Page 72 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

WESTERN MARXISM

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it was a revolution against Capital. But as that moment of
revolutionary optimism failed, as Lukács came to terms with Stalinism,
as Gramsci struggled to produce the Prison Notebooks in an Italian
fascist prison, as the Frankfurt School retreated into an increasingly
academic exile from politics, and thence to the literal exile of escape
to the United States, then so the emphasis shifted towards an analysis
of the system-supportive nature of cultural legitimations.
Where scientific socialism had theorized the relationships between
culture and society in terms of the base/superstructure model, critical
Western Marxism, by contrast, sought to understand both base and
superstructure as particular moments within a contradictory totality.
Thus, for Lukács, the revolutionary principle in Marx, as in Hegel, is
that of the dialectic, “the concept of totality, the subordination of
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every part to the whole unity of history and thought”. For the Lukács
of History and Class Consciousness, this notion of totality provides
the positive pole against which is developed the central, critical concept
of reification. Here Lukács expands upon the discussion of commodity
fetishism in Capital, reading it in the light both of Hegel, and of
Weber’s rationalization thesis (but not that of the as yet still unpublished
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), so as to develop what is,
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in effect, a version of the theory of alienation. By reification Lukács
means the process by which human relations come to be understood
as relations between things, an important instance of which is, of
course, commodity fetishism. But Lukács generalizes the notion so as
to insist that capitalism is itself a system of reification. Human reality
is thus necessarily detotalized under capitalism, both by commodity
fetishism and by the various reified forms of consciousness, the most
important of which is, in fact, science. 54
For the young Lukács, such reified thought could be overcome
only by the proletariat’s coming to consciousness of itself as the identical
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subject and object of history. There can be little doubt that, in the
early 1920s, Lukács had viewed the prospects for such a development
as fairly imminent: the “imputed” class consciousness embodied in
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Marxism was to become actualized in the empirical consciousness of
a working class organised and led by the revolutionary Communist
Party. But, as Lukács recoiled from both Nazism and Stalinism, this
revolutionary optimism gave way to an increasing reliance on the
realist novel as the principal totalizing instance in our culture Lukács’s
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later socialist realist writings are complicit, both politically and

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