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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?
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):
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: