History and class consciousness

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

History and class consciousness . Studies on Marxist Dialectics , is a collection of essays by Georg Lukács (1885–1971) published in 1923 and is considered a fundamental work of neo-Marxism of class consciousness . It exerted a great influence on critical theory , especially on Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas .

background

The Hungarian philosopher Lukács had become deputy people's commissar for education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 . His essays on the question of organization, contained in history and class consciousness , reflect these experiences.

overview

The volume brings together essays on various aspects of Marxist theory and practice; in detail: “What is orthodox Marxism” - “ Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist” - “Class consciousness” - “The reification and consciousness of the proletariat ” - “The change of function of historical materialism ” - “Legality and illegality” - “Critical remarks about Rosa Luxemburg's Critique of the Russian Revolution "-" Methodical Regarding the Organization Question "

"The reification and the consciousness of the proletariat"

In particular, the longest essay in the volume, “The Reification and Consciousness of the Proletariat” is considered a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Karl Marx's theory , which Lukács presented under the influence of Max Weber . For many years Lukács was studying in Heidelberg and mainly occupied with neo-Kantian philosophy , his friend and teacher.

reification

Starting from the chapter “The fetish character of the commodity and its secret” from the 1st volume of “ Capital ” by Karl Marx, a theory of reification is developed: modern capitalism , in which commodity exchange is the dominant form of human reproduction, favors a form of object which abstracts from the material qualities of things and only allows quantifiable and instrumental properties to apply. This process begins with the creation of industrially organized wage labor . As Marx already pointed out, the commodity form of labor means that the relationship between individual labor and total social labor appears as a relationship between things - the goods in the market.

This is the basic form of Marxist ideology criticism - the transformation of social characteristics into natural characteristics. By virtue of their value, goods not only mediate objectively between the individual works, they also subjectively produce the impression that value is something inherent in things - i.e. reification.

Lukács links this ideology-critical analysis with Max Weber's theory of rationalization, which he only considers from the point of view of enforcing formal rationality . Only the rationalization of the concrete work process, the abstraction of the "organic activity" creates the prerequisite that the work is broken down into quantifiable steps, the personality of the worker becomes a means to an end and the goods become interchangeable things. The rationalization described by Weber is thus both a prerequisite and a result (in the rationalization of law, rule, art, etc.) of the capitalist mode of production .

The consciousness of the proletariat

Based on the fundamental analysis of a misperception of things, the second part of the essay develops a comprehensive critique of modern philosophy , which from Kant to Hegel deals with the contradictions of form and substance as well as of the individual and system . The purely formal character of modern knowledge finds its clearest expression in the Kantian transcendental philosophy . Through the practical philosophies of Fichte and Schiller , the awareness of the problem developed further up to Hegel, who tried to solve this contradiction through the discovery of historicity. However, according to Lukács, Hegel failed in his attempt to find the subject of the action, which relates the form to the content, and instead set an abstract world spirit .

The subject of history that can (and in Lukács's opinion also will) remove the contradictions of bourgeois thought is the proletariat (see also position theory ).

In the third and last part of the essay, the idea is developed that the proletariat in its historical existence is driven via immediacy towards philosophy and that the contradictions are resolved through practical suspension in the revolution .

This last chapter is strongly based on Hegel's philosophy of history and therefore appears questionable even to authors who share the fundamental diagnosis of reification. In particular, it is an internal difficulty of the work that the contradictions can only be resolved practically, but the subject of this practice can be determined beforehand by theory.

Web links

expenditure

  • History and class consciousness. Studies on Marxist Dialectics . Malik-Verlag , Berlin 1923 ( Small Revolutionary Library Volume 9)
  • History and class consciousness . Neuwied 1968 ( Georg Lukács. Works. Early writings . Volume 2)
  • History and class consciousness . Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-89528-999-6
  • The reification and the consciousness of the proletariat . Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8498-1117-4 (selection of works in individual volumes, vol. 3)

literature

  • Hanno Plass (ed.): Class history awareness. What remains of Georg Lukács' theory? , Berlin Verbrecher Verlag 2015, ISBN 978-3-95732-005-6 .
  • Georg Lukács: Chvostism and Dialectics (1925). Edited by László Illés. [posthumously]. Áron Verlag, Budapest 1996, ISBN 963-85504-2-2 . [English: "A Defense of 'History and Class Consciousness': Tailism and the Dialectic", London - New York 2000] (To be published soon in German in Germany.)
  • Georg Lukács u. a .: Reification, Marxism, history. From the defeat of the November Revolution to critical theory , edited and introduced by Markus Bitterolf and Denis Maier, ça ira-Verlag, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-86259-105-3