Page 23 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

The method of totality that characterizes his Marxism, Lukács argued, is rooted in
the class position of the proletariat. It is the standpoint of the proletariat that,
uniquely, makes possible an explicit adoption of the method of totality. The synthe-
sis sought by Hegel can be achieved only from a proletarian standpoint; all other
standpoints offer only limited or partial points of view. Marxism, therefore, must be
seen not as a neutral and detached scientific description of the world, but as an
expression of the consciousness of the proletariat. It does not, however, correspond
to the actual consciousness of the proletariat as it might exist in any particular place
or time. The proletariat as it exists in a particular society may be in a condition of
false consciousness and so its members may misunderstand their own position and
prospects. What is important for Lukács is the theoretical consciousness of a mature
proletariat that has come to a full understanding of its own position in history and
of the actions necessary to advance its further historical development. To achieve
this state of consciousness, Lukács concluded, proletarian consciousness must be
guided by a Communist Party whose leaders have a sure grasp of the real situation
faced by the class. Communist intellectuals are able to formulate the revolutionary
will of the proletariat in a rational form as they move towards a grasp of the totality.
A superior intellectual understanding of the social world is built inside a Communist
Party, and so it can truly act as the vanguard of the proletariat.
There is an obvious contradiction in this position, which Lukács failed to resolve.
On the one hand, he argued, true science must be informed by the proletarian stand-
point. On the other hand, however, he saw this standpoint as non-existent in most
real situations, and actual proletarians must be guided by a scientifically informed
vanguard of intellectuals. If, however, intellectuals can grasp the totality before
members of the proletariat have achieved this consciousness, a justification for their
knowledge must be made on grounds closer to those of orthodox ‘scientific’ Marxism
and positivism: and if this is the case, what then differentiates Marxism from any
other intellectual position?
Lukács’s early work had been concerned with the cultural products of art and lit-
erature, but the arguments of History and Class Consciousness were concerned with
culture in the broader sense of the practical consciousness and experiences of partic-
ular social groups. It is not simply novels and dramas that derive from class stand-
points, it is whole ways of life. It was in developing this particular view of culture
that Lukács introduced the idea of ‘reification’. He used this concept of reification to
explore the false consciousness of actual proletarians, and in doing so he virtually
reinvented the early Marx’s work on alienation. The concept, in fact, had its origins
in Marx’s analysis of ‘commodity fetishism’ in Capital, and Lukács effectively recon-
structed the Hegelian basis of Marx’s mature work. Marx had argued that the per-
sonal characteristics of people in a capitalist society are irrelevant to their role in the
process of production. Workers are treated as mere quantities of labour power that
can be bought or sold in the market and so can be subjected to a process of ratio-
nalization, a specialization and fragmentation of work tasks. As a result, relations
between people appear simply in the form of the value relations among commodi-
ties and money. Their human character and meaning are lost and they are reified,
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