The dialectic of reification

Out of these scattered passages a theory emerges that Lukács himself did not articulate in a coherent fashion. This theory helps us to understand how he could have believed his position was truly dialectical rather than a replay of the old transcendental tune or a regressive return to Gemeinschaft. It gains in plausibility to the extent that it deflates his rhetorical appeal to the creative power of the subject. But the dialectic seems to concern only society. The theory does not directly address the ontological issues raised by the critique of classical German philosophy. Furthermore, it has implications that do not square easily with Marxism.

Because he relates reification to commodity fetishism, Lukács cannot admit that it persists under socialism in principle rather than as vestige. He makes a similar assumption concerning bureaucracy, law, and technology, all of which are reified under capitalism and presumed to be dereified under socialism. But this seems to leave socialism without an institutional structure, a conclusion Lukács nowhere reaches. So what is his alternative?

One sees him attempting to find the alternative in a passage in which he remarks that

the world which confronts man in theory and in practice exhibits a kind of objectivity which—if properly thought out and understood—need never stick fast in an immediacy similar to that of forms found earlier on. This objectivity must accordingly be comprehensible as a constant factor mediating between past and future and it must be possible to demonstrate that it is everywhere the product of man and of the development of society.⁵⁷

It is hard to see the difference between this good “objectivity” and the persistence of something like reification in a context where it has become more malleable instead of rigidly determining for the human lives it shapes.

If this theory remains implicit this is because the Marxist tradition holds no place for it. The elimination of the commodity form would seem to eliminate its effect, reification. For Marx the alternative is planning of some unspecified sort under the control of the “assembled producers.” But Lukács has read Weber and knows that planning requires administration, which is just another instance of reification. He cannot consider the state as a simple institutional solution to the problem of reification. His later book on Lenin suggests a combination of the Soviets and a more or less conventional state apparatus under party control, but his analysis is brief and inconclusive, and history has refuted it at least in the form it took in the Soviet Union.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, this speculation on the socialist state shows how Lukács intended his theory of rationality to be realized in the practice of the “identical subject-object.”

All this suggests a very different image of socialist revolution from the classic one derived from the French and Russian experiences. Those revolutions are generally understood as one-time breaks in the continuity of history. Although this idea still influences Lukács’s notion of historical development as a sudden reversal—how could it not in 1923?—his theory implies an evolutionary pattern in which reification and its overcoming stand in a permanent relationship of ever renewed conflict and resolution, beginning before the overthrow of capitalism and continuing long afterwards. The “revolution” would alter the conditions of that conflict, favoring agency over structure. But it would do no more than institute new terms of struggle.

Human action in modern societies, whether capitalist or socialist, continually constructs reified social objects out of the underlying human relations on which it is based. The reified form of objectivity of these objects gives a measure of stability and control while at the same time sacrificing significant dimensions of the human lives they structure. The chief difference between capitalism and socialism is not that the one is reified and the other dereified, but rather that the one stands or falls with reification while the other can support a continual mediating and transforming of reified social objects in order to realize the potential of those sacrificed dimensions. This approach implies a theory of modernity as a differentiated social formation with two variants, a capitalist one in which reification is predominant and resistances suppressed, and a socialist one in which resistances modify malleable reified systems subject to continuous revision.

The theoretical possibility of a socialist variant undoes the most important consequence of reification, namely, the misrecognition of its own social contingency. Once that possibility is established, reification appears not as a “second nature” alien to subjectivity, but as a mediated product of subjectivity, “properly understood.” Society is no longer seen as subordinate to laws it cannot change, because those laws are revealed as social products. This perception subverts the functional role of reification under capitalism that consists precisely in blocking consciousness of the productive power of collective action.

What are the philosophical implications of Lukács’s dialectic? The basic “demand of reason” is that knowledge and action stand in essential relation to reality itself. Reified rationality and its technical practice cannot fulfill this demand because it cannot “penetrate” the contents of its forms, specifically, the life process underlying capitalism. By contrast, dialectical rationality and the proletarian revolution that corresponds to it reach down into those contents by modifying their form of objectivity, hence also their function in the social totality. This is not a superficial change in quantity or quality but a fundamental change in meaning, in nature. Nor is it the full-blown constitution of reality by a social version of the transcendental subject. Rather, subject-object identity is achieved in society through a process of mediation. But the question remains: can that process of mediation be extended beyond society, specifically, to nature? Unless subject and object can be united in every domain, the demands of reason are not fulfilled. Lukács’s attempt to address this problem is the subject of the next chapter.

 

1 Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner’s, 1937).

2 HCC, xlv.

3 Engels still could say of the petty bourgeoisie, “Let [them] cast in their lot with the anti-Semites until they have convinced themselves that they get no help in that quarter.” Frederick Engels, “The Peasant Question in France and Germany,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International, 1969), 648.

4 HCC, 110 and 187–8. It was Nietzsche who first attempted a general critique of rationality as an expression of the will to power, identifying conceptual generality with hierarchy, control, and domination. The Frankfurt School continues some aspects of this critique, which it enriches and concretizes in terms of the Lukácsian critique of reification. See Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi, “The Over-Bourgeois and the Dissolution of Subjectivity: Adorno as Nietzsche’s Scholar,” in Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi, ed., Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future (Rome: John Cabot Press, 2009).

5 Quoted by Lukács in HCC, 141. The passage is from Die Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems. In its entirety it reads: “The antitheses … which used to be expressed in terms of mind and matter, body and soul, faith and reason, freedom and necessity, etc., and were also prominent in a number of more restricted spheres and concentrated all human interests in themselves, became transformed as culture advanced into contrasts between reason and the senses, intelligence and nature and, in its most general form, between absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity. To transcend such ossified antitheses is the sole concern of reason. This concern does not imply hostility to opposites and restrictions in general; for opposites and the totality of life, at its most intense is only possible as a new synthesis out of the most absolute separation.”

6 HCC, 121.

7 Ibid., 63.

8 Ibid., 77. Lukács had already treated this dilemma in The Theory of the Novel before becoming a Marxist. That early work, which contains Lukács’s critique of romanticism and ethical idealism, concludes with a chapter on the “transcendence of social forms of life.” The messianicutopian stage in Lukács’s thought lies here, in the idea of the creation of a new epic community through the dissolution of all social conventions and constraints in Dostoevskian soul-to-soul encounters. The theory presented in History and Class Consciousness is quite different despite the formal similarity to messianism, as I will show in the conclusion of this chapter. For more on Lukács’s messianism, see Michael Löwy, Pour une Sociologie des Intellectuels Révolutionnaires (Paris: PUF, 1976).

9 HCC, 134.

10 Ibid., 87.

11 Ibid., 135. It is important not to confuse reification with objectification as such. Reification is a particular type of alienated objectification in which the alienated human powers appear as formal rational laws. Hence dereification is a disalienation and not the abolition of objectification as the later Lukács charged in his critique of his own early work. See HCC, xxiv.

12 Ibid., 129 (translation modified). The similarity of this argument to Heidegger’s later discussion of technology is striking. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977).

13 HCC, 112.

14 Ibid., 128.

15 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. M. J. O’Connell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 211. Subject–object identity in this sense is clearly quite different from the kind of identity rejected by the Frankfurt School. Cf. Martin Jay, “The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Marxist Humanism,” Social Research, Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 (1972). See also John Grumley, “Adventures of the Concept of Totality: Thoughts on Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality” Thesis Eleven, No. 15 (1986), 111–21.

16 Lukács’s interpretation of Kant is developed further in Lucien Goldmann, Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1945) and Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1975).

17 HCC, 116. Lukács was influenced by Emil Lask’s Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr, 1902.) For the neo-Kantian background, see Guy Oakes, Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988).

18 HCC, 117 (translation modified).

19 HCC, 116.

20 Ibid., 115.

21 Ibid., 122.

22 Ibid., 126.

23 Ibid., 124.

24 Ibid., 160.

25 Ibid., 134.

26 Ibid., 126.

27 Ibid., 126.

28 Ibid. 137.

29 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. H. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 255. The centrality Lukács attributes to the idea of an “intuitive understanding” in the development of classical German philosophy follows closely on Hegel’s interpretation. In Glauben und Wissen, Hegel even asserts that “die Idee dieses urbildlichen, intuitiven Verstandes ist im Grunde durchaus nichts anders als dieselbe Idee der transzendentalen Einbildungskraft” G. W. F. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen (Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 1962), 33. This identification also underlies Lukács interpretation of Fichte and Hegel.

30 HCC, 138. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 255.

31 HCC, 138.

32 Ibid., 142.

33 The accuracy of this interpretation of Kant is not the issue here since this was in fact how Hegel understood critical philosophy. cf. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, 20–1.

34 Herbert Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, trans. S. Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 118.

35 See ibid., 36–8 and especially 118–19.

36 Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 67.

37 HCC, 147.

38 Ibid., 17.

39 Ibid., 18.

40 Ibid., 201.

41 Ibid., 121–2.

42 Ibid., 155.

43 Tom Rockmore, Irrationalism: Lukács and the Marxist View of Reason (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 137.

44 HCC, 204.

45 Ibid., 204–5.

46 Ibid., 163.

47 Ibid., 176.

48 Ibid., 21.

49 Ibid., 204.

50 Ibid., 185.

51 Ibid., 187.

52 Ibid., 142.

53 Ibid., 199.

54 Ibid., 206.

55 Konstantinos Kavoulakos, “Back to History?” in M. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2011), 164.

56 Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 67. Marck writes, “Das Existenzproblem soll an Stelle des Seinsproblems in den Mittelpunkt treten, die Fragen des gesellschaftlichen Daseins die metaphysischen Probleme durch ihre Vermenschlichung und Entfetischiseirung lösen.” Siegfried Marck, Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der Gegenwart (Tübingen, Germany: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr, 1929), 130.

57 HCC, 159.

58 Andrew Feenberg, “Post-Utopian Marxism: Lukács and the Dilemmas of Organization,” in John McCormick, ed., Confronting Mass Technology and Mass Democracy: Essays in Twentieth-Century German Political and Social Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 45–69.