History And Class Consciousness At 100

While sometimes alluded to, the affinity between Lukács’s conception of the “standpoint of the proletariat” and feminist standpoint theories is, however, rarely further developed and problematized. The unspoken assumption seems to be that the latter simply dislocated Lukács’s theoretical framework from a class-centered perspective and applied it to a gender-centered one. In reality, however, feminist standpoint theories are far from monolithic, and their relation to Marxism is more complex. In order to refine this debate, I will address two versions of feminist standpoint theory, exploring what they draw on and what they leave behind in Lukács’s accounts of the “revolutionary standpoint.”

Nancy Hartsock

Let us start with Nancy Hartsock’s proposal of a feminist historical materialism.¹⁷Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” Discovering Reality, Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 283–310. For Hartsock, both feminist and Marxist standpoint theories hold that differences in material life structures how we understand social relations. This structuring works in such a way that the vision available to the rulers will be partial and perverse, while, inversely, the lives of the oppressed make available a particular and privileged vantage point to see the entire system of domination. This possible revolutionary standpoint is not immediately given, but rather an achievement and a result of overcoming the dominant vision of the world.

Like Lukács, Hartsock criticizes the quantification of things and people, the abstraction of their concrete qualities, and the over-instrumentalization in one’s relationships to objects and other subjects. In her view, the feminist take on the world is similar to the class consciousness of the proletariat because both are more closely connected to the material world than are the masculinist and the capitalist views: “Women and workers inhabit a world in which the emphasis is on change rather than stasis, a world characterized by interaction with natural substances rather than separation from nature, a world in which quality is more important than quantity.”¹⁸Ibid., 290. This concreteness allows for a non-reified perspective: the productive and reproductive activities of both women and workers engenders a sort of unification of mind and body because of their practical, material character.

According to Hartsock, however, close as the experience of workers and women might be, women make a double contribution to capitalism: they produce both commodities and human beings. Hence, for Hartsock, the feminist standpoint goes deeper than the merely proletarian standpoint: “the female experience in bearing and rearing children involves a unity of mind and body more profound than is possible in the worker’s instrumental activity.”¹⁹Ibid., 294. Hartsock’s argument seems to be that women’s consciousness and experience are not reified and avoid the antinomies of masculinist thought. Emancipation then would be a matter of restructuring the whole of society on the basis of women’s material activities. Doing so would move us towards “a fully human community, a community structured by connection rather than separation and opposition.”²⁰Ibid., 305.

Hartsock’s characterization of women’s experience is problematic not only because it excludes groups of people from her analysis (especially trans women), but also because it places women outside history: women’s activities are conceived as a sort of natural, precapitalist remainder within a capitalist society. Her emphasis on natural, organic processes bears resemblance to a sort of anticapitalism with romantic undertones and potentially reactionary implications. Furthermore, taking women’s everyday experience as non-reified makes it difficult for Hartsock to address the kind of negative experiences constitutive of their practices that compel women to grasp and struggle against them. Lukács’s account of reification and class consciousness offers some valuable insights that can help improve this problematic view.

Georg Lukács

As a historical phenomenon, reification appears for Lukács when capitalism turns the exchange of commodities into the form par excellence of the metabolism between human beings. The abstraction of human labor is vital in this process, and Lukács’s aim consists precisely in exploring the consequences of this phenomenon, intensified with the increasing rationalization of the division of labor.

For Lukács, the worker who objectifies his labor power into a commodity appears as “a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system.”²¹Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89. He is torn apart not only from the product of his work and from his own work activities, but also from his community and, ultimately, from and within himself: “this rational mechanization extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it.”²²Ibid., 88, translation amended by author.

For Lukács, the capitalist does not experience this tearing apart within himself: his reified situation appears not as passivity but as activity; he seems to be the active embodiment of capitalism. This unproblematic position makes it unlikely for him to view social conditions as questionable: “this illusion blinds him to the true state of affairs.”²³Ibid., 166. Since unveiling reification would reveal tendencies toward the abolition of capitalism, “for the bourgeoisie to become conscious of them would be tantamount to suicide.”²⁴Ibid., 181. The proletarian, on the other hand, “is denied the scope for such illusory activity” and “perceives the split in his being preserved in the brutal form of what is, in its whole tendency, a slavery without limits.”²⁵Ibid., 166. The standpoint of the proletariat is the standpoint of a split between subject and (commodified) object.

But this very split contains the potential for the proletariat to unveil reification: “the proletariat is confronted by the need to break through this barrier, to overcome it inwardly from the very start by adopting its own point of view.”²⁶Ibid., 164. The proletariat experiences this like it is a matter of life and death—here lies the genesis of the proletariat’s emancipatory interest in overthrowing capitalism. For Lukács, the proletarian’s inner split is therefore a step on the path to a possible new unity. The proletariat does not itself offer a template for a non-reified praxis, quite the opposite, for it “only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself.”²⁷Ibid., 80.

Both Hartsock and Lukács stress the necessity of unveiling the processual character of reality from either the feminist viewpoint or the perspective of the proletariat. The most significant difference between them does not lie, however, in the subject (either women or workers) who would be in a privileged position to bring about the unveiling of reification, but rather in why their position is considered to be a distinctive (and in a sense privileged) one.

For Hartsock, the feminist standpoint is privileged because women’s material practices are more connected with organic, natural processes than men’s, resulting in a worldview free from dichotomies. For Lukács, by contrast, the reason for the distinctive standpoint of the proletariat is precisely the fact that reified dichotomies are essentially constitutive of workers’ experience under capitalism.

Dorothy Smith

Let us now turn to another early proposal of feminist standpoint theory, one that is closer to Lukács’s Marxism. I have in mind Dorothy Smith’s radical critique of sociology from women’s perspectives.²⁸Dorothy Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” Sociological Inquiry 44, no. 1 (1974): 7–13. In her seminal essay, Smith describes the process of conceptual imperialism whereby the requirement of objectivity “lifts the actor out of the immediate local and particular place in which he is in the body.”²⁹Ibid., 9.

With a split between conceptual and more concrete bodily experience, there arises a bifurcation of consciousness that affects those who engage in both kinds of activities—notably women. In addition to that, women “mediate for men the relation between the conceptual mode of action and the actual concrete forms in which it is and must be realized.”³⁰Ibid., 10. The better women perform this mediation, the more they become subjected to the authority of men’s abstract activities, the greater the dichotomy and estrangement between both worlds.

Smith does not suggest that women try to stand outside the conceptual, for one can only know a set of socially constructed practices from within. Only from within the men-dominated world can women experience the dissonance that might make that world problematic. As with Lukács’s proletariat, a feminist approach must transcend the contradiction, rather than simply invert (as Hartsock would have) the poles.

With the notion of bifurcated consciousness, Smith offers a more complex account of women’s standpoint. Women’s experiences are seen in a less romanticized way—not as relating mainly to organic processes purified from dichotomies, but as permeated by acute contradictions which their activity reproduces. Such contradictions are precisely what allows and compels those who experience them to see them and, more than that, to see them as problematic.

For Smith, the direct everyday experience of women is only the starting point that might lead us to problematize the total socio-economic order including the supposed nature, position, and role of “women” themselves. In this sense, the feminist standpoint would be a result, a mediated knowledge, rather than an immediate perspective to be universalized as it currently stands.

Although feminist standpoint theory is often taken as a monolithic endeavor in its interest in the distinctive and potentially emancipatory knowledge produced from a feminist perspective, its representatives actually disagree on how to characterize such a standpoint and why it can be revolutionary. In this regard, on the centennial of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács’s account of the worker’s reifying inner split points to a latent emancipatory interest which still, to this day, offers us resources to counter the idealization of socially subjugated standpoints.

Mariana Teixeira works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She is also an associate researcher at the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning in São Paulo, Brazil, and an adjunct editor of Dissonancia: Critical Theory Journal, a publication of the University of Campinas, Brazil. She is co-editor, with Arthur Bueno and David Strecker, of De-Centering Global Sociology: The Peripheral Turn in Social Theory and Research (Routledge, 2022) and has published numerous articles in the fields of feminism, critical theory, and Marxism.

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The Marxist Ideology, or History and Class Consciousness after One Hundred Years

Daniel López

Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious “orthodox” Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto—without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.

—Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness³¹Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press 1968), 1.

After Marx, every major innovation within Marxist theory has invoked the rhetoric of orthodoxy to announce its arrival. This was also true of History and Class Consciousness (HCC), although the theory Lukács expounded was so radically nonconformist that it earned him the denunciation of the Marxist inquisitors of his day. Consequently, most Marxist orthodoxy has regarded Lukács’s masterpiece as quasi-heretical.

The last few decades, however, have been kinder. For example, just imagine a contemporary reader favourably citing Zinoviev’s denunciation of Lukács—or, for that matter, Adorno’s. Or take the Althusserians. While they still remember the old polemics, they are generally more interested in intelligent discussion than in slaying the humanist Marxist dragon. Indeed, there are probably more sympathetic readers of Lukács in China now than there were opponents of Lukács during the entire twentieth century. And anyway, these days, Marxist orthodoxy is less a Comintern censor and more a silver-haired crank distributing leaflets outside a Democratic Socialists of America meeting.

Consequently, new readers of Lukács will approach him with fewer prejudices or misconceptions than ever. However, my argument is not that Lukácsian Marxism has stood the test of time while other currents have failed. After all, HCC was clearly not a success. It was too Bolshevik for the non-party philosophers and too Hegelian for the Bolsheviks. Lukács inspired few intellectual inheritors, and there has never been a party whose leaders or theorists committed themselves to his version of historical materialism. No subsequent revolution has vindicated his account of the relationship between party and class or his concept of praxis. In short, by every criterion Lukács’s intervention failed.

And yet—at the risk of sounding like a bad Žižek imitation—is it not precisely the failure of HCC that makes it relevant for our times? After all, every tradition within Marxism has failed, but we nevertheless share a conviction that Marxism still offers universal, liberatory answers. Facing this obvious problem requires a return to method—and this is precisely the call that Lukács issued in 1923. The quote with which this essay began continues: “orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded, and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders.”³²Ibid., 1.

Most read these claims as rhetoric or hyperbole, and not without reason. If we uphold historical materialism by virtue of conviction, haven’t we subjectively predetermined the result of our inquiry, rendering it unscientific? If we’re being honest, this is an all too common approach to theory. Knowing in our hearts that Marxism must be true, we seek proofs. Though pursued in earnest, the results of such an inquiry are destined to be subjective, one-sided, and false.

Yet, as Lukács wrote, “it is of the essence of dialectical method that concepts which are false in their abstract one-sidedness are later transcended.”³³Ibid., xlvi. This is because “the ‘false’ is an aspect of the ‘true,’” and that insofar as this is the case, “it is both ‘false’ and ‘non-false.’”³⁴Ibid., xlvii. This is to say, if we can uncover the unthought, subjective element underlying our convictions, we can transform the false into an aspect of the truth.

Lukács suggested we do so by situating our knowledge historically and in light of its relation to totality. Yet, when we consider Marxism historically, we quickly encounter many utopian or sectarian currents that claim to uphold the Marxist tradition. These claims usually reach back to specific historical events, for example, 1917, the founding of the Fourth International, the Chinese Revolution, 1968, and so on.

Although they ground themselves in a past event, these historical narratives almost always reflect the culture of the small ethical-political movements, communities, or sects that advocate for them. Indeed, such narratives cohere organizations and help them set themselves apart from the world. This is to say, they unconsciously meet a present need. The result is usually a moralistic, romantic, and nostalgic worldview that fails to understand or alter history as it unfolds. In HCC, Lukács explained quite correctly how this reproduces the immediate ethical, aesthetic, and historic logic of bourgeois society.³⁵Ibid., 192.

What about totality, then? Like all totalities, it’s easier to posit Marxism as an abstract totality than a concrete one. Typically, attempts to outline Marxism as a systematic doctrine lead to dogmatism. After all, who decides on the boundary lines between Marxist and non-Marxist thought? Is it the proletariat? Pure reason? The party? The editorial board of Historical Materialism? Clearly not.

Against this kind of thinking, a cheerfully ecumenical, pragmatic Marxism is an attractive (and typically more successful) alternative. Yet this also carries risks. Suppose a self-identified Marxist is interested in ecology, social movements, political economy, or any other concrete field of study. Without a dogmatic Marxism already in hand, they should presumably begin with the facts. Yet, as Lukács reminds us, “however simple an enumeration of ‘facts’ may be, however lacking in commentary, it already implies an ‘interpretation.’”³⁶Ibid., 5.This is because “facts are nothing but the parts, the aspects of the total process that have been broken off, artificially isolated and ossified.”³⁷Ibid., 184, author’s emphasis.

Such an empiricist Marxism might help understand this or that concrete question. And growing mass political and industrial organizations requires open-minded coalition building and serious attention to the facts. However, because empiricism takes as its starting point a reality that is abstract, fragmented, and seemingly natural, it risks accommodating with reformism or state socialism.

Thus, we must pay attention to method precisely because we inherit our specific methodologies unconsciously, as common sense, or consciously in the academic discipline instilled by whichever set of departments and institutions we happen to be shaped by. As Lukács pointed out, this also mirrors the logic of capitalism which compartmentalises the social totality into discreet spheres that may be studied rationally, but whose overall logic is irrational.³⁸Ibid., 100.

In the early 1920s, Lukács turned to transformative practice of the proletariat to overcome these aporias and revitalize Marxism. Yet, we live in an age of class de-alignment, and consequently, in many parts of the world, the Marxist tradition is a theory in search of practice. Once, Marxism guided movements of many millions. Today, it’s in danger of becoming the opium of the Left. We must face the possibility that history itself has turned “orthodox Marxism” into an ideology.

What’s needed is a critique of the Marxist ideology, and this is where HCC can help. For example, take Lukács’s “actuality of revolution.” The term describes a historic period in which the immanent contradictions within capitalism begin to de-reify the natural and ineluctable appearance of bourgeois society. Crises render historical what had once seemed eternal. Prior to this, revolutionary Marxism will, by necessity, remain abstract. Outside the actuality of revolution, to be committed to revolution is, at best, to maintain and promote a shared ethical commitment to a non-actual goal while contributing to partial, non-revolutionary struggles against oppression or exploitation.

During the actuality of revolution, however, Marxist theory may overcome its abstraction by orienting towards transformative practice. This is what Lukács argued Lenin accomplished.³⁹Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso 1967), 13. Yet, in saying this, he was being too modest about his own contribution. Instead of generalizing Leninism in the form of a program or doctrine shorn of its context, Lukács developed it into a philosophy of praxis—and philosophy gives us a standpoint from which we can relativize tradition and criticize ideology, including prior to major class struggle.

Yet, to fully understand the political value of Lukács’s philosophy of “praxis,” we must turn his method against HCC itself.⁴⁰Daniel Andrés López, Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (Leiden: Brill, 2019). While this term is key to his breakthrough, it also constitutes a conceptual mythology:⁴¹López, “Lukács: The Antinomies of Bourgeois Philosophy and the Absolute,” Thesis Eleven, 157 (April 2020): 110–32; López, “The Absolute and the Relative in Lukács and Simmel,” Aesthetic of Form as Social Philosophy: Re-reading Lukács (Zagreb: Zagreber Germanistiche Beiträge, 2020); and López, “The Finite and the Infinite in Lukács and Hegel,” Theory and Society, forthcoming 2023.

Mythologies are always born where two terminal points, or at least two stages in a movement, have to be regarded as terminal points without it being possible to discover any concrete mediation between them and the movement … But mythology inevitably adopts the structure of the problem whose opacity has been the cause of its own birth.⁴²Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 194.

The opaque problem that has given birth to the Marxist ideology is our estranged relationship with the present. Marxism rejects the current state of affairs in favour of a liberated world to be realized after capitalism, a promise that is now vouchsafed by the memory of past events. This relation to the present, a possible future, and history is the source of Marxism’s critical power. Yet, because of this critique, Marxism misidentifies its own relation to the actuality of bourgeois society, which grounds its insight.