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Georg Lukacs: History and Class Consciousness (Studies in Marxist Dialectics)

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György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, History and Class Consciousness initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. Lukács's work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class consciousness.

In the first chapter, "What is Orthodox Marxism?", Lukács defined orthodoxy as the fidelity to the "Marxist method", and not to the "dogmas":

He criticised revisionist attempts by calling to the return to this Marxist method, which is fundamentally dialectical materialism. Lukács conceives "revisionism" as inherent to the Marxist theory, insofar as dialectical materialism is, according to him, the product of class struggle.

In line with Marx's thought, he thus criticised the individualist bourgeois philosophy of the subject, which founds itself on the voluntary and conscious subject. Against this ideology, he asserts the primacy of social relations. Existence -- and thus the world -- is the product of human activity; but this can be seen only if the primacy of social process on individual consciousness, which is but the effect of ideological mystification, is accepted. This doesn't entail that Lukács restrain human liberty on behalf of some kind of sociological determinism: to the contrary, this production of existence is the possibility of praxis.

Henceforth, the problem consists in the relationship between theory and practice.The dialectical relation between subject and object gives the basis for Lukács's critique of Kant's epistemology, according to which the subject is the exterior, universal and contemplating subject, separated from the object.

Lukács presents the category of reification whereby, due to the commodity nature of capitalist society, social relations become objectified, precluding the ability for a spontaneous emergence of class consciousness. It is in this context that the need for a party in the Leninist sense emerges, the subjective aspect of the re-invigorated Marxian dialectic.

In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of History and Class Consciousness, in particular the belief in the proletariat as a subject-object of history" but he wrote a defence of them as late as 1925 or 1926. This unfinished manuscript, which he called Tailism and the Dialectic, was only published in Hungarian in 1996 and English in 2000 under the title A Defence of History and Class Consciousness. It is perhaps the most important "unknown" Marxist text of the twentieth century.

The writings collected in this volume encompass Lukacs' years of apprenticeship in Marxism. They include the most important documents of this period (1918-1930), in order to emphasize to their experimental nature and not to suggest that they have any topical importance to current controversies about the true nature of Marxism.

The writings assembled here do more than simply illuminate the stages of personal development; they also show the path taken by intellectual events generally.