New Left Review - Gareth Stedman Jones: The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: an Evaluation

The Kautsky-Lenin schema, which stresses that bourgeois intellectuals are by definition the possessors of previous scientific accumulations, and must therefore be the initial bearers of Marxist theory ‘to’ the working class, is doubtless only a partial one (for it omits to stress that the historical preconditions and materials of this theory are the real struggles of the nascent working class itself, without which it would be impossible for historical materialism to have been forged). But it is at least, within its own self-declared limits, close to the historical facts, and moreover possesses the merit of posing sharply the question of what happens to the science of historical materialism when the masses adopt it in a revolutionary party. It thus confronts the central problem of the relation between the party and the masses by allowing for their respective autonomy. Lukács’s formulations, however, tend to banish the problem altogether by collapsing science into consciousness, and class consciousness into (acute) class situation. Where Lenin had contrasted revolutionary Marxist science with spontaneous trade-unionism, Lukács juxtaposes a Weberian ‘ascribed class consciousness’ with non-consciousness trapped in the reified world of appearances. The transition from one to the other is presented at times as a moral ascesis, accomplished under the pressure of economic crisis: ‘Class consciousness is the “ethics” of the proletariat, the unity of its theory and its practice, the point at which the economic necessity of its struggle for liberation changes dialectically into freedom. . . . The moral strength conferred by the correct class consciousness will bear fruit in terms of practical politics.’ [72] Here ethics expressly commands politics, in a philosophical moralization of class struggle. The role of the party is thus inevitably a supernumerary one, merely reduplicating the ethical bearing of the class. ‘The true strength of the party is moral: it is fed by the trust of the spontaneously revolutionary masses whom economic conditions have forced into revolt.’ [73] Thus when, in the later essays which end the book, the problem of the party is reposed in more Leninist fashion, there is no epistemological basis for it. The parthenogenetic powers of the class are simply displaced onto the party, without there being any real effort to explain why the party is both distinct from the masses and yet a detachment of them, a vanguard which both teaches the masses and learns from them. These positions are formally affirmed in the closing pages of the volume, but there is no theoretical foundation for them within the book.

... [change from History and Class Consciousness to Lenin, the unicity of thought:

Lukács was thus now able to assimilate Lenin’s strategic conception of the weakest link in the ruling order of the class enemy, which had to be seized and attacked if the working class were to wage its struggle for emancipation victoriously: ‘The need to take into account all existing tendencies in every concrete situation by no means implies that all are of equal weight when decisions are taken. On the contrary, every situation contains a central problem the solution of which determines both the answer to the other questions raised simultaneously by it and the key to the further development of all social tendencies in the future.’ [80] At the same time, the party whose function it is to lead the working class in the socialist revolution is an altogether different entity from the shadowy demiurge of History and Class Consciousness. Instead of a Manichean alternation between party and class, Lukács now develops a theory of the party that is authentically close to the conceptions of Lenin, both in its stress on the need for maximuminternal coherence and discipline and maximum external concern for the widest possible alliances of the exploited. Moreover, the party is no longer simply a vanguard that awakens the masses from a slumbering lethargy: it listens to the masses and learns from them, in a permanent dialectic between party and class. ‘In no sense is it the party’s role to impose any kind of abstract, cleverly devised tactics upon the masses. On the contrary, it must continuously learnfrom their struggle and their conduct of it. But it must remain active while it learns, preparing the next revolutionary undertaking. It must unite the spontaneous discoveries of the masses, which originate in their correct class instincts, with the totality of the revolutionary struggle, and bring them to consciousness.’ [81]

Furthermore, Lukács now directly confronts the problem of a working-class consciousness that is not revolutionary, but reformist, and in doing so actually provides in some ways a more complex and subtle account of the roots of the phenomenon of reformism than Lenin himself. For, unlike Lenin, he does not confine his explanation simply to trade-unionist spontaneity and a labour aristocracy corrupted by imperialist superprofits. He stresses in addition to these forces, both the objective pressure of the socio-economic differentiation within the working class and—particularly strikingly—the subjective cultural advantages of a labour bureaucracy over its class, due to its relative monopoly of professional knowledge and administrative skills: ‘Capitalist development, which began by forcibly levelling differences and uniting the working class, divided as it was by locality, guilds and so on, now creates a new form of division. This not only means that the proletariat no longer confronts the bourgeoisie in united hostility. The danger also arises that those very groups are in a position to exercise a reactionary influence over the whole class whose accession to a petty-bourgeois living standard and occupation of positions in the party or trade-union bureaucracy, and sometimes of municipal office, etc, gives them—despite, or rather because, of their increasingly bourgeois outlook and lack of mature proletarian class consciousness—a superiority in formal education and experience in administration over the rest of the proletariat; in other words, whose influence in proletarian organizations thus tends to obscure the class-consciousness of all workers and leads them towards a tacit alliance with the bourgeoisie.’ [82]

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