The mediations

In contrast with the French scholars whose interpretation of Lukács influences this account, scholars influential in Germany and America argue that his distinction between class consciousness and real consciousness is not only arbitrary but politically dangerous. They rely heavily on Lukács’s borrowings from Weber, while ignoring his concept of practice. The effect of this emphasis is to misrepresent his concept of class consciousness to the point where he appears to announce later repressive Soviet practice. This interpretation is neither textually nor historically plausible.

How do the critics justify this extraordinary charge? Since they overlook the link Lukács makes between class consciousness and “the historically decisive acts” of the class, the ideal-typical construct of the former seems to have no basis in reality.⁴² Lukács is supposed to have no way of “getting” from class consciousness to real consciousness, but can only juxtapose the one to the other as “ought” to “is.” He is thus confronted with the very question he himself had posed in relation to Marx on the second page of History and Class Consciousness, i.e., whether he is foisting his own revolutionary goals on a proletariat with quite other aims. Leszek Kołakowski concludes that since, according to Lukács, proletarian class consciousness is embodied in the party, the party can safely ignore the empirical consciousness of the proletariat and act on its own. For Lukács, “the party is always right.”⁴³ But in the era of the Russian Revolution, this question has tragic implications; the party has become imperious and demands of classes that they conform to an essence it imputes to them, rather than reflecting the thoughts and actions of their members. Such an approach, as Lukács elaborates it, constitutes an anticipatory justification of Stalinist voluntarism.

James Miller argues similarly that Lukács’s approach “doubles” the proletariat into a real class, not necessarily revolutionary at any given moment, and an ideal one possessed by definition of revolutionary class consciousness. Theoretically, the consciousness of the ideal proletariat is represented by Marxism, while practically it is represented by the vanguard party. Thus the revolutionary subjectivity of the class is surreptitiously attributed to the party, while the real proletariat is dismissed as stuck in “reified facticity.” The tension between proletariat and party, real and ideal class is left unresolved in fact, while conceptual equivocations prevent its recognition in theory. “The subject’s objective subjectivity is ‘held safe’ in the party, but the subject himself becomes a mere abstract object for the party. The equivocation of Lukács was the equivocation of Lenin—and this equivocation was ‘transcended’ not in utopia, but in concentration camps.”⁴⁴

Does Lukács really leave such a yawning abyss between class consciousness and real consciousness? This interpretation ignores Rosa Luxemburg’s influence on Lukács’s political thought. In her essay “The Mass Strike,” Luxemburg argues that theory prolongs action and articulates its inner meaning. Marxism sums up the class experience in ideas that it disseminates through educational work and propaganda in times of social peace. Ideas are the highest product of theory but they represent the lowest level of class consciousness. Mere opinions are what Luxemburg calls a “theoretical and latent” class consciousness. Class consciousness achieves full development not in this contemplative form, but in the “practical and active” expression of class aspirations and solidarity in revolutionary struggle. Theory must cease to be a mere representation of the meaning of class struggle to become consciousness as a historical force in that struggle.⁴⁵ As Lukács later explains, “Proletarian thought is in the first place merely a theory of praxis which only gradually … transforms itself into a practical theory that overturns the real world.”⁴⁶

For Luxemburg, as for Lukács, the party plays a decisive role in the passage from theory to practice, the latent to the active. “Organization,” Lukács writes, “is the form of the mediation between theory and practice.”⁴⁷ What is theoretical at any given moment must be made present organizationally if it is later to become practical in struggle. In relation to the masses, “the party is the objectification of their own will (obscure though this may be to themselves).”⁴⁸ Like theory, the party represents the still latent meaning of struggles that need only achieve sufficient breadth and intensity to express themselves in revolutionary consciousness. Theory and party organization are thus joined to historical necessity by their expressive function. They grant conscious and explicit form to the implicit content of the spontaneous struggle.

From this Luxemburgian standpoint, political leadership no longer has the voluntaristic traits Marx rejected. It does not change the fundamental orientation of the movement, but rather expresses the significance of ongoing actions, thereby aiding the actors to clarify their own goals.

It [the party] must immerse its own truth in the spontaneous mass movement and raise it from the depths of economic necessity, where it was conceived, on to the heights of free, conscious action. In so doing it will transform itself in the moment of the outbreak of revolution from a party that makes demands to one that imposes an effective reality. This change from demand to reality becomes the lever of the truly class-oriented and truly revolutionary organization of the proletariat.⁴⁹

In the concluding essays of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács expresses reservations about Luxemburg’s theory. While he still maintains that Luxemburg “saw the significance of mass actions more clearly than anyone,”⁵⁰ he praises Lenin for having grasped the role of the party in resolving major technical problems of the revolution such as class alliances and the seizure of the state. Far from authorizing the party to ignore the class, these essays also contain a critique of sectarianism. Lukács emphasizes the hermeneutic function of independent party action rather than just its technical aspect. The coincidence of hermeneutic and technical functions is achieved where, by their exemplary form, the party’s technically necessary acts also serve to advance consciousness. Thus Lukács writes that the party’s

organizational separation from the class does not mean in this case that it wishes to do battle for its interests on its behalf and in its place … Should it do this, as occasionally happens in the course of revolution, then it is not in the first instance an attempt to fight for the objective goals of the struggle in question (for in the long run these can only be won or retained by the class itself), but only an attempt to advance or accelerate the development of class consciousness.”⁵¹

This conception of the relation of party to class is shared by Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks offer a striking complement to Lukács’s theory of class consciousness. Gramsci elaborates precisely the least developed sides of that theory within a generally similar framework. He starts out from the same view of practice as Lukács. As he puts it, worldviews are “implicit” in the action of classes and become “explicit” in the corresponding ideologies. Gramsci explains the process in which the difference between the beliefs of the individuals and the theoretical construction of the specific rationality of their action is reduced so far as possible, and the individuals provided with ideas that raise to consciousness or make explicit what is already adumbrated in their practice.

A new class acts in function of its real social situation and interests even if at first its self-understanding is still determined by the established ideologies, the “common sense” of the old society. In this situation, the meanings implicit in the acts of the class contradict its beliefs. But in the long run, the implicit meanings will prevail and real consciousness will be brought into harmony with them. The determinism of class consciousness is therefore felt not through the literally unthinkable relation between real consciousness and a theoretical construct, as Lukács’s critics charge, but through the gradual effects of class practice on thought, through, in short, the need of the class for beliefs that articulate its historically necessary behavior.

To bring belief into harmony with behavior requires, in Gramsci’s words, the “cultural deployment” of the worldview implicit in action (Lukács’s “class consciousness”), and this process consists in “adjusting culture to the practical function.”⁵² Class consciousness is not immediately realized in class thought, but must be spread through real, historically effective mediations. First, a theory must be elaborated that corresponds with the class consciousness of the class by falling under the horizon of the specific rationality of its class behavior. Second, a specialized stratum of intellectuals and organizers must communicate the ideas corresponding with its implicit worldview. In the modern world, Gramsci argues, political parties are primarily responsible for these functions. The party’s role is to socialize the class consciousness of the class, a process that is “objectively possible,” in Lukács’s terms, because the class is predisposed to believe ideas that rationalize its behavior. Class consciousness, the worldview implicit in action, is the goal toward which real consciousness tends.

But parties are relatively autonomous groups of individuals, with their own real consciousness. Who is to say that the views they “impute” to the class in their theory and propaganda actually correspond to the needs of the class? Gramsci argues that the class itself will always be the judge of the adequacy of the ideology offered it by the party. The excessive deviation of the party from the class consciousness of the class will result in the class abandoning the party. Lukács too argues that “the constant misapplication of false theories must lead inevitably to the collapse of the party.”⁵³ The determinate contingency of the relation between party and class insures against arbitrariness.

Class consciousness is achieved to the extent that the class unifies itself behind representatives whose real consciousness makes sense of their action. The adjustment of real consciousness to class consciousness is thus a social process that takes place in a relation between different real consciousnesses, some of which have the leading, others the following role. The supposed gap between “objective possibility” and actuality is closed by showing how the real consciousness of the members of the class approximates to their class consciousness through the development of specific social relations. Where the party is given assent, its propaganda serves the function of progressively bringing real consciousness into line with class consciousness.

In Gramsci as in Lukács the party does not have the proletariat at its disposal, but rather vice versa. When Lukács writes that the party is “the visible embodiment of proletarian class consciousness,” he does not mean that the party is the true subject of the revolution, but on the contrary, that it is the privileged object of the working class as subject, the object through which the class “sees” its own situation and potentialities most clearly.⁵⁴ Even in its acts, the party “appears” to the class that can accept or reject it, follow or abandon it, as the explicit formulation of a class project inarticulately present in the life of the class itself. The party is thus not a mechanism of social control in the service of the revolution—an impossible contradiction: it is there to be “seen,” and the sight of it is a moment in the constitution of a subject of history.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. Once the party comes to power, it is no longer simply an object but becomes a subject in its own right. Given the immense means of repression and propaganda at the disposal of the modern state, this is no small matter. The Soviet state explored all the terrifying possibilities of one-party rule and in the process destroyed the prospects of socialism it was the first to open up. The critics of Lukács’s theory of class consciousness are mistaken, however, in identifying his theory with this outcome. His hope in a fruitful combination of workers’ councils and party was disappointed.⁵⁵ Far cruder and more elemental processes were engaged than anything he imagined. Even as late as 1923 neither Marxism nor liberalism had yet taken the full measure of the new tyranny equipped with the productive and organizational powers unleashed by modern invention. The final accounting was to come later, at great cost. But the theory of class consciousness hardly weighs in the balance.

 

1 HCC, 3.

2 See for example the presumed authoritative work of Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: 3—The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Chapter VII.

3 The German constitutional scholar Henry Ehrmann contacted me shortly after the first version of this book was published, excited to find someone interested in Lukács’s organizational theories. He explained that he had been a member in exile of a group called Neues Beginnen that attempted to implement these theories as a response to Nazi persecution. He recalled that the group was able to evade arrest for a time due to its tight structure and discipline. Clearly, the issue for these revolutionaries, as for Lenin in his early party work, was survival in the face of tyranny, not the imposition of tyranny.

4 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International, 1963), 115.

5 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 15, 23.

6 For a brilliant treatment of the antinomy, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.) Anthony Giddens offers another treatment in The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). For an early approach to the antinomy, see Hans Freyer’s 1923 Theory of Objective Mind, trans. S. Grosby (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998).

7 HCC, 38.

8 Ibid., 197. Cf., for an example, Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. H. J. Stenning (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1964). For a detailed discussion of the problem of mechanical determinism in this period, see Lucio Colletti, “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International,” in Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, trans. J. Merrington and J. White (New York: Monthly Review, 1972). On Marx and determinism, see Donald MacKenzie, “Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 25, No. 3 (July 1984).

9 Frederick Engels, “Engels to J. Bloch,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), 693.

10 Ibid., 692.

11 HCC, 178.

12 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International, 1968), 14.

13 Ibid., 7.

14 HCC, 83.

15 Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1904), 280 (translation modified).

16 HCC, 186.

17 HCC, 326.

18 Ibid., 262.

19 Ibid., 164.

20 Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 350.

21 Letter from Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), quoted in HCC, 77.

22 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., 20.

23 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1968), 121. Fredric Jameson identifies this passage as the source of Lukács’s theory of class consciousness. See, Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 46.

24 Lucien Sebag, Marxisme et structuralisme (Paris: Payot, 1964), 88: “A critical theory of knowledge is possible; revealing a gap between what is said and what is done, it brings to light the non-fulfillment of that which is implied by a given ideology. This presupposes that the domain of Doing [le Faire] can be autonomized, become its own point of reference. Ideologies then simply are added to it to veil it, deform it, or on the contrary unveil it; but this deformation, when it exists, can always be objectively demonstrated.” Pierre Bourdieu calls the view according to which practice is merely the execution of a project formulated in conscious thought or unconscious mental structures “subjectivist voluntarism.” See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 216, n28. See also Adolpho Sanchez Vasquez, The Philosophy of Praxis (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), Chapter VIII. Sanchez Vasquez writes that Marx “acknowledged the existence of unintentional praxis, while insisting that it is still rational” (276).

25 HCC, 52.

26 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 11.

27 Max Weber, On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. E. Shills and H. Finch (Glencoe, Il: The Free Press, 1949), 42.

28 HCC, 51 (translation modified).

29 Ibid., 51.

30 Ibid., 92. Bourdieu formulates a similar point in his own terms: “The awakening of ‘class consciousness’ is not a primal act constituting the class in a blaze of freedom; its sole efficacy, as with all actions of symbolic reduplication, lies in the extent to which it brings to consciousness all that is implicitly assumed in the unconscious mode in the class habitus.” Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 216, n28.

31 HCC, 51. Weber, On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, 92.

32 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 67.

33 Ibid., 164.

34 Ibid., 149.

35 Cited in Ibid., 149.

36 HCC, 65.

37 For a more detailed discussion of the dialectics of working-class consciousness in a loosely Lukácsian framework, see Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), Chapter 2.

38 HCC, 168.

39 Ibid., 168–9.

40 HCC, 178.

41 For further discussion of the significance of class consciousness in Lukács’s early Marxist writings, see Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York: Routledge, 2005), Chapter 4.

42 Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 27. Morris Watnick, “Relativism and Class Consciousness,” in L. Labedz, ed.,Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), 160.

43 Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. III, 282.

44 James Miller, “Marxism and Subjectivity,” Telos, No. 6 (1970), 180. Cf. Michael Löwy, Pour une Sociologie des Intellectuels Revolutionnaires (Paris: PUF, 1976), 227–54.

45 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 199.

46 HCC, 205.

47 Ibid., 299. For Lukács’s critique of Luxemburg, see Andrew Feenberg “Post-Utopian Marxism: Lukács and the Dilemmas of Organization,” in J. McCormick, ed., Confronting Mass Technology and Mass Democracy: Essays in Twentieth-Century German Political and Social Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 45–69.

48 HCC, 42.

49 HCC, 41–2.

50 Ibid., 298.

51 Ibid., 326.

52 Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince (New York: International Publishers, 1959), 113– 14.

53 HCC, 327.

54 Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, trans. N. Jacobs (London: New Left Books, 1974), 27 (translation modified). See also HCC, 42.

55 Feenberg, “Post-Utopian Marxism,” 66–9.