Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 15:42:10 -0500
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: godenas-AT-edgenet.net (Louis R. Godena)
Subject: Re: Lukacs & Class Consciousness


Rakesh, your post served to llustrate the great importance of Lukac's work; 
his posing, in its sharpest and most acute form, the fundamental dilemma of 
the marxist conception of class and the proletariat.  This, as you know, 
involves the gap between the "proletariat" as an empirical entity and its 
assigned historical role as the "last class in history."  Marx himself 
suggested this gap when he fashioned the dismissive category of the 
"lumpenproletariat."

You are no doubt familiar with Lenin's What is to be Done?  It is the 
premier exploration of this issue as a practical problem of the creation of 
a revolutionary vanguard party.  Lenin argued, of course, that the 
proletariat, if left to its own devices, would develop spontaneously in its 
routine struggles with employers, only a "trade union" consciousness; their 
efforts remain innocent of a genuine class component until seasoned from 
without by a "true" class consciousness implanted by a revolutionary 
vanguard party.  Lenin's experiences with the Soviets in 1905 led him to 
amend this rather severe conclusion.

Lukacs seemed to retreat from this view himself after serving as a minor 
minister in the ill-starred Hungarian Soviet Government in 1919.  Do you 
know the circumstances surrounding this?  In the preface to 1967 edition of 
History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs compared his analysis of proletarian 
class-consciousness with the view taken by Lenin in What is to be Done?  
Ironically, he recanted his earlier view and adopted, in effect, the early 
Lenin, who in turn, had modified his analysis after the events of 1905.

Does anyone know anything about this?  Also, Lukacs, like Gramsci, opposed 
Stalin's "turn to the left" in the Comintern in 1928 (though he quickly 
recanted).  Any thoughts on Lukacs' relations with Stalin?

                                              Louis Godena 



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