Tuesday, July 05, 2011


Reading Lukacs 'History and Class Consciousness' at the moment. It makes for a very effective re-reading of Marx, despite the author's preface disclaiming the book as no longer in line with his thinking.

The section on 'totality' makes sense - capitalist readings of economics and history work on the particular, they do not challenge the overall system. Marx's starting point is different. It is to step outside the base assumptions made by orthodox economists and review the whole system. Only when the particular is viewed through the lense of the general can a system or period of history or economy be understood.

The section on class consciousness I find slightly more problematic. While I see the rationale for what Lukacs calls 'imputed' class consciousness - it is in part an explanation for why a historical situation might not end in revolution when Marx's theories suggest it ought to. It is also an explanation for why not all workers support communism. The problem is that this seems somewhat like explaining away a problem rather than developing a solution to it. On the face of it, the failure of all workers to see that communism represents their interests suggest that Marx was misguided. How should this problem be analysed? It seems clear that the impact of the culture of capitalism is part of this, and Gramsci's theory of 'hegemony' is a more rational attempt to deal with this than Lukacs rather simplistic attempt to simply explain it away.

It feels like an attempt to justify Lenin's approach to the working class movement - workers should follow the party because the party knows what their class consciousness in any set of historical circumstances is expected to be, even if not all individuals subscribe to it.

I'm moving on to the chapter on reification now, and this is much more effective. It follows on the tradition of Marx in providing a vivid critique of aspects of capitalism. In Lukacs' case this is about capitalism transforming the relations between people into the relations between things, and how this eats its way into all aspects of society.

Plenty more to read on this, but it certainly feels like a strong and valid criticism of the capitalist approach.

This allows Lukacs to strike out beyond the factory and the relationship of worker to capitalist and begin to critique other aspects of capitalist society. I found the section on civil service bureaucracy particularly interesting:

"It is not only a question of the completely mechanical, 'mindless' work of the lower echelons of the bureaucracy which bears such an extraordinarily close resemblance to operating a machine...it is also a question, on the one hand, of the way in which objectively all issues are subjected to an increasingly formal and standardised treatment and in which there is an ever increasing remoteness from the qualitative and material 'essence' of the things to which bureaucratic activity pertains. On the other hand, there is an even more monstrous intensification of the one-sided specialisation which represents such a violation of man's humanity...it becomes all the more clear, the more elevated, advanced and 'intellectual' is the attainment exacted by the division of labour.

"The specific type of bureaucratic 'conscientiousness' and impartiality, the individual bureaucrat's inevitable total subjection to a system of relations between the things to which he is exposed, the idea that it is precisely his 'honour' and his 'sense of responsibility' that exact this total submission, all this points to the fact that the division of labour...here invades the realm of ethics. Far from weakening the reified structure of consciousness, this actually strengthens it."

Sounds like an analysis with a lot to say about the modern British civil service.