2. Content and totality: Lukács’s critique of Kant

Before I analyse how Lukács uses neo-Kantian concepts in his critique of capitalism, I will detail his explicit discussion and critique of Kant. Lukács deems Kant’s philosophical system to be troubled by insurmountable tensions. Yet he does not rest content with a philosophical critique of transcendental idealism. Interlacing philosophical critique with the sociology of knowledge, he treats classical German philosophy as an expression of social reality, and he uses its problems and tensions as diagnostic indicators of conflicts within that reality. In Lukács’s reconstruction, what is philosophically false can capture something true about society. Kant must fail, precisely because he provides a clear-eyed and uncompromising presentation of capitalist rationality and its breaking points.

Part of the reification chapter is a broader historical reconstruction of classical German philosophy under the telling title ‘antinomies of bourgeois thought’, which houses Lukács’s critique of Kant. In this reconstruction, Lukács brings out the continuities between German idealism and historical materialism, suggesting that the latter holds the solution to the failures of the former. The symmetry of failures and solutions is erected on a common promise: Vico’s declaration that history can be known because it is a human product (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 288). At stake in modern philosophy is nothing less than the reconciliation of subject and object in and through history.

Lukács finds in Kant’s transcendental idealism a radicalisation of Vico’s promise. Modelled on mathematical physics, the Kantian mind can grasp the world precisely because its formal structures are constitutive of experience. Unlike his rationalist predecessors, however, Kant is attentive to the boundaries that the ‘abstract, formal-rationalist “human” capacity for cognition’ (ibid. 291) must face. The notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’ gives explicit expression to these boundaries. Lukács identifies two problems that are bound up with the concept of the ‘thing-in-itself’.

First, he reads Kant as a non-conceptualist who holds consciousness to receive representational content from sensibility.Footnote ⁴ This sensible content is initially independent of the categories, the ‘forms’ of the understanding, under which it must subsequently be subsumed for cognition to be possible. For Lukács, this means that the ‘suchness of the sensual contents’ (ibid., 292) presents itself as an external, ‘irresolvable given’ (ibid. 293) and is in this sense ‘irrational’ (ibid.). Formal cognition remains incomplete, as it needs to refer to its content as an irrational other which it cannot penetrate.

Second, this opens up the question as to how the individual contents of consciousness can be integrated into a system, or put differently, how the contents can be known as a totality. While Lukács’s remarks on this issue remain somewhat cursory, he correctly points out that Kant’s principles provide but a formal framework for possible experience, not a system of actual experience (ibid. 293). The problem that Kant faces – and that he addresses in the third Critique by introducing ‘reflective judgement’ – is how individual empirical cognitions can be organised not just in terms of their shared formal structure, but ‘qua content’, reflecting their specific suchness.

Whatever the details of Kant’s proposed solution, Lukács is not convinced that the problem can be solved at all. Any formal account of reason, on which the contents of consciousness are subsumed to external forms, must lead to the conclusion that thought cannot grasp the totality of being. ‘[T]he unresolved problem of irrationality reappears in the problem of totality’ (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 298). Lukács is quite clear that the root of these difficulties is to be found in the form-content dualism. This dualism creates a dilemma: if content is reduced to the system, the givenness of the content is negated and we fall back into dogmatic rationalism. But if content is said to reach into the structure of the system, the very idea of a system needs to be given up, since the contents of sensibility are arbitrary (ibid., 295).

After having identified these problems in Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Lukács turns to his moral philosophy. His main target is the concept of transcendental freedom, which, on Lukács’s reading, remains a mere external point of view for the evaluation of happenings that are subject to mechanical necessity. Since Kant’s dualism forecloses any contact between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the moral ought can confront reality only externally and subjectively (ibid., 302-303). Lukács’s interpretation stops short of meaningfully engaging with Kant’s own attempts at resolving these difficulties. But it is ingenious in detecting the very same structural tension that had already animated Kant’s theoretical philosophy in his turn to the practical. It is, again, the form-content dualism that separates the mechanical laws that can be known from what must remain irrational (concrete content) and that ends up confining the subject of practice within its own formal structures (ibid., 306). Because the problems of Kant’s transcendental idealism remained unresolved in theoretical philosophy, they are bound to reappear in practical terms.

This critique of Kant is of broader significance. Lukács holds that the antinomic structure of formal reason is not specific to Kant, but characteristic of modern rationality in general. He observes that the conflict between content and totality that had troubled Kant’s theoretical philosophy also marks the special sciences. Empirical science registers isolated facts and states the formal laws that these are submitted to, without, however, being able to provide an understanding of their totality (ibid., 298). Lukács also finds the conflict that had marked Kant’s moral philosophy to reappear in German social democracy, in particular in the debates between reformists and utopianists (ibid., 383). While the reformists assumed that the demise of capitalism would be brought about by mechanical laws of history, the utopians upheld socialism as a pure ethical ideal external to historical reality. Neither is able to make sense of how political practice can intervene into history, very much like Kant, who fails to explain how the transcendentally free subject can intervene into the laws that govern the world of experience.

For Lukács, the mode of reason which encounters these problems is wide-ranging and pervasive, since, as we will see in the next section, it is rooted in the reified social relations of capitalism itself. Formal reason, for Lukács, corresponds to the paradoxical experience of modernity: social institutions can for the first time be known as the product of human activity alone, yet those same institutions seem to be characterised by a ‘fatalist necessity alien to and distant from human beings’ (ibid., 307; see also 361 for a slightly different formulation)Footnote ⁵ . At the precise moment of making the social world visible as a human creation, modernity also creates a formal mode of rationality that envisages this world in terms of isolated facts and mechanical laws. Any sense of the social totality is lost, and conscious control over the development of society on the whole becomes impossible. Kant is to be credited with having given a clear account of formal reason and its problems, as produced by capitalist modernity. Situating Kant socially in this manner justifies a further step in Lukács: since unbeknownst to Kant himself, his concepts express reification, Kant can be read as a diagnostician of capitalism.

3. The categorial form of reified experience

The analysis and critique of reification remain Lukács’s decisive contribution to the traditions of Western Marxism and critical theory. His objections notwithstanding, Adorno – and the early Frankfurt School – remain indebted to Lukács in precisely this point: the concept of ‘reified consciousness’ brings into view how capitalist social relations maim experience, creating a subject ‘incapable of experiencing things not already contained in the repertory of eversameness’ (Adorno Reference Adorno and Ashton1973, 95).

In this section, I will show that Lukács’s account of capitalist reification is more firmly rooted in transcendental idealism than his critique of Kant may lead one to expect. Lukács argues that capitalism’s social forms constitute a categorical structure that shapes how the subject experiences the world. Capitalism creates historically specific ‘forms of objectivity’ (Gegenständlichkeitsformen) and ‘forms of subjectivity’ (Formen der Subjektivität) (ibid., 257), that determine what can become an object of experience and how the subject is to encounter it.Footnote ⁶

In Lukács’s analysis, the most important social form in capitalist modernity is the commodity. In his own words, the problem of the commodity is the ‘central, structural problem of capitalist society in all expressions of life’, and the ‘archetype of all forms of objectivity and all corresponding forms of subjectivity in bourgeois society’ (ibid., 257). Note that this is not a commodification thesis. Lukács does not argue that in capitalism, everything becomes a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. Rather, his argument is that a society which organises its own reproduction through commodity exchange also creates a historically specific categorical structure that shapes both subjects and objects of experience. As we will see, the capitalist world of experience is reified, because it is populated by isolated facts subject to unchanging laws and by individualised subjects that passively observe these objects.

Lukács develops this set of claims through a reading of the commodity fetishism chapter of Capital, vol. 1. Arguably, the central theme of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism had been the disappearance of social relations behind things: in commodity exchange, relations between the things to be traded come to stand in for relations between their producers, ‘a definite social relation between men … assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx Reference Marx1887, 83). Lukács, however, is not primarily concerned with how social relations disappear behind things and their presumed properties. Rather, he is interested in how capitalist categories and their corresponding forms of objectivity and subjectivity emerge. In order to explain how the commodity form provides the archetype of all forms of objectivity and subjectivity in capitalist modernity, he draws on Marx’s concept of ‘abstract labour’.

Marx had introduced ‘abstract labour’ as the ‘substance of value’: for two commodities to be exchangeable, they need to be considered commensurable. As use-values, the traded items may be incommensurable. Yet their commensurability as exchange-values is ensured by the fact that both are expenditures of human labour. And the labour in question counts not as concrete labour, as a specific productive activity performed under specific circumstances, but merely as ‘human labour in the abstract’ (Marx Reference Marx1887, 84).

Lukács deems this abstraction from concrete labour to be the central mechanism that creates the formal rationality characteristic of capitalist modernity. Objectively, the abstraction consists in making qualitatively different entities exchangeable by treating them as products of the same, formally equal human labour (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 261). Subjectively, abstract labour also becomes the ‘real principle of the actual production process of commodities’ (ibid.). This means that human labour is being rendered comparable and calculable through the rational organisation of labour processes, leading to ‘an ever greater elimination of the qualitative, human-individual characteristics of the worker’. (ibid., 262)

The importance that Lukács, in these brief passages, seems to ascribe to the rationalisation of industrial labour processes has led some commentators to closely align alienation and reification (Feenberg Reference Feenberg1981, 94). However, such a reading ignores that labour-rationalisation is introduced as the subjective side of a more encompassing process. Far from deriving reification from alienation in industrial production, Lukács here gestures towards an understanding of abstract labour as the unified form of capitalist production and exchange.Footnote ⁷ Arguably, a society in which commodity exchange is the dominant form for allocating resources and labour-time is also a society in which the goal of production is exchange. For this reason, the same overarching principle may be seen to characterise both spheres. The labour-abstraction is this common principle. In commodity exchange, qualitatively different and hence incommensurable use-values are treated as formal equivalents. In commodity production, qualitatively different processes of concrete labour count only as expenditure of human labour as such. Hence, in both domains, the social form is abstract – a world of formal equivalence and quantitative measure is erected that is independent of the qualitative human content subsumed under it.

Note the structural parallels to Kant’s philosophy. If the main problem of Kant’s philosophy consisted in its dualism, subsuming contents to external forms, we can detect the same dualism in capitalist social reality itself: qualitative human content is subsumed to the form of abstract labour. For Lukács, the fundamental process of labour-abstraction needs to be understood to provide capitalism’s categorial structure. As a ‘form of objectivity’, the commodity-form produces phenomena as ‘pure facts’: isolated, quantifiable, subject to universal laws, and appropriate to natural scientific method (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 176-178). On the subjective side, the commodity-form creates a ‘contemplative consciousness’ which is individual and passive. Its only mode of action consists in calculating the outcomes of lawlike processes, yet it cannot change the laws themselves (ibid., 273, 307-309). This world, in which objects assume the form of isolated, quantifiable, law-governed facts, while the subject addresses these facts with a passive attitude, is a reified world.

We might find this reference to ‘contemplation’ as an experience of unchangeability startling, given the historical dynamism of capitalism, famously captured by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: ‘Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones’. (Marx/Engels Reference Marx and Engels1848, 487).

Lukács, however, draws a fundamental contrast between a historical dynamism that remains external to the subject, and historical change that results from its conscious activity. On his account, the antinomies of capitalist modernity make it impossible to understand and intend the social totality in practice, they erect real barriers to intentional change of the social whole. As long as the reified form of objectivity is not broken, humans cannot change the totality and must remain passive observers of history rather than active creators. This is why it makes sense for Lukács to claim that the pervasive experience and attitude of the subject in capitalist modernity consists in the passive contemplation of general laws and isolated facts.

In this context, Lukács integrates sociological observations about capitalist modernity from the neo-Kantian sociologists Simmel and Weber with his reading of Marx. In his Philosophy of Money, Simmel had argued that the modern monetary economy promotes the human capacity for calculation, and that the spheres of economics, law and scientific thought take the form of an ‘abstract generality’: they disregard the subjective emotional or practical value, and thus the individuality, of what is subject to them (Simmel 1900/Reference Simmel1930, 480-487). While Simmel had still allowed for counter-tendencies in religion, morality, and the arts, for Weber all areas of cultural life show a tendency towards objectification and rationalisation in which ‘one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’ (Weber 1919/Reference Weber, Gerth and Wright Mills1946, 139). In his claim that modern bureaucracy, law, and science are no less reified than economic relations, Lukács takes up these sociological diagnoses, while re-situating them within his own theory of categorical forms. Once the commodity form has created a world of experience in which a passive subject encounters law-governed facts, all domains of life will be ruled by abstract, formal calculation.

Being based on the same form-content dualism that had animated Kant’s antinomies, reification recreates these antinomies as social and practical problems. That formal rationality grasps neither content nor totality is, for Lukács, not merely a philosophical but a political problem. The predominance of formal rationality creates a situation in which the subject can neither understand nor intend the social whole. While individual social subsystems, such as economics, the state, or law, appear under the rule of abstract rules and laws, the mediations that connect these manifold domains into a totality remain outside the grasp of formal rationality.

Just as in Kant’s philosophy, where the unresolved irrationality of the content reappeared in the problem of totality, in capitalism the social world can no longer be grasped as a whole.

4. But is it idealism? Social form and category

I have shown Lukács’s account of reification to be structured by the very same concepts that have been central to his critique of Kant. In this section, I will discuss the question of whether the Kantian vocabulary of form, content, categories, and forms of objectivity imports an idealism that would be incompatible with his commitment to historical materialism.

One indication that this might be the case stems from Lukács’s use of the term ‘contemplative consciousness’. Adorno picks up on this when he observes that reification is a ‘reflexive form’, and a mere ‘form of consciousness’ (Adorno Reference Adorno and Ashton1973, 190). On my neo-Kantian reading, however, the social world is not merely conceptualised, or thought of as reified. The problem is not that people make a cognitive error and, misconstrue the state of the world when forming a reflexive theoretical understanding of it. Rather, the categorial structure of the social world produces an experience of unchangeability. This means that objects are given in a mode of unchangeability, and their persistent character is the unexamined premise for encountering and interacting with them. Yet the idea that social reality has a categorial structure deserves some examination.

Lukács’s analysis of capitalist modernity is situated within a more encompassing view of the historicity of social life that is centred on the concept of social form. Historical materialism, on Lukács’s view, is first and foremost a way of understanding historicity. On this view, history consists in the production, reproduction, and change of ‘social forms’ – i.e. of the relatively stable relations that organise individuals’ interactions with each other, ‘forms of combining people into society’ (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 220).

Now Lukács holds social forms to be closely related to categories of experience, as well as to the categories that appear in reflexive thought. Criticising Friedrich Engels in a frequently discussed footnote, he writes that materialist dialectics applies only to the social, but not to the natural world (ibid., 175). The underlying assumption is that the social world is conceptual in a manner that the natural world is not. One way to account for the relevant difference has been developed in the hermeneutic and neo-Kantian traditions, which tend to treat the socio-historical as coextensive with the realm of value and meaning. In contrast, Lukács’s account of the conceptuality of the social does not rest on values or the human capacity for symbolic world-making. Rather, Lukács holds that social forms provide the categories which, just like Kant’s categories of the understanding, constitute the structure of the world of experience. As I have shown, the reification chapter develops an account of the historically specific categorial structure of capitalism. One might worry that together with object-constituting categories, the ideal has been allowed to determine history.

Whether this is the case depends entirely on how the relation between social form and category is conceived. Lukács’s remarks on that relation remain somewhat vague. In the essay ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’, he interprets Marx’s introduction to the Grundrisse to state the inseparability of thinking and being (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 175). In the relevant passage, Marx writes that economic categories ‘express forms of being, determinations of existence – and sometimes only individual aspects – of this particular society, of this subject’ (Reference MarxMarx 1857/58, 43). The question is, of course, what it means to say that theoretical categories ‘express’ aspects of society. Marx himself is far from stating the identity of thought and reality. He emphasises that theory needs to develop the categories which ‘reproduce’ the concrete whole of social relations in thought, while ‘[t]he real subject remains outside the mind and independent of it’ (Reference MarxMarx 1857/58, 38). Lukács, however, reads this passage to express the inseparability of method and reality, thinking and being, in such a manner that the ‘real subject’ also builds the categories that allow for its own theorisation (ibid., 174-175). In the footnote that I have already mentioned, he provides more detail on how he envisions the connecting link: ‘unity of theory and practice, historical change of the substrate of the categories as the basis for their change in thinking’ (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 175, my emphasis).

This formulation is crucial. As long as the directionality from social reality to forms of thought is observed, Lukács’s neo-Kantianism does not do much damage to his historical materialism. After all, it is not a transcendental subject that structures the world of experience. Rather, it is the history of the production and reproduction of social forms that makes available the categories that constitute experience, which are then also expressed in theoretical categories, or categories of reflection. Whatever Lukács conception of the relation between social form and categories entails in detail, social reality remains primary.

I believe that the relevance that Lukács, in his account and critique of reification, ascribes to the process of abstraction also protects him from the full force of Adorno’s critique. In Lukács’s concern with reification, Adorno had detected a denigration of all objective being that is not the result of the creative activity of the subject. Adorno sees Lukács falling back into a version of subjective idealism for which the standpoint of the proletariat makes transparent all being as a product of the free act of the human subject (Adorno Reference Adorno and Ashton1973, 191).

This criticism is not entirely adequate. In his critique of the form-content dualism characteristic of modern formal rationality, ‘content’ comes to occupy a position that is similar to Adorno’s ‘non-identical’. Lukács is willing to spell out this content in terms of an ethical humanism, which Adorno would not accept. But in analysing capitalism as a mode of social organisation disfigured by abstraction, and in identifying qualitative content as the site of potential rupture, Lukács’s analysis is continuous with Adorno’s own mode of thought. His notion of ‘content’ stands in for precisely those features of experience that, on Adorno’s analysis, capitalist modernity has cut off: demanding the equivalence of what is incommensurable, the exchange principle suppresses difference, diversity, and otherness – the qualitative content to its identifying forms (Adorno Reference Adorno and Ashton1973, 141-143, 146-148, 173-174). If the antidote to idealism is to be found in the precarious attempt to recognise the non-identical, Lukács’s insistence on a human content that remains irreducible to the formal rationality of capitalist abstraction goes some of the way.

At what point does Lukács’s philosophy show a problematic attachment to idealism, then? When turning to practice, Lukács switches from Kantian to Hegelian modes of speech. And he fashions his practical answer to reification on Hegel’s critique of Kant. As a result, he adopts a Hegelian emphasis on the developmental unity of being and consciousness, theory and practice in history. I want to suggest that this emphasis on unity is, indeed, an idealist remnant that keeps Lukács from systematically developing his own insights into the conditioned and contingent character of political practice.

5. Hegelian mediations: the practice of de-reification

Although his problem diagnosis is (neo-)Kantian, when developing an account of transformative social practice, Lukács changes mode of speech. Seeking to identify the conditions under which the proletariat emerges as the active subject of history, he increasingly draws on Hegelian concepts of subject and object, essence and appearance, mediation, totality, and unity. He takes this step with confidence, encouraged by what he deems Hegel’s special status in modern philosophy: only Hegel understood that the antinomies of formal rationality need to be resolved in history. Moreover, Hegel’s dialectical method of mediations presents a genuine alternative to Kant’s formalistic conception of reason (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 324-325).

Lukács finds Hegel to ultimately fall back into dualism since his ‘world-spirit’ transcends the actions of concrete historical agents. Incapable of finding the identical subject-object in actual history, Hegel reverts to ‘mythology’ (ibid., 328-329). And yet, to the extent that philosophies need to be read as reflections on social reality, Hegel represents – in the sphere of bourgeois thought – those social conditions that point beyond the reified world of capitalist modernity. What are these conditions?

As detailed above, reification is based on the labour-abstraction. Hence, the possibility of countering reification depends on overcoming the separation of abstract form and content. Lukács is quite explicit about this point:

If practice is to be possible, Lukács therefore has to show that there is a site within reified experience where the separation of form and content can be challenged. He finds this site in the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’. For Lukács, the wage-worker has a privileged standpoint in capitalist society not just because their centrality in production affords them collective power, but because the commodity form – which, as we have seen, is the central form of capitalist social relations – is ‘the defining form of his existence as a subject, as a human being’ (ibid., 351). In selling their own labour-power, the worker comes to experience abstraction, paradoxically, in concrete terms. ‘In the life of the worker the quantification of objects, their being determined by abstract categories of reflection, appears immediately as a process of abstraction that is carried out on himself’ (ibid., 349).Footnote ¹⁰ Lukács also captures this in terms of the Hegelian notion of quantity changing into quality – a change which is apparent to the worker, but not to the capitalist:

Lukács suggests that the transformation of quantity into quality, abstraction into concrete experience, means that the worker becomes ‘the self-consciousness of the commodity’ (ibid., 352). The worker knows themselves to be a concrete human subject that gives life to the commodity form that they are subjected to. Here is an experience that does not accord with capitalist modernity’s dominant ‘form of objectivity’: not isolated quantifiable fact, but qualitative significance. Encapsulated within that experience is the possibility of overcoming all reified forms of objectivity. Once reification is fractured by human content, all social forms can – at least potentially – be seen to exist as products of human relations. When explaining how this wider process of de-reification becomes possible, Lukács’s claim that Marx’s historical materialism is the rightful heir to Hegel’s dialectical method unfolds its full constructive force.

One of the critiques that Hegel launched against Kant was that his categories remain purely formal. The merely formal categories of the understanding remain empty if they do not receive an external content from the faculty of sensibility. The restriction of cognition to experience, the incapacity of concepts to grasp the ‘thing in itself’, can thus be seen to result from the form-content dualism (Hegel Reference Hegel2010, 83-85, 88). Hegel’s counter-strategy is to allow for concepts to provide their own content. A dialectical process unfolds the implicit presuppositions of a given concept as the successive determinations of its content. Mediation refers to the mutual dependencies between initially abstract concepts and their hidden presuppositions. Concepts are fluid, unfolding the connections and interrelations in which they implicitly already stand, and from which they receive their determinate, i.e. concrete, meaning (ibid., 56-64). This unfolding eventually uncovers the unity of all previous mediations, their totality. ‘[T]he true insofar as it is concrete exists only through unfolding itself in itself, collecting and holding itself together in a unity, i.e. as a totality’. (ibid., 43).

Lukács’s theory of practice takes up Hegel’s strategy for overcoming abstraction. As we have seen, he thinks that the commodity form becomes concrete in the life-experience of the wage-worker, the living content which emerges as ‘the self-consciousness of the commodity’ (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 352). On this basis, it becomes possible ‘to increasingly render concrete and overcome the abstract universality of the form of appearance’ (ibid., 356) of society in general. In ever-wider social spheres, the form of objectivity in which social phenomena present themselves initially – unchanging laws and isolated facts – can be broken to reveal the mediations, connections, and mutual dependencies that relate different social objects and phenomena. Understood as mediated, social objects show themselves as what they implicitly have been all along: historical and changeable. ‘The realisation … that social objects are not things, but relationships between people, rises to their complete dissolution into processes’ (ibid., 366).Footnote ¹²

Note that revealing the human core of the commodity form is not already revolutionary practice. Lukács knows that once the individual worker has grasped themselves as the living core of the commodity form, they still need to work for a wage. The worker’s ‘minimal consciousness’ (Arato/Breines Reference Arato and Breines1979, 134) of form-content identity presents no more than the possibility of a rupture in the reified world of capitalism. A more encompassing process of de-reification needs to be worked out in revolutionary theory, in the formation of the proletariat as a self-conscious class, and in the self-organisation and revolutionary activity of that class. And this is not an automatic process. Lukács holds that the historicization of different social domains will proceed according to requirements and challenges specific to these domains. He also allows for some domains of being, ‘nature’ most importantly, to resist de-reification (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 394-395). Nevertheless, he is optimistic that starting from the capital-labour relation, the mediated social totality can gradually be disclosed. Precisely because the commodity form provides the categorial form of experience in capitalist society, the discovery of its human content ripples through ever wider social domains (ibid., 371). Just as Hegel’s concepts imply their own concrete content and become fluid, the experience of the worker allows for connecting social phenomena. In the final step, as this understanding of the historical totality is raised to the consciousness of the working class, the proletariat emerges as the identical subject-object of history. As the barriers to grasping – and to intending – society as a historical totality are broken down, the revolutionary transformation of society becomes possible as a ‘free act of the proletariat’ (ibid., 397).

Arato and Breines have suggested that a gap remains between the minimal consciousness of the individual worker and the self-consciousness of a unified proletarian class, and a corresponding gap between the de-reification effected by Marxist theory and that achieved through practice (Arato/Breines Reference Arato and Breines1979, 136). If there is a problem of idealism in Lukács’s conception of practice, it concerns his approach to these moments of disunity.

6. Idealism, practice, and history

Before concluding, it makes sense to spell out why idealism should be considered objectionable in the first place. Perhaps most commonly, the danger of idealism is seen to reside in a misidentification of the drivers and character of historical development. The posthumously published drafts by Marx and Engels, compiled under the title of The German Ideology, present a stable reference point and source for this sentiment, taunting idealism for the installment of mere ideas as active forces of history. The problem with idealism, we might think, is that it misconceives historicity in terms of ideas instead of ‘real, active men’ (Reference Marx and EngelsMarx/Engels 1845/46, 36), disembodied thought instead of human agency. Since it mystifies the actual drivers of historical development, it hinders humans from entering the historical plane as conscious subjects. This is the background against which it makes sense to think that idealism must be overcome by a turn to practice. But the tenor of the German Ideology, and in particular of the notes collected under the title ‘Feuerbach’ is a different one.

Opposing idealist exaggerations of the formative power of ideas and consciousness, Marx and Engels stress not so much human agency as material necessity, the dependency of all forms of society and culture on nature, life, and the labour performed by human bodies. Practice then does not refer to the subject’s self-conscious intervention into history, but to that collectively organised physical activity which ensures the survival of both human individuals and social formations. ‘As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts, as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists’ (Marx/Engels Reference Marx and Engels1845/46, 37). These two criticisms pull in different directions. While the former bolsters subjectivity and agency, the latter reverberates in Adorno’s reminder that the subject remains dependent on the non-identical other (Adorno Reference Adorno and Ashton1973, 183).

Recent literature has attempted to absolve Lukács from the charge of idealism by showing both aspects of this critique of idealism to be present in his writings. Feenberg and Kavoulakos have argued that when characterising the working class as the ‘identical subject-object’ of history, Lukács does not relapse into idealism, but points to the necessary mediation between subjective agency and its historical conditions. The defense can be summarised in terms of four points.

First, Feenberg and Kavoulakos point out that Lukács envisages historical practice as conditioned. Revolutionary practice does not create the world like an absolute subject would, but rather, it mediates and transforms pre-existing historical conditions (Feenberg Reference Feenberg2014, 133-134). The proletariat as a subject, as the conscious agent of historical transformation, itself emerges as a product of this activity of confronting and transforming the given (Kavoulakos Reference Kavoulakos2018, 89). Second, among the conditions of practice is a subject-independent ‘nature’ which cannot be fully de-reified, presenting itself as an external limit to transformative practice (Feenberg Reference Feenberg2014, 130-131, 135-136, 141-142; Kavoulakos Reference Kavoulakos2018, 213-218). Third, there are practice-immanent limits to de-reification. This point is stressed by Kavoulakos, who argues that the practical-organisational conditions of historical agency can themselves present limits to social transformation (Kavoulakos Reference Kavoulakos2018, 208-209). Fourth, historical change is a contingent and open-ended process. The formation of class-consciousness cannot proceed in a single stroke. It takes place gradually, facing the permanent risk of set-backs and failures (Feenberg Reference Feenberg2014, 134; Kavoulakos Reference Kavoulakos2018, 188-189, 196). Therefore, the identical subject-object issues no guarantee of success, as it itself ‘appears and fades with the rhythms of the historical struggle’ (Feenberg Reference Feenberg2014, 137).

If more thoroughly developed, this set of insights would indeed allow for a materialist conception of history as conditioned and contingent. Kavoulakos has suggested that Lukács’s references to the ‘identical subject-object’ of history are merely lexical – borrowings of idealist terms devoid of substantive theoretical content. On his reading, the idealism charge could easily have been avoided had Lukács spoken of the ‘mediation’, rather than the ‘identity’, of subject and object in history (Kavoulakos Reference Kavoulakos2018, 89-90).

My own reading is less charitable. In my view, the Hegelian language in which Lukács’s philosophy of practice is cast severely constrains the extent to which he can acknowledge and theorise the conditioned and contingent character of history. It hampers the development of Lukács’s own insights into the disunified and open-ended character of political practice. The problem emerges because the structure that the practical answer to reification must take is – from the onset – determined by a theoretical demand for unity taken over from Hegel’s critique of Kant. In what follows, I seek to make visible how Lukács’s use of Hegelian concepts leads him to conceive of being and consciousness, theory and practice as a historically developing unity. And this idea constrains his own insights into practice as a contingent confrontation of disunities. To make this case, I will turn to the later chapters of History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács reflects on the theoretical and organisational conditions of revolutionary practice.

As we have seen, Lukács characterises historical materialism as a theory of social mediations which breaks through the reified form of experience by revealing the interconnected and processual nature of social reality. In his practical reflections, he continues this line of thought, emphasising that historical materialism must serve as ‘means of combat’ (Lukács Reference Lukács2013, 398) in revolutionary struggle. The theory of historical materialism fulfils practical functions, allowing the proletariat to understand how its own activity is related to the broader social structures and historical tendencies of capitalist society. Lukács argues that the objective developmental tendencies of the capitalist mode of production repeatedly culminate in situations of crisis. Moments of crisis are, at the same time, moments of historical openness in which the possibility of revolutionary transformation comes into reach. However, whether the proletariat experiences the crisis as a passive object, or as a subject that can turn this crisis into a moment of historical decision, depends on the development of its class-consciousness, on whether the proletariat correctly grasps its own position and objective capacities (ibid. 421, 488). Theory is necessary for the awakening of class consciousness, because only in understanding its own social position can the proletariat conceive of itself as a unified class with a historical mission. Self-consciousness ‘arose for the proletariat everywhere as a result of the realization of the true situation, of the actual historical connections’ (ibid. 399).Footnote ¹³

Lukács repeatedly captures this function of theory for practice in terms of unity. This emphasis on unity, however, does not seem to emerge from his reflections on the concrete conditions of actual political practice. Rather, it follows from Hegel’s response to Kant, which Lukács adopts as a model for practice. As explained above, Hegel’s answer to the split between form and content is the processual mediation of the concept. The process of mediation culminates in ‘totality’ – referring to a form of knowledge that includes all previous mediations. Hegel’s mediated concepts are not – like Kant’s categories – mere forms of the human mind. Rather, they pertain to the structure of the object in-itself. This means that knowledge of the totality is a form of self-knowledge, precedented on the identity of subject and object. Lukács takes over the exact terms of this solution in his general characterisation of practice. He explicitly states that a materialist account of history must retain the Hegelian identification of consciousness and being, conceived in terms of a processual totality (ibid. 206). ‘The unity of theory and practice is … the other side of the historical-social situation of the proletariat, that from its standpoint self-knowledge and knowledge of the totality coincide’ (ibid. 193).Footnote ¹⁴ Hence, the ‘reform of consciousness is the revolutionary process itself’ (ibid. 435). It is formulations like these, in which Lukács overemphasises self-transparent consciousness, that have invited the charge that he fails to break with idealism.

However, in his reflections on the organisational conditions of revolutionary struggle, a different picture emerges. In his commentary on Luxemburg’s account of the Russian Revolution, Lukács revises his earlier, thoroughly positive assessment given in ‘Luxemburg as a Marxist’. He now criticises Luxemburg for overestimating the organic character of historical development and the spontaneous forces of revolutionary upheaval while underestimating the necessary role of conscious political organisation (ibid. 453, 455, 459-460). In his reading, Luxemburg sees the party as organically grown, rather than consciously made. Because she assumes that the proletariat already possesses, at least latently, a unified revolutionary consciousness, Luxemburg fails to account for the disunity of the proletariat which arises as a result of workers existing under conditions of reification (ibid. 461-462, 480). Lukács thus criticises Luxemburg for the assumption that proletarian consciousness and revolutionary practice evolve in organic unity, when such unity must be consciously constructed and is never guaranteed in practice.

Against the presupposition of organic unity, Lukács points to the internal divisions within proletarian consciousness, and to the gaps between theory and practice which need to be bridged by means of political organisation: for the proletariat to form as a class, to turn from a passive object into empowered subject, theory and practice need to be consciously mediated within institutional structures that are adequate to this task (ibid. 475, 483). Lukács’s hence directs our attention to the objective organisational forms that are required for the formation of active subjectivity. Precisely because the prevalent forms of subjectivity in capitalism are reified, the party needs to provide for objective organisational structures that allow for the cultivation of alternative modes of subjectivity. At times, Lukács comes close to formulating a theory of practice as proceeding under conditions of disunity. He highlights that there is a disunity between assigned class-consciousness – that is, the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes which individuals would have if they fully understood their position in the social totality – and empirical consciousness – the thoughts and feelings that they happen to have as a matter of psychological fact (ibid. 223-224). Although the proletariat forms a class economically, it is disunified in consciousness as only parts of it approach the height of assigned class consciousness. This, in turn, necessitates a split within the party between a highly disciplined, progressive vanguard and the masses (ibid. 503).

Whatever one may think of Lukács’s turn to vanguardism politically, the philosophy of practice that it articulates is fully materialist, in the sense that it envisages history as conditioned and contingent: not the unfolding of a unified self-conscious subject, but a terrain marked by divisions and disunity. While overcoming the gaps between objective being and empirical consciousness, theory and practice, vanguard and masses, is a central aim of political practice, the achievement of unity is never guaranteed and remains precarious throughout the unfolding stages of revolutionary struggle.

Towards the end of his essay on party organisation, Lukács can be observed to grapple with the problem of how to fit the mode of historical thinking implied by his vanguardism into the notion of unity that his Hegelianism demands. He concludes as follows: ‘the sharp, organisational separation of the conscious vanguard from the broad masses [is] only one moment of the unified but dialectical process of development of the whole class, the development of its consciousness’ (ibid., 517).Footnote ¹⁵ Lukács thus reintegrates class-internal divisions into the encompassing and unified historical process of the proletariat becoming self-conscious. By presenting the internal conflicts, the disunities of the working class as dialectically mediated and contained within an encompassing developmental process, he ends up diminishing his own insights into the efforts of practice. Within the Hegelian conceptual registry, the unity that is to be achieved as a contingent result of successful organisation – and that may very well fail to be achieved – is refashioned as the unity of consciousness of a developing historical subject.