Lukács' 1918 conversion to communism and his subsequent engagement with philosophical Marxism not only confounded his friends, even for today's readers, it can be difficult to track the many shifts in Lukács theoretical commitments between 1918 and 1923.
In the December 1918 article on “Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem”, Lukács draws a connection between his newfound Marxist convictions and the ethical views he had previously held: whereas the historical necessity of class struggle is only a descriptive claim of Marxism, the normative, ethical demand to overcome such a struggle and to establish a classless society must be separated from any issue of truth and be recognized as an utopian form of ethical idealism, appropriate to the expression of a pure will. At this point in 1918, Lukács still thinks that the specific content of this ideal leads into a paradoxical situation: in order to enable the proletarian “messianic class” (1918: 218) to overcome class society, it must first seize power by creating the most extreme form of class dominance, i.e., a dictatorship. Bolshevism thus presupposes the conviction that evil actions can produce good outcomes, or, as Lukács puts it in the essay on “Tactics and Ethics”, that tragedy cannot be avoided in revolutionary politics (1919a: 10). However, by the time History and Class Consciousness appeared, Lukács seems to have thought of himself as having found another conception of revolutionary action that paved the way for a new approach to political practice.
At the foundation of this new conception lies the theory of reification that Lukács introduces in the essay on “Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat”. This essay is not only credited to be one of the classics of Western Marxism, but also as spelling out the paradigmatic “central problem” (Brunkhorst and Krockenberger 1998) of Critical Theory.
In his essay on reification, Lukács frames his basic argument as an extension of Marx's analysis of the “fetishism of the commodity form” in Capital I, whereby Marx refers to the phenomenon of social relations between producers of commodities that appear in capitalism under the guise of objective, calculable, properties of things (“value”). The form which commodities acquire due to this fetishism has gradually become, Lukács claims, the “universal category of society as a whole” (1923a: 86). In capitalist societies, the commodity form even becomes the dominantform of objectivity itself (Gegenständlichkeitsform, a Neo-Kantian term). This process has both an objective and a subjective dimension: objectively, the qualitative homogeneity and continuity of human work is destroyed when industrial work processes become rationalized in a way that is appropriate to understanding them as commodity exchanges. Their mechanization and specialization leads not only to a fragmentation of human life but also to the destruction of the “organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product” (1923a: 88). On the subjective side, reification entails a fragmentation of human experience, leading to an attitude of “contemplation” where one passively adapts to a law-like system of social “second nature” and to an objectifying stance towards one's own mental states and capacities.
As Lukács writes about the commodity form,
[it] stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can “own” or “dispose of” like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic “qualities” into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process. (1923a: 100)
Lukács calls this development “reification”. It is a process which affects four dimensions of social relations: the socially created features of objects (primarily their features as commodities), the relations between persons, their relations to themselves and, finally, the relations between individuals and society as a whole (Stahl 2011). The objective and subjective dimensions of the dominance of the commodity form constitute a complex of reification because the properties of objects, subjects and social relations become “thinglike” in a particular way. These properties become independent, quantifiable, non-relational features that must remain alien to any subjective meaning that one could attach to them. Additionally, by losing grip of the qualitative dimensions of their social relations, people become atomized and isolated.
With this description of capitalist society, Lukács combines Weber's theory of rationalization, Simmel's theory of modern culture and his own idea of a contradiction between form and life (see Dannemann 1987) with Marx's theory of value. The resulting theory of reification as a socially induced pathology has not only had considerable influence on the Frankfurt School (for the influence of Lukács on Adorno, see Schiller 2011; for the explicit engagement of the later generations of Frankfurt School criticism with Lukács see Habermas 1984: 355–365; Honneth 2008; cf. also Chari 2010), but has also lead Lucien Goldmann to speculate that Heidegger'sBeing and Time is to be read as an answer to Lukács (Goldmann 1977).
Drawing on this idea, Lukács sketches a theory of social rationalization that goes beyond a mere description of economic relations and towards a theory of cultural change. The core of this argument is the claim that the dominance of commodity forms in the economic sphere must necessarily lead to the dominance of rational calculation and formal reason in society as a whole. Because a break with the organic unity and totality of human existence is a necessary precondition for this development, the commodity form must, over time, subject all social spheres to its rule. By forcing politics and law to adapt to the demands of capitalist exchange, the commodity form consequently transforms these spheres into a mode of rational calculability (a line of thought clearly stemming from Weber's analyses)—which helps explain the rise of the bureaucratic state and the dominance of formal, positive law that continues to alienate individuals from society and encourages their passivity in the face of objectified, mechanical rules (1923a: 98).
This development leads into a contradictory situation both on the practical and the theoretical level: because the process of rationalization precludes the grasp of any kind of totality, it cannot ever succeed in making the whole of society subject to rational calculation for it necessarily must exclude all irrational, qualitative dimensions from such calculation. As Lukács argues, the inability of economic rationality to integrate qualitative features (e.g., of consumption) into a formal system not only explains the economic crises of capitalism but is also reflected in the inability of economic science to explain the movements of the economy (1923a: 105–107). The same holds true for a formalist model of law, which cannot theoretically acknowledge the interdependence of its principles with their social content and therefore must treat this content as an extra-legal, irrational foundation (1923a: 107–110).
This analysis of the social and cultural features of reification allows Lukács, in a third step, to present an analysis of the “antinomies of bourgeois thought” (1923a: 110). In attempting to achieve a rational system of principles, modern philosophy is always, Lukács claims, confronted with the issue of there being a “content” necessary for the application of its formal principles of knowledge, a content which cannot be integrated into a formal philosophical system—a prime example of which is Kant's “thing in itself” (see Bernstein 1984: 15–22). Kantian dualism is nothing other than the most self-conscious expression of this “hiatus” between subject (the source of rational unity) and object (the source of non-rational content). This dualism between subject and object—and in ethics, between norms and facts—haunts modern philosophy. As Fichte and Hegel recognize, this problem arises only because modern thought takes the contemplative subject of reified self-world relations as its paradigm, ignoring the alternative of an active subject that is engaged in the production of the content. Fichte's proposal to postulate an “identical subject-object” (that is, a subject that produces objectivity by positing objective reality as distinct from itself) is also the key to Lukács' answer. But Fichte's solution still suffers from an inadequacy in that he conceives of the constitutive activity still as the act of an individual subject confronted with an external, alien reality (1923a: 124).
An alternative is to be found in the idealist conception of art as an activity directed at the creation of a meaningful totality and in Schiller's view of artistic activity, which is not an application of external, given laws but a form of play (1923a: 138). However, the conceptualization of practice from the standpoint of aesthetics obscures its historical dimension. Lukács acknowledges Hegel as the thinker who came nearest to finding a solution to this problem by recognizing that it is thetotality of concrete history, understood as the expression of a subject, of a “we”, which is the only standpoint from which the antinomies between form and content can be overcome (1923a: 146f.). But Hegel adopts a mythologizing view of this subjectivity in terms of a “World Spirit” that lies beyond any concrete historical agency. The subject Hegel desperately tried to find could only be discovered by Marx—it is the proletariat to which Lukács assigns the role of the “subject-object” of history (1923a: 149).
The final step in Lukács' argument is to show that it is only the proletariat that can understand itself as the producer of the totality of society and which is thereby able to overcome reification. Initially, both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie face the same immediate reality of an alienated world. Bourgeois thought, however, endorses this facticity and sees every possible normative stance only as a subjective projection onto a world of immediate facts. In contrast, the proletariat is unable to remain within bourgeois ideology. Lukács gives two reasons for this claim: in the 1920 essay, titled “Class Consciousness”, he distinguishes between “empirical” and rational, “imputed” class consciousness (1920a: 51 and 74) that only constitutes an “objective possibility” given the interests of the proletariat. In contrast, in the “Reification” essay, he argues that there is an intrinsic dialectics within the class consciousness of the proletariat (Arato and Breines 1979: 131–136; for an epistemological reading see Jameson 2009, 65ff.), arising from its objective position as mere object of the social process. In capitalism, the activity of workers is reduced to a completely quantifiable process. But, at the same time, workers cannot have any immediate self-consciousness of their work other than of a qualitatively determined activity. Lukács argues that this intrinsic tension in the consciousness of the worker constitutes the objective possibility of the proletariat's grasping three important things: first, the proletariat's own reified existence as a product of social mediation, second, the social totality and, third, the proletariat as the subject-object of that totality.
However, the process of the proletariat becoming self-conscious does not only describe a theoretical insight. By realizing that it is the subject-object of history, the proletariat discovers itself to be the subject of the process of social reproduction (see 1923a: 181; Jay 1984: 107f), not an object of contemplation. As Lukács writes, “The act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object” (1923a: 178). The proletariat can thus overcome reification through a practical engagement with totality—by consciously transforming it into the product of the proletariat's collective action—which this totality in its essence has always already been. Of course, this process is, in Lukács' mind, nothing other than the communist revolution. As many critics of Lukács have remarked (Adorno 1973: 190f., Bewes 2002), this seems to commit Lukács to the view that there can be a complete overcoming of reification resulting in a totally transparent society. However, this interpretation ignores Lukács' insistence that the resistance against reification must be understood as a never-ending struggle (see 1923a: 199, 206; Feenberg 2011).
As Lukács' essay on the “Problem of Organisation” (written shortly before the reification essay) shows, the distinction between “empirical” and “imputed” class consciousness had not entirely been resolved by the introduction of a dialectics of consciousness that is supposed to ground this spontaneous process (1923b). The proletarian situation does not necessarily entail an immediate consciousness of the totality. This consciousness remains only an objective possibility, always threatened by the seductions of the immediate consciousness. This makes the agency of the communist party a necessary condition for the revolution. Due to his criticism of bureaucracy, Lukács cannot endorse Lenin's idea of the completely rationalized organization of the state (Arato and Breines 1979: 154). Nonetheless, in his political writings immediately precedingHistory and Class Consciousness, he seems to (paradoxically) endorse both a qualified Luxemburgian view of proletarian spontaneity (for example in 1920b) and an elitist conception of party vanguardism (a “party myth”, Arato and Breines 1979: 145). The “unconditional absorption of the total personality in the praxis of the movement”, Lukács writes, is “the only possible way of bringing about an authentic freedom” (1923b: 320).
It is easy to see that the resulting conception of society that Lukács articulates owes as much to Hegel as to Marx. This inheritance commits Lukács to a number of methodological claims which put him into stark opposition not only to social democrats like Bernstein but also, somewhat unintentionally, to the orthodoxy of the Soviet party. In his essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919b), Lukács contrasts his method with social democratic economic determinism. He describes Marxism as a purely methodological commitment to Marx's dialectics rather than as depending on any belief regarding the truth of Marx's economic theory. Lukács even goes so far as to claim that “it is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality” (1921: 27).
The primacy of the social totality not only affects the Marxist method, but also the conception of practice and the underlying social ontology: by insisting on a foundational role of practice in the social totality, Lukács makes political action rather than labor into the foundation for overcoming reification (Feenberg 1998). In his 1967 preface to the new edition of History and Class-Consciousness, Lukács acknowledges (next to a number of exercises in self-criticism, which appear both unjustified and externally motivated) that his insistence on this point meant a departure from Marx's concept of practice (1967: xviii), at least as interpreted by orthodox Marxists: while Marx had understood practice primarily as the conscious engagement of humans with non-human nature, the self-sufficiency of the social for the very essence of reality had led Lukács to a different understanding of practice which privileges the theoretical and the political (see also Jay 1984).
Within his social ontology, Lukács is finally committed to the claim that the totality of historical processes, rather than individual facts, are the foundation of objective reality (1923a: 184; for the resulting view of history see Merleau-Ponty 1973), leading him to a rejection of all “contemplative” epistemologies (such as Lenin's) which rely on the idea of a simple correspondence between thoughts and facts (1923a: 199ff; see also Lichtheim 1970: 62–65; in addition, it follows from the premise that only the perspective of the social totality solves the epistemological problems of classical philosophy that Lukács must reject Engels' claim that the experimental method is a model for the type of defetishizing praxis that can overcome the subject-object divide, see 1923a: 131–133). This ontology of pure processuality finally entails a normative conception of society that is critical towards all forms of institutional rationalization which are rejected as forms of alienation across the board. At the same time, in insisting that the emancipated society must be capable of presenting itself as a totality for its subjects, Lukács is unable to discover any resources for progress in the differentiation of social spheres (Arato and Breines 1979: 155).
