Lukacs’ Theory of Reification as an Extension of Marx’s Thought

Anthony DiMauro

22/01/2021

Much American discourse on Marxism is sloppy, sometimes intentionally so. According to some of on the right, Joe Biden is a Marxist, as is the entire Democratic Party platform and even the suburban high school teachers in Illinois.

In an effort to understand what Marxism actually is, let’s consider one influential Marxian thinker. Literary theorist and philosopher György Lukacs is generally understood to be the father of western Marxism, a strain that departed in subtle ways from Soviet Marxism. Lukacs saw his theoretical formalisms as an extension of Marx’s nineteenth-century writings. But to what extent is that true? Lukacs’ innovative theory of reification may provide a clue.

First introduced in his essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” published shortly after his conversion to communism in 1918, the theory of reification is built on two of Marx’s foundational concepts: the fetishization of commodities and the alienation of labour. It also incorporates philosophical work on subject-object relations and new materialism.

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat

Reification is a twofold process comprising a subjective, qualitative consciousness and an objective, quantitative mode. The latter mode is the “fetishized” commodity mode that Marx outlines in Capital: the mode in which an apparent, quantifiable objective stratum of value exists between producers and commodities within a capitalist socioeconomic system.

Lukacs argues that, through the fetishization identified by Marx, this mode came to become 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 the commodity form to become the form of objectivity as such. The driving force of our relationship with the world is no longer connections between humans, but between things. This is physically manifested in the mechanized industrial method, through industrial specialization, which fragments the “organic, irrational unity” of the product.

Industry, then, facilitates the objective moments of the reification process and assigns the “commodity” feature to a product or object, universalizing that product or object such that a “subject commodity” is a contradiction in terms—and thus alien to the worker. Industry in this view is one of the “rational” elements of capitalist society.

Lukacs frequently uses the term “irrational” to describe the non-industrial (non-specialized) product.

He assumes that the principle underlying the physical fragmentation (essentially, Taylorism) of the industrial process is the principle of rationalization. Lukacs understands rationalization as the process by which one quantifies a system in order to be “able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved,” a predictive method that “is only to be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements.”

In other words, rationalization within capitalist industry is the process of division of labour that assigns to each worker a specialised task governed by a system of laws, designed to achieve a predicted value outcome in the form of a commodity. This also impacts the subject.

While the objective aspect of reification involves, for Lukacs, the fragmentation of the work-production process, such that objective value features are assigned to the product through the fetishization of the commodity mode, for the subject this results in a fragmentation of human consciousness.

The rationalization of the industrial object also affects the subject because the predictive movements of industrial Taylorism supplant human qualities. Those human qualities are, in fact, seen as “sources of error.” The human subject is merely part of the objective, “thing like” synthesis produced by the subjective aspect of reification. It has no independent existence separate from industry, says Lukacs.

Thus, the individual is subordinated to the machine such that she cannot utilize her unique qualities in the labour process, but can only assume the position determined by the preconditions 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 active states and forces human qualities to be compartmentalized into “owned” and “discarded” categories, dependent 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, governing society as a whole, including its 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, 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.

Reification is the modal objective-subjective commodity process of fragmenting the capital-industrial system through rationalization (Taylorism) and the human consciousness (contemplation) into thing-like quantities, separate from the irrational totality of the human experience and labour process that yield qualitative ownership.
Lukacs’ and Marx’s Value Criteria

Lukacs uses Marx’s “fetishization” of commodity as a foundational observation in his reification theory. He quotes Marx incessantly throughout the essay, drawing particularly on the commodity-as-value mode (or form) and the claim that it is the dominant objective mode, as evidence of the reification process, a mode that ensures its continuance as an ongoing cycle to which everyone is subjected within capitalist societies.

Lukacs uses Marx to establish new challenges to the bourgeois systems of his time. He does this both by using Marxian commodity fetishism as the basis of his theory of reification and by using the subjective and objective aspects of the process of reification to account for Marx’s materialism, which differs from eighteenth-century materialism in that it does not view subjective dynamics as merely passive.

Commodity fetishism is not merely the nominal basis of reification theory, but the consequential “thing-ifying” function operating upon objects in the physical world by furnishing them with value quantities.

This is something Marx says himself (in fewer words) in Capital. Lukacs was probably drawing heavily on Marx’s 1844 work Estranged Labour, in which he describes the labour process as alienating the worker from her work. The subject-object dualism present in Lukacs’ reification theory is a much more subtle attempt to draw on Marx.

Lukacs’ reification can be seen as 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 perfectly in line with Marx’s materialism.

Marx’s materialism revised older concepts of materialism. As Bertrand Russell eloquently puts it, Marx thought that “the older materialism … mistakenly regarded sensation as passive, and thus attributed activity primarily to the object.” Marx thought that all sensation resulted from an unmistakable interaction between subject and object, by which the subject’s epistemological state changes from unknowing to knowing and that this necessitates a change in the object, transforming it from raw material to whatever it becomes known as through the interaction.

This knowledge does not enter the passive mind like liquid seeping into a dry sponge. Neither the liquid nor the sponge are static: they are both in a “dialectical” flux that changes both the knower and the known object. In his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “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 passive contemplation nor a static object that is the 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 subject-object dualism, since the reification process affects both.

Here too, Marx would undoubtedly agree. We can therefore conclude that Lukacs’ work is an extension of Marxian thought and that he himself rightly perceived it as such.

https://areomagazine.com/

Marxism’s missing link: a reader’s guide to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness

Chris Nineham 

2 November 2023

Lukács, György, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic.

 Source: Horst Strum - German Federal Archives -

Wikicommons / cropped from original / shared under license CC-BY-SA 3.0

LONG READ

One hundred years after it was published, Chris Nineham argues that it is time for a revival of Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness

Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness is one of the most important theoretical works to come out of the experience of the revolutionary wave that began in Russia in 1917. It is a unique attempt to integrate the lessons of those tumultuous years into an account of how class consciousness develops under capitalism. The result is perhaps the most comprehensive account of Marx’s method ever written, and a theoretical link between Marx’s Capital and the politics and practice of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Its scope and brilliance have made it legendary, and yet unlike that other great theoretical Marxist document of its time, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, it is rarely read or referred to nowadays, even on the left. This is partly because some of it is written in a philosophical style that can be difficult to follow. But the main reasons lie elsewhere.

Where the prison notebooks are fragmentary and open to different interpretations, History and Class Consciousness aims at a coherent, unified, revolutionary worldview. Amongst other things, this involves a frontal assault on the intellectual and spiritual viewpoint of the capitalist class. As a result, it is completely beyond the pale in bourgeois intellectual circles.

But the book’s stress on workers’ revolutionary self-activity as the key to change has also always been a challenge to the traditions of social democracy and Stalinism. Its insistence that not just revolution but revolutionary theory can only be a product of workers’ self-activity makes for difficult reading in left academia too.

Despite the resulting neglect, one hundred years after it was published, it feels intensely relevant. The tendencies to commodification and crisis in capitalism, that it discusses, are once again pressing on our daily lives. In a world wracked by economic disorder, war and climate breakdown, Lukács’ stress on both the interconnectedness of things and the irrationality of the system that connects them are compelling. His insistence on the need to understand capitalism as a totality is a challenge to the subjectivity and the suspicion of theory that still haunts parts of the left, years after the postmodern turn. Most important of all, Lukács’ account of the way that capitalism can generate both resistance and fatalism amongst working people provides an indispensable basis for a theory of revolutionary organisation and a coherent revolutionary strategy.
Historical context

The book is made up of a series of essays inspired by the revolutionary experience of 1917-1922, the greatest wave of insurgency capitalism has witnessed. Lukács was a Hungarian radical intellectual who was deeply inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917. He became a Marxist and was one of the first to join the Hungarian Communist Party when it launched in 1918. In short order, he emerged as a leader of the Hungarian workers’ republic of 1919. The experiment was crushed by the right. Lukács realised too late that, for all the heroism of those involved, it had been a premature adventure without sufficient support, particularly in the countryside, and that it had been fatally marked by ultra-left politics. After narrowly escaping Hungary alive, Lukács continued to pursue revolutionary politics in Vienna.

The essays address different theoretical questions thrown up by the Russian revolution and the revolutionary struggles that followed it, focussing in particular on how ideas change and how revolutionaries should organise. This involved understanding ‘the essence of Marx’s method and applying it correctly’ on the central issues of revolutionary theory. ‘The goal of these arguments,’ he writes in the preface, ‘is an interpretation, an exposition of Marx’s theory as Marx understood it.’1

Why was this effort so important? Partly because Marx never had time to write a systematic account of his method. Lukács also wanted to rescue Marx’s ideas from distortion by some of his followers. History and Class Consciousness is partly a polemic against the degeneration of Marxism after Marx’s death. In the period of the Second International, Marxism had effectively become a theory of the inevitability of socialism, based on the notion that class consciousness could simply be read off from economic reality. As a result it had relapsed into fatalism.

In practice this led to the view that socialism would come through parliament or that socialists’ job was simply to prepare for a revolution that would spontaneously emerge. Either way the role of socialists was conceived as essentially passive. One of the main thrusts of Lukács’ book was to show in theory how such fatalism and passivity involves a surrender to the system and to bourgeois attitudes to reality.

In order to deal with these problems, Lukács went back to Marx’s theoretical understanding of human beings’ relationship with the material world. The majority of left-wing accounts of consciousness tend to focus on ideology, on the media and other institutions in society. While not ignoring these questions, these essays root their understanding of consciousness in the way we experience the capitalist world and in particular in an analysis of commodification and reification, of the way capitalism turns every aspect of life into things for sale.

Building on Marx’s theory of alienation, Lukács produced a still unrivalled account both of how capitalism manages to sustain itself and of why it remains vulnerable to overthrow, clearly million-dollar questions for anyone who wants to see change. It also lays out a way forward. For Lukács, as for Marx himself, it is only by taking a revolutionary attitude to the world in practice and in theory that it is possible to break through the reified immediacy of capitalist reality and grasp its underlying dynamic. ‘The solution proposed by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach is to transform philosophy into praxis,’ Lukács says, by which he means revolutionary activity. Revolutionary activity is necessary not just to dismantle the structures of capitalist society, but to penetrate the illusions that capitalism creates.

History and Class Consciousness is not just an abstract call for revolutionary action. The final three essays all address the question of how revolutionaries should organise and operate. The last chapter, ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation’, which he later called the most important in the book, draws detailed political conclusions from the theoretical analysis that precedes it.

It is of course impossible to do justice to the full richness of Lukács’ argument in a few thousand words. What I aim to do here is to introduce potential readers to the main themes of the book in the order in which he addressed them. The book progresses logically, but it is worth pointing out that Lukács continually circles back on the key themes, enriching his argument as he does so. It is also worth noting that Lukács himself suggests that readers not grounded in philosophy might want to come to the most difficult chapter, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ last.
Rescuing Marxism

‘In Marxism’, Lukács says in the preface, ‘the true method by which to understand society and history has finally been discovered’. In the first two essays, ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ and ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’, Lukács explains the fundamentals of Marx’s breakthrough. First, Marxism approaches society as a whole and conceives the world as a totality of different interacting elements, something ruling-class thinking avoids. It is a totality in which the whole has supremacy over the individual elements:


‘It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into a whole new science.’

Secondly, Marxism seeks to understand society and the material world as a historical process. Understanding society historically helps us explain the origin and the development of the present and to overcome the sense of the givenness or permanence of things. So, as he comments later in the book, ‘in the case of almost every insoluble problem we perceive that the search for a solution leads us to history’, and ‘only the historical process truly eliminates the – actual – autonomy of the objects and the concepts of the objects with their resulting rigidity’.

Thirdly, Marxism recognises that these social processes are generated by human beings’ activity even if we don’t have conscious control over that activity.

This includes the institutions of society which tend to ‘appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature,’ rather than as relations between people. As Marx points out, ‘these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen, flax, etc.’

Taken together, the importance of understanding the world as a whole, the appreciation that everything around us has a history, and the recognition that society is created by human beings and is not just given, provide the necessary basis from which to comprehend the world around us. Together they involve seeing the world from the vantage point of ‘the production and reproduction of social life’. This is tremendously liberating. It doesn’t only provide us with a way of understanding the world, conceiving an interconnected and changing world as produced by human beings over time opens up the possibility of changing it anew.

In this light, the present is not static or timeless but a link between the past and the future. It is in this sense ‘a becoming’. The bourgeoisie, despite its own revolutionary origins, tend to do everything possible to close down this sense of change. They can’t completely deny the existence of history but they trivialise it, empty it of any discernible dynamic and, whenever possible, claim it is finished. In Marx’s words, their attitude tends to be ‘there was a history but there is no longer any’.

A crucial further step in overcoming the givenness of things was, for Lukács, to reassert the importance of a dialectical understanding of reality in Marxism. As Lukács explains, Marx’s method involved a transformation of the dialectical method developed by the greatest of the bourgeois philosophers in the early nineteenth century, Friedrich Hegel.

Dialectics involves grasping that things are interconnected not mechanically but dynamically. You simply cannot understand an individual fact without grasping it as part of the wider social process, which, as we have seen, has the organisation of production at its heart:


‘Only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality’ and ‘the intelligibility of objects develops in proportion as we grasp their function in the totality to which they belong.’

As an illustration, Lukács quotes a famous passage from Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital:


‘A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain circumstances. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in certain circumstances does it become capital. Torn from those circumstances it is no more capital than gold is money or sugar the price of sugar.

In particular, Lukács stresses the importance of seeing human consciousness as part of this dialectical totality. Even the greatest bourgeois philosophers were never able successfully to work out the relationship between thought and reality, to overcome what the philosopher Fichte called ‘the gaping chasm’ between the idea or concept and the thing itself. Inadequate responses to this problem include the ideas that consciousness merely reflects an external reality, which if true would leave us as prisoners of circumstances that are beyond our control. Another is the opposite belief that ideas shape the world, which would mean that all problems could be solved if we could just develop the right thoughts, concepts, or political programmes. Both these mistaken ideas continue to have a strong influence on the left.

By seeing society as a historical process, constituted in part by conscious human activity, Marxism provides the means to overcome this duality between thought and being. It involves understanding consciousness not as something which ‘reflects’ a separate reality, but as a part of an all-encompassing historical process:


‘Thus thought and existence are not identical in the sense that they “correspond” to each other or “reflect” each other, or that they “run parallel” with each other (all expressions which conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are aspects of one and the same historical, dialectical process.’

This is an absolutely crucial element of Lukács’ argument. It involves understanding consciousness dialectically as shaped by the wider totality of social relations, but not reducible to them, and potentially reacting back on the world. It allows us to break from the fatalism of reflection theory, while also understanding ideas and consciousness as always tightly related to social and historical developments.

Hegel recognised a dialectical relationship between ideas and historical development, but he saw history ultimately as an unexplained working out of the idea, in what he called ‘the absolute spirit’. Marx’s crucial move beyond Hegel was to see that self-knowledge of the totality came not from some mystical absolute, but from the life experience and struggle of a crucial part of the divided totality, the working class.

Lukács quotes Marx explaining that the working class is the negation of capitalism:


‘In the conditions of its life, all the conditions of contemporary society find their most inhuman consummation; because in the proletariat man is lost to himself but at the same time he has acquired a theoretical consciousness of this loss and is driven by the absolute imperious dictates of his misery – the practical expression of this necessity – which can no longer be ignored or whitewashed, to rebel against inhumanity.’

This life experience gives working people the need and the capacity to grasp the dynamics of the system. The bourgeoisie is so committed to the status quo that it does everything possible to suppress contradictions or any sense of becoming in the present. Those suffering most under capitalism, on the other hand, have an interest in finding elements of a possible future in the here and now:


‘Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future … only he who is willing and whose mission is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth.’

Because of its position as the exploited majority, the working class is unique in history in having both a special ability to understand it and a special need to change the world:


‘for the proletariat, the total knowledge of its class situation was a vital necessity, a matter of life and death; because its class situation becomes comprehensible only if the whole of society can be understood and because this understanding is the inescapable precondition of its actions. Thus the unity of theory and practice is only the reverse side of the social and historical position of the proletariat. From its own point of view, self-knowledge coincides with knowledge of the whole so that the proletariat is at one and the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge.’

Like everything else in Lukács’ conception of the world, none of this is given or automatic. Workers have an interest both in understanding the world and in changing it. But one is not achievable without the other, and the development of class consciousness, a self-understanding sufficient to achieve fundamental change, is by definition a conscious and contingent effort. It depends on the outcome of struggles and on an active process of intellectual clarification that has to go hand in hand with struggles as they unfold. It is an attempt to understand and guide this process which is at the heart of History and Class Consciousness.

This understanding is rooted, more than anything, in Lukács’ rescue of Marx’s theory of alienation, which Lukács discusses as reification, the way capitalism turns social processes and relations between human beings into things. Reification has a contradictory impact, on the one hand, it obscures the underlying dynamics of the system, on the other hand, at certain times, it creates the conditions that can lead to those dynamics being exposed and overturned.
The tragedy of the bourgeoisie

A central theme of the book concerns the fact that the capitalist ruling class, the bourgeoisie, is incapable of fully understanding the society that it itself has created. This idea is touched on in the first three essays, but is fully developed in the central and longest essay in the collection, ‘Reification and the Class consciousness of the Proletariat’.

Why is it important to discuss the limits of bourgeois thinking at such length? Partly it is a question of pointing out ruling-class weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Lukács highlights the contradictions in the way that the ruling class approaches society, contradictions that can break open in periods of crisis. The discussion illuminates more generally its inability successfully to take society forward and to deal with the immense challenges that face humanity. But it is also important because of the influence that ruling-class thinking has on wider society and the working class.

Lukács argues that the consciousness of both main classes is deeply shaped by the economic processes of capitalism, and in particular the commodity structure of society, and the reification this creates. This is a product of the unprecedented domination of a single economic system, and the resulting interdependence of the two main classes. The way reification plays out in the two classes is different, but as we shall see, it nevertheless has a deep impact on the lives of working people.

There are a number of related reasons for the bourgeoisie’s inability to comprehend the central dynamics of capitalism. As a minority, the capitalist class needs to deceive the majority about the robbery at capitalism’s heart – the fact that it makes its wealth by putting huge numbers of people to work and paying them less than the value of the goods they produce. But this deception is important for its own confidence too:


‘The fighting power of a class grows with its ability to carry out its own mission with a good conscience and to adapt all phenomena to its own interests with unbroken confidence in itself.’

So a paradoxical situation emerges in which even though the bourgeoisie came to power through the first openly recognised class struggles in history, faced with an emerging working class, they very quickly did everything possible to try to ‘eradicate the fact of class conflict from the consciousness of society.’

Secondly, our rulers’ inability to grasp the dynamics of the system are reinforced by a core contradiction in their economic system. Capital is a social force which is the product of the interaction of the two great classes in society. But capitalism is a system based on blind competition. As a result, capital is also ‘a social force whose movements are determined by the individual interests of the owners of capital – who cannot see and are necessarily indifferent to all the social implications of their activities’.

So, in Lukács’ words:


‘It is true that the bourgeoisie acts as a class in the objective evolution of society. But it understands that process (which it is itself instigating) as something external which is subject to objective laws and which it can only experience passively.’

This explains the dissonance in all ruling-class ideology between individualism on the one hand and what is regarded as the ‘natural’ and inevitable process of social development on the other. The exact form of this contradiction varies over time, but it always involves an impossible combination of personal voluntarism – ‘you can be who you want to be’ – and fatalism at the level of society – ‘the market must decide’.

As a result, the bourgeoisie and its supporters are unable to see the fundamental contradictions at capitalism’s heart. They have a high degree of detailed understanding of the world without being able to grasp the overall picture:


‘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 issue, while at the same time, such a clear awareness becomes fatal when it is extended to the question of the totality.’

As Marx himself pointed out, economic crises provide the clearest example of this. They are an expression of the irrationalities of the blind competition that drives capitalism, and, as such, they are bound to remain incomprehensible to capitalists. In Marx’s words, crises ‘heap theoretical fright on top of practical panic; and the dealers by whose agency circulation is effected shudder before the impenetrable mystery in which their own economic relations are shrouded.’

In general then:


‘Our rulers are then reduced to a crude empiricism when it comes to the particular issue and at best a kind of abstract, mathematical generalisation or eternal laws when it comes to trying to explain the totality.’

Reification is at the heart of this process. As we have seen, reification describes the way in which processes under capitalism take on the appearance of measurable, quantifiable ‘things’. This is inherent to commodity production itself. The exploitation of workers by capitalists generates products whose value is measured by the price they achieve on the ‘free market’ rather than their usefulness. So, the production process takes on a ‘phantom-objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people’.

Lukács argued that the problem of commodities, the starting point for Marx in his great economic work Capital, was also crucial to the wider understanding of capitalist society. It must be seen, Lukács argues, as ‘the central, structural problem of society in all its aspects’, with impacts on every part of the social world.

In making this argument, Lukács was in fact making a considerable advance on Marx, who was writing at a time when capitalism was much less developed. For Lukács, ‘all issues are subjected to an increasingly formal and standardised treatment and in which there is an ever-increasing remoteness from the qualitative and material essence of things’. This was the key, for example, to understanding the development of the bureaucracies that dominate state institutions and much of social life under capitalism:


‘Bureaucracy implies the adjustment of one’s way of life, mode of work and hence of consciousness to the general socioeconomic premises of the capitalist economy, similar to that which we have observed in the case of the worker in particular business concerns. The formal standardisation of justice, the state, the civil service, etc., signifies objectively and factually a comparable reduction of all social functions to their elements, a comparable search for the rational formal laws of these carefully segregated partial systems. Subjectively, the divorce between work and the individual capacities and needs of the worker produces comparable effects upon consciousness. This results in an inhuman, standardised division of labour analogous to that which we have found in industry on the technological and mechanical plane.

This in turn leads to a situation in which different elements of the state develop their own autonomous ‘rationality’ based on their own special needs. Engels pointed out, for example, the way in which, ‘In a modern state, law must not openly correspond to the general economic condition and be its expression, but must also be an internally coherent expression which does not, according to its own inner contradictions, reduce itself to nought. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly…’

This process can lead to tensions within and between state institutions. Lukács gives examples of interdepartmental conflicts of the civil service, ‘consider the independence of the military apparatus from the civil administration’, or between academic faculties’ he says. In the section titled, ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’, perhaps the most difficult section of the book, Lukács goes on to explain how the problems created by reification profoundly shaped the great philosophical works of the bourgeoisie. ‘Modern critical philosophy’, he argues, ‘springs from the reified structure of consciousness’.

Lukács describes the ways that different classical philosophers, unable to understand society as a product of human activity over time, struggled and failed to theorise a relationship between thought and external reality, between ‘knowing’ and ‘being’. The failure to integrate human activity and thinking into a totality has led to a situation in which philosophers either have recourse to abstract system building or simply ‘establishing the irrationality of matter as logically, the ‘ultimate’ fact’. Despite its huge achievements, bourgeois philosophy cannot break out of the contradictions that flow from its class viewpoint. Lukács summarises his argument in this section as follows:


‘Our aim here was to locate the point at which there appears in the thought of bourgeois society the double tendency characteristic of its evolution. 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.’
The standpoint of the working class

The working class inhabits the same reified world as the bourgeoisie and it is consequently influenced by bourgeois ways of thinking. At the same time, its class position means it is affected differently. For the worker, reification has two aspects.

On the one hand, reification has an objective side. It creates a world in which processes take on the appearance of objects. The way in which the free market appears to set the price of goods gives the whole of the economic process the appearance of being autonomous. It creates a world of immediacy dominated by quantity and calculation. As we have seen, the impact of reification extends to all areas of life, the legal system, the functioning of state institutions, and even philosophy, all of which are veiled in formal, apparently timeless laws.

On the other hand, workers’ labour power also becomes a commodity as it is estranged or alienated from the worker by the capitalist. The fact that the process of production ‘is progressively broken down into abstract, rationalised, specialised operations’ means that ‘the worker loses touch with the finished product.’ The objective fragmentation of the production process necessarily entails the fragmentation or alienation of the worker:


‘In this environment where time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space, an environment at once the cause and effect of the scientifically and mechanically fragmented and specialised production of the object of labour, the subjects of labour must likewise be rationally fragmented. On the one hand, the objectification of their labour-power into something opposed to their total personality (a process already accomplished with the sale of that labour-power as a commodity) is now made into the permanent ineluctable reality of their daily life. Here, too, the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system.

And:


In consequence of the rationalisation of the work process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error.

This complete dehumanisation has the effect, most of the time, of reinforcing the objective reification of production. It further obscures the real processes that are going on under the surface, and it generates passivity and a sense of powerlessness. As a result, workers are placed in a position in which they can all too easily share the fatalism and passivity that characterises the bourgeoisie:


‘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. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. As labour is progressively rationalised and mechanised his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.

Part of the reality of the working-class experience, however, points in another direction. As Lukács puts it towards the end of ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, while ‘the bourgeoisie remains enmeshed in its immediacy by virtue of its class role, the proletariat is driven by the specific dialectics of its class situation to abandon it.’

The explanation for this lies in the dynamics of capitalist production itself and specifically in the constant pressure that capitalism exerts for the increase in productivity, longer working days, shorter breaks, faster pace of production, the introduction of new technology and so on. These things appear to the boss as mere changes in quantity, as mathematical calculations. For the worker, they are life-changing attacks on her very existence. As Lukács puts it:


‘The quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.’

The question of labour time then can lead to a conflict that can illuminate their own condition as that of a commodity. ‘This is the point at which the “eternal laws” of capitalist economics fail and become dialectical and are thus compelled to yield up the decisions regarding the fate of history to the conscious actions of men.’

The result is a clash of interests. Lukács quotes Marx’s description of this process in Capital:


‘The capitalist maintains his right as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible and to make, whenever possible, two working days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to one of definite, normal duration. There is here, therefore an antimony, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class.’

The dynamics of capitalism itself then create the circumstances in which workers are periodically forced to rebel against at least the worst implications of commodification. In these struggles, workers have the possibility of starting to understand their commodity status. This self-understanding can develop into an understanding of the way the whole system operates. The special commodity nature of workers’ labour power opens up the possibility of grasping the nature of the commodity system as a whole.

Understanding the commodity nature of society is something that is implicit in workers’ situations, but it is an understanding that has to be struggled for. It is one thing, Lukács says, for workers to become aware of their own status as commodities, as the object of the economic process. But it is only when workers understand capital ‘as an unbroken process of production and reproduction’ that they will also understand that ‘they are also the subject of this process, that they produce not just one particular set of products, but capital itself.’

In complete contradiction to those who call him a determinist, Lukács is stressing here, as he does throughout History and Class Consciousness, that even in periods of struggle, workers don’t automatically or inevitably see beyond the immediacy of reification and grasp the full implications of their situation. Great struggles only increase this possibility.

This is because even in moments of crisis and conflict, the commodity structure continues to have an impact on working-class life. Reification doesn’t fall away in one moment but can be challenged only through a series of ‘mediations’, or collective leaps in consciousness and organisation. As Lukács points out ‘what is historically possible cannot be achieved simply by a straightforward progression of the immediately given (with its laws).’ The extent to which class consciousness develops will depend on the extent to which a growing understanding of the whole of society develops out of the experience of struggle and resistance. This in turn involves ‘a movement of mediations from the present to the future’ What is being raised here is the problem of the political organisation of the working class.
The theory of organisation

The last three essays in the collection focus on the question of socialist organisation. Lukács points out that the theory of political organisation was underdeveloped in his time, and History and Class Consciousness is above all an attempt to provide the basis on which to ground that theory. Lukács argues that political change is often approached in a utopian way, as a question primarily of developing a programme for a different kind of society. Utopianism always ignores the question of how change can actually happen. Looking back at the development of socialist theory in the years before the Russian revolution, Lukács argues that this was no accident:


‘The great workers’ parties grew up for the most part in periods when the problem of revolution was only conceived as influencing programmes in a theoretical way rather than as something which informed all actions of everyday life. Thus it did not seem necessary to spell out in theoretically concrete terms the nature and the probable course of the revolution.’

Even in the period of the great revolutionary upsurges that followed, for all the richness of the experience and of the debates, little theoretical work was done on the question of organisation. If utopianism – the mere imagining of a better future – was one recurring problem on the left, another was the tendency to approach the revolution as a technical question. This involves propagandising the revolution and preparing for it organisationally. The problem with both these approaches is that they encourage passivity, and don’t try to lead workers’ actually existing struggles. While utopian schemers remain aloof from the actual lives of workers and therefore have little impact, Lukács argues that organisations that simply preach for and prepare the revolution ‘always limp behind the real actions of the masses, and … impede rather than further them, let alone lead them’.

To grasp how socialists should organise means going back to the two-sided nature of the working-class experience under capitalism. We have seen that commodification both conceals the nature of exploitation behind a veil of immediacy much of the time and leads to explosive resistance at others, resistance that can open up the possibility of a wider understanding of the need for change. The impact of mass struggles on consciousness depend partly on the wider social context:


‘Where the economic process provokes a spontaneous mass movement in the proletariat there is a fundamental qualitative distinction to be made between a situation in which society as a whole is basically stable and one in which a profound regrouping of all social forces and an erosion of the bases of power of the ruling class is taking place.’

However, even in crisis situations, reification and the passivity it generates is not broken uniformly across the whole of the working class. What actually happens is not the spontaneous development of a revolutionary mood across the working class, but an ideological crisis. The most advanced sections start to draw revolutionary conclusions, while for others the past continues to weigh heavily, in Marx’s words ‘like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. For many workers, Lukács argues:


‘This ideological crisis manifests itself on the one hand in the fact that the objectively extremely precarious situation of bourgeois society is endowed, in the minds of the workers, with all its erstwhile stability.’

On the other hand, the reformist institutions of the labour movement reinforce the dead weight of alienated experience and do their best to confuse and hold back workers’ consciousness and combativity:


‘These organisations now consciously labour to ensure that the merely spontaneous movements of the proletariat (with their dependence upon an immediate provocation, their fragmentation along professional and local lines, etc.) should remain on the level of pure spontaneity. They strive to prevent them from turning their attention to the totality, whether this be territorial, professional, etc., or whether it involves synthesising the economic movement with the political one. In this, the unions tend to take on the task of atomising and de-politicising the movement and concealing its relation to the totality, whereas the Menshevik (moderate) parties perform the task of establishing the reification in the consciousness of the proletariat both ideologically and on the level of organisation.’
Challenging reification

How then can the influence of reification and bourgeois ideas be challenged? First, there needs to be a clear recognition of the unevenness of shifts in consciousness among workers:


‘the class consciousness of the proletariat does not develop uniformly throughout the whole proletariat, parallel with the objective economic crisis. 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. With the result that the standpoint of the proletariat and its reaction to the crisis is much less violent and intense than is the crisis itself.’

Because of this, the most militant, class-conscious workers need to organise separately in order to influence the wider layers. The revolutionaries will be an organised minority in the class, at least up till the revolution. Here, Lukács, for all his huge respect for the great Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, makes the point that Luxemburg’s failure to see the need for separate revolutionary organisation in the period before the First World War held back the development of clear class consciousness in practice. ‘Every “theoretical” tendency or clash of views must immediately develop an organisational arm if it is to rise above the level of pure theory or abstract opinion, that is to say, if it really intends to point the way to its own fulfilment in practice.’

Second, given the centrality of revolutionary practice to Marxist theory, socialists must not simply propagandise for revolution, comment on events, produce socialist programmes, or prepare for revolution. All of these things are necessary at different times, but they mean nothing if socialists are not seeking to develop and lead actual struggles in the here and now whenever they can. Socialists must not, however, engage in particular struggles or campaigns simply for their own sake. They must not treat them only as partial, sectional battles, but always attempt to link them to the wider struggle for change. Unless every issue is linked to the goal of transforming society, socialists end up once again caught in the immediacy of capitalist life. This idea is explored in a very rich philosophical passage towards the end of the reification essay. Reification, the immediate reality of capitalism, can only be overcome Lukács argues:


‘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 development.’

What this means in practice is that each campaign, each struggle has to be waged in such a way as to take the working class forward, so that the class is strengthened and, at least, a minority increases its confidence and understanding of its overall situation. This connection of the partial struggle to the larger project of revolution is what Lukács is referring to when he says, ‘whether an action is right or wrong is decided ultimately by the evolution of proletarian class consciousness’. It is what Lenin meant when he discussed selecting campaigning priorities on the basis of what issue was ‘the next link in the chain’.

In order to undertake this project, a new type of organisation is necessary, one that can enable ‘the interaction of spontaneity and conscious control’. Such an organisation is necessary because of the uneven consciousness that exists within the working class, the ‘prevailing disunity, the different degrees of clarity and depth to be found in the different individuals, groups, and strata of the proletariat’.

In a fascinating discussion of the characteristics necessary for a successful revolutionary organisation at the end of the methodology chapter, Lukács argues against the sect mentality and the fear of united-front work which betrays the fact that people ‘still frequently follow the sects by acting for the proletariat instead of letting their actions advance the real process by which class consciousness evolves.’ He points out, on the other hand, that social-democratic organisations tend to treat their members as mere objects. In the old social-democratic or bourgeois type of organisation, Lukács argues, ‘the individual can only occur as “the masses”, as follower, as cipher.’

In the kind of revolutionary organisations that had begun to emerge following the Russian revolution, members were seen as participants, organisers, engaged in decision making but also ‘in a state of constant, vital interaction’ with the wider movement. In this kind of organisation, theory and practice are fused, ‘the ability to act, the faculty of self-criticism, of self-correction and of theoretical development all co-exist in a state of constant interaction.’ This must involve a high level of involvement from members. A revolutionary party ‘represents a higher form of organisation than every bourgeois party or opportunist workers’ party, and this shows itself in the greater demands made by the party on its individual members.’ In this connection, Lukács quoted the theses from the Third Congress of the Communist International which states ‘all members should be involved in constant, day to day collaboration’. ‘Of course’, he goes on to say, ‘in many cases this principle exists only on paper even to this day. But this does not in the least detract from its importance.’

For the individual can only begin to overcome the reified nature of their own consciousness in the process of active, collaborative and conscious struggle. Revolutionary organisation aspires to ‘really active participation in every event, really practical involvement of all the members,’ which can only be achieved by ‘engaging the whole personality.’ This in turn requires a collective discipline which ‘can only come into being as the free and conscious deed of the most conscious element’.

The analysis in this final essay, often overlooked in discussions of the book, forms the most coherent theoretical account of the role of revolutionary organisation that exists. It is the crucial culmination of Lukács’ whole argument and the result of an intense period of involvement in and study of revolutionary struggle at the highest level. He is making the case that only revolutionary organisation of the kind he outlines can enable individual workers to challenge the impact of reification on their lives and open up the possibility of collectively making history:


‘for the first time in history the active and practical side of class consciousness directly influences the specific actions of every individual, and … at the same time it consciously helps to determine the historical process.’
Legacy

History and Class Consciousness created a lively debate when it was first published in 1923, and was well received on the revolutionary left. Lukács followed it up in 1924 with a much shorter book explicitly linking his ideas to Lenin’s revolutionary politics, titled Lenin: The unity of his thought.

The historical context however, was not favourable. History and Class Consciousness was published in the same year as the decisive defeat of the revolutionary movement in Germany and a time of gathering degeneration of the Russian revolution. Lenin was forced to withdraw from politics because of ill health, and he died in1924. Stalin and his clique meanwhile were gaining ground and inflicting defeats on Trotsky’s Left Opposition.

By the time of the fifth congress of the Communist International in 1924, the book was being denounced. Reviews by Lazslo Rudas and Abram Deborin attacked it in terms that revealed a strong continuity between Second International determinism and the crude economism of emerging Stalinist ideology. Once again, the argument was being made that consciousness should be understood as a reflection of economic developments.

Lukács wrote a defence of History and Class Consciousness titled Tailism and the Dialectic in 1925 or 1926 which was only discovered in the 1990s. The book brilliantly reconfirmed and elaborated his positions. Further defeats for the revolutionary movements followed however, and Stalin consolidated his grip on power in Russia through the 1920s, abandoning the internationalism so central to the Bolshevik tradition, committing to ‘socialism in one country’ and moving against the ideas and the activists of October 1917.

Faced with the ebbing of the revolutionary tide and Stalin’s vicious clampdown on opposition, Lukács moved to the right and adopted a political position broadly in line with Stalin’s abandonment of the revolutionary project. Soon after, he withdrew from politics altogether focussing instead entirely on cultural questions. Much later in 1967 he wrote a new preface to the book, distancing himself from its revolutionary dialectic.

Despite serial attacks, neglect by much of the left and the fact that it was disowned by its author, History and Class Consciousness has proved irrepressible. It has gained new audiences at moments of revolutionary resurgence, in particularly the great upsurges that began in 1968. As crisis returns to the heart of the system, it is high time for a revival.

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.

Chris Nineham  is a founder member of Stop the War and Counterfire, speaking regularly around the country on behalf of both. He is author of The People Versus Tony Blair and Capitalism and Class Consciousness: the ideas of Georg Lukacs.

Lukács: Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat

Tony McKenna 

9 August 2010

Theory

LONG READ

Georg Lukács made a large contribution to Marxist theory, but especially significant are the series of essays he wrote under the title History and Class Consciousness (published in 1923). Of these the crowning achievement remains the section Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat’.

Lukács’ Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat is a disorganized but masterful essay written in the aftermath of the greatest revolution ever known. 1917 shook the entire world and all over the poor and oppressed were given a powerful impetus, not least because now history could no longer appear as a phantasmagoria, a nebulous and remote myriad of wishes, desires and policies shaped in the minds of Tsars or ministers and formalized in huge, fortified buildings which exclude the vast majority of humanity.

1917 powerfully revealed to man ‘the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future’ and demonstrated that these tendencies exist in society’s midst. The present was revealed through consciousness as ‘a process of becoming’.

History morphed into something which people could lay their hands upon and make their own, thereby changing the world. The effect that this has upon a single life is beautifully described by John Reed when he records the following in the days after the October revolution:

‘Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dike of jewels heaped on the barren plain.

The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture – “Mine!” he cried, his face all alight. “All mine now! My Petrograd!”’

Lukács’ greatest works are imbued with this sense of profound democratic freedom. But his essay has been widely described as idealist, as over-playing the role of consciousness in the development of class struggle. The reason for this is quite clear – the essay itself is a concentrated examination of the forms of consciousness which take shape in, and affect, bourgeois society. To someone unable to penetrate the heart of this work – its methodological depth – it will appear to be idealist precisely because of its subject matter (consciousness).

But at no point does Lukács abandon the materialist standpoint. Although the focus of the essay is consciousness and its reified states, that from which all other categories are deduced (and take shape from) is the commodity form itself. Lukas never once loses sight of this.
Commodities, capitalism and class consciousness

The Hungarian Marxist makes this observation about capitalism: ‘The universality of the commodity form is responsible both objectively and subjectively for the abstraction of the human labour incorporated in commodities’. Lukács explains how this works on both objective and subjective levels in capitalist society:

‘objectively in so far as the commodity form facilitates the equal exchange of qualitatively different objects….subjectively, this formal equality of human labour in the abstract…becomes the real principle governing the actual production of commodities’.

Abstract labour becomes the ‘real principle governing the actual production of commodities’. It imposes its ‘quantitative’ character on the production process. This development came with the development of industrial capitalism.

Before the development of modern capitalism, any one product was the visible and organic unity of a series of different operations. The cobbler would be skilled in the various stages of work required to make the shoe. He was overseer to the whole process and the completed article was the conscious end of his endeavours.

Moving from handicrafts through to factory production, the qualititative element is increasingly phased out. The labour process is relentlessly broken down: split into isolated and specialised routines, such that the end product is lost to the individuals that create it.

As Lukács puts it – ‘the unity of a product as a commodity no longer coincides with its unity as a use-value’.

The ‘rationalisation’ of the labour process also impacts on the way that labour is understood and organized. Lukács states, ‘the time necessary for work to be accomplished…is converted, as mechanisation and rationalisation are intensified, from a merely empirical average figure, to an objectively calculable work stint that confronts the worker as a fixed and established reality’.

The X hour day, time sheets, clocking in machines and the factory gong are not the super objective, time honoured means by which a fair and precise exchange of labour for wages is facilitated. They are instead expressions of the change in character undergone by the labour process itself, whereby ‘time sheds its qualitative ,variable flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable things’.

The reality of social existence is, in a certain way, the same for both proletariat and bourgeoisie but only in its immediacy. The means by which this immediacy ‘becomes’ for both classes are fundamentally different. And here Lukács makes a vital point:

‘Engels talks about quantity to quality – water to steam…he ignores the fact that when the point of view is changed even transitions which seem to be purely quantitative now become qualitative’.

Lukács gives an example: ‘let us compare these two series (the growth or reduction in the sum of money and the increase or decrease in labour time)……in the first case we are confronted by what Hegel calls a ‘nodal line of measure relations’ whereas in the second case every change is one of quality in its innermost nature although its quantitive appearance is forced on to the worker by his social environment’.

Though both the capitalist class and the proletariat are expressions of human alienation, differences in exploitation to the capitalist appear as necessarily quantitative. He may tally up profits at the end of the year and based on this, with an eye toward re-investment and competition, make a brisk calculation as to how much the workers’ wages should increase or fall. But for the worker this same calculation becomes a determiner of ‘his whole physical, mental and moral existence’.

An increase or decrease in wage for the worker is a qualitative fact which permeates their inner life. It determines standard of living. It establishes whether or not the worker’s family are able to take a holiday in the summer or the quality of health care the worker’s children receive etc.

This is profoundly important because it shows just how the bourgeoisie is bound to the most immediate and quantifiable forms of thought by its objective class position. For the bourgeoisie ‘method arises directly from its social existence….mere immediacy….. constituting its outermost barrier, one that cannot be crossed’. Lukács goes on examine how this is reproduced across the various spheres of social life. He notes that the ‘need to systematise and to abandon empiricism, tradition and material dependence was the need for exact calculations’.

In law, for instance, this meant the old forms where justice was dispensed according to living tradition and the highly specific aspects of each case were replaced by ‘a rational systematisation of all statutes regulating life, which represents, or at least tends towards a closed system applicable to all possible and imaginable cases’.

More and more do the judges become the mere mouthpiece of a rigid set of laws endowed with a ‘ghostly objectivity’. This is the essence of reification – the sense of powerlessness and passivity brought about by those things which, though created by human beings, assume a life over and above them.

As a result of ‘the splitting of man into an element of the movement of commodities’, every semblance of the whole is lost. The proletarian is denied the chance to be master of his work, to envisage the total process by which is created an end product, and to realise his own personality.
Ideology and consciousness in capitalist society

The commodity form exerts its influence more broadly. A single factory is a highly organized unit but the same factory considered alongside others enters into a broken and disordered chain. When it comes into contact with other factories, that which brings them together is nothing more than arbitrariness. It is blind compulsion, the force of competition.

There is nothing necessary in the connection. A conscious, totalizing principle is almost always absent (war time economies are sometimes exceptions). Lukács says ‘The Capitalist process of rationalisation based on private economic calculation requires that every manifestation 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 so far as it takes possession of society.’

This structure is expressed in and through the development of the sciences: ‘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….the more highly developed it becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of practical laws’.

Trotsky once wondered how it was possible that the man who formulated the theory of evolution was in the same moment a devoted believer in God. The answer, in part, lies in the fragmentation of the whole as a necessary feature of bourgeois thought (though Darwin’s theory was a splendid confirmation of dialectics, and therefore totality and process within certain limits, it nevertheless remained isolated in the sphere of nature).

When scientists seek totality intuitively and unconsciously, for there is no other means available to them within the parameters of bourgeois thought, they often discover the notion of the whole preserved in the fixed and unchanging guise of God. Of course there are scientists who reject God, or do not even try to grasp the ontological problems of our age.

There are a good few scientists (and we see this a lot nowadays) who raise an ontological problem over and above their own specialisation; a problem which does indeed confront all human beings in totality. But this problem is not deduced from a concrete analysis of the connections between those human beings and the processes which animate them, but instead comes into being fully formed and therefore, like God himself, artificially whole.

Lukács describes how in philosophy, too, ‘the impossibility of comprehending the whole with the conceptual framework of the rational partial systems’ expresses itself. This time it can be found in the form of the unknowable ‘thing in itself’(Kant). Lukács concedes that ‘bourgeois thought landed in these antinomies after great mental strife’ but the ‘irrational chasm between the subject and object of knowledge’ is the inevitable resting place ‘of a theoretical approach based on unmediated contemplation’.

So it is that, once again, Lukács returns to the notion of immediacy, or the ‘unmediated’, as not simply an aspect of bourgeois thought but its very foundation. Bourgeois thought expresses the fact that bourgeois society ‘acquires increasing control of the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs’ but that society is unable to unite those details in a rational system.

Bourgeois thinking corresponds to this in so much as it too is unable to escape those ‘details’ in the theoretical realm, but neither can it comprehend them as ‘aspects of a totality, i.e the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change’. And so it is compelled to concentrate on these details so the details themselves emerge as the reality at the expense of the connections between them. A concept is raised ‘in itself’ and therefore brought into conflict with other isolated concepts whereupon we experience the lifeless division between ‘subject and object, freedom and necessity, individual and society, form and content etc’.

Lukács describes how this became apparent in the bourgeois understanding of history which also ‘became polarised into two extremes: on the one had, there were the ‘great individuals’ viewed as the autocratic makers of history, on the other hand, there were the ‘natural laws’ of the historical environment. They both turned out to be equally impotent.’

In a paragraph which contains a certain sadness Lukács describes what the acceptance of immediacy means for a single person and their everyday life in society. He writes:

‘anyone who insists upon immediacy may never go beyond this first sight his whole life long – it may look as though the next stage implied a purely intellectual exercise, a mere process of abstraction. But this is an illusion….where the immediately given form of the objects, the fact of their existing here and now and in this particular way appears to be primary, real and objective, whereas their relations seem to be secondary and subjective. For everyone who sees things in such immediacy every true change must seem incomprehensible’.

This is relevant today. On a psychological level there are many people to whom real change seems incomprehensible and also, therefore, frightening. This is the result, maybe, of the depth of reification which 21st century society experiences. There are others who embrace immediacy and exalt their own ignorance.

We find, in the gutter press, the often abstract but well intentioned attempts to help the most oppressed in society described as ‘politically correct’ and met with bitter venom. The struggle to move beyond immediacy becomes stigmatized yet the very narrowness of human thinking is raised up and applauded; the limited movement of thought within the rigid confines of ‘common sense’ is regarded as an expression of realism and wisdom.

Many of the ugliest things in society – racism, sexism, prejudice – emerge somehow fortified by their superficiality and baseness. Part of the greatness of Lukács’ essay lies in the fact that it provides a powerful context from which some of this can be understood today.
Overcoming the limits of contradictory consciousness

But is it possible for human beings to overcome this narrowness, to transcend immediacy? If so, then how?

Lukács writes that although ‘immediacy….is the relation of bourgeois thought to the social and historical reality of bourgeois society’ the other great social class, the proletariat, is necessarily forced beyond immediacy because ‘for the worker labour-time is not merely the objective form of the commodity he has sold, i.e his labour power (for in that form the problem for him too is one of the exchange of equivalents i.e a quantative matter)’.

But in addition is the determining form of his existence as subject, as human being. Lukács as a genuine Marxist recognised the importance of ‘the special objective character of labour as a commodity, it’s ‘use value’ (its ability to yield surplus produce)’ It is the sale of this commodity upon which the whole system rests.

A worker is unique as he is, in a manner of speaking, a living commodity for he ‘directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity’. Hence the consciousness of the true nature of a social system based on the sale of commodities is for the proletariat at the same time a consciousness of self.

We have seen how the bourgeoisie is compelled to perceive ‘the subject and object of the historical process and of social reality in a double form’ but for the proletariat social reality does not exist in this way – consciousness ‘is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self consciousness of the object’.

Lukács states that ‘when the worker knows himself as a commodity…..the special nature of labour as a commodity which in the absence of this consciousness acts as an unacknowledged driving wheel in the economic process now objectifies itself by means of this consciousness.’ It becomes ‘abundantly clear that quantification is a reified and reifying cloak spread over the true essence of the object and can only be regarded as an objective form of reality inasmuch as the subject is uninterested in the essence of the object to which it stands in a contemplative or (seemingly) practical relationship’.

It is only from the standpoint of the proletariat that history ceases to be:

‘an enigmatic flux to which men and things are subjected. It is no longer a thing to be explained by the intervention of transcendental powers or made meaningful by reference to transcendental values. History is, on the one hand, the product (albeit the unconscious one) of man’s own activity, on the other hand it is the succession of those processes in which the forms taken by this activity and the relations of man to himself (to nature, to other men) are overthrown’.

But it is not enough to raise this standpoint in consciousness alone. What is required is the active intervention which such consciousness paves the way for. Repeatedly Lukács emphasises the importance of practice and in this connection cites Marx and Engels.

‘Proletarian thought is practical thought and as such is strongly pragmatic. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” Engels says, providing an idiomatic gloss on Marx’s second Thesis on Feuerbach:

“The question whether human thinking can pretend to objective truth is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”

This pudding, however, is the making of the proletariat into a class: the process by which its class consciousness becomes real in practice. This gives a more concrete form to the proposition that the proletariat is the identical subject-object of the historical process, i.e. the first subject in history that is (objectively) capable of an adequate social consciousness.

It turns out that the contradictions in which the antagonisms of the mechanics of history are expressed are only capable of an objective social solution in practice if the solution is at the same time a new, practically-won consciousness on the part of the proletariat. Whether an action is functionally right or wrong is decided ultimately by the evolution of proletarian class consciousness.

This is vitally important, for it shows that in Lukács the relationship between consciousness and practice is an organic one. Lukács appreciates very well the dialectical tension between freedom and necessity. He understands that the objective economic evolution of society creates the conditions and the necessity for its revolutionary transformation, but also that without the conscious appreciation of this necessity on the part of the proletariat the situation comes to nothing.

Class consciousness is the mediation through which the actions of the proletariat can be self determined and therefore free. It is in and through this process that the revolutionary party is formed.

Tragically, the 1917 revolution was physically annihilated. Revolutionary movements rose throughout the world and were betrayed and defeated while the Stalinist apparatus grew increasingly powerful.

Through fear or despair Lukács tried to accommodate Stalinism – he, and the word is fitting, denounced his own ‘History and Class Consciousness’ turning his back on ‘political’ activity and confining his Marxism to the consideration of literature, with the important exception of a brief period of activity in 1956.

Lukács survived until 1971. It is hard not to contrast his situation with that of Leon Trotsky who made not a single concession to Stalinism and was subsequently murdered. Trotsky’s sacrifice was infinitely more profound, but we should remember that there is something of the tragic too in the story of this brilliant Marxist theoretician who was compelled to renounce the creativity, which had once inspired him and filled him with so much hope.

Lukács has left us with his ‘History’ and his examination of Lenin (Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his thought, published in 1924). These works are powerful affirmations of the dialectical materialist tradition and therefore great resources, especially for the many today who have never heard of Georg Lukács.



Tony McKenna
Tony McKenna’s journalism has been featured by Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, Salon, The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, New Internationalist, The Progressive, New Statesman and New Humanist. His books include; Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective (Macmillan); The Dictator, the Revolution, the Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin (Sussex Academic Press); a first novel – The Dying Light (New Haven Publishing) Angels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives (Zero Books), Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art (Zero Books) and The War Against Marxism: Reification and Revolution (Bloomsbury). He can be reached on Twitter at @MckennaTony

 

Ambitious workers park the office politics when employer is struggling, study suggests

Workers curb competition against competitors to unite against external rivals when employer faces either losing sector status or can improve reputation, research suggests

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CITY UNIVERSITY LONDON

One of the study authors, Professor Hans Frankort, Professor of Strategy at Bayes Business School, City, University of London, said: “Sports – particularly motorsports – can be a good proxy for several other industries as they are extremely competitive: if you don’t perform and progress you may be out. Workers in sectors such as consultancy and financial services face similar pressures.”

The peer reviewed paper, which has been published on the website of the Academy of Management Journal, found that riders systematically adjusted their internal and external overtakes based on their team’s competitive threats and opportunities, as well as the resources available to those competitor teams.

Professor Frankort said: “Earlier research has shown that employees compete to improve their relative standing in the eyes of their employer, in the hope of climbing the career ladder. Such behaviours may include poaching colleagues’ clients or even disrupting or sabotaging their work. This study suggests that ambitious workers tend to modify those behaviours when the standing of their organisation is about to deteriorate or improve. Why? Because they see the standing of their firm as an important factor in deciding who to compete with to advance their career.

“If the company has a chance to out-perform better-resourced rivals, employees’ workplace behaviour is geared towards being seen to be a key contributor to that success. For example, a salesperson might try to poach colleagues’ clients. However, if a firm is facing threats, such as losing market share to smaller rivals, workers may feel that infighting is poor form. Instead, they would focus on competing against rival firms. Inside the firm, individuals may simply want to blend into the background when their company is going through difficult times.”

The findings suggest, Professor Frankort said, that employers can influence the nature of their employees’ competitive actions. For example, employers could highlight threats to the firm from underdog firms or its opportunities against bigger rivals.

The research also found that riders’ overtaking attempts were shaped by their contractual position with the team. For example, replacement riders – the MotoGP equivalent of agency workers – attempt more overtakes against teammates when the team is doing well and against all riders when the team is struggling.

The paper concludes: “It may be that replacement riders are keen to signal their skills relative to incumbents, hoping to secure a permanent contract.”

Riders whose contracts will not be renewed challenge their teammates on the track and are less likely to overtake riders from other teams – suggesting they feel detached from the team and even disgruntled with it.

These findings, Professor Frankort noted, give a rare insight into how employees on various kinds of contracts behave.

The other authors of the paper, Revving up or backing down? Cross-level effects of firm-level tournaments on employees’ competitive actions, are Patrick Hallila from Imperial College London and Professor Paolo Aversa from King’s College London.

Notes to editors

For further information (journalists only) or to request an interview please contact Chris Mahony, Senior Communications Officer, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London

M: +44 (0)7867 232852   E: chris.mahony@city.ac.uk

Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) is a leading global business school driven by world-class knowledge, innovative education, and a vibrant, diverse community. The School has been at the forefront of business education for more than 50 years, developing leaders who help businesses thrive through change and uncertainty.   

Located in the heart of one of the world’s top financial centres, the School has strong links to both the City of London and the thriving entrepreneurial hub of Tech City.   

The faculty members are experts in their fields, producing cutting-edge research with real-world impact. The 2021 Research Excellence Framework results assessed 92 per cent of its research to be world-leading or internationally excellent.  

The School is a signatory of the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). It is home to the renowned ETHOS Centre for Responsible Enterprise, and the Centre for Charity Effectiveness, one of the UK’s leading non-profit and philanthropy centres.

The School educates nearly 5,000 students each year on globally renowned courses across all levels of study including undergraduate, postgraduate and Executive Education. On graduating, students join a strong alumni community of 50,000 from 160 countries.

The new name replaces Cass Business School. In June 2020, there was increasing awareness of the links between Sir John Cass and the slave trade, which made the School, and its stakeholders, reflect on whether such a link was consistent with the School’s values. The School decided that, in line with its values and principles, it should change its name and increase its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Read more about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work at Bayes.

The School had carried the Cass name between 2002 and 2020 after a donation from the Sir John Cass Foundation, an educational charity which has now been renamed The Portal Trust.

---

JOURNAL

Academy of Management Journal

DOI

10.5465/amj.2022.0946 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Ambitious workers park the office politics when employer is struggling, study suggests

Marxists.org

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat by Geor...

The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability shows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind necessarily ...