Why Read Lukács Today?

Daniel Lopez is a Commissioning Editor for Jacobin magazine and the author of Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute. Daniel spoke to the Federation on Lukács at our 2023 Conference in Christchurch.

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

— Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1888.

Despite Marx’s famous third thesis on Feuerbach, Marxists have perpetually found ourselves in the position of would-be educator to the workers’ movement. Prior to the end of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society, could it be otherwise? Yet, presuming we agree with Marx’s thesis, the questions arise: what should we learn from revolutionary practice and how should we learn it?

The most sectarian Marxists—be they Trotskyists, Maoists or whatever—defend Marx’s insight, but without seriously applying it to themselves. Once, there was something to learn, but now, they’ve learned it—which is why their bookshelves rarely change. Or, if sectarian Marxists concede that there is something yet to be learned, it’s usually just the empirical details of whatever situation or campaign they find themselves in. And once they’ve mastered these facts, it’s relatively simple to fit them into a pre-determined political schematic, usually referred to as ‘lessons of history.’ The result of this procedure, suffice to say, involves neither learning nor revolutionary practice. The educators refuse to become the educated; their theory becomes ossified, nostalgic, and dogmatic.

In contradistinction, every Marxist movement that has changed the world has, as part of the process, transformed its outlook; they have allowed themselves to be educated by the political practice of the workers’ movement. Fair and well—but what, precisely, does this mean? In the 20^th century, Marxism undoubtedly developed as a result of the Russian Revolution, which saw workers’ councils establish themselves as a government, clarified the organisational implications of the divide between reformists and revolutionaries, and called for an updated theory of imperialism and national liberation. But it’s not as though delegations of workers presented these breakthroughs to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks. Rather, the Bolsheviks developed Marxism by working through problems posed by class struggle and revolution. But for socialists in the West today, this is hardly an option, given the absence of revolution and, more importantly, the lack of mass socialist organisation.

Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács.

It might seem that the best recourse is to return to the history books—if we can’t lead a revolution, we may as well learn from those who did. The first problem with a history-centric approach, however, is that even if we can make some generalizations about revolution or class struggle, history does not repeat itself. There will always be something new to comprehend. The second, more serious problem is that there is an unconscious bias in how we approach history; a tendency that Nietzsche referred to as ‘monumental history’ in the second of his Untimely Meditations. Insofar as we look to history to address a political lack that exists in the present, we unknowingly project our present realities into history. This is why, in the various histories of the Russian Revolution written by members of Trotskyist sects, Lenin always seems to resemble the leader of the sect in question.

So how do we break out of paradox? Simply put, before we can be educated by revolutionary practice, we must educate ourselves. This requires theory. And the most profound theoretical answer to the question that was posed at the beginning of this article is to be found in Georg Lukács’s 1923 masterpiece, History and Class Consciousness.

Capitalism and Law

Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness in response to a profound problem that confronted the European communist movement: Namely, no one knew how to adapt the experience of Bolshevism to other countries.

Of course, Lukács was not the only communist leader to face this problem—Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci and others also attempted their own answers. But what marks Lukács’s answer out from the others is that it was more profoundly philosophical, and therefore more readily universalizable. Of course, there’s no substitute for reading Lukács himself. But, as the point of this article is to persuade you to do so, we’ll illustrate the point by discussing one chapter of History and Class Consciousness entitled ‘Legality and Illegality’, which is both accessible and an excellent example of the way that Lukács related theory to practice.

‘Legality and Illegality’ is dedicated to explaining the attitude a communist party should take towards the law. The most obvious alternatives—uphold the law or break the law—are obviously simplistic and will not suit all circumstances. As Lukács notes, a ‘party may be opportunistic even to the point of total betrayal and yet find itself on occasion forced into illegality’—and indeed, this was the case in Germany after 1933, when the German Social Democratic Party found itself banned despite its loyal adherence to the law.[1] ‘On the other hand,’ Lukács continues, ‘it is possible to imagine a situation in which the most revolutionary and most uncompromising Communist Party may be able to function for a time under conditions of almost complete legality.’[2] This is largely the situation communists face in Western countries today. We dream of overthrowing the state, as meanwhile the state lazily surveils us, knowing very well that the far left isn’t anything to worry about.

To decide on a practical policy towards the law, two things are needed. Firstly, good strategy must be informed by a detailed and concrete understanding of the political situation. We will return to this point later. Secondly—and this is also the key to the first—we need a sound theory of the law and capitalism.

The starting point is what Lukács refers to as immediacy or facticity, namely, the everyday reality and appearance of capitalist society. Quoting Engels, Lukács observes that under capitalism,

… the organs of authority harmonise to such an extent with the (economic) laws governing men’s lives, or seem so overwhelmingly superior that men experience them as natural forces, as the necessary environment for their existence. As a result they submit to them freely. (Which is not to say that they approve of them.)[3]

On this analysis, the law and state are naturalised, and consequently they appear inescapable and unquestionable, while the violent force underpinning the state and justice system seems legitimate and non-arbitrary. In part, this is because the state structures cohering society are inherited from history and are largely insulated from change by their own mechanisms and logics, which systematically exclude the majority from meaningful democratic control. As a result, most of the time, most people consent to their domination.

Indeed, this reality is a large part of what makes reformism persuasive. It’s obviously plausible to propose changing some laws for the better, but it’s much less plausible to propose a fundamental transformation of the economic and legal foundation of society. ‘Property law is a bourgeois social construct!’ you might insist to a security guard after being caught shoplifting. Of course, you’d be right. But precisely because neither you, nor the security guard, nor anyone else in the supermarket had much to do with making the law, it seems completely beyond our control and inviolable. ‘Tell it to the judge,’ the security guard replies—and even if he’s wrong, theoretically, the way of the world is on his side.

Lukács called this phenomenon reification, namely, a situation in which human social relationships are estranged from their historical, human origins and come to dominate us. Something similar also occurred in pre-capitalist societies—after all, humans also created gods, kings, and emperors, before allowing themselves to be dominated by them. But as Lukács observed elsewhere in History and Class Consciousness, reification under capitalism is different because it is a formally rational system of exploitation. To be clear, as a whole, capitalism is irrational, as can be seen in crisis, war, climate breakdown or any number of other disasters. But because capitalists accumulate value primarily by producing and exchanging commodities on the market, rationalising the process of production and exchange boosts efficiency. And, at the same time, capitalists benefit from a legal and political system that is predictable, uniform, and that ensures they treat each other as legal equals. This is why, within its own set of presuppositions which are irrational and unequal in practice, the law is rational and impartial. Indeed, under capitalism, in contrast with pre-capitalist societies, we have a legal code that applies universally, irrespective of differences in wealth—and it’s precisely this abstract equality that conceals the systematically unequal operation of law under capitalism. It’s just as illegal for a billionaire to pinch a $10 block of cheese from the supermarket as it is for you.

For many working class or oppressed people, the just or fair appearance of law is broken by experience. But although this kind of experience may constitute a step forward with respect to naïve fetishism of the law, it is not an adequate foundation for a critique of the law. As Lukács observes, citing Dostoyevsky’s reminiscences of exile in Siberia,

… every criminal feels himself to be guilty (without necessarily feeling any remorse); he understands with perfect clarity that he has broken laws that are no less valid for him than for everyone else. And these laws retain their validity even when personal motives or the force of circumstances have induced him to violate them.[4]

Or, to put it more simply—the prisons are full of people who have both experienced the injustice of law and who have broken the law. But the prisons are not full of communists. We might say that crime violates capitalist legality in practice, but not in principle, that is, not in theory. By contrast, while contemporary socialist practice may challenge this or that injustice—by protesting, striking and so on—nothing we do challenges capitalism as a whole. Our theory, on the other hand, does. And this is what distinguishes Marxism, as a worldview. Our starting point is thoroughgoing rejection of the whole of bourgeois society and legality; in Lukács’s language, this is the intellectual negation of the immediacy of capitalism.

Now if by some miracle the majority of the working class were to wake up tomorrow with a detailed understanding of Marx’s Capital, the intellectual negation of capitalism would quickly become the actual and practical negation of capitalism, namely, socialist revolution. But as Lukács also points out, outside of eras of deep historic crisis—what he calls the actuality of revolution—most people will not break with the ways of thinking they have inherited from capitalism or with the reified social relationships and attendant practices that maintain it day to day, like going to work or paying too much for a block of cheese.

This has implications for Marxist theory itself. As Lukács writes, in such situations of relative stability, Marxist theory will ‘think out what is merely a tendency and take it to its logical conclusion, converting it into what reality ought to be and then opposing this “true” reality to the “false”’ reality of what actually exists.’[5] This will inevitably be a minority endeavour for a long time because, as Lukács continues,

. . . even those groups and masses whose class situation gives them a direct interest, only free themselves inwardly form the old order during (and very often only after) a revolution. They need the evidence of their own eyes to tell them which society really conforms to their interests before they can free themselves inwardly from the old order.[6]

Theory and Practice

Daniel Lopez presenting to the Federation of Socialist Societies inaugural National Conference in Lyttelton, 2023.

These kinds of observations are typical of Lukács’s 1920s writing, which was dedicated to understanding and overcoming the divide between the minority of communists and the rest of the working class. To Lukács, understanding and solving the divide between theory and practice was the key—and before it was possible to consider the working class as a whole, it was necessary for Marxists to clarify their own theory and practice.

The starting point, as we have seen, is one in which Marxists are a minority and are consequently limited to the intellectual negation of capitalism. This makes our theory necessarily utopian and abstract. As Lukács wrote, quoting Marx,

In order to understand a particular historical age we must go beyond its outer limits.’ When this dictum is applied to an understanding of the present this entails a quite extraordinary effort. It meant that the whole economic, social and cultural environment must be subjected to critical scrutiny. And the decisive aspect of this scrutiny, its Archimedean point from which alone all these phenomena can be understood, can be no more than an aspiration with which to confront the reality of the present; that is to say it remains after all something “unreal”, a “mere theory”.[7]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lukács argued that practice—the experience of actual class struggle—was the antidote to the ‘unreality’ of Marxist theory. However, in order to contribute meaningfully to practice, Marxists need large-scale socialist organisation. To build that, we need a kind of theory that can overcome its own abstractness, and go on to ground concrete, practical initiatives.

The question of law is also relevant here. Because Marxists have already rejected bourgeois law wholesale, however, there’s less danger of reformism. Rather, when Marxists find themselves in a minority, the dialectically opposed mistake is often more of a danger. Lukács terms this the romanticism of illegality. For Lukács, this approach valorises illegality, sometimes to the point of condemning all non-illegal political practice as inherently collaborationist. As he argues, it is both a necessary starting point for revolutionary movements and a barrier to their growth and success.

Those who romanticise illegality almost always do so on a moralistic basis while refusing to acknowledge the reality of the state or the fact that the vast majority of people—on whose behalf they may claim to fight—do not share their rejection of law. This is why, although the specifics of such arguments might be correct, they remain abstract and incapable of informing practice effectively. For example, in Australia and Aotearoa, it would be quite right to say that the state, courts and parliament are colonial institutions and that they replicate a racist and exploitative logic. However, to conclude from this that contesting elections would reinforce settler-capitalism and racism is to raise an abstract, moralistic barrier to necessary political practice. After all, it’s hard to see how a socialist party will ever be able to lead millions of people without engaging in parliamentary politics.

Most of the time, the romanticism of illegality is all talk. Anarchists might paste up cute posters calling on people to kill cops, but let’s see them actually have a go. And when the romanticism of illegality does attempt to transform words into deeds, the state almost always wins very quickly, usually with disastrous implications for the broader left and the workers movement. For Lukács, the core of the problem is that the romanticism of illegality secretly fetishises the law and the state. Wherever ‘… it is resolved to break the law with a grand gesture,’ he argues, ‘this suggests that the law has preserved its authority—admittedly in an inverted form—that it is still in a position inwardly to influence one’s actions and that a genuine, inner emancipation has not yet occurred.’[8] That is to say, just as an undergraduate atheist betrays an ongoing fascination with God by constantly seeking to refute his existence, whoever romanticises illegality betrays their fetishism of the law and their inability to perceive the real strength of the state, both ideological and physical. As Lukács explains,

The disease itself is the inability to see the state as nothing more than a power factor. … For by surrounding illegal means and methods of struggle with a certain aura, by conferring upon them a special, revolutionary “authenticity”, one endows the existing state with a certain legal validity, with a more than just empirical existence. For to rebel against the law qua law, to prefer certain actions because they are illegal, implies for anyone who so acts that the law has retained its binding validity.[9]

By contrast, Lukács suggests that the Marxist critique of the state leads to a non-moralistic strategic outlook, in which communists view the choice between legality and illegality as a matter of indifference and expedience. ‘The risk of breaking the law,’ he writes, ‘should not be regarded any differently than the risk of missing a train connection when on an important journey.’[10]

Revolutionary Practice

Despite having rejected both the fetishism of legality and its antinomy, the romanticism of illegality, we’re still on the terrain of theory. And for Marxists, as Lukács insisted, theory ‘cannot be of the abstract kind that remains in one’s head . . . it must be knowledge that has become flesh of one’s flesh and blood of one’s blood; to use Marx’s phrase, it must be “practical critical activity.’” And this is where things become more challenging, especially for Marxists today.

What we need to do is to connect theory with practice. And to fully understand how Lukács did this, it’s necessary to turn to one of the foundations of his philosophy generally overlooked by academic commentators—namely, the practice he was involved in, as a leader of the Hungarian Communist Party. The best single source for this is Michael Löwy’s book Georg Lukács: from Romanticism to Bolshevism. However, we needn’t summarize Lukács’s whole political career to make the point. Rather, a bit of background and a few key anecdotes will help.

From 1919 until the end of the 1920s, Lukács served as a member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP). Especially during the early 1920s, he gained a reputation as an ultra-left communist, largely because he published articles arguing against standing candidates in parliamentary elections or participating in trade unions, and in favour of ‘offensive’ tactics he believed would hasten the success of revolution. Nevertheless, when it came to Hungary, Lukács was not an ultra-left. To the contrary, he regularly favoured far more concrete, grounded and realistic strategies. Given the defeat of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic and the subsequent dictatorship of Miklós Horthy, this was crucial.

In those years, the Central Committee of the HCP was split between a faction led by Béla Kun, who often enjoyed the support of Moscow, and a faction jointly led by Lukács and Jenő Landler, an experienced trade union leader. Béla Kun’s name will be familiar to students of early Comintern history. For those who haven’t come across it before, however, suffice to say the only good thing to be said about Béla Kun is that he recruited Lukács. In short, Kun was a cynical, short-sighted, careerist bureaucrat who knew how to use ultra-left language to justify whatever factional manoeuvre he thought might be advantageous to him. At one point Lukács even gathered evidence that Kun was using bribery as a tool to build his leadership clique.

In order to rebuild the Hungarian Communist Party, Lukács and Landler had to sideline Béla Kun’s faction and win the party to a more concrete and grounded strategy. And this conflict played out over a number of issues. For example, as Lukács recounts in his autobiography, during the early 1920s, the HCP debated the question of union dues. At the time, the Hungarian Communist Party was illegal and forced to operate underground. Anyone outed as a communist risked jail. The Social Democratic Party and trade unions, however, were not illegal. Of course, HCP members were also union members. But the issue was that in Hungary, as was the case in many countries, unions reserved a portion of members’ dues and passed them on to the Social Democratic Party.

Béla Kun’s faction argued that it was unprincipled for dues paid by Hungarian Communist Party members to go towards the Social Democratic Party and tried to push through party rules requiring members to opt out of these contributions. In Lukács and Landler’s view, this would have been a disaster. At worst, it would force communists to expose themselves and risk jail. And at best, even if HCP members managed to avoid jail, refusing to allow their union dues to fund the Social Democratic Party would mean losing rights to attend meetings, to speak and to vote. It would have denied communists access to one of the only political spaces left, and one where their critique of social democracy was most relevant.

In the abstract, Béla Kun was right to point towards the fundamental incompatibility between social democracy and Marxism, and to insist that communists attempt to win leadership of the workers’ movement away from social democrats. But to proceed immediately from this general theoretical perspective to an intransigent policy and obviously impractical policy was, in Lukács and Landler’s view, irresponsible and dangerous. We could call Kun’s approach the ‘romanticism of revolutionary purity.’ In protest of the proposal, Lukács and Landler threatened to split the party and staged a walkout at a Central Committee meeting where Kun hoped to pass the policy. In so doing, they undoubtedly helped to avoid a situation in which potentially thousands of communists would be asked to sacrifice the legal cover gained by membership of unions and, indirectly, the social democratic party.

Landler and Lukács’s point, of course, was not to fetishize legality and less still to defend social democracy. Rather, as Lukács argued in History and Class Consciousness, communists ought to be prepared to work legally or illegally as the situation demands, and in fact experience in both were crucial to developing a mass communist party capable of leading a socialist transformation. ‘For the proletariat can only be liberated from its dependence upon the life-forms created by capitalism,’ he explained, ‘when it has learnt to act without these life forms inwardly influencing its actions. As motive forces they must sink to the status of matters of complete indifference.’[11]

But what does this have to do with revolutionary practice? In Lukács’s work, praxis refers to conscious and socially transformative activity, which occurs when theory and practice unite, overcoming the deficiencies of both in isolation. In short, without theory, practice is blind. And without practice, theory is abstract and utopian. And because Lukács recognized this, his philosophy of praxis was rigorously radical, non-dogmatic and practice-oriented. This was why he turned to Hegel; he understood, as Hegel also did, that to arrive at the truth, it’s necessary to overcome abstraction.[12] And overcoming abstraction means developing theory that can reflect on itself critically—namely, philosophy.

Although our situation is a far cry from the one that Lukács faced in the early 1920s, this is why his philosophy is worth our time and attention. Of course, theory can’t substitute for practice. But by helping us tear down the reified and abstract forms of thought we inherit from history, society and from the socialist movement itself, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis can help us develop self-critical Marxist theory that is capable of generating concrete and grounded strategies that can help our movement develop beyond moralism, abstraction, dogmatism and sectarianism. And this will be necessary to rebuilding large scale socialist organisation. That is to say, Marxists must allow themselves to be educated—if not yet by revolutionary practice, then first by philosophy.

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[1] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Merlin, 1971) p. 256.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, p. 257.

[4] Ibid, p. 260.

[5] Ibid, p. 257.

[6] Ibid, p. 258.

[7] Ibid, p. 261.

[8] Ibid, p. 263.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid, p. 264.

[12] The essay ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ by Hegel is an excellent illustration of this point. It’s readily available online and you will be delighted to know that it’s written in very straight-forward language. If you only read one thing by Hegel, this should be it.