Chapter one The Philosophy of Praxis marx and lukács

In this chapter, I discuss the philosophy of the early Marx from a Lukácsian perspective, as background to the exposition of Lukács’s own parallel attempt to resolve the problems first posed by Marx. Considerable differences separate these thinkers, and there is always the risk that in comparing them in this manner the identity of one will be submerged in that of the other. I will do my best to avoid an artificial identification of the two positions where they do actually differ; however, I will argue that in spite of real differences we are dealing here with a specific philosophical doctrine, which I will call “philosophy of praxis,” and which is shared by a number of thinkers.

While writing his notebooks in prison, Gramsci used the phrase “philosophy of praxis” ambiguously to signify Marxism in general and his own cultural interpretation of Marxism. In essence Gramsci argues that all knowledge is situated in a cultural context, itself based on a class-specific worldview. No domain of knowledge and no corresponding domain of being is independent of society. That interpretation, which he called “absolute historicism,” resembles in broad outline the Hegelian Marxism of Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, Marcuse, and the early work of Marx himself.¹ It seems appropriate therefore to call this whole trend “philosophy of praxis,” not as a euphemism for Marxism in general but rather to distinguish a particular radical philosophical version of Marxism from other interpretations.

The early method of Marx and Lukács is very different from the “scientific socialism” erected later on the basis of historical observation and economic theory. In 1843 and 1844 Marx developed a philosophy of revolution that he seems to have intended as a foundation for economic studies. From 1918 to 1923 Lukács elaborated a philosophy of revolution supplementing Marxist economics. For both the early Marx and Lukács, such central Marxist concepts as the proletariat and socialism were not first developed through empirical research. Instead, as philosophers they set out from a critical discussion of the philosophical tradition in the course of which they deduced the characteristic historical concepts of Marxism. Included in this deduction is the concept of revolution, which plays a pivotal methodological role in their philosophies.

In interpreting Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as a philosophy of praxis, I have been obliged to choose positions in some of the numerous debates over this early work. It will be useful at the outset to make these positions explicit by situating this interpretation with respect to some others. I will not review the enormous literature on the Manuscripts; only two facets of it are relevant here: the debates over the ontological and the normative character of social categories in the Manuscripts.² At issue is more than a matter of textual exegesis. The larger question concerns whether the Manuscripts are a philosophy of praxis, as I am engaged in defining it, or on the contrary, a far less ambitious ethical complement to economic research within the framework of some traditional ontology.

I show the former—that Marx founds a new concept of reason in revolution through an ontological treatment of social categories. This approach brings to the fore all that links the project of the early Marx to that of Lukács. But Marx’s Manuscripts had not yet been published when Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness. In fact, Capital is the primary basis of Lukács’s Marxism rather than Marx’s early work.

Capital is self-consciously unphilosophical in spite of Marx’s prefatory acknowledgment of Hegel’s influence. In it Marx is careful to minimize the use of philosophical terminology and to avoid the exploration of philosophical problems. Yet we now know on the basis of extensive textual evidence just how complex were the philosophical considerations behind Capital. The link between the Manuscripts and the published writings of Marx’s maturity is supplied by his own draft of Capital, the Grundrisse; but the publication of this text was delayed until the beginning of World War II.³ These textual absences, combined with the image Marx wished to project of his work in Capital, seemed to authorize a scientistic interpretation of his later doctrine that Lukács first challenged from a dialectical perspective.

Lukács made the connection between Marxism and philosophy (that is, between Marx and Hegel), primarily through reflection on Marx’s methodology in his economic writings, and only secondarily on the basis of those of Marx’s comments on philosophical matters with which he was acquainted. This is possible because, as Ernest Mandel remarks, “the concept of alienation … is part of the mature Marx’s instrumentarium.”⁴ Lukács was in fact the first to show this, to notice and explain not merely the influence of Hegel on Marx’s early political essays, or on the general Marxian “worldview,” but on the concepts and method of Capital. He reevaluated Marx’s famous “coquetting” with Hegel, and concluded that in that work, “a whole series of categories of central importance and in constant use stem directly from Hegel’s Logic”.⁵

Lukács reconstructed a philosophy of praxis from the methodological traces of Marx’s philosophical position visible in his economic writings. The result of this effort is not identical with the position of either the Manuscripts or the Grundrisse; nevertheless, it is impressive to what extent Lukács’s somewhat speculative extrapolations from Marx’s published work can find support in these unpublished ones. Most important, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis has remarkable structural similarities to that of Marx, notably insofar as Lukács develops an original critique of philosophy paralleling Marx’s own. This convergence has a biographical background. Like Marx, Lukács was deeply schooled in Hegelian dialectics and so when he sought to develop a Marxist philosophy, he returned to the Hegelian doctrine from which Marx set out. It is this link, mediated by the supposedly “scientific” work Capital, which bespeaks an affinity of Marxism for philosophy of praxis. Yet this biographical coincidence does not quite explain the similarity of the transformation undergone by Hegel’s dialectic at their hands.