Lukacs — Political Writings 1921-29 (Tactics and Ethics), New Left Books, £3.
The appearance in a paperback edition of this important volume of Lukacs' early writings is a welcome event. It is of course well known that in its first years the Communist International had a major debate around the question of 'ultra-leftism', and that several of the chief leaders of this latter trend wrote important and controversial books on Marxist philosophy — notably Lukacs (History and Class Consciousness), Karl Korsch (Marxism and Philosophy), and, somewhat later, Pannekoek (Lenin as Philosopher). However, while the writings on this subject of Lenin, Trotsky and the majority of the Russian leadership have long been available in English — most notably, of course, Lenin's Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder — the political writings of the opponents of the Bolsheviks in this discussion are only now becoming available. In addition to the Lukacs volume reviewed here, important recent translations include material in International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History edited by Gruber, a presentation of Bordiga's positions in Gwyn Williams's Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Italian Communism, and a number of Bordiga articles in Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings 1910-20 edited by Quintin Hoare.
The appearance of this new material does not alter the estimate as to the political outcome of the debate on ultra-leftism. On the contrary, it increases respect for the arguments produced by the Comintern. But, as always, the ability to make an examination of both sides of the polemic gives a much more rounded and clearer conception of the issues involved. Not merely does this increase the political lessons which may be drawn, but in this case it also reveals [illegible] discussions involved issues which remain strikingly relevant. It is on this aspect of the Lukacs volume that we want to concentrate here. This is not because there is not much else which is valuable in the collection — On the contrary, some of the philosophical writings, including the famous review of Bukharin's Historical Materialism and the essay Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics, are among the most important Lukacs ever wrote. However, the real fascination of the book is that it gives an insight into a very different political debate, and a very different Lukacs, than that which is generally familiar.
The first conception that may rapidly be dispensed with through a reading of Lukacs' essays of the 1920s, and of the other material available on the early debate in the Comintern, is any idea that the Bolsheviks' opponents on this issue were some sort of ideological primitives simply marching around the streets screaming 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat Now'. It is true that a few of the groups and theorists of Comintern ultra-leftism were marked by really primitive conceptions — the German Communist Workers Party (KAPD) in its opposition to trade unions, or the ideas of Sylvia Pankhurst, for example. But in general the outlook of the European opposition to Lenin was theoretically sophisticated and not at all patently stupid in its argumentation. Certainly Lukacs is profoundly thought provoking and penetrating in this volume, even in his most erroneous positions. Far from defending boycotts of parliament and elections from the point of view of abstract principle, as is frequently assumed in accounts of this period, the ultra-lefts invoked virtually every argument except abstract principle.
Herman Gorter, a Dutch ultra-leftist, explicitly declared for example that the tactics of the Bolsheviks in standing in parliamentary elections in Russia had been entirely correct: 'Your tactics were brilliant for Russia, and the Russians were victorious because of them.'(1) Gorter's argument against standing in elections was posed at the level of differences in concrete class relations between Russia and Western Europe — an interesting ultra-left twist — a distinction which is today invoked by the West European CPs to justify reformism. Gorter wrote; 'When you say you did thus and such in Russia...it does not mean very much and therefore neither is [illegible] now has to be correct. For Western European class relations in the revolutionary struggle are entirely different from those in Russia.'(2)
Differing from Gorter, but again not raising abstention from elections and parliament to a principle, was the position of the Austrian Communist Party. They in fact went so far as to declare that in general participation in parliament was entirely correct in Western Europe — including in Germany. The argument of these ultra-lefts was based on the concrete situation then existing in the country — on the fact that in Austria the struggle had gone beyond the stage of mass working class demonstrations and strikes and had arrived at a situation of workers councils. They wrote: 'Parliament is important to Communists only as a platform for propaganda. We in Austria have the Council of Workers' Deputies as a platform for propaganda. We therefore refuse to take part in elections to the bourgeois parliament. In Germany there is no Council of Workers' Deputies that could be taken in earnest.'(3)
What could be more apparently Marxist than that? When the class struggle has passed to the formation of workers councils, surely the time has come to boycott the parliamentary fraud and pass directly to the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat?(4) Given that the Workers Council which was formed following the fall of the Hapsburg Empire lasted right through to 1922 (admittedly in a diminishing form), this did not appear at all a preposterous position on the face of it.(5) Indeed, it could be argued that it was correct on the basis of certain formal analogies with the positions of the Bolsheviks on the boycott in 1905 and Lenin's call for the boycott of the pre-Parliament in 1917.
Lukacs himself, at that time a theoretical leader of Hungarian ultra-leftism, also avoided any argument 'on principle' against participation in parliament. On the contrary, he declared that in [illegible] parliamentary participation [is an] important tactic: [Communist Party] is forced onto the defensive, by all means let the proletariat use the form of parliament for agitational and propagandistic purposes; let it exploit the possibilities afforded members of parliament by bourgeois 'freedom' as substitute for forms of expression otherwise denied it; let it make use of the parliamentary struggles with the bourgeoisie in order to gather its own forces, in preparation for the really basic struggle against the bourgeoisie. Clearly, such a phase may well last for a considerable period of time.'(6)
All Lukacs asserted was that, 'parliamentary activity can never be [illegible] more interactive forms of workers' democracy were already emerging: 'Theoretically and tactically, then, we have defined the respective roles of workers council and parliament: where a workers council (on however modest a scale) is possible, parliamentarianism is redundant.'(8)
All these positions of Lukacs again sound apparently Marxist and Leninist — to utilise participation in parliament as a subsidiary [illegible] to prepare the decisive (and therefore necessarily extra-parliamentary) [illegible] with the bourgeoisie. After all, didn't Lenin correctly write even in Left Wing Communism that, [illegible] big strike, for instance, [illegible] deeper than parliamentary activity at all times...'(9) And, far from being by-passed, such arguments have an extremely familiar ring in the positions taken by ultra-left organisations in Portugal, for example. It is not possible in a short review to deal with all the political [illegible] through reading the relevant works of Trotsky in reply to Lukacs, Korsch, Pannekoek, Gorter et al. Lenin's own summary on Lukacs' Position was: 'Its Marxism is purely verbal; its distinction between 'defensive' and 'offensive' tactics is artificial; it gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical situations; it takes no account of what is most essential (the need to take over, and learn to take over, all fields of work and all institutions in which the bourgeoisie exercises its influence over the masses, etc.).'(10)
Against the Austrians and Lukacs on workers councils and parliamentary boycotts, Lenin pointed out that the relevant issue was not whether such bodies existed but whether they were strong enough to overthrow the bourgeois system: 'As long as we lack the strength to disband the bourgeois parliament, we must work against it from within and without. As long as any considerable number of working people (not only proletarians, but also semi-proletarians and small peasants) still trust in the bourgeois-democratic instruments employed by the bourgeoisie for deceiving the workers, we must explain this deception from the very platform which the backward sections of the workers, and particularly of the semi-proletarian labouring masses, consider most important, most authoritative.'(11)
All in all, the ultra-lefts received one of the most thorough political drubbings which anyone has ever taken — while simultaneously, incidentally, Lenin fought a major struggle against elements such as Paul Levi to try to keep the 'infantile-leftists' (such as the KPD) within the Communist International.
If, however, the errors of Lukacs and others on the political plane were dealt with relatively early, the controversy has nevertheless continued as to the exact relation between their positions in the debate in the Comintern and their views on philosophy. It is hardly likely to be coincidental that writers with such distinct political positions as Lukacs, Pannekoek and Korsch should also have had extremely similar concepts on the field of philosophy. At the same time, however, there is no systematic study of the precise connections between the two. Lukacs himself initially stressed as the source of his errors a failure to situate his work in any systematic economic theory and analysis. Finally he reached the conclusion that the correct line of approach to theoretical questions lay in ontology.(12) Other recent studies have seen his challenge to Marxist political positions of that period.(13) Gareth Stedman Jones, in a striking analysis, has stressed Lukacs' concept of a working class ideologically dominated through commodity fetishism, and his inability to analyse the complexity of modes of production and of the capitalist State, as the decisive elements.(14)
All these conclusions, particularly that of Stedman Jones, undoubtedly provide elements of an explanation of the theoretical roots of Lukacs' positions on the Comintern debates. However, this present collection of his writings suggests a very clear political deviation whereby Lukacs arrived at his wrong positions — although it is undoubtedly an error connected to his early 1920s theoretical concept of class consciousness. Despite the incessant talk of 'the totality' which runs throughout these essays, in reality Lukacs never [illegible] to derive a political line [illegible] elements of capitalist society but takes it solely and exclusively from the state of the proletariat itself.
This concept, which in fact runs throughout the collection of writings, is stated most clearly of all in the essay on the question of 'Opportunism and Putschism'. Here Lukacs states: 'Because of their mechanical notion of the class struggle, opportunists and putschists alike are bound to have a static concept of the class, seeing it as a once-and-for-all, unalterably given fact, and not as something dynamic which emerges, grows and brings itself to life in the course of the struggle. However, it is only when the constitution of the [illegible] is regarded as the goal and the tendency of the [revol]ution that we can discover a firm basis for the constantly changing tactics of communist activity. The economic, scientific reality of the class is of course the starting point for tactical considerations. But the other reality, the living reality of the class effected by the proletariat — this is possible only as a goal of revolutionary action. Every genuine [illegible] tension, the gulf between economic being [and] active consciousness [illegible] which Marx and Lenin had to be [illegible] of the proletariat. Once this consciousness has reached, penetrated and illuminated being, it is immediately possessed of the power to overcome all obstacles and to complete the process of revolution.'(15)
Even leaving aside the evident errors of the 'philosophy of action' contained here, the entire way in which the question of the basis of tactics is formulated is, in terms of class relations, totally different from that displayed by Lenin. For Lukacs the political tactics are derived from the situation of the proletariat — 'The economic, scientific reality of the class is of course the starting point for tactical considerations.' For Lenin, on the contrary, tactics can only be derived from the relation of all the forces and classes of capitalist society — 'the Communist Party...must act on scientific principles. Science...demands that account must be taken of all the forces, groups, parties, classes and masses operating in a given country'.(16) For Lukacs it is simply the achievement of consciousness [by the] proletariat which suffices for the revolution: 'Once this consciousness has reached, penetrated and illuminated being, it is immediately possessed of the power to overcome all obstacles and to complete the process of revolution.'
Indisputably, of course, the positions Lukacs took on materialism, economics, and the 'power' of commodity fetishism led to the particular deviation outlined above. In particular, the extremely under-developed concept which exists in Lukacs' work of any specifically political structures plays a crucial role.(18) It is only at this specifically political level that the relation of all classes could have been analysed.(19) However, no matter what its theoretical origin, in these 1920s essays the operative element which comes over in Lukacs' political positions is the continual attempt to derive a line from the situation of the working class alone. In this concept also, of course, the early Lukacs' positions again clearly link up with contemporary ultra-left concepts.(20)
Finally, it is worth noting that, in the period following the debates in the Comintern, Lukacs pulled back from ultra-leftism and moved sharply towards more correct conceptions. In 1924, in his book on Lenin, Lukacs was already able to make a clear self-criticism: that the 'the slogan of left wing radicalism was the rejection in principle of any compromise. Lenin's polemic shows...that this rejection contains an evasion of decisive struggles, behind which lies a defeatist attitude towards the revolution. For the genuinely revolutionary situation...expresses itself in the fact that there are no areas of the class struggle in which revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) possibilities are not present.'(21)
Unfortunately, however, Lukacs collided with Stalin in this process. As he recalled in 1967: 'In the debate in the Russian Party I agreed with Stalin about the necessity for socialism in one country, and this shows very clearly the start of a new epoch in my thought.'(22)
The outcome of this 'new epoch in his thought' is clearly revealed in Lukacs' final article in the present collection — the so-called 'Blum Theses'. These theses, which constitute Lukacs' last major political writings, are a clear expression of a theory advocating a Popular Front. Lukacs was to support and give gloss to this political line in his philosophic and aesthetic works throughout the Stalin era. The sole originality of the Theses is that they were produced not in the mid 1930s but in 1928 — at the start of the ultra-left ravings of the Comintern's Third Period. Lukacs paid the price for having anticipated the turn of Dimitrov and Stalin by six years by making a public 'self-criticism' and withdrawing from explicitly political [illegible].
Even this capitulation of Lukacs however has its interesting political lessons. The difference between the types of qualities needed to be a theoretician and those needed to be a political leader are well summed up in the reasons Lukacs gives to explain his capitulation:
'When I heard from a reliable source that Bela Kun was planning to expel me from the Party as a "Liquidator", I gave up the struggle, as I was well aware of Kun's prestige in the International, and I published a "self-criticism". I was indeed firmly convinced that I was in the right but I also knew — for example, from the fate that had befallen Karl Korsch — that to be expelled from the Party meant that it would no longer be possible to participate actively in the struggle against Fascism. I wrote my self-criticism as an "entry ticket" to such activity.'(23)
Not merely did this reveal a total lack of the human qualities that are needed to make a political leader — try telling a Left Oppositionist of the 1930s, dying in a labour camp, murdered by the GPU, or even merely struggling to produce a newspaper, that such a prospect of merely being expelled from the party was too much to ask anyone to bear — but it was political bankruptcy. The idea that the political line of an organisation is fundamentally wrong but that this can be compensated for by personally valuable work is, in the strictest scientific sense, a typical concept of petty-bourgeois individualist intellectualism. As to what Lukacs really bought an 'entry ticket' to, this was well summed up in one of the obituaries following his death in 1971: 'Lukacs recanted because a refusal — an act of resistance — would have resulted in his expulsion from the Comintern. If this were to happen...he could not join the "antifascist struggle". What concrete insight! What brilliance! We are well acquainted with the Comintern's brilliant record in the "anti-fascist" struggle. The string of its victories echoes with the hollow [illegible] history of the proletariat — [illegible] Germany, Spain, France.'(24)
No matter what his personal intentions, Lukacs became in reality a political appendage of Stalinism — and all the more dangerous because of his brilliance. Even leaving aside the purges and Popular Fronts, someone who could write that 'the real dilemma of our age is not the opposition between capitalism and socialism, but the opposition between peace and war'(25), can in no serious political sense be said to represent anything remotely resembling the interests of the working class. It is true that at the very end of his life Lukacs did once again begin to take a certain position to the left of Stalinism on issues such as the student revolt, but this cannot be said to mark a radical break.(26)
Undoubtedly throughout the forty years following his capitulation of 1928-29 Lukacs produced Marxist writing of truly outstanding quality. Works such as The Young Hegel, Goethe and His Age, and various of the aesthetic essays are, no matter what specific criticism may be made, amongst the finest writings produced since the 'classic period' of Marxism was closed by Stalinism. Lukacs provides an outstanding example of the fact that in Marxism there is no simple one-to-one relation between theoretical brilliance and political position in defence of the interests of the working class.(27) However, in Marxism it is the political position and not the individual theoretical brilliance that is the most decisive criterion. On that level, Lukacs was a failure. The person who is revealed in the essays of the 1920s to have been a powerful and original political thinker even when profoundly wrong was irrevocably destroyed by Stalinism.
To read this present volume is not merely to enter into debates which still have contemporary relevance but is to come face to face with one of the major problems and political 'might have beens' in the history of Marxism. To discover that a person who served the Stalinist bureaucracy for forty years could be a Marxist writer and theoretician of stunning brilliance is a salutary lesson to all philistine and reductionist revolutionaries. To realise that a near genius could still adopt a political position completely opposed to the interests of the working class should provide food for thought for those intellectuals who think that the degree of personal intelligence is the surest guide to the class line. Either way the experience, and the quality of Lukacs' ideas, is well worth £3.
1. Gorter: 'Open Letter to Comrade Lenin' in International Communism in the Era of Lenin, (ed) Gruber, p.222.
2. [illegible] p.216.
3. Cited in Lenin: 'Letter to the Austrian Communists', in Collected Works, Vol.31, p.249.
4. Such [illegible] will of course be well known to those, such as the PRP and the Socialist Workers Party, who advocated the slogan in Portugal of 'Dissolve the Constituent Assembly' in summer 1975.
5. On the situation in Austria at the time, see Braunthal: History of the International 1914-43, pp.202f, and Rosdolsky: 'La situation revolutionnaire en Autriche en 1918 et le politique des sociaux-démocrates', in Critique Communiste, no. 8/9.
6. Lukacs: Tactics and Ethics, p.58.
7. ibid. p.68.
8. ibid. p.63.
9. Lenin: Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, in Collected Works, Vol.31, p.60.
10. Lenin. 'Kommunismus', in Collected Works, Vol.31, p.165.
11. [illegible]
12. Lukacs states: 'Once I had gained a definite and fundamental insight into what was wrong with my whole approach in History and Class Consciousness this search became a plan to investigate the philosophical connections between economics and dialectics. My first attempt to put this plan into practice came early in the Thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first draft of my book on the young Hegel (which was not completed until Autumn 1937), [illegible].'
13. [illegible] the English edition History and Class Consciousness, [illegible] Lenin as Philosopher, in International Socialist Review, January 1972, and Novack: 'In Defence of Materialism', in International Socialist Review, July-August 1972. This latter issue also contains 'A Criticism of George Novack's Stand on Lukacs' by Etienne Abrahamovici.
14. Gareth Stedman Jones: 'The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: An Evaluation' in New Left Review 70.
15. Lukacs: Tactics and Ethics, p.79 (our emphasis).
16. Lenin: Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, op. cit., [illegible].
17. [illegible] of the Constituent Assembly in Russia. It might even aid in the dispersing of bourgeois parliamentary bodies to have the elections to them — while of course in other conditions, such as 1905 and the pre-Parliament of 1917, Lenin advocated a boycott (as did Trotsky, for example, in relation to the 1931 elections in Spain).
18. [illegible] puts it when he states: 'Lukacs' [illegible] conception of class power is so totally confined to an etherealised [illegible] that it not merely passes over the whole array of cultural apparatuses whereby the bourgeoisie exercises its ideological dominance in capitalist social formations, but it also largely neglects the political apparatus of capital par excellence: the State [illegible] which Marx and Lenin had to be broken [illegible] by the working class (op. cit., [illegible]).' Perry Anderson has made the same point in terms of a more general theoretical framework in 'The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci' in New Left Review 100, p.46.
19. 'Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and [illegible]. [The] sphere from [illegible] alone it is possible to obtain [this] knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes [illegible]' (Lenin, [illegible] Vol.5, p.422.)
20. [illegible] Again [illegible] provides a classic contemporary case [illegible]. During [illegible] summer [illegible] ultra-left attempted to develop its line simply from the [illegible] forces amongst the proletariat of Lisbon. This method, which totally left out of account the situation of the peasants in the [illegible] of the country and the state of the bourgeois forces themselves, inevitably led to disastrous ultra-left conceptions of the relation [illegible] forces — Socialist Worker of 6 December 1975, for example, [illegible] 'Winning the Masses', in Red Weekly, 8 January 1976.)
21. Lukacs: Lenin, p.82.
22. Lukacs: 1967 'Preface to the English edition [of] History and Class Consciousness [illegible].'
23. ibid., p.xxx.
24. Rosemont et al, in Memory of Georg Lukacs.
25. [illegible] merely an expression of his essential political development [illegible]. [illegible] on 'Western Marxism': 'Despite everything, its [Western Marxism's] major thinkers remained immune [illegible] reformism' (Anderson: Considerations on Western Marxism, p.93).
26. Michael Lowy: 'Lukacs and Stalinism', in New Left Review 91, attempts to make out a case for a final political regeneration of Lukacs. However, the absolutely meagre evidence which is all that even this heroic effort can bring shows how thankless the task is. Apart from various criticisms of US imperialism, which were standard even in the most 'peace-oriented' period, the most that Lowy can dig out of real criticism of the Stalinist system (as opposed to the Stalin individual) is that Lukacs apparently said in a conversation with one of his ex-students that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was 'the greatest disaster for the communist [illegible] approved the Kaiser's war credits in 1914' [illegible]. Doubtless it is interesting to know that Lukacs opposed the [illegible]. [illegible] comment: 'On 4 June 1971 [illegible] "return to first principles"; after half a century of "reconciliation" and "lost illusions", Lukacs had, in the last three years of his life, begun to rediscover the intense hopes, the red flame of the People's Commissar of 1919' (ibid., p.41). In his admiration for Lukacs' theoretical gifts, Lowy has unfortunately lost all sense of political [illegible] invasion of Czechoslovakia. Trotskyists denounced 99 scoundrels [illegible] those who did not. Does Lukacs, on the basis of a private conversation of dissociation, become 'the red flame of the People's [illegible]' [illegible] on this 'greatest disaster to [illegible] movement since 1914'? Just as throughout the preceding 50 years, Lukacs moaned and groaned a bit but did precisely nothing. If Lowy wants to try to [illegible] anything different he has in reality abandoned all serious political standards. To take an obvious analogy, Lenin might well have admired Plekhanov's philosophy greatly, but he would never have dreamed of covering up for his rotten politics.
27. [illegible] death ('Georg Lukacs — Fate of the Unattached Intellectual' in Red Mole, 15 June 1971). This article committed the opposite error to that of Lowy above. In the name of a (perfectly justified) attack on Lukacs' political record, it attempted to deny virtually any theoretical merit to the work produced following his capitulation to [illegible] in the [illegible] debates. [illegible] to maintain the distinction and relative autonomy between politics and theory and, within that, the primacy of the political criterion.