title: Marxist philosophy

text:
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought.
The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.

Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, for example, defined the philosophy as "class struggle in theory", thus radically separating himself from those who claimed philosophers could adopt a "God's eye view" as a purely neutral judge.

Marxism and philosophy
The philosopher Étienne Balibar wrote in 1996 that "there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before." So even the existence of Marxist philosophy is debatable (the answer depends on what is meant by "philosophy"). Balibar's remark is intended to explain the significance of the final line of Karl Marx's 11 Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which can be read as an epitaph for philosophy: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it".

If this claim (which Marx originally intended as a criticism of German Idealism and the more moderate Young Hegelians) is still more or less the case in the 21st century, as many Marxists would claim, then Marxist theory is in fact the practical continuation of the philosophical tradition, while much of philosophy is still politically irrelevant. Many critics, both non-Marxist and some Marxist philosophers, feel that this is too quick a dismissal of the post-Marxian philosophical tradition.

Much sophisticated and important thought has taken place after the writing of Marx and Engels; much or perhaps even all of it has been influenced, subtly or overtly, by Marxism. Simply dismissing all philosophy as sophistry might condemn Marxism to a simplistic empiricism or economism, crippling it in practice and making it comically simplistic at the level of theory.

Nonetheless, the force of Marx's opposition to Hegelian idealism and to any "philosophy" divorced from political practice remains powerful even to a contemporary reader. Marxist and Marx-influenced 20th century theory, such as (to name a few random examples) the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the political writing of Antonio Gramsci, and the neo-Marxism of Fredric Jameson, must take Marx's condemnation of philosophy into account, but many such thinkers also feel a strong need to remedy the perceived theoretical problems with orthodox Marxism.

Such problems might include a too-simple economic determinism, an untenable theory of ideology as "false consciousness," or a simplistic model of state power rather than hegemony. So Marxist philosophy must continue to take account of advances in the theory of politics developed after Marx, but it must also be wary of a descent into theoreticism or the temptations of idealism.

Étienne Balibar claimed that if one philosopher could be called a "Marxist philosopher", that one would doubtlessly be Louis Althusser:
Althusser proposed a 'new definition' of philosophy as "class struggle in theory"... Marxism had proper signification (and original "problematic") only insofar as it was the theory of the tendency towards communism, and in view of its realization. The criteria of acceptance or rejection of a 'marxist' proposition was always the same, whether it was presented as 'epistemological' or as 'philosophical': it was in the act of rendering intelligible a communist policy, or not." (Ecrits pour Althusser, 1991, p.98).

However, "Althusser never ceased to put in question the images of communism that Marxist theory and ideology carried on: but he did it in the name of communism itself." Althusser thus criticized the evolutionist image which made of communism an ultimate stage of history, as well as the apocalyptic images which made it a "society of transparence", "without contradiction" nor ideology. Balibar observes that, in the end, Althusser enjoined the most sober definition of communism, exposed by Marx in The German Ideology: Communism is "not a state of the future, but the real movement which destroys the existing state of being.".

Karl Marx's philosophy

There are endless interpretations of the "philosophy of Marx", from the interior of the Marxist movement as well as in its exterior. Although some have separated Marx's works between a "young Marx" (in particular the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) and a "mature Marx" or also by separating it into purely philosophical works, economics works and political and historical interventions, Étienne Balibar has pointed out that Marx's works can be divided into "economic works" (Das Kapital, 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the 1871 Civil War in France which concerned the Paris Commune and acclaimed it as the first "dictatorship of the proletariat", etc.)

Marx's philosophy is thus inextricably linked to his critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the workers' movement, such as the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program or The Communist Manifesto, written with Engels (who was observing the Chartist movement) a year before the Revolutions of 1848. Both after the defeat of the French socialist movement during Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's 1851 coup and then after the crushing of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx's thought transformed itself.

Marxism's philosophical roots were thus commonly explained as derived from three sources: English political economy, French republicanism and radicalism, and German idealist philosophy. Although this "three sources" model is an oversimplification, it still has some measure of truth.

On the other hand, Costanzo Preve (1990) has assigned four "masters" to Marx: Epicurus (to whom he dedicated his thesis, Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus, 1841) for his materialism and theory of clinamen which opened up a realm of liberty; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which come his idea of egalitarian democracy; Adam Smith, from whom came the idea that the grounds of property is labour; and finally Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

"Vulgar Marxism" (or codified dialectical materialism) was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastructure.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Marx developed a comprehensive, theoretical understanding of political reality early in his intellectual and activist career by means of a critical adoption and radicalization of the categories of 18th and 19th century German Idealist thought. Of particular importance is Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's organicist and essentialist categories in the light of Kant's transcendental turn.

Marx builds on four contributions Hegel makes to our philosophical understanding. They are: (1) the replacement of mechanism and atomism with Aristotelean categories of organicism and essentialism, (2) the idea that world history progresses through stages, (3) the difference between natural and historical (dialectical) change, and (4) the idea that dialectical change proceeds through contradictions in the thing itself.

(1) Aristotelian organicism and essentialism

(a) Hegel adopts the position that chance is not the basis of phenomena and that events are governed by laws. Some have falsely attributed to Hegel the position that phenomena are governed by transcendent, supersensible ideas that ground them. On the contrary, Hegel argues for the organic unity between universal and particular. Particulars are not mere token types of universals; rather, they relate to each other as a part relates to a whole. This latter has import for Marx's own conception of law and necessity.

(b) In rejecting the idea that laws merely describe or independently ground phenomena, Hegel revives the Aristotlean position that law or principle is something implicit in a thing, a potentiality which is not actual but which is in the process of becoming actual. This means that if we want to know the principle governing something, we have to observe its typical life-process and figure out its characteristic behavior. Observing an acorn on its own, we can never deduce that it is an oak tree. To figure out what the acorn is - and also what the oak tree is - we have to observe the line of development from one to the other.

(c) The phenomena of history arise from a whole with an essence which undergoes transformation of form and which has an end or telos. For Hegel, the essence of humanity is freedom, and the telos of that essence is the actualization of that freedom. Like Aristotle, Hegel believes the essence of a thing is revealed in the entire, typical process of development of that thing. Looked at purely formally, human society has a natural line of development in accordance with its essence just like any other living thing. This process of development appears as a succession of stages of world history.

(2) Stages of world history

Human history passes through several stages, in each of which is materialized a higher level of human consciousness of freedom. Each stage also has its own principle or law according to which it develops and lives in accordance with this freedom. Yet the law is not free-standing. It is delivered by means of the actions of men which spring from their needs, passions, and interests. Teleology, according to Hegel, is not opposed to the efficient causation provided by passion; on the contrary, the latter is the vehicle realizing the former. Hegel consistently lays more stress on passion than on the more historically specifiable interests of men. Marx will reverse this priority.

(3) Difference between natural and historical change

Hegel distinguishes as Aristotle did not between the application of organic, essentialist categories to the realm of human history and the realm of organic nature. According to Hegel, human history strives toward perfectibility, but nature does not. Marx deepens and expands this idea into the claim that humankind itself can adapt society to its own purposes rather than adapting themselves to it.

Natural and historical change, according to Hegel, have two different kinds of essences. Organic natural entities develop through a straightforward process, relatively simple to comprehend at least in outline. Historical development, however, is a more complex process. Its specific difference is its "dialectical" character. The process of natural development occurs in a relatively straight line from the germ to the fully realized being and back to the germ again. Some accident from the outside might come along to interrupt this process of development, but if left to its own devices, it proceeds in a relatively straightforward manner.

Society's historical development is internally more complex. The transaction from potentiality to actuality is mediated by consciousness and will. The essence realized in the development of human society is freedom, but freedom is precisely that ability to negate the smooth line of development and go off in novel, hitherto unforeseen directions. As humankind's essence reveals itself, that revelation is at the same time the subversion of itself. Spirit is constantly at war with itself. This appears as the contradictions constituting the essence of Spirit.

(4) Contradiction

In the development of a natural thing, there is by and large no contradiction between the process of development and the way that development must appear. So the transition from an acorn, to an oak, to an acorn again occurs in a relatively uninterrupted flow of the acorn back to itself again. When change in the essence takes place, as it does in the process of evolution, we can understand the change mostly in mechanical terms using principles of genetics and natural selection.

The historical process, however, never attempts to preserve an essence in the first place. Rather, it develops an essence through successive forms. This means that at any moment on the path of historical change, there is a contradiction between what exists and what is in the process of coming-to-be. The realization of a natural thing like a tree is a process that by and large points back toward itself: every step of the process takes place in order to reproduce the genus. In the historical process, however, what exists, what is actual, is imperfect. It is inimical to the potential. What is trying to come into existence - freedom - inherently negates everything preceding it and everything existing, since no actual existing human institution can possibly embody pure human freedom. So the actual is both itself and its opposite (as potential). And this potential (freedom) is never inert but constantly exerts an impulse toward change.

Rupture with German idealism and the Young Hegelians

Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer, a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians to whom Marx attached himself. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer and the rest of the Young Hegelians about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Having achieved his thesis on the Difference of natural philosophy between Democritus and Epicurus in 1841, the young Marx progressively broke away with the Prussian university and its teachings impregnated by German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel).

Along with Engels, who observed the Chartist movement in the United Kingdom, he cut away with the environment in which he grew up and encountered the proletariat in France and Germany. He then wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, The Holy Family (1845), and The German Ideology (1845), in which he criticized not only Bauer but also Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844), considered one of the founding book of individualist anarchism. Max Stirner claimed that all ideals were inherently alienating, and that replacing God with Humanity, as did Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1841), was not sufficient. According to Stirner, any ideals, God, Humanity, the Nation, or even the Revolution alienated the "Ego". Marx also criticized Proudhon, who had become famous with his cry "Property is theft!", in The Poverty of Philosophy (1845).

Marx's early writings are thus a response towards Hegel, German Idealism and a break with the rest of the Young Hegelians. Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of Feuerbach. His theory of alienation, developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published in 1932), inspired itself from Feuerbach's critique of the alienation of Man in God through the objectivation of all his inherent characteristics (thus man projected on God all qualities which are in fact man's own quality which defines the "human nature").

But Marx also criticized Feuerbach for being insufficiently materialistic, as Stirner himself had pointed out, and explained that the alienation described by the Young Hegelians was in fact the result of the structure of the economy itself. Furthermore, he criticized Feuerbach's conception of human nature in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach as an abstract "kind" which incarnated itself in each singular individual: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man (menschliche Wesen, human nature). But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations."

Thereupon, instead of founding itself on the singular, concrete individual subject, as did classic philosophy, including contractualism (Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau) but also political economy, Marx began with the totality of social relations: labour, language and all which constitute our human existence. He claimed that individualism was the result of commodity fetishism or alienation. Some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will.

Criticisms of human rights
In the same way, following Babeuf, considered one of the founders of communism during the French Revolution, he criticized the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as a "bourgeois declaration" of the rights of the "egoistic individual", ultimately based on the "right to private property", which economism deduced from its own implicit "philosophy of the subject", which asserts the preeminence of an individual and universal subject over social relations. On the other hand, Marx also criticized Bentham's utilitarianism.

Alongside Freud, Nietzsche, and Durkheim, Marx thus takes a place amongst the 19th century philosophers who criticized this pre-eminence of the subject and its consciousness. Instead, Marx saw consciousness as political. According to Marx, the recognition of these individual rights was the result of the universal extension of market relations to all of society and to all of the world, first through the primitive accumulation of capital (including the first period of European colonialism) and then through the globalization of the capitalist sphere. Such individual rights were the symmetric of the "right for the labourer" to "freely" sell his labor force on the marketplace through juridical contracts, and worked in the same time as an ideological means to discompose the collective grouping of producers required by the Industrial Revolution: thus, in the same time that the Industrial Era requires masses to concentrate themselves in factories and in cities, the individualist, "bourgeois" ideology separated themselves as competing homo economicus.

Marx's critique of the ideology of the human rights thus departs from the counterrevolutionary critique by Edmund Burke, who dismissed the "rights of Man" in favour of the "rights of the individual": it is not grounded on an opposition to the Enlightenment's universalism and humanist project on behalf of the right of tradition, as in Burke's case, but rather on the claim that the ideology of economism and the ideology of the human rights are the reverse sides of the same coin. However, as Étienne Balibar puts it, "the accent put on those contradictions can not not ring out on the signification of 'human rights', since these therefore appears both as the language in which exploitation masks itself and as the one in which the exploited class struggle express itself: more than a truth or an illusion, it is therefore a stake". Das Kapital ironizes on the "pompous catalogue of the human rights" in comparison to the "modest Magna Charta of a day work limited by law":
{{blockquote|The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class... It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity "labour-power" face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no "free agent," that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him "so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited." For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies," the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear "when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins. Quantum mutatus ab illo![How changed from what he/it was!]"<ref>Karl Marx, Das Kapital, chapter X, section 7</ref>}}
But the communist revolution does not end with the negation of individual liberty and equality ("collectivism"), but with the "negation of the negation": "individual property" in the capitalist regime is in fact the "expropriation of the immediate producers." "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor... The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

 Criticisms of Ludwig Feuerbach

What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Engels said in The German Ideology (1846):

In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), in which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's idealism, he writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. This opposition between various subjective interpretations given by philosophers, which may be, in a sense, compared with Weltanschauung designed to legitimize the current state of affairs, and effective transformation of the world through praxis, which combines theory and practice in a materialist way, is what distinguish "Marxist philosophers" with the rest of philosophers.

Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy; Louis Althusser, founder of "Structural Marxism" in the 1960s, would define it as "class struggle in theory". Marx's movement away from university philosophy and towards the workers' movement is thus inextricably linked to his rupture with his earlier writings, which pushed Marxist commentators to speak of a "young Marx" and a "mature Marx", although the nature of this cut poses problems.

A year before the Revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels thus wrote The Communist Manifesto, which was prepared to an imminent revolution, and ended with the famous cry: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!". However, Marx's thought changed again following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's December 2, 1851 coup, which put an end to the French Second Republic and created the Second Empire which would last until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would later arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism, exposed in the first chapter of the first book of Das Kapital (1867). This abandonment of the early theory of alienation would be amply discussed, and several Marxist theorists, including Marxist humanists such as the Praxis School, would return to it. Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the "epistemological break" between the "young Marx" and the "mature Marx" was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a "scientific theory" of society.

In 1844–1845, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed, in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy.

He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy.

 Historical materialism

Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (this term was coined by Engels and popularised by Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism, and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism.

The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, in particular in dialectical materialism (diamat, as it was known in the Soviet Union). They also gave way to a vulgar Marxism as plain economic determinism (or economism), which has been criticized by various Marxist theorists. "Vulgar Marxism" was seen as little other than a variety of economic determinism, with the alleged determination of the ideological superstructure by the economical infrastructure. However, this positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels' latter writings in an attempt to theorize "scientific socialism" (an expression coined by Engels) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci or Althusser.

Some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a shorthand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as Grundrisse). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists.

In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages espoused by Hegel (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.

Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; and sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket.

Differences within Marxist philosophy
Some varieties of Marxist philosophy are strongly influenced by Hegel, emphasizing totality and even teleology: for example, the work of Georg Lukács, whose influence extends to contemporary thinkers like Fredric Jameson. Others consider "totality" merely another version of Hegel's "spirit," and thus condemn it as a crippling, secret idealism.

Theodor Adorno, a leading philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who was strongly influenced by Hegel, tried to take a middle path between these extremes: Adorno contradicted Hegel's motto "the true is the whole" with his new version, "the whole is the false," but he wished to preserve critical theory as a negative, oppositional version of the utopia described by Hegel's "spirit." Adorno believed in totality and human potential as ends to be striven for, but not as certainties.

The status of humanism in Marxist thought has been quite contentious. Many Marxists, especially Hegelian Marxists and also those committed to political programs (such as many Communist Parties), have been strongly humanist. These humanist Marxists believe that Marxism describes the true potential of human beings, and that this potential can be fulfilled in collective freedom after the Communist revolution has removed capitalism's constraints and subjugations of humanity. A particular version of the humanism within the Marxism is represented by the school of Lev Vygotsky and his school in theoretical psychology (Alexei Leontiev, Laszlo Garai). The Praxis school based its theory on the writings of the young Marx, emphasizing the humanist and dialectical aspects thereof.

However, other Marxists, especially those influenced by Louis Althusser, are just as strongly anti-humanist. Anti-humanist Marxists believe that ideas like "humanity," "freedom," and "human potential" are pure ideology, or theoretical versions of the bourgeois economic order. They feel that such concepts can only condemn Marxism to theoretical self-contradictions which may also hurt it politically.

Key works and authors

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, especially the earlier writings such as The 1844 Manuscripts, The German Ideology and "Theses on Feuerbach", but also the Grundrisse, Das Kapital and other works inspired
Vladimir Lenin
Guy Debord
Leon Trotsky
Antonie Pannekoek
Rosa Luxemburg
Karl Korsch
Antonio Labriola
M. N. Roy
CLR James
Raya Dunayevskaya
Hal Draper
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness developed the theory of ideology to include a more complex model of class consciousness
Antonio Gramsci
Laszlo Garai
Ernst Bloch
Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas
Walter Benjamin
Joseph Dietzgen
Jean-Paul Sartre
Socialisme ou Barbarie (Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and others)
Louis Althusser and his students (e.g. Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey)
Henri Lefebvre
Praxis school
Josef Stalin
Amadeo Bordiga
Situationist International
Fredric Jameson
Karl Kautsky
Georgi Plekhanov
Clara Zetkin
Nikolai Bukharin
Georges Politzer
Alexandra Kollontai
Antonio Negri and autonomist Marxism
Helmut Reichelt
Maurice Cornforth
Paul Lafargue
Daniel DeLeon
Slavoj Žižek
Mao Zedong

See also

:Category:Marxist theorists and list of contributors to Marxist theory
Critical theory
Dialectical materialism
Freudo-Marxism
Marxist explanations of warfare
Marxist feminism
Neo-Marxism
Marxist humanism
Orthodox Marxism
Post-Marxism
Analytical MarxismRethinking MarxismReferences

 Bibliography
 Balibar, Étienne, The Philosophy of Marx. Verso, 1995 (French edition: La philosophie de Marx, La Découverte, Repères, 1991)
 Bottomore, Thomas, ed.. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought''. Blackwell, 1991.

Social philosophy


title: György Lukács

text:
György Lukács (born György Bernát Löwinger; ; ; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

As a  critic, Lukács was especially influential due to his theoretical developments of literary realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was appointed the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919). Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed both to support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also to champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism.

Life and politics
Lukács was born Löwinger György Bernát in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to the investment banker József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family. He had a brother and sister. He and his family converted to Lutheranism in 1907.

His father was knighted by the empire and received a baronial title, making Lukács a baron as well through inheritance. As a writer, he published under the names Georg Lukács and György Lukács. Lukács participated in intellectual circles in Budapest, Berlin, Florence and Heidelberg. He received his doctorate in economic and political sciences (Dr. rer. oec.) in 1906 from the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár. In 1909, he completed his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Budapest under the direction of Zsolt Beöthy.

Pre-Marxist period
Whilst at university in Budapest, Lukács was part of socialist intellectual circles through which he met Ervin Szabó, an anarcho-syndicalist who introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel (1847–1922), the French proponent of revolutionary syndicalism. In that period, Lukács's intellectual perspectives were modernist and anti-positivist. From 1904 to 1908, he was part of a theatre troupe that produced modernist, psychologically realistic plays by Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann.

Between 1906 and 1909 while in his early twenties, he worked on his 1,000 page A modern dráma fejlődésének története (). It was published in Hungary in 1911.
He was despaired when it won a prize in 1908 because he did not think the jury was fit to judge it.

Lukács spent much time in Germany, and studied at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1907, during which time he made the acquaintance of the philosopher Georg Simmel. Later in 1913 whilst in Heidelberg, he befriended Max Weber, Emil Lask, Ernst Bloch, and Stefan George. The idealist system to which Lukács subscribed at this time was intellectually indebted to neo-Kantianism (then the dominant philosophy in German universities) and to Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In that period, he published Soul and Form (, Berlin, 1911; tr. 1974) and The Theory of the Novel (1916/1920; tr. 1971).

After the beginning of the First World War, Lukács was exempted from military service. In 1914, he married the Russian political activist Jelena Grabenko.

In 1915, Lukács returned to Budapest, where he was the leader of the "Sunday Circle", an intellectual salon. Its concerns were the cultural themes that arose from the existential works of Dostoyevsky, which thematically aligned with Lukács's interests in his last years at Heidelberg. As a salon, the Sunday Circle sponsored cultural events whose participants included literary and musical avant-garde figures, such as Karl Mannheim, the composer Béla Bartók, Béla Balázs, Arnold Hauser, Zoltán Kodály and Karl Polanyi; some of them also attended the weekly salons. In 1918, the last year of the First World War (1914–1918), the Sunday Circle became divided. They dissolved the salon because of their divergent politics; several of the leading members accompanied Lukács into the Communist Party of Hungary.

Pivot to communism
In the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lukács rethought his ideas. He became a committed Marxist in this period and joined the fledgling Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. Up until at least September 1918, he had intended to emigrate to Germany, but after being rejected from a habilitation in Heidelberg, he wrote on December 16 that he had already decided to pursue a political career in Hungary instead. Lukács later wrote that he was persuaded to this course by Béla Kun. The last publication of Lukács' pre-Marxist period was "Bolshevism as a Moral Problem", a rejection of Bolshevism on ethical grounds that he apparently reversed within days.

Communist leader

As part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was made People's Commissar for Education and Culture (he was deputy to the Commissar for Education Zsigmond Kunfi).

It is said by József Nádass that Lukács was giving a lecture entitled "Old Culture and New Culture" to a packed hall when the republic was proclaimed which was interrupted due to the revolution.

During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was a theoretician of the Hungarian version of the red terror. In an article in the Népszava, 15 April 1919, he wrote that "The possession of the power of the state is also a moment for the destruction of the oppressing classes. A moment, we have to use". Lukács later became a commissar of the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army, in which capacity he ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers in Poroszlo, in May 1919, which he later admitted in an interview.

After the Hungarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Lukács was ordered by Kun to remain behind with Ottó Korvin, when the rest of the leadership evacuated. Lukács and Korvin's mission was to clandestinely reorganize the communist movement, but this proved to be impossible. Lukács went into hiding, with the help of photographer Olga Máté. After Korvin's capture in 1919, Lukács fled from Hungary to Vienna. He was arrested but was saved from extradition due to a group of writers including Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Thomas Mann later based the character Naphta on Lukács in his novel The Magic Mountain.

He married his second wife, Gertrúd Bortstieber in 1919 in Vienna, a fellow member of the Hungarian Communist Party.

Around the 1920s, while Antonio Gramsci was also in Vienna, though they did not meet each other, Lukács met a fellow communist, Victor Serge, and began to develop Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy. His major works in this period were the essays collected in his magnum opus History and Class Consciousness (, Berlin, 1923). Although these essays display signs of what Vladimir Lenin referred to as "left communism" (with later Leninists calling it "ultra-leftism"), they provided Leninism with a substantive philosophical basis. In July 1924, Grigory Zinoviev attacked this book along with the work of Karl Korsch at the Fifth Comintern Congress.

In 1925, shortly after Lenin's death, Lukács published in Vienna the short study Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought (). In 1925, he published a critical review of Nikolai Bukharin's manual of historical materialism.

As a Hungarian exile, he remained active on the left wing of Hungarian Communist Party, and was opposed to the Moscow-backed programme of Béla Kun. His "Blum theses" of 1928 called for the overthrow of the counter-revolutionary regime of Admiral Horthy in Hungary by a strategy similar to the Popular Fronts that arose in the 1930s. He advocated a "democratic dictatorship" of the proletariat and peasantry as a transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat. After Lukács's strategy was condemned by the Comintern, he retreated from active politics into theoretical work.

Lukács left Vienna in 1929 first for Berlin, then for Budapest.

Under Stalin and Rákosi
In 1930, while residing in Budapest, Lukács was summoned to Moscow. This coincided with the signing of a Viennese police order for his expulsion. Leaving their children to attend their studies, Lukács and his wife went to Moscow in March 1930. Soon after his arrival, Lukács was "prevented" from leaving and assigned to work alongside David Riazanov ("in the basement") at the Marx–Engels Institute.

Lukács returned to Berlin in 1931 and in 1933 he once again left Berlin for Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. During this time, Lukács first came into contact with the unpublished works of the young Marx.

Lukács and his wife were not permitted to leave the Soviet Union until after the Second World War. During Stalin's Great Purge, Lukács was sent to internal exile in Tashkent for a time, where he and Johannes Becher became friends. Lukács survived the purges of the Great Terror. There is much debate among historians concerning the extent to which Lukács accepted Stalinism at this period.

In 1945, Lukács and his wife returned to Hungary. As a member of the Hungarian Communist Party, he took part in establishing the new Hungarian government. From 1945 Lukács was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1945 and 1946 he strongly criticised non-communist philosophers and writers. Lukács has been accused of playing an "administrative" (legal-bureaucratic) role in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals such as Béla Hamvas, István Bibó, Lajos Prohászka, and Károly Kerényi from Hungarian academic life. Between 1946 and 1953, many non-communist intellectuals, including Bibó, were imprisoned or forced into menial work or manual labour.

Lukács's personal aesthetic and political position on culture was always that socialist culture would eventually triumph in terms of quality. He thought it should play out in terms of competing cultures, not by "administrative" measures. In 1948–49, Lukács' position for cultural tolerance was smashed in a "Lukács purge," when Mátyás Rákosi turned his famous salami tactics on the Hungarian Working People's Party.

In the mid-1950s, Lukács was reintegrated into party life. The party used him to help purge the Hungarian Writers' Union in 1955–1956. Tamás Aczél and Tibor Méray (former Secretaries of the Hungarian Writers' Union) both believe that Lukács participated grudgingly, and cite Lukács leaving the presidium and the meeting at the first break as evidence of this reluctance.

De-Stalinisation
In 1956, Lukács became a minister of the brief communist revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy, which opposed the Soviet Union. At this time Lukács's daughter led a short-lived party of communist revolutionary youth. Lukács's position on the 1956 revolution was that the Hungarian Communist Party would need to retreat into a coalition government of socialists, and slowly rebuild its credibility with the Hungarian people. While a minister in Nagy's revolutionary government, Lukács also participated in trying to reform the Hungarian Communist Party on a new basis. This party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, was rapidly co-opted by János Kádár after 4 November 1956.

During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Lukács was present at debates of the anti-party and revolutionary communist Petőfi Society while remaining part of the party apparatus. During the revolution, as mentioned in Budapest Diary, Lukács argued for a new Soviet-aligned communist party. In Lukács's view, the new party could win social leadership only by persuasion instead of force. Lukács envisioned an alliance between the dissident communist Hungarian Revolutionary Youth Party, the revolutionary Hungarian Social Democratic Party and his own Soviet-aligned party as a very junior partner.

Following the defeat of the Revolution, Lukács was deported to the Socialist Republic of Romania with the rest of Nagy's government. Unlike Nagy, he avoided execution, albeit narrowly. Due to his role in Nagy's government, he was no longer trusted by the party apparatus. Lukács's followers were indicted for political crimes throughout the 1960s and '70s, and a number fled to the West. Lukács's books The Young Hegel (, Zurich, 1948) and The Destruction of Reason (, Berlin, 1954) have been used to argue that Lukács was covertly critical of Stalinism as a distortion of Marxism. In this reading, these two works are attempts to reconcile the idealism of Hegelian-dialectics with the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, and position Stalinism as a philosophy of irrationalism.

He returned to Budapest in 1957. Lukács publicly abandoned his positions of 1956 and engaged in self-criticism. Having abandoned his earlier positions, Lukács remained loyal to the Communist Party until his death in 1971. In his last years, following the uprisings in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Lukács became more publicly critical of the Soviet Union and the Hungarian Communist Party.

In an interview just before his death, Lukács remarked:

Work

History and Class Consciousness

Written between 1919 and 1922 and published in 1923, Lukács's collection of essays History and Class Consciousness contributed to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy. With this work, Lukács initiated the current of thought that came to be known as "Western Marxism". At Lukács' direction, there was no reprinting in his lifetime, making it rare and hard to acquire before 1968. Its return to prominence was aided by the social movements of the 1960s.

The most important essay in Lukács's book introduces the concept of "reification". In capitalist societies, human properties, relations and actions are transformed into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things, which become independent of man and govern his life. These man-created things are then imagined to be originally independent of man. Moreover, human beings are transformed into thing-like beings that do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. This essay is notable for reconstructing aspects of Marx's theory of alienation before the publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 — the work in which Marx most clearly expounds the theory.

Lukács also develops the Marxist theory of class consciousness - the distinction between the objective situation of a class and that class's subjective awareness of this situation. Lukács proffers a view of a class as an "historical imputed subject". An empirically existing class can successfully act only when it becomes conscious of its historical situation, i.e. when it transforms from a "class in itself" to a "class for itself". Lukács's theory of class consciousness has been influential within the sociology of knowledge.

In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of History and Class Consciousness, in particular the belief in the proletariat as a "subject-object of history" (1960 Postface to French translation). As late as 1925–1926, he still defended these ideas, in an unfinished manuscript, which he called Tailism and the Dialectic. It was not published until 1996 in Hungarian and English in 2000 under the title A Defence of History and Class Consciousness.

What is Orthodox Marxism?

Lukács argues that methodology is the only thing that distinguishes Marxism: even if all its substantive propositions were rejected, it would remain valid because of its distinctive method:

He criticises Marxist revisionism by calling for the return to this Marxist method, which is fundamentally dialectical materialism. Lukács conceives "revisionism" as inherent to the Marxist theory, insofar as dialectical materialism is, according to him, the product of class struggle:

According to him, "The premise of dialectical materialism is, we recall: 'It is not men's consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.' ...Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." (§5). In line with Marx's thought, he criticises the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology, he asserts the primacy of social relations. Existence – and thus the world – is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness is accepted. Lukács does not restrain human liberty for sociological determinism: to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis.

He conceives the problem in the relationship between theory and practice. Lukács quotes Marx's words: "It is not enough that thought should seek to realise itself; reality must also strive towards thought." How does the thought of intellectuals relate to class struggle, if theory is not simply to lag behind history, as it is in Hegel's philosophy of history ("Minerva always comes at the dusk of night...")? Lukács criticises Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring, saying that he "does not even mention the most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves." This dialectical relation between subject and object is the basis of Lukács's critique of Immanuel Kant's epistemology, according to which the subject is the exterior, universal and contemplating subject, separated from the object.

For Lukács, "ideology" is a projection of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which functions to prevent the proletariat from attaining consciousness of its revolutionary position. Ideology determines the "form of objectivity", thus the very structure of knowledge. According to Lukács, real science must attain the "concrete totality" through which only it is possible to think the current form of objectivity as a historical period. Thus, the so-called eternal "laws" of economics are dismissed as the ideological illusion projected by the current form of objectivity ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §3). He also writes: "It is only when the core of being has showed itself as social becoming, that the being itself can appear as a product, so far unconscious, of human activity, and this activity, in turn, as the decisive element of the transformation of being." ("What is Orthodoxical Marxism?", §5) Finally, "orthodoxical Marxism" is not defined as interpretation of Capital as if it were the Bible or an embrace of "marxist thesis", but as fidelity to the "marxist method", dialectics.

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat
Drawing from the insights of Max Weber and Georg Simmel and Marx's magnum opus Capital, as well as Hegel's concept of appearance, Lukács argues that commodity fetishism is the central structural problem of capitalist society. The essence of the commodity structure is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing. Society subordinates production entirely to the increase of exchange-value and crystallises relations between human beings in to object-values. The commodity's fundamental nature is concealed: it appears to have autonomy and acquires a phantom objectivity.
There are two sides to commodity fetishism: "Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market) Subjectively – where the market economy has been fully developed – a man's activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article." A man is no longer a specific individual but part of a huge system of production and exchange. He is a mere unit of labour power, an article to be bought and sold according to the laws of the market. The rationalisation of the productive mechanism based on what is and can be calculated extends to all fields, including human consciousness. Legal systems disregard tradition and reduce individuals to juridical units. Division of labour becomes increasingly specialised and particularised, confining the individual's productive activity to a narrower and narrower range of skills.

As the bourgeoisie plays the dominant role in this system, it is contrary to its own interests to understand the system's transient historical character. Bourgeois consciousness is mystified. Bourgeois philosophy understands only empirical reality or normative ethics; it lacks the cognitive ability to grasp reality as a whole. Bourgeois rationalism has no interest in phenomena beyond what is calculable and predictable. Only the proletariat, which has no interest in the maintenance of capitalism, can relate to reality in a practical revolutionary way. When the proletariat becomes aware of its situation as a mere commodity in bourgeois society, it will be able to understand the social mechanism as a whole. The self-knowledge of the proletariat is more than just a perception of the world; it is a historical movement of emancipation, a liberation of humanity from the tyranny of reification.

Lukács saw the destruction of society as a proper solution to the "cultural contradiction of the epoch". In 1969 he cited:“Even though my ideas were confused from a theoretical point of view, I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch. Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values.

Literary and aesthetic work
In addition to his standing as a Marxist political thinker, Lukács was an influential literary critic of the twentieth century. His important work in literary criticism began early in his career, with The Theory of the Novel, a seminal work in literary theory and the theory of genre. The book is a history of the novel as a form, and an investigation into its distinct characteristics. In The Theory of the Novel, he coins the term "transcendental homelessness", which he defines as the "longing of all souls for the place in which they once belonged, and the 'nostalgia… for utopian perfection, a nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality'". Lukács maintains that "the novel is the necessary epic form of our time."

Lukács later repudiated The Theory of the Novel, writing a lengthy introduction that described it as erroneous, but nonetheless containing a "romantic anti-capitalism" which would later develop into Marxism. (This introduction also contains his famous dismissal of Theodor Adorno and others in Western Marxism as having taken up residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss".)

Lukács's later literary criticism includes the well-known essay "Kafka or Thomas Mann?", in which Lukács argues for the work of Thomas Mann as a superior attempt to deal with the condition of modernity, and criticises Franz Kafka's brand of modernism. Lukács steadfastly opposed the formal innovations of modernist writers like Kafka, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, preferring the traditional aesthetic of realism.

During his time in Moscow in the 1930s, Lukács worked on Marxist views of aesthetics while belonging to the group around an influential Moscow magazine "The Literary Critic" (). The editor of this magazine, Mikhail Lifshitz, was an important Soviet author on aesthetics. Lifshitz' views were very similar to Lukács's insofar as both argued for the value of the traditional art; despite the drastic difference in age (Lifschitz was much younger) both Lifschitz and Lukács indicated that their working relationship at that time was a collaboration of equals. Lukács contributed frequently to this magazine, which was also followed by Marxist art theoreticians around the world through various translations published by the Soviet government.

The collaboration between Lifschitz and Lukács resulted in the formation of an informal circle of the like-minded Marxist intellectuals connected to the journal Literaturnyi Kritik [The Literary Critic], published monthly starting in the summer of 1933 by the Organisational Committee of the Writers' Union. ... A group of thinkers formed around Lifschitz, Lukács and Andrei Platonov; they were concerned with articulating the aesthetical views of Marx and creating a kind of Marxist aesthetics that had not yet been properly formulated.

Lukács famously argued for the revolutionary character of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac. Lukács felt that both authors' nostalgic, pro-aristocratic politics allowed them accurate and critical stances because of their opposition (albeit reactionary) to the rising bourgeoisie. This view was expressed in his later book The Historical Novel (published in Russian in 1937, then in Hungarian in 1947), as well as in his essay "Realism in the Balance" (1938).

The Historical Novel is probably Lukács's most influential work of literary history. In it he traces the development of the genre of historical fiction. While prior to 1789, he argues, people's consciousness of history was relatively underdeveloped, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars that followed brought about a realisation of the constantly changing, evolving character of human existence. This new historical consciousness was reflected in the work of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels use 'representative' or 'typical' characters to dramatise major social conflicts and historical transformations, for example the dissolution of feudal society in the Scottish Highlands and the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism. Lukács argues that Scott's new brand of historical realism was taken up by Balzac and Tolstoy, and enabled novelists to depict contemporary social life not as a static drama of fixed, universal types, but rather as a moment of history, constantly changing, open to the potential of revolutionary transformation. For this reason he sees these authors as progressive and their work as potentially radical, despite their own personal conservative politics.

For Lukács, this historical realist tradition began to give way after the 1848 revolutions, when the bourgeoisie ceased to be a progressive force and their role as agents of history was usurped by the proletariat. After this time, historical realism begins to sicken and lose its concern with social life as inescapably historical. He illustrates this point by comparing Flaubert's historical novel Salammbô to that of the earlier realists. For him, Flaubert's work marks a turning away from relevant social issues and an elevation of style over substance. Why he does not discuss Sentimental Education, a novel much more overtly concerned with recent historical developments, is not clear. For much of his life Lukács promoted a return to the realist tradition that he believed had reached its height with Balzac and Scott, and bemoaned the supposed neglect of history that characterised modernism.

The Historical Novel has been hugely influential in subsequent critical studies of historical fiction, and no serious analyst of the genre fails to engage at some level with Lukács's arguments.

Critical and socialist realism
Lukács defined realistic literature as literature capable of relating human life to the totality. He distinguishes between two forms of realism, critical and socialist. Lukács argued that it was precisely the desire for a realistic depiction of life that enabled politically reactionary writers such as Balzac, Walter Scott and Tolstoy to produce great, timeless and socially progressive works. According to Lukács, there is a contradiction between worldview and talent among such writers. He greatly valued the comments made in that direction by Lenin on Tolstoy and especially by Engels on Balzac, where Engels describes the "triumph of realism":

Balzac boldly exposed the contradiction of nascent capitalist society and hence his observation of reality constantly clashed with his political prejudices. But as an honest artist he always depicted only what he himself saw, learned and underwent, concerning himself not at all whether his-true-to-life description of the things he saw contradicted his pet ideas.

Critical realists include writers who could not rise to the communist worldview, but despite this tried to truthfully reflect the conflicts of the era, not content with the direct description of single events. A great story speaks through individual human destinies in their work. Such writers are not naturalists, allegorists and metaphysicians. They do not flee from the world into the isolated human soul and do not seek to raise its experiences to the rank of timeless, eternal and irresistible properties of human nature. Balzac, Tolstoy, Anatole France, Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann are the brightest writers from the gallery of critical realists.

Lukács notes that realistic art is usually found either in highly developed countries or in countries undergoing a period of rapid socio-economic development, yet it is possible that backward countries often give rise to advanced literature precisely because of their backwardness, which they seek to overcome by artistic means. Lukács (together with Lifshitz) polemicized against the "vulgar sociological" thesis then dominant in Soviet literary criticism. The "vulgar sociologists" (associated with the former RAPP) prioritized class origin as the most important determinant for an artist and his work, categorizing artists and artistic genres as "feudal", "bourgeois", "petty-bourgeois" etc. Lukács and Lifshitz sought to prove that such great artists as Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe or Tolstoy were able to rise above their class worldview by grasping the dialectic of individual and society in its totality and depicting their relations truthfully.

All modernist art – avant-garde, naturalism, expressionism, surrealism, etc. – is the opposite of realism. This is decadent art, examples of which are the works of Kafka, Joyce, Musil, Beckett, etc. The main shortcoming of modernism, which predicts its inevitable defeat, is the inability to perceive the totality and carry out the act of mediation. One cannot blame the writer for describing loneliness, but one must show it in such a way that it is clear to everyone: human loneliness is an inevitable consequence of capitalist social relations. Whereas in Kafka we meet with "ontological solitariness", depicted as a permanent situation of man and a universal value. In this regard, Kafka stops at the description of the phenomenon, given directly, he is not able to rise to the totality, which alone can reveal the meaning of loneliness. Therefore, Kafka acts like the naturalists. In order for the image of chaos, confusion and fear of the modern world and man to be realistic, the writer must show the social roots that generate all these phenomena. And if, like Joyce, one depicts the spiritual world and the sense of time of a person in a state of absolute decay, without bothering to search for reasons and prospects for a way out, then the writer gives a false image of the world, and his works must be recognized as immature.

So, modernism is deprived of a historical perspective, tying the person to positions and situations that are not really historically and socially determined. Modernism transforms such situations into transcendental qualities. The great images of great literature, Achilles and Werther, Oedipus and Tom Joad, Antigone and Anna Karenina, are social beings, for Aristotle already noted that man is a social being. And the heroes of modernist literature are torn out of ties with society and history. Narrative becomes purely "subjective", the animal in man is opposed to the social in him, which corresponds to Heidegger's denial and condemnation of society as something impersonal. He wrote:

Literary and art history is a mass graveyard where many artists of talent rest in deserved oblivion because they neither sought nor found any association to the problems of advancing humanity and did not set themselves on the right side in the vital struggle between health and decay.

Barbara Stackman maintains that, for Lukács, decadents are decadent not because they depict illness and decay, but because they do not recognize the existence of health, of the social sphere that would reunite the alienated writer to the progressive forces of history. Sickness, then, is a reactionary mode of insertion into the class struggle; sickness, writes Lukács, "produces a complete overturning of values." Though "sick art" may have its dialectical moment in the sun (Lukács cites only Antigone as an example where that which is declining may even appear as human greatness and purity), it is destined for the dust heap of history, while "healthy art" is a "reflection of the lasting truth of human relationships."

On the other hand, socialist realism is recognized as the highest stage in the development of literature:

The prospect of socialist realism is, of course, the struggle for socialism. Socialist realism differs from critical realism not only in that it is based on a specific socialist perspective, but also in that it uses this perspective to describe from within the forces that work in favor of socialism. Critical realists have more than once described the political struggle of our time and depicted heroes – socialists and communists. But only socialist realists describe such heroes from the inside, thus identifying them with the forces of progress. The greatness of socialist realism lies in the fact that the historical totality, directed towards communism, becomes clear as daylight in any fragment of a given work.

In 1938, in his work Realism in the Balance, a polemic against Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, Lukács explained the lack of modernism in the Soviet Union in this way:

The more the domination of the proletariat strengthened, the more deeply and comprehensively socialism penetrated the economy of the Soviet Union, the wider and deeper the cultural revolution embraced the working masses, the stronger and more hopelessly "avant-garde" art was pushed out by an ever more conscious realism. The decline of expressionism is ultimately a consequence of the maturity of the revolutionary masses.

No less typical is his article "Propaganda or Partisanship?", in which he polemicizes against the definition of socialist art as "tendentious." Literature, in his opinion, should not be biased, but only "party-spirited" in the essence of taking the side of the class that is objectively progressive in the given historical moment. Tendentious literature eclectically connects "pure art" with politically alien elements brought in from outside. But such a program, which Franz Mehring once defended, means "the primacy of form over content" and contrasts the aesthetic and political elements of the work. This understanding of art, Lukács says, is Trotskyist.

Lukács' defense of socialist realism contained a critique of Stalinism and a condemnation of most of the party-propagandistic Soviet literature of the 1930s and 1940s (which was based on Andrei Zhdanov's doctrine of "conflictless art" and which Lukács dismissively called "illustrative" literature) as a distortion of true socialist realism. He acknowledged that Stalinism suffered from a lack of "mediation" in the field of cultural policy. Instead of describing the real conflicts of the life of socialist society, Stalinist literature turned into bare schemes and abstractions, describing the general truths of theory and in no way "mediating" them with images taken from reality. The specificity of art was forgotten, and it turned into an instrument of agitation. Schematic optimism has spread in place of the historical. The heroes did not represent any of the typical qualities of the new society. Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature", which, as Nadezhda Krupskaya said, dealt only with political literature, turned into a rule of artistic activity and its evaluation.

Despite all this criticism, Lukács never changed his basic conviction: socialist realism represents a "fundamentally" and "historically" higher stage in the development of art than all its predecessors.

The most surprising product of Lukács' discourse on socialist realism is his articles on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom he considered to be the greatest "plebeian realist" writer of the twentieth century. Lukács welcomed the appearance of the writer's short stories and novellas as the first sign of the renaissance of socialist realism, since Solzhenitsyn, in describing camp life in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicts everyday events as a symbol of an entire era. Nor is Solzhenitsyn a naturalist, since he refers the events described to the socio-historical totality and does not seek to restore capitalism in Russia. According to Lukács, Solzhenitsyn criticizes Stalinism from a plebeian, and not from a communist point of view. And if he does not overcome this weakness, then his artistic talent will decrease.

Ontology of social being
Later in life, Lukács undertook a major exposition on the ontology of social being, which has been partly published in English in three volumes. The work is a systematic treatment of dialectical philosophy in its materialist form.

Bibliography

 History and Class Consciousness (1972). .
 The Theory of the Novel (1974). .
 Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought (1998). .
 A Defense of History and Class Consciousness (2000). .

See also
 Lajos Jánossy, Lukács's adopted son
 Marx's notebooks on the history of technology

Notes

References

Sources

 Aczel, Tamas, and Meray, Tibor, 1975. Revolt of the Mind: a case history of intellectual resistance behind the iron curtain. Greenwood Press Reprint.

 Baldacchino, John, 1996. Post-Marxist Marxism: Questioning the Answer: Difference and Realism after Lukacs and Adorno. Brookfield, VT: Avebury.
 Corredor, Eva L., 1987. György Lukács and the Literary Pretext. New York: P. Lang.

 Granville, Johanna. "Imre Nagy aka 'Volodya' – A Dent in the Martyr's Halo?", "Cold War International History Project Bulletin", no. 5 (Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington, DC), Spring, 1995, pp. 28, and 34–37.
 Granville, Johanna, "The First Domino: International Decision Making During the Hungarian Crisis of 1956", Texas A & M University Press, 2004.
 Heller, Agnes, 1983. Lukacs Revalued. Blackwell.

 Kadvany, John, 2001. Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Duke University Press. .
 Kadarkay, Arpad, 1991. Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics. Basil Blackwell.
 Kettler, David, 1970. "Marxism and Culture: Lukács in the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918/19," Telos, No. 10, Winter 1971, pp. 35–92

 KGB Chief Kryuchkov to CC CPSU, 16 June 1989 (trans. Johanna Granville). Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5 (1995): 36 [from: TsKhSD, F. 89, Per. 45, Dok. 82.].

 Löwy, Michael, 1979. Georg Lukács—From Romanticism to Bolshevism. Trans. Patrick Chandler. London: NLB.

 Lukács, György (2001) "Realism in the Balance." In, Vincent B. Leitch (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  New York: Norton. pp. 1033-1058.

 Meszaros, Istvan, 1972. Lukács' Concept of Dialectic. London: The Merlin Press.
 Muller, Jerry Z., 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor Books.

 Shafai, Fariborz, 1996. The Ontology of Georg Lukács: Studies in Materialist Dialectics. Brookfield, USA: Avebury.
 Sharma, Sunil, 1999. The Structuralist Philosophy of the Novel: a Marxist Perspective: a Critique of Georg Luckács , Lucien Goldmann, Alan Swingewood & Michel Zéraffa. Delhi: S.S. Publishers.
 Snedeker, George, 2004. The Politics of Critical Theory: Language, Discourse, Society. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
 Thompson, Michael J. (ed.), 2010. Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy, and Aesthetics. Continuum Books.

 Woroszylski, Wiktor, 1957. Diary of a revolt: Budapest through Polish eyes. Trans. Michael Segal. [Sydney: Outlook]. Pamphlet.

Further reading
 Furner, James. "Commodity Form Philosophy," in Marx on Capitalism: The Interaction-Recognition-Antinomy Thesis. (Leiden: Brill, 2018). pp. 85–128.
 Gerhardt, Christina. "Georg Lukács," The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to the Present. 8 vols. Ed. Immanuel Ness (Malden: Blackwell, 2009). 2135–2137.
 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. "The Scholar, The Intellectual, And The Essay: Weber, Lukács, Adorno, And Postwar Germany," German Quarterly 70.3 (1997): 217–231.
 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe "Art Work And Modernity: The Legacy of Georg Lukács," New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 42.(1987): 33–49.
 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, and Blackwell Jeanine. "Georg Lukács in the GDR: On Recent Developments in Literary Theory," New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 12.(1977): 169–174.
 Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
 Morgan, W. John, 'Political Commissar and Cultural Critic: Georg Lukács'. Chapter 6 in Morgan, W. John, Communists on Education and Culture 1848–1948, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 83–102.
 Morgan, W. John, ‘Georg Lukács: cultural policy, Stalinism, and the Communist International.’ International Journal of Cultural Policy, 12 (3), 2006, pp. 257–271.
 Stern, L. "George Lukacs: An Intellectual Portrait," Dissent, vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring 1958), pp. 162–173.

External links

 Georg Lukács Archive, Marxists website
 Guide to Literary Theory , Johns Hopkins University Press
 Georg Lukács, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 Bendl Júlia, "Lukács György élete a századfordulótól 1918-ig"
 Lukács and Imre Lakatos
 Hungarian biography
 Georg Lukács Archive, Libertarian Communist Library
 Múlt-kor Történelmi portál (Past-Age Historic Portal): Lukács György was born 120 years ago
 Levee Blanc, "Georg Lukács: The Antinomies of Melancholy", Other Voices, Vol.1 no.1, 1998.
 Michael J. Thompson, "Lukacs Revisited" New Politics, 2001, Issue 30
 Realism in the Balance

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title: Kenrick Clayton

text:
Sir Kenrick Clayton, 2nd Baronet ( – 10 March 1769) of Marden Park, Surrey, was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons of Great Britain from 1734 to 1769.

Clayton was the eldest surviving son of Sir William Clayton, 1st Baronet (died 1744), and his wife Martha Kenrick, the daughter of John Kenrick, a London merchant. He was admitted at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on 9 May 1732. He married Henrietta Maria Herring, daughter of Henry Herring, director of Bank of England on 13 February 1736.

Clayton's father inherited from his uncle, Sir Robert Clayton, the manor of Bletchingley, and thereby controlled both seats in the rotten borough of Bletchingley.

Clayton was returned with his father as Member of Parliament (MP) for Bletchingley on his father's interest at the 1734 British general election, and again at the 1741 British general election. He succeeded to the baronetcy on his father's death in 1744, and inherited his father's controlling interest both in Bletchingley and in the parliamentary borough of Great Marlow. He was returned at the subsequent general elections in 1747 and 1754 with his brother William. In about 1750 Lord Egmont describer the Claytons as 'strange people and not to be depended upon' but observed that their attendance was infrequent and they were irresolute in opposition. In 1753 Clayton applied for a church preferment for his brother-in-law Rev. John Thomas, which was granted the following year after Pelham had pointed out to Newcastle that he had a controlling interest in two parliamentary seats. He was returned for Bletchingly again in  1761 and in 1768 sat with his son Robert.

Clayton died on 10 March 1769 leaving a son and two daughters. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by his son Robert who died childless. The baronetcy then passed to Clayton's nephew William, son of his brother William.

References

1713 births
Year of birth uncertain
1769 deaths
Alumni of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Baronets in the Baronetage of Great Britain
Members of the Parliament of Great Britain for English constituencies
British MPs 1734–1741
British MPs 1741–1747
British MPs 1747–1754
British MPs 1754–1761
British MPs 1761–1768
British MPs 1768–1774


title: Arno, Missouri

text:
Arno is an unincorporated community in western Douglas County, Missouri, United States. Arno is located just east of the confluence of Beaver and Cowskin creeks, approximately five miles west of Ava.

History
Arno was founded in about 1857 in Taney County and the area became part of Douglas County in 1864. Arno was temporarily the county seat of Douglas County in 1869 replacing Vera Cruz. In 1870 Ava became the county seat. Arno post office operated from 1857–63 in Taney County and 1867–1933 in Douglas County.

In 1925, Arno had 31 inhabitants.

References

Unincorporated communities in Douglas County, Missouri
1857 establishments in Missouri
Unincorporated communities in Missouri


title: Pilili

text:
Pilili is a reed wind instrument in Adjara, west Georgia. It is a pipe of 25-30cm in length with 5-7 keys.

Description
The main parts of the pilili are: trunk and mouthpiece. The stem or trunk is a tube about 25-30 cm long, on which 5-7 holes are made. The mouthpiece is a small tube, the length of which depends on the desired sound. It has a split it its sidewall, creating a reed that makes sound when a musician blows through the top tip.

The stem of the pill is made from Tkemli (Prunus cerasifera plum tree) or Didgula (Sambucus nigra) wood. In ancient times, tsipil (the tip) was also made from didgula wood, but today bamboo is used for this. The tone of the pilili is diatonic, it is arranged in one octave.

References

Musical instruments of Georgia (country)


title: Kaduy

text:
Kaduy () is the name of several inhabited localities in Russia.

Urban localities
Kaduy, Vologda Oblast, a work settlement in Kaduysky District of Vologda Oblast

Rural localities
Kaduy, Irkutsk Oblast, a village in Nizhneudinsky District of Irkutsk Oblast
Kaduy, Chuprinsky Selsoviet, Kaduysky District, Vologda Oblast, a village in Chuprinsky Selsoviet of Kaduysky District in Vologda Oblast


title: Eonema

text:
Eonema is a fungal genus in the family Hygrophoraceae. It is monotypic, consisting of the single corticioid species Eonema pyriforme. This fungus was previously classified in the genus Athelia until molecular analysis demonstrated that it was unrelated to the Atheliales and instead nested within the Hygrophoraceae.

See also
 List of Agaricales genera

References

Hygrophoraceae
Monotypic Agaricales genera
Taxa named by Robert Lücking
Taxa named by James D. Lawrey
Taxa described in 2009