again a radical mass movement is shaking the country.

Last year, the biggest workers’ movement for decades mobilised millions across France in an attempt to defend retirement pensions. This year it is the turn of the farmers to revolt. On Tuesday, 6 000 tractors were present at 120 blockades, and at least sixteen motorways were immobilised. Regional government headquarters have been covered with manure, and a number of hypermarket distribution centres (as well as Toulouse airport) paralysed. A column of two hundred tractors from the South of France was heading for Paris on Wednesday, intending to blockade the main wholesale food market of the capital at Rungis. In every town they pass through, locals express support and bring food. A ‘siege’ of Paris and of Lyon has been announced.

France counts over 400 000 farmers, as against 100 000 in the UK. Over four decades, farmer income has fallen in real terms by 40%, and a quarter of French farmers live below the poverty line. In particular, sheep farmers, cattle farmers and fruit producers are often extremely poor. This, along with unsocial hours and isolation, can have tragic consequences. Statistics show that at least two farmers a week in the country commit suicide.

Slogans painted on the barricading tractors vary. One can read, ‘I love my work, but I need to earn a living’, ‘We shouldn’t import food whose production is banned in France’, ‘Cattle farmers, wine producers, vegetable growers, one struggle!’, or, ‘We want decent prices, not subsidies!’

Radical action works. The government has already made concessions, reducing taxes on tractor fuel, increasing compensation to cattle farmers hit by disease, and promising to put a little more pressure on the big supermarket chains, who use their market power to pay criminally low prices. This is very far from sufficient, and the vast majority of farmers are determined to continue the movement.

We must not see farmers as a homogeneous bloc. The largest farmers’ federation, the FNSEA, is dominated by owners of huge farms. The farmers’ movement can put forward progressive demands or reactionary ones. The left should support moves to guarantee minimum prices for producers and to cut into the mega profits of the food and supermarket industries. But other demands, such as for the abolition of the new rule that 4% of land must be left fallow at any one time, to help restore biodiversity, and similar calls to scrap green regulations, must be opposed.
Defend green options

There are three major national farmers’ federations. The biggest, the FNSEA, (which got 55% of the votes in 2019 elections to choose farmers’ representatives) has a leadership which is hoping that the government will concentrate on scrapping green regulations and increasing agricultural subsidies, subsidies which benefit above all the biggest farms. In contrast, the left-wing Confederation Paysanne (20% of the votes) is putting forward demands for minimum selling prices and a reduction of the profits of agribusiness and supermarket chains. The Confederation says blockades should be mostly aimed at supermarket chains. Both federations are, meanwhile, protesting at new European Union treaties which aim at reinforcing the dictatorship of the market and allowing imports into Europe which are not subject to the same environmental and animal-welfare rules as is local production.

Macron is hesitating before sending riot cops in, since the farmers have often been solid conservative voters. His interior minister even declared, “We do not respond to suffering by sending in riot police” (which must be surprising news to the many strikers, antiracists and ecologists maimed by police on demonstrations in recent years). And farmers interviewed in the media said they were confident the police sympathised with them. This is likely to change as the actions go on, and armoured vehicles were in place around Paris on Wednesday, while fifteen farmers have been arrested near Rungis. The situation is changing every day.

The most radical major workers union, the CGT, has called on its activists to attend farmers’ pickets and blockades and discuss common interests. The radical-left La France Insoumise also called for support, supporting demands to freeze the profit margins of the supermarket chains and impose minimum pricing. In some towns, left-wing mayors have organised meetings in support. However, some on the left mistakenly refuse to support the movement because of the right-wing domination of the main farmers’ federation.

This week’s radical tactics were inspired by the Yellow Vest movement of a few years back, and by last year’s pensions protests, which were particularly spectacular in smaller provincial towns with a solid conservative tradition.

More and more of the distribution centres of supermarket chains are being targeted as days go by, and this is a welcome development. With a major one-day teachers’ strike planned this week, a taxi drivers’ protest growing and bus drivers’ strikes in the offing, let’s hope the farmers’ example leads to more generalised revolt.

John Mullen is an anticapitalist activist in the Paris region and a supporter of the France Insoumise. His website is randombolshevik.org

EP Thompson: historian for the working class

Dominic Alexander 

2 February 2024

Opinion 

E P Thompson addresses anti-nuclear weapons rally, Oxford, England, 1980. 

Source: Kim Traynor - Wikicommon / cropped from original / shared under license CC BY-SA 4.0


On the centenary of Thompson’s birth, Dominic Alexander celebrates his monumental work, The Making of the English Working Class

Edward Palmer Thompson, born a century ago on 3 February 1924, was not only one of the most important British Marxist historians but was also among the most important internationally. He is surely best remembered for his monumental work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which in charting the development of a political class consciousness among workers in England during the Industrial Revolution from the end of the eighteenth century through to the 1830s, has been praised and attacked in equal measure ever since.

Given all this argument, it is worth establishing just what the book’s core contribution was to the story of the working class, and to the history of political radicalism. The book begins with the English Jacobins of the 1790s and explores the religious and political traditions the radicals inherited from dissenters and other sources. It then moves from considering this relatively respectable milieu of literate artisans and shopkeepers to what can be gleaned about attitudes of the ‘unrespectable’ working class, whose participation in politics could appear as ‘as something of a mixture of manipulated mob and revolutionary crowd’.

The establishment routinely paid such people to attack their opponents, especially radicals, on the basis that the latter were a threat to the people’s liberty. Thus, In the 1790s, radical reformers might well be attacked by a ‘Church and King’ mob, but this changed in the course of the next couple of decades. As early as 1815, ‘it was not possible, either in London or in the industrial North or Midlands, to employ a ‘Church and King’ mob to terrorize the Radicals.’ The ruling class hold on the loyalty of the ‘unrespectable’ crowd had evaporated. This is one of the notable signs of growing class consciousness and hostility to the ruling class and the system.

In one respect, Thompson’s argument is about how the two, often mutually antagonistic, sections of eighteenth-century plebian society, the artisanal and the ‘disreputable’, both fed into what would become a self-conscious working class waging a mass struggle for radical democratic change by the 1830s with the Chartist movement. Explaining this massive shift in social alignments and political consciousness takes in the most detailed consideration of the social conditions and exploitation endured by all sections of the wider working classes during these years of the Industrial Revolution, as well as all the industrial and political agitations of the time.

In so doing, Thompson challenged a whole range of academic opinions about the period, from arguments that the working class benefited from industrialisation (they demonstrably did not), to long-standing dismissals of various radical figures and movements, such as the Luddites. The latter, in particular, Thompson showed to be far from blindly anti-technology or just ‘primitive’ trade unionists, but people capable of considerable feats of clandestine organisation and political-economic awareness.
Controversies and opponents

The magnificence of the research and the vivid detail in the writing won many a reader over to Thompson’s argument, but aspects of it have remained controversial even among Marxists. The issues have been partly muddled by the passage of time. Thompson himself in later years wrote voluminously on contemporary politics, particularly through his anti-nuclear activism, but the positions taken in such essays need to be assessed separately from what he wrote in The Making. The development of historical research, the academic arguments engendered by the book, and Thompson’s disappointments with the New Left, all had an impact on his later writings.

It is necessary to go back to the original context for The Making to grasp Thompson’s intent. He had opponents in two directions, firstly the right-wing and liberal academic consensus, and secondly a version of Marxist analysis that has now largely been left behind. That was the typically mechanistic conception of social change and consciousness indebted to Stalinist Marxism. Whatever some may have later taken from the book, The Making itself remained fully materialist in its approach.

The period the book covers was long understood to be a dramatic one, and Thompson agreed that ‘the history of popular agitation during the period 1811-50’ suggests that ‘it is as if the English nation entered a crucible in the 1790s and emerged after the Wars [i.e.1815] in a different form’. For Thompson, this led on to a period in which a class-conscious working-class movement took shape by the 1830s. However, the period 1790-1815 also coincided with a ‘dramatic pace of change in the cotton industry’, so the assumption had been that the arrival of the modern factory system was the direct and automatic cause of the emergence of a militant working class: ‘the cotton-mill is seen as the agent not only of the industrial but also of social revolution, producing not only more goods but also the ‘Labour Movement’ itself.’ This deterministic view was what Thompson had set out to challenge.

To start with, he was quite right to point out that the mass of pre-factory hand-loom weavers, for example, ‘were as prominent in every radical agitation as the factory hands. And in many towns, the actual nucleus from which the labour movement derived ideas, organization, and leadership, was made up of ’a whole range of artisanal trades. Factory workers did not become the dominant core of the working class until at least the 1840s. In other words, there is not a straight read-off to be made from the new forces of production of the modern factory system to a class-conscious labour movement.
Dialectics of change

This is really what should be expected. No social formation arrives all at once, ready-made, but necessarily grows within already existing social relations, creating a whole host of contradictory dynamics and influences. Even so, Thompson was not in any way denying the significance of the new forces of production, indeed he notes in the course of the analysis being quoted here that: ‘Cotton was certainly the pace-making industry of the industrial revolution, and the cotton mill was the pre-eminent model for the factory-system’. Moreover, much of the book is concerned directly with the impact of the industrial revolution on all sections of the ‘labouring classes’, which had much to do with the rise of the range of radical dissent and protest in the period.

Thompson’s argument, however, is that nothing is automatic, and people can only pursue their struggles using all the available social resources. Thus the existing radical traditions inherited from the eighteenth century, many of them even preserving elements of the radicalism of the seventeenth-century Civil War period, fed into and helped to shape the working-class politics and consciousness of the 1830s. Although Thompson could later be interpreted as arguing that ‘culture’ was more important than the ‘economic base’ in determining consciousness, thus opening the way to postmodernist approaches that disappear the materiality behind social change altogether, that was clearly not what the argument of The Making was doing in 1963. Then, the target was Stalinist determinism, where ‘consciousness’ is held to reflect statically conceived economic structures.

The argument of The Making seems to me to be firmly in line with Marx’s oft-quoted view that: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’ Thompson’s famous explanation of class in the Preface to the Making is sometimes criticised for leaning too heavily on the subjective side of the formation of class, but the material foundation of class is underlined as strongly here as it is throughout the book: ‘The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily’.

Class consciousness is, however, necessarily more dependent upon subjective factors: ‘We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.’ Class itself is not a static structure in which people are simply slotted, but is something that happens: ‘class is a relationship and not a thing.’ This then is a powerful argument against the kind of academic sociology that splits the population into various strata, each of which can be defined as much by status indicators as economic position: ‘If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences’.
Class in time

However, class is a relationship of domination and exploitation, which unfolds over time. This renders different particular experiences of it comparable; thus hand-loom weavers and factory operatives came to understand, argued Thompson, that their experiences of class shared the same ‘logic’, regardless of other differences between them. This played out over the decades 1790-1830, and over different struggles, economic and political, in which radical and eventually early socialist views were increasingly common amongst workers of various sectors. Since class consciousness happens as a historical process, so it can also subsequently weaken, and even be overcome by the various material differences between sections of the working class. It must be continuously nurtured and revitalised.

Rather than undermining the Marxist understanding of the role of base and superstructure in society, Thompson in the Making seems to offer a properly dialectical conception of the way in which people come to understand the social relations in which they live their lives. Existing traditions of dissent and protest therefore played an important part in the formation of the new working-class consciousness of the nineteenth century. This is not to give ‘superstructural’ forces undue weight but to realise that what were subjective factors in one generation feed into the objective conditions of the next. In sum, Thompson was pointing out that what we do now matters because it lays down the conditions in which we and our successors will be working in the years to come. Apart from the theoretical arguments about class and consciousness, it seems very likely that this argument about the necessity and meaningfulness of activism is one of the main reasons so many readers have found the book to be inspirational.

The Making was by no means Thompson’s only important contribution to Marxist historiography. Throughout the rest of the 60s and 70s, he continued to work on the social history of the eighteenth century, showing that a century supposedly without class struggle was, in fact, brimming with it, and that while classes did not yet exist in the form they would come to take due to the industrial revolution, nonetheless, the pre-industrial period was characterised by conflict between the two poles of capital and labour.

Two classic articles, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’ (1967) and ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1971), were later followed by the book Whigs and Hunters (Penguin 1975), which found class conflicts raging in aspects of early eighteen-century English society where no one had thought to seek them before. His very final book was a tour de force of intellectual history, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), where Thompson unpicked Blake’s debt to seventeenth-century revolutionary religious radicalism through the obscure sects that survived to his time, carrying fossilised parts of that radical tradition with them.
Late arguments

The essays on eighteenth-century England were developed further and finally collected in the book Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991/2010). However, here there are concessions to very different approaches to history, and probably to the increasing volume of attacks on his earlier writing from the academic left, as well as the right. In some of the statements in this last book, Thompson does at points allow for consciousness to be formative of class itself in some sense.

This was surely in response to the postmodernist approaches that had been attacking the very root of the materialist account of history. For example, Joan Wallach Scott, in a passage seemingly directed at Thompson, insisted that while ‘the rhetoric of class appeals to the objective “experience” of workers, in fact such experience only exists through its conceptual organization; what counts as experience cannot be established by collecting empirical data but by analysing the terms of definition offered in political discourse’ such that ‘class and class consciousness are the same thing’. This dispiriting, pure idealism is not the position Thompson took in The Making, and would indeed have undermined the very basis of all the painstaking research Thompson had carried out for that and his subsequence books.

Thompson’s understanding of history was highly sensitive to the complexities of change, and how in new circumstances, people forge new relationships and ideas out of the materials, whether organisational or ideological, bequeathed by old circumstances. Yet, if ‘discourses’ really had total primacy, then no new ideas could ever be born, and certainly no new movements could ever have appeared. The Making, in contrast, was about a period where, demonstrably, new kinds of struggles and new ideas burst forth together. It was not the ideas that puppeted the people, but the workers and artisans who developed the ideas and ways of resisting their rulers and the ruthlessness of the new capitalism.

In a sense, by the 1990s, the arguments had come full circle. Thompson was originally arguing against a view of Marxism that saw ‘consciousness’ as merely a reflection of material circumstances. His project was to show that people were active, rather than simply reactive, in forging the shape of their struggles and thus that class consciousness was actively self-created. For a variety of reasons, not least the generational defeat of the left in the 1980s, academic fashion blew past this dialectical view. It landed on another absolute as untenable as the Stalinist thesis: the enthronement of language as the controller of all that is real. Unfortunately, we have not yet escaped that space. Thompson was endeavouring to find the dialectical midpoint. This would recognise the interplay of determination and agency, of consciousness and material constraints, where the potential for class struggle to change the world is found. The lesson of The Making is that what we do matters, but also that it is necessary to think to do; theory and practice are inextricably bound together.

Before you go
If you liked this article, please consider getting involved. Counterfire is a revolutionary socialist organisation working to build the movements of resistance and socialist ideas. Please join us and help make change happen.


Dominic Alexander  is a member of Counterfire, for which he is the book review editor. He is a longstanding activist in north London. He is a historian whose work includes the book Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (2008), a social history of medieval wonder tales, and articles on London’s first revolutionary, William Longbeard, and the revolt of 1196, in Viator 48:3 (2017), and Science and Society 84:3 (July 2020). He is also the author of the Counterfire books, The Limits of Keynesianism (2018) and Trotsky in the Bronze Age (2020).

Georg Lukacs:

The Reification of Subjectivity

The Russian Revolution transformed the practical context of Marxian theory. Socialism no longer appeared a distant goal; militant action no longer seemed futile; the gloomy urgency of Rosa Luxemburg's wartime essays was replaced by a new spirit of combative optimism. With the end of the war and the collapse of social order in Germany and Hungary, a fluid historical situation emerged, fostering apocalyptic hopes. Revolutionaries could believe in the "imminence of world revolution and the total transformation of the civilized world," as Georg Lukács has recalled.[10] The example of Lenin himself fueled such hopes. Against Marxist gradualism, with its cautious evolutionary positivism, Lenin epitomized the primacy of human action; this radical figure who had seized history by the reins attracted a new stratum of Western intellectuals to Marxism. Such communists as Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Korsch brought to Marxism a fresh set of theoretical perspectives, coupled with an activist orientation.

The subjective and spiritual dimensions of Marxism slighted by orthodoxy were suddenly revived. Theorists expressed renewed interest in the nature of class consciousness and a refurbished faith in the revolutionary capabilities inherent in the proletariat. Events now suggested that Marx's original prognosis of proletarian militancy was not wholly mistaken. Socialism could appear plausibly as the inevitable rational goal of modern history: not coincidentally, the Marxist revival coincided with a Hegelian revival in several theoretical circles.

Lukács, a thinker influenced by Max Weber and Georg Simmel as well as Hegel, stands at the beginning of the contemporary renaissance of Marxist philosophical studies. In The Theory of the Novel , his last major pre-Marxist work, Lukács had described the modern era as "an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality."[11] When Lukács transported this aesthetic yearning for wholeness into Marxism, he resurrected Marx's own hopes for a qualitatively new form of life.

He also briefly resurrected Marx's rationalist optimism, a rebirth vividly conveyed in his first Marxist essays, collected in Tactics and Ethics and published in 1919. The messianic significance of the Russian Revolution decisively colored his prose: "The message of reality," exclaimed Lukács, "Marxist reality, the unity of the historical process, is quite clear: the revolution is here ." The imminence of revolution invested the situation of the proletariat with an extraordinary moral urgency. Every proletarian, he asserted, was impelled to attain a clear sense of his true class interest, which necessarily surpassed the "merely given" to comprehend a "world-historical mission." While only Marxism could provide "intellectual leadership" in this ongoing process "of making social development conscious," the inner essence and momentum of history seemed relatively unambiguous: for Marx had properly perceived world history "as a homogenous process, as an uninterrupted revolutionary process of liberation."[12]

The temper of these essays was impatient, impetuous, demanding, of a piece with a romantic reading of Lenin's accomplishment: "Decisions, real decisions, precede the facts ." One telling indicator of Lukács's optimism at this stage was his doctrine of the party. After describing orthodox socialist parties as the "external organizational expression" of the proletariat's immaturity, its "inability to impose its will and its interests on society," he proceeded to praise the Bolsheviks for dismantling the traditional party organization, and enabling "the proletariat to take all power into its own hands. . . . The parties have ceased to exist—now there is a unified proletariat ".[13]

The illusion of a revolution without political parties quickly dissipated, however: rationalist optimism gave way to rationalist pessimism. Under the impact of revolutionary setbacks in Hungary and Italy in 1919, and confronted with Lenin's critique of his position as "ultra-Leftist" in 1920, he was driven to reformulate his outlook and specifically to reconsider his position on the party. By 1923, when History and Class Consciousness was published, additional reasons for a reassessment could be found in Lukács's own theory of reification. The importance of this book was twofold. Not only did he analyze the formation and function of class consciousness, he also sharply posed the problems involved in liberating men from fixed and falsifying forms of thought. The rationality of the proletariat—its understanding of its "world-historical mission"—could no longer be taken for granted as an emergent result of historical development.

His theory of reification took as its starting point Marx's discussion in Capital of commodity fetishism. The development of capitalist society had created "the fetishistic character of economic forms, the reification of all human relations, the constant expansion and extension of the division of labor which subjects the process of production to an abstract, rational analysis, without regard to the human potentialities and abilities of the immediate producers; all these things transform the phenomena of society and, with them, the way in which they are perceived."[14] Under the reign of capital, society was mobilized for the accumulation of surplus value, rather than the cultivation of human capacities—an omission which took its toll on the victims of the system and their understanding of their situation. Here Lukács invoked Max Weber as well as Karl Marx: within modern society, most men had become prisoners of bureaucratic routine and instrumental manipulation, creatures of closed categories. The reification represented in commodity exchange thus infected the subjects of exchange: the worker, enmeshed in unthinking activities overseen by the capitalist, was in thrall to bourgeois forms of thought.

For Lukács, as for Marx, the individual in a commodity form of exchange was immediately confronted with a "fantastic relation between things," rather than the actual relation between men which produced this appearance. One of Marx's main tasks in Capital had been the penetration of appearances such as the "free exchange" of wages for labor power to reveal the exploitative logic of capital. He also seemed to follow Marx in deriving fetishistic forms "from the primary forms of human relations."[15] But he refused to join Marx in premising theory on the concrete activity of real individuals. Instead, he asserted that "no path leads from the individual to the totality."[16]

Indeed, by 1923 Lukács felt that the prevalent reification of bourgeois society had prevented most individual workers from acquiring a "true, concrete self-knowledge of man as a social being ." The categories of bourgeois consciousness presented, not the reality of domination, but the unreflected appearance of free exchange. Marxist theory thus decisively outstripped proletarian practice: "We must never overlook the distance that separates the consciousness of even the most revolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat."[17] Lukács thus reserved the possibility of true consciousness for classes alone; only a class as a whole could attain a "total point of view," and grasp the essential social relations. Sundered from Marx's original premise of individuals producing in society, and questioning the capacity of even the most enlightened individual workers for self-emancipation, his theory proceeded to present modern history as an ongoing struggle, not between interested individuals involved in antagonistic class relations, but between two conceptual entities, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

The conceptual proletariat, catalyzed by a true class consciousness, became the general subject of a true history in his eyes. But the empirical proletarians did not immediately coincide with their conceptual essence—a situation which only the enlightened efforts of the Communist Party could rectify. He thus assigned to the party the sublime role of bearing the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat, the "consciousness of its historic vocation," although he departed from Leninist orthodoxy by emphasizing the cultural and pedagogical aspects of the party's mission.[18] Nevertheless, for Lukács as for Lenin the concrete subjects of history—these particular proletarians—were deemed incapable of educating themselves, of acquiring a proper grasp of the social totality. Like the Great Legislator in Rousseau, the party in Lukács appeared a slightly fabulous creature—as if only the gnosis of the party's illuminati, by divining the "final goal," could rescue workers from the falsifying forms of thought typical of bourgeois society. Moreover, since Lukács tended to portray the subject of history ideally, as a collective "we," the individual workers threatened to become relatively inconsequential elements in a rigidly teleological movement governed by the party's interpretation of history and its "objective possibilities." Perhaps this is the real meaning of Lukács's remark that reification "over-individualizes" men: the quest for a unified totality here led, first, to the abandonment of real individuals as an ontological premise of theory, and then to an attenuation of individuation as a goal of communism.[19]

But these were not the critical aspects of his contribution. Instead, subsequent Marxists fastened on his understanding of class consciousness, and his insights, however problematically linked to a defense of the Leninist party, into the importance of a materialist pedagogy able to raise interests to the level of rational action. As the foremost philosopher of a genuinely dialectical theory of history, Lukács stimulated a new concern with the subjective aspects of Marxist theory, while redirecting attention to the human basis of revolutionary practice. If his own theory in History and Class Consciousness veered toward conceptual rigidity, perhaps this was but a by-product of his steadfast adherence to Marx's original rationalist hopes in an increasingly unpromising situation.

History and Human Existence From Marx to Merleau-Ponty James Miller UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1982

On Lukacs’ Reification Theory

Reification as an extension of Marx’s commodity form



Anthony DiMauro· MEDIUM


The Hungarian literary theorist and philosopher Georg Lukacs is generally understood to be the father of Western Marxism. This distinct strain of Marxism departed in subtle ways from the dogma of Soviet Marxism. Yet, often, Lukacs saw his theoretical formalisms as an extension of Marx’s writings of the nineteenth century. This tension is what I am primarily interested in within this discussion. That is, to what extent was Lukacs actually writing as an outgrowth of Marx? This seems to be an important question, nominally for the sake of intellectual historiography, but consequently for our understanding of Marxism qua coherent theory. Thus, it is through one of Lukacs’ most innovative theories that we might find an answer; namely his theory of reification.

The theory, first introduced in his essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, attempted to build up from two of Marx’s foundational concepts: the fetishization of commodity and the alienation of labor. However, there is much philosophical heavy work done regarding subject-object relations and new materialism — both of which we will soon see as aligning closely with the Marxian formula. Thus, in this paper, through an analysis of the theory of reification, I will attempt to show that, although Lukacs goes beyond Marx and what is put forth in his writings, he stays true to the Marxian angle and provides conclusions that seem to follow from Marx’s analysis on commodity form and materialism.

The theory, first introduced in his essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, attempted to build up from two of Marx’s foundational concepts: the fetishization of commodity and the alienation of labor. However, there is much philosophical heavy work done regarding subject-object relations and new materialism — both of which we will soon see as aligning closely with the Marxian formula. Thus, in this paper, through an analysis of the theory of reification, I will attempt to show that, although Lukacs goes beyond Marx and what is put forth in his writings, he stays true to the Marxian angle and provides conclusions that seem to follow from Marx’s analysis on commodity form and materialism.

I. REIFICATION AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PROLETARIAT

Lukacs’ essay, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, first saw light after the printing press following his conversion to communism in 1918. His newfound politics required a point of departure, and many scholars see this essay as just that. To begin, we must address what, precisely, comprises the theory of reification. There is much debate surrounding how one ought to interpret this theory. Many suggest that there is a proper reading that indicates a classically Marxist view; and another that reorients the interpretation to provide for its being an essay on the central problem of Critical Theory. I, for now, will not entertain this debate nor forward a position on whether his argument is better regarded in light of one theory over the other; I will merely be providing the structure of the argument (and its basic claims) and highlighting where reification theory falls in line with Marx’s value criteria and where it does not.

The argument

The phenomenon of reification is a divided process comprising a subjective, qualitative consciousness and an objective, quantitative mode. The latter is merely the “fetishized” commodity mode that Marx outlines in Capital I; that is, the mode by which a seemingly apparent objective strata of value exists between producers and commodities, quantifiably and without doubt in a capitalist socio-economic system. This is the mode that, for Lukacs, came to be, through the fetishization identified by Marx, the “dominant form in society” under modern capitalism such that the commodity form itself can only be “understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole.” Thus, under capitalism the appearance of objective value allows for the commodity form to become the form of objectivity as such. This is physically manifested in the mechanized industrial method, through specialization, which serves to fragment the “organic, irrational unity” of the product. This industry, then, is the facilitator of the objective moments of the reification process, and assigning the feature of “commodity” to a product or object universalizes that product or object such that a “subject commodity” is a contradiction in terms (and thus alien to the worker). The industry, as it is described, is one of the “rational” elements (as opposed to irrational) of capitalist society.

It is worth taking a moment to consider the term “irrational”, which Lukacs uses frequently to describe the non-industrial (non-specialized) product. He takes it to be the case that the underlying principle of the physical fragmentation of the industrial process is the principle of rationalization. Lukacs takes rationalization as the process by which one quantifies a system into “being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved” such that this predictive method “is only to be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements.” In other words, rationalization within capitalistic industry is the process, like the division of labor, which yields a specialized task for the worker governed by a system of laws to achieve a predicted value outcome in the form of a commodity. This has with it a subject impact as well, of which we will turn to at present.

While the objective aspect of reification has, for Lukacs, the fragmentation of the work-production process, such that there are objective value features assigned to the product through the fetishization of the commodity mode, the subject aspect obtains as a fragmentation of human consciousness. The rationalization of the industrial object also affects the subject; namely, by way of supplanting the human qualities for the predictive movements of industrial Taylorism; that is, making human qualities, in fact, “sources of error”. The human subject is merely part of the objective, “thing like” synthesis produced by the subjective aspect of reification. Thus, the individual is subordinated to the machine such that she can not utilize her unique qualities in the labor process, but merely assume the position of the pre-conditions set out by the specialization faculties of the rational system. This position is the contemplative state; that is, the state in which the rational process disallows for active states and forces human qualities to be compartmentalized into those that are “owned” or “discarded”, depending on the rational laws of the productive system. This applies outside of the industrial system as well. Lukacs sees these rational laws, and thus the facilitation of reification, taking place in society as a whole, including legal and social systems. Lukacs describes this symptomatic state (of reification) as having the following effect:


“The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system, must likewise transform the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world: it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space.”

Thus, it is not merely that reification contains rationalized laws that enforce a subjective fragmentation and a contemplative state upon the subject; but, rather, that reification creates an “objective continuum” of thing-like faculties; i.e., the worker is not “himself” personally, but merely the quantified space that denotes his performance.

In a word, then, reification is the objective-subjective commodity modal process of fragmenting through rationalization the capital-industrial system (Taylorism), and the human consciousness (contemplation) into thing-like quantities, apart from the irrational totality of the human experience and labor process that yield qualitative ownership. At this point, we can now attempt to compare this process with Marx’s writings on value criteria, and show how Lukacs overlaps with Marx from the onset, but eventually goes beyond the postulates of the 19th century thinker.

II. LUKACS AND MARX’S VALUE CRITERIA

Lukacs seems to clearly use Marx’s “fetishization” of commodity as a foundational observation to his reification theory. Besides the incessant quoting of Marx throughout the essay, he particularly draws on the commodity-as-value mode, and the claim that it is the dominant objective mode, as evidence of the reification process, securing it as an on-going cycle one is currently subjected to within capitalistic societies. However, I find Lukacs as a largely additive figure — one which used Marx as a foundation to establish new challenges to the bourgeois systems of his time. Take, for example, his use of Marxian commodity fetishism as a means to reification, or the use of subjective and objective aspects within the process of reification to account for Marx’s materialism, which differed from the materialism of the 18th century and did not see subjective dynamics as merely passive.

The former we might already say has been covered in our exposition of reification as such. Yet, it might be worth spending a few words more, as it is critical to understanding the position Lukacs holds. The fetishm of commodity is not merely the nominal beginning of the reification theory, but the consequential “thing-ifying” function operating upon objects in the physical world by way of furnishing value quantities upon them. This is very much a Marxian thought; one in which Marx might well be claimed to have said himself (in less words) in Capital I. Although it should not go without mention that Lukacs was likely drawing heavily from Marx’s Estranged Labor (1844), in which he described the labor process as alienating to the worker (i.e., alienating her from her work). The latter, subject-object dualism present in Lukacs’ reification theory is a much more subtle attempt to draw on Marx and will be the focus of the rest of this paper.

As we have said, Lukacs’ reification can be seen through the fragmentation of the objective (or apparently objective) world and the fragmentation of the subjective consciousness of an individual’s qualitative idiosyncrasies. This dualism is, in fact, perfectly in line with Marx’s materialism. As above mentioned, Marx’s materialism was a revivalism of a new sort. He thought, as Bertrand Russel eloquently expressed, that “[t]he older materialism . . . mistakenly regarded sensation as passive, and thus attributed activity primarily to the object.” Marx thought all sensation an unmistakable interaction between subject and object, by which the subject’s epistemological states (from unknown to known) necessitate a change upon the object such that it transforms from raw material to whatever it is that becomes known through the interaction.

This knowledge, however, does not come into the mind passively, as liquid into a dry sponge. In fact, neither the liquid nor the sponge are static, but both are in a “dialectical” flux that presents changes both in the knower and the object known. In his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, Marx says “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” That is, subjective “sensuousness” and objective material are both active; there is neither a passive contemplation nor a static object to be an object of that contemplation; both are active through “practice” and the activity necessarily begins the mutual dialectic. Thus, it is no surprise that Lukacs maintains the subject-object dualism, with the reification process affecting both. Here too, then, Marx would undoubtedly agree.

We have now seen that Lukacs overlaps with Marx in two major ways: through his use of commodity fetishism as the result of reification and the conception of a practical — that is active — subject and object. Here, I will say a word in conclusion.

III. CONCLUSION

Inthis paper I have provided an analysis of Lukacs’ essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat and his theory of reification understood as a modal process that, though rationalization (which utilizes specialization), fragments the subjective and objective aspects of reality, industry, and law according to the latter, and quality-consciousness according to the former. Thereafter, I showed how Lukacs aligns with the Marxian outlook in two important ways: (i.) maintaining the notion of commodity mode fetishm and (ii.) putting forth a type of implicit materialism that has with it an active subject and an active object.

Therefore, we can conclude that Lukacs, along with how he saw his work, was a furthering additive of Marx’s thought.



Written by Anthony DiMauro
Anthony DiMauro is a freelance writer in New York City. J.D. Candidate. NYU philosophy alum. You can follow him on Twitter @AnthonyMDiMauro
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