Page 24 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

seen as ‘things’. This was the insight that never figured in bourgeois economics and
that had been lost sight of in orthodox Marxism. Lukács’s work aimed to return an
awareness of the human character of social products to their producers.
Lukács held that bourgeois thought is necessarily confined to these reified appear-
ances. The particular class standpoint of the bourgeoisie limits its perspective on the
world, and does not allow it to penetrate beyond the ways that things appear externally.
Bourgeois intellectuals cannot escape their limited standpoint and so bourgeois knowl-
edge necessarily emphasizes the properties of particular isolated and thing-like phe-
nomena. This is shown clearly in the categories and theorems of classical economic
theory, Lukács argued, where all social phenomena are reduced to value relations that
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can be explored through calculation and precise prediction. Proletarian thought, as
grasped by its vanguard thinkers, can penetrate beyond appearances and so can over-
come this reification. Those intellectuals who adopt the proletarian standpoint are able
to point the way to a more adequate understanding of contemporary social conditions.
True proletarian consciousness has to be seen as the self-knowledge of the commodity,
of the specific commodity that is human labour power. When workers understand how
they have come to be a commodity and how their emancipation depends on their tran-
scending the knowledge and conditions of bourgeois production, they will have
achieved a self-knowledge that will guide them in their revolutionary practice.
Lukács had, then, restored to Marxism many of the ideas set out by Marx in 1844–45,
though this became apparent only after Marx’s early works were prepared for their first
publication in the 1930s. Orthodox Marxists, in the 1920s, saw the incorporation of a
Hegelian dimension into Marx’s work as dangerous and heretical, and History and Class
Consciousness caused a fierce storm in Marxist circles. Like Korsch, Lukács had been
active in Communist politics, and this made it inevitable that, along with Korsch’s
Marxism and Philosophy, his own book would be denounced. Thus, Zinoviev and
Bukharin, the leading activists and theorists of the Communist International, criticized
it for its abandonment of the scientific principles of Marxism. Lukács toyed with the
idea of publishing an answer to his critics, but – however strategically – he left his
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response unpublished and reverted to a more orthodox position. Korsch refused to
abandon his views and went on to elaborate them further. As a result of this and his
expulsion from the KPD, his work (Korsch, 1936) was not widely read in Marxist circles. 5
Lukács published a more orthodox study of Lenin (Lukacs, 1924), and became
increasingly committed to the Stalinist political line of those who had denounced
him. In 1929, he even recanted his earlier theoretical ‘aberrations’ and re-stated his
commitment to a reflectionist view of truth and his commitment to Soviet ortho-
doxy and the Soviet regime. Lukács moved to Moscow to work in the Marx archives
and, apart from a brief visit to Berlin, he remained there until the end of the Second
World War. His work in the Marx archives involved a study of the still unpublished
early manuscripts of Marx, and it must have been galling for him to discover their
great similarities with his own, now denounced and rejected, work. 6
Lukács’s most creative period ended at precisely the time that other Marxists were
beginning to see his Hegel-influenced work as an important contribution to the
reconstruction of Marxism. Lukács himself played no part in this and espoused a

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