Chapter four Reification and Rationality culture and the crisis of rationality

Husserl’s 1935 “Vienna Lecture” ended with an ominous warning: “There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all.”¹ Husserl was reacting to the rise of romantic and pessimistic currents of thought, a Spenglerian mood of doom hanging over Europe. The earlier attempts of Dilthey and the neo-Kantians to distinguish humanistic knowledge from natural science and to salvage thereby a space for spirit in an increasingly mechanized world had failed. Triumphant science and technology were met by increasing hostility to reason itself. Heidegger’s impressive attempt to formulate a philosophical alternative to disintegrating rationalism came to grief in a lamentable involvement with fascism.

Lukács too was a product of an intellectual environment that favored the idea of independent Geisteswissenschaften as against bourgeois social science and vulgar Marxism. He responded to the crisis with a return to Marx for a solution in the philosophical domain. His version of “heroic” rationalism was based on the revolutionary socialist movement.² Like the young Marx demanding the realization of philosophy, Lukács insisted that what is at stake in the struggle for socialism is not only a change in society, but also the fate of rationality: the revolution is an affair of reason. But Lukács’s path to Marxism was long and began with the very romantic critique of rationalism that led so many other thinkers to reactionary conclusions. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce Lukács’s concept of reification, through which he attempted to reconcile the themes of that early critique with a renewed faith in reason.

Reification means, literally, treating human relations as relations between things. In Lukács’s usage, the “thing” implied in the “re” of reification is not just an entity in general but an object suited to formal rational comprehension, prediction, and technical control. Lukács writes:

What is important is to recognize clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the form of objectivity of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature. And also, the subject of this “action” likewise assumes increasingly the attitude of the pure observer of these—artificially abstract—processes, the attitude of the experimenter.³

The problem, Lukács argues, is not with scientific reason per se, but with its application beyond the bounds of its appropriate object, nature. The bourgeois social sciences do not simply comprehend their objects but reflect and contribute to the reshaping of society to resemble a thing of nature. Marxism grounds a different dialectical paradigm of knowledge in a social movement capable of realizing that paradigm not merely in theory but in practice as well. The critique of scientism is recruited to the proletarian cause even as the proletariat becomes the bearer of this alternative form of rationality. As we will see, this surprising synthesis alters both the critique and the idea of reason. Understanding it poses challenges not all interpreters of Lukács successfully meet.

In his youth Lukács belonged to a group of philosophers and social critics whose principal concern was alienation in modern life.⁴ Marx’s Manuscripts of 1844 interpreted alienation in terms of labor but this text was still unpublished at the time Lukács and his friends developed their cultural perspective. Their critique drew on the sociology of Weber and especially of Simmel, whose analysis of the “tragedy of culture” had a deep influence on their thinking.⁵

Culture as they understood it had both a descriptive and a normative dimension. On the one hand the hermeneutics of culture distinguished understanding of society from natural science and technology. This distinction supported a corresponding distinction between culture, as the realm of creative expression, and civilization, as the domain of practical activity. On the other hand, scientism, mechanization, and commercialism were destructive of personal Bildung as a value. Both these senses of culture come together in Lukács’s early literary criticism where the objectifications of culture in customs and mores are analyzed as a rigid “second nature” opposed to the personal self-development of the individual.⁶

World War I threw bourgeois society into a general crisis embracing not only the ethical and political domains, but the very substance of its cultural life. As Lukács put it in one early article: “The culture of the capitalist epoch had collapsed in itself and prior to the occurrence of economic and political breakdown. Therefore … it is a pressing necessity, precisely in the interests of culture, in the interest of opening the way to the new culture, to bring the long death process of capitalist society to its completion.”⁷ The alienation sapping the spirit of Europe must be overcome along with the capitalist system that is its material base.

Soon after identifying the new culture with communism, Lukács rejected his early formulation of the problem. By 1923, when he published History and Class Consciousness, concepts drawn from Marx’s Capital and from his own Hegelian interpretation of Marx replace the cultural approach. No doubt Lukács believed this was necessary to overcome the vaguely spiritual and politically conservative associations of the concept of culture at that time. But lacking a concept of culture, Lukács was forced to formulate his theory of epochal cultural change in a strange mixture of Marxist economic determinism and idealist philosophical speculation. This has led to much confusion about his meaning. To a lesser degree Marx’s own formulations display a similar ambiguity. Neither of these revolutionary philosophers offer an elaborated theory of the revolution they advocate. Their explanations waver between philosophical deduction and causal necessity without achieving a convincing account. However, in the case of Lukács at least, it is possible to extract a coherent account from his various formulations. This is what I will attempt to do in this chapter.

In Chapter 2 I have shown that Marx arrives at the concept of socialism not through an ethical argument but through a theory of rationality and its “demands.” Marx’s early theory ranks capitalism and socialism as forms of rationality. Their succession is determined less by economic motives or political power than by the logic of his metacritique. The later Marx sometimes takes this logic for a causal link. This is due to his self-misunderstanding in terms of a scientific paradigm of explanation unsuited to the tasks he set it. Marx claims that capitalism leads to socialism “with the inexorability of a law of Nature.” In fact he gets from capitalism to socialism not by a causal progression but by a dialectical demonstration. He argues that just as capitalism has stripped craft producers of their tools, so will it lose control of machinery to the industrial labor force it has called into being. Socialism is thus “the negation of the negation” the “expropriators are expropriated in the revolution.”⁸ It is not surprising that unsympathetic critics speak of a religious or ethical exigency of socialism in Marx’s work, since the economic theory does not live up to Marx’s deterministic promise.⁹

Lukács takes over Marx’s critique of capitalism and projects a socialist resolution to its crises. He is more aware than Marx of the risks of confusing social change with natural processes. He develops a much more elaborate theory of the passage from capitalism to socialism, not as a causal sequence but as a dialectical transcendence of the capitalist paradigm of rational social order by a higher form of socialist rationality. But just because he downplays economic determinism, his argument has been interpreted by later commentators as a pure philosophical deduction. As in the case of Marx, critics claim that Lukács’s faith in socialist revolution is founded on a philosophical myth, the myth of the proletariat as “identical subject–object of history.”

The critics misunderstand the concept of social change in Marx and Lukács. But Marx and Lukács are partially responsible since they fail to clearly explain their alternative to philosophical deduction and causality. A theory of cultural change could have provided the missing term between Marx’s Manuscripts and Capital, on the one hand, and between the critique of capitalism and the socialist revolution on the other. Unfortunately, when he turned to economic research and abandoned philosophy, Marx left behind the conceptual tools needed to develop such a theory. The theory of alienation in the Manuscripts adumbrates a concept of culture that appears more fully developed in Lukács’s theory of reification. But as we have seen, Lukács rejected the concept of culture and so appeared to fall back on a philosophical projection of the future.¹⁰

Today we are remote from the sources of Lukács’s early concept of culture. The most widely accepted usage of the term no longer has any connection with reactionary culture-critique but derives from sociology and anthropology. “Culture” now refers to the unifying pattern of an entire society, including its typical artifacts, rituals, customs, and beliefs.¹¹ The concept of culture points toward the common structures of social life. It assigns the researcher the problem of discovering the overarching paradigms of meaning and value that shape all the various spheres of society. This social scientific sense of culture has influenced everyday speech as well. The changed meaning and connotations of “culture” free the term from the associations that troubled Lukács. Today we can safely identify Lukács’s concept of reification as a cultural construct in the contemporary usage of the term.

There are of course many versions of a cultural approach to understanding society. Those closest in spirit to Lukács’s Marxism treat cultural structures as intertwined with the agency of the members of society in a circular pattern. The circularity of culture is a familiar social ontological principle currently referred to by the fashionable term “performativity.” For example, money is money only insofar as we act as though it were money and it is the success of this sort of action that determines our conviction that money is in fact money. Social “things” are not merely things but are implicated in practices. The categories under which social life makes sense are the categories under which it is lived.¹²

Gillian Rose shows that this concept of culture has its source in the neo-Kantian doctrines debated in Lukács’s own intellectual environment. The pattern of culture is a kind of naturalized version of the Kantian a priori, a quasi-transcendental precondition of the facts and values it engenders. “The status of the precondition becomes ambiguous: it is an a priori, that is, not empirical, for it is the basis of the possibility of experience. But a ‘sociological a priori’ is, ex hypothesi, external to the mind, and hence appears to acquire the status of a natural object or cause.”¹³

This neo-Kantian concept of culture operates under the Marxist surface of Lukács’s argument, offering a way out of the difficulties of Marx’s problematic determinism. According to Lukács, social being and social thought cannot be separately conceptualized and then related by a theory of reciprocal causal interaction, as in most Marxist theory. This view, he argues, leads to an insoluble antinomy of thought and things that can be overcome “only by conceiving of thought as a form of reality, as a moment in the total process …”¹⁴ The focus must shift from the mechanistic “influence” of social conditions on consciousness to the generalized patterning of all dimensions of society by what Rose calls a “quasi-transcendental” form. Form in this sense is culture as an emergent property of social behavior, a property that is irreducible to the traditional categories of subjectivity and objectivity because it constitutes them.

Lukács’s theory is based on the double character of the capitalist economy, as means of life and form of life, utilitarian instrumentality and foundation of a cultural system. This conforms with Marx’s explanation of historical materialism in The German Ideology. There Marx writes, “This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather, it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.”¹⁵

The unusual feature of Lukács’s cultural approach is his identification of rationality itself as a cultural pattern. It is this identification that is enshrined in the concept of reification. The disenchantment of the world Marx described in the Communist Manifesto, where capitalism is attributed an irresistible power to demystify tradition, is fully realized in the lawful character of the capitalist system. The mathematical precision of equal exchange becomes the binding logic of social life, replacing myth and deference to personal authority. Capitalism’s rational form, the exchange of equivalents and its laws, replaces earlier non-rational meanings as the structuring principle of social thought and action. Lukács’s challenge is explaining opposition to capitalist rationality without resuscitating the irrationality capitalism overcomes. He transforms romantic protest against a rigid conventional order into the philosophical conflict of forms of rationality.

There is a distinct advantage to considering reification as a cultural category. Reification is often defined as a mental state, an attitude. But this is not the conception of History and Class Consciousness. In that work reification is the underlying unity of the social system, the “model” of “all the forms of objectivity of bourgeois society together with all the corresponding forms of subjectivity.”¹⁶ Treating human relations as things, the definition of reification, is constitutive of capitalist society, an essential aspect of its workings. In his unpublished Defence of History and Class Consciousness he says this explicitly although the reference to reification is veiled: “The direct forms of appearance of social being are not, however, subjective fantasies of the brain, but moments of the real forms of existence.”¹⁷

The point of treating reification as a cultural category is not to deny its economic basis. From the Lukácsian perspective, Marxist theory explains the overriding influence of the economy on all sectors of capitalist society rather than simply assuming it a priori on general “materialist” grounds. A specific feature of the capitalist economy, the commodity form, also functions as the basis of the capitalist cultural system. Economic exchange is the paradigmatic order in which rationality emerges from social practice to become the cultural form of society as a whole. Capitalism is thus the source of a cultural system prevailing throughout the social order: “What is known as economics,” Lukács writes, “is nothing but the system of forms of objectivity of real life.”¹⁸

This cultural approach is no more reductionist than capitalism itself, a society unique in the cultural significance it assigns the principle of exchange. As Marshall Sahlins writes, “In bourgeois society, material production is the dominant locus of symbolic production.”¹⁹ The theory of reification explains how the cultural pattern of capitalism is derived from its economic system and, still more fundamentally, from the practices producing that system.²⁰

But then the discovery of contradictions in the economic sphere takes on a larger significance. Exploitation is not just an economic issue but generates a tension between capitalist rationality as a “mode of life,” and working-class experience and needs. Class struggle is thus cultural struggle, and what Marx describes as the economic crisis and breakdown of capitalism, Lukács reconstructs as the system’s cultural crisis and breakdown. He thereby avoids economism, which derives revolution from simple dissatisfaction with the level of welfare that capitalism can (in theory) deliver to its working class.

The transition to socialism now appears in a different light as well; it is neither a causal sequence, nor an ethical exigency, but a process of cultural change. This process arises from the immanent cultural contradictions of capitalism, contradictions between reified social patterns and living human beings who resist the imposition of the reified forms even as they unwittingly reproduce them through their everyday practical activities.

Lukács can finally link the philosophical concerns of Marxism with its analysis of political economy and projection of a socialist future. The tension he identifies in social reality between its reified form and its living human substratum represents metacritically a larger conflict in the paradigms of rationality. In this conflict, capitalist rationality, with its quantitative concept of exchange and social law, comes up against a limitation that is overcome theoretically by Marxist dialectics and practically by socialism. Lukács reconceptualizes class struggle as the dialectical mediation in which the formal-analytic rationality of capitalism is transcended as a cultural paradigm by an alternative dialectical paradigm.

Lukács relates Marxism to the problem of rationality through a revolutionary philosophical interpretation of Capital. The preceding chapters have shown how Marx moved from an early critique of formalism in political philosophy to a broader concern with the formalistic concept of reason, very much as Lukács supposed. Although Marx did not explicitly follow up this line of thought in his later work, nevertheless, it is clear that his early metacritique prepared his choice of a dialectical method in economic and social research. Long before the publication of the Manuscripts, Lukács discovered that Marx’s critique of fetishistic formalism in political economy implies a far more general reconstruction of the concept of reason. Lukács’s theory of reification is an original critique of formal rationality, based on Marx’s Capital, and pursued to the point where it founds a dialectical concept of reason. There is a sense then in which his early Marxist work anticipates the publication of the Manuscripts, and goes beyond them theoretically.

This interpretation of Marxism is controversial. Commentators of the so-called “scientific” school of Marxism, such as Lucio Colletti and Louis Althusser, protest that Lukács’s theory of reification leads back to the romantic culture-criticism from which Marx is supposed to have liberated radical social thought. For them the Lukácsian approach signifies the revival of philosophy, that is to say, of ideology, inside the cordon sanitaire surrounding the “science” of Marxism. The huge intellectual labor through which Lukács freed himself from his youthful romanticism and arrived at an original interpretation of Marxism is simply ignored.

Thus Gareth Stedman Jones writes that History and Class Consciousness “represents the first major irruption of the romantic anti-scientific tradition of bourgeois thought into Marxist theory.”²¹ Colletti has a similar opinion, complaining that Lukács “entered the factory not with Capital but with the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience …”²² In sum, Lukács transformed the Marxian critique of capitalism into a romantic critique of reason per se by conceptualizing formal rationality through the concept of reification rather than considering such rationality in the approved “scientific” manner as a universal feature of knowledge as such.

But Lukács had no need to study Bergson to arrive at his intellectual destination: Marx and Hegel would have sufficed. Nor, pace Colletti, is his understanding of modern technology so very different from Marx’s that it would justify the label of “romantic” it has acquired in the course of numerous polemics.²³ There is ample material in the first volume of Capital to support his critique of the alienating effects of the division and mechanization of labor. Lukács no more than Marx is hostile to machinery per se, as is sometimes charged. Nor is Lukács opposed to reason in general, but like Hegel he rejects the universal pretensions of formal rationality in order to validate the claims of dialectical rationality.

What really is questionable in his procedure is also what is most original and fruitful, namely, the discovery that linking all the phenomena of capitalist society Marx criticizes, from fetishism to mechanization and crises, there is a common structure, a pattern constituted by the imposition of formal rationality on the social world. It is this discovery that is the basis for Lukács’s generalization of Marx’s approach in the theory of reification. This, rather than any retreat into irrationalism, inspired by mauvaises lectures, is what lies behind the introduction of the concept of reification and its application in a cultural critique of capitalism. Lukács’s leap from the critique of political economy to a theory of capitalist culture is a daring step beyond Marx made possible by the change in the intellectual and social landscape since Marx’s day.