Daniel Tutt looks to the philosophy of Georg Lukács and his critique of bourgeois irrationalism to explicate the role of intellectuals and worldviews in the class struggle. Read By: Allen Lanterman

The author would like to offer thanks to comrades Tijana Okić and Harrison Fluss for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions on this essay.

The worker-intellectual and the question of intellectuals within the workers’ movement is a topic of great concern to any Marxist practice. The period from 1848 to the First World War saw the infusion of philosophy within the workers’ movement, and this fact is highlighted in large part by Engels and his strong premise, which he articulated in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). Here Engels argues bourgeois Hegelian philosophy was finished within the bourgeois academy after 1848 but that it continued in the workers’ movement. It was the Marxist treatment of Hegel and the “revolutionary dialectic” Marx and Engels developed that continued Hegel in practice, and, thus, Marxists maintained a certain obligation to incorporate philosophy into the very core of revolutionary activity. 

If Marxism remains a philosophically oriented movement, what does this mean for the position of the philosopher or the intellectual in the class struggle? In the view of the philosopher Georg Lukács in his 1919 essay “‘Intellectual Workers’ and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership”, the intellectual—the philosopher and the intellectual are thought synonymously here—is absolutely a decisive presence for the workers’ movement. Specifically, Lukács argues that the intellectual plays an active role in leading an intellectual struggle within the proletariat; it fights to develop the complete independence of consciousness of the proletariat as a class with a specific “world-revolutionizing force.”

The intellectual aims to further the development of a distinct worldview (weltanschauung) of the proletariat by building the consciousness of the proletariat as a distinct revolutionary agency. Lukács, in his most well-known work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), will expand this view and argue it is only the proletarian standpoint—and by extension the worldview of the proletariat—that can overcome conditions of alienation and reified social existence of capitalism. This standpoint is the one that enables the proletariat to see more of the world and grants it the means to revolutionize the world. But this can only occur through the development of revolutionary class consciousness. Revolutionary class consciousness, as Lukács argues in History and Class Consciousness, “means the abolition of the isolated individual, it means that workers can become conscious of the social character of their labor, it means that the abstract universal form of the societal principle as it is manifested can be increasingly concretized and overcome.”¹ We thus see two crucial categories at work in this argument: consciousness and worldview. 

Consciousness for Lukács simply refers to a particular stage of knowledge where the subject and the object of knowledge are homogeneous, i.e., where knowledge takes place from within and not from without. Thus, the consciousness of the revolutionary historical mission of the proletariat is one in which the distinction between subject and object disappears, and with it, therefore, the distinction between theory and practice.

That this process of revolutionary consciousness is also bound up with a worldview implies that the problem of a worldview is not a transcendental a priori for a class. In other words, the question of the worldview is tied up with historical contingencies and with the fact that the bourgeois class is constantly modifying its worldview to adjust to and maintain its hold on power. The bourgeois worldview is a malleable assemblage and quite elastic; it relies on the positive sciences to sustain itself. The bourgeois worldview contains a spectrum from progressive social reform to the adoption of racialized myths rooted in nationalistic chauvinism, and this spectrum must be understood as maintained and propped up through class power. For Lukács, the worldview of the proletariat, on the other hand, is inextricably tied to the science of Marx’s doctrines as developed in Capital as much as it is crucially linked to the philosophical insights of Marx and Engels who extended Hegel’s dialectic to a fundamentally different terrain than the bourgeois philosophers were capable of doing. As Karl Korsch will argue in Marxism and Philosophy, a work published in the early 1920s around the same time as Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, the denial of scientific socialism by the bourgeois philosophers in the mid-19th century resulted in a major turning towards irrationalism within bourgeois philosophy. A worldview, as we intend to discuss in what follows, is fundamentally bound up with the philosophical enterprise and endeavor. 

While Lukács, and by extension Engels, are criticized by thinkers from Theodor Adorno to the liberal philosopher Leszek Kołakowski for maintaining this view that bourgeois reaction stems from a rejection of Marxism, Lukács’s argument concerning the rise of bourgeois irrationalism is far more sophisticated than critics have made it out to be. Lukács’s masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, published in German in 1954, shows how the worldview of the bourgeoisie used philosophy and found in philosophers and intellectuals a set of accomplices and apologists—some direct, and others indirect—for the legitimacy of the bourgeois liberal order and how philosophers played a vital role in the justification of imperialism, limits to social and political reform and nationalist ideologies. This work surveys, in encyclopedic rigor and precision, the history of the rise of irrational and reactionary thought from the early German idealist period following the French Revolution up to the rise of Hitler. 

Georg Lukács is a founder of Western Marxism who began his career as a liberal existentialist and neo-Kantian philosopher. Interested in tragedy and literature, the early Lukács wrote beautifully and incisively on the contradictions of bourgeois society from a romantic position. It was not until he seriously engaged Marx that he had what he calls a dramatic conversion to Marxism. This conversion led him to refine a theory of reification and revolutionary praxis that would shape Marxist debates for close to a century. As a philosopher deeply committed to the Bolshevik cause, Lukács would write some of the most important works of Marxist theory in the 20th century. 

Lukács’s philosophy served as the inspiration for modern critical theory, most notably the Frankfurt School, although Adorno would break with Lukács in his work. His thought touches on everything from a theory of the modern novel, Hegel’s philosophy, art, and aesthetics to revolutionary strategy and he frequently placed himself at the center of political upheaval and revolution. Lukács participated in the socialist revolution in his own country of Hungary and went on to serve in the government following its revolution. For some time, he lived and operated in Stalin’s Russia, but his relation to Stalin is complex, and he even fled the purges and expressed staunch criticisms of Stalin. In Lukács one finds a thinker of integrity, a thinker whose ideas must be wrestled with today.   

The Intellectual and Power

It is worth understanding the social function of the intellectual given that we have this important historical record of intellectuals playing formative roles in the workers’ movement and within Marxist thought. What are the problems that come with the class character of the intellectual? Although it is true that since the time of Kant the philosopher and the intellectual has primarily been a handmaiden of the university system, many philosophers that are known to us today, from Marx himself to Walter Benjamin to Alexandre Kojève, worked mostly outside the university. The first immediate problem of the intellectual is the nature of their labor. Because the intellectual is afforded a leisure time that exempts the intellectual from the degradations and realities of wage labor, this exemption can often pervert the intellectual’s conception of social and political antagonisms. This dynamic can lead to an intellectual possessing a sort of paradoxical power such that their seemingly revolutionary or radical ideas ultimately serve the political and social interests of the bourgeois social order. As such, any philosopher, and especially philosophers working today, must ask themselves whether their thought is serving the worldview of the bourgeois class from which the university is administered, or whether it will instead fundamentally challenge the status quo. 

This argument again returns us to the question of the worldview, which is not merely a notion that suggests the university requires the intellectual to adopt a fad or abide by certain hip scholarly topics to be in vogue from one period to the next. The point we are making is stronger, in that there is indeed a bourgeois worldview that relies on intellectual production of thought to further its agenda and legitimacy. And due to this reality, there are intrinsic barriers to a true grasp of the social and political realities of our world that are imposed on the academic intellectual because they are caught within an intellectual climate in which they are forced to further the worldview of certain class interests. Intellectuals occupy a middle ground, insofar as they produce “ideology” due to their specific position in the division of labor. The intellectual is between those who work directly in the process of production and are exploited in a much more direct way and those who exploit others in the workplace. The position of the intellectual within the division of labor is not static, however, and not every intellectual is an academic in this in-between status within the division of labor. 

The cliché we often have of the academic philosopher is that they pontificate and write in a rarefied discourse of concepts and ideas. The stereotype of academics is that they speak in an inaccessible jargon. This inaccessible language of thought, however, does have a rationale according to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He refers to this sort of academic knowledge as “skhole”, by which he means the academic philosopher develops a form of knowledge that is ultimately superfluous to the common concerns of the people borne as it is from excessive leisure time. Skhole is meant to be irrelevant to the masses because in its irrelevance the scholar forms a habitus with other scholars to effectively fortify themselves off as a closed community that speaks in an inaccessible language that is only accessible to those who have undergone academic initiation.² 

This stereotype of the Ivory Tower academic, subtracted from daily toil and inhabiting scholarly leisure, is less reflective of reality after the 2008 recession, the restructuring of academic humanities departments and the “adjunctification” of higher ed. In fact, most philosophers in America are more likely to be proletarianized today as many work on a limited contract basis. The crisis of higher education and the austerity policies that have become the norm since 2008 has led to a completely new composition of the intellectual public sphere. Given the profound contradictions that the university contends with related to these dynamics of austerity and budget cuts to humanities departments, it should not surprise us that some of the most dynamic intellectual activity on the left today emerges on the fringes of academic cultures in podcasts and YouTube. Although it is important to stress that even though this activity is not necessarily housed within the university system, there is an important class composition within the ecosystem of the contemporary left intellectual scene. Although the intellectual scene on the left is often entrepreneurial and seemingly disconnected from the university system and often disconnected from a workers’ movement, it too is a site of contending worldviews and class dynamics that should be studied and examined more fully. 

While Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason centers the intellectual and their role in the class struggle, it is also arguably the single most sustained and serious intellectual history on the role philosophers and intellectuals played in the emergence of fascism. Philosophy is, after all, an extremely interdisciplinary endeavor given that most philosophers work with ethics, aesthetics, politics, and science. Although “system-building” philosophers are rare today, and most are highly specialized “experts” of a small corner of philosophy, it is important to understand that philosophers have played a crucial role in justifying the social order and indeed philosophers are granted a social power which they often disavow or neglect. Lukács will go so far as to suggest that any philosopher is faced with the fact that they are furthering a class worldview as an effect of philosophizing, whether they are conscious of this or not. 

Hegel’s Achievement and What Came After It   

In the modern period, bourgeois philosophy started out with a progressive commitment to the revolutionary aspirations generated in the French Revolution. Yet it was during the period immediately following the Napoleonic Restoration up to the Revolutions of 1848, that these commitments began to deteriorate. Bourgeois philosophy witnessed a highly unstable social and political context, and its aspirations to advancing freedom and equality were not borne out due to the class system that bourgeois society was quickly entrenching. 

Out of this ever-growing decadent social order the seeds were planted for what would become the great catastrophes of European fascism in the 20th century. These seeds were found in what Lukács calls “irrationalism” in thought and philosophy. It was within German idealist and classical German philosophy that the most dynamic debates and the most fecund philosophical ingenuity occurred during this time even though German culture and society had never fully undergone the bourgeois revolution as France had. Germany faced social misery and deprivation because the persistence of a stunted feudal social order plagued German social life. But this backwardness did not prevent Germany’s philosophical community from refining a system of thought out of this oppression. Classical German philosophy, Lukács maintains, was the seedbed for both a complete comprehensive solution to philosophy—as found in Hegel—and the perversion of that very project as found in Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. 

This was not limited to Germany; across Europe it became difficult to remain committed to the universal ideals of the French Revolution as the class struggle and the workers’ movement were revealing that the bourgeois class could not in fact live out or continue the promises of the Revolution. In this context, the philosopher was faced with a choice: do they remain a steward or guardian of the status quo or do they evade, flee, and ignore the social and political antagonisms around them? Amidst this decadent social context in which the bourgeois class grew reactionary, philosophy reached a point of completion with Hegel. Lukács affirms that Hegel successfully resolved the German idealist project and brought philosophy to a comprehensive position, i.e., Hegelianism presented a rational account of society and history and a logical science of the new in which dialectical philosophy was now capable of addressing contradictions of the social world through philosophy. 

Hegel gave philosophy a renewed social mission and for Lukács, this was fundamentally a radical political and social mission. So successful was Hegel’s achievement that the entire society could only be grasped with the historical and dialectical method Hegel refined and developed. Hegel brought philosophy into a relation with the world and modern society that left the philosopher in a fundamentally public role. Despite the limitations in Hegel’s dialectical insights, those limitations were merely a result of the limited historical development that Hegel himself faced in his social context and Hegelianism would naturally find its heirs and expositors who will continue the system. 

But philosophers did not heed this call and the Hegelian moment birthed the emergence of two warring camps: the Hegelians of the right and the Hegelians of the left. These schools of thought would debate the direction philosophy is to take after Hegel’s death. On top of this debate, by the time of the workers’ uprising of 1848, bourgeois philosophy became mired in the wider crisis facing the bourgeois class itself. In this crisis it was Marxism and the workers’ movement that absorbed the Hegelian project. This is the incredible claim of Frederic Engels’s 1888 work Ludwig Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy; namely that the German workers’ movement must be understood as the true heir of classical German philosophy insofar as it absorbed Marxist theory, including its philosophical aspects, and this coincided with the birth of the Second International.³ It is not that Hegelianism ended in a full-stop sense but rather in the sense of a sublation, i.e., it was Marxism that held the mantle of Hegelian philosophy in its fullest and most liberated form.

The story Engels will tell, which has no doubt piqued the ire of many a Marxist is that while bourgeois philosophers were fighting petty battles over right and left Hegelianism, it was the workers’ movement and Marx and Engels who specifically advanced Hegel’s dialectical method and conception of history, and they emerge as the true philosophical core of European philosophy. The workers’ movement must therefore be understood as a fundamentally philosophical project but one which made a decisive break from a conception of philosophy that was oriented around furthering the worldview of the bourgeoisie. The incorporation of philosophy within the workers’ movement meant that it was philosophy that held the key to the emancipation of the proletariat. As Lukács writes, “the proletariat is the first oppressed class in history that has been capable of countering the oppressors’ philosophy with an independent and higher world-view of its own.”⁴ Here we see the proposal of Marxism being cast as a project of the development of a comprehensive worldview of the proletariat which requires philosophy to bring into existence. 

At this point it should be clear that the Marxist insistence on the abolition of philosophy, which we see in the early Theses on Feuerbach is not to be understood as the replacement of philosophy with undialectical positive sciences.⁵ The material relations that find their ideological expression in philosophy and in social science – it is this that is abolished. Korsch argues that it is science that overthrows reality – positive science does not do that. It is rather scientific Marxism: a theory of social revolution that affects all areas of society as a totality, that overthrows these oppressive relations.⁶ It is in this movement that the Marxist critique of philosophy is to be understood.  

What is implied here is that philosophy is immanently engaged in confronting the problems of the social and political antagonisms of the world, and therefore the philosopher must be actively engaged in those problems precisely because the development of philosophy is historically conditioned. The lesson then is clear: the philosopher sides with a class whether they are conscious of their solidarity or not, and the stakes of the philosopher’s class allegiance shapes their thought. We cannot forget this axiomatic claim of Hegelian thought, that a philosopher is only capable of comprehending their own time in thought. Thus, to think philosophically after Hegel, one confronts the present. Confronting the present means confronting the social problems and contradictions of the society in which the philosopher lives and thinks. Hegelian philosophy changed the world because it made the social order itself only conceivable as a historical and dialectical site of contestation. 

With Hegel the bridge from understanding (Verstand) to reason is a supersession (Aufhebung) in its specific triple meaning, as negation, preservation and elevation to a higher plane. Between understanding and reason there prevails a dialectical contradiction which permeates Hegel’s whole system and constitutes in particular the core of the logic of essence. Hence logic, for Hegel, had to become the basic science of the new, dialectical philosophy.⁷ 

In today’s time we are experiencing a mini-Hegelian renaissance with analytic philosophers turning to Hegel’s thought such as the American analytic philosopher Robert Brandom.⁸ One of the outcomes of this Hegel renaissance is that the question of whether Hegel possesses a fundamentally conservative, liberal, or even reactionary philosophy is now debated. For Lukács, this answer is clear: Hegel’s philosophy is implicitly revolutionary and the most progressive element of the French Revolution, namely the Jacobin position, is hardwired into Hegelian philosophy.⁹ 

In today’s debate about the political thought of Hegel there is a common tendency to read Hegel as flanked by Prussianism – i.e., that at his core, Hegel is a conservative liberal. And indeed, the Hegel of the Philosophy of Right is most often read as evidence of Hegel’s inherent conservativism. Lukács however argues that Hegel’s political thought absorbed the Jacobin position and incorporated it into his philosophical orientation and that Hegelian thought is concerned not with articulating a perspective from the position of the bourgeois state but should be understood, even in his later work, as an effort meant to synthesize contradictions dialectically in absolute knowledge. To the extent that Hegel incorporates a standpoint or worldview, Lukács remarks it is from the standpoint of the “valet’s knowledge of human nature” that most interests Hegel. Thus, even though Hegel did not develop a mature theory of capitalism this was due to the primitive economic conditions of the pre-bourgeois revolutionary situation in which he lived in Germany. Moreover, for Lukács, in the young Hegel, his greatness consists precisely in seeing the economy—Hegel read widely in English political economy—as the foundational element of modernity and therefore Hegel’s position incorporates, into philosophy, historical and social determinations.

The Perversions of Neo-Kantianism as the Seeds of Reactionary Philosophy

If Hegel resolved the project of German idealism and brought it to a point that had to be furthered and taken up, this did not mean that the Kantian approach to philosophy died out. To the contrary, during this period from the end of the French Revolution to 1848, bourgeois philosophy experimented with neo-Kantian thought in all sorts of ways. It is this turn to neo-Kantianism that brought about a tendency of what Lukács calls “irrationalism,” sowing the seeds for what would become the basis for various notions of intuition, myth, and vitalism. These and other mystical ideas were used to replace the more rationally developed thought of Hegelian philosophy within mainstream bourgeois philosophy. Of course, it is not that these irrationalist ideas and concepts are all guilty of feeding into what would become the hyper-irrationalism of European fascism. Rather, they created an ecology of thinking which formed the basis of a tendency to obscure social antagonisms and thus to circumvent the real stakes of social conflict in theory and practice.  

What is irrationalism within philosophy? There are three key aspects: it first begins with an embrace of the Kantian epistemological limit to knowing objective reality. Kant posits an incognizable residue that resists all efforts at knowledge and philosophers will take this proposal into all sorts of different directions. The danger lies in the tendency for the philosopher to abandon the idea that the world can be grasped practically by means of a rational point or perspective on objective reality. When they maintain this view, they replace a rational perspective with a turn to the prospect that this unknowable thing (the Kantian noumenon) is only graspable by a myth or an intuition or through the clairvoyance of the philosopher himself. 

Secondly, irrationalism is borne from the philosopher drawing out the consequences of this epistemological orientation to a theory of the subject. If objective reality cannot be known, and this condition cannot be overcome, philosophy harkens back to an aristocratic theory of the subject and the philosopher develops an aristocratic epistemology. Philosophers end up creating a theory that access to knowledge is supra-rational and thus only a select few have access to insight or great intuition. Most often, as we find in Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the philosopher concocts an epistemology in which there are unbridgeable differences across human beings which is again tied into the way the philosopher has worked with and embraced this fundamental unknowability. An irrationalist epistemology such as we find in Nietzsche will extend this emphasis of unbridgeable differences amongst human beings and argue philosophically that these differences must be acknowledged in the field of politics, ethics, aesthetics, and morality. The insistence on absolutizing differences and then seeking justification for that absolutization in science or philosophy is what is then used as justification for the perpetuation of relations of domination in society more broadly.  

A third tendency of irrationalism is that the philosopher abandons the category of dialectics and history as knowable categories of thought. For the irrationalist philosopher, the only way to grasp historical truth or historical mediation is via a supra-rational solution. Oswald Spengler’s conception of morphological cultures inhabited by mystical spirits is one such example of historical change that is fully irrationalist and relativist. The question of history also concerns how the philosopher thinks of the history of philosophy. An irrationalist approach to the history of philosophy tends to reduce the entire history of philosophy from Heraclitus, Aristotle, Descartes, Vico to Hegel to an impenetrable vitalist or existentialist murkiness.¹⁰ This irrationalizing of the history of philosophy is found in neo-Kantian thought and in the neo-Hegelian thought of Wilhelm Dilthey’s work in the history of philosophy. 

For Lukács, the most important hallmark of irrationalism is the abandonment of the dialectical and historical orientation to thought. Once the philosopher decides that arriving at a coherent understanding of the antagonisms and the contradictions that make up the bourgeois world is impossible, history no longer provides the means to discern or to resolve problems in the present. As such, philosophy falls into an apologetics for the bourgeois social order. This apologetics can take two forms: a direct apologetics in which the philosopher aims to champion the unjust social order directly as we find in the case of the American philosopher James Burnham; or the philosopher adopts an indirect apologetics in which they critique the bourgeois social order and even aspects of capitalism, but they keep open an implicit justification of the social order. Indirect apologists often make for more effective proponents of reactionary agendas as they incorporate an anti-capitalist critique, but they do not decisively champion a revolutionary position. In other words, indirect apologetics involves an obscuring of the political situation. And there is no better champion of indirect apologetics than Nietzsche.

That Lukács tracks irrationalism with neo-Kantian approaches to philosophy raises an important biographical point. He was trained by the neo-Kantian philosophers Emil Lask and Heinrich Rickert who both in different ways treat the problem of historical knowledge as fundamentally unknowable. Lask maintains there is a hiatus irrationalis that prevents the concept of historical knowledge from grasping its object, and Rickert reduces historical truth to the individual event as part of a totality that develops through time. While Lask and Rickert disagree on whether the historical object is irrational or rational with respect to thought, what this leads to is a strong claim on behalf of Lukács. As Tom Rockmore has argued, this claim maintains the following: non-Marxist philosophy is intrinsically incapable of knowledge of reality, and the absolute is cognizable only from a Marxist perspective.¹¹ If we accept this thesis, combined with the prior thesis that Engels presents how it was only Marxism and the workers’ movement that continued Hegelianism following 1848, then irrationalism thus consists of the rejection of Marxism, since the rejection of Marxism is akin to the rejection of what is rational and to discern the rational—Hegelian philosophy is necessary.  

Irrationalism primarily emerged with neo-Kantianism, but it also had a presence in neo-Hegelianism. For the important 19th century thinker Wilhelm Dilthey, Hegel signifies nothing more than an attempt to make a compromise philosophy between the German bourgeoisie with more fully reactionary extremists. Neo-Hegelians developed a method that was centered around the category of life and vitalism. For Dilthey, “very genuine philosophy (Weltanschauung) is an intuition springing from the state of being-within-life (Darinnensein im Leben).” By adding “life” as a third category between being and consciousness, neo-Hegelians mystified the possibility of ever comprehending the world from the standpoint of human consciousness. Lukács writes: 

When the Hegelian system collapsed, so did the whole endeavour to co-ordinate, and so to comprehend, the world ‘s totality and its principle of growth from idealist sources, i.e., from elements of the human consciousness. This is not the place to give even a rough outline of the fundamental changes resulting from this final breakdown of the idealist system-concept.¹² 

The persistence of the aristocracy within the bourgeois order meant that philosophers not only furthered the interests of the bourgeois class, but they also served the interests of the aristocracy, and this is most evident in Schelling. Schelling was appointed to lecture by Wilhelmine crown with an explicit demand that he push back on the “pantheistic” spread of Hegelian thought which was growing throughout German culture. Among Lukács’s most compelling claims regarding the radicality of Hegel’s thought is how Hegel’s famous preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit was a polemic against Schelling’s thought. Lukács’s treatment of Schelling is nothing less than eye-opening. One way to understand the wider project of Schelling—and we do not have the space here to review Lukács’s entire argument here—is to think about the chronology of reactionary thought from “Schelling to Hitler.” It is Schelling who made objective reality a fundamentally incoherent prospect and this incoherence formed the organon of his philosophy.¹³ 

However one conceives of Lukács’s polemic with bourgeois philosophy in this work it is important to recognize the following fact: Marxism and the workers’ movement saw itself as the true heir of Hegelian philosophy and as such built the workers’ movement with a deep commitment to a comprehensive philosophical outlook and worldview. It bears repeating that for Lukács a worldview is bound up with philosophy, forming the nexus of a decision that has stakes in the class struggle: one must pick a side. It is also a compelling fact to know that the 19th-century workers’ movement centered texts such as Engels’s Anti-Dühring, which is a deeply philosophical account of Marxism offering Marxist perspectives on metaphysics, political economy, and the fundamental questions of human existence. The lesson for us today should be clear: socialism must be engaged in the project of advancing the worldview of the proletariat and socialists have a pre-history with philosophy that we should not shy away from embracing today. The class struggle has a home in philosophy and that home does not necessarily need to be housed within the university.

Lukács and the Origin of the Marxist Critique of Nietzsche

Nietzsche is given an entire chapter in The Destruction of Reason, and he represents a form of irrationalism in philosophy that is built on the irrationalist tendencies of Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche’s irrationalism was far more explicit than Schopenhauer’s because the social conditions in which he worked were more decadent and crisis-prone due to the capitalist order entering its imperialist phase.¹⁴ For example, it is not a coincidence that Heidegger became popular following the 1929 depression when a philosophy of despair was required to speak to the wider mood of bourgeois life. Nietzsche is read by Lukács as a thinker conditioned by the imperialist stage of capitalism, a period he refers to as socially and culturally decadent. Lukács expands on Lenin’s insight into the stage of imperialism in capitalist production by showing how irrationalist concepts and ideas were embraced by the bourgeois social order during this period in ways that were more explicitly political and specifically sought to further a new myth of the European individual. It is in this context that Nietzsche must be read, and paradoxically, he emerges as a philosopher who champions the bourgeois order but not by directly aligning with it. Nietzsche rather champions the existing social order by providing the intellectuals within that order with an aristocratic epistemology that is meant to retain the status quo first and foremost. Nietzsche said, after all, of his concept of the eternal return that it was a doctrine meant for the ruling class. 

In what way is this doctrine of the eternal return tied up with a political project of an aristocratic epistemology? At the core of Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return is the proposal that the world is deliberately evading a goal and a cyclical process becomes an inevitability to which “all those must succumb who would like to decree upon the world the power of eternal innovation, i.e., to invest such a finite, specific, constant and immutable force as ‘the world’ with a miraculous capacity for the infinite shaping anew of its forms and conditions.”¹⁵ For Lukács, the affirmative spirit of Nietzsche which we have come to know as a cornerstone of Nietzsche from admirers such as Gilles Deleuze is to be understood as an immanent defense of the capitalist social order as such. Nietzschean immanence is not of the Spinozist variety, and it is importantly Christians and socialists alike who are made to be morally reprehensible because they represent ‘transcendence,’ and are therefore the true reactionaries in Nietzsche’s eyes. 

Nietzsche did read in political economy, and there is some evidence that he read Marx indirectly.¹⁶ He was a deep political thinker, indeed a thinker who could smell politics where it had never been before. Nietzsche cannot be read as apolitical or even as offering a neutral set of ideas for a ‘grand politics’ that can somehow be applied transhistorically. Nietzsche is not a neutral actor regarding the question of the class struggle, and the key point of Lukács’s treatment of Nietzsche is that he actively created a philosophy that aims to disrupt the emergence of proletarian consciousness. This is an argument that Geoff Waite affirms in his magnum opus Nietzsche’s Corps/e (1996) and Domenico Losurdo will elaborate in his work Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (2020). Lukács shows how Nietzsche’s radical project took off in uniquely decadent times and he explains the social world in which Nietzsche wrote in the following way:  

The vast majority of the bourgeois intelligentsia clung to the illusion of living in the ‘best of all worlds’, defending what they supposed to be the ‘healthy condition’ and the progressive nature of their ideology. Now, however, an insight into their own decadence was becoming more and more the hub of these intellectuals’ self-knowledge. This change manifested itself above all in a complacent, narcissistic, playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism, etc. But in the case of honest intellectuals, these often turned into sincere despair and a consequent mood of revolt (Messianism, etc.).¹⁷

Nietzsche extended this crisis of culture and nihilism into an entirely new myth and formula for the philosopher. Importantly, the Nietzschean concepts were meant for a specific class of intellectuals and arguably they still function this way today. One of Nietzsche’s guiding mottos is “nothing is true, everything is permitted” which anticipates directly on the sorts of mottos that emerged in May 68 in France. It is no surprise that Nietzsche emerged as the philosophical name of the May 68 revolution, celebrated by a certain class of bourgeois intellectuals. Lukács shows how in his own time and in the two generations leading to the Nazis after him, Nietzschean philosophy provided a morality for the socially militant bourgeoise and middle-class intelligentsia.¹⁸ Reading Nietzsche in this context allows us to better understand his notion of perspectivism. By rejecting any criterion of truth other than usefulness for the biological survival of the individual (and the species), Nietzsche became an important precursor of imperialist pragmatism. Perspectivism, like the eternal return and Nietzsche’s ontology and metaphysics are all linked back to a fundamental political project which is itself deeply cognizant of the class struggle. Again, Nietzsche does not need to have a familiarity with Marx to take a stand on the class struggle – we should remember that Louis Blanqui, a leader of the Paris Commune (an event that radicalized Nietzsche immensely) is the philosopher that first seriously developed an idea of the “eternal return” and Nietzsche would modify this socialistic notion into his own philosophy. There is a good deal of research that shows Nietzsche discovered the idea of the eternal return in Blanqui’s cosmological speculations and Blanqui in fact developed a theory he called the eternal return.¹⁹ 

Lukács reads Nietzsche’s engagements with the natural sciences as part of his explicit political agenda. This agenda is based on the following hypothesis: if the class struggle (the struggle for survival) does not automatically bring about the higher type of human being Nietzsche desired, it cannot possibly be the law of evolution in nature and society.²⁰ Thus, the project of Nietzschean genealogy and his critique of nihilism is a philosophy that aims to capture the social conditions of naked exploitation and brutal cruelty as those most conforming to nature; of what is most natural and thus as how the ubermensch are to come into being. It is better that the workers be thrown to the violent whims of the market, for those who are weakest need to be pushed more; they need to be broken down so that they can grow stronger. Only the strong can become who they are, those who reveal themselves as weak will either serve or perish through trials and tribulations. This view on human suffering and the wider category of suffering is placed at the very center of Nietzsche’s philosophy and it is done so to pervert and ultimately to prevent the emergence of the suffering of the underclasses as legitimate expressions of suffering. Nietzsche created an ethics in which there is an apartheid of class–and an entire aesthetics of suffering, of bourgeois suffering specifically–that is meant to prevent any sort of aesthetics, philosophy or higher art that would embrace a proletarian conception of the world. We can now see why Nietzsche becomes the greatest antagonist to any worldview of the proletariat from ever emerging because his concepts were designed as weapons to prevent such an emergence from ever occurring. Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism thus possesses a tendency that is hardwired into its very conceptual architecture to naturalize the historically contingent economic order and affirm its inevitability as eternal.²¹

The Problem of Progress in Lukács

There is a powerful claim at work in Lukács’s survey of the deterioration of bourgeois philosophy, one that we must keep alive in today’s time: philosophy conveys a worldview shaped by class society. Whether conscious of this fact or not, the worldview of a class imposes itself on the philosopher. The philosopher can unsuccessfully try and evade this imposition, or they can affirm it by actively developing a philosophy that takes a position on the class struggle. A worldview, as Lukács defines it, is not a transcendental schema, and the use of “standpoint theory” in contemporary identity politics does lean on Lukács’s notion of worldview as a distant intellectual point of influence. However, such approaches end up erring because they often fail to see how a worldview is a contingent historical phenomenon that is tied into the class struggle. It is hard to ascribe a standpoint to an identity group without a careful application of that standpoint to the forces of production and to the dynamics of capitalist exploitation. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács argues bourgeois thought lacks a praxis, or a more comprehensive commitment to revolutionizing the world. Bourgeois thought can only attain what he calls the “contemplative stance,” since the bourgeois position cannot resolve the contradictions inherent to capitalist social life and must submit to the problems (and horrors) of bourgeois society. 

There is a historical problem that emerges in Lukács’s thought, but it is not the problem we often hear waged against him, namely that his thought leads to vulgar class reductionism. This is not a charitable reading of Lukács; however, there are problems in some of the ways Lukács formulates the historical task of the proletariat and this revolves around the question of how he treats the category of progress within capitalism and the question of class solidarity. Lukács conceives of the proletariat as the only subject position capable of praxis insofar as the proletariat can only overthrow capitalism as an act of critical practice. To frame this claim Lukács will often hark back to the bourgeois demand for “social progress” and champion it to fortify the proletariat in the class struggle. 

In our own time, however, is it sensible to advocate for progress? Consider the recent debates over accelerationism: did they not reveal that a Marxist position within the contemporary class struggle risks losing its compass and direction when it sides with the champions of social progress? The entire category of progress and progressivism is inextricably bound up with a liberal bourgeois class project. Because the Marxists were bound up with the workers’ movement in the 19th century to the First World War, they could advocate for a socially progressive position, whereas today, we experience an absence of the workers’ movement. Thus, when we advocate progressivism, we lose a coherent grasp on our very basis of class solidarity and the importance of maintaining a distance from liberal ruling class ideology. A partnership with the ruling class and its professional magistrates leads only to a cycle of defeat and disappointment. 

Thus, the issue with handling the legacy of Lukács does not revolve around vulgar class reductionism. On the contrary, based on our formulation of the worldview of classes, the issue is not that worldviews are a priori static encrustations of a given class. To suggest such an undialectical conception of class would be a fait accompli regarding the very question of class itself. It is often the case that when a liberal formulates class in vulgar terms, they can only imagine the Marxist must formulate class in far more vulgar terms. This creates a hysteria over the very incorporation of class into political struggle and debate and this paralysis leads to division and anti-solidarity. The Lukácsian view on class is in fact far from class reductionist, however. Rather, it is a conception of class consciousness that relies on a reading of capitalism as a progressive system that is flawed. While capitalism contains the seeds of progressive elements, progressivism is a politics that only cares about bringing about civil peace and equilibrium for competing liberties and for the continued atomization of workers. As the French intellectual Jean-Claude Michéa argues, the progressive position is effectively indistinguishable from the liberal position, as both operate on a categorical imperative: “act always in such a manner that you can consume ever more with no limit, while working ever more.” Progressivism binds the socialist and workers’ movement to an inevitable social compact that can rhetorically appear extraordinarily radical but which in practice relies on a class alliance with the bourgeois order.  

Time and again in the work of Lukács he will argue the progress of the system and the development of the capitalist system is one which the proletariat can seize towards ends that are in the vast interest of humanity. This argument presupposes a developmentalist view of capitalist production which in the age of secular stagnation may not hold up any longer. Lukács will argue that “Marx recognized the class struggle as the moving force in the development of society and the laws governing that struggle as the laws of social development generally.” There are thus two reasons to throw into question the idea of the workers’ movement and the proletariat accessing an ideological agenda based on a theory of progress and development of capitalism, the first is that it is quite possibly intellectually bankrupt as an idea and understanding of capitalist production; although more debate needs to be had on this question, and this is not the place for an elaboration on this problem. But the second and more important problem here is that a discourse on progress links the workers’ movement with progressive liberal actors when time has shown that such alliances, especially alliances that rely on an apologetic relation to the Democratic Party in the United States, simply have not borne any fruit. 

Conclusion

The question of the intellectual’s role in the class struggle is rarely discussed on the contemporary Left mostly because we have such a rudimentary discourse on the class character that makes up the Left intellectual scene itself. One side is mired in a protracted debate around an idea of class centered on the professional-managerial class (PMC) as the central antagonist to working-class consciousness, whereas others have pointed to the pitfalls in such an analysis of class.²² What Lukács’s work shows is clear: there is a bourgeois worldview, but it should not be read or understood as an a priori imposition that any salaried bourgeoisie or credentialed professional cannot escape. This would mean that Lukács’s reading of class is vulgar and static, and such conceptions of class have proven historically to shut down the possibility of solidarity based on working-class goals and objectives. As Gabriel Winant has argued, it does not help the working-class movement to think of the professional and credentialed class as a homogenous class that is always an enemy to the workers’ struggle. The anti-PMC view takes the ideology of the professional-managerial class as a singular form of irrationalism and tends to draw the conclusion from that claim that any member of that class is complicit in it. This leads to petty resentments and it furthers a sense of class that is neo-feudal, i.e., one remains bound by the ideology of a given class like a serf who can’t escape the lord’s manor. To the contrary, the intellectual can operate outside of the predominant ideological project of the professional class. Ideological struggle today is based on this problem: how does one break with professional class doxa in ways that open up new possibilities of working-class solidarity while at the same time forge alliances with professionals that properly alienate them from their own ideological commitments. 

For the intellectual, it is important that they be reminded of the power that comes with their social position even when they wish to frame an understanding of that social power as impotent and marginal. How can a more comprehensive worldview that is rooted in a working-class standpoint begin to be articulated? This requires a turn to a consideration of and further study of working-class intellectual activity that is both in the academy and outside of it. Another important task is to assist intellectuals in framing social and political antagonisms in such a way that they center class struggle in their analysis of social and political crises and conflict. A project of political education would blur the lines of how we even define the intellectual and likely move such a definition away from the credentialed professional markers that we have come to know the intellectual by.  

The intellectual has a great power even when they deny or disavow the constituent antagonisms that make up capitalist exploitation. When the intellectual is reserved, agnostic and quiet regarding social and political struggles they indirectly champion the bourgeois order, and this is often a better form of apologetics than intellectuals who do direct apologetics. Indirect apologetics are necessary in times of crisis and decadence because the contradictions of the social order make defending it impossible. For Lukács, the socialist philosopher has more political understanding about the world because they have identified and discerned social antagonisms which are borne out of class struggle. We must think of how to incorporate a different role for philosophers and intellectuals in the class struggle. As Lukács shows us, history can serve as our guide. 

Daniel Tutt is a philosopher with a focus on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Marxist thought. He recently convened a three-day conference on Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason which can be viewed on Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics, a study collective that engages texts and debates in the Freudian and Marxist context. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation with the Palgrave Lacan Series and Adjunct Professor of philosophy at George Washington University, Marymount University and elsewhere. He is the host of the podcast Jouissance Vampires.

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1. Lukács, Georg History and Class Consciousness Bibliotech Press, 2017. Pg. 142.
2. For a full treatment of Bourdieu’s ideas on academic philosophers see his work Pascalian Meditations, Stanford University Press, 1998.
3. See Korsch, Karl Marxism and Philosophy Verso Books, Pg. 105.
4. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason Verso Books, 2020. Pg 22.
5. Korsch, Karl Marxism and Philosophy, Pg. 69.
6. Ibid, 70.
7. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, Pgs. 138 – 139.
8. See Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust Harvard University Press for his study of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
9. Before writing The Destruction of Reason (1954) Lukács would argue this idea that Hegel absorbed the Jacobin view into the heart of his thought. See Lukacs, The Young Hegel, a study on the social and economic conditions of Hegel’s time and how these dynamics affected his thought.
10. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 105.
11. Rockmore, Tom, Irrationalism: Lukács and the Marxist View of Reason, Temple University Press, 1992. Pg. 77.
12. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 334.
13. Ibid, 149.
14. It is this more ambiguous category of the social being of the philosopher in relation to the capitalist order that Lukács periodizes in his analysis of irrationalism within philosophy that will be expanded in Lukács’s incomplete later work Ontology of Social Being – a three-volume work published in 1978 by Merlin Press.
15. Ibid, 378.
16. See Brobjer, Thomas Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography University of Illinois Press, 2008. Pg. 70.
17. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 306.
18. Ibid, 353.
19. See Hallward, Peter “Blanqui’s Bifurcations” Radical Philosophy 185 (May/Jun 2014) Radical Philosophy (https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/blanquis-bifurcations).
20. Ibid, 327.
21. There has been a fruitful, and at times, passionate debate regarding left-Nietzscheanism and how Nietzsche is to be incorporated on the socialist and Marxist left. As I have aimed to demonstrate in this article, Lukács’s critique is at the very origin of what I consider the most robust and convincing Marxist view on Nietzsche. In addition to Lukács, the work of Domenico Losurdo, Jan Rehmann, Harrison Fluss, Ishay Landa and Geoff Waite are all essential to read in this debate. The author has also reviewed Losurdo’s Nietzsche, Aristocratic Rebel for Historical Materialism, see Tutt, Daniel “Nietzsche in His Time: The Struggle Against Socratism and Socialism” (https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/nietzsche-his-time-struggle-against-socratism-and-socialism).
22. For a nuanced overview of the debate on the PMC and its class composition see Hines, Taylor “The Pitfalls of Polemic, or How to Criticize the Crankiest Class of Critics” Damage Magazine. June 24, 2021 (https://damagemag.com/2021/06/24/the-pitfalls-of-polemic-or-how-to-criticize-the-crankiest-class-of-critics/)