Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 10:40:08 +0100 From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk> Subject: M-TH: Lukacs + Adorno In message <2.2.16.19970914114811.22474668-AT-pop.igc.org>, Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> writes >Do you have any other thoughts as to Lukacs' development from pre-Marxist to >revolutionary Marxist to Stalinist periods? I'm far from a knolweledgable >person in this area. Many people dismiss later Lukacs as a Stalinist. It >seems aspects of his aesthetics are most questionable from this period, but >I don't have a grip on this whole thing. Some people treat Lukacs' >conversion to materialism after H&CC as a cardinal sin, whereas it seems to >me that is a real advance. Lukacs' relation to Stalinism? Complex, I guess is the word. I don't subscribe to the view that you can discount the later works because he took on board some criticisms. Indeed the self-criticism in the preface to H&CC seems correct to me. Of course that is a relative point, if you like Lukacs because his concept of reification is a trojan horse for Heideggerian meanderings on man's 'thrownness' then the self-criticism will be unwelcome. 'Conversion to materialism' is a bit strong. Lukacs was a materialist when he wrote H&CC - at least in aspiration, though it does carry some negative influence of sociology. On the other hand, L. did get from sociology a willingness to take ideology seriously, something that was missing from the vulgar materialism of the official Stalinist ideologues. Lukacs was always a bit shy of criticism from the party authorities since Lenin laid into him in Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder, because, I think, he thought he could learn something of his own one- sidedness from criticism he respected. As the theoretical degeneration within Stalinism continued, those criticisms became less convincing and more irksome - but L. was always willing to learn from his critics. In the recently published 'Process of Democratisation' (orig 1970s) Lukacs makes criticisms of Stalinism, but they tend to see Stalin as something external to the development of the 'socialist societies'. But by and large he kept his theory from degenerating by abstaining from a full involvement in day-to-day politics, backing off to a theoretical distance whenever he was likely to get into trouble. I share Russell's qualms about the Ontology of Social Being - a damn difficult read and not terribly enlightening. There is a good critique by Meszaros of both it and 'Process of democratisation' (either in Beyond Capital or Critique, I think). Meszaros says something to the effect that the boundary between nature and society that L. develops in Ontology of Social Being is an abstract schema. I think that his desire to write an 'Ontology' took him down the path of a theory of everything that tempted Marxists in inverse proportion to their influence on real events (as in Pannekoek's 'Anthropogenesis' for example.) >Your pop at Adorno was what exactly? And yes, you're right: one should >never assume that Frankfurt School scholars have any feeling for Marxism at >all. In fact, Frankfurters are their substitute for Marxism; their real >credo is intellectual alienation. Mine was an old-fashioned point: Scientific and technological progress is the precondition for human development, not a barrier to it. Amongst people who adopted Adorno's thesis that all technology objectification, and therefore the objectification of man, this went down as well as a declaration of support for Adolf Hitler. -- James Heartfield --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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