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Lukács on Present Politics
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
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Lukács on Self-Narrative
I sort of wish I had written something like this in the opening of my graduate application statement of purpose, taken from Georg Lukács’s 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, which I just started reading tonight (and very much enjoying):
I think that I would be departing from the truth if I were to attempt to iron out the glaring contradictions of that period by artificially constructing an organic development and fitting into the correct pigeon-hole in the ‘history of ideas’. If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself when he finds himself changing from one class to another in the middle of a world crisis?
Contingency and Catastrophe
Perhaps this has some bearing on a past excerpt I posted, but either way I really enjoyed this passage from Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic where he discusses Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness at some length:
Contingency is as it were the inner blind spot of bourgeois consciousness, or of the existential experience of capitalism. In the twin forms of chance and of “crisis” or “catastrophe,” it marks the moment at which events that are meaningful socially or historically turn incomprehensible, absurd, or meaningless faces to individuals, who can henceforth only ratify their bewilderment with the name of “accident” or of well-nigh “natural” convulsion and upheaval. That in bourgeois science these “irrationals” or unthinkables become themselves the object of new forms of scientific inquiry and specialization—in probability theory and statistics, for example, or in crisis theory or catastrophe theory—is perhaps a rather different development from the second feature of Lukács’s analysis, which designates the blind spot of the system itself, and the incapacity to grasp totality as a meaningful whole.
Well, now I’m tempted to read Studies in European Realism (lest we remind our readers, not of the object-oriented variety).