Chapter Six
Consciousness Overemphasized?
Copyright 2009 and 2011 by Robert Lanning
But the existence of objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to “know”
them and to know how to use them.
—Antonio Gramsci
The perspective on objective conditions in relation to social being and consciousness presented in the last chapter is consistent with the founders of historical materialism and many of their supporters over the long history of Marxism. It is somewhat surprising, then, to find criticism of Lukács’s work among one of his usual supporters, especially when the criticism is directed at the issue of consciousness. While István Mészáros’s work cannot be lumped together with the sociologists discussed in chapter 4, his criticisms are a matter of concern, for they may indirectly and unintentionally provide fodder for arguments such as those of Gorman, Dunk, and Seccombe and Livingstone.
A major focus of Mészáros’s Beyond Capital (1995), is what he refers to as the insurmountable power of capital. Part of this text is devoted to criticisms of Lukács’s “overemphasis” on the ideological crisis of the proletariat and his argument for the development of consciousness as a partial solution. From Mészáros’s viewpoint this is a misdirected concentration; nothing but a complete revolution offers the necessary conditions to change capitalist society, for any change that occurs through reform has limited significance due to the very nature of capitalism. To Lukács, capitalism’s damage to the individual psyche, its repression of
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collective efforts of the working class, and its offences against human dignity were paramount in his commitment to resolving the problems created by this exploitative system and fundamental to his demand for its overthrow. To Mészáros, Lukács’s work fails to provide sufficient prospects for the negation of capital’s driving force. He argues that Lukács was ineffective because the enemy, the system of capitalist production, was simply too powerful to be deterred from dominating every aspect of social and personal life. While Mészáros rightly criticizes those whose slogan has become “there is no alternative” (1995, xiii) much of his critique of Lukács might be taken as an unintended affirmation of that claim.
Mészáros’s argument certainly points to the difficult objective conditions that capitalism has produced and sustained and which inhibit the development of consciousness and social change. While the perceived and actual strength of the objective conditions of capitalism is important for any discussion of class consciousness, it is possible to overstate the case for the power of capital on the grounds Mészáros suggests. His position implies that the objective conditions of capitalism are always sufficient to suppress the emergence of circumstances objectively favorable for the struggle for socialism, for trade-union demands, and for racial and gender equality. This position withholds the actuality of correct objective conditions for such struggles until a point in time at which the struggle itself becomes qualitatively different as a struggle to consolidate socialism.
The ideological crisis to which Lukács referred is one in which the majority of the proletariat do not take up Mészáros’s third ideological position, that of overcoming all class antagonism, but rather the first or second position of acquiescence or reform resulting in nonstructural change. Those who adopt the first or second position form a subjective barrier to, and often an objective rationale against, the feasibility of radical social change.1 As these individuals express their subjective acceptance of this position in a variety of everyday contexts, their actions and attitudes constitute objective conditions against which progressive and socialist forces must struggle as they also struggle against the structural conditions created by capitalism. As it has been argued here, these
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ideological adaptations may also have been brought about by the absence of sufficient knowledge with which to develop such consciousness, or the refusal to appropriate such knowledge. Thus, overdependence on the expectation of correct objective conditions assumes that these will somehow emerge in sufficient quantity and character to propel a movement forward. Such overdependence also assumes that objective conditions are unidirectional agents of political socialization and training.
Following Marx, Mészáros focuses on the nature of capital, its fundamental structure that sets the conditions for maximum expropriation of surplus labor and the creation of ever more surplus value. The nature of capital refers to its “unalterable” character, by which Mészáros means “its objective structural determination” (1995, 112–13). No amount of reform can reconstruct this intentionality, which is essential to capitalism’s inherent form and content. From its earliest stages of development to the present, the capitalist system has exercised its greatest energies toward maximizing profits and power, and while reforms in the policy and practice of capitalism have occurred, the system as a whole has resisted any reforms that might diminish its capacity to achieve its fundamental goals. Its exercise of power involves the organized and increasingly entrenched capitalist mode of production, the institutional complexes designed to support these structures, and the individuals for whom the continuation of the system provides the resources of economic, political, and cultural power. Among other things, these are components of the “nature of capital [that] remains the same in its developed as in its undeveloped form” (Marx 1967, 272 n. 3; Mészáros 1995, 112). There is a dialectical principle in Mészáros’s focus. Marx argued that the proletariat must cease to be what it is as created by its opposing class. The proletariat, as has been discussed in chapter 2, must develop its consciousness and create a movement that will abolish itself as a class. But, by abolishing itself, the proletariat also abolishes capitalism. The proletariat negates, by revolutionary means, the nature of capitalism’s structure and the class, economic, and cultural relations that emerge from it. The major point to be taken from Mészáros is this: eradicate capitalism and there will be no more
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Westrays, and in its place will come a flowering of consciousness and socialism. The problem remains how to get there from here, and how long must organized political progress and elevated forms of consciousness wait before the moment of socialism negates the nature of capital.
The emphasis must be on the process of social change, individual development undertaken over time, and the complex of dialectical interactions that contribute to the eventuality of socialism. Such a process consists of a series of moments, points at which choices are made, new information received, and more comprehensive knowledge developed that informs the future of the process. In dialectical terms, a “moment,” writes Lukács, is a “situation whose duration may be longer or shorter, but which is distinguished from the process that leads up to it in that it forces together the essential tendencies of that process, and demands that a decision be taken over the future of the process” (2000, 55). Such moments may be comprised of merely reformist measures, but they may also consist of meaningful, organized advancements over existing disadvantageous conditions. Forcing “together the essential tendencies” requires an awareness of the historical development of that moment and evaluating its components to draw out the successes for a political movement and discover the cues demanding different directions in strategy and tactics.
Because of his concentration on the “insurmountable” nature of capitalism, Mészáros appears to be focused on the moments of limited reform measures and less interested in them as processes of alternative or oppositional activities. He centers his argument on the objective conditions of capitalism that empower existing structural forces and shape the organization of society at any given historical moment. Emphasizing the “unalterable” character of capital is implicitly a critique of the reformist impulse in late modern society such as the proponents of a third way for capitalist society. Consider the point Mészáros makes about capitalism’s ideological claim of formal equality against the struggles for substantive equality at all levels of everyday life (1995, 187ff.). As one of capitalism’s integral legitimizing components, liberal democratic political systems have largely conceded to demands
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for formal equality by establishing state constitutions and acquiescing to court decisions enforcing civil equality and individual rights. Every statement at local, national, and international levels on human rights is a communication of capitalism’s willingness to grant equality at the formal level. Most such measures have been brought about by agitation and protest by groups that find themselves subordinated to the power of capitalism. While these formal measures are yet to be completed historically, they nevertheless remain an important basis for the betterment of present conditions and future development. And it is important to note that the organized Left has provided some of the major pressure to achieve formal equality with regard to race and ethnicity, for example. The relative success of the women’s movement has been facilitated in Europe and North America by provisions made in legislation that has been brought about in large part by women’s politically driven organizations. This is one indication of the significance of overcoming the ideological problems of patriarchal relations, even if it is only a partial and reformist achievement; that is, even if proponents only take up Mészáros’s second ideological position, which recognizes the contradictions of capitalism without advocating structural change. Educational and occupational opportunity, income, and control over one’s body, among other things, are policy initiatives that have affirmed the principle of gender equality. Much the same can be said for provisions of formal equality for racial and ethnic minorities. Mészáros demands, quite rightly, a recognition of the limitations of such measures, limitations that are due to the nature of capital, which includes limited flexibility of its boundaries and tolerance for change. Thus, while women have increasingly broken through barriers in the marketplace, their entry has had the effect of reducing wage levels for both men and women. The reduction of household spending power since the 1980s, despite the increase of two-earner families, is one manifestation of the opening up of virtually all occupations to women. Mészáros cites several studies indicating this downward trend (cf. 1995, 192 and sources in endnote 249; see also Eisenstein 2005). Similarly, fears of the effects of lower-paid African American industrial workers in the twentieth century became the rationale
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for some trade unions to restrict actively the integration of their ranks in order to protect the wage levels and racial status of their predominantly white workforce (Foner 1991; Solomon 1998; Stephan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003). These are, Mészáros notes, manifestations of the structural limitations to realizing the promise of genuine equality and social mobility for the “small minority of cases” who move out of the lower class “only as isolated individuals” (1995, 116).
It is true that alternative developments intended to reform the effects of capitalism do not have sufficient power to cause radical change in the system as a whole; that is, in themselves these measures cannot change the nature of capital (Mészáros 1995, 189). Mészáros is correct to point this out so long as the argument is directed against reforms as ends in themselves. The objective facts of the limits to mobility must be considered alongside the political reasoning of individuals and social groups seeking to maximize the level of equality possible in liberal democracy in light of the existence of intentionally constructed inequitable conditions within capitalism. Tensions among the promises of the system, the possibility of social mobility and reform, and the true nature of capitalism must be acknowledged; they cannot be ignored without falling into the quagmire of supporting subjectivist and limited interests. Neither individual social mobility nor wide-ranging social reform provides sustained advancement over the original conditions. But the promises of the system and individual motives and desires expressed in social movements are nevertheless objective conditions that arise over time through interests and actions of particular groups of people applying pressure (in varying degrees) on capitalism’s structure and content. Such counterpressures become material conditions of the environment of capitalism even as its nature remains unchanged. Such interests, of course, only make sense and are only viable to the extent they are consciously assessed and related to the objective possibilities uncovered by movements of organized consciousness.
Mészáros’s argument focuses on what he calls the first-order mediations of capital, those “between human beings and the vital conditions of their reproductive nature.” Capital is bolstered in
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its reproductive capacity by a range of second-order mediations, among which are the family, “fetishistic production objectives” and their operation through an alienated labor force, the absence of control on the part of labor, and the “varieties of capital’s state formation” (1995, 108–9). Each of these relations operates on an internal logic by which individuals function to survive and reproduce themselves in everyday life framed by the demands of capitalism.
Primary and second-order mediations combine to produce the instrumentality Mészáros identifies in the structure of capitalism and relations among people and classes within this system. He is correct in his assertions that achievements in the area of social equality and mobility “over centuries, did not alter in the slightest the exploitative surplus-labor-extracting command structure of capital” (1995, 116). The formal equality afforded to women permitted entry into sectors of the labor force from which they had previously been excluded or their participation restricted. “But under no circumstances,” Mészáros writes, “can they be allowed to question the established division of labor and their own role in the inherited family structure” (1995, 209). It is statements such as these that emphasize the limits of reforming the nature of capitalism, but in making them he risks undermining the actual challenges to capitalism that might emerge from efforts of social movements that may or may not have goals beyond reform of immediate conditions; in other words, movements that may be guided by the second position in his scheme of ideological alternatives. Remarks about women not being allowed to question the fundamentals of capitalism may reflect something of the frustrations of political activism inside or outside of the academy, but they are also patently untrue and have the potential to portray erroneously social reality as an inflexible structure which imposes circumstances that are able to suppress or repel every attempt at progressive change in modern society. His position also tends to ignore the significant gains of particular historical moments of women’s movements. Advancements in formal equality have set the basis for further organized protest that has resulted in some improvement in the lives of many, but that in itself is not an argument for seeking liberal reforms before radical
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change is possible. In North America, for example, racial and ethnic minorities can be subordinated or provided opportunities for more equitable access to education, occupations, and other social resources. When pressured, the structure of capitalism has often allowed for the development of such opportunities while retaining the power to revoke or restructure its earlier measures. Capitalism can facilitate advancements without losing its grip on power, as the current neoliberal economic and cultural environment shows. If such mobility is permitted, even encouraged, one outcome is certain: the stratification within the ranks of subordinated groups will change without altering the fundamental structure that produced the inequality. But one element of that unchanging nature—not its resistance to change, but what capitalism produces to resist change—is reification. Capitalism has had such power in full measure, but organized political action forced it to relinquish or renegotiate some of it in order for capitalism to retain a much needed stability. It is through such processes, limited though they are, that participants in radical and reform movements can learn something of both the nature of capitalism and the potential of their own power. Thus, the nature of class conflict and class consciousness must be stressed just as much as Mészáros stresses the power inherent in the nature of capital.
While making this claim, Mészáros is aware of a principle that is fundamental to Marxism: “History, it goes without saying even if it is often tendentiously ignored, does not deserve its name unless it is conceived as open-ended in both directions, towards the past no less than towards the future” (1995, 112). But he comes close to nullifying Lukács’s analytical and organizational advances because he chooses not to consider fully the role of consciousness, interest, and the political commitment of those who have kept history open by confronting what to Mészáros are the “insurmountable” problems presented by capitalism. Those who have committed themselves in this way have demonstrated that some problems produced by capitalism can be confronted with sufficient and sustained force to result in important change.
“What is really at stake in these matters,” he writes, “is the nature of capital, and not the actual or fictitious characteristics
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of ‘human nature’”(1995, 112). While Mészáros correctly drawsattention to the “fictitious” character of “human nature,” one wonders why the actual criteria of human nature are not articulated if we assume that by “actual” Mészáros is referring to “the ensemble of human relations” by which Marx basically defined it. Ignoring the opportunity for a comparison suggests that the question of human nature is best left to the period in which socialism is actively being constructed. This is a missed opportunity to emphasize and develop an aspect of Marx’s materialist method founded on the concrete basis of the intentionally constructed environment of human existence.
Alongside the issue of human nature is one of ethics, especially as it relates to activism. This is evident in Mészáros’s discussion of social policies in contemporary Britain regarding the extent of medical treatment required by the elderly. He cites examples of policies and practices restricting life-saving surgery and dialysis, as well as the reduction of welfare support for the poor. He also cites the decision to withhold flu vaccine from the elderly, a practice that resulted in a number of deaths and, no doubt, much unnecessary distress for the aged and their families. Mészáros cites one health official who argued that, “once you legitimise the idea that you can withhold treatment on the grounds that someone’s quality of life is not worth a £5 vaccination you are on a dangerous path. It’s doctors playing God.” Mészáros’s response to this comment is troublesome: “in reality the responsibility for ‘playing God’ lies with the government; doctors only obey its guidelines” (1995, 213–14). The capitalist state thus imposes upon the elderly a decision that could kill them; but can one really accept Mészáros’s claim that medical doctors, whose years of education, training, and experience also include training in ethical standards for treatment, have no choice but to obey the state? By attributing such exaggerated power to the state, Mészáros abdicates his ethical responsibility as an intellectual to provide criticism of any such rationale professionals might hold as a measure against the ideological crisis that characterizes the relation of public medicine to the demands of capitalism and its state. Is it acceptable that the state’s guidelines are viewed by the medical profession
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as the market rationale for their professional survival? This does not leave much room for political or professional mobilization to change such circumstances, even if only as a reformist measure.
The crucial absence, again, is the process by which we move from social movements or political interests that are more or less immediately concerned with reformist measures to revolutionary practice. Even though realistically this can only be an outline of strategy and theoretical analysis, at some point it must be designed to shape a broadly based social movement. Mészáros’s approach unintentionally leads to a denial of a dynamic and dialectical understanding of history and to an unjustified downgrading of the potential effectiveness of human agency in the face of state policies and the power of capital. It allows a criticism of capitalism to flourish without paying sufficient attention to how people have responded to capitalism or how they should respond in the future. This approach seems to settle for the affirmation of the reifying powers of capitalism’s second-order mediations.
If we were to follow the implications of Mészáros’s critique, we would find ourselves trapped by the same dichotomous relationship that apparently cannot be resolved; namely, viewing the problems of capitalism and the necessary solutions to be at such a distance from each other that prospects for mobilizing for the resolution of the contradictions could be quickly calculated and dismissed. That is, it appears that the health of the elderly and their doctors’ apparent autonomy, the oppressive conditions of work imposed by mining corporations, and other examples, must await the establishment of socialism before an attempt is made to resolve these issues. However, if the choice is to move toward socialism, the matter of how historical subjects can develop the knowledge necessary to do so cannot be left to the moment of transition to socialism or to its period of development. Unavoidably, the transition from capitalism to socialism is arrived at through the “one-step-forward-two-step- back” experiences of political struggle. But for Mészáros, the historical moment of complete destruction of capitalism seems to be the starting point for significant social change. Perhaps this is why his focus on ideological struggle, including reification, is a central element in his criticism
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of Lukács. Ideological struggle is primarily a long-term process for addressing the problems presented by capitalism, a process that necessarily begins with individuals and social groups rather than the structure of society as a whole.
For Lukács, the dialectical relation between individuals and social groups, and the objective conditions of their society, was part of the ideological struggle to educate, to socialize, and to move people toward a comprehensive understanding of the relations of capital and the possibility of socialism. Mészáros derides Lukács’s efforts to focus revolutionary organization on these problems, citing the latter’s emphasis on educating the working class and his stress on class consciousness as “the ‘ethics’ of the proletariat.” We have noted this already in chapter 3 as the precondition for the formulation of the concept of imputed class consciousness.
Mészáros does acknowledge the important distinction between Lukács’s dialectical approach to the formation of class consciousness, which informed his educational orientation toward the working class, and Bernstein’s Kantian perspective on knowledge (1989, 301). Lukács made it clear in his response to the critics of History and Class Consciousness that “educational work” is insufficient, and that the struggle for consciousness of the proletariat and the peasantry involved the entire work of the Party, including the formation of alliances (2000, 85–86). This by no means negates the importance of educating people about the actual conditions of their existence and about alternatives to such conditions; rather, it points to the necessity of expanding the complex of revolutionary organization. Mészáros criticizes the “individualistic/educational” remedy of developing consciousness as one of the “illusions of the Enlightenment” (1989, 386). Quoting from History and Class Consciousness, he writes, “For, according to Lukacs ‘it is an ideological crisis which must be solved before a practical solution to the world’s economic crisis can be found’” (1995, 314). Mészáros had made the same point in an earlier work (1989, 300–301), referring to Lukács’s perspective as “a misdiagnosis” of the historical situation after the revolutionary period of 1917–19. He criticized Lukács for failing to apply dialectical principles in his argument by defining the problem in terms of
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“before” and “after” and failing to provide a means of solving the problem (1995, 313–14). However, Mészáros imposes a meaning on Lukács’s statement that was not necessarily intended, for it is Mészáros who puts the word “before” in italics (cf. Lukács 1971a, 79), thus reconstructing the statement as a dichotomy of “before” and “after.” Indeed, Lukács could have avoided phrasing the issue as the development of consciousness “before” anything else could be done; he could have chosen phrases such as “along with” or “simultaneously” or “as a component of the dialectical process” that would be more consistent with a historical materialist approach. He also could have put the point in terms of the practical reality of revolutionary movements: the more or less simultaneous, sometimes contradictory ebb and flow of concrete revolutionary activity.
However, it must be said that in one of his last works Lukács did articulate a sequence in the development of consciousness that implies a problematic “before and after.” As Bhaskar has pointed out, Lukács was not always clear in his use of objectivity in historical materialism between a sense of objectivity as externality and objectivity as the production of the subject (1983, 325). He sometimes reduced objective external social forces to immutable and impenetrable laws even as he argued for the necessity and possibility of intervention and transcendence of them. Lukács characterized the relation between individual and society as the “complementary poles of a unified social process” (1991, 124) and argued for the objectivity of the social structures as external to human beings in the same sense in which Marx discussed externality in the introduction to the Grundrisse (Marx 1986–87, 17–18). However, Lukács also asserted that these “social structures are the inherent processes of society that develop in accordance with deterministic laws and lie beyond human control” (1991, 125). Without explicitly correcting this overemphasis, he argued that socialist democracy was the means by which “blind objectivity” could be overcome “without violating the inherent law of objectivity,” although objectivity itself becomes “a tool in the teleological designs of conscious active men” (1991, 125). The difficulty lies in the particular structuring of the complex
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of individual, society, capitalism, and socialism. If the objectivity of capitalism is external to the subject, it is nevertheless the set of material conditions that produce the historical subject as an alienated subject. But that alienated subject at the same time can reason under constraints, has the potential for higher levels of consciousness and therefore can organize opposition to that alienating social system. Particularly problematic for Lukács, as an advocate of imputed class consciousness, is the suggestion that the problem lies in the stages implied in these statements. Indeed, socialist democracy will allow for “the conquest of consciousness and self-determination over blind objectivity” (Lukács 1991, 125). However, it is within capitalism that the oppositional fragment against alienation and exploitation develops. Even within oppressive conditions, reification is neither an absolute nor a static state. What must be qualified is the notion that the actuality of socialism alone produces this “active creature, which is the true nature of [the] human species” (Lukács 1991, 125). In its moment, socialism will do this, but so too does capitalism construct, unintentionally in terms of its own interests, the conditions in which opposition to oppression develops. Marx could never have advocated revolution if such unintentional conditions did not exist. That is, socialist democracy secures the conditions for the species as a whole to develop its freedom, but the conscious imperative for such development arises amidst the contradictions, exploitation, and alienation of capitalism. That conscious imperative materializes in the “formation of a conscious minority [as] the precondition of a mass movement” (Lukács 1975a, 68). This remark was made in a discussion of literature and consciousness hat Lukács referred to in an earlier writing as a means of understanding and developing potentiality, that which “is richer than actual life” and already existent in objective reality (1963, 21; cf. Hegel 1931, 105).
Returning to Mészáros’s criticisms, we note that he is not correct when he argues that Lukács offers no precise solution to a practical problem, for his criticism avoids Lukács’s statement regarding class consciousness in terms of “objective possibility” and the “inner transformation of the proletariat.” These
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are clearly terms and phrases of process, rather than closure as Mészáros implies. Mészáros also avoids the substantial discussion of the role of the Communist Party in the final chapter of History and Class Consciousness. The point of Lukács’s statement about solving the ideological crisis should be that education and the development of consciousness are essential not only for finding a solution to crises, but for establishing the preconditions of the solution: developing a firm basis in the individuals comprising a political movement.
Mészáros also disregards an important dialectical statement Lukács made toward the end of History and Class Consciousness. Quoting from Engels’s discussion of the transition in human society under socialism as a “leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom,” Lukács points out that any “leap” is “in essence a process” (1971a, 312). A leap is never just a sudden break from prevailing social relations of a specific moment, just as the realm of freedom is not a static condition. Lukács is referring to the rather lengthy, sometimes circuitous route of social change that requires many steps, including the process of organizing the consciousness of the most advanced and the most retrograde sectors of the class. Thus, Lukács comments on the relationship of necessity to freedom: “The only problem is to determine the starting-point of the process” (1971a, 312). One can argue that this is hardly the only problem, but it is certainly a central problem f the preparation and carrying out of revolutionary organizing.
In his own defense, here quoting affirmatively G. Y. Zinoviev, Lukács argued that the “communist vanguard of the working class struggles against social democracy (labour aristocracy, petit bourgeois fellow travelers) for the working class. The working class at whose head stands the Communist Party, struggles with the bourgeois for the peasantry” (2000, 85). Perhaps it is the communist movement that Mészáros really objects to, and in this way interprets the intervention of the Communist Party as a problem of substitution (which will be more thoroughly explored in the following chapter). After quoting Zinoviev, the question Lukács asks one of his critics might well be asked of Mészáros, Dunk, or Seccombe and Livingstone: “Does Comrade Rudas think that this
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is not a struggle of consciousness?” Put differently, do such critics of the struggle against the ideological crisis not think that is the work of communist parties.
Having rejected Lukács’s argument on the necessity of an ethical component in revolutionary theory and practice, it becomes easier for Mészáros to set aside Lukács’s main point—giving priority to finding a solution to the ideological problem of the reification of the proletariat. Further, this allows Mészáros to focus his argument on the “insurmountable” problems in the unchanging nature of capitalism and the problems of the historical experiences of postcapitalist societies. Thus, while Mészáros argues that Lukács had created an idealized conception of working-class consciousness in his identification of party and class, the alleged error is extended by Mészáros to creation of a dichotomy of “before” and “after” that reifies the necessary processes of the development of working-class consciousness. That process enlarges over time within the context of more or less favorable economic, political, and other objective conditions that mediate the struggle between classes, as does the developing awareness of concrete conditions and alternatives by members of the working class as it is more or less continuously objectified in their movement.
Knowledge of economic conditions and the struggle against them is a crucial component in the development of consciousness, as Ollman has argued, and in the movement toward socialism. Lukács treated this set of problems with less vigor than the problem of ideology and consciousness, but he correctly recognized the latter as “the struggle of the proletariat against itself” (1971a, 80). Further, “The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle” (Lukács 1971a, 80). Notice that the proletariat does not begin to develop itself in a classless society, it begins to perfect itself during the struggle with the opposing class in the social, economic, and political context created and sustained by the opposing class. The question is how the class moves toward that state of “perfection,” including the transcendence of the inner barrier of reification which initiates its
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meaning on his statements, a matter that is as important organizationally as it is methodologically.
A further point needs to be made, though it should be obvious given the connection of Lukács statement above with the position Marx took on the proletariat, discussed in chapter 2. Stephan Breuer, arguing that Lukács succumbs to the “illusion of politics,” claims that this is manifested in his insistence on the “self-elimination of the proletariat.” Breuer puts this in terms of sacrifice, the “earnestness of death” (1982, 76–77). This is an inaccurate portrayal of Lukács’s position, and of Marx’s. There is nothing sacrificial about raising the level of consciousness among members of a social group to the point at which they become aware of their subordinated condition and discover the theoretical principles, the “guidelines for action,” that redefine and reconstruct their circumstances. Consistent with Goldmann’s argument, discussed in chapter 3, this is evidence that the group has gone beyond the maximum level of consciousness possible as a subordinated group and has begun to change its structure by way of a rational, dialectical reorganization of the group itself.
This problem of “before” and “after” is highlighted in Willis Truitt’s recent discussion of Marxist ethics in which tactics in the period of revolutionary struggle are given priority over the “ethics of duty” in the period of building socialism (2005, 84–85).2 For Truitt, tactics in the period of revolutionary struggle may “determine the continuing conditions of life, and in many instances, the very survival of humanity” (71). He cites a passage from a version of Lukács’s “Tactics and Ethics” in which “correct tactics” are categorically ethical; that is, revolutionary tactics and ethics are identical. This misconstrues Lukács’s argument, the context of which was the preparation of revolutionary cadre. His emphasis on knowledge and conduct as the core of a revolutionary ethics is important in establishing a process obscured by his own problematic assumption of the identity of tactics and ethics in the statement quoted. Lukács’s definition of ethics has already been cited: knowledge of one’s position within existing historical conditions, the consciousness of the necessity to challenge the power of capital and a means to achieve it, the necessity of commitment
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(non-neutrality), and the belief that one’s individual actions can make a meaningful difference in the struggle for socialism. But he notes that the ethical relations of conscience and responsibility nvolve a “purely formal and ethical definition of individual action” that moves forward into “a special level of action, that of politics” when the individual “makes an ethical decision within himself,” a decision derived from the consciousness of common interests, goals, and objective possibility (Lukács 1975b, 8–9). Mészáros’s third ideological position thus begs several questions: If the recognition of the necessity of a classless society constitutes an ideological position, at what point in the process does that recognition occur in the concrete form of an active social movement to achieve this end? To use the two categories suggested in Truitt’s argument, does this position develop during the course of revolutionary struggle, or in the period of building socialism, as an “ethics of duty”? At what point are Mészáros’s first and second forms of ideology recognized as supports of capitalism, and therefore as hindrances to the development of consciousness that facilitates the kind of knowledge and commitment necessary to take up the third position and its projected goal? Thus, the ideological crisis needs to be addressed prior to attaining anything like a socialist society, for it is the overcoming of the inner barrier of reification in, at least, a conscious minority that is the precondition for that achievement.
In other words, there must be an “ethics of duty” relevant to the period of struggle, ethics that can be developed and distinguished, for analytical and organizational purposes, from tactics for organizing trade unions, on-the-job safety, struggles against racism, and so on. Such ethics may be distinguishable from, but cannot be fundamentally different than those that motivate people to build and consolidate socialism in a post-revolutionary period. The relation between tactics and ethics is clarified by the requirements of action at this “special level.” The point here is that the ethical decision of the individual may occur with or without the influence of the movement—the Communist Party in Lukács’s case—but the movement must present a clear ethical standpoint as a motivation and common frame of reference for newly committed
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individuals. The identification of ethics with tactics in a period in which tactics are said to take priority has certain organizational risks. These were experienced in the history of the Communist movement when certain “necessities” of the struggle were sometimes considered exempt from ethical consideration. Examples cited in this study of politically motivated action by working people, show the beginnings of the formation of a sense of ethical duty under the immediate conditions of capitalism, even though the immediate effects of these struggles have greater implications for reform than for revolution.
Mészáros throws up his own barriers to the possibility of an alternative to capitalism and the formation of oppositional movements necessary for working toward this end. His “insurmountable nature” of capitalism becomes a rationale against the ideological struggle to overcome reification and develop class consciousness as the central means of advancing a movement toward socialism at the present historical juncture. Perhaps the collapse of Soviet socialism, having resurrected the “god-that-failed” argument, has overtaken Mészáros’s interest in how to achieve a socialist future. In many respects there are similarities with the attitude taken by Gorman, Dunk, and Seccombe and Livingstone. A disturbing aspect of this is the passivity engendered by the approaches these authors take and the sense of futility with regard to participating in social movements, especially those based on the systematic historical analysis of Marxism, and more specifically the movements for socialism.
NOTES
1. These ideological positions were noted at the beginning of chapter 5.
2. See my review of Truitt (Lanning 2005).