From: "Russell Pearson" <r.pearson-AT-clara.net>
Subject: Re: M-TH: List die or Princess Die?
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 1997 18:54:32 +0100


"I brought up Lukacs on the Frankfurt School list, basically
to contrast him with Adorno, but I didn't get far."

"When I took a pop at Adorno the entire room went bonkers."

Bravo to Ralph and James! One of the best ripostes to the Frankfurter's,
especially Adorno is _The Power of Ideology_ by Lukacs' former student
Meszaros. Here he points out that Adorno's critique of Lukacs was in a
journal funded in part by the CIA...

_The Destruction of Reason_ is a damn good read. Okay it's a tad
reductionist in parts, but then Lukacs was never afraid of the broad brush
stroke picture that situtates bourgeois ideology as expressing a general
decadent decline, etc. Not surprisingly, since he very firmly includes such
pomo heroes as Nietzsche and Heidegger in this malaise, he's castigated by
the whole broad church of 'critical theory'. 

I'm not so sure that I'd go along with James' point that "History and Class
Consciousness, though excellent, ... is too readily assimilated into ...
Weberian/Frankfurt sociology...". The way I see HCC is this: HCC _is_
Weberian in many aspects and its primary influence on Frankfurt sociology
is often not recognised enough, although there's an excellent work by
Ferman which documents the full impact of the work on the Frankfurters. HCC
is a pretty eclectic piece of work and I don't think that the Simmelian
side of it has been worked through adequately (anyone know of any work on
this score?), but when mainstream sociology uses Lukacs they strip out the
radicalism of his ideas and substitute an ersatz form of dissent-
reification aint nice, lets resist the alienating processes etc. In this
their approach is much the same as the cultural studies crowd's use of
Gramsci. Here, Gramsci's Marxist-Leninism is conviniently ignored and we
get a dreary drained version of his politics. On this score, thanks for the
comments from Chris, Louis and Michael, I reckon I'm in broad agreement
with all their points for once! Gramsci is perhaps too ambiguous for his
own good, although with the censor looking over one shoulder and his
enemies in Moscow looking over the other, it's perhaps not surprising. Can
anyone corroborate this one? - I was told once that his Prison Diaries
ended up in the hands of his arch enemy in Moscow, who doctored the bits he
didn't like.

Back to Lukacs, Ralph writes "Many people dismiss later Lukacs as a
Stalinist." Yep they do, but this is a cop out. Lukacs might be best
harangued more as a 'Stalinist' before the event, in that in the years of
the attempted Hungarian revolution he ordered four people to be shot for
revolutionary cowardice. As a friend once pointed out to me, they were
probably poor terrified conscripts who hadn't a clue what was going on.
After fleeing the right wing takeoever he ended up in the USSR and had to
repent the 'idealism' of HCC, only to reinstate his central belief in the
work's core strands in the 1967 preface. In between he spent time in jail
during world war two as a suspected Trotskyist, took part in and took a
ministerial role in the next attempted Hungarian revolution, and ended up
defending Solzenitzen (excuse appalling spelling!) as the true realist
novelist of our times. Hardly the biography of a Stalinist I'd say. 

What I wouldn't defend are his notes to his last works- the _Ontology of
Labour_ etc. These are very reductionist, though I'd welcome a discussion
on this line.

Russ




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