TwentiethCentury Marxism

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Twentieth-Century Marxism

• Lecture Five Lukács Hegelianism

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Introduction

• History and Class Consciousness the charter
  document of Hegelian Marxism (Martin Jay,
  Marxism and Totality, p. 84)
• Main reading Reification and the Consciousness
  of the Proletariat, Parts 2 3 also What is
  Orthodox Marxism?, 5.

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G. W. F. Hegel

• 1770-1831
• Kants Copernican revolution
• Lukács the idea that the object of cognition
  can be known by us for the reason that, and to
  the degree in which, it has been created by
  ourselves (RII1/112)

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Subject/object dualism

• Lukács Obviously the great classical
  philosophers Fichte, Hegel were much too
  perceptive and critical to overlook the
  empirically existing duality of subject and
  object. Indeed, they saw the basic structure of
  empirical data precisely in this split.
  (RII2/123)
• But the task is to overcome this dualism.

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Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit

• from

• to

• OBJECT ? SUBJECT
• realism
• consciousness of the object
• dualism
• appearance

• SUBJECT ? OBJECT
• idealism
• subjects self-consciousness
• identity
• reality

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The dialectic

• Lukács the dialectical process ... is enacted
  essentially between the subject and the object
  (RII4/142)
• the movement from
• differentiated disunity, to
• differentiated unity

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Culminates in

• spirit Geist (or God?)
• the identical subject-object

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In Lukács words

• the grandiose conception that thought can only
  grasp what it has itself created strove to master
  the world as a whole by seeing it as self-created
  Therefore it had to strive to find the
  subject of thought which could be thought of as
  producing existence (RII2/121-122)

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And again

• only if the subject (consciousness, thought)
  were both producer and product of the dialectical
  process, only 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
  Objektivität, only then can the problem of
  dialectics, and with it the abolition Aufhebung
  of the antitheses of subject and object, thought
  and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to
  be solved. (RII4/142)

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The real problem

• man in capitalist society confronts a reality
  made by himself which appears to him to be a
  natural phenomenon alien to himself he is wholly
  at the mercy of its laws even while acting
  he remains the object and not the subject of
  events. (RII3/135)
• Marxs 11th Thesis on Feuerbach The
  philosophers have only interpreted the world in
  different ways the point is to change it

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So if the problem is that ...

• Man finds himself confronted by purely natural
  relations or social relations mystified into
  natural relations fixed, complete and immutable
  entities which can be manipulated and even
  comprehended, but never overthrown then the
  answer is that man must become conscious of
  himself as a social being, as simultaneously the
  subject and object of the socio-historical
  process (OM5)

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Needed a class able to become...

• the conscious subject of total social reality
  (OM5/21)
• the proletariat it is, or at least is in the
  process of becoming, the identical
  subject-object of society and history

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Proletariat as identical subject-object

• knowledge of object
• self-consciousness as object
• self-consciousness as subject (see next slide)
• recreation of the object communism

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Proletariat as producing society

• RIII3/181 cites Marx Does a worker in a cotton
  factory produce merely cotton textiles? No, he
  produces capital. He produces values which serve
  afresh to command his labour and by means of it
  to create new values (Wage-Labour and Capital,
  KMSW 258/283).

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Long quote (part 1)

• Lukács refers to Marxs 1843 text, Towards a
  Contribution to the Critique of Hegels
  Philosophy of Right Introduction, saying that
  it provides a lapidary account of the special
  position of the proletariat in society and in
  history, and the standpoint from which it can
  function as the identical subject-object of the
  social and historical processes of evolution.

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Long quote (part 2)

• When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution
  of the previous world-order it does no more than
  reveal the secret of its own existence, for it
  represents the effective dissolution of that
  world-order. (Marx, Towards a Contribution to
  the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right,
  quoted by Lukács)

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Long quote (part 3)

• The self-understanding of the proletariat is
  therefore simultaneously the objective
  understanding of the nature of society. When the
  proletariat furthers its own class-aims it
  simultaneously achieves the conscious realisation
  of the - objective - aims of society, aims which
  would inevitably remain abstract possibilities
  and objective frontiers but for this conscious
  intervention. (RIII0/149)

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Another quote

• Only at this point does the consciousness of the
  proletariat elevate itself into the
  self-consciousness of society in its historical
  development. By becoming aware of the commodity
  relationship the proletariat can only become
  conscious of itself as the object of the economic
  process. For the commodity is produced and even
  the worker in his quality as commodity, as an
  immediate continued

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... continued

• ... producer is at best a mechanical driving
  wheel in the machine. But if the reification of
  capital is dissolved into an unbroken process of
  its production and reproduction, it is possible
  for the proletariat to discover that it is itself
  the subject of this process even though it is in
  chains and is for the time being unconscious of
  the fact. (RIII3/180-181)

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Lukács conclusion

• the future that is to be created
• a practical theory that overturns the real
  world
• Only then would the statement that the
  proletariat is the identical subject-object of
  the history of society become truly concrete.
• (RIII6/204-206)