Lawrence Parker argues that existing Trotskyist schemas around the revolutionary career of Georg Lukács in the mid-to-late 1920s are fallacious in the extreme.
Introduction
In his famous 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness (HCC), Georg Lukács, writing on his road to Marxism in the years after the First World War, pointed out the errors in attempting “to iron out the glaring contradictions of that period by artificially constructing an organic development and fitting it into the correct pigeon-hole in the ‘history of ideas.’”1 Whether Lukács followed his own advice further into the 1967 preface is doubtful. Rather, we get a post festum ‘tidying’ of the narrative, after Lukács talked of his support for Stalin’s faction in the CPSU in the mid-1920s. Added to this, we have the notorious problem of Lukács’s Aesopian language (i.e., with an allegorical or concealed meaning) in some of his writings from the mid-1920s.
Regarding his development around the First World War, Lukács said: “If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing from one class to another in the middle of a world crisis?”2 Leaving aside that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a class, Lukács certainly changed sides when he decided to back Stalin in the mid-1920s, although this is a judgment made with the enormous benefit of hindsight. So, it wasn’t unfeasible that Lukács could again have “two souls within his breast”: one of the revolutionary proletariat and one of the nascent Soviet bureaucracy. But this dialectic was overthrown by Lukács in favor of a more straightforward schema for his development in the mid-1920s. He stated that he “agreed with Stalin about the necessity for socialism in one country” and this marked “a new epoch” in his thought.3
Although Lukács, somewhat concerned in his later years to offer up convoluted justifications for his support for Stalin, does not return to the idea of the “two souls,” there are hints in the 1967 preface that this conversion, as it took form in his rich theoretical writings of the period, was complicated. Of his little book Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought (1924), Lukács wrote that he tried to see in Lenin neither a straightforward follower of Marx and Engels nor a “pragmatic ‘Realpolitiker’ of genius.”4 In other words (even though Lukács’s overall analysis of Lenin’s politics was dubious), Lenin was more than a Stalin figure constantly pursuing tactics over strategy. When Lukács moves on to discuss his essays on Ferdinand Lassalle (1925) and Moses Hess (1926), he offers some more dialectical clues to the structure of his thought in this period, noting his “tendency to ground social criticism and the evolution of society more concretely in economics” and a move towards objectivism, which could appear to underwrite an adaptation to the reality of bureaucratic rule in the Soviet Union.5
However, Lukács also identified a node of his thought counterposed to any such adaptation in his essay on Lassalle, which pointed to a “radicalism that is purely imaginary” influenced by the idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and “that as far as knowledge of the real movement of history is concerned Hegel’s philosophy moves on an objectively higher plane than Fichte’s.”6 Lukács’s works of this period just as well function as critiques of communist bureaucracy, as well as attempts to undermine revisionist attempts to promote Lassalle as being on par with Marx.6 Lukács’s earliest introduction to a bureaucratised communist movement was in the practice of Comintern head Grigory Zinoviev (1883-1936) and his disciple in the Hungarian party, Béla Kun (1886-1938). Lukács’s anti-Kun position thus led him to sympathize with Stalin when the latter became an opponent of Zinoviev from around 1925.7 Lukács was influenced in this period by his practical work in Hungary with communist rail worker Jeno Landler (1875-1928). Talking of the Hungarian movement in the early 1920s, Lukács said: “Internationally we were messianic sectarians, in Hungarian affairs we were practitioners of Realpolitik.”8
Given Lukács’s more direct experience of Zinoviev and Kun’s manipulative methods, his critique of an ‘imaginary radicalism’ lacking any sense of concrete mediation, seems more likely to be directed at them than at Stalin, of whom Lukács probably knew very little in 1925. Such stances are mostly assumed by subsequent critics to be part of a mid-1920s rightward shift in Lukács’s world outlook where such objectivism of method pulled him towards Stalin and the emerging Soviet bureaucracy. But, as stated previously, they can also function as critiques of bureaucratism. Indeed, presenting a turn towards realism and objectivism as rightism puts critics in the position of having to at least partly enshrine the ‘imaginary radicalism’ that is the lot of a bureaucratic sectarianism that has subsequently become embedded in Trotskyist oil-slick internationals.
Most interpreters of this period of the mid-to-late 1920s, under the influence of the Trotskyist Michael Löwy,9 have disregarded the dangers of ‘ironing out contradictions’ in favor of the flat, schematic view also partly contained in the HCC preface: that there was a new epoch in Lukács’s theory marked out by his reconciliation with the reality of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This is not a matter of prettifying Lukács and the terrible political choice of backing ‘socialism in one country.’ But if one removes the schema of simple reconciliation, there is clear evidence in the essays on Moses Hess, alongside the Blum Theses (1928), that Lukács did not quickly collapse into Stalinism and, indeed, such works contained an important critique that went beyond merely proving the necessity of the present.
This article does assume some basic familiarity with Lukács’s revolutionary career and writings. For those interested in doing some background reading (with freely available digital texts), I would strongly recommend the collection of autobiographical writings and interviews contained in Record of a Life.10 As we have already seen, there are issues with the way Lukács attempted to ‘tidy’ the narrative of his life a posteriori. However, his interlocutors in these interviews do challenge Lukács in relation to his history and the results are generally valuable. Similarly, in relation to Lukács’s later work and thought, I would recommend Conversations with Lukács, which features a long, multi-layered interview conducted towards the end of his life.11 His interlocutors here are, again, empathetic but critical, and the transcript also contains many interesting observations about Lukács’s earlier work. These two books are the ones I started with when I began exploring Lukács in my 20s; they are a useful initial counterpoint to the various reductive schemas that the contemporary revolutionary left uses in terms of this topic. There has been a huge literature around Lukács, for example, produced by the British SWP and its international co-thinkers over many years. I must regretfully record that most of this output is about as useful as a Soviet-era consumer product, festooned with blank, undialectical schemas and over-fixated with HCC: a thoroughly transitional work that Lukács quickly forgot about. Attentive readers may remember a debate hosted by the Weekly Worker in 2013 between myself, James Turley, Mike Macnair, and others.12 This was perhaps more illuminating than most debates on Lukács in that it overthrew some of the more habitual left-traditionalist discourse (‘intellectual becomes a revolutionary,’ ‘Lukács and Stalinism,’ and so on), although I believe that Turley and Macnair imported other false narratives, some of which began to dissolve under pressure. This article is a partial continuation of those 2013 encounters, moving beyond an over-emphasized HCC.
Lukács and Stalin
Löwy sketches out his own schema that seems to partly match the simplistic one suggested by Lukács in 1967. The latter is deemed to have gone through a “utopian-revolutionary” stage from 1919 to 1921; and “a short but monumental climax of revolutionary realism” from 1922 to 1924, including HCC. But, from 1926, Löwy sees Lukács as having regressed into a position that was “nearer to realism pure and simple and, as a consequence, politically closer to the non-revolutionary Realpolitik of Stalin.” He adds: “[Lukács’s] ‘Moses Hess’ of 1926 had far-reaching political implications: it provided the methodological basis for his support for the Soviet ‘Thermidor’.”13 One of the facets of this change sketched out by Löwy is the shift in Lukács’s interpretation of Hegel by 1926. Previously, Lukács was concerned with the conception of totality and the subject-object dialectic. But in 1926: “He now saw in Hegel’s tendency to ‘reconcile’ himself with reality (e.g., the Prussian state) the proof of his ‘grandiose realism’ and his ‘rejection of all utopias’.”14
Löwy’s account is not without its immanent contradictions. He admits that the Moses Hess essay is “rightly acclaimed as one of [Lukács’s] most stimulating and profound philosophical works,”15 which is not faint praise for an article that apparently showcases the author’s subjection to Stalin. Löwy also suggests that Lukács was not completely ‘reconciled with reality’: “[Lukács] recognized that Hegel’s tendency to stop at the present was politically reactionary, but from the methodological point of view he saw it as the expression of a profound dialectical realism.”15 But, any doubts that Löwy may have about his formulations are smothered in the embrace of his overarching narrative of 1926: Lukács=realism=Stalin. This becomes particularly absurd when Löwy, more recently, addressed Lukács’s Tailism and the Dialectic (1925/26). He stated that Laszlo Illés, a Hungarian editor of the original version, believed that Tailism and the Dialectic was written in 1925 or 1926, at the same time as the Lassalle and Moses Hess essays.16 However, because Tailism and the Dialectic defends at least some elements of HCC then it can’t possibly be a product of 1926 and adjacent to the Moses Hess essay since HCC was a product of Lukács’s period of ‘revolutionary realism’; unlike the piece on Hess, which was a product of Lukács’s 1926 reconciliation with Stalinism.17 This seems to be a particularly tortured case of a historical schema writing historical assumptions.
The wretched irony of Löwy’s standpoint is that it embodies precisely what Lukács warned against in his essay on Hess. Lukács wrote: “… in all cases where the object-forms of historical reality are discovered in conceptually aprioristic fashion, either reality has to be conceived of as being ultimately and at heart irrational… or reason and reality, category and history, aprioristic form and empirical material, have somehow to be brought together and ‘reconciled’ with each other. But that involves applying to reality a thought-determinant that has not been developed out of historical reality itself.”18 My thesis is that Löwy imposes his own aprioristic logic on the Lukács of the mid-1920s (Lukács=realism=Stalin), so that the reality as evidenced in Lukács’s writing has to be brought to heel under the heteronomy of Löwy’s conceptual blinkers; the ‘problem’ of reconciliation thus lies not so much in Lukács himself as in Löwy having to reconcile this intellectual period with the literary violence of an insensitive schema.
We will explore further some of the problems of Löwy’s interpretation of Lukács in 1925/26 in relation to the latter’s own writing. But it is also worth initially pondering some of the odd undialectical language that Löwy uses. He argues: “Lukács’s essay on Moses Hess… lacks balance. It tilts towards ‘reconciliation’ with reality and lacks the dialectical revolutionary harmony of History and Class Consciousness.”19 “Balance” and “harmony” are phrases redolent of the ‘Machism’ that Lenin once bitterly polemicized against; messy and convoluted intellectual reality would surely be a constant process of the mutual mediation of the extremes/opposites of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘revolution’. In contrast, ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’ read like artificial constructs. Similarly, “dialectical revolutionary harmony” is a strange way of thinking about intellectual (or material) processes that never resolve into such a harmony; that constantly resolve into opposites that mediate one another. These seem to be superimposed, conservative concepts that rather betray the apparent radicalism of Löwy’s critique of Lukács.
An Influential Schema
One must admit that Löwy’s schema of the theoretical evolution of Lukács in the mid-1920s has been enormously influential. In a work that appeared in the same period as that of Löwy, Arato and Breines state that the former has a “suggestive and interesting reading” of how the issue of reconciliation and a growing realism in Hegel’s thought provided a template for Lukács’s own accommodation to Stalinism.20 However, Arato and Breines see the seeds of 1926 in earlier works such as HCC and Lenin. John Rees also follows Löwy on the Moses Hess essay, arguing that “for the first time in Lukács’s thought, there are indications of his collapse into an accommodation with existing reality,”21 although Rees states that the 1928 Blum Theses were the “real turning point” in this regard.22 The Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton talks of how Löwy has “convincingly demonstrated the inner logic of Lukács’s fraught alliance with Stalinism.”23 Unsurprisingly, given Lukács’s own reading of 1967, Löwy’s ideas were in circulation beyond the Marxist Left. For example, Lichtheim says the “defense of Hegelian ‘realism’” in the Moses Hess essay “can perhaps be seen as a rearguard action in Lukács’s slow retreat from the exposed position he had occupied three years earlier [in relation to the Soviet bureaucracy, which had attacked HCC].”24
But such interpretations have not, thankfully, been universal. Lukács’s student István Mészáros offers an important clue as to the status of the essays of the mid-1920s, stating that such polemics against ‘mechanical materialism’ and ‘vulgar Marxism’ “fulfill an important political function… in the struggle against sectarianism and its undialectical cult of immediacy.”25 Given that Lukács was exposed to this in the form of Zinoviev’s leadership of the Comintern, this also suggests that such works harbored a critique of bureaucratism. Mészáros also offers a more useful starting point to judge what writers such as Rees have identified as Lukács’s evolving “quietude.”26 Mészáros remarks on the closure of open political discourse that arose during Stalin’s rise to power, which pushed Lukács into the “Aesopic language of philosophical methodology” that represented the theoretician’s “greatly mediated political aspirations.”27 So, ‘quietude’ and ‘reconciliation’ are also inherent in the forms that Lukács’s work took in the mid-1920s but that does mean such essays do not offer a critique, albeit an abstract one with its inherent dangers of mystification. Lukács’s chosen path of a ‘guerilla’ struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy is questionable in that it is a clear adaptation to chastened circumstances. But it is not at all clear how far such ‘reconciliation’ had gone by, say, 1928, and his theoretical works of this period, contra Löwy and his supporters, offer no clear idea. More recently, John Clendaniel and Paul Le Blanc have also produced alternative, yet problematic, accounts of Lukács’s evolution in the 1920s that I will return to subsequently.
The Moses Hess Essay
Moses Hess (1812-75) was a philosopher and early German communist. He was a friend and collaborator of Marx and Engels, although he became the object of the latter’s criticism, particularly in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). It was this critique of the idealism and utopianism inherent in ‘German’ or ‘true socialism’ that Lukács sought to rescue and elaborate in his 1926 essay on Moses Hess, in reply to works from German socialist writers such as Franz Mehring (1846-1919),28 which, in Lukács’s eyes, sought to undermine criticisms made by Marx and Engels and present Hess as the “theoretical link between Hegel and Marx.”29 For Lukács, Hess played no such role, remaining an idealist and ethical utopian, somewhat in contrast to his participation in the German Lassallean workers’ movement. This means that Lukács, of course, had to crystallize his own views on Hegel’s legacy and this, as we have seen, is where the meat of the matter is for Löwy’s simplistic equation of Lukács=Soviet Thermidor.
Lukács was not writing in an intellectual vacuum when considering Hess and Hegel; rather he appears to be channeling Marx and Engels. In looking at Hegel, he was able to draw on Engels’ authoritative account in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886).30 Engels argued that Hegel’s “thoroughly revolutionary method of thinking produced an extremely tame political conclusion,” namely that the “absolute idea is to be realized in that monarchy based on social estates… that is, in a limited, moderate, indirect rule of the possessing classes suited to the petty-bourgeois German conditions of that time [1820].”31 It was this contradiction in Hegel that Lukács elaborated on in an orthodox vein that would have been understood by many in the pre-1914 Second International.
This idea of Hegel’s ‘reconciliation’ with German reality (in Elements of the Philosophy of Right – 1820), a monarchy based on social estates, looms into view in the essay on Moses Hess. But, in Lukács, such ‘reconciliation’ cannot simply be folded into his own collapse into ‘Stalinism’: “… Hegel developed very early on in his work the tendency to ‘understand what is’, a tendency [that] originally pointed energetically in the direction of the future.”32 While with Hegel, this insight into ‘what is’ collapsed, and, with him, the present lost its tendency to point to the future, stuck hard and fast into the present; with Lukács it lead to no such outcome in 1926: “Given that, the rejection of all ‘oughts’ [i.e. the moralistic strand of criticism that says rather than x being ‘this’, it ‘ought’ to be ‘that’ without truly considering the actual movement of history] and futuristic utopian thinking, the concentration of philosophy on knowledge of the present (grasped dialectically) emerges precisely as the only possible epistemological method of knowing what is really knowable about the future, the tendencies within the present [that] impel it really and concretely towards the future.”33 Lukács’s praise of Hegel’s realism, which he argued became “increasingly reactionary,”15 cannot be read as a plea for a simple ‘reconciliation’ with the immediacy of the present in the Soviet Union of 1926 or elsewhere. ‘What is’ also incorporates the seeds of the future. Löwy complains that Lukács’s critique “leaves out that for Marx ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it’.”19 This is transparently false criticism as can be gleaned from a close reading of the Moses Hess text and the quotations offered immediately above.
It is also highly probable that, following Mészáros, Lukács’s constant injunctions against abstract moral utopianism in the likes of Hess, and its propensity to collapse into a cult of ‘immediate’ reality (i.e., without properly considering any tendencies that might presage the future), were Aesopian responses to the bureaucratic sectarianism he had experienced from Zinoviev and Kun when Lukács was confronted with the practical tasks of rebuilding the Hungarian Communist Party after the collapse of Hungary’s Soviet Republic in 1919. This becomes clearer when one closely reads the autobiographical material dealing with the 1920s in Georg Lukács: Record of a Life (1983). Some of this critique at least was carried over into Lukács’s similarly Aesopian critiques of Stalin’s bureaucratic rule in the 1930s, although it would be a mistake to simply transpose this work of the 1920s into the following decade.
Conceptual IOU
Like many specious ideological constructs, Löwy’s narrative around Lukács in the mid-1920s owes a conspicuous debt to preconceptions about Hegel, which on further inspection are just as faulty as the identity of 1926 Lukács=Soviet Thermidor. In Löwy’s labored passages on the Moses Hess essay, the Hegel of Elements of the Philosophy of Right features simply as a resigned conservative, explicitly against the more dialectical treatment offered by Lukács and Engels. The latter argued: “No philosophical proposition has earned more gratitude from narrow-minded governments and wrath from equally narrow-minded liberals than Hegel’s famous statement: ‘All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real.’ That was tangibly a sanctification of things that be, a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, police government, star chamber proceedings and censorship.”31 This Hegel formulation of the ‘real is rational’ is taken from the preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right (there are slightly varying translations of it). But, as has been pointed out by many subsequent commentators, Hegel, is not, in this formulation, merely trying to gloss the status quo and the contingencies of the immediately existing world.34 The existing political order is not always rational. As Engels said: “… according to Hegel certainly not everything that exists is also real, without further qualification. For Hegel the attribute of reality belongs only to that which at the same time is necessary: ‘In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity.’ A particular governmental measure – Hegel himself cites the example of ‘a certain tax regulation’ – is therefore for him by no means real without qualification.”15
A similar point can be made to a related sentence that Löwy lifts from the preface of Elements of the Philosophy of Right and renders as: “The task of philosophy is to understand what is, because what is, is reason.”35 Löwy presents this flatly and singularly, without qualification, to make Hegel and Lukács appear as conservatives. This is misleading. As we have already seen, Lukács’s praise for Hegel’s ‘realism’ did not preclude ‘what is’ including historically necessary portents of the future. Hegel himself qualified his statement in the preface when he talked of recognizing “reason as the rose in the cross of the present”. He said: “… this rational insight is the reconciliation with actuality [that] philosophy grants to those who have received the inner call to comprehend, to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, and at the same time to stand with their subjective freedom not in a particular and contingent situation, but in what has being in and for itself.”36 ‘Reconciliation’ with ‘what is’ is thus not about a collapse into mere contingency. Despite a definite reactionary trend in Hegel towards monarchy based on social estates, neither Engels nor Lukács drew the conclusion that Hegel’s stress on reconciliation with reality was reactionary in toto.
The debt that Löwy’s 1926 Lukács=Soviet Thermidor narrative owes to his partialized view of Hegel is not repaid and the former’s construction, already heavily shaken by what is on show in the text of the Moses Hess essay, crashes to the ground.
Blum Theses
We see very similar problems in Löwy’s analysis of the Blum Theses that Lukács drew up in 1928 as an intervention into the Hungarian Communist Party’s second congress (‘Blum’ was his pseudonym). Löwy and John Rees have simple ideas in relation to these theses in line with the general backdrop of Lukács’s apparent reconciliation with Soviet Thermidor: that they are ‘rightism’ and quietist. Löwy argues: “… all that lies behind [the theses] is an application to Hungary of the right turn of the Comintern; Lukács was only following the ‘general line’ of 1924-27”,37 only to be caught out as the Comintern line moves rapidly leftwards in 1928, leading to his political defeat. Lukács argued more expansively about the origins of the Blum Theses; he certainly said it was a rearguard action against the Comintern’s developing ultra-leftism but there was also an “essential point” that the “proletarian revolution and the bourgeois-democratic revolution, in so far as it was genuine, were not separated from each other by a Chinese wall.”38 (This latter phrase was culled from Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.)39 To that end, Lukács revived Lenin’s idea of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry as operative for the Hungarian party.
Lukács, following the successful practice of Bolshevism in Russia, was clear that any such dictatorship could not be ‘stopped’ at the bourgeois stage and needed to be carried out in an uninterrupted fashion to its ‘end’: “A democratic dictatorship, then, although in terms of its immediate concrete content it does not go beyond bourgeois society, is a dialectical form of transition towards the revolution of the proletariat – or towards the counter-revolution. To stop at democratic dictatorship, conceived as a fixed, ‘constitutionally determined’ period of development, would necessarily signify the victory of the counter-revolution. Democratic dictatorship can therefore be understood only as the concrete transition by means of which the bourgeois revolution turns into the revolution of the proletariat.”40 Such a revolution, again, as in Russia, was hinged on an alliance of the proletariat and peasantry. Lukács said: “… the HCP remains the only party [that] inscribes the consistent implementation of the demands of the bourgeois revolution on its banner: expropriation of the large landed-property owners without compensation, revolutionary occupation of the land, free land for the peasants!”41 This struggle for the Hungarian republic, according to Lukács, “can only be used in the sense of a struggle for total democracy, for the republic headed by a government of workers and peasants, a struggle against the democratic liquidation of democracy, a fulfilment of the slogan, ‘Class against class’ [an obvious rhetorical concession to the Comintern’s third-period politics], a mobilization for the struggle [that] has to be conducted to secure democratic dictatorship.”42
Even though Lukács makes it clear that this process points beyond bourgeois society, Löwy manages to draw exactly the opposite conclusion: “The central argument of the ‘Blum Theses’ is that the aim of the Hungarian Communist Party should no longer be the re-establishment of a Soviet republic, but rather, simply [!], a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’, whose ‘immediate concrete content… does not go beyond bourgeois society’. The point was to replace the semi-fascist regime in Hungary by a bourgeois democracy… [!]”37 Löwy repeats the same mistake he makes regarding Hegel’s ‘what is’: just as ‘what is’ is simply equated with the immediate and purged of any dialectic of the future, the ‘democratic dictatorship’ is simply equated with what Lukács only sees as its bourgeois “immediate concrete content” and purged of any formulation that points beyond it.
Löwy even has the enormous chutzpah to tell the reader exactly what he is doing here: “We have purposely chosen the most ‘right-wing’ formulations of Lukács’s text, by-passing some more ‘leftish’ passages [that] were no more than verbal concessions.”43 I share Clendaniel’s skepticism at the bowdlerization involved in this admission.44 I would only add that Löwy is not just trimming away the very occasional material in the Blum Theses that includes third-period rhetoric (‘class against class’, for example), he is also selectively choosing material that backs up his false thesis that Lukács is engaged in a shift to the right.
Many of the same points could be made about Löwy’s camp-follower John Rees, who argues the Blum Theses “advocated the wholesale abandonment of the strategy of proletarian revolution and instead called for the HCP to work merely for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, that is, merely for a democratic revolution.”45 Like Löwy, Rees sees the Blum Theses foreshadowing the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s. Clendaniel makes many formally correct criticisms of the violence that the Löwy/Rees schema does to the actual text of the theses. But all three agree (following Lukács’s own retrospective ‘tidying’ of his history)46 that the Blum Theses foreshadow the Popular Front; Clendaniel thinks this is a positive, while the two Trotskyists think it’s a negative. But this deliberately obscures the point that the type of politics that Lukács is outlining in the Blum Theses, the proletariat dictating the political pace of the democratic revolution and taking it beyond the dimensions of bourgeois society, is light years from any of the later experience of the Popular Front, which, as we know from the manifold observations and criticisms that Trotsky and others voiced in the 1930s, involved the practical subjection of communist to bourgeois politics.
One final note in relation to the Blum Theses. We have discussed previously how these tortured schemas in relation to Lukács’s development leech off, and owe a debt to, other, equally questionable, ideas. The same factor occurs with criticism of the Blum Theses, which relies upon the preconception that Lenin’s 1905 slogan of the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,’ skillfully revived by Lukács in 1928, was ‘quietist,’ ‘stageist,’ and ‘bourgeois.’ In fact, Lenin approached such issues in 1905 in much the same spirit as Lukács did in 1928. For example, Lenin said: “Have no fear of sullying yourselves by most energetic halting-at-nothing participation in a republican revolution together with the revolutionary bourgeois democrats. Do not exaggerate the dangers of such participation; our organized proletariat is quite capable of coping with them.”47 More recently, Lars T Lih has convincingly shown how the idea of the Bolsheviks ‘re-arming’ themselves in 1917 is a myth and, in fact, 1917 represented the ironic triumph of ‘old-Bolshevism’ originating in 1905 and the worker-peasant vlast (power).48 To go too deep into those matters would take us far from the topic of Lukács; nevertheless, the debt that Blum Theses=bourgeois owes to the notion of Lenin’s 1905 argument having similar flaws is not repaid; and the whole rotten construction collapses under a mountain of bad debt.
Lukács and the Second International
Paul Le Blanc is another writer who has more recently criticized some of the traditional narratives around Lukács’s evolution in 1923-29, stating that the latter’s interventions in this era “are… more consistent with the orientation advanced by Lenin and Trotsky in the third and fourth congresses of the Communist International.”49 While I agree with Le Blanc, at least very formally, on certain points, what is notable with him is a radical amnesia in relation to the Second International. But the latter’s influence shadows points made about Lukács’s undoubted commitment to the Hungarian movement and the HCP faction around rail workers’ leader Jeno Landler, a veteran of the left wing of the Second International. This underlines that the boundaries of the Second and Third internationals were rather more fluid than subsequent schemas might suggest. But any contrary tendency, or trend, in Lukács’s thought (as opposed to treating that thought as substantially given for a periodic schema) in relation to the influence of the Second International is absent from much of the literature considered in my article.
This radical amnesia can, in some part, be traced back to Lukács himself. Speaking in an interview in the 1960s, he said: “… I do not at all regret today that I took my first lessons in social science from [Georg] Simmel50 and Max Weber51 and not from Kautsky.”52 His interlocutor, Wolfgang Abendroth,53 challenged this assertion, stating: “Yes, only we should not forget one thing, that in your case it was the late Kautsky that was at issue. The earlier Kautsky still played a positive role.”15 Lukács replied: “Yes, of course. I don’t want to make my own biography into a law of development – that is very far from my intention.”15 So, even Lukács, now routinely and boringly trotted out as someone opposed to the ‘mechanistic’ theories of Kautsky and the Second International in toto, seemingly had an appreciation of Lenin’s view of Kautsky as ‘renegade’ i.e., reneging on something that was previously positive. This was a familiar understanding among at least some sections of ‘official’ communism, even during the Stalin years.54 Such comments by Lukács throw interesting light on some of his earlier judgements, for example, the idea that Lenin was correct to see “in the centrists and in their theoretician, Kautsky, the most dangerous enemies of the revolutionary proletariat,”55 where Kautsky’s career is merely treated as a unity of being a consistent centrist i.e., wavering between reform and revolution.
However, as we have shown, in the Blum Theses and his essay on Moses Hess, Lukács was merely amplifying theoretical and programmatic ideas that were part of the common currency of the Second International. Some might object that such an idea is partly speculative, to which the response would be that this is a necessary speculation and that a comprehensive research project investigating the precise depth of Lukács’s debt to the intellectual heritage of the Second International, beyond the antique schemas of Trotskyist orthodoxy, would be a fine thing indeed.
- Original emphasis unless stated, G Lukács ‘Preface to the New Edition (1967)’ in History and Class Consciousness: studies in Marxist Dialectics Cambridge (Mass) 1975, px.
- Ibid. Lukács refers to the play written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
- Ibid pxxviii.
- Ibid xxxii.
- Ibid xxxiii.
- Ibid xxxiv.
- I Eorsi (ed.) Georg Lukács: Record of a Life London 1983 p79.
- Ibid p76.
- Löwy is an academic based in France with links to the Revolutionary Communist League, a Trotskyist organization.
- https://archive.org/details/recordoflife00gyrg
- https://archive.org/details/conversationswit0000lukc
- See https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/946/supplement-the-antinomies-of-georg-lukacs/, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/952/debate-lukacs-reloaded/ and https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/987/lukacs-the-philosophy-trap/
- M Löwy Georg Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism London 1979, p196.
- Ibid p194.
- Ibid.
- M Löwy ‘Revolutionary Dialectics Against “Tailism”: Lukács’ Answer to the Criticisms of History and Class Consciousness’ in MJ Thompson Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics London 2011 p66.
- Despite the erroneous title appended by the publishers when Tailism and the Dialectic was published in English 20 years ago, Lukács makes it clear in the essay that he already has a critical attitude to HCC by 1925/26: “There are many things in the book [History and Class Consciousness] that I deem needful of correction. I would formulate many of the things contained therein quite differently today. It is certainly not my intention to defend the book itself.” G Lukács A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic London 2000 p47.
- G Lukács ‘Moses Hess and the Problems of Materialist Dialectics’ in Tactics and Ethics 1919-1929 London 2014 pp188-189.
- Löwy Georg Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism op cit p196.
- A Arato and P Breines The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism London 1979 p199.
- J Rees ‘Introduction’ in Lukács Tailism and the Dialectic p34.
- Ibid p35.
- T Eagleton Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism London 1981 p83.
- G Lichtheim Lukács London 1970 p79.
- I Mészáros Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition London 1995 p501n.
- Rees op cit p34.
- Mészáros op cit p502n.
- Lukács refers to Mehring’s 1918-19 biography of Karl Marx, which can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/ch05.htm#s2
- Lukács ‘Moses Hess’ op cit p223.
- This work appears in Lukács’s annotations in ibid p210n.
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm
- Lukács ‘Moses Hess…’ op cit p191.
- Ibid. My emphasis.
- See for example the commentary by Allen Wood in GWF Hegel Elements of the Philosophy of Right Cambridge 1991 pp389-90.
- Löwy Georg Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism op cit p195.
- Hegel op cit p22.
- Löwy Georg Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism op cit p198.
- Georg Lukács: Record of a Life op cit p178, 81.
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/subservience.htm
- G Lukács ‘Blum Theses (extracts)’ in Tactics and Ethics 1919-1929 London 2014 p243. My emphasis.
- Ibid p250.
- Ibid p249.
- Ibid p198.
- https://www.lana.info.hu/lukacs-gyorgy/irasok-lukacsrol/john-clendaniel-the-revolutionary-marxism-of-lukacss-blum-theses/
- Rees op cit p33.
- Georg Lukács: Record of a Life op cit p81.
- VI Lenin The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm
- https://johnriddell.com/2015/06/01/lars-lih-the-ironic-triumph-of-old-bolshevism/
- P Le Blanc ‘Spider and Fly: The Leninist Philosophy of Georg Lukács’ Historical Materialism 2013.
- Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was a German sociologist and philosopher.
- Max Weber (1864-1920) was a German sociologist and historian.
- T Pinkus (ed.) Conversations with Lukács London 1974 p100. Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) was one of the leading theorists of German Social Democracy, having a deep and lasting impact on Lenin and many others.
- Wolfgang Abendroth (1906-85) was a socialist German jurist and political scientist.
- For examples from the old Communist Party of Great Britain and its leading theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt see https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2017/10/31/palme-dutt-and-karl-kautsky/ and https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2020/12/14/notes-on-kautsky-as-a-marxist-and-the-post-war-cpgb/
- G Lukács ‘Bernstein’s Triumph: Notes on the Essays Written in Honour of Karl Kautsky’s 70th birthday’ in Tactics and Ethics op cit p133.