apotheosizing the party: lukács's "chvostismus und dialektik"

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Apotheosizing the Party: Lukcs's "Chvostismus und Dialektik" Author(s): Lee Congdon Source: Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2007), pp. 281-292Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23317260Accessed: 07-05-2015 19:43 UTC

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Stud East Eur Thought (2007) 59:281-292 DOI 10.1007/s 11212-007-9039-2

Apotheosizing the Party: Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik

Lee Congdon

Published online: 11 October 2007

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract Georg Lukcs's recently discovered defense of Geschichte und

Klassenbewusstsein, written in 1925 or 1926 in reply to critical attacks by Lszl Rudas and Abram Deborin, is of a piece with that earlier work and his Lenin of 1924. In its emphasis on the pivotal role and absolute authority of the Communist

Party as the incarnation of the class consciousness of the proletariat, it is Leninist to the core. For many contemporary Marxist theorists, including the Lukcs disciple Istvn Mszros, such an apotheosis is precisely what is dead in Lukcs's thought.

Keywords Alienation Class consciousness Communist Party Dialectic of nature - Dialectics Leninism Mediation Tailism

Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik

One week after Hitler ordered his armies into Soviet Russia, the NKVD arrested

Georg Lukcs. It would be two months before the eminent Marxist theorist walked

out of Lubyanka, cleared, for the moment, of charges that he spied for Hungary's

political police and orchestrated the activity of Hungarian agents in the U.S.S.R.1

During one of the lengthy interrogations to which he was subjected, he was asked if he knew Lszl Rudas, another, though less sophisticated, Hungarian Marxist who had served time in a Soviet prison in 1937-1938. As Lukcs undoubtedly surmised,

the NKVD had already taken Rudas into custody, alleging that he, Lukcs, and other

Hungarians had organized a Trotskyite espionage ring.2 Lukcs denied any

1 Sziklai (2000: 35).

2 Hajdu (2000: 18).

L. Congdon (E3)

Department of History, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA 22807, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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282 L. Congdon

wrongdoing, but resisted the temptation to even scores with Rudas; long years in the

Party had taught him that denunciations could boomerang.3 The temptation must, however, have been great because Rudas had by then made

it his primary mission in Ufe to discredit Lukcs as a Marxist and Party loyalist. The same age as his bete noire, who was born to wealth, Rudas was one of ten children

raised by poor working-class parents. At 18, he entered the socialist movement and soon joined the editorial staff of the socialist daily Ne'pszava (Voice of the People). After brief service in World War I, he undertook to deepen his understanding of Marxism and subsequently helped to establish the Hungarian Communist Party. During the short-lived Soviet Republic of 1919, he edited V'ros jsa'g (Red Gazette), and when the government of Bla Kun collapsed he fled to Vienna, where he sided with the Jen Landler (anti-Kun) faction and popularized the views of

Lukcs, chief ideologist in the Landler camp.4 In 1922, Rudas left Austria for the Soviet Union, where he launched a many

sided research and teaching career. With an eye to his political future, he shifted his

allegiance to the Kun faction and, as proof of his sincerity, published a scathing attack on Lukcs's brilliant, but controversial, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein

(1923). His countryman, he charged, was guilty of the sin of idealism, an evil to which he inclined as a result of his prewar associations with Max Weber, Emil Lask, and Heinrich Rickert.5 As a result, he had had the temerity to criticize Engels for

holding that the dialectic operated in nature as well as history/society, and hence that Marxism was a science governed by natural laws. According to Lukcs, Rudas

concluded, "the dialectic is not an objective lawfulness independent of men, but a

subjective lawfulness of men"the essence of what he characterized as "subjective

idealism."6 A similar criticism was leveled at Lukcs by the Russian philosopher Abram

Deborin. A former Menshevik and follower of Georgi Plekhanov, Deborin, like

Lukcs, had been profoundly influenced by Hegel. In fact, he was shortly to become the leader of the so-called Dialecticians, who wagedand by 1929 wonan

ideological war against the Mechanists, who maintained that science had rendered

philosophy superfluous. Nevertheless, Deborin adopted a tone of righteous indignation while condemning Lukcs for his alleged idealist heresies and his effort to play a sophisticated Marx off against a simple-minded Engels.

Deborin claimed to be appalled by Lukcs's rejection of the dialectic of nature,

which he saw as a logical consequence of his repudiation of materialism. After all,

he wrote, "from the standpoint of dialectical materialism, nature is dialectical in itself."7 This, Deborin said, was not only the view of Engels, but also of Marx, for the two men had always worked closely together; they had never had any

fundamental disagreement. Only "an idealist from head to foot" could argue to the

3 See the transcript (in Hungarian translation) of the NKVD's interrogation of Lukcs, July 13, 1941 in

Sziklai (2002: 71-75). 4

Feitl (1985: 6), and Erzsbet Andics in Rudas (1950: 5-9). 5 Lszl Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, I (1981: 191). 6

Lszl Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, I (1981: 203). 7 Deborin (1924: 627).

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Lukcs's Chvostismus und Dialektik 283

contrary.8 The most subversive aspect of Lukcs's idealism, Deborin argued, was his identification of subject and object, of thought and Being. On such a view,

thought was as important as material existence, a heresy that Lenin had condemned

in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Lenin's Party

As far as anyone knew, Lukcs never replied to Rudas and Deborin's attacks. The

recent discovery in Moscow of Chvostismus und Dialektik, a spirited rejoinder and defense of Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, was therefore totally unexpected.

Lukcs seems to have written it in 1925 or 1926, a year or two after his critics' review essays appeared in Arbeiter-Literatur. Not without reason, he chose a title

that would buttress his claim to be a true Leninist whose antagonists were "tailists,"

from the Russian word "khvost" (tail). Lenin had chosen that word to characterize his Party opponentsthe Mensheviks and "Economists"in What Is to Be Done?

In that famous tract, Lenin had taken up the question "of the relation between consciousness and spontaneity," or "unconsciousness."9 His adversaries, he

charged, held the quietistic view that the working class would develop a

revolutionary (he called it a Social-Democratic) consciousness on its own

spontaneouslyas a result of economic evolution. Such a view was "tailist" because it relegated the Party to the tail end of the movement, transforming its leaders into mere followers of the masses, passive observers of an automatic and

guaranteed advance.

That, Lenin argued, was a serious misreading of Marx's theory. By their own

effort, workers could develop only trade-union consciousness; they could recognize the need to combine in unions in order to secure higher wages, shorter hours, and

greater benefits. But they could not achieve true class consciousness, by which he

meant recognition of their assigned historical role, which was to overthrow the class rule of the bourgeoisie and usher in a classless society. That was why the Party and

bourgeois intellectuals turned revolutionaries had to intervene. By some means Lenin did not say whatintellectuals such as Marx and Engels (and he himself) intuited the proletariat's true, as opposed to its merely empirical, will. Like

Rousseau's General Will, the class consciousness of the proletariat was not an

awareness of what workers actually want, but what they ought to want and would

want if they were fully conscious of their historic mission. It followed, according to Lenin, that class consciousness had to be brought to the

workers from without, "imputed" to them by the Party, which is to say Party leaders. At times, in fact, the Party had to force the workers to be free. It had, at

whatever the cost, to awaken them to the necessity of a total reconstruction of

society; small, even large, improvements in working conditions would only weaken

revolutionary resolve.

8 Deborin (1924: 622).

9 Lenin (1929 [1902]: 31, 44).

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284 L. Congdon

That was the Lenin whom Lukcs memorialized in a small book of 1924, and to whom he had deferred in the early 1920s, after the Bolshevik leader criticized one of his essays: "G. L.'s article is very left-wing and very poor. Its Marxism is purely verbal... it gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical situations; it takes no account of what is more essential."10 From the moment he accepted that

criticism to the day he died in 1971, Lukcs was a dedicated Leninist.

Thus, when he wrote Chvostismus und Dialektik, the Marxist master was

defending not only himself but the man whom he had come to idolize. In a sense, he was rewriting What Is to Be Done? in an effort to combat a new generation of

Mensheviks (Deborin) and tailists (Rudas). In tilting against "subjectivism," for

example, Rudas and Deborin were, in Lukcs's judgment, waging war against Bolshevism itself. Like Mensheviks and tailists of old, they sought to reduce Marxism to a bourgeois sociology with trans-historical laws, a theory that ruled out action on the part of human beings; revolution would come about mechanically, as the end result of unconscious economic forces.

Lukcs did not, of course, deny that there was an objective historical

development, but he insisted that at various key "moments," human beingsor

to be more specific, the class-conscious proletariathad to take conscious and decisive action. That did not mean that the subjective "moment" was divorced from the objective process that occasioned it. That would be true only if one viewed them

separately, apart from their dialectical reciprocity," their unity in revolutionary praxis. Rightly regarded, the subjective moment was objective as well; upon "inserting" itself into the objective sequence, it became a member of it. The

argument was clever, for it managed to portray objective circumstance and decisive

action, necessity and freedom (fully conscious action), as one. And if the price of

calling particular attention to the latter weakened the sense of historical

inevitability, so be it; it helped to explain the receding of the revolutionary wave and to rescue faith in the future.

Mediation

As a philosophically more learned Lenin, Lukcs insisted that Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein had hinged on "the role of the Party in the Revolution."12 That

role was to induce the proletariat to carry out its revolutionary tasks. Unfortunately,

as Lenin had pointed out, the proletariat could develop no more than trade-union

consciousness because it was deceived into thinking that bourgeois society was

stable and permanent. In order to ensure success, therefore, the Party had to impute

class consciousness to workers, attribute to them the thoughts and feelings that they

would have were they fully conscious of their, and hence humanity's, true interest

and historic mission. In plain language, the Party had the right, indeed the duty, to

coerce workers for their own, and History's, good.

10 V.l. Lenin in Lukcs (1975: xvi-xvii).

11 Lukcs (1996: 14). 12

Lukcs, (1996: 8).

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Lukcs's Chvosttsmus und Dialektik 285

Perhaps because he came from a working-class background, Rudas had taken

exception to that idea. In "Die Klassenbewusstseinstheorie von Lukcs," he had

complained that "in the best (or worst?) case the 'imputed' consciousness of Comrade L. is a hypostatised consciousness-very similar to a divine conscious ness."13 As far as he was concerned, individual workers or the proletariat as a whole could become class conscious; there was no other possibility. However far he was from matching Lukcs's intellect, he recognized that his so-called comrade's class consciousness was an ideal class consciousness contemptuous of what workers

actually thought. As the custodian of authentic class consciousness, Lukcs had

maintained, the Party alone possessed truth and the authority to see that it prevailed. He had never bothered to explain how we know that the Party incarnates the true

will of the proletariatother than to say that Marxism proclaimed it. No more than Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein itself is Chvostismus und

Dialektik a work of philosophy; it is the systematization and explication of a faith. Just as a Christian dogmatics constitutes an effort to elucidate the truths and

implications of a prior commitment, so Lukcs's Marxism is a rendering of that

political faith to which he had converted in 1918. No evidence can be adduced to

disprove the dogma, which is internally consistent and self-certifying. We can know the truth, according to Lukcs, by adopting the standpoint of the proletariat, which can be done only by participating actively in the communist movement. Those who remain outside the Party cannot possibly know the truth, because it is nothing but the self-awareness of the movement.14

It angered Lukcs that there remained within the Party some, like Rudas, who failed to recognize its indispensability. One of his critic's fundamental errors, he

believed, was his naive belief that proletarian class consciousness was a mechanical

product of the immediate economic situation of the workers.15 Rather like

Protestants who believe that one may have direct dealings with God, unmediated by church or clergy, Rudas missed completely the Party's role as an agent of

mediation; his tailist ignorance served to point up the pressing need "to abandon

immediacy."16

That was a restatement of the argument Lukcs made in section three of the most

famous essay in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, "Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats." Only bourgeois thinkers, he insisted there, viewed

the world in its immediacy; for them, reality was immediately given, natural, the unalterable object of contemplation. They could not regard the world and the social

order as anything other than the sum of eternal, isolated "facts." Were they to

abandon abstract, formal rationality, they would have to recognize that bourgeois class dominance was a temporal, not an eternal, phenomenon. To be sure, the best

bourgeois thinkers were not willfully and cynically obtuse, but they possessed a

consciousness that distorted ultimate reality in the interest of their class.

13 Lszl Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, II (1981: 26). 14

Congdon (1991: 61). 15

Lukcs had already condemned such a belief in Lukcs (1967 [1924]: 28). 16 Lukcs (1996: 25).

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286 L. Congdon

The privileged epistemological standpoint of the proletariat was also a function

of class interest. Precisely because it was not in that class's interest to view reality in

its factual immediacy, it was capable of achieving a mediated view for which facts

derived their meaning from their relation to the whole, or the totality, of history. What for bourgeois thinkers were static, isolated "things" were for the proletariat

dynamic aspects of processes, immanent tendencies and possibilities. Rightly understood, reality was not, it became; hence, the proper cognitive relationship to

reality was not contemplation, but action. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways," Marx had written. "The point, however, is to change it."17

Mediation was Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein's most important concept. It

provided Lukcs with a theoretical weapon to use against "tailism" and against the

utopianism by which, as a younger man, he had been led astray. "Comrade Rudas," he wrote with obvious irritation in Chvostismus und Dialektik, "knows very well

that I have broken completely with my past, not only socially but philosophically as

well."18 The concept of mediation was the key to the revolutionary realism that he

learned from Lenin and that viewed the socialist future not as yet to come, but as

already present in each "moment" of the revolutionary movement, mediated by that

movement in its totality.19

Lukcs returned again and again to the crucial mediating function of organiza tional forms, the Party first and foremost.20 Marx, he pointed out, was not only the

author of Das Kapital, but the founder of the Communist League and the

International, while Lenin founded the Russian Communist Party and the Third

International. Such organizations mediated between the proletariat's real situation

and its consciousness; for one part of the working class, they brought the latter into

line with the former by working out "practical measures from the correct knowledge

of the historical process as a whole, from the totality of its economic, political,

ideological, etc. moments."21

The dialectic of nature

"In the previous considerations," Lukcs wrote in the section of Chvostismus und Dialektik devoted to the dialectic in nature, "we came up repeatedly against the

problem of mediation."22 Rudas and Deborin had been highly critical of what

theyand many otherstook to be Lukcs's rejection of the idea that the dialectic

operated in nature as well as society/history. According to Rudas, "there is only one

single lawful regularity (in nature as well as in society): the dialectic, and

17 See the dense, but not incomprehensible, section three, "Der Standpoint des Proletariats" in Lukcs

(1970/1923: 267-355), and Congdon (1991: 60-61). 18 Lukcs (1996: 44). 19

See the chapter "Revolutionre Realpolitik" in Lukcs (1967/1924). 20 See the essay "Methodisches zur Organisationsfrage" in Lukcs (1970/1923). 21 Lukcs (1996: 34). 22 Lukcs (1996: 44).


everything that happens in the world, everything is subject to the natural laws of the dialectic."23 Rather surprisingly, Lukcs protested that he did accept the idea that the dialectic determined nature's development. How, after all, could anyone doubt that nature and its lawfulness existed before there was any society, that is before there were human beings? But he quickly added that social development could

produce new, equally objective forms of movement24a necessary move if he

wished to avoid having to accept a scientific determinism.

Moreover, Lukcs continued, what he had written in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein was that the dialectic of nature could not be known directly. And that was indeed the case; he had faulted Engels for "extending the dialectic method to the knowledge of nature as well."25 For good political and philosophical reasons, however, he chose not to pursue the matter further. In Chvostismus und

Dialektik he did. "Our consciousness of nature," he wrote, "that is our knowledge of nature, is determined by our social being."26 What men and women took to be

nature in its immediacy was in fact nature as viewed from a particular class

standpoint, nature as mediated by a person's social being. At first blush that would seem to imply relativism, but Lukcs denied that it did

because some standpoints, some angles of vision, were better than others. For him,

that is, it was not the discovery of new facts that yielded deeper theoretical insights. It was something external to scientific research: economic change that resulted in

social change. Thus it was no accident that under capitalism, the most advanced

socio-economic system prior to the advent of socialism, science reached its zenith

(thus far). Would, then, those in possession of the class consciousness of the

proletariat arrive at the correct theoretical understanding of the natural world in the

same way that they did of the historical worldby simultaneously changing it? Can nature be changed as history/society can? Lukcs sidestepped the issue:

To what extent all knowledge of nature can ever be transformed into historical

knowledge, that is whether there are material facts in nature that never change their structure (or only do so over such periods of time that they cannot be

considered changes for human knowledge) cannot be raised here because even

when it seems to us that historical developments have taken place, their

historical character cannot be clearly grasped.27

Unable to resolve the dilemma, Lukcs simply reiterated that a clearer vision of

social development produced a superior understanding of nature.

For what my critics call my agnosticism [or relativism] is nothing other than

my denial that there is a socially unmediated, that is an unmediated

relationship of humans, to nature in the present stage of social development and naturally I decline to argue about Utopian possibilities of the future. I am

23 Lszl Rudas in Krausz and Mesterhzi, II (1981: 48).

24 Lukcs (1996: 51).

25 Lukcs (1970/1923: 63n). 26

Lukcs (1996: 49). 27

Lukcs (1996: 63).

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288 L. Congdon

of the opinion, therefore, that our knowledge of nature is socially mediated

because its material foundation is socially mediated; and thus I remain true to

the Marxian formulation of the method of historical materialism; "it is social

being that determines consciousness."28

It follows from that that non-communist scientists, though they may obtain valid

scientific results, remain oblivious to the fact that their interpretations of those

results are mediated by their social identity. Nor do they notice that their attitude is

merely contemplative, not "practical" in the historical materialist sense.29 Hence

they never place their findings in the service of History's movement toward a truly human society. Only communist scientists, men such as J. D. Bernal and J. B. S.

Haldane, could, as historical materialists and Party members, adopt the correct

practical attitude toward their researches.

Does this make them better scientists? Lukcs would probably have answered

yes; they consciously transform nature from an "in itself' to a "for us." But despite

the Hungarian's genius for obfuscation, it is difficult to see how such politically committed scientists could create truth about nature in the process of discovering it

(unless 'truth,' even concerning nature, is only what advances the communist

cause). And it is equally difficult to believe that Chvostismus und Dialektik will

erase the suspicion that dialectical thinking, as Lukcs practiced it, is a slippery business.

Against Lenin's Party

Those who were and are sympathetic with Lukcs's Marxism can, to be sure, benefit

from a close reading of his recently discovered workif they focus their attention

on his concept of mediation. Even without having read Chvostismus und Dialektik, for example, Istvn Mszros had placed the concept at the center of his updated

version of Marxism. One of Lukcs's best students and most faithful disciples, he

has nevertheless distanced himself from the Communist Party.

Born in Budapest in 1930, Mszros is, like Rudas, of poor working class origin. As a young factory worker, he discovered Marx and Engels and soon began to read

Lukcs. Thanks to personal determination and the requisite social background, he

gained admittance to the University of Budapest's prestigious Etvs College in

1949, a year after the communists consolidated power in Hungary. By then the so

called "Lukcs Debate" was in full swing; once again Lukcs found himself the

target of a Party inquisition, and once again Rudas played the role of Torquemada.30

Fearful studentsthis was the time of the Purge Trial of Lszl Rajktreated Lukcs, then a professor, as though he had contracted the plague. Mszros was

among the very few who were willing to risk contagion, and as a result he was

nearly expelled from the University. He managed, however, to complete his degree

28 Lukcs (1996: 53-54). 29 Lukcs (1996: 70). 30 See Ambrus (1985).

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in 1953, and two years later earned a doctorate in philosophy at East Germany's Friedrich Schiller University. The following year, 1956, he accepted an appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy in the University of Budapest and joined the reform movement that helped pave the way for the fall Revolution. When Soviet forces crushed that great popular uprising, he decided to emigrate, and did so

legally. Eventually, Mszros found his way to the University of Sussex, where he taught

until his retirement in the early 1990s. Despite his academic career, however, he has

always identified more closely with the working class into which he was born than with the intellectual class by which he was co-opted. "Intellectuals of bourgeois

origin, like Lukcs," he has written rather pointedly, do not share the workers'

experience of life and thus they "know/ar less about 'what is to be done'" to make socialism a reality.31

Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein did, Mszros thinks, present a realistic rather than a Utopian approach to the presentand to the future it contained.

Socialism, he has learned from his experience in Stalinist Hungary, cannot be summoned into existence overnight by an act of political will. On the other hand, reforms that are treated as ends in themselves, unrelated to the ultimate goal of a

fully socialist societyin a word, revisionismcan only prolong capitalism's existence. What are needed, he concludes, are mediationstransitional stepsthat

never lose sight of the final goal, that are socialism in the process of its realization. It was with that Lukcsian conviction in mind that Mszros set to work on the

book that first established his reputation in England, Marx's Theory of Alienation.

Following Marx, he argued there that alienated, that is wage, labor was the root cause of all other forms of human alienation. In order to create genuine human

relationships between "social individuals"those who, while maintaining their

individuality, fulfill their identity in cooperative and equal association with others

proper forms and institutions would have to act as mediations. "To do away with all

mediation," Mszros argued, "is the most naive of all anarchist dreams." It

represented the denial of "first order mediation"productive activity (labor)that is "ontologically necessary" to human existence as such.32 Labor, that is, was the

means by which one could objectify and realize one's "species essence."33

Marx and Lukcs were right to see, Mszros concluded, that "it is not mediation

itself which is at fault but the capitalistic form of reified second order mediations."34 Among those second order mediations Mszros listed private

property and division of labor; they "interpose themselves between man and his

activity and prevent him from finding fulfillment in his labor, in the exercise of his

productive (creative) abilities, and in the human appropriation of the products of his

activity."35 They were alienated, historically specific, and therefore transcendable

31 Mszros (1995: 396). 32

Mszros (1972 [1970]: 79, 285). 33

Mszros learned this from Lukcs; see the latter's introduction to Lukcs (1970 [1923]). 34

Mszros, (1972 [1970]: 285). 35 Mszros (1972 [1970]: 78).

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290 L. Congdon

forms of human labor. And those forms had to be transcended/negated if alienation

was to be overcome.

Prime examples of the kind of first order mediations Mszros had in mind were

so-called "workers' councils" that operated effectively and independently of self

appointed leadership vanguards like the Communist Party.36 Such spontaneously

organized, grassroots councils have appeared on the historical stage in various

places and at various times: France in 1871; Russia in 1905 and February 1917;

Germany in 1918-1919; and, most important to Mszros, Hungary in 1956. In

every case they were suppressed, but that only adds to the Romantic aura that

surrounds them.

Mszros was quick to note that Lukcs, even though he ultimately opted for the

Party and its dictatorship, had himself spoken in praise of workers' councils in

Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein.

The Workers' Council [Lukcs had written] is the politico-economic conquest of capitalist reification. In the situation after the dictatorship, it ought to

overcome the bourgeois separation of legislative, executive and judiciary;

similarly, in the struggle for power it is called upon to end the spatio-temporal

fragmentation of the proletariat, and also to bring economics and politics

together into the true unity of proletarian activity, and in this way to help reconcile the dialectical opposition of immediate interest and ultimate aim.37

In his magnum opus, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, Mszros

declined to say precisely what form restructured social institutions/first order

mediations should eventually assume, but once again he called attention to workers'

councils as among "the most important potential organs of material and political mediation in the age of transition from capital's rule over society to a socialist

order."38 He continues, that is, to champion the self-organization of the workers and

to reject any Party claim to speak or act in their name. Precisely on that issue he

asserts his theoretical independence. Even in Demokratisierung Heute und Morgen, written at the time of the Soviet

suppression of the "Prague Spring," Lukcs could not, according to Mszros,

break with his dogmatic outlook.

In 1968, after nearly seventy years of Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (which also

means five decades of Soviet power), Lukcs still has to idealize the strategy of successfully introducing, one fine day, socialist consciousness "from

outside" into the working class ... ["From outside" means:] from the vantage

point of some self-perpetuating hierarchy ruling society from above.39

36 Mszros (1972 [1970]: 287).

37 Lukcs (1970 [1923]: 168-169). Cited in Mszros (1972 [1970]: 287). I have modified Mszros's

translation slightly. 38 Mszros (1995: 371). 39 Mszros (1995: 399).

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For Lenin's Party

Mszros's rejection of Lukcs's theory of imputation is all the more telling because

it comes from a lifelong disciple and a Marxist who has known life under Party rule.

As he has reason to know, neither Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein nor

Chvostismus und Dialektik can be read today as though nothing has happened since

the 1920s. One cannot divorce Lukcs's ideas from the record of Communist parties in power; Lukcs himself refused to do so. By the time he sat down to write his

defense of his famous book, he could already see that Stalin was likely to succeed

Lenin as Party leader and he therefore hastened to call attention to the Man of

Steel's ideological acuity.40 Throughout the years that Stalin ruledand afterLukcs submitted to the

Party's will and discipline; hence, while he sometimes had reservations concerning

Party policy, he never contemplated apostasy. By thinking "dialectically," he knew

that he could justify anything to himself and to others. One is reminded of Albert Camus's words: "The dialectic miracle is the decision to call total servitude freedom."41

It is not surprising, then, that Lukcs eventually repudiated his defense of

Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein; that almost certainly accounts for the fact that

he never made mention of Chvostismus und Dialektik in any of his later writings or interviews. During his first sojourn in Moscow, 1929-1931, David Ryazanov showed him Marx's unpublished Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. On reading them, he was gratified to have confirmed his claim in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein that the problem of alienation was central to Marxism. At the

same time, however, the manuscripts convinced him that his earlier work was in fact

idealist and hence fundamentally un-Marxist. He would have to begin anew from a

properly Marxistthat is, materialiststandpoint42 Lukcs may in fact have recognized that he simply could not maintain the

position he defended in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein after he had accepted, or been obliged to accept, the dialectic of nature. "The idea of the unity of subject and object," Leszek Kolakowski has pointed out, "cannot survive if the dialectic relates to external nature."43 Moreover, the logic of his belief that the Party alone

possesses truth dictated that he remain a member whatever the price. And so he

committed himself to ideas he had once rejected: the dialectic of nature and the

"theory of reflection."

Lukcs made that commitment public in his essay of 1933, "Mein Weg zu

Marx," and in the 1934 lecture that he delivered to members of the Soviet Academy

of Sciences, assembled to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the publication of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. "My battle against the theory of reflection and the Marx-Engels conception of the dialectic of nature was," he said on that

occasion, "a typical manifestation of that 'subterranean idealism'" that (an

40 Lukcs (1996: 27).

41 Camus (1956 [1951]: 234). 42

On this matter, see Congdon (1991: 180-184). 43

Kolakowski, m (1981: 274).

Springer


292 L. Congdon

undialectical) Lenin had condemned in his major work of philosophy.44 He was, after all, guilty of the sins with which Rudas and Deborin had charged him a decade

before. And if he retained any doubts, he kept them to himself, because for him

there was neither truth nor life outside of the Party.

References

Ambras, J. (Ed.). (1985). A Lukdcs-vita (1949-1951). Budapest: Mzsk Kozmvelodsi Kiad.

Camus, A. (1956 [1951]). The Rebel. New York: Vintage Books.

Congdon, L. (1991). Exile and social thought: Hungarian intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919

1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Deborin, A. (1924). Lukcs und seine Kritik des Marxismus. Arbeiter-Literatur, 1/2, 615-640.

Feitl, I. (1985). Rudas Lszlrl. Ne'pszabadsg, February 21, 6.

Hajdu, T. (2000). Lukcs Gyrgy a Lubjankn. Mozgo' Vilg, 8, 16-21.

Kolakowski, L. (1981). Main currents of Marxism, III. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Krausz, T., & Mesterhzi, M. (Eds.). (1981). A "T'rtnelem e's osztlytudat" a 20-as e'vek vitdiban, III.

Budapest: Filozfia Oktatk Tovbbkpzo s Informcis Kzpontja ELTE Bolcsszettudomnyi Kar s Lukcs Archvum s Konyvtr.

Lenin, V. I. (1929 [1902]). What is to be done? New York: International Publishers.

Lukcs, G. (1967 [1924]). Lenin: Studie ber den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken. Neuwied:

Luchterhand.

Lukcs, G. (1970 [1923]). Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Neuwied: Luchterhand.

Lukcs, G. (1970 [1933]). Marxismus und Stalinismus. Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag.

Lukcs, G. (1975). Tactics and ethics: Political essays, 1919-1929. New York: Harper and Row.

Lukcs, G. (1996). Chvostismus und Dialektik. Budapest: ron Verlag.

Mszros, I. (1972 [1970]). Marx's theory of alienation. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Mszros, I. (1995). Beyond capital: Towards a theory of transition. London: Merlin Press.

Rudas, L. (1950). Elmlet e's gyakorlat. Budapest: Szikra.

Sziklai, L. (2000). "41-ben mgis lebuktam": Lukcs Gyrgy vallatsa a Lubjankn. Kritika, 29/12, 33

37.

Sziklai, L. (Ed.). (2002). Vallats a Lubjankn: Luka'cs Gyrgy vizsgalati gyiratailetrajzi dokumentumok. Budapest: Argumentum KiadLukcs Archvum.

44 Georg Lukcs, "Mein Weg zu Marx" in Lukcs (1970 [1933]: 11).

Springer

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle Contentsp. [281]p. 282p. 283p. 284p. 285p. 286p. 287p. 288p. 289p. 290p. 291p. 292Issue Table of ContentsStudies in East European Thought, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2007) pp. 261-346Front MatterTotalitarianism and the problem of Soviet art evaluation: the Lithuanian case [pp. 261-280]Apotheosizing the Party: Lukcs's "Chvostismus und Dialektik" [pp. 281-292]Iconic wonder: Pavel Florensky's phenomenology of the face [pp. 293-308]In pursuit of a historical tradition: N. A. Rozhkov's scientific laws of history [pp. 309-346]

apotheosizing the party: lukács's "chvostismus und dialektik"

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