Lukács, Georg (1885–1971)

Georg Lukács was a Marxist philosopher and literary critic whose work greatly influenced the Western Marxist tradition. Born into a bourgeois Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1885, Lukács later attended the University of Berlin, where, in 1907, he completed his doctoral dissertation in philosophy on the metaphysics of tragedy. In his early work, Lukács aimed to combine the ethical and moral demands of a leftist view with the materialist understanding of the natural world. For Lukács, this meant undoing the positivist influence on Marxist thought, as embodied in Friedrich Engels, and rediscovering the revolutionary aspects of dialectics, influenced by G. W. F. Hegel, in Karl Marx's early works. Despite remaining distanced from official Marxism for many years, in December 1918 Lukács finally joined the Hungarian Communist Party and in March 1919 assumed the position of deputy people's commissar for public education in Béla Kun's ill-fated government of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. After the failure of Béla Kun's government, Lukács fled to Austria and then to Russia. In 1923, his best-known and most influential book, History and Class Consciousness, was published.

In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács emphasized the role of Hegelian dialectics in Marx's early revolutionary works. He also introduced the concept of reification, which, unknown to Lukács at the time, bears striking similarities to Marx's notion of alienation, both of which view objectification of humans and human effort as one of the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist epoch. Another key argument contained in with the work emphasizes the role of consciousness and ideas as necessary catalysts for revolutionary action. The idea of developing class consciousness among the proletariat was certainly not a new concept, but Lukács treated the issue as a largely philosophical problem resulting from the subject-object dichotomy prevalent in metaphysics. Lukács's idea was to close the gap between the subject doing the observing and the object being observed. The proletariat develops revolutionary class consciousness when it becomes both the subject doing the considering and the object of consideration; in other words, the proletariat becomes aware of itself as a class.

Lukács's work in the early twenties, predominantly History and Class Consciousness, was viewed as offering a potential alternative to the Bolshevization of European Marxism and, as such, was seen as dangerous by the Comintern (also known as the Third International) and by Soviet communists. In 1924, the same year that Lenin died, Lukács was condemned by the Third International as a revisionist and by the Soviets for rejecting Engels in favor of Hegelian idealism. After the hostile reaction to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács began to make what is viewed by many as a tactical retreat from the controversial ideas it contained. This has been viewed as an attempt at self-preservation, as well as, perhaps, an effort to maintain some influence within the party, but it can [Page 877]also be seen as part of wider trend engulfing the intellectual atmosphere of Central Europe at that time.

Although Lukács continued moving away from his ultraleftist idealist views, by 1928 he was once again the target of harsh criticism by the International and by Soviet communists, but now he was accused of becoming a revisionist of the right. In 1928, Lukács composed his Blum Theses, which called for a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants in Hungary and suggested that the current regime could be replaced only by a democratic republic, and such a democratic revolution need not necessarily lead to socialism. It was also at precisely this time that Soviet communism was moving to the left and rejecting this sort of deviation from orthodox doctrine. Lukács was severely censured by the party, removed from any decision-making process, and forced to confine his activities to philosophy and literary criticism. In 1930, Lukács relocated to Moscow, where he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute. It was there, for the first time, that he had the opportunity to read the handwritten pages of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which had not yet been published. The 1932 publication in Germany of this work, containing Marx's theory of alienation, vindicated much of Lukács's work on the concept of reification, but Lukács remained silent on the issue and the rise to power of the Nazis curtailed the debate.

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