File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9709, message 84


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


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