logicp_writings/new/Lukacs.md

Lukacs

History and Class Consciousness

"Capitalist society is based on "a natural law that is founded on the unconsciousness of those involved in it"". You are choosing to not be conscious. You are forcing everyone to adhere to an ideology so blindly that you are no longer conscious of the world around you nor the reality of how the world is affected by people.

"Man appears as the product of his social milieu, whereas, on the other hand, "the social milieu is produced by 'public opinion', i.e. by man".

Mystical Economics

Marx is often described as both a philosopher and an economist, but his brand of economics has really nothing to do with economics as we understand it and is much better described as mysticism built on Hegel's metaphysic.

Gyorg Lukacs, a prolific Cultural Marxist whose major contribution to Marxism has been developing the concept of Class Consciousness, advocates for Marx's views by elaborating on them and attempting to bring about a more modern understanding, as he thought it was necessary for many followers of Marx to better grasp what he felt were the legitimate mechanisms necessary to affect class struggle and history.

In particular, he critiques the concept of Objectivity as a post-Kantian notion as the budding realms of modern science and economics had come to assert the validity of their means on the basis of applying analyses towards an objective understanding of the world.

There was a split in the understanding of history, as historicism was the concept of seeing affairs within the context of an evolving historical process; that is to say, that the state of the world is contextually related to the moments preceding it, and that understanding the history which led to our current circumstances can reveal a better understanding of the world. Wiki describes it as explaining phenomena by studying their history.

For humans of today, there's nothing controversial about this, though we might take for granted the fact that, at some point in the evolution of society and analytical capacity, we moved from seeing phenomena reactively in an almost animalistic sense to being about to communicate and contemplate them with formalized concepts such as historical context.

What happened, however, is that as science itself was evolving from naturalism towards a set of areas of inquiry relying on scientific method, the habit of declaring something scientific by virtue of the fact that one was aiming to find a deeper understanding was widespread, and the effects of this are felt throughout society today, particularly in the humanities, social "science", and so forth.

History and Class Consciousness

Lukacs' "Magnum Opus" delves into the problem of class exploitation extending from bourgeois thinking and capitalism, the manner in which Marx created the means of addressing this, and reasons why those tools haven't been properly understood by the Marxists of his day.

He comments on how the bourgeois' starting point for all activity is not simply an "apologia for the existing order of things", but that it remains this apologia especially so when attempting to be "objective". In fact, the very effort of aiming to be "objective" is itself the mystification:

...bourgeois must come up against an insuperable obstacle which is the fact that regardless of its claim that it understands history, the very desire to adhere to objective standards of measure for its affairs in the present is akin to declaring that history has itself ended, as the means of measure themselves are affected by the historical process, and that process itself is incomplete. He says this as though it's self-evident, but only because of his presumption that the purpose of history is insofar that it has a purpose for Man:

"...the entire history of the world is nothing but the creation of Man through human labour" - Marx

Therefore the empirical disposition of the bourgeois is akin to stating "there has been history, but there is no longer any". Furthermore, that this constitutes an "intractable problem" for the bourgeois: "either it is forced to abolish the process of history and regard the institutions of the present as eternal laws of nature... Or else, everything meaningful or purposive is banished from history".

That's a pretty insane false dichotomy, but it's only possible because of the mystical view of history exists only as a process for Man rather than as being an observable consequence of the existence of a time dimension in spacetime.

Consequences of Formalism

The bourgeois' practicing empirically formulated methods in the face of their false consciousness causes society to fail to understand the development society as per its relations between men, or to understand that these relations are a product in the same sense as "linen, flax, etc". Furthermore, history becomes something incomprehensible because it itself becomes an irrational rule of blind forces.

Marx supposedly solves this by revealing that man, enslaved by forces of production, becomes an object in history rather than the subject. He does this by critiquing what he calls the reification which takes place in bourgeois society. Reification, to make a thing, and in this case it refers to that which is believed to be objectively or empirically deducible from the actions taking place in a market economy, where the value of a commodity is evaluated and expressed through its exchange.

Reified Mystification

This reification is the generating of anything which a capitalist society can measure about itself in order to proclaim it having analyzed a phenomenon objectively; that is to say, for the Marxist, the act of empirically assessing something is actually a mystification, because it is based on a world where the values of things are as exchange values, rather than the true value that they have as part of the history of Man, leading all the way until Man can finally become free.

For a Marxist, objectivity is based on the subject seeing the whole. The concretization of something is based only on seeing it within the context of the entirety of human existence, rather than understanding it in terms of how it is and what it means in the present, and that the reason this is the case is because humans aren't yet liberated. Another way of saying this, however, would be to speak of something in terms of its social relations. For a Marxist, these mean the same thing.

Objectifying the Subject

Efforts to make an objective assessment of something only causes the subject to be objectified. That is, the conditions surrounding that thing, the language by which it is spoken about, and the transactions which are conducted about and around the subject or that which it perceives and the manner in which this causes the subject to exist as an object for the reified structures and implements which, ultimately, serve only those who most benefit from them through Hegemonic influence.

Negation Religion

With any modern gnostic domain of thought, man's ontology is expressed through a process of negation. Man's purpose is to become man in himself by overcoming the environment that has thus far prevented it from being able to happen. Even defining the identity of man's liberator requires a process of definition.

"When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the previous world-order it does no more than reveal the secret of its own existence, for it represents the effective dissolution of that world-order."

The proletariat's very state of being is the existing order's negation process. The process of negating the existing order is an activity which can be said to be the proletariat's becoming. Put another way, the determination of the proletariat's being is the negation of the world, and if that process of negating the world were itself negated, so too would that determination of a proletariat be negated and, consequently, the proletariat class in full.

"The proletariat makes its appearance as the product of the capitalist social order. The forms in which it exists are ... the repositories of reification in its acutest and direst form adn they issue in the most extreme dehumanization."

"The proletariat shares with the bourgeoisie the reification of every aspect of its life."

The reifications consequent to a capitalist society are those things which cause society to function in such a way that a class of persons are advantaged. Those things which mystify the masses into a permutation whereby the bourgeoisie are able to dominate the poor classes (that is, the division of labour which allows the bourgeoisie to dictate what work is undertaken and how it is performed).

"The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognizes alienation as its own instrument and in it it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence."