I find Macnair\u2019s analysis and critique of the political motivations and potential consequences of Rees\u2019s affirmative account of Marxist Hegelianism compelling and good. I agree with Macnair\u2019s conclusion that, despite Rees\u2019s former SWP\/UK leader Alex Callinicos\u2019s anti-Hegelian Althusserianism, Rees considering \u201chistorical experience summed up in theory\u201d was intrinsically connected to the SWP\u2019s concept of the party as one which \u201ccentralises experience\u201d, with all the problems such a conception entails.<\/p>\n
I wish to offer a rejoinder to Macnair\u2019s idea that such problematic conceptions of theory and political practice have roots in Lenin, Luxemburg and Luk\u00e1cs, Macnair\u2019s analysis of whom I find to be false. Also, I do not think that Macnair quite gets Hegel, although I agree with his characterisation (in “Against philosopher kings<\/a>,” Weekly Worker<\/em> 749, December 11, 2008) that “philosophy — as such — is inherently<\/em> only a way of interpreting the world”, and so limits Hegel\u2019s work for the political purposes under consideration. Furthermore, I agree with Macnair\u2019s interpretation of Lenin with respect to the purposes of his polemical defence of Marxist approaches to philosophy in Materialism and empirio-criticism<\/em> (1908). Moreover, I agree with his central point that philosophical agreement cannot be the basis of agreement on political action.<\/p>\n However, as Nicholas Brown responded to comrade Macnair\u2019s question at the opening plenary on \u2018The politics of critical theory\u2019 of the Platypus convention in Chicago on April 29, it is not possible to \u2018Hegelianise\u2019 Marx, because Marx was more Hegelian than Hegel himself (Platypus Review<\/em> 37, July 2011<\/a>). That is, Marx tried to achieve the \u2018Hegelian\u2019 self-consciousness of his own historical moment. The question is, what relevance has Marx\u2019s Hegelianism today, and what is the relevance of taking such a Hegelian approach to the history of Marxism subsequent to Marx? I disagree that Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s \u201csubject\u201d of history is the point of view or relative perspective of the proletariat as the revolutionary agent that must assert its \u201cwill\u201d. Rather, I take Luk\u00e1cs to be following Lenin and Luxemburg (and Marx) quite differently than Macnair seems to think, in that the workers\u2019 movement for socialism is the necessary mediation for grasping the problem of capital in its \u201ctotality\u201d, that the workers must not remake the world in their image, but rather lead society more generally beyond capital. Hence, as Macnair characterises the approach of the Kautskyan \u201ccentre\u201d of the Second International, the socialist workers\u2019 movement must be a leading, practical force in democratic struggles beyond the workers\u2019 own (sectional) interests in the transformation of society as a whole.<\/p>\n I disagree that Lenin made a virtue of necessity in the Russian Revolution after October 1917 and adopted a voluntarist (and substitutionalist) conception of the working class and the political party of communism. Rather, Lenin consistently criticised and politically fought against those tendencies of Bolshevism and in the early Third International. I do not think that Lenin\u2019s newly found \u2018Hegelianism\u2019 after 1914 was the means by which he achieved (mistaken) rapprochement with the \u2018left\u2019.<\/p>\n The key is Luxemburg. I do not think she was a semi-syndicalist spontaneist\/voluntarist, or that she neglected issues of political mediation: she was not an \u2018ultra-left\u2019. I take her pamphlet, The mass strike, the political party, and the trade unions<\/em> (1906), to have an entirely different political purpose and conclusion. It was not an argument in favour of the mass strike as a tactic, let alone strategy, but rather an analysis of the significance of the mass strike in the 1905 Russian Revolution as a historical phenomenon, inextricably bound up in the development of capital at a global scale, and how this tasked and challenged the social democratic workers\u2019 movement (the Second International and the SPD in particular) to reformulate its approach and transform itself under such changed historical conditions, specifically with regard to the relation of the party to the unions.<\/p>\n Luxemburg\u2019s perspective was neither anarcho-syndicalist\/spontaneist nor vanguardist, but rather dialectical<\/em>. The mass strike was not a timeless principle. For Luxemburg, 1905 showed that the world had moved into an era of revolutionary struggle that demanded changes in the workers\u2019 movement for socialism. A contradiction had developed between the social democratic party and (its own associated) labour unions, or \u2018social democracy\u2019 had become a self-contradictory phenomenon in need of transformation.<\/p>\n Furthermore, I take Lenin\u2019s critiques of Kautsky for being \u201cnon-dialectical\u201d to be very specific. This is not a critique of Kautsky \u2018philosophically\u2019 (although it does speak to his bad practices as a theorist), but politically<\/em>. It is about Kautsky\u2019s non-dialectical approach to politics: that is, the relation of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness, in and through the concrete mediations of the historically constituted workers\u2019 movement. Kautsky failed in this. Lenin agreed with Luxemburg in her Junius pamphlet<\/em> (1915) that the problem was Kautsky thinking that the SPD\u2019s Marxism (that is, what became Kautsky\u2019s USPD) could \u201chide like a rabbit\u201d during World War I and resume the struggle for socialism afterward. Or, as Lenin put it in his Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism<\/em> (1916) and Socialism and war<\/em> (1915), contra <\/em>Kautsky\u2019s theory of \u2018ultra-imperialism\u2019, the world war must be seen as a necessary and not accidental outcome of the historical development of capitalism, and so a crisis that was an opportunity for revolutionary transformation, and not merely, as Kautsky thought, a derailment into barbarism to be resisted. This was the essential basis for agreement between Luxemburg and Lenin 1914\u201319.<\/p>\n I do not think the separation of the pre-World War I Lenin from Luxemburg is warranted, especially considering their close collaboration, both in the politics of the Russian movement and in the Second International more generally, throughout the period 1905\u201312 and again 1914\u201319. Throughout their careers, Lenin and Luxemburg (and Trotsky) were exemplars of the Second International left, or \u2018radicals\u2019 in the movement. They all more or less mistook Kautsky to be one of their own before August 1914. Also, Kautsky himself changed, at various points and times — which is not to say that Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky never changed.<\/p>\n But the question is the nature and character of such change, and how these figures allow us to grasp the history of Marxism. It is not about learning from their trials and errors, I think, but rather from the example of their \u2018consciousness\u2019, not merely theoretically, but practically. Moreover, the history of Marxism must be approached as part and parcel, and the highest expression, of the history of post-1848 capital.<\/p>\n Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s \u2018Hegelian\u2019 point was that \u201csubjective\u201d struggles for transformation take place in and through \u201cnecessary forms of appearance\u201d that misrecognise their \u201cobjective\u201d social realities, not in terms of imperfect approximations or more or less true generalised abstractions, but specifically as a function of the \u201calienated\u201d and \u201creified\u201d social and political dynamics of capital. Capital is \u201cobjective\u201d in a specific way, and so poses historically specific problems for subjectivity.<\/p>\n The reason for Marxists distinguishing their approach from Hegel is precisely historical: that a change in society took place between Hegel\u2019s and Marx\u2019s time that causes Hegelian categories, as those of an earlier, pre-Industrial Revolution era of bourgeois society, to become inverted in truth, or reversed in intention. Marx\u2019s idea was that the \u201ccontradiction\u201d of bourgeois society had changed. Thus the dialectical \u201claw of motion\u201d was specific to the problem of capital and not a transhistorical principle of (social) action and thought. Marx\u2019s society was not Hegel\u2019s. The meaning of Hegel had changed, just as the meaning of the categories of bourgeois society had changed. Labour-time as value had become not productive (if not unproblematically) — as in Hegel\u2019s and Adam Smith\u2019s time, the era of \u2018manufacture\u2019 — but destructive of society; as a form of social mediation, wage-labour had become self-contradictory and self-undermining in the Industrial Revolution, hence the \u2018crisis of capital\u2019.<\/p>\n One fundamental disagreement I have with Macnair\u2019s approach, in which I think I follow Lenin, Luxemburg, Luk\u00e1cs and Marx, is with the idea that the potential transformation of capitalist society involves the confrontation of two antithetical social principles, of the workers (collectivism) vs the capitalists (individual private property). Capital, as Marx understood it, is not based on the mode of existence of the capitalists, falsely generalised to society as a whole, but rather that of the workers. This is not a top\u2013down, but a bottom\u2013up, view — shared by Smith, for example. As Luk\u00e1cs put it, the fate of the worker becomes that of \u201csociety as a whole\u201d (“Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat” [1922] part 1, \u2018The phenomenon of reification<\/a>\u2019 in History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics<\/em> [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971], 91). The contradiction of capital is the contradiction of the workers\u2019 — not the capitalists\u2019 — existence in society. For Marx, capital is a social mode of production and not merely a relation of production. As a mode of production, capital has become increasingly self-contradictory. As a function of capital\u2019s historical development, through the Industrial Revolution, in which the workers\u2019 own increasing demands for bourgeois rights, to realise the value of their labour, and not merely capitalist competition, played a key, indispensable role, bourgeois society became self-contradictory and self-undermining. That is, the workers centrally or at base constituted the self-destructive, social-historical dynamic of capital through their labouring and political activity. This development culminated in the crisis of world war and revolution 1914\u201319.<\/p>\n As Lenin put it in The state and revolution<\/em>, the social relations of bourgeois society — namely, the mutual exchange of labour as the form of social solidarity in capital — could only be transformed gradually and thus \u201cwither away,\u201d and not be abolished and replaced at a stroke (The state and revolution<\/em> chapter 5, \u2018The economic basis of the withering away of the state\u2019, part 3, \u2018The first phase of communist society<\/a>\u2019). The proletarian socialist revolution was supposed to open the door to this transformation. The potential for emancipated humanity expressed in communism that Marx recognised in the modern history of capital is not assimilable without remainder to pre- or non-Marxian socialism.<\/p>\n As Marx put it, \u201cCommunism <\/em>is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society\u201d (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts<\/em> of <\/em>1844<\/a>). This was because, according to Marx, \u201cCommunism is a dogmatic abstraction and . . . only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property\u201d (letter to Arnold Ruge, ‘Ruthless criticism’, September 1843<\/a>). Marx was not the pre-eminent communist of his time, but rather its critic<\/em>, seeking to push it further. Marxism was the attempted Hegelian self-consciousness of proletarian socialism as the subject-object of capital.<\/p>\n As Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s contemporary, Karl Korsch, pointed out in \u2018Marxism and philosophy\u2019 (1923), by the late 19th century historians such as Dilthey had observed that \u201cideas contained in a philosophy can live on not only in philosophies, but equally well in positive sciences and social practice, and that this process precisely began on a large scale with Hegel\u2019s philosophy\u201d (Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy” [1923], in Marxism and Philosophy<\/em> trans. Fred Halliday [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008], 39). For Korsch, this meant that \u2018philosophical\u2019 problems in the Hegelian sense were not matters of theory, but practice. From a Marxian perspective, however, it is precisely the problem of capitalist society that is posed at the level of practice.<\/p>\n Korsch went on to argue that \u201cwhat appears as the purely \u2018ideal\u2019 development of philosophy in the 19th century can in fact only be fully and essentially grasped by relating it to the concrete historical development of bourgeois society as a whole\u201d (40). Korsch\u2019s great insight, shared by Luk\u00e1cs, took this perspective from Luxemburg and Lenin, who grasped how the history of the socialist workers\u2019 movement and Marxism was a key part — indeed the crucial aspect — of this development, in the first two decades of the 20th century.<\/p>\n The problem we have faced since then is that the defeat of the workers\u2019 movement for socialism has not meant the stabilisation, but rather the degeneration, disintegration and decomposition, of bourgeois society — without the concomitant increase, but rather the regression, of possibilities for moving beyond it. This shows that the crisis of Marxism was a crisis of bourgeois society, or the highest and most acute aspect of the crisis of capital: bourgeois society has suffered since then from the failure of Marxism.<\/p>\n The \u2018crisis of Marxism\u2019, in which Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky took part (especially in 1914\u201319, but also in the period leading up to this, most significantly from 1905 on), and Luk\u00e1cs tried to address \u2018theoretically\u2019 in History and class consciousness<\/em> and related writings of the early 1920s, was (the highest practical expression of) the crisis of bourgeois society.<\/p>\n This crisis demanded a Marxist critique of Marxism, or a \u2018dialectical\u2019 approach to Marxism itself: that is, a recognition of Marxism, politically, as being a self-contradictory and so potentially self-undermining historical phenomenon (a phenomenon of history<\/em> — hence the title of Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s book, History and class consciousness<\/em>), itself subject to necessary \u201creification\u201d and \u201cmisrecognition\u201d that could only be worked through \u201cimmanently\u201d. This meant regaining the \u201cHegelian\u201d dimension, or the \u201cself-consciousness\u201d of Marxism. This is because Marxism, as an expression of the workers\u2019 \u201cclass-consciousness\u201d, was — and remains — entirely \u201cbourgeois\u201d, if in extremis<\/em>. While self-contradictory in its development, the socialist workers\u2019 movement, including its Marxist self-consciousness, pointed beyond itself, \u2018dialectically\u2019 — as consciousness of the bourgeois epoch as a whole does.<\/p>\n Georg Luk\u00e1cs, People's Commissar for Education and Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1919<\/p><\/div>\n I follow Adorno’s characterisation of the problem of workers’ consciousness and the necessary role of intellectuals, which he took from Lenin, in his letter to Walter Benjamin of March 18, 1936: “The proletariat . . . is itself a product of bourgeois society. . . . [T]he actual consciousness of actual workers . . . [has] absolutely no advantage over the bourgeois except . . . interest in the revolution, but otherwise bear[s] all the marks of mutilation of the typical bourgeois character. This prescribes our function for us clearly enough — which I certainly do not mean in the sense of an activist conception of ‘intellectuals’. . . . It is not bourgeois idealism if, in full knowledge and without mental prohibitions, we maintain our solidarity with the proletariat instead of making of our own necessity a virtue of the proletariat, as we are always tempted to do — the proletariat which itself experiences the same necessity and needs us for knowledge as much as we need the proletariat to make the revolution” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Correspondence with Benjamin,” New Left Review<\/em> I\/81 [September\u2013October 1973], 66\u201367).<\/p>\n The problem we face today, I think, is the opacity of the present, due to our lack of a comparably acute, self-contradictory and dialectical expression of the crisis of capital that Marxism\u2019s historical self-consciousness, in theory and practice, once provided. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n Oiriginally published in <\/em>The Weekly Worker<\/strong><\/a> 878<\/a> (August 11, 2011) <\/em>[PDF<\/a>].<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chris Cutrone I am writing in response to Mike Macnair\u2019s 2003 critical review of John Rees and David Renton’s books (“‘Classical Marxism’ and grasping the dialectic,” Weekly Worker 495, September 11, 2003), cited in Macnair’s critique of Platypus (“No need for party?,” Weekly Worker 865, May 12, 2011; “Theoretical dead end,” Weekly Worker 866, May […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,18,32,19,16],"class_list":["post-1283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-29","tag-adorno","tag-cpgb","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1283"}],"version-history":[{"count":73,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3211,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions\/3211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![\"Dialectical](\"http:\/\/www.cpgb.org.uk\/assets\/images\/wwimages\/1004516.jpg\")
<\/p>\nLuk\u00e1cs, Lenin, Luxemburg<\/h2>\n
Hegelianism<\/h2>\n
Crisis of Marxism<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/lukacs_commissar-161x300.jpg\" "\\"lukacs_commissar\\"")
<\/a>