Elie Kedourie: Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness II
In his preface, Lukfics tells us that ever since his childhood he had felt 'hatred and contempt' for life under capitalism. Lukacs's childhood as is well-known, was that of a banker's son, and his hatred and contempt cannot therefore be the outcome of personally having to suffer that 'oppres- sion and exploitation' which, according to him, characterises this 'system of produc- tion' more than any other known to history. His book, then, like Do It and The Anar- chist Cookbook may be described in words of Hegel, the master to whom Lukacs frequently appeals, as a rude product of luxury. Do It and The Anarchist Cookbook, like History and Class Consciousness, in- voke and justify violence. But Yippies and Weathermen are direct and crude, having none of the glitter and sophistication with which the cultivated and learned author of a treatise on The Soul and the Forms or The Theory of the Novel knows how to embellish such a subject.
Lukies, then, starts by making clear that Marxism is the doctrine by which history as a 'totality' and as a 'unified process' may be understood. Marxism teaches that class, which is created by a particular system of production, is at once cause and effect, mirror and motor of the historical and dialectical process'. Two classes and one system of production particularly in- terest Lukacs. The system is capitalism, and the two classes are the bourgeoisie (the beneficiaries of capitalism) and the proletariat (the indispensable victims, and eventual supplanters of capitalism). The capitalist mode of production deprives man of his 'authentic' humanity. Under capital- ism human labour'becomes a mere commod- ity, to be bought and sold at a price which is determined by supply and demand in a market seemingly impersonal and beyond human control. Man is thus fragmented and destroyed because his humanity is alienated and his -free activity becomes 'reified' into objects, institutions and so-called laws of economics. A superstition prevalent under capitalism, the superstition of fetishism, deludes men into thinking that these objects and institutions which they themselves have made, nonetheless exist independently of their will, and can somehow exercise power over them. Capitalism thus dehumanises
man, and its overthrow liberates man from the demonic power of fetishism and reifi- cation.
Lukacs's account suffers from an illusion and a misapprehension. The illusion—which he shares with Marx—derives from the German romantics. It is to the effect that there once was in the past, and that there once more can be in the future, a man who is a 'perfected whole', free from 'the dichotomies of theory and practice, reason and the senses, form and content'. The misapprehension—which Lukacs de- rives from Marx—is that this dichotomous existence, in which man reifies his own activities and then allows these reifications to tyrannise over him, is the doing of capitalism, i.e. of private ownership of the means of production. The oppressive dich- otomy, in which there is an utter divorce between man's activity and the product of this activity, which so offends Lukacs is clearly the effect not of capitalism, but of the industrial or factory systerri.
The misapprehension under which Lukacs labours is clear, if not to Lukacs himself, at any rate to his readers. Consider the features which he associates with cap- italism, and which result in 'Oppression and an exploitation that knows no bounds and scorns every human dignity' in a manner hitherto unparalleled : Luklics quotes Max Weber with approval to the ef- fect that what is specific to modern capital- ism is 'a strictly rational organisation of work on the basis of rational technology' and himself declares that 'At every single stage of its development, the ceaselessly revolutionary techniques of modern produc- tion turn a rigid and immobile face towards the individual producer'. Is this not today a more apt description of the wage-slave econ- omies of the 'socialist sixth of the world' than of capitalism, and does not then alien- ation and reification ravage Soviet society more deeply than American? Lades also believes that these ravages extend to all aspects of life under capitalism, and says for instance of joufnalists under captitalism that the 'prostitution' of their experiences and beliefs 'is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification'. Remem- bering the unfortunates who write in Pravda or Ahram as they are bidden, or Lukdcs himself who, to appease the sectarian fer- ocities of the Comintern had abjectly to recant, and to disown this very book, we become very sceptical alike of his diagnosis and of his remedy.
Not that his remedy is particularly orig- inal. A faithful Marxist, he says that a strategy exists by which mankind can attain the 'realm of freedom', fashion a 'con- sciously ordered society', that 'in our deeds and through our deeds, we will be able to transform the quality of life and consciously take our history in our hands. All this can be accomplished through the proletariat, which Marx called the universal class. The proletariat is produced by capitalism and is indespensable to it. As a class, it exper- iences capitalist oppression at its sharpest. This oppression leads it to class conscious- ness, ie, to a knowledge of the system which inevitably produces this oppression, and hence to a determination to destroy it. And by destroying capitalism, the prole- tariat saves not only itself but all mankind. Reification and alienation lose their ma- leficent power : homo laborans again be- comes what he had once been, homo ludens.
But there are problems. For class con- sciousness, on which so much revolves, turns out to be a very peculiar thing. For Lukiics, class consciousness is not neces- sarily a consciousness which anybody ac- tually has; he firmly says that class con- sciousness is different from psychological consciousness. Again he distinguishes it from status consciousness which, he says, can actually 'mask' class consciousness. It turns out that class consciousness in the consciousness which 'objectively' a class ought to have of its position as disclosed by historical materialism. Class conciousness, Lukacs telli us, is 'imputed' consciousness. With this piece of transformative analysis, or, some might say, prestidigitation, the or- thodox Marxist Lukacs transforms himself into an orthodox Leninist. The fate of man- kind turns on the proletariat and its class consciousness, but the proletariat does not know it. Who knows it? The Party knows it: 'The form taken by the class conscious- ness of the proletariat is the Party'; again, 'the Party is assigned the sublime role of bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the conscience of its his- torical vocation'. in discharging this sub- lime role, the Party organises and directs revolution against capitalism since, Lukacs observes, the latter will change neither `by itself' nor 'through legal devices'. It will also have to coerce peasants and drag them in the wake of the proletariat; it must come into conflict with 'certain proletarian strata' fighting on the side of the bour- goisie; it is sometimes even 'forced to adopt a stance opposed to that of the masses; it must show them the way by rejecting their immediate wishes'. The Party, again, must
`purge' its own ranks. All this is inescapable, for as Lukacs says, quoting Marx with ap-
proval: 'The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wil- derness. It must not only conquer a new
world, it must also perish in order to make room for people who will be equal to a new world.'
This scriptural simile leads us to another aspect of Lukdcs's book, namely the reli- gious fervour which he displays towards the Party. Where the Party is concerned he is, as they say, 'stoned'. The Party, he says, is 'the first conscious step towards the realm of freedom'. But this freedom does not mean the freedom of the indivi- dual. It is only by fully subordinating him- self to the Party, by the 'unconditional absorption of the total personality in the praxis of the movement', that the indivi- dual can hope to obtain freedom. What the Party does as a whole, writes Lukacs in his last paragraph 'it performs likewise for its individual members. Its closely-knit organisation with its resulting iron disci-
pline and its demand for total commitment tears away the reified veils that cloud the consciousness of the individual in capital- ist society.' We can now perhaps under- stand why, like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, Lukics gladly accused himself, re- canted and disowned his book when, for obscure sectarian reasons, it pleased the Party to decree its suppression—a suppres- sion which has incongruously endowed this apology for tyranny with an aura of per- secution and martyrdom. For to obey the Party, to welcome and approve this sup- pression is for the true believer to acquiesce in a necessity which is yet one more proof of his freedom. We may quote the master once more: as Hegel profoundly observed, nobody is coerced who does not will his own coercion.
Elie Kedourie is Professor of. Politics at the London School of Economics and author of Nationalism, The Chatham House Version and other books
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