Lukács, Irrationalism and Marxist Reason
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 เม.ย. 2023
- Based on some of your requests, we have created a video where we address Lukács's later work and the meaning of irrationalism. We analyze Marxist reason in contradistinction to neo-Kantian thought, we touch on what is most distinctive about philosophy for Marx and Engels and how Marx breaks with both Kant and Hegel.
From a Marxist point of view, the practical aim of philosophy is to bring about human freedom and human freedom in capitalist society requires the activation and the organization of the proletariat to realize and overcome class domination.
References:
Lukács, Georg The Destruction of Reason Verso Books, 2021
Lukács, Georg History and Class Consciousness MIT Press, 1992
Lukács, Georg "Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics" from Tactics and Ethics Verso Books, 2014
Lukács, Georg "Intellectual Workers’ and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership” from Tactics and Ethics Verso Books, 2014
Lenin, Vladimir "What Is to Be Done" www.marxists.org/archive/leni...
Frederick C. Beiser The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880 Oxford University Press, 2014
Rockmore, Tom Irrationalism: Lukacs and the Marxist View of Reason Temple University Press, 1991
Check out our symposium on Lukács' The Destruction of Reason ( • Philosophy and the Ris... )
Supplemental reading:
Tutt, Daniel "The Question of Worldview and Class Struggle in Philosophy: On the Relevance of Lukács' The Destruction of Reason" Cosmonaut Magazine February, 2022 cosmonautmag.com/2022/02/the-...
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A profounding reading of Marx and Lukacs! Thank you for sharing this! The questions that you raised here somehow correlate with Ilyenkov's hegelian marxism in its opposition to dogmatic soviet dialectical materialism, which was actually a soviet form of hegemonic rationality, as Lukacs puts it. And i feel like The Destruction of Reason really sums up this soviet philosophy's lifelong struggle within itself... Lots of names, mostly unknown outside post soviet space, but maybe for the better)
'profound'
A critique of Lukács' dependence on Neukantianismus and the subsequent dependence on Max Weber would have been nice.
Very interesting lecture. I have to say that my brain is still in recovery mode from taking in so many high-level, important ideas!
I discovered this video & your channel through your interview with Haz (Infrared) and fount it illuminating. Thank you!
Amazingly good video, thanks. From what I could get from Luckács, he defines irrationalism as every movement that denies evolution, or history, class struggle and its dialectical character, the negation of the negation of one identity. I believe we could read him as everyone who denies that history is about the act of fighting ( the party leading the revolutionary process ) and working ( the proletariat ), as states Kojèv, denies the reason in history.
Now, about culture. I guess, the revolutionary party could not just preserve the bourgeois culture, but overcome it, since, as Marx write: "Light, air, etc. - the simplest animal cleanliness - ceases to be a need for man. Filth, this stagnation and putrefaction of man - the sewage of civilization (speaking quite literally) - comes to be the element of life for him. Utter, unnatural depravation, putrefied nature, comes to be his life-element. None of his senses exist any longer, and not only in its human fashion, but in an inhuman fashion, and therefore not even in an animal fashion". To turn it into a human culture maybe we must even going back to the Ancients Greek and Romans, to start again. I guess even Nietzsche realized that.
Sorry my English and for witting so much, once again, wonderful video, thank you.
Excellent. Thanks for this Daniel.
Epic ‼️
There are many things that could be said about this lecture. For one: Lenin wasn't the first to say socialist consciousness had to be brought into the working class, he got that from Kautsky. Lenin's contribution was to show the particular form of party the working class needed to fight against political opportunism and bourgeois consciousness within the working class.
But I think this is the most important:
30:38 "... you're introduced to an interesting ethical conundrum which needs to be discussed from the point of view of view of Marxist ethics which is something that liberals
(and here I don't mean neoliberals I mean classical liberal critics of Marxism such as Kolakowski have argued even against Lukacs) that at a moment of class struggle in which the higher logic of the historical thrust of the proletariat's realization of self-consciousness is occurring, one of the dangers is the justification that this higher logic and the participation in this higher logic can quite easily negate empirical reality of what's actually occurring within the historical sequence.
We could talk about aspects of Stalinism in this regard for example. I do not propose to bring a solution to this but merely to flag it as something we can discuss in the future."
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This is indeed the question you must discuss! The proposition that Stalinism was the logical and historical continuity of Marx and Lenin has been vigorously promoted by the Stalinists, their acolytes in the left, and by liberals and conservatives on behalf of world imperialism.
Did Stalinism "quite easily negate empirical reality"? Was it "easy"? From September 1923 Stalinism engaged in an escalating struggle against Trotsky, the Left Opposition and anyone who insisted Lenin was correct that that fate of the Soviet Union depended on a revolution in an advanced industrialised country. (Stalin himself maintained this in the first edition of "Foundations of Leninism" published at the start of 1924, just after Lenin's death, but this was removed (without explanation) in the second edition published at the end of that year.) This culminated in the political genocide of the Great Terror from 1936-1939 because Stalin and the bureaucracy had no formal answer to a principled Marxist critique of their policies so their chose physical elimination.
It is not just a question of Stalinism. In August 1914, at another "moment of class struggle", almost all the parties of the Second International effectively renounced the anti-war and international resolutions that had been passed at the congresses in Stuttgart in 1907, Copenhagen in 1910 and Basel in 1912. Only the Bolsheviks under Lenin and the Serbian section didn't. Various justifications in Marxist terms were offered which led Lenin to write the following in State and Revolution (1917) "... Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!"
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I highly recommend the following lectures
The Left Opposition's struggle against Stalinism (100 mins)
th-cam.com/video/VSJQV1L-Fpg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=bdgMAQeqbGalLO91
Book launch of Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative? (125 mins)
th-cam.com/users/live8Wx6Mk_F568?si=q653JdavI5GCGAIv
Very interesting stuff. I certainly want to read The Destrution of Reason soon. But seems like a lot of that is already in History and Class Consciosuness, especially the "irrationality problem" and its relation to the Kantian thing-in-itself (the antimonies of bourgeois consciousnes).
Something I didn't understand at the very end of the video: Where exactly do you see the connection between Lukacs' argument and Spinoza? Could you elaborate on that or rephrase it?
Yes indeed, HCC hints to the basis of Lukács' critique of irrationalism within it. But it is elaborated more in Destruction of Reason. Regarding the Spinoza reference, what I meant was that the identical subject object notion is a Spinozist move philosophically in the sense that for Spinoza there is a necessary parallel between thought and being as a condition of knowledge. Also see my other References to get good reading tips to dig further into Lukács.
Take care of that cold Daniel.
7:30 aristocrat epistemology, UNbridgeable differences
17:00 hegel, ,,marx flip
25:50 overcome reification
This fuxking spooky lighting af
love this dude's hair. Has a mad Shahrukh Khan energy when he pushes the hair back with his hand. very intentional I would say. I hope he knows that Shahrukh has seen this and he approves
So the proletariat needs to achieve dasein? 😊
to connect with each other as common inhabitants of the planet, yes.
That's false consciousness
Nah. Not good enough. Daniel does a good job on contextualising Lukacs’ thought but ultimately he leaves this Paleo-Stalinist dross of the late Lukacs un interrogated. The working class should not be fetishised! Not in 2023. .