[Marxism] Georg Lukács as a Marxist thinker

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

If Lukács had "a brilliant mind, but did not have the unbending will or
toughness of character of someone like Trotsky", that was because he was a
completely different person than Trotsky. Lukács was born into a Jewish
banking family and was (like Kozo Uno) a student of Max Weber, very
interested as an intellectual in the analysis of literature. His actual
political activity was limited, he was mainly a scholar. Trotsky/Bronstein
came from a peasant family, was a drop-out mathematics student who became a
political agitator, journalist and professional politician in the school of
Lenin.

In her autobiography (now published in Dutch and German, presented by János
Köbányai), Agnes Heller has some interesting observations about Lukács.
Among her critical comments, she has noted his lack of concern with
democracy and democratic theory. Curiously, when Lukacs died, the remaining
books in his study included the works of Freud.

Personally, I don't see a future for "Marxism", although I think Marx will
continue to inspire activists and scholars, and the socialist movement will
continue. That is because I think that the idea of basing a living politics
on a readymade categorical system or ontology with universal pretensions,
derived from a few leaders in the socialist pantheon, cannot succeed for
long. On the other side, if dilletantes simply "throw out Marx" for shallow
reasons, that is just as bad, in that case you have to defend Marx.'s
legacy, which is substantive and of enduring value.

The problem here is that the conservative reflexes of doctrinal "orthodoxy"
in the Marxist camp and its propensity for assimilating experience to
analogies with the past, militate against rewarding innovation, creative
individual input and renewal, even though that is precisely what is needed
to develop new political methods and cultural strategies. The concept of a
specifically "Marxist party" nowadays is I think a recipe for failure - even
if many political experiences of Marxist parties in the past remain
insightful and instructive.

The peculiar thing I find is that, despite a number of valiant attempts and
much more information, there is - some 120 years or so later - still no
wholly satisfactory and complete book about the life and work of Karl Marx.
Possibly that attests to the richness and variegatedness of his thought, and
the difficulty of the endeavour. Even so, for many self-styled Marxists the
real experience of Marx remains to a large extent still unknown.

Lukács claimed that "Orthodox Marxism... does not imply the uncritical
acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief'
in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. On the
contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific
conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its
methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid
down by its founders."

The problem here is that Marx did not have just one "method", and that there
exists no one method that can be applied in all situations to obtain
successful results. This is a bit like asking for the philosopher's stone, a
magic wand or a crystal ball, and in reality few Marxists can agree about
what Marx's method really was anyhow. Whatever the case, the method has to
be appropriate to the situation in which it is applied, and if the method
does not lead to good results, one ought to throw out the method, and get
another one.

Dialectical materialism is not a term that Marx ever used, nor should it be
a faith, and Marx himself cautioned that there was no "royal road to
science". Dialectical materialism is a catch-all metaphysical term that
could apply to any number of sins, and in reality it just provided Lukács
with a convenient "orthodox" justification for his creative research.

Finally, if it is true, that what is important about Marx is his
methodological legacy, then this means precisely no true orthodoxy is
possible, because Marx's own way of working was unorthodox, creative and
dialectical. The whole point is, that he overturned existing methods and
theories through critique, revolutionised them, to find new important
insights.

If there is to be a real "commitment", it should not be to a Marxist faith,
but rather to what Marx called the "categorical imperative" (a Kantian term)
to question, resist, protest or fight against those conditions which make
people less than they could be, premised on the idea that although some
suffering is inevitable, much suffering can be humanly prevented, because it
is man-made, and not preordained. If people create hell on earth, we do not
have to reconcile ourselves with that hell, we can search for alternative
options, and do something about it, passionately and compassionately.

Which was the real message of the Enlightenment: the capacity of people to
change themselves and their society for the better, based on knowledge,
because they themselves had created that society and could learn to
understand its functioning. Making such a commitment can be difficult enough
to sustain for a person, nevermind doctrinal fidelity - you cannot fight all
of the time, and have to balance your activities - but that is what I think
is the real challenge.

This is what I have believed since my student days, and I have continued to
believe it as an enduring principle.  I cannot say that I have always acted
on that conviction (insofar as that is at all possible), I have my share of
mistakes, confusion, demoralisation, and foolishness, but I have thought
that way. The trouble is, that you can get too preoccupied with the downside
of life, so that you miss the upside, meaning that life becomes unbalanced.
You can be too critical, and insufficiently constructive, and so on.

I think insofar as you have at least shown that you have seriously grappled
with the commitment mentioned, in whatever way you are able to do it, that
you have done your duty as a human being. To demand more, is to place
unrealistic expectations on people, which cannot lead to healthy forms of
association. It is, as Marx showed, the social conditions themselves which
drive people, sometimes spectacularly, into accomplishing feats which nobody
expected.

But that is something people decide to do on their own accord, in particular
circumstances, not something you ought to demand of them, or force them into
doing. That in my experience is the saddest feature of the sects - the fact,
that people tear out their lives for the sake of something that eludes them
by definition. Idealism is fine, but idealism which destroys lives is not to
be recommended.

Jurriaan





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