SV THE SPECTATOR

REVIEWaBOOKS

Elie Kedourie on Lukacs T. G. Rosenthal on Jonathan Cape Reviews by Barbara Hardy, Peter Linehan Percival Spear and Auberon Waugh

Tibor Szamuely: Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness I

Georg Lukacs, now in his eighty-sixth year, is generally recognised as the most original Marxist thinker of our time (ex- cept in Russia, where that distinction is traditionally conferred on the current Gen- eral Secretary, and in China, which has only one Thought for every day). Like many other eminent philosophers, Lukacs is also a politician—an unsuccessful one. It is impossible to understand his tortuous path as a philosopher without knowing something of his rather unusual political career. In 1919, during the Hungarian Soviet Republic; Lukacs was Deputy People's Commissar for Education. When the military front began to crumble Lukacs, together with other leading Com- munists, was sent to stiffen the resistance of the Red Army, and this gentle phil- osopher became the only Hungarian pol- itical commissar to order the decimation of a unit which had retreated without orders.

Lukacs's next political appointment came thirty-seven years later when he was promoted to Minister of Education in the short-lived government of Imre Nagy. Then the Russian tanks arrived, and his political activities came to an abrupt halt. But in between these two high-points he had had a number of interesting exper- iences. One came just before the Soviet- German war, when Lukacs, gaoled in the Lubyanka, had his liberty won in a game of cards by the Russo-Hungarian econ- omist Eugen Varga, a regular bridge part- ner of the late Mr Beria (I have this story from Lukacs himself). A tough training, but then being a Marxist philosopher is a tough profession—in a Marxist country, that is, not in the `represSive tolerance' of the West.

Over the past sixty years Lukacs has History and Class Consciousness Georg Lukacs (Merlin Press £2.50); Lenin Georg Licks (m.,0 £1.50); Aspects of History and Class Consciousness edited by Istvan Wszaros (Routledge & Kegan Paul £2.50) written many books. Some of them are extremely good, others pretty awful (one can easily discover a correlation between the quality of Lukacs's works and the switches in the Party line, which he has followed with the utmost rigour). But his great, and justified, fame is essentially based on one book, or rather a collection of essays written between 1919 and 1922, and published in 1923 under the title History_ and Class Consciousness. For de- cades the book has been a legend in Marxist circles. Most people had heard of it, hardly anyone had read it. The book was not re-published for forty-five years. when it was immediately subjected to one of the most vicious campaigns of ideo- logical slander ever mounted by the com- munist apparatus; Lukacs was accused of practically every heresy under the sun. Finally he capitulated: he recanted his `non-Marxist' views in a grovelling act of self-abasement (which he was to repeat many times in the course of his stormy career). Now at last we can read the full text in an English translation, with anew Preface by the much-mellowed author. It is without doubt a most remarkable book; one of the truly important philosophical works of the century, and a significant con- tribution to the sum of human misery.

At the time of writing Lukacs was still a comparative newcomer to Marxism. Be- fore the 1914 war he had studied at the feet of renowned German idealistic phil- osophers; he was steeped in neo-Kantian- ism and Hegelianism. The shock of war turned his attention to Marx, and the Rus- sian Revolution transformed him into a Communist. He became an ardent Lenin- ist, though it is clear that even by 1922 he had read very little Lenin, and was unfamiliar with the most important of Lenin's theoretical writings. (One of the first people from whom Lukacs had learned the essentials of Leninism was my uncle—the agent of Bela Kun's terror— who, as Lukacs now complains, 'had little talent for theory'. I am sure he is right: my uncle's real forte was terror- ising rather than theorising.) This gave Lukacs a definite advantage: he was able to apply his brilliant mind and his ruthless Hegelian logic to a re-examination of Marxist doctrine without .having had the cutting edge of his dialectic blunted in the endless pettifogging scholastic argu- ments of the pre-war Marxist theoretic- ians. He also had behind him the exper- ience of a 'proletarian' revolution that had been rejected by the proletariat.

Luicties was thus unencumbered by any of the dead dogma of post-Marxian Marx- ism when he carried out his complete re- interpretation of the Marxist theory of Socialist revolution. He did it by returning to Hegel which had been the starting-point for Marx's own intellectual development. Luktics showed that the later accretions of positivism, scientism and vulgar mater- ialism, made by Engels, Plekhanov, Kaut. sky and their followers (including Lenin, although Luktics was at that stage unaware of this), were profoundly alien to the spirit of the Dialectic and of Marxian historical materialism. The 'vulgar Marx- ists' had based their faith in social change upon the 'natural laws' of economic development—but, wrote Lukacs, to ex- pect these 'immanent laws' to lead to socialism, without the violent and con- scious intervention of external forces, 'is effectively synonymous with the eternal survival of capitalist society'.

Lukacs treats his subject-matter in terms of Hegelian contradictions and con- flicts. His language may be difficult—his argument is quite clear. On the one hand, the proletariat is a unique class with a unique historical mission: in liberating itself it will simultaneously accomplish the abolition of class society as such. On the other hand the proletariat is itself a pro- duct of capitalism and a prisoner of its creator's way of life. And while the pro- letariat remains caught up in bourgeois forms of thought it will never carry out a revolution, even at a time of revolution- ary crisis. More than any other Marxist thinker, Lukacs is aware of the under- lying strength of the liberal-capitalist sys- tem : 'Whatever positions capitalism may find itself in there will always be some "purely economic" solutions available'.

How is this dialectical contradiction to be resolved? By means of a unique instru- ment—the Communist Party: 'The Party is assigned the sublime role of bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the conscience of its historical vocd- - tion'. Its sole possession of true conscious- ness makes the Party superior to any other type of organisation, past, present or future; the Party provides the 'concrete mediation' between theory and practice, between man and history.

But the Communist Party is superior to bourgeois parties (a category that includes the social-democrats) in yet another respect: unlike them it has achieved 'the unconditional absorption of the total personality in the praxis of the movement', The Party, as an autonomous form of proletarian consciousness, must exist as an organisation independent of the proletariat. There can be no question of the Party wishing to implement the actual desires of the proletariat—on the contrary, as a conscious vanguard, it will frequently have to oppose them.

The relationship will not change after the Party seizes power in the name of the proletariat. 'The conscious transformation of the whole of society' will be a 'lengthy and painful process' (he can say that again!). The revolution will establish a `consciously ordered society', where vio- lence is 'put to the service of man and the flowering of man'. Inevitably, the un- comprehending masses will feel rather unhappy about this—a social revolution `violates the instinct of the average man' —but not to worry: after a long period of `education' the proletariat, too, should acquire its true consciousness. As for free- dom—well, 'freedom cannot represent a value in itself . . . Freedom must serve the rule of the proletariat'. Anyway, what we call freedom is no more than the free- dom of the individual, isolated by the fact of property from other individuals. The true realm of freedom established by the Party 'must entail the renunciation of individual freedom, . . . the conscious subordination of the self to that collective will ... that is the Communist Party'.

What Lukacs propounded was a doc- trine of pure totalitarianism. For all its philosophical sophistication, it is almost identical with the arguments put forward 20 years earlier by Lenin in his famous What Is To Be Done?—which Lukacs had almost certainly not yet read. He showed this in his essay Lenin, written just after the Bolshevik leader's death in 1924, be- fore the great heresy-hunt had started. Lukacs is enchanted by Lenin's 'revolu- tionary concept of society as a contin- uously developing totality', and, above all, by his disdain for economic determinism (or for what, in actual fact, was the essence of Marx's theory). If the chance to make a revolution is missed, wrote Lukacs, then the development of the econ- omic forces of capitalism might well pro- ceed along a different course, and the op- portunity for revolution would never come around again (an idea that is only just 'beginning to penetrate the minds of West- ern Communists).

In the light of this close affinity to Lenin's ideas one might well wonder as to the reason for the ensuing ferocious on- slaught upon Lukacs. Most Western writers explain it by Lukacs's demolition of the primitive mechanistic materialism that was already becoming the basis of official Soviet ideology, and his 're- discovery' of the idealistic, Hegelian sources of Marxism. I believe that this is only part of the truth, and that the main reason for Luktics's disgrace lay in his forthright analysis (far more cold-blooded even than Lenin's) of the relationship be- tween proletariat, consciousness, and Party. The Party was now in power; it did do certain things. to be sure—but it did not care to have them discussed. The time for candidness was past. Hegelian analysis would never do—philosophers-should find prettier terms for describing the Father- land of the Toilers. When the Absolute Idea had acquired its physical incarnation, the last thing it wanted was the truth.

How different, how very different from the home-life of our own dear left-wing intelligentsia. In 1969-70 the University of Sussex organised a series of lectures on various aspects of Luktics's book. The proceedings have how been published.

While they add nothing whatever to our understanding of Lukacs, they do provide some fascinating insights into the varieties and the vagaries of Leftish thought. One sees, for instance, why it is that continental Marxists despair of their British con- freres. The British contingent provided lucid, competent and fairly interesting academic essays (some of which lacked even the remotest connection with either Lukacs or Marx). The continentals, on the other hand, produced jargon-ridden and confused ideological gibberish. The prize belongs to the conference convener, Mr Istvan M6szaros. A former pupil of. Lukdcs's, the only thing he has picked up• from his master is an addiction to long and incomprehensible Germanic expres- sions. Mr Maszaros is convinced, quite simply, that everything Marx ever wrote is Absolutely correct; in his eagerness to prove this he is not above stretching a fact or twisting a quotation. Mr Mdszaros sounds hopelessly dogmatic-by the much more enlightened standards of the present- day Soviet Agitprop: so pure is his ortho- doxy that he even calls the Second Woild War an imperialist war!

Apart from the admirable British liter- ary historians, whose interest is in the class consciousness of Jane Austen rather than of Georg Lukacs, the only participant who clearly understands what he is talking about is Mr Eric Hobsbawm, Britain's leading Marxist historian. 'The moment when the "proletarian revolution" is suc- cessful', he remarks, 'is the critical one'. It is indeed. Every 'proletarian revolution' so far has led to tyranny, mass-murder, unimaginable suffering—in the name of a goal that recedes ever further into the distance. In short, t6 the establishment of a totalitarian system. Which is why Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness remains as important today as half a cen- tury ago. It is the best,• the frankest, the most wide-ranging and powerful expos- ition of the philosophy of totalitarianism ever written.

Tibor Szantuely is Lecturer in Politics at Reading University and a frequent con- tributor to the SPECTATOR