Lukacs on reification

The largest part of Georg Lukacs's famous 1923 book History and Class Consciousness is entitled Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.

Lukacs had been a big intellectual figure in Hungary and Germany for some years before becoming a Marxist in 1918. He took part in the ill-fated Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Fleeing subsequent repression, he became part of the "theory of the offensive" "ultra-left" faction of the Comintern, centred in Vienna. Somewhat retreating from that and proclaiming himself the most Leninist of Leninists, he published History and Class Consciousness in 1923.

The book was denounced by Zinoviev in 1924 from the platform of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern (not yet quite Stalinist, but already substantially degenerated) and Lukacs retreated again, though he wrote a defence (or semi-defence: assessments vary) unpublished at the time. He withdrew from active politics around 1928 after clashing with the new "Third Period" policy of the Comintern; spent most of the time from 1930 to 1945 in Russia, evading repression but writing famously about literature; returned to Hungary in 1945, and appeared as a prestigious intellectual supporter of the Stalinist regime until 1956, when, at age 71, he supported the anti-Stalinist uprising. He survived the subsequent repression and was a supporter of the Kadar regime, probably always quietly critical and later vocally so, until his death in 1971.

History and Class Consciousness came back into discussion following Lukacs's self-distancing from Stalinism in 1956. In the English-speaking world it became a major reference especially after an English translation of the book came out in 1971. (A translation of Lukacs's shorter 1924 book, Lenin, had already appeared in 1970).

All that has made "reification" part of Marxist discourse.

(For myself, I recall a Labour Club weekend school at my university in 1968. With other newbies, I was dispatched to be briefed in advance, so we could understand the sessions, on necessary terminology. Our instructor was Andrew Gamble, later a famous academic Marxist. He was then reckoned to be the member of the Labour Club best-read in Marxist literature, including that not yet translated into English. Andrew, sitting at his desk as we others clustered around, read out to us definitions of two words, "alienation" and "reification", from Berger and Pullberg, Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness, New Left Review Jan-Feb 1966. We returned to the main event, grateful but still fairly baffled).

The first English translation of at least part of History and Class Consciousness was by the Third Camp Heterodox Trotskyists of the ISL in the USA in 1957. The International Socialism group in the UK, what is now the SWP but back then had at least some affinity with Heterodox Trotskyism, republished that translation in 1966. In 1955 the dissident French Communist Party intellectual Henri Lefebvre gave a talk on Lukacs which then (because of CP hostility) was not printed up for thirty years. The French translation of History and Class Consciousness in 1960 came from a philosopher, Kostas Axelos, critical of the French Stalinist party. The leading French Mandelite writer Michael Löwy wrote a book on Lukacs in 1976 translated to English in 1979.

In our time in the UK, John Rees of Counterfire has been the main advocate of Lukacs as "the most important Marxist political philosopher since Marx" and "the great theorist of revolution in the 20th century".

Comrades around Workers' Liberty also often have a warmer assessment of Lukacs than I do. But I think a cool assesment is also called for of Lukacs's argument about reification.

Lukacs developed the idea of reification to mean, roughly, human activities and relations being transformed into or dominated by "things" (Latin: res). He got the word from the writings of Max Weber's associate Georg Simmel, and much of his explication from Weber, to whom Lukacs was close from 1913, long before he (Lukacs) became a Marxist (in 1918).

"Reification" is Lukacs's rendering of what Weber described as rationalisation, bureaucratisation, mechanisation, dehumanisation, the "disenchantment of the world". Humanity, says Lukacs, has been "socially destroyed, fragmented, and divided between different partial systems" – "humanity destroyed by reification".

Lukacs finds, or thinks he finds, the same idea in Marx.

Weber was politically a conservative-nationalist liberal; Simmel, according to a 2021 study, had a "peculiar kind of liberal-Nietzschean aristocratic individualism". Neither saw a clear way out of what Weber gloomily described as the "iron cage".

"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future… [maybe we will have only] mechanised petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved'."

Lukacs, however, holds that "the consciousness of the proletariat" is a way out of the "mechanised petrification" and "nullity".

How? By what Lukacs thinks of as dialectics, the dialectical method which (so Lukacs has told us elsewhere in History and Class Consciousness) grasps the totality whatever particular errors may be made, and thanks to which (Lukacs believes) a revolutionary party equipped with the method can lead the working class whatever the vagaries of some or even many actual workers.

How this "dialectical" inversion will enable the working class to understand the "totality" of very large parts of society (today, and even more in Lukacs's own time) which are neither working class nor capital, Lukacs does not explain. He rebukes Engels for adducing scientific experiment as a valid way of grasping reality, and is disdainful of all "specialised" (i.e. all real) scientific investigation.

Lukacs takes off from an early declaration by Marx:

"“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.”

He could have quoted other passages:

"The proletariat… is the complete loss of humanity and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of humanity".

"Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since humanity has lost itself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need — the practical expression of necessity — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity… [and] It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today".

Marx wrote those passages, in the years before he and Engels had come to , in Engels's words, "settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience". He did not repeat or republish them in later years, when his references to earlier writings were all to On the Question of Free Trade, The Poverty of Philosophy, Wage Labour and Capital, the Communist Manifesto, and some texts by Engels.

On the contrary, he wrote in Wages, Price, and Profit (1865) that if the working class do not use the chances which capitalism allows us to organise and improve our lot (trade unions, shorter working hours, better wages, more education) then we will become "one level mass of broken wretches". That wretchedness, rather than plugging us into a neat dialectical inversion by which we will "completely re-win humanity", will "disqualify [us] for the initiating of any larger movement".

Lukacs, however, goes further than did Marx in his years of (as Engels later put it) "German-philosophical" flourishes. The "consciousness of the proletariat" will not only do away with "inhuman conditions of life" (reification, for Simmel; rationalisation, bureaucratisation, mechanisation, specialisation, etc. for Weber).

It will make the proletariat "the identical subject-object of history" and give it understanding of "the totality". It thus resolves the dilemma running through classical German philosophy. All knowledge is necessarily subjective, because dependent on the (episodic and partial) sense-impressions and previous judgements of the subject; how, then, can anything be known objectively? It will also, comments Lukacs in passing, resolve impasses in jurisprudence and aesthetics.

I have studied some of Hegel (the two Logics, the Phenomenology, the Philosophy of History), but only extracts from Kant. I know of Fichte and Schelling only through secondary survey books, and I know nothing of their contemporary Solger, whom Lukacs praises. I know nothing much about the debates in jurisprudence and aesthetics which Lukacs discusses.

Nevertheless, I am sure that Lukacs is wrong. Wrong on the presentation of "the consciousness of the proletariat" as a way out of "reification", and wrong in his conversion of the Marxist critique of capitalism into a version of Simmel's and Weber's ideas about reification and rationalisation.

Some of what I will say about this is also said by Chris O'Kane in a useful short article.

To present Marx as a version of Simmel and Weber, Lukacs relies on chapter 1 section 4 of Marx's Capital volume one, on Commodity Fetishism. Moreover, he asserts that section contains the gist of Marx's critique of capitalism.

Marx notes explicitly in Capital volume 1 that he has not developed the concepts of labour-power (as a commodity) and of capital. Indeed, in principle (though not in historical fact) an entire society could operate with generalised commodity exchange (the presumption of chapter 1 section 4), via production by small farms and workshops with no capital and no sale of labour-power. It makes no sense that the whole Marxist understanding of capitalism and the working class is there already in chapter 1, section 4, without capital and without the sale of labour-power.

Moreover, in chapter 1 of Capital the word Verdinglichung (Lukacs's German word for reification, taken from Simmel) does not appear. The word Vergegenständlichung does appear. Modern dictionaries give "reification" as one possible translation of that (alongside "objectification" or "concretisation"). In English translations of Capital it is rendered (reasonably, I think) as "materialisation" (as in: the labour of a boot-maker is materialised in boots)

Marx then argues:

"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour… [in the market] a definite social relation between men [i.e. exchange of products of their labour]... assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things".

"The labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products... To the [producers], therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things".

The two passages seem at first sight to contradict each other. The economic relations between people appear in the market as a social relation between things (a pair of boots is equivalent to x yards of linen) and a material relation between people (who exchange things). That is a "fantastic form"? Or what the relations "really are"?

Both. The relations between boot-makers and linen-makers go via the "social" relation between boots and linen, in which boots and linen appear to – i.e. in the "market view" of society do – have their exchange-values as properties in the same way as they have weights. That way of operating is real, but also a "fantastic form".

The "mystification" here is not that the boots are "things", or that the labour of the boot-makers is represented socially in the boots. Of course it is. It would be in any mode of production. It is that the things are personified – that they appear to have social agency. Somewhat as gods, the constructs of human imagination, "appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race" in ancient Greek mythology, for example.

The "thing-ification" of labour – its embodiment in a product – is not at all special to a society of general commodity exchange. Special is the "personification" of the "things".

In that section of Capital, Marx, just for simplicity I think, assumes all commodities are physical goods, boots, linen, whatever. He was entirely aware that some products of labour are not discrete physical goods, but material processes or even capacity, like transport services produced by transport workers, stored electricity produced by power workers, labour power, etc. The reference to "thing-ification" in Capital chapter 1 section 4 is an expository simplification, not a core of critique.

There are parts of Marx's critique of capitalism which could be expressed in terms of "thing-ification". Capital appears as a thing, or a collection of things (machines, buildings, stashes of cash), whereas those are only passing forms in the ongoing process which is capital, and their apparent capacities of social agency ("capital as fructiferous") come from the social relations within that process.

Lukacs argues that labour-power appears to us as a "thing" which we then sell. That is doubtful. However bewildered we may be by the market show of capitalist society, we know that the labour capacities we sell are ongoing processes based on our past activity.

Lukacs goes on to argue that the working class is more dehumanised by reification than the bourgeoisie or middle-class official (bureaucrats). Here, though not referring to Capital, he relies on Marx's analysis in chapter 15 of Capital on large-scale machine industry. There, Marx argues, workers become more and more machine-minders, regulated by the system of machinery (things).

Lukacs completes his argument by reference to chapter 23 of Capital, where Marx sketches the ground for what has in recent decades become "the theory of social reproduction" by arguing that "from a social point of view, therefore, the working class, even when not directly engaged in the [social, industrial] labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the ordinary instruments of labour".

"In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life, he finds this to be an illusion".

Lukacs's presentation could be bolstered by quite a few short passages quoted from Marx. But in fact it flattens Marx's analysis, in fact in an undialectical way.

Machine-minders have never been the majority of the working class. In Marx's own day, according to figures he himself gives in Capital, the total factory workforce was markedly less numerous than domestic servants.

Once a job is reduced to machine-minding, or to supplementing the flow of the system of machinery by repeated stereotype actions, it is ripe for automation. And with microelectronics since the 1960s, many such jobs have been automated. Factory jobs have become more likely to be skilled machine-operation, painting, welding, maintenance and repair, internal transport, checking, coordination, design, etc.

Even machine-minding changes constantly as technology does, and requires considerable skills and "knacks". As Marx wrote: "Modern industry imposes… variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of their varied aptitudes". At the same time, it also works to tie workers to narrow, highly specialised, stereotype tasks. Both tendencies exist.

Capitalist production both "dehumanises" each particular job, and seeks a constantly greater level of human development from labour-power - literacy, numeracy, capacity to process information critically, communication and teamwork skills. It both seeks to drive down wages and lengthen work hours, and gives the working class scope to increase real wages and force shortening of work hours.

The length of the working week, as Marx stresses in Capital, is not at all rigidly determined by the rules of commodity exchange or anything "reified".

"The nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day... There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges... Hence is it that... the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class".

The value of labour-power (let alone how many workers' wages fail even to reach that level, i.e. "a living wage") contains a "moral and historical element", i.e. not just determined by the market "social relations between things". It is pushed up and down by class struggle.

It could be argued that capitalists, in those struggles over work hours and wages, are trapped by "reification" in the sense that, even if they personally think shorter hours and better wages would be more humane, their decisions are dictated by calculated effects on profits and share prices. But workers in those struggles act not as mere "carriers" of the commodity labour-power, but as human beings, concerned to win free time and the means to do more in that free time. Lukacs suggests that the upper classes are encaged by "reification" less than the working class, but it is not so.

To point out the two-sideness here, the degree to which capitalist functioning is not just determined by market "mechanisms", is not pedantic over-correction. Only that two-sidedness enables the working class to develop politically.

Workers win (in collective struggle, not just by having improvements handed down) "free time" and scope to read, discuss, and educate ourselves.

To be sure, in our "free time" outside work hours (and the "free time" which is breaks at work) we reproduce ourselves as labour-power: fed, rested, and fit for a new week's work, and forced to sell our labour-power again because otherwise we cannot feed, clothe, etc. our households for the next week. But how we do that is prescribed in no such detail as our activity in work time is. We can and do use that "free time" to socialise with friends and workmates (often of cultural backgrounds different from our own) and to discuss with them; to read; to watch films; to take part in socialist and trade-union meetings, book clubs, and demonstrations; to study socialist theory; to attend art exhibitions and public lectures, etc. Chattel slaves and serfs had no such options.

In Lukacs' scheme, the "consciousness of the proletariat" develops through a sort of dialectical "ruse of reason", or at best by elemental human revolt against inhuman conditions. His discussion is long, but nowhere adduces organisation and discussion and self-education among workers (or the efforts of "intellectuals of bourgeois origin", like Marx or Lukacs himself, to bring ideas into the workers' movement) as engines. Marx, and reality, indicate something different. Marx specifically disputed the idea that capitalism is unilaterally a "destruction of humanity".

"Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from themselves and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of their relations and capacities".

But also! The whole of working-class politics lives in that "but also". Marx noted: "The worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for their own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating their children, developing their taste etc…" Without that, no workers' movement, no "consciousness of the proletariat".

The "romantic", semi-magical character of Lukacs' sketch of "the consciousness of the proletariat" is the flipside of his horrified-glance-from-above, "romantic", picture of the working class as "destroyed by reification".