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Fidelity to the Event? Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and the Russian Revolution

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Abstract

The underlying assumption of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness is that “history” can be understood as a unified and meaningful meta-narrative, which can be read along the lines of a realist novel. Although the future is not guaranteed, the present contains “objective possibilities” which can be identified and realized through activist intervention in the world by those who are destined to “make” history, the proletariat. In the intervening century since the Russian Revolution, it has become impossible to read “history” as a singular, triumphalist story leading to human emancipation or identify any one group as its subjective agent. To salvage the revolutionary potential of Lukács’ work, it has been read instead in terms of “fidelity to the Event” by such latter-day Leninists as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižik. But their recourse to a meta-historical notion of pre-figuration and future realization is itself no less beholden to a literary or rhetorical device, that of figura, which was traced by Erich Auerbach in originally religious terms.

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Notes

  1. The odd epithet “tailism” came from a Russian word, khvostism (chvostismus in German) which Lenin had used to attack passive, economistic Marxists who linger indecisively in the rear of any revolutionary movement.

  2. The comparison is not idle, as Lukács was himself fascinated by Kierkegaard and the difficult choices he made in his life. See Kadarkay (1991), 80.

  3. Lukács (1971), xv.

  4. Lenin (1966), 165. Lenin’s epithet “an infantile disorder” appeared in the pamphlet he wrote shortly thereafter called “Left-wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder, which Lukács read soon after it appeared in June, 1920 and took to heart.

  5. A still excellent account can be found in Arato and Breines (1979).

  6. See, for example, Thompson (2011) and Bewes and Hall (2011). For an account of the Hungarian government’s threat to close the Lukács archive, which is kept in his old apartment in Budapest, see Kerekes (2017). It has since been carried out, along with the removal of a statue of Lukács from St. Stephen’s Park.

  7. Lukács (1971) 24. He later modified his critique in “Tailism and the Dialectic.”

  8. See Lukács (1972), 134–147.

  9. Jameson (1971), chapter 3, and (1981), 34. For a more sustained development of this argument, see Jameson (1988).

  10. Lukács (1971), 159.

  11. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), 191. The crucial issue, of course, is what exactly has been forgotten and must now be remembered: the origin of commodities in human labor? The domination of nature? The dialectic of recognition?

  12. Some critics of History and Class Consciousness read Lukács as arguing for the sufficiency of the proletariat’s knowledge alone to bring about dereification. And indeed, certain passages in the book support this conclusion, e.g. “When the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge” (Lukács [1971], 169). But elsewhere he acknowledges that without the organizational leadership of the Party, such knowledge alone would not suffice.

  13. Lukács (1971), 1.

  14. Lukács (1971), xxxviii.

  15. For a discussion of its history and implications, see Rosen (2014).

  16. Lukács (1990), 41.

  17. Lukács (2002), 5–6.

  18. Scholem (1995), In “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem,” Lukács had himself referred disparagingly to Dostoyevsky’s character Razuhimin from Crime and Punishment for believing that it was possible that we can “lie ourselves through into truth.” Lukács (1990), 41.

  19. Merleau-Ponty (1969), 28–29.

  20. Jay (1984), chapter 1.

  21. See, for example, Feenberg (2011).

  22. Lukács (1971), 152. Jameson (1981), 54–55, argues that “in some paradoxical or dialectical fashion, Lukács’ conception of totality may here be said to rejoin the Althusserian notion of History or the Real as an ‘absent cause’.”

  23. Lukács (1971), 277.

  24. For an account of its different uses in Weber, see Swedberg (2005), 17–179. For a more extensive consideration of its relationship to probability theory and the distinction between its applicability in individual cases and large-scale populations, see Turner and Factor (1981). They argue that it shows the importance of Verstehen in Weber’s conception of causal explanation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty understood the importance of Lukács’ debt to Weber in the origins Western Marxism so much that he called it “Weberian Marxism.” See Merleau-Ponty (1973), 29.

  25. Morson (1994) and Bernstein (1994).

  26. Lukács (1971), 79.

  27. Goldmann (1977), xv.

  28. Jameson (1988), 66.

  29. Rees in Lukács (2000), 22.

  30. Kantorowicz (1997).

  31. Lukács (1971), 329–330. Italics in original. As Michel Löwy has noted, by the time of “Tailism and the Dialectic,” Lukacs had reverted to the claim that the Leninist Party, led by intellectuals, brought class consciousness to the proletariat “from the outside.” See Löwy (2011), 67.

  32. There are, to be sure, still some holdouts. See, for example, Kavoulakos (2011).

  33. Lyotard (1984), xxiv.

  34. See Gilman (2004).

  35. Jameson (1988), 57.

  36. Fülöp-Miller (1927) and Slezkine (2017).

  37. Kadarky (1991), 203–204.

  38. Löwy (1992) and Rabinbach (2001).

  39. For one account of his struggle to free himself from his religious concerns and his fraught relationship to Bloch, see Liebersohn (1988), chapter 6.

  40. Blumenberg (1983).

  41. Žižek (2000), 164.

  42. See Jay (2014). For an insightful treatment of the “political semiotics” of the event, see Wagner-Pacifici (2017).

  43. Romano (2009); For a discussion of the implications of his argument, see Jay (2011).

  44. As in the case of most binaries, the absolute opposition of Event and historical context cannot be upheld for long, as each entails the other. See Wagner-Pacifici (2017), chapter 3.

  45. Reversing the normal identification of appearances with ephemeral flux and essences (or in Badiou’s terminology, Being) with enduring substances, Žižek claims that for Lukács, reified surface appearances, the realm of seemingly intractable “facts,” are really much more rigid than the elusive fragility of Events, which surge up from the realm of fragile fluctuation beneath. See Žižek (2000), 181).

  46. Lichtheim (1966), 68.

  47. Where the Event is experienced as entirely traumatic rather than emancipatory, however, Fidelity involves precisely the opposite, as demonstrated by the injunction “never again” in response to the Holocaust.

  48. Auerbach (2016); the essay has generated considerable commentary over the years. For an insightful recent reading, see Porter (2017).

  49. Slavoj Žižek cited in Bensaïd (2004), 102.

  50. See Lukács (1968). For an account of it as an answer to Trotsky’s critique of Stalinist Thermidorian counter-revolution, see Žižek (2017), lxxv.

  51. For my understanding of Fichte’s abiding role in Lukács’ argument in History and Class Consciousness, see Jay (1984), 104–109; for an alternative reading, see Feenberg (2011).

  52. Lukács (1970), 88.

  53. Lukács (1970), 39.

  54. Žižek (2017), lii–liii.

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  1. History Department, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

    Martin Jay

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Jay, M. Fidelity to the Event? Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and the Russian Revolution. Stud East Eur Thought 70, 195–213 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-018-9307-3

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