Abstract
This chapter briefly considers the relationship between Lukács, the outstanding Marxist philosopher, and Lenin, the outstanding Marxist political figure. Classical Marxism, which was invented by Engels, is anti-Hegelian. Not surprisingly, views of the relationship between Lukács and Lenin differ. There is a basic difference between Marxist philosophy and Marxist politics. I will be suggesting there is a deep tension between Lukács’ philosophical Hegelian Marx interpretation and Lenin’s political version of Marxist orthodoxy. This tension is later partially covered up by Lenin’s philosophical turn to Hegel, hence to a Hegelian view of Marx he never worked out, as well as by Lukács’ turn, after the invention of Hegelian Marxism, to Marxist political orthodoxy. Classical Marxism is based philosophically on an anti-Hegelian reading of Marx invented by Engels and defended by a long series of later Marxists. Lukács made his breakthrough to an anti-Marxist Hegelian reading of Marx in ‘HCC.’ Lukács’ Hegelian interpretation of Marx led him to criticize Engels in that book and throughout his later writings. After ‘HCC,’ he remained faithful to his most important philosophical insights in continuing to defend and to develop Marxian Hegelianism. Yet beginning in his little book on Lenin, he accepted the political hegemony of Leninism suggested in the Leninist political concept of partyness. From a political angle of vision, in virtue of his acceptance of Marxist political hegemony, Lukács is a political but not a philosophical Leninist. But he is certainly not a Leninist in an unqualified sense. Under the influence of Engels and Plekhanov, Lenin initially adopted an anti-Hegelian approach before his later conversion to Hegelianism in the Philosophical Notebooks. Suffice it to say that as a philosopher, Lukács is neither a Leninist nor an anti-Leninist. He is rather the single most important Marxist philosopher, who, in formulating Hegelian Marxism, simultaneously refutes classical anti-Hegelian Marxism while inventing Western Marxism.
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Notes
- 1.
See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: Verso, 1987.
- 2.
Georg Lukács , History and Class Consciousness , trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Hereafter cited in the text as HCC , followed by page number.
- 3.
See Leon Trotsky , Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Morality, College Park, GA: Pathfinder Press, 1973.
- 4.
See Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger ’s Nazism and Philosophy, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992.
- 5.
See Georg Lukács , The Ontology of Social Being, trans. David Fernbach, London: Merlin Press, (1) Hegel , (2) Marx , and (3) Labour. Hereafter cited in the text as OSB followed by the volume and the page number.
- 6.
Georg Lukács , A Defense of History and Class Consciousness : Tailism and the Dialectic, London: Verso, 2000. Hereafter cited as TD followed by the page number.
- 7.
See Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel , and Western Marxism , Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
- 8.
Heine, for instance, a contemporary observer, thought that after Hegel the only new development was in philosophy of nature ( Naturphilosophie ). See Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, trans. John Snodgrass, Albany: SUNY Press, 1986.
- 9.
See F.A. Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance, trans. E.C. Thomas, London: Kegan Paul, 1925.
- 10.
Immanuel Kant , Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, New York: Cambridge University Press, B 566, p. 535.
- 11.
G.W.F. Hegel , The Difference Between Fichte ’s and Schelling ’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf, Albany: SUNY Press, 1977.
- 12.
See Henry Allison , Kant ’s Transcendental Idealism: an Interpretation and Defense, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
- 13.
See Friedrich Engels , Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, translated by C.P. Dutt, New York: International Publishers, 1941, pp. 22–23.
- 14.
For discussion, see Tom Rockmore, Irrationalism: Lukács and the Marxist View of Reason, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992, Chaps. 4–6, pp. 79–152.
- 15.
Cited in Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Luká́cs and the Origins of Western Marxism , New York: Seabury, 1979, p. 180.
- 16.
“It is, of course, a principle of Marxism –Leninism that philosophy should be written in a ‘party spirit’, with ‘partyness ’.” Mind LXI (1952), 120.
- 17.
See David Joravsky , Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, p. 24. For discussion, see Chap. 2, “Lenin and the Partyness of Philosophy”, pp. 24–47.
- 18.
“Materialism includes, so to speak, partyness , enjoining one in any judgment of an event to take directly and openly the standpoint of a definite social group.” V.I. Lenin, Sochineniia, I, 169–170 et passim, pp. 380–381.
- 19.
See ibid., p. 26.
- 20.
Georg Lukács , Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, trans. Nicholas Jacobs, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971, p. 9.
- 21.
Mao , who apparently picked up this term from Lenin, used this word in a non-specific way in various texts and speeches. For instance, in the last paragraph of his speech entitled “On Coalition Government” (24 April 1945), Mao said: “Another hallmark distinguishing our Party from all other political parties is that we have very close ties with the broadest masses of the people. Our point of departure is to serve the people whole-heartedly and never for a moment divorce ourselves from the masses … Our comrades must not assume that everything they themselves understand is understood by the masses …. Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness.” Mao ’s point is that the party depends on but also leads the masses. Yet one must say, in thinking about the situation, that the latter is more in evidence than the former. That is exactly the point about which Lenin and Luxemburg disagreed.
- 22.
Lenin defines “Marxism … [as] the system of the views and teachings of Karl Marx .” V.I. Lenin, The Teachings of Karl Marx , New York: International Publishers, 1930, p. 10.
- 23.
See Slavoz Žižek, “Postface: Georg Lukács as the philosopher of Leninism ,” in Tailism and Dialectic, pp. 151–182.
- 24.
See part 3: “The Method of Political Economy” in the Introduction to Karl Marx , Grundrisse : Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973.
- 25.
For discussion of the positivist views of Mach and Avenarius, see Leszek Kolakowski , The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, translated by Norbert Güterman, New York: Doubleday, 1968.
- 26.
See F.W.J. Schelling , On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- 27.
See, for discussion, Tom Rockmore, Irrationalism: Lukács and the Marxist View of Reason, Chap. 6, pp. 215–243.
- 28.
See Paul Le Blanc , “Spider and Fly,” in Historical Materialism, 2013, vol. 21, issue 2, pp. 47–75.
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Rockmore, T. (2018). Lukács as Leninist. In: Rockmore, T., Levine, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51650-3_9
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