Lukács Notes-Revised

His Self-critical remarks:

1. Labor, that mediates between society and nature, is missing from HCC

2. Hence ontological objectivity of nature is missing, and so is interaction between labor and the development of the people who labor.

"If we take away the useful labor expended upon ... [commodities] a material substratum is always left which is furnished by Nature with the help of man. The latter can only work as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. (Marx, Capital, Vol I.)

3. Praxis that leaves out labor gave rise to a concept of imputed class consciousness that is contemplative, not revolutionary

4. The Hegelian identical subject-object as "purely metaphysical construct", not materialism but idealist, out "Hegeling" Hegel.

5. Alienation treated as equivalent to objectification, so alienation seems incurable

From the book:

6. Assume Marx wrong about economic theses, orthodox Marxism (anti-Bernstein) is a matter of method only. (Totality, historical, dialectical)

7. Bernstein et. al. claim that there are economic laws like laws of nature that people can not influence. Totality viewpoint contradicts this, the totality which is the working class is both the subject that knows and acts and the object of knowledge and action. (Question: why not the whole society as the subject/object, instead of just the working class?)

8. "False consciousness" only makes sense if there is such a thing as "true consciousness" Imputed consciousness is what is appropriate for people in a particular class position to think. It is this imputed consciousness that determines "in the last resort" the historically significant acts of a class. p. 253. How is this different from saying it is what in a classes interest to believe is what causes them to act in "historically significant" ways? How can a class be determined by interests of which the members are unaware? See p. 256 on class-consciousness that has no psychological reality.

9. Reification: Taking social relations as things, and seeing those things as obeying laws that humans can not alter. The idea of reification comes from Marx's book Capital. Treating social relationships as things, that is, reification, leads to absurdities in economic theory and more importantly for class consciousness, in the thinking of workers. Fetishism, that is, treating things as if they had magical properties, results from this reified thinking, since the social relationship is not recognized. Money invested in stocks or in the bank, for example, is treated as a self-expanding substance, since the actual social process of extracting profit from workers' labor is hidden.

10. Description of the dialectic p. 258-9 dialectic is the process of self-created conscious subject that is conscious of itself

11. "the act of becoming conscious turns into a point of transition in practice" p. 259 "the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object." p. 259. This is the crucial (and controversial point): What you believe about yourself can influence what you are able or not able to do. People sometimes wrongly supposed that there is some objective constraint on them that forces or prevents them from doing something which they could in fact do or avoid if they chose. (Sartre calls this "bad faith"). Compare: I make my own choices and preferences a "thing", by saying that I won't accept a certain responsibility because "I would not be good at that". Changing my consciousness of myself also changes myself, and overcomes the "objective fact" that I would not be good at it. Even avoiding bad faith, however, Weston would not be able to run the 4 minute mile, although it is remotely possible that he could write a half-decent novel. Analogously, there are, according to Marx, objective economic laws that do not operate just because people think a certain way. Lukács may not be denying this, but he certainly de-emphasizes it. Remember that Marx puts great emphasis on the objective developmental tendencies of the capitalist system, but Lukács is willing to assume with Bernstein that Marx is wrong about these. Instead he claims that the main content of "orthodox" (non-Bernstein) Marxism is totality, that is, the Hegelian analysis in terms of subject/object.

Question: are the obstacles to revolution all in the thinking of the working class, or are they (partly) external?