Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998

From: Lau Kam To

Re: Lukacs

Andy Blunden wrote:

I would be interested in your opinion of Lukacs. Also, I have just read a bit of Althusser. I find him a very "dangerous" revisionist of Marxism. "Contradiction and Overdetermination" raises the same question you asked about "inverting" Hegel. Althusser it appears simply doesn't understand it, and he purports to criticise Marx and Engels for some sort of "scam", ... also the same with the dialectics of Nature. It's people like Althusser that have made me cynical about "recent Marxism, post-Marxism" etc etc. But what do you make of Lukacs?

Andy

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Andy,

Lukacs enjoyed some popularity while I was a college student. His Reification of Consciousness was then particularly attractive to many students and to me for supplying a conceptual tool in de-Maoization and in criticisms against the Cultural Revolution which was denounced as a holocaust. But we knew Lukacs mainly through his History and Class Consciousness and our understanding of him was partial or superficial since none of us was familiar with Hegel. On the other hand, HCC was his youthful work and a better appreciation of him should go to his mature system, his Social Ontology (Chinese edition = 1300 pages! might take years to finish reading).

But, retrospectively, I think the merit of the Lukacs of HCC lies not in his critique of vulgarized or dogmatic Marxism, positivism etc.; his polemics against the Scientism and Naturalism of the 2nd International, his solution to the antimonies of bourgeoisie philosophy, and history as unity of subject-object, I think many of his arguments could be traced back to Hegel. IMO, his merit is in re-emphasizing or re-defining the concept of history in Marxism: 1) history is objective, history is the history of social institution as the interrelations among men; 2) man is the centre of history, the human world exhibits itself as a dynamic and developing system which only dialectic method could comprehend; 3) the place of nature in Marxism - Lukacs argued that there is dialectic in history but not in nature, he subsumed the catergory of nature under history and criticized the extension of the dialectic to nature (I think L's target was not Engels because D of N was published after HCC, if my memory was correct).

The 3nd point was then and now an interesting question/puzzle to me: does Marxism need a dialectic of nature to justify the validity of historical materialism or to make Marxism 'Scientific'? My knowledge in science did not go beyond high school elementary level so I'm not in a position to say yes or no on Engels's position, not to mention whether modern science has confirmed a dialectic in nature or not. But it seems that if the three laws of dialectic: quantity to quality, negation of the negation etc. were laws in the sense of, say, Newton's universal gravitation or Law of Motion, then the implications are determinism as well as the 'algebra of revolution'. Furthermore, how could these laws enable us to understand concrete history event: e.g. European workers and their Social Democratic Parties, contrary to all expectations, voted in support to go for war in 1914. Commentators used to say a dialectic of nature is just another version of Schelling and Hegel's futile philosophy of nature. In this respect I think Lukacs is correct in insisting on a dialectic of revolution and rejecting a dialectic of nature.

But you have a much stronger scientific background, so if you have the time perhaps you could give an explication on the dialectic of nature and its relation to Marxism and some related issues (of course, in layman's terms), other members may be also be interested.

Alex Lau