Page 21 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

Drama and novels, together with other forms of modern art, Lukács argued, are to be
seen as bourgeois productions in which there has been a separation of the cultural
forms from the personalities of their producers. He saw the central values of the bour-
geoisie, centred on individualism and an ascetic sense of duty, reflected in the ‘tragic’
vision in literature. The bourgeoisie, however, was a declining social class, and its cul-
tural products show the evidence of its decline. Contemporary social conditions could
no longer sustain audiences for the classic bourgeois forms of art. Contemporary audi-
ences seek out mass entertainment, and they find it increasingly difficult to exercise
any reflective judgement on the social conditions responsible for their cultural prefer-
ences. Lukács clung to the hope that the proletariat might still be a source of creative
cultural renewal and historical understanding, but he believed that the class con-
sciousness of the German proletariat, as it currently existed, was inadequate. It had
been distorted by bourgeois concerns that resulted from their structural subordination
within capitalist production. It was these reflections on class consciousness that led
Max Weber famously to commend this ‘talented author’s’ views.
Lukács’s early political and economic ideas were not based on a wide reading of
Marxist works, and on his return to Hungary he set about remedying this. Together
with Arnold Hauser and Karl Mannheim, he formed a study group that aimed to rec-
oncile the approach of the Geisteswissenchaften with Marxist economic theory. Lukács
wanted to incorporate Marxist views on cultural production into his developing
framework of ideas. His engagement with Marxist theory, and his rejection of the
particular materialist philosophy that underpinned orthodox Marxism, became the
central element in his thought when he began to work on the series of essays that
were brought together in his famous work, History and Class Consciousness (Lukács,
1923). This book was intended as a provisional and programmatic statement of ideas,
rather than a definitive solution to his philosophical concerns, and Lichtheim has
correctly remarked that it is a rather uneasy amalgam of neo-Hegelian philosophy
with economic and political analyses derived from Luxemburg and Lenin
(Lichtheim, 1970: 20).
Karl Korsch, at the same time, was developing similar ideas. An active member of
the German Communist party (the KPD) from 1920, Korsch for some years combined
membership of the Reichstag with his university work. Korsch was a Leninist in pol-
itics, but he rejected the conventional philosophical basis of Leninism. In Marxism
and Philosophy (Korsch, 1923), he argued that knowledge of the social world was not
the mere ‘reflection’ of an independent, external world but was directly constitutive
of that world. There could be no sharp line drawn between an external reality and
our consciousness of it. This implied the radical thesis that the forms of conscious-
ness that comprise what was conventionally regarded as the ‘superstructure’ are
directly constitutive of the social relations that comprise the ‘base’.
History and Class Consciousness, too, aimed to defend the politics of orthodox
Marxism against revisionism and reformism, while challenging its philosophical dis-
tortions. Like Korsch, Lukács rejected the naïve representational realism of Engels
and Lenin and sought to recapture the Hegelian dimension that had been lost in the
building of orthodox Marxism. By stressing the importance of Hegel – and, beyond
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