A re­sponse to Georg Lukács

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Izrail’ Vain­shtein
Un­der the Ban­ner of
Marx­ism 10 (1924)
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The philo­soph­ic­al ex­plan­a­tions present among people claim­ing to be Marx­ists mani­fest a haphaz­ard­ness of spec­u­lat­ive philo­soph­iz­ing that must meet their nemes­is in the philo­sophy of dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism.

The his­tory of hu­man thought, from the dia­lect­ic­al stand­point, is least of all a ground for con­struct­ing hy­po­theses, con­coct­ing du­bi­ous con­cepts that bear on their face the im­print of tra­di­tion­al philo­soph­ic­al striv­ings. True and deep thought, thought that opens a new epoch in his­tory, of­ten be­comes a pole of at­trac­tion for philo­soph­iz­ing per­sons whose con­cep­tu­al fancy seizes upon such thought only to cov­er it over with their own ques­tion­able designs. Such a ques­tion­able design is the the­ory of re­ific­a­tion of Georg Lukács.¹

Marx, as is known, dis­closed the fet­ish char­ac­ter of the com­mod­ity. He showed that value is not a fet­ish in­vis­ibly resid­ing in the com­mod­ity, but a pro­duc­tion re­la­tion in a so­ci­ety based on in­di­vidu­al ex­change between com­mod­ity pro­du­cers. The struc­ture of com­mod­ity so­ci­ety in gen­er­al, and cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety in par­tic­u­lar, is such that a thing be­comes a point of in­ter­sec­tion in a nex­us of in­ter­link­ing labors. The com­mod­ity es­tab­lishes links in such a so­ci­ety, where there is no planned reg­u­lat­ory con­trol over pro­duc­tion and where a thing, dis­con­nec­ted from the pro­du­cer that made it, des­cends on to the mar­ket as a com­mod­ity unit, obed­i­ent to the spe­cif­ic laws of cir­cu­la­tion: “The labor of the private in­di­vidu­al mani­fests it­self as an ele­ment of the total labor of so­ci­ety only through the re­la­tions which the act of ex­change es­tab­lishes between the products, and, through their me­di­ation, between the pro­du­cers.”² A thing is dis­con­nec­ted from the pro­du­cers be­cause they them­selves are dis­con­nec­ted from each oth­er. The over­com­ing of this sep­ar­a­tion is car­ried out in com­mod­ity cir­cu­la­tion, through which things es­tab­lish so­cial ties. To un­der­stand the con­scious­ness of such a so­ci­ety and its con­stitutive classes (a means in the struggle) it is ne­ces­sary to go bey­ond the lim­its of thing­hood and to ad­dress the liv­ing con­crete act­ors in struggle. Things do not struggle amongst them­selves. If the so­cial con­scious­ness is a crit­ic­al factor in this mu­tu­al his­tor­ic­al rivalry, then, of course, it is ne­ces­sary to un­der­stand it in terms of so­cial class in­terest, which only finds ex­pres­sion in liv­ing agents of the his­tor­ic­al pro­cess. The geni­us of Marx’s dis­clos­ure con­sisted in re­veal­ing be­hind re­la­tions of things the re­la­tions of people and, con­versely, in es­tab­lish­ing the ne­ces­sity of the re­ific­a­tion of pro­duc­tion re­la­tions in a com­mod­ity so­ci­ety. Lukács, pro­ceed­ing from the fact of com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism — which Marx so bril­liantly dis­sec­ted hav­ing seen be­hind this oc­cult idol hu­man re­la­tions — at­tempts to con­struct an en­tire “mon­ist­ic” the­ory of re­ific­a­tion in whose im­age and like­ness all phe­nom­ena of this so­ci­ety are for­mu­lated, in­clud­ing con­scious­ness. However, Lukács’s con­struc­tion stands in sharp con­tra­dic­tion to the sense of dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism.

First of all, when Marx speaks about cap­it­al “as auto­mat­ic gen­er­a­tion”³ in which all traces of its ori­gin dis­ap­pear, he in this case does not at all de­scribe, as Lukács thinks, “the in­clin­a­tion of con­scious­ness to­ward re­ific­a­tion.”⁴ Rather, Marx is speak­ing about the re­frac­tion of de­term­in­ate forms of so­cial re­la­tions, op­er­at­ing as re­la­tions of things in the con­scious­ness of bour­geois the­ory and rep­res­ent­a­tion. Polit­ic­al eco­nomy is the sci­ence of re­la­tions between people rep­res­en­ted as re­la­tions between things. The cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy is a com­mod­ity eco­nomy, the single cell of which — the private busi­ness en­ter­prise — is man­aged by form­ally in­de­pend­ent com­mod­ity pro­du­cers, between whom an in­dir­ect link is es­tab­lished in the pro­cess of ex­change. Speak­ing about com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism and all its modi­fic­a­tions in cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety, Marx least of all psy­cho­lo­gizes. He is de­scrib­ing an in­clin­a­tion of con­scious­ness, but he spe­cifies it in re­la­tion to the pro­duct­ive re­la­tions of people char­ac­ter­ist­ic of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety. Ru­bin is com­pletely right to say that the the­ory of com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism could be bet­ter called “a gen­er­al the­ory of the pro­duc­tion re­la­tions of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety.”⁵

In Lukács we read that, “just as the eco­nom­ic the­ory of cap­it­al­ism re­mains stuck fast in its self-cre­ated im­me­di­acy, the same thing hap­pens to bour­geois at­tempts to com­pre­hend the ideo­lo­gic­al phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion.”⁶

But what is this im­me­di­acy cre­ated by cap­it­al­ist eco­nom­ic the­ory that pre­cludes an un­der­stand­ing of the ideo­lo­gic­al phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion? It must be said that thus to per­ceive in com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism an im­me­di­acy cre­ated by cap­it­al­ist eco­nom­ic the­ory is ut­terly in­com­pat­ible with a dia­lect­ic­al un­der­stand­ing of so­cial phe­nom­ena. Com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism, of course, is not a sim­pli­fic­a­tion cre­ated by cap­it­al­ist eco­nom­ic the­ory, but a form in­her­ent to a so­ci­ety in which people are con­nec­ted by means of things. Cap­it­al­ist eco­nom­ic the­ory in its vari­ous stages re­flects the vari­ous stages [in the his­tor­ic­al de­vel­op­ment] of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety. Con­sequently, to ex­pound in these cases [of over a cen­tury and half of bour­geois polit­ic­al eco­nomy] that some kind of haphaz­ardly cre­ated “im­me­di­acy” pre­vents an un­der­stand­ing of the ideo­lo­gic­al phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion is com­pletely un­ten­able.

“Even those thinkers,” Lukács con­tin­ues, “who have no de­sire to deny or ob­scure its ex­ist­ence and who are more or less clear in their own minds about its hu­manly de­struct­ive con­sequences re­main on the sur­face and make no at­tempt to ad­vance bey­ond its ob­ject­ively most de­riv­at­ive forms, the forms fur­thest from the real life-pro­cess of cap­it­al­ism, i.e., the most ex­tern­al and vacu­ous forms, to the ba­sic phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion it­self.” But how are we to take this claim that the­or­ists of cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy are, “clear in their own minds about [re­ific­a­tion’s] hu­manly de­struct­ive con­sequences?”⁷

De­struct­ive for whom? Which con­sequences? Ac­cord­ing to Lukács, the the­or­ists of cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy go no fur­ther than de­scrip­tion. Their at­tempts to ques­tion deeply are con­strained by the form of re­ific­a­tion’s mani­fest­a­tion. In real­ity it is not quite so. Bour­geois polit­ic­al eco­nom­ists do not only de­scribe, but also ex­plain. And the fact of the mat­ter is that if at bot­tom these ex­plan­a­tions fail to tran­scend cer­tain de­term­ined lim­its, this lim­it­a­tion ought to be sought not on the ground of re­ific­a­tion, but on that of ant­ag­on­ist­ic so­ci­ety. This is what prompts these the­or­ists to con­vert even “hu­manly de­struct­ive con­sequences” in­to etern­al be­ne­fits and a re­deem­ing core of so­cial well-be­ing.

Take, for ex­ample, clas­sic­al eco­nomy’s highest rep­res­ent­at­ive, Dav­id Ri­cardo. In what lies his es­sen­tial dif­fer­ence from Marx? Why didn’t Ri­cardo ap­pre­hend the es­sence of the “phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion”? For Ri­cardo, as is known, changes in the mag­nitude of value de­pend on changes of the pro­ductiv­ity of labor. Labor, for Ri­cardo too, is the sub­stance of the value of a com­mod­ity. Yet the value of a com­mod­ity, as pro­duct­ive labor, is for Ri­cardo not a so­cial cat­egory, but an etern­al form of so­cial pro­duc­tion per se. “Polit­ic­al Eco­nomy has in­deed,” Marx says, “ana­lyzed, however in­com­pletely, value and its mag­nitude, however in­com­pletely, and has un­covered the con­tent con­cealed with­in these forms. But it has nev­er once asked the ques­tion why this con­tent has as­sumed that par­tic­u­lar form, that is to say, why labor is ex­pressed in value, and why the meas­ure­ment of labor by its dur­a­tion is ex­pressed in the mag­nitude of the value of the product.”⁸ Clas­sic­al eco­nomy stud­ied the pro­cess of pro­duc­tion in its ma­ter­i­al-tech­nic­al basis, but it failed ut­terly to re­gard it from the stand­point of so­cial ant­ag­on­ism.

The eco­nom­ic cat­egor­ies of Marx — the cat­egor­ies of value, money, cap­it­al dis­sec­ted by the scalpel of the dia­lect­ic­al meth­od — already speak not only of re­la­tions of pro­duc­tion in gen­er­al (this hap­pens also in the clas­sics), but also of the de­term­in­ate form of re­la­tion that ob­tains between cap­it­al­ists and work­ers. The is­sue, con­sequently, is not only the re­ified char­ac­ter of pro­duc­tion re­la­tions, but the de­term­in­ate so­cial-ant­ag­on­ist­ic form they ac­quire only at a giv­en stage of de­vel­op­ment of the pro­duct­ive forces. Not the re­ified char­ac­ter of pro­duct­ive re­la­tions in cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety, but the in­terest of the rul­ing class, con­sti­tutes the first premise of the eco­nom­ic thought of its the­or­ists. This is what de­term­ines the view­point of Ri­cardo, ac­cord­ing to whom cap­it­al is “ac­cu­mu­lated labor.” That is, he can only see in cap­it­al a “means of pro­duc­tion” in which no so­cial-class op­pos­i­tion ex­ists. Pre­cisely class in­terest pre­vents bour­geois the­ory to over­come its fet­ish­ist view­point, to ap­pre­hend the phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion and thus to stand on the ground of dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism, the out­look of the work­ing class.

But even po­ten­tial ap­pre­hen­sion by bour­geois the­ory in the point of re­ific­a­tion still does not guar­an­tee it against ideo­lo­gic­al and fet­ish­ist il­lu­sions, if the whole class in­terest sup­presses and fet­ters its the­or­et­ic­al pur­view. If cap­it­al is not an auto­mat­ic fet­ish, not money hatch­ing money, still it is value cre­at­ing sur­plus value, i.e., a so­cial re­la­tion of ex­ploit­a­tion and op­pres­sion res­ult­ing from the rul­ing class’ own­er­ship of ac­cu­mu­lated labor, i.e., the means of pro­duc­tion. Per­cep­tion of this so­cial form­a­tion is already the over­com­ing of the class view­point of the bour­geois­ie and any type of ideo­lo­gic­al and so­cial il­lu­sions: This nat­ur­ally can­not take place in bour­geois the­ory as such. The mys­tery of any so­cial con­struc­tion should be sought in the re­la­tion of the own­ers of the means of pro­duc­tion to the dir­ect pro­du­cers. The the­or­ists of the bour­geois­ie, as well as all pos­sible sorts of the­or­et­ic­al op­por­tunism, dir­ect their ef­forts to ideo­lo­gic­al dis­tor­tion and the blunt­ing of class con­flict. This leads in turn to “ideo­lo­giz­a­tion” of the giv­en so­cial re­la­tions, ob­scur­ing their dia­lect­ic­al nature. Per­cep­tion of this dia­lect­ic­al nature is im­possible without treat­ing the spe­cif­ic type of pro­duct­ive re­la­tions that ob­tains between people. This alone sheds light on all the phe­nom­ena of the giv­en so­ci­ety, re­ific­a­tion as well as ideal­iz­a­tion. Marx ap­pre­hen­ded the ideo­lo­gic­al nature of re­ific­a­tion, dis­clos­ing the so­cial back­ground of com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism, when he came to ex­am­ine the pro­cess of his­tory dia­lect­ic­ally. Then, in­stead of mute thing­hood, a drama of so­cial struggle un­fol­ded. True, pro­duc­tion re­la­tions in com­mod­ity so­ci­ety in gen­er­al, and cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety in par­tic­u­lar, op­er­ate as re­la­tions of things. However, not these re­la­tions between things, but pre­cisely the re­la­tions between people led by eco­nom­ic in­terests are what il­lu­min­ate the fun­da­ment­al prob­lems of a giv­en form of so­cial life in its di­verse so­cial and ideo­lo­gic­al rami­fic­a­tions.

In the be­gin­ning was the deed. When Plekhan­ov de­scribed dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism as the philo­sophy of ac­tion, he ac­tu­ally only re­prised Marx’s own view that he ap­plied in the as­sess­ment of Feuerbach’s ma­ter­i­al­ism in con­tra­dis­tinc­tion to his emer­ging dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism.

The chief de­fect of all hitherto ex­ist­ing ma­ter­i­al­ism — that of Feuerbach in­cluded — is that the thing, real­ity, sen­su­ous­ness, is con­ceived only in the form of the ob­ject or of con­tem­pla­tion, but not as hu­man sen­su­ous activ­ity, prac­tice, not sub­ject­ively. Hence, in con­tra­dis­tinc­tion to ma­ter­i­al­ism, the act­ive side was de­veloped ab­stractly by ideal­ism — which, of course, does not know real, sen­su­ous activ­ity as such. Feuerbach wants sen­su­ous ob­jects, really dis­tinct from the thought ob­jects, but he does not con­ceive hu­man activ­ity it­self as ob­ject­ive activ­ity.⁹

The fact is that his­tor­ic­al reg­u­lar­ity is not brought about out­side this sub­ject­ive activ­ity, but in the pro­cess of such activ­ity, which seizes, per­meates, and il­lu­min­ates ob­jectiv­ity, which in con­sequence of this activ­ity loses its mys­tic­al oc­cult char­ac­ter and ac­quir­ing a hu­man physiognomy. The prob­lem of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety for Marx is the prob­lem of pro­duc­tion re­la­tions between cap­it­al­ists and work­ers hav­ing taken re­ified form. But the meth­od­o­lo­gic­al ori­gin­al­ity of Marx con­sists in the so­ci­olo­gic­al over­com­ing of this sup­posed ob­jectiv­ity, ex­pressed in the dis­clos­ure of this ma­ter­i­al fet­ish.

We have already seen that a fun­da­ment­al dif­fer­ence between Marx’s dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism and the ma­ter­i­al­ism of Feuerbach is that Marx con­siders real­ity not only in the form of ob­jects, but also in the form of con­crete hu­man ac­tion, i.e., sub­ject­ively. Len­in, the bril­liant mas­ter in the field of re­volu­tion­ary activ­ity, showed that re­volu­tion can­not hap­pen if to the ob­ject­ive pre­requis­ites of re­volu­tion are not ad­ded sub­ject­ive pre­requis­ites, namely an aptitude of the re­volu­tion­ary class for re­volu­tion­ary mass ac­tion. Op­por­tun­ist ob­ject­iv­ism al­ways prefers to con­fine it­self to “ob­ject­ive con­di­tions,” grant­ing them the un­di­vided ini­ti­at­ive in the do­main of re­volu­tion­ary ac­tion, pro­ceed­ing by way of such ob­ject­iv­ism to simply, polit­ic­ally tak­ing the path of least res­ist­ance.

As a the­ory of re­volu­tion­ary ac­tion, dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism con­tra­dicts any the­ory of re­ific­a­tion that seeks the mys­tery of all struc­tures of hu­man con­scious­ness in “things,” in “ghostly ob­jectiv­ity.” Such a view com­pletely ig­nores the sub­ject­ive di­men­sion op­er­at­ive in ac­tu­al class con­flict. “In the suc­ces­sion of the eco­nom­ic cat­egor­ies as in any oth­er his­tor­ic­al so­cial sci­ence,” Marx says, “it must not be for­got­ten that their sub­ject — here, mod­ern bour­geois so­ci­ety — is al­ways what is giv­en, in the head as well as in real­ity, and that these cat­egor­ies there­fore ex­press the forms of be­ing, the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of ex­ist­ence, and of­ten only in­di­vidu­al sides of this spe­cif­ic so­ci­ety, this sub­ject.”¹⁰ The so­cial, and not the re­ified ex­ist­ence of people de­term­ines their con­scious­ness. The ma­ter­i­al­ist the­ory of his­tory in so­cial re­la­tions seeks to ex­plain phe­nom­ena, tak­ing place in the giv­en so­cial whole.

Of course inas­much as re­la­tions of people take the form of re­la­tions of things, the re­ified char­ac­ter of so­cial re­la­tions in­ev­it­ably im­parts to so­ci­ety a cer­tain cast, com­pared, e.g., with a so­ci­ety in which people con­nect dir­ectly in the pro­cess of pro­duc­tion, rather than through the me­di­ation of things. “The bour­geois­ie,” Marx says,

has re­solved per­son­al worth in­to ex­change value, and in place of the num­ber­less in­de­feas­ible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, un­con­scion­able free­dom — Free Trade. In one word, for ex­ploit­a­tion, veiled by re­li­gious and polit­ic­al il­lu­sions, it has sub­sti­tuted na­ked, shame­less, dir­ect, bru­tal ex­ploit­a­tion. The bour­geois­ie has stripped of its halo every oc­cu­pa­tion hitherto honored and looked up to with rev­er­ent awe. It has con­ver­ted the phys­i­cian, the law­yer, the priest, the poet, the man of sci­ence, in­to its paid wage laborers.¹¹

Uni­ver­sal ex­change has formed, ac­cord­ing to Marx, a new or­der such that even those things, “which till then had been com­mu­nic­ated, but nev­er ex­changed; giv­en, but nev­er sold; ac­quired, but nev­er bought — vir­tue, love, con­vic­tion, know­ledge, con­science, etc. — when everything, in short, passed in­to com­merce.”¹² That is how Marx de­scribed with clas­sic­al clar­ity the gen­er­al per­va­sion of ex­change value through all phe­nom­ena of the so­cial and ideo­lo­gic­al or­der. But at the same time we must not lose sight of the fact that Marx calls this uni­ver­sal re­ific­a­tion a na­ked, shame­less, dir­ect and bru­tal ex­ploit­a­tion. Marx con­siders the phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion not as autonom­ous and de­tached, as some sort of key to all the phe­nom­ena of giv­en so­ci­ety, but as a dir­ect ex­pres­sion of so­cial ant­ag­on­ism it­self op­er­at­ing through the fet­ish ap­pear­ances of the com­mod­ity form of labor. In Lukács this so­cial mo­ment is com­pletely ob­scured by the mo­ment of thing­hood. “The journ­al­ists’ lack of con­vic­tions,” says Lukács, “the pros­ti­tu­tion of their ex­per­i­ences and be­liefs is com­pre­hens­ible only as the cul­min­at­ing point of cap­it­al­ist re­ific­a­tion.” About what sort of journ­al­ists does Lukács speak? Of course, not about the pro­let­ari­an, but about the bour­geois journ­al­ists. But pros­ti­tu­tion of their tal­ents is char­ac­ter­ist­ic for the “gradu­ated flun­keys of the bour­geois­ie.” It is char­ac­ter­ist­ic, in oth­er words, as an in­stru­ment of class struggle. The pros­ti­tu­tion by journ­al­ists of their ex­per­i­ences should be con­sidered not at all as the cul­min­at­ing point of cap­it­al­ist re­ific­a­tion, but as one of the forms of struggle of the cap­it­al­ist class, a struggle, of course, which is not a struggle for truth, but a struggle for power, dis­dain­ing neither hy­po­crisy nor pros­ti­tu­tion.

“There is no such thing as ab­stract truth, truth is al­ways con­crete.”¹³ The geni­us of Marx, who al­ways em­ployed the dia­lect­ic­al meth­od, con­sisted in dis­clos­ing the con­crete mo­ments that lie hid­den be­neath a re­ified shell. Cap­it­al for Marx is not a thing, not ac­cu­mu­lated labor, a so­cial form, which the means of pro­duc­tion take on the basis of wage labor. In this way, un­deter­mined thing­hood is boiled down to so­cial de­term­in­acy, which is that cent­ral prob­lem the solu­tion of which in­volves the in­ev­it­able dis­clos­ure of all the prob­lems of the giv­en so­ci­ety. Marx al­ways de­man­ded con­crete­ness. This was clearly ex­pressed in his ba­sic the­or­et­ic­al de­mand that in the meth­od of polit­ic­al eco­nomy, “the sub­ject, so­ci­ety, must al­ways be kept in mind as the pre­sup­pos­i­tion.”¹⁴ Thus, for in­stance, Marx re­proaches Hegel for start­ing the Philo­sophy of Right with own­er­ship, as the simplest leg­al re­la­tion of the sub­ject. “No own­er­ship ex­ists, however, be­fore the fam­ily or the re­la­tions of mas­ter and ser­vant are evolved, and these are much more con­crete re­la­tions.”¹⁵ There­fore it would be more cor­rect to say that there ex­ist fam­il­ies and tribes which have as of yet only pos­ses­sions, but not prop­erty. “Al­though the sim­pler cat­egory may have ex­is­ted his­tor­ic­ally be­fore the more con­crete,” Marx says, “it can achieve its full (in­tens­ive and ex­tens­ive) de­vel­op­ment pre­cisely in a com­bined form of so­ci­ety, while the more con­crete cat­egory was more fully de­veloped in a less de­veloped form of so­ci­ety.”¹⁶ De­term­in­a­tion of the or­gan­iz­a­tion of pro­duc­tion, the mys­tery of which is dis­closed in the own­ers of the means of pro­duc­tion’s re­la­tion to the dir­ect pro­du­cers, con­sti­tutes the es­sence of all so­cial struc­tures. When things flow­ing in their usu­al chan­nel ad­vance re­ific­a­tion, as “mod­el of all the ob­ject­ive forms of bour­geois so­ci­ety to­geth­er with all the sub­ject­ive forms cor­res­pond­ing to them,”¹⁷ it means such an ab­sorp­tion of the sub­ject­ive by the ob­ject­ive. This is rad­ic­ally con­tra­dicted by dia­lect­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism, the philo­sophy of ac­tion.

Cit­ing the words of En­gels — that in a mod­ern state, “law must not only cor­res­pond to the gen­er­al eco­nom­ic situ­ation and be its ex­pres­sion, but must be an ex­pres­sion which is con­sist­ent in it­self and which does not, ow­ing to in­ner con­tra­dic­tions, look glar­ingly in­con­sist­ent. And in or­der to achieve this, the faith­ful re­flec­tion of eco­nom­ic con­di­tions is more and more in­fringed upon”¹⁸ — Lukács re­marks, “It is hardly ne­ces­sary to sup­ple­ment this with ex­amples of the in­breed­ing and the in­ter­de­part­ment­al con­flicts of the civil ser­vice (con­sider the in­de­pend­ence of the mil­it­ary ap­par­at­us from the civil ad­min­is­tra­tion), or of the aca­dem­ic fac­ulties, etc.”¹⁹ This in­ter­pret­a­tion is not quite true. En­gels ac­tu­ally wants to say that law, as an ideo­lo­gic­al in­stru­ment of the rul­ing class of cap­it­al­ists, has still as its task to ob­scure and blunt the sharp edges of this dom­in­a­tion, that it strives to hide its class nature and to ap­pear as above class con­sid­er­a­tions. The law ap­pears uni­ver­sal ir­re­spect­ive of all such in­terests. The dis­tor­ted re­flec­tion of eco­nom­ic re­la­tions by bour­geois law is, “all the more [dis­tor­ted] the more rarely it hap­pens that a code of law is the sharp, un­mit­ig­ated, unadul­ter­ated ex­pres­sion of the dom­in­a­tion of one class.”²⁰ It seems clear, then, that for En­gels the is­sue is about class law, which strives to crown it­self with the flower of etern­ity, mask­ing the signs of its own class char­ac­ter. All the (if one can put it like this) crotchets and dis­tor­tions of the law En­gels links closely to its class char­ac­ter. But how does it stand in Lukács? Such a dis­tan­cing of law from its eco­nom­ic basis char­ac­ter­izes for Lukács a struggle between civil ser­vices, between fac­ulties.

If we care­fully look at his “mon­ist­ic” the­ory, one very in­ter­est­ing fact emerges, namely the ana­logy with cer­tain fea­tures of the out­look of Bog­dan­ov. Take the role played in Lukács by spe­cial­iz­a­tion: Spe­cial­iz­a­tion for Bog­dan­ov con­sti­tutes the root of the prim­al fall, the fatal source of present and emer­ging dis­son­ances the over­com­ing of which by uni­ver­sal or­gan­iz­a­tion is it­self tan­tamount to the real­iz­a­tion of a high­er so­cial har­mony. Point­ing to ra­tion­al­iz­a­tion of in­di­vidu­al func­tions in cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety, tak­ing place along with the ir­ra­tion­al­ity and prob­lem­at­ic “reg­u­lar­ity” of the whole, Lukács says:

This has the ef­fect of mak­ing these par­tial func­tions autonom­ous and so they tend to de­vel­op through their own mo­mentum and in ac­cord­ance with their own spe­cial laws in­de­pend­ently of the oth­er par­tial func­tions of so­ci­ety (or that part of the so­ci­ety to which they be­long).

As the di­vi­sion of labor be­comes more pro­nounced and more ra­tion­al, this tend­ency nat­ur­ally in­creases in pro­por­tion. For the more highly de­veloped it is, the more power­ful be­come the claims to status and the pro­fes­sion­al in­terests of the ‘spe­cial­ists’ who are the liv­ing em­bod­i­ments of such tend­en­cies. And this cent­ri­fu­gal move­ment is not con­fined to as­pects of a par­tic­u­lar sec­tor. It is even more in evid­ence when we con­sider the great spheres of activ­ity cre­ated by the di­vi­sion of labor.²¹

The lo­gic of spe­cial­iz­a­tion thus fig­ures in Lukács as a frac­tur­ing force thanks to which so­ci­ety’s self-present­a­tion ob­scures its very to­tal­ity. Real­ity is par­ti­tioned in­to frag­ments and sci­ence is turned in­to a sys­tem for which, “the world ly­ing bey­ond its con­fines, and in par­tic­u­lar its own ma­ter­i­al base which it is its task to un­der­stand, its own con­crete un­der­ly­ing real­ity lies, meth­od­o­lo­gic­ally and in prin­ciple, bey­ond its grasp.”²² This same lo­gic of spe­cial­iz­a­tion leads to a “struggle of two coiled springs,” i.e., an ob­scur­ing of the real so­cial class struggle, cap­able alone of dis­clos­ing any type of ir­ra­tion­al­it­ies, wheth­er mani­fes­ted in the an­archy of so­cial pro­duc­tion or in some sort of ideo­lo­gic­al vari­ation, as in the philo­soph­ic­al sys­tem of a Spen­gler. Pre­cisely class re­la­tions — as the spring of so­cial pro­gress, as the dia­lectic of the so­cial pro­cess — pre­vent bour­geois the­or­ists to ad­opt the dia­lect­ic­al view­point. In this way Lukács’s dia­lect­ic­al meth­od­o­logy gives way to “a meth­od­o­logy of re­ific­a­tion.” Lukács writes:

It has of­ten been poin­ted out in these pages and else­where, that the prob­lem that forms the ul­ti­mate bar­ri­er to the eco­nom­ic thought of the bour­geois­ie is the crisis. If now, in the full aware­ness of our own one-sided­ness, we con­sider this ques­tion from a purely meth­od­o­lo­gic­al point of view, we see that it is the very suc­cess with which the eco­nomy is totally ra­tion­al­ized and trans­formed in­to an ab­stract and math­em­at­ic­ally ori­ent­ated sys­tem of form­al ‘laws’ that cre­ates the meth­od­o­lo­gic­al bar­ri­er to un­der­stand­ing the phe­nomen­on of crisis.²³

It will not be an ex­ag­ger­a­tion, if I say, that Lukács him­self resides on the plane of form­al­ism, which oc­cludes from him the real nature of things. The fact is that the meth­od­o­lo­gic­al bar­ri­er to un­der­stand­ing the prob­lem of crisis is cre­ated for bour­geois eco­nom­ists not at all by eco­nom­ic ra­tion­al­ity, be­cause eco­nom­ics as a sci­ence is an ap­plic­a­tion of the ra­tion­al meth­od to em­pir­ic­al facts, but by hatred of the ra­tion­al ker­nel of dia­lectics, the ap­plic­a­tion of which, for in­stance, to the prob­lem of crisis, touches upon the most dan­ger­ous and deadly sores of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety.

En­gels, con­sidered crises from the dia­lect­ic­al view­point, in­dic­at­ing that they emerge from the very nature of cap­it­al­ist pro­duc­tion and com­pet­i­tion: “In the present un­reg­u­lated pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion of the means of sub­sist­ence, which is car­ried on not dir­ectly for the sake of sup­ply­ing needs, but for profit, in the sys­tem un­der which every one works for him­self to en­rich him­self, dis­turb­ances in­ev­it­ably arise at every mo­ment.”²⁴ He went fur­ther, not­ing that since the be­gin­ning of the last cen­tury crises set in every 5-7 years. Every time the event was fraught with the greatest poverty for work­ers and gen­er­al re­volu­tion­ary ex­cit­a­tion. Every crisis, con­sequently, is a great danger for the en­tire ex­ist­ing or­der. The dia­lect­ic­al in­ter­pret­a­tion of the prob­lem of crisis is con­nec­ted in En­gels, on the one side, with the ob­served de­term­ined sys­tem of the dis­tri­bu­tion of products, the cap­it­al­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, and, on the oth­er side, it closely con­nects its neg­at­ive ef­fect with that class that suf­fers from it dir­ectly, oc­ca­sion­ing in it a re­volu­tion­ary com­mo­tion that threatens the en­tire ex­ist­ing or­der. It is com­pletely clear that bour­geois the­or­ists’ in­ter­pret­a­tion of crises will meth­od­o­lo­gic­ally avoid those mo­ments that point to the re­volu­tion­ary class over­throw of their so­cial found­a­tion, cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety. For them the dis­pro­por­tion­al­ity between pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion which speaks to the so­cial class op­pos­i­tion of labor and cap­it­al gives way to the­or­et­ic­al ef­forts to find the source of crises in a dis­pro­por­tion­al­ity between ele­ments solely of pro­duc­tion it­self. It is com­pletely clear that in this case the de­term­in­ant for bour­geois the­ory is not ra­tion­al­ity, but, on the con­trary, the so­cial re­la­tions that de­term­ine its meth­od­o­logy. Marx­ism leads to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions.

Lukács evid­ently feels that something is wrong in his own type of in­ter­pret­a­tion, at­trib­ut­ing to ra­tion­al­iz­a­tion the de­cis­ive force for so­cial phe­nom­ena, which al­lows only for this sav­ing clause — “the in­com­pre­hens­ib­il­ity and ir­ra­tion­al­ity of crises is in­deed a con­sequence of the class situ­ation and in­terests of the bour­geois­ie but it fol­lows equally from their ap­proach to eco­nom­ics.”²⁵ But such a sep­ar­a­tion by Lukács between ap­par­ently in­tern­al con­tent and form does not save the situ­ation but makes it, on the con­trary, still more shaky and doubt­ful. In or­der to sub­stan­ti­ate the meth­od­o­lo­gic­al in­ev­it­ab­il­ity of such in­com­pre­hens­ib­il­ity of the crisis prob­lem for bour­geois the­or­ists, Lukács re­calls the the­ory of Tugan-Baran­ovsky, in which the lat­ter, giv­ing an ana­lys­is of his­tor­ic­al crises over nearly a cen­tury-long peri­od, tries to ex­clude the fact of con­sump­tion and to found an eco­nom­ics purely fo­cused on pro­duc­tion. But it is com­pletely clear that re­gard­ing crises purely in terms of pro­duc­tion and dis­reg­ard­ing con­sump­tion, the bour­geois the­or­ist ob­scures the most ele­ment­al so­cial char­ac­ter­ist­ic of crises — that they are re­bel­lions of the pro­duct­ive forces against the ex­ist­ing mode of pro­duc­tion — ad­du­cing in­stead that ab­surd con­tra­dic­tion, “the mean­ing of which is that pro­du­cers have noth­ing to con­sume, be­cause cus­tom­ers are want­ing.”²⁶ I re­peat, it is not eco­nom­ic ra­tion­al­ity that causes the ir­ra­tion­al­ity and in­com­pre­hens­ib­il­ity of crises for bour­geois the­ory, but a cer­tain class trend pre­de­ter­mines for it those lim­its bey­ond which it is not per­mit­ted to ven­ture.

This, however, raises the fol­low­ing ques­tion: Sup­pose the fatal and in­sur­mount­able obstacle to the com­pre­hen­sion of the fun­da­ment­al nature of so­cial phe­nom­ena lies for bour­geois the­ory in the form­al-the­or­et­ic­al meth­od. In that case, after all, there ex­ists a so-called in­tu­it­ive school (Bergson, James, etc.), which gnost­ic­ally rebels against the op­press­ive claims of ra­tion­al­ism, ad­van­cing in­tu­ition as the most com­pet­ent or­gan of know­ledge cap­able by means of feel­ing to ap­pre­hend the very vis­cera of life. Does then not the philo­sophy of Bergson ap­pear in the role of sa­vior, res­cuing cog­ni­tion from its para­lyz­ing form­al­ism? Why may not il­lu­min­a­tion be de­rived from there? Cer­tainly, Lukács’s con­struc­tion leads lo­gic­ally to sim­il­ar con­clu­sions as those drawn by Bergson and James. Is not Bergson’s ir­ra­tion­al in­tu­ition­ism it­self in­voked to ap­pre­hend the very phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion? Here’s Lukács:

[Philo­sophy] may rad­ic­ally ques­tion the value of form­al know­ledge for a “liv­ing life” (see ir­ra­tion­al­ist philo­sophies from Ham­a­nn to Bergson). But these epis­od­ic trends lie to one side of the main philo­soph­ic­al tra­di­tion. The lat­ter ac­know­ledges as giv­en and ne­ces­sary the res­ults and achieve­ments of the spe­cial sci­ences and as­signs to philo­sophy the task of ex­hib­it­ing and jus­ti­fy­ing the grounds for re­gard­ing as val­id the con­cepts so con­struc­ted.²⁷

Lukács thus dis­tin­guishes between the main and epis­od­ic trends in philo­sophy, so that the vi­tal­ist trend ap­pears to him epis­od­ic in com­par­is­on to the main ra­tion­al­ist trend, which, for its part, is hope­lessly re­moved from all pos­sib­il­ity of grasp­ing the phe­nomen­on of re­ific­a­tion. However, it is baff­ling how one can re­gard as epis­od­ic the in­tu­ition­ist dir­ec­tion in philo­sophy that gnost­ic­ally jus­ti­fies all sorts of re­li­gious folly that runs counter to the ba­sic evid­ence of sci­entif­ic think­ing. Such think­ing is em­in­ently suit­able for bour­geois the­ory and the cap­it­al­ist class. Is it, for in­stance, merely an epis­od­ic­ally ir­ra­tion­al­ist as­pir­a­tion in James that drives him to his apo­theosis of re­li­gious feel­ing, his glor­i­fic­a­tion of re­li­gious con­trasts as re­fin­ing and deep­en­ing the world, such that, “[the world] is all the rich­er for hav­ing a dev­il in it, so long as there is also archangel Mi­chael to keep his foot upon his neck.”^{28 Such ideo­lo­gic­al phrase-mak­ing is in fact far from epis­od­ic in the dec­ad­ent philo­sophy of the bour­geois­ie, whose the­or­ists strive to hoist aloft the ban­ner of sci­entif­ic cler­ic­al­ism, hound­ing ideo­lo­gic­al class struggle out of hear­ing on grounds of bad taste. In this paltry man­ner they at­tempt to de­fend them­selves against any re­volu­tion­ary shock to good con­science. “In fact, it can­not be an ac­ci­dent,” Len­in ex­claims, “that the small school of em­pirio-cri­ti­cists is ac­claimed by the Eng­lish spir­itu­al­ists, like Ward, by the French neo-cri­ti­cists, who praise Mach for his at­tack on ma­ter­i­al­ism, and by the Ger­man im­man­ent­ists.”29}

When it thus ap­pears that arch-bour­geois philo­soph­ers ad­opt an ir­ra­tion­al­ist pos­ture in their striv­ings to over­come ra­tion­al­ist form­al­ism, then Lukács’s true po­s­i­tion is at odds with his con­ten­tion that, “a rad­ic­al change in out­look is not feas­ible on the soil of bour­geois so­ci­ety.” If one takes such a view­point, then the vi­tal­ist philo­sophy of Bergson, however “epis­od­ic,” nev­er­the­less ap­pears to be such a rad­ic­al change of the form­al­ist view­point. After all, it makes a claim to ap­pre­hend the es­sence of things. In­deed, it ad­vances this es­sence as a com­mend­able ob­ject of gnostic ef­fort, den­ig­rat­ing by con­trast the form­al-ra­tion­al­ist achieve­ments of the in­tel­lect that touch only re­la­tions… a rather sad res­ult. |P

Notes

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¹ Vain­shtein here is re­fer­ring to a trans­la­tion of the first part of Lukács’s three-part es­say “Die Verding­lichung und das Bewußtsein des Pro­let­ari­ats” [“Re­ific­a­tion and the Con­scious­ness of the Pro­let­ari­at”] that ap­peared in Rus­si­an in Vest­nik Socialističeskoj Aka­demii 4 (1923), 186-222. A Rus­si­an trans­la­tion of the rest of “Re­ific­a­tion and the Con­scious­ness of the Pro­let­ari­at” ap­peared in the fol­low­ing is­sues, num­bers 5 and 6, of Vest­nik Socialističeskoj Aka­demii. It is un­clear wheth­er at the time of writ­ing Vain­shtein was un­fa­mil­i­ar with the second and third parts of the es­say or, if he was, wheth­er their later ap­pear­ance in Rus­si­an altered his views on Lukács’s en­ter­prise. Lukács’s es­say, of course, had first ap­peared as the cent­ral con­tri­bu­tion to his 1923 volume, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein [His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness], which he would even­tu­ally re­pu­di­ate. For Lukács’s own 1925 de­fense of the book, see his A De­fense of His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness: Tail­ism and the Dia­lectic, trans. by Es­th­er Leslie (Lon­don: Verso, 2000). It is un­clear wheth­er Lukács was aware of Vain­shtein’s Rus­si­an re­view. His 1925 De­fense is dir­ec­ted against re­sponses to his book by Ab­ram De­bor­in and Laszlo Ru­das, both of which ap­peared in 1924 in the journ­al Arbeit­er­l­it­er­at­ur pub­lished in Vi­enna.
² Karl Marx, Cap­it­al: A Cri­tique of Polit­ic­al Eco­nomy, Vol. 1, trans. by Ben Fowkes (Lon­don: Pen­guin Books, 1976), 165.
³ The ref­er­ence here is to the gen­er­al for­mula for cap­it­al: “The in­de­pend­ent form, i.e., the mon­et­ary-form, which the value of com­mod­it­ies as­sumes in simple cir­cu­la­tion, does noth­ing but me­di­ate the ex­change of com­mod­it­ies, and it van­ishes in the fi­nal res­ult of the move­ment. On the oth­er hand, in the cir­cu­la­tion M-C-M, both the money and the com­mod­ity func­tion only as dif­fer­ent modes of ex­ist­ence of value it­self, the money as its gen­er­al mode of ex­ist­ence, the com­mod­ity as its par­tic­u­lar, or, so to say, dis­guised mode. It is con­stantly chan­ging from one form in­to the oth­er, without be­com­ing lost in this move­ment; it thus be­comes trans­formed in­to an auto­mat­ic sub­ject…As the dom­in­ant sub­ject of this pro­cess, in which it al­tern­ately as­sumes and loses the form of money and the form of com­mod­it­ies, but pre­serves and ex­pands it­self through all these changes, value re­quires above all an in­de­pend­ent form by means of which its iden­tity with it­self may be as­ser­ted [Marx, Cap­it­al, 255 em­phas­is ad­ded]. The older Eng­lish trans­la­tion puts it this way, “[cap­it­al] as­sumes an auto­mat­ic­ally act­ive char­ac­ter.”
⁴ It seems that Vain­shtein is re­fer­ring to here to Lukács’s state­ment that, “Just as the cap­it­al­ist sys­tem con­tinu­ously pro­duces and re­pro­duces it­self eco­nom­ic­ally on high­er and high­er levels, the struc­ture of re­ific­a­tion pro­gress­ively sinks more deeply, more fate­fully and more defin­it­ively in­to the con­scious­ness of man” [His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness, trans. by Rod­ney Liv­ing­stone (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 93].
⁵ Ap­pear­ing in the same year as Lukács’s text, Isaak Ru­bin had main­tained that while, as Bog­dan­ov and Kaut­sky had main­tained, “[Marx’s] the­ory of fet­ish­ism dis­pels from men’s minds the il­lu­sion, the gran­di­ose de­lu­sion of brought about by the ap­pear­ance of phe­nom­ena in the com­mod­ity eco­nomy… [nev­er­the­less] “this in­ter­pret­a­tion, though gen­er­ally ac­cep­ted in Marx­ist lit­er­at­ure, does not nearly ex­haust the rich con­tent of the the­ory of fet­ish­ism de­veloped by Marx. Marx did not only show that hu­man re­la­tions were veiled by re­la­tions between things, but rather that in the com­mod­ity eco­nomy so­cial pro­duc­tion re­la­tions in­ev­it­ably took the form of things and could not be ex­pressed ex­cept through things…. [On this read­ing] the the­ory of com­mod­ity fet­ish­ism is trans­formed in­to a gen­er­al the­ory of pro­duc­tion re­la­tions of the com­mod­ity eco­nomy [I. I. Ru­bin, Es­says on Marx’s The­ory of Value, Third Edi­tion, trans­lated by Miloš Samardžija and Fredy Per­l­man (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973), 2].
…The way that Vain­shtein con­trasts Ru­bin with Lukács so strongly here is un­usu­al. Typ­ic­ally, the two are viewed as sim­il­ar in their read­ings of Marx.
⁶ Lukács, His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness, 94.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Marx, Cap­it­al, 173-4.
⁹ Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in the Marx-En­gels Reader, Second Edi­tion, ed. by Robert C. Tuck­er (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), 143. Em­phas­is in ori­gin­al.
¹⁰ Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Found­a­tions of the Cri­tique of Polit­ic­al Eco­nomy, trans. by Mar­tin Nic­olaus (Lon­don: Pen­guin Books, 1973), 106. Note that while the Grundrisse in its en­tirety was not pub­lished un­til 1939, this pas­sage is taken from the “In­tro­duc­tion” which had been pub­lished in the SPD’s house the­or­et­ic­al journ­al, Die Neue Zeit, in 1903. Thus was the text avail­able to Vain­shtein in 1924.
¹¹ The ref­er­ence here of course is to Marx and En­gels’s “Com­mun­ist Mani­festo,” in Marx-En­gels Read­er, 475-476.
¹² Karl Marx, Poverty of Philo­sophy (New York: In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers, 1992), 27.
¹³ V. I. Len­in, One Step For­ward, Two Steps Back, in The Len­in An­tho­logy, ed. by Robert C. Tuck­er (New York: W. W. Norton & Com­pany, 1975), 117.
^{14. Marx, Grundrisse, 102.
15} Ibid.
¹⁶ Ibid., 103.
¹⁷ Lukács, His­tory, 83.
¹⁸ Friedrich En­gels to Con­rad Schmidt, 10/27/1890, in The Se­lec­ted Cor­res­pond­ence of Karl Marx and Friedrick En­gels, 1846-1895, trans. by Dona Torr (New York, In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers, 1942), 481.
¹⁹ Lukács, His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness, 103.
²⁰ En­gels to Schmidt, 10/27/1890, in Se­lec­ted Cor­res­pond­ence, 481.
²¹ Lukács, His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness, 103.
²² Ibid., 104.
²³ Ibid., 105.
²⁴ Friedrich En­gels, The Con­di­tion of the Work­ing Class in Eng­land (Ox­ford: Ox­ford Uni­versity Press, 1993), 93-4.
²⁵ Lukács, His­tory, 105.
²⁶ Friedrich En­gels, So­cial­ism: Uto­pi­an and Sci­entif­ic, trans. by Ed­ward Avel­ing (New York: In­ter­na­tion­al Pub­lish­ers, 1975), 71.
²⁷ Lukács, His­tory and Class Con­scious­ness, 110.
²⁸ Wil­li­am James, The Vari­et­ies of Re­li­gious Ex­per­i­ence, a Study in Hu­man Nature: Be­ing the Gif­ford Lec­tures on Nat­ur­al Re­li­gion De­livered at Ed­in­burgh in 1901-2 (Lon­don: Long­mans, Green, and Co., 1902), 50.
²⁹ V. I. Len­in, Ma­ter­i­al­ism and Em­pirio-Cri­ti­cism (Mo­scow: For­eign Lan­guages Pub­lish­ing House, 1972), 414.