The critiques

Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas wrote two of the major early critiques of History and Class Consciousness; they accuse Lukács of idealism from a Leninist perspective and introduce the main themes of later critique, particularly “orthodox” Marxist critique.³ Deborin and Rudas claim that Lukács sets Engels against Marx in order to substitute his own idealistic dialectic for their materialistic dialectic. In a footnote to the first essay of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács does actually reject the application of dialectics to nature, and offers an interpretation of historical dialectics he distinguishes rather sharply from that of Engels.

It is of the first importance to realize that the method is limited here to the realms of history and society. The misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels—following Hegel’s mistaken lead—extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics—the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc.—are absent from our knowledge of nature.⁴

This seems to imply that nature and society are separate domains to which correspond separate methods of study. Rudas writes, “If the dialectic is restricted to society, then two worlds exist, with two quite different sets of laws: nature and society. In nature phenomena are undialectical, in society they are dialectical … According to L. the world is dualist.”⁵ Deborin calls this “a new conception of dialectical method … a conception which contradicts that of Marxism.”⁶

Deborin goes on to argue that Lukács is an idealist who “sees in the category of knowledge, in a certain sense, the substance or truth of reality.”⁷ In his dialectic, practice and historical reality are supposedly aufgehoben in knowledge. Hence, “according to Lukács praxis is overcome only though theory, only through knowledge, and not through the self-development of reality, of which knowledge is simply a part.”⁸ Deborin sees Lukács as a traditional idealist, completely overlooking his revision of the subject-object concept. “The object,” Deborin declares, “is swallowed by the subject.”⁹

Deborin concludes by contrasting this theory with orthodox Marxism. Knowledge, he objects, is never identical with its objects but tends asymptotically toward accurate representation. The true unity of subject and object is to be found in the domain of labor practice, not in revolutionary class consciousness. The object with which Marxism is specifically concerned is nature, the substratum of human life, the subject is labor, and their unity (not identity) is the process of production.

Like many later critics of Lukács, Deborin misses the point because he does not grasp the originality of Lukács’s concept of consciousness which is not identifiable with “knowledge” in the usual sense. Merleau-Ponty clarifies Lukács’s distinction between consciousness and knowledge. “In the proletariat, class consciousness is not a state of mind or a knowledge, nor yet is it a theoretical construction, because it is a praxis, that is to say less than a subject and more than an object.”¹⁰ More precisely, class consciousness denotes the inner tendency of the “historically significant actions of the class as a whole” in which it enacts new meanings in conflict with capitalist society.¹¹ These new meanings are not thoughts in the heads of the proletarians but functional shifts in the totality. It is thus incorrect to argue that for Lukács consciousness “transcends” practice, or that the subject “swallows” the object. Lukács’s goal is to overcome the opposition of theory and practice, subject and object, in a region of historical reality where they stand in essential and necessary relation. But by defining the Lukácsian subject as a knower, Deborin forces the theory back into a traditional idealistic framework it is designed to escape.

In his new foreword of 1967, Lukács himself discusses these problems, and suggests another critique that is surely unique as an example of philosophical self-misunderstanding. He describes how the reading of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts finally convinced him of the ontological priority of objectivity and the universality of objectification; therewith, says the older Lukács, his early Marxist work became completely “alien” to him.¹² He dismisses his own identity theory as an “attempt to out-Hegel Hegel.”¹³ Many other critics have similarly charged the early Lukács with confounding, as did Hegel, objectification with alienation in the concept of reification.¹⁴

This is the line taken in Adorno’s influential critique. This critique carries the imprimatur of a great thinker. It is elaborated against a sophisticated theoretical background and represents the tradition of the Frankfurt School, which shared Lukács’s ambition to construct a Marxist philosophy on the ruins of German idealism. Adorno claims that Lukács lapsed into idealism, believed the proletarian subject could constitute social reality independent of any institutional framework or objective constraint on its action, and idealized immediacy and precapitalist society. Quite a program! And Adorno does not hesitate to associate his critique with that of the Stalinists who first denounced Lukács, including presumably Deborin and Rudas.¹⁵

There is a good deal of irony in the fact that the brutal and primitive functionaries who more than forty years back damned Lukács as a heretic, because of the reification chapter in his important History and Class Consciousness, did sense the idealistic nature of his conception … If a man looks upon thingness as radical evil, if he would like to dynamize all entity into pure actuality, he tends to be hostile to otherness, to the alien thing that has lent its name to alienation, and not in vain.¹⁶

Unfortunately, Adorno’s critique is no better than the Stalinist ones. Like them, he addresses a straw man. He claims that reification, which he too interprets as a cognitive phenomenon, is overcome by the dereification of consciousness rather than concrete social change in the real world of “non-identical” objects. “The cause of human suffering, meanwhile, will be glossed over rather than denounced in the lament about reification.”¹⁷

To make matters worse, Adorno considers the critique of reification to be a version of romantic anxiety over the distancing effect of rationality. Blaming all problems on reification implies that immediacy is the solution. Reduced to the thesis that in criticizing reification, he is criticizing the very independence of the object, Lukács seems to call for assimilating things to the stream of consciousness or action. So Adorno writes, “The liquefaction of everything thinglike regressed to the subjectivism of the pure act.”¹⁸ The reference here is at once to a kind of existentialist decisionism and to the Fichtean actus purus in which the world is “posited” by transcendental consciousness. Versions of this critique abound in the literature and after becoming acquainted with them few readers bother to go back to the original, much less read it with fresh eyes.

But in the first pages of his book Lukács warns the reader that the concept of “totality” under which he conceives social reality “does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity.”¹⁹ This reservation is confirmed elsewhere in the text despite the often overblown language in which Lukács describes the identical subject-object. Under the rhetorical surface his views depend on a rather conventional Marxism, not the rehash of subjective idealism and naïve romanticism Adorno attributes to him.

In sum, Marx, not Heraclitus or Bergson. It is certainly worth questioning whether this is coherent, but it is hardly idealist. What requires understanding is Lukács’s purpose in producing this strange hybrid of classical German philosophy and the Marxist critique of political economy. We need to know whether he accomplished anything of interest in doing so. Ignoring the complexity of his thought is not helpful for this purpose.