Mediation

Marx describes the historical tendencies leading to socialism emerging within the capitalist economy as tensions, breakdowns, crises. These crises reveal the limits of reification not only as a social form but as a form of rationality. The transcendence of capitalism in socialist revolution is also the transcendence of its philosophical limits, the resolution of the antinomies. For Lukács as for the early Marx revolution is method, the solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought.

Lukács works out the implications of this position in the third part of the Reification essay, but the argument is developed in scattered passages that omit important themes and problems. He explains the historical mediation of social forms by their contents, but he fails to apply the concept of mediation to the antinomy of society and nature. Instead he offers bold statements claiming that the proletariat is the identical subject-object. This makes for several confusing ambiguities I will examine in more detail in the remainder of this chapter and the next.

In brief it is unclear if the identical subject-object is a particular entity, the proletariat as a class, or a process of mediation engaging the whole society in which the proletariat plays an essential role. In the former case, there is little to be said in defense of the theory today. In fact this is a commonplace interpretation; Lukács is supposed to have described the proletariat as a kind of romantic subjectivity writ large. This interpretation, which I will call “metaphysical,” makes of him a voluntarist in relation to society and a subjective idealist in relation to nature. Here is an example of the sort of lyrical passage that seems to confirm this image of Lukács:

Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming, that belongs to him. Only he who is willing and whose mission it is to create the future can see the present in its concrete truth. As Hegel says: “Truth is not to treat objects as alien.”⁴⁴

The alternative interpretation of subject-object identity as a process of mediation belongs to a theory of dialectical rationality. This theory has suggestive implications for us even though our context is very different from that of Lukács in the early 1920s. Mediation has not disappeared along with the revolutionary proletarian movement but has simply changed purpose and form. The important point is that mediation is a process, not a thing. The continuation of the passage quoted above confirms this interpretation. Lukács goes on:

Thus thought and existence are not identical in the sense that they “correspond” to each other or “coincide” with each other (all expressions that conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process. What is “reflected” in the consciousness of the proletariat is the new positive reality arising out of the dialectical contradictions of capitalism. And this is by no means the invention of the proletariat, nor was it “created” out of the void. It is rather the inevitable consequence of the process in its totality; one which changed from being an abstract possibility to a concrete reality only after it had become part of the consciousness of the proletariat and had been made practical by it. And this is no mere formal transformation. For a possibility to be realized, for a tendency to become actual, what is required is the objective overthrow of society, the transformation of the function of its moments and with them the structure and content of every individual object.⁴⁵

What is happening in these passages? Here Lukács condenses two radically different discourses, the idealist discourse of classical German philosophy and the Marxist critique of political economy. The performative power of thought drawn from the one discourse is joined to the concept of economic evolution of the other. Simply put, history moves forward through the realization of its objective tendencies but the tendencies can only be realized when they are seized and appropriated by consciousness. Has Marxism ever said anything else? But in Lukács’s version of this thesis something new is implied, for the concept of mediation implicates the fate of reason in social theory.

Here I will review some of the passages in which Lukács explains the concept of mediation underlying his theory of dialectical rationality. They are of more than historical interest. If we abstract from certain Marxist references more relevant in 1923 than today, they suggest a dialectic of reification and resistance, structure and agency. Anticipating my conclusion, I will argue that the notion of mediation supports a non-essentialist interpretation of the role of the proletariat in the resolution of the antinomies. In the remainder of this section I will focus on five passages that reveal the implications of Lukács’s theory.

1. The proletariat cannot create a new society ex nihilo, but must start out from the capitalist heritage. The transcendence of reification in proletarian class consciousness implies no epistemological withdrawal to a free cogito, to a pure undetermined ground. Its precondition is capitalist society itself, its culture, its forms of thought that can only be transcended through a reflection in which they are criticized and comprehended historically. Reification is the foundation of true knowledge of society precisely insofar as it is relativized dialectically.

Proletarian thought does not require a tabula rasa, a new start to the task of comprehending reality and one without any preconceptions … [but] conceives of bourgeois society together with its intellectual and artistic productions as the point of departure for its own method … It implies that the “falseness” and the “one-sidedness” of the bourgeois view of history must be seen as a necessary factor in the systematic acquisition of knowledge about society.⁴⁶

Why? Because “it is just in this [bourgeois] objectification, rationalization and reification of all social forms that we see clearly for the first time how society is constructed from the relations of men with each other.”⁴⁷ Where precapitalist societies saw the work of God, capitalist societies recognize the human hand, if in an alienated form. This explains why Marxist economic theory is a critique rather than a positive statement free of reference to “error.”

2. The proletariat is the subject of history but it is not an idealist subject. It is determined as much as determining, and cannot freely create a world after its own designs.

It is true that the proletariat is the conscious subject of total social reality. But the conscious subject is not defined here as in Kant, where “subject” is defined as that which can never be an object. The “subject” here is not a detached spectator of the process. The proletariat is more than just the active and passive part of this process: the rise and evolution of its knowledge and its actual rise and evolution in the course of history are just the two different sides of the same real process.⁴⁸

Lukács further clarifies this proposition, writing that the “identity” of thought and existence means not that the subject creates the object but “that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process.”⁴⁹

3. History must be explained through human action, but human action itself is as much product as producer of history. “Man has become the measure of all (societal) things,” and the understanding of history consists in the “derivation of the indissoluble fetishistic forms from the primary forms of human relations.”⁵⁰ “Man is the measure” specifically in opposition to all attempts to “measure” history from “above” or “outside” of history, i.e., from a god, nature, or transhistorical laws conceived as founding for history. Yet this is no humanism in the sense of a doctrine that would derive history from a prior concept of man, or from a quasi-theological creative power attributed to the human species.

For if man is made the measure of all things, and if with the aid of that assumption all transcendence is to be eliminated without applying the same “standard” to himself or—more exactly—without making man himself dialectical, then man himself is made into an absolute and he simply puts himself in the place of those transcendental forces he was supposed to explain, dissolve and systematically replace.⁵¹

4. Lukács develops this argument further in a passage that shows that the transcendence of the antinomies is not a one-sided predominance of the subject.

The dialectical process, the ending of a rigid confrontation of rigid forms, is enacted essentially between the subject and the object … [Only if] the relativizing or the interpenetration of the subject and the object themselves … only if “the true [were understood] not only as substance but also as subject,” only if the subject (consciousness, thought) were both producer and product of the dialectical process, and if, as a result the subject moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antitheses of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved.⁵²

Lukács’s rejection of the voluntaristic notion of the proletariat as a free agent overcoming all structure comes through clearly in these passages. Instead, he affirms that the proletariat is objectively structured and that only as such is it an agent of structural transformation. Its objectivity is the condition of its subjectivity while also limiting its agency.

5. This position seems incompatible with the notion that reification characterizes only the bourgeois era and can be wholly eliminated under socialism. Given the dialectic of reification and mediation, the elimination of the former would eliminate the latter. Insofar as the truth is discovered dialectically, reification is a necessary moment in the process of discovery. Reification is, in sum, not the “opposite” of dialectics, but a moment in it. Nevertheless, the position of the reified moment in the totality may change in the course of history. Lukács himself says something like this in a passage that shows he was aware of the danger of a utopian interpretation of his theory:

At the same time it is clear that from the standpoint of the proletariat the empirically given reality of the objects does dissolve into processes and tendencies; this process is no single, unrepeatable tearing of the veil that masks the process but the unbroken alternation of ossification, contradiction and movement; and thus the proletariat represents the true reality, namely the tendencies of history awakening into consciousness.⁵³

Again, Lukács concedes that “even the proletariat can only overcome reification as long as it is oriented toward practice. And this means that there can be no single act that will eliminate reification in all its forms at one blow; it means that there will be a whole host of objects that at least in appearance remain more or less unaffected by the process. This is true in the first instance of nature.”⁵⁴ I will come back to this reservation concerning nature in the next chapter.

Konstantinos Kavoulakos reasonably asks, “How ‘identical’ is then this subject-object of history, which is pervaded by internal ruptures, by internal divisions that impel it to a constantly renewed search for its identity? We should rather think of it, ultimately, as an open process rather than as … the completion of the Hegelian ‘absolute spirit.’”⁵⁵ These remarks are anticipated by Marcuse in an early text in which he credits Siegfried Marck with having “put to an end the primitive ‘critique’ according to which Lukács’s analysis can be refuted by calling it a ‘metaphysics.’”⁵⁶