Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 21:52:41 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: The Search for a Western Proletariat: Lukacs,  Korsch,  Gramsci & Modernity


                
Is the modern Western proletariat capable of leading a revolutionary
transformation of society?    Is it as "revolutionary" as it was in Marx's
day?    Or Lenin's?     What distinguishes the working class of their era
>from that of our own time?    A number of threads on Marxism-International
have explored --at least temporally-- this important issue.    The current
post takes as its starting point the ideas of three of Western Marxism's
most seminal thinkers and begins to trace through them the origins of our
own conceptions of the contemporary working class.

What exactly did Marx mean by the "proletariat" ?    Marx was a precise
thinker who was never content with empirical approximations.     While he
failed to produce any formal definition-- owing,  it is presumed,  to the
unfinished state in which his major work reached the world--  it is plain
that he defined the "proletariat" as a class in the objective terms of its
relation to the instruments of production.     In the coinage of the modern
West,  it denotes specifically the industrial wage worker,  particularly
those engaged in basic (or heavy) industry.     Paradoxically,  the
"proletariat" (meaning a largely urban class of industrial workers) has
nowhere led a successful revolution on the Marxian model.   The`Russian
proletariat itself (and especially in its reified form) came not before,
but after,  1917,  developing largely out of the necessity of breakneck
industrialization in a world marked by implacable hostility towards the
first socialist state.    Lenin himself applied the term to the most
versatile and dynamic of all the classes,  though he was forced to
substitute the party for the proletariat in executing the October
Revolution.    As the preeminent historian of Soviet Russia put it,  "The
Russian Revolution was made and saved not by a class,  but by a party
proclaiming itself to be the representative and vanguard of a class" (E.H.
Carr,  "A Historical Turning Point: Marx,  Lenin,  Stalin",  in Richard
Pipes [ed] *Revolutionary Russia* [Cambridge,  MA,  1968: Harvard University
Press]  p. 289). 

Alternatively,  Marx often used the word *proletariat* to embrace garment
workers,  bricklayers,  and others who did not specifically employ the
machinery of industry (T. Carver [ed], *The Cambridge Companion to Marx*
[Cambridge, 1995: Cambridge University Press],  62-63).    Class
consciousness was for Marx a vital element in the proletariat's waging of
class struggle.    But class itself was not a voluntary agglomeration of
individuals.    Its essence was not determined simply by the conscious will
and purpose of its individual members.    In the Western Marxian tradtion,
the concept of "class" has been used coextensively (and in an off-handed
way) with that of the "proletariat" --two terms that, by virtue of their
imprecise subjectivity,  have shaped (and,  perhaps,  misshaped) much of
what we in the West understand of contemporary Marxism.     

This terminological misunderstanding has a long and vexing pedigree among
Western Marxists and can in fact be traced back to the first three important
theoreticians of the post 1920 generation --the real originators of the
whole pattern of Western Marxism--  Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci.    Their
problemmatic development of the idea of the "proletariat" continues to
bedevil the practitioners of contemporary Western Marxism.        

Significantly,  each of the three was a direct participant and organizer in
the revolutionary mass upheavals of the post 1920 epoch,  embodying.that
organic unity of theory and practice realized in the classical generation of
Marxists, but increasingly rare after the 1930s.      Gyorgy Lukacs
(1885-1971) was a Deputy People's Commissioner for Education in the
ill-starred Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919,   and fought with its
revolutionary army on the Tisza front against the fatal drive of the
Entente.   In exile in Austria in the 1920s,  he became a leading member of
the Hungarian Communist Party,  briefly becoming general secretary in 1928.    

Karl Korsch (1886-1961) was a Communist Minister of Justice in the
Thuringian government in 1923,   charged with regional para-military
preparations for the insurrection of the KPD in central Germany during that
year,  which was preempted by the Reichswehr.    He then became a prominent
Reichstag deputy for the Party;  the editor of its theoretical journal;  and
one of the leaders of its left faction in 1925.    

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) played a much more significant role in the mass
struggles of the immediate post--WW I epoch.    The central organizer and
theorist of the Turin factory councils and editor of *L'Ordine Nuovo* in
1919-20, he was one of the founding members of the PCI the following year,
and gradually rose to become the dominant leader of the party in 1924,  when
it was waging a difficult defensive struggle against fascist consolidation
in Italy.  

In the 1920s,  all three held similar views of both the proletariat as a
class and the development of class- consciousness which Lukacs,
specifically,  traced back to both Hegel and to Lenin's *What is to be
Done?*.    Lukacs,  Korsch,  and Gramsci all opposed Stalin's "turn to the
Left" in the Comintern in 1928 (though Lukacs immediately recanted).    In
the days when the pundits in Moscow worked hard to play down the Hegelian
pedigree of Marxism,  all three were freely accused of importing Hegelian
glosses into the pure corpus of Marxist--Leninist doctrine.     And all
three held strikingly similar views on the definition and prospects of the
revolutionary proletariat (Perry Anderson,  *Considerations of Western
Marxism* [London,  1976: New Left Books];  Sue Golding *Gramsci's Democratic
Theory: Contributions to a post-liberal democracy* [Toronto,  1992:
University of Toronto Press];  E.H. Carr,  "Lukacs and Class-consciousness"
*Times Literary Supplement*,  September 21, 1971). 

Lukacs' approached the proletariat through the concept of
"class-consciousness",  which for him distinguished --to use Hegelian and
Marxist language--the "class-for-itself" from the mere "class-in-itself".
But what is the nature of class consciousness and how does it arise?    It
was and is true that nowhere has more than a minority of the industrial
proletariat (especially in the West) ever developed a revolutionary
class-consciousness.    Lukacs provided a novel answer in a key chapter in
his 1924 collection of essays (written during the previous half-decade)
*History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics* (London,
1971: The Merlin Press).    Since class is defined in terms of objective
situation in the historical process,  class consciousness cannot be
understood as a subjective phenomenon,  a state of mind.    The concrete
cannot be "located in the empirical individual of history...and in his
empirically given (and hence psychological or mass-psychological)
consciousness."   At the same time,  Lukacs specifically annointed the
proletariat the "decisive force" in the "transition from medieval to modern
times" while in the same breath dismissing the peasant as a "politically
vacillating stratum-- a class whose destiny is ultimately decided by the
urban class struggle,  the destiny of towns,  large-scale industry and state
apparatus."  (*Lenin: A study on the unity of his thought* [Cambridge,  MA,
1971: MIT Press]).     

The work of Lukacs is important,  not because he solves but because he poses
in its sharpest and most acute form the fundamental dilemma of the Marxist
conception of class and of the proletariat,   the dilemma of the gap between
the proletariat as an empirical entity and the role assigned by history to
the proletariat as a class-- the gap which Marx revealed,   but did not
explore,  when he invented the dismissive category of the
"Lumpenproletariat".   Lenin was the first to face this issue as a practical
problem of the creation of a revolutionary party.    As Lukacs correctly
guessed,  Lenin in *What is to be Done* argued that the proletariat left to
itself would develop spontaneously,  out of its experience of the
day--to--day struggle between workers and employers,  only a "trade union"
consciousness;  this struggle would never become a genuine class struggle
until true class-consciousness was implanted in the proletariat "from
without" by an organized revolutionary party.    
Lukacs recognizes this and proceeds to dissect skilfully and profoundly the
process of "reification" in capitalist society,  whereby what are
essentially human relations are transformed into entities apparently
possessing an independent existence of their own (commodities,  exchange
value,  laws of the market).    This process not only stands in the way of
any true understanding of reality (except at its most superficial empirical
level),  but protects and perpetuates exploitation,  since both exploiters
and exploited see themselves as subject to the rigid compulsion of external
realities,  though these are in fact merely the relations which bourgeois
society itself has created.   

The trouble with Lukacs can be seen when the bourgeoisie is overthrown by
the proletariat.   Marx and Engels attribute to the bourgeoisie,   misled by
the "fetishism" or "reification" inherent in capitalist thinking,  only a
"false consciousness" which they called "ideology".    The proletariat,
triumphing over the bourgeoisie,   would attain true consciousness,   and
ideology would disappear.    Lenin,  on the other hand,  used the term
"ideology" neutrally,  applying it both to the (false) consciousness of the
bourgeoisie and to the (hypothetically true) consciousness of the
proletariat.     This is a significant innovation,  and is at the crux of
the debate surrounding the effficacy of the modern proletariat.
Certainly,  when Lukacs effects his divorce between an abstract proletarian
class consciousness,   whose concrete embodiment is the authority of the
Communist Party,  and the empirically observed thoughts and feelings of
proletarians submitted to that authority,  he opens the door wide for a
return to a regime of "reified" laws and institutions,  in the form of the
party and its discipline,  imposing a false consciousness or ideology on the
mass of workers. 

Lukacs remains in a world of Hegelian abstractions,  innocent in many
respects of Marx's (and Lenin's) concrete approach to economic problems.
Lukacs was right in confessing,  in later years,  that his own attempt "to
deduce the revolutionary implications of Marxism" was "deprived of a
genuinely economic foundation".    The analysis of capitalist economy and
capitalist society which absorbed the last three decades of Marx's life,
the identification of the proletariat as the producer of surplus value,  as
at once the essential cog in the economic machine and its predestined victim
and destroyer--all this,  was the result of unremitting and penetrating
study of a concrete situation.    The "proletariat" of Marx,  whatever its
initial inspiration,  and whatever utopian elements may have crept into his
final designation of its role,  was an army of actual factory workers,  not
Lukacs' quasi-metaphysical abstraction.     The Marxist class,  whatever its
criterion of definition within the vagaries of Western sociology,  is a
collection of real workers,   not a party or trade union or other authority
acting in its name.  Yet the classical western definition of the proletariat
more closely follows that of Lukacs and his contemporaries,  rather than
that of Marx.

In the 1920s,  Lukacs' views found some echoes in the thought of Karl
Korsch,  expelled in 1926 from the German party as a heretic and
"revisionist",  and whose *Marxism and Philosophy* (1923) was a high-water
mark of the post-1920 generation of Marxists.    Much of Korsch's work
during this period reflected his growing view that the workers could embrace
a number of ideologies (including Marxism) with equal efficacy,  and that
the "stages" of Marxian theory now rendered obsolete much of Marx's theories
of the working class.    Korsch in his later years would categorically
declare that "all attempts to re-establish the Marxist theory as a whole,
and its original function as a theory of the working class social
revolution,  are now reactionary utopias" (D Baldwin [ed] *The Karl Korsch
Reader: Some essays on Marxism and its aftermath* [Toronto,  1995: Garamond
Press ].    Korsch's vision of the revolutionary proletariat paralleled
those of Lukacs and Gramsci in the early twenties and represented a subtle,
though profound revision of both Marx and Lenin in that it beheld that
working class as a reified self-actualizing entity capable of producing on
its own the revolutionary denouement envisaged by Marx.     Elements of this
thinking continue apace within Western Marxism today.

Gramsci is a more difficult and complex case.    Gramsci's reification of
the industrial working class stemmed from his perspectives in the
engineering factories of the "proletarian city",  Turin,  with its
Piedmotese (labor) aristocracy with a mission to lead a revolution and
found a new state in 1919-20.    Gramsci constantly stressed the need to
"liberate the productive forces" of the North from the corrupt,
protectionist bureaucracy of Rome and the South.     He envisioned a new
state,  based on institutions of economic self-management,   within a
strongly "productivist"-- and free trading-- framework.    In Gramsci's
scheme,  the revolutionary northern workers would carry the southern
peasantry with them,  though he had few convincing ideas how this might be
done.    Gramsci despised traditional labor militancy and its institutions.
His socialism was based upon a vision of rank-and-file workers--sober,
responsible and educated--  building the new society and in effect
organizing production by themselves.    Gramsci,  in his evocation of the
modern proletariat,  has more in common with Sorels than with Marx;  his
*dramatis personae*-- the northern Italian industrial worker-- was created
at precisely that moment that fascism was poised to march on Rome (Richard
Bellamy, "Introduction" to Gramsci,  *Pre-Prison Writings* [Cambridge,
1994: Cambridge University Press],  pp. ix-xxviii).

Next: the evolution of the modern proletarian idea

Louis Godena



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