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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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.

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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
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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.