I’m just finishing up Lukács’s brilliant essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and was struck by this passage which seems to describe in perfect detail the present political situation characterized predominantly by the ideological struggle between neoliberalism and social democracy, the latter of which has increasingly become the willing agent of the former. Unfortunately, Lukács’s somewhat optimistic solution to this antinomy in “bourgeois thought”—rooted in the worldview of the early 1920s when a communist world-revolution seemed imminent—is the so-called “standpoint of the proletariat,” which, thanks to its unique position in the capitalist machinery, is capable of transcending the reified dualism through its ability to grasp history as a concrete dialectical totality. But what happens when—to quote Dylan—”the buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down” and “history,” for all intents and purposes, has ended?

The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immediacy together with the bourgeoisie. With the growth of social democracy this threat acquired a real political organization which artificially cancels out the mediations so laboriously won and forces the proletariat back into its immediate existence where it is merely a component of capitalist society and not at the same time the motor tat drives it to its own doom and destruction. Thus the proletariat submits to the ‘laws’ of bourgeois society either in a spirit of supine fatalism (e.g. towards the natural laws of production) or else in a spirit of ‘moral’ affirmation (the state as an ideal, cultural positive).…

On this territory, social democracy must inevitably remain in the weaker position. This is not just because it renounces of its own free will the historical mission of the proletariat to point the way out of the problems of capitalism that the bourgeoisie cannot solve, nor is it because it looks on fatalistically as the ‘laws’ of capitalism drift towards the abyss. But social democracy must concede defeat on every particular issue also. For when confronted by the overwhelming resources of knowledge, culture and routine which the bourgeoisie undoubtedly possesses and will continue to possess as long as it remains the ruling class, the only effective superiority of the proletariat, its only decisive weapon is its ability to see social totality as a concrete historical totality; to see the reified forms as processes between men… With the ideology of social democracy the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification that we have hitherto analyzed in such detail.

And here’s a little tidbit from a recent story in Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”