"The Dialectic and 'The Party':

Lukács' History and Class Consciousness Reconsidered"

Peter Hudis

The startling discovery, made several years ago in an archive in Moscow, of a
heretofore unknown manuscript defending History and Class Consciousness by
its author, Georg Lukács, seemed destined to impel a reconsideration of one of
the most important chapters in the history of Marxism.
From the moment of its publication in 1923, History and Class Consciousness
was renowned for its creative attempt to restore the revolutionary nature of
Marx's thought through an extension and renovation of Hegel's dialectic. Neither
the Communist International's denunciation of the book in 1924, nor Lukács'
later "self-criticism" of it when he capitulated to Stalinism, lessened its
appeal for several generations of radicals drawn to its innovative discussion of
class consciousness, reification, and the dialectical interrelation between
subject and object. Nevertheless, Lukács' failure to speak out in defense of his
book following the attacks on it in 1924 led many to conclude that he
abandoned its perspective soon after its publication.Now that the manuscript of Lukács' defense of History and Class
Consciousness — entitled Tailism and the Dialectic, written in 1925 or 1926 — has been
published and translated into English (Verso, 2000), it becomes possible to see to
what extent, if any, the history of Marxism needs to be rewritten after all.

FROM PHILOSOPHY TO "THE PARTY"

Though Tailism and the Dialectic puts to rest the notion that Lukács
renounced History and Class Consciousness as soon as it was attacked by the Communists
in 1924, anyone looking for a serious defense or development of its
philosophic concepts will be sorely disappointed. Lukács does not really discuss the
major theoretic concepts in History and Class Consciousness. He is mainly
concerned with responding to the charge leveled by Abram Deborin and László Rudas
that his stress on "subjective" factors like class consciousness and
"idealistic" dialectics meant that he downplayed the centrality of Lenin's notion of a
"vanguard party."

Lukács' effort to answer Deborin and Rudas' attack shows the limits of taking
the ground of one's opponent. It is not he, Lukács argues, who downplays "the
role of the party," but rather his critics. He refers to "the open Menshevism
of Deborin and the tail-ending of Rudas."

Lukács' defensiveness on the question of "the party" has to be seen in the
context of the times. Though few party hacks were likely to wade through Lukács'
dense discourses on dialectics, any sign of lack of enthusiasm for the
"vanguard role" of the Bolshevik Party would have earned him instant expulsion from
the Communist movement. Yet Lukács' focus on "the organization question,"
which takes up over half of Tailism, is not disingenuous. It represents a genuine
effort on his part to defend his basic theoretic position — even though "the
party" is directly discussed only in the final (and perhaps least read) essays in
History and Class Consciousness.

In Tailism, Lukács contends that Deborin and Rudas suffer from a "vulgar
view" of history in that they downplay subjective agency. For them, society is
just an extension of nature. The subjective element is minimized and the role of
class consciousness takes a back seat.

In contrast, Lukács argues: "Everything depends on class consciousness, on
the conscious will of the proletariat. This is where the moment of decision
lies....The fate of the proletarian revolution depends on the subjective element."

But this hardly means that Lukács stresses the spontaneous self-activity of
the masses. He writes, "There is a distance between the consciousness of the
situation that the proletariat actually possesses and the consciousness that it
could have." What "bridges" that distance is "the party": "The task of the
proletarian party is to overcome the distance between being and consciousness."
Lukács therefore insists that "Lenin's organizational forms are
essential...In no way are they, as Comrade Rosa Luxemburg thought, useless 'paper'
guarantees.... The organizational forms of the proletariat, in first rank the party,
are real forms of mediation, in which and through which develops and is
developed the consciousness that corresponds to the social being of the proletariat."

Lukács even goes so far as to quote approvingly Lenin's 1903 statement that
"Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without,
that is, only from outside the sphere of relations between workers and
employers." Lukács adds: "The consciousness of the masses at any one time does not
develop independently of the party."

Decades later, in his Preface to the 1967 edition of History and Class
Consciousness, Lukács remarked that his book had tried to "out-Hegel Hegel." It
appears that his 1925-26 "defense" of it tried to out-Lenin Lenin. Of course, at
the time none of Lenin's "followers," Lukács included, had any inkling that
Lenin had written a detailed study of Hegel's Science of Logic in 1914-15 which
went further philosophically than even Lukács in embracing such Hegelian
concepts as "subjectivity," "self-movement," and "transcendence." But since Lenin
kept his Hegel Notebooks to himself and never connected his philosophic
reorganization to the question of "the party," it made no impact on the "Leninists."

In any case, it is clear from Tailism and the Dialectic that despite all of
the emphasis on "class consciousness," for Lukács it isn't the proletariat
which is subject of history, but rather the party.

This should come as no surprise. In the period in which he wrote Tailism
(1925-26), Lukács published essays on Moses Hess and Lassalle, in which he
accommodated himself to established "Marxism." Moreover, the tendency to fetishize
the party is evident even in History and Class Consciousness.
It is true that organization is only fully discussed at the end of the book.
And it is also true that, whether in the 1920s, when it first appeared, or the
1960s, when it was the rave of the New Left, what excited everyone was not
the book's discussion of organization, but its probing of alienation,
reification, and dialectics, especially in the essays "What is Orthodox Marxism" and
"Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat."

The truth, however, is that Lukács' organizational "orthodoxy" on "the party"
flowed from his original philosophic contribution — his essay on Reification.
To Marx, reification refers to the process whereby living labor is
transformed into a thing through the regimen of the factory clock — that is, by the worker
being subjected to the discipline of socially necessary labor time. Lukács,
in contrast, treated reification as a universal, as what effects everyone. Not
only is labor reified, turned into a thing, he argued; in capitalist society,
thought is reified as well.

This theory of reification has proved immensely popular, since it seems to
explain everything — from the commodification of culture to the increasingly
one-dimensional character of capitalist ideology. Yet it places advocates of
revolutionary transformation in a thorny contradiction.
To Marx, the reification of labor is met by the resistance of the laborer,
who resists from within the effort to transform her laboring activity into a
component part of capital. But if even our thought is reified, wherein resides
the internal point of resistance? It is impossible, from the vantage point of
Lukács' theory of reification, to answer the question. Either one gives up the
effort to postulate a subject of resistance altogether (as did the Frankfurt
School and the postmodernists), or one reaches for an outside force to resolve
the contradiction — the vanguard party. The latter became Lukács' approach.

Lukács' defense of History and Class Consciousness makes explicit what should
have been clear all along — that his original philosophic categories are unable
to account for proletarian self-activity and so he ends up deifying "the
party."

DIALECTICS VS. ENGELS

This is not to say that organization is the only issue taken up in Tailism.
The latter part of the manuscript contains some interesting material related to
dialectics of thought.
In response to Deborin's attack on him for critiquing Engels' effort to work
out a dialectics of nature, Lukács shows he wasn't saying that dialectics
applies only to society and not to nature. Instead, History and Class Consciousness
argued that there is no immediate link between dialectics and nature since
our "metabolic interchange with nature" is mediated socially.
Tailism also returns to Lukács' critique of Engels for claiming that
"practice," especially the progress of experiment and industry, will prove the
incorrectness of Kant's notion of the "thing-in-itself." History and Class
Consciousness brilliantly demolished this claim, showing that "in fact, scientific
experiment is contemplation at its purest."
Tailism lacks the audaciousness of his earlier critique of Engels, but
neither does it take it back. Lukács says that Engels failed to understand that for
Kant "practice" actually confirms the validity of the "thing-in-itself." He
writes: "It is thoroughly possible to be an agnostic in a philosophic sense in
relation to reality, without bringing this agnosticism to bear on one's
practical attitude to the external world."

In the few places where Lukács directly discusses Hegel, we get some
brilliant insights, as when he writes: "Categories that in Hegel himself, in the most
abstract and idealist part of his Logic ("The Logic of the Concept") form the
peak of his system, become real, practical moments of the proletarian class
struggle." Unfortunately, he does not develop this. By the end he retreats to
saying, "If Marx, in overturning Hegel's philosophy, has at the same time
rescued its real core, then he precisely rescued most from the Logic of Essence."

Even when he is most philosophic, however, the question of organization takes
precedence. Again and again Lukács denies that "workers can arrive at class
consciousness through the mere labor process and the spontaneous elemental
struggles against employers." Class consciousness, he insists, can only be
attained through the agency of "the party."

VANGUARD FETISHISM TODAY

Lukács' vanguardism is being touted as the "newness" of Tailism, as seen from
the Introduction to it by John Rees and the Postface by Slavoj Zizek.
Rees, a Trotskyist, is escatic at finding that Lukács fetishized "the party,"
since he is a vanguardist himself. His discussion of the theoretic issues
borders on the banal. He describes Lukács' theory of reification thusly: "Lukács
rediscovered the idea that a social construct, the market, appears to the
actors trapped within it as a natural necessity, which imposes a pattern on their
lives in a manner that they themselves are powerless to resist....This is
precisely the idea of Marx's writings on alienation and commodity fetishism."

Nothing is further from the truth. To Marx it is not "the market" that
defines alienation and commodity fetishism, it is the perversity of capitalist
production, wherein the machine assumes mastery over the living laborer. Marx never
tired of showing that what happens in "the market" is simply a consequence of
the alienation of labor at the point of production. Rees' vulgarization not
only turns Marx on his head, it hardly does justice to Lukács.

A much more serious analysis is provided by Slavoj Zizek's Postface. Zizek is
drawn to Lukács' embrace of Lenin's theory of organization because for him it
represents a break from the notion that revolution depends on "objective
conditions." To Zizek, revolution depends on The Event, the willful action of
intervening at a crucial juncture to seize the initiative. Lukács' emphasis on
"the party," he argues, restores the subjective, willful component of Marxism
against objectivistic tendencies.

On these grounds Zizek, like Lukács, rejects Rosa Luxemburg's emphasis on
spontaneity and revolutionary democracy in her debates with Lenin. Lenin's
contribution, Zizek says, was "to take a leap, throwing oneself into the paradox of
the situation, seizing the opportunity and intervening, even if the situation
was 'premature,' with a wager that the very 'premature' intervention would
radically change the 'objective' relationship of forces."

What this perspective fails to notice is that Luxemburg's debates with Lenin
were never about whether or not to "seize the moment." As Luxemburg wrote in
Reform or Revolution, "Since the proletariat is not in the position to seize
political power in any other way than 'prematurely'...the objection to the
'premature' conquest of power is at bottom nothing more than a general opposition
to the aspiration of the proletariat to possess itself of state power."

Moreover, she hailed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 on the grounds that "they alone
dared." And she took the initiative in leading the 1919 German Revolution,
even though she realized that the masses were ill-prepared and could suffer a
defeat. At no point did Luxemburg display any reticence about "seizing the
moment" "prematurely."
What was at issue for Luxemburg was the need not to constrain the revolution
within narrow party dictates which vitiate revolutionary democracy. In her
debates with Lenin she argued that the suppression of revolutionary democracy
after the seizure of power would compromise the liberatory character of the
revolution itself.

Zizek, to the contrary, writes: "Here, we should reject this blackmail (as
Lukács does a propos of Rosa Luxemburg): there are no 'democratic' procedural
rules one is a priori prohibited to violate....The political legacy of Lukács is
thus the assertion of the unconditional, ruthless, revolutionary will, ready
to 'go to the end,' effectively to seize power and undermine the existing
totality....Lenin was right: after the revolution, the anarchic disruptions of the
disciplinary constraints of production should be replaced by an even stronger
discipline."

Clearly, what matters for Zizek is the seizure of power, and not what happens
after. But that is not the burning question facing this generation. The
question facing this generation is not "how to seize power," but how to ensure that
the revolutionary process continues after the seizure of power — that is, for
the revolution continue "in permanence" until all forms of alienation are
totally uprooted.

Luxemburg's emphasis on spontaneity and revolutionary democracy remains a key
component of the effort to work this out for our times. Even here, of course,
we must be critical, since she too held to the elitist concept of the "party
to lead" and never related dialectics to the problem of revolutionary
organization. As Tailism and the Dialectic makes clear, Lukács' didn't either. His
legacy leads, as does post-Marx Marxism as a whole, to a cul-de-sac on the
question of organization. A totally new beginning must be made, which cannot be
found within the parameters of either a purely political critique of "Leninism" or
a philosophic one which shies away from jamming together dialectics and
organization.