CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AND A SHORT LIFE SKETCH OF GYORGY LUKACS

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS AND A SHORT LIFE SKETCH OF GYORGY LUKACS

Classes have been defined by property ownership (Marx), position or role (Mosca, Pareto), status rank (Warner, Lenski) prestige (Barber) or by intermarriage (Schumpeter). Let us go through some aspects of class:

First, class membership is not biologically determined but is a form of social stratification based on laws, esteem, wealth or power. Estates or castes may comprise types of class stratification, or classes maybe defined by different status or ranks. In all cases, however, class is a vertical division into superior-inferior, super-ordinate-subordinate.

Second, a difference in class is a difference in wealth, power, or esteem. All definitions do not assume an identity between class and rank, but all assume a correlation. Class is a division in privileges. Super-ordinates benefit from the status quo; they are well situated in the system of rewards and privileges.

Third, class is a dividing line between different kinds of behaviours. What these behaviours are, depends on the actual definition but nonetheless all definitions assume that different classes can be separated empirically according to different patterns of behaviour such as inter-marriages, social mixing, organizational memberships, travel, etiquette, and mannerisms.

Fourth, all definitions assume that class membership has continuity. There is disagreement as to whether membership maybe frozen, as for castes, but in case are classes considered adhoc or momentary aggregations like a crowd. There may be a circulation of members between classes but it is not so rapid as to homogenise their distinctive behaviours nor to change in a generation more than a small proportion of class membership.

Fifth, all definitions assume that interests are associated with class membership. Interests may be directed towards status mobility or maintenance, overcoming or protecting the privileges of the upper class, or changing or defending the status quo. In any case, class divisions form latent or manifest interest groups. A class is considered potentially or actually a group which shares similar information and interests vis-à-vis some other class.

Sixth, a class is always defined within a system of relations constituting an opposing class or classes, analogous to hot being defined relative to cold, virtue relative to vice, and so on. Class as rank, esteem, privilege, or position requires an opposition to complete the definition. This is because all definitions assume a superior-inferior stratification, and an inferior and superior cannot be defined without the other.

Finally, all assume that class constitutes a basic component of the social order. To understand the major social divisions in society, patterns of interaction and conflict is to understand class.

Such are the common assumptions in literature. These notwithstanding, since definitions of class do vary, some markedly different assumptions exist.

One difference is whether class can be latent groups or must manifest in behaviour or consciousness. Class must manifest within an organization’s empirical division of power, but common class interests and consciousness maybe latent. Authoritative roles structurally divide people into classes which constitute different life situations. Out of these different structural relationships and resulting experiences develop similar attitudes (latent interest) which are the seat of common class interest.

A second difference has to do with whether one can indeed define class. Because of the confused state of the literature, some simply pose a definition for research purposes or treat class as a construct or a stepping stone concept towards empirical analysis. Confused literature however, does not mean a confused reality. Clearly, there is some important aspect of society that all definitions have captured.

Another difference in assumption concerns the significance of class. Some argue that class is a functional division of society based on talent or aptitude. The upper class, being those who contribute scarce resources required for society to function, is rewarded more than the lower class. Some argue that classes are divisions resulting from historical conflicts of power. The privileges of an upper class result from their dominance usually through monopolisation of force.

A final difference concerns whether class is a term applicable only to capitalist societies, and not to traditional or communist systems. All societies are held together by law-norms, an aspect of which is to define authoritative roles that divide people everywhere into those who can command and those who obey. This is true for communist societies than for the so-called capitalists. In any society this division determines who gets what.

Hungarian literary historian, essayist, critic, an influential and controversial figure in the Western Marxist tradition, Georg Lukacs supported the aesthetic doctrine of socialism realism but was viewed with suspicion by Communist Party ideologists. Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness was attacked by the Russian Communist Party leaders and Lukacs later regretted the ‘Messianic Utopianism’ of this work. Lukacs aesthetics that opposed the political control of the artist was hailed by New Left intellectuals in 1960s.

In the writings of the Stalinist period, the real problems were overlooked and as with economic subjectivism, the correctness of particular solutions became a matter for dogmatism. Literature ceased to reflect the dynamic contradictions of social life; it became an illustration of abstract ‘truth’. The aesthetic consequences of such an approach are all too evident. Even where this ‘truth’ was in fact true and not as so often, a lie or half truth, the notion of literature as illustration was extremely detrimental to good writing.

Lukacs was born in Budapest, studied in Budapest and Berlin, went to Italy, and stayed at Heidelberg. He became associated with German sociologist, Max Weber. Lukacs described himself as a subjective idealist, and his writings showed interest in neo-Kantian thoughts vastly inspired by Hegel. After converting to Marxism and historical materialism, Lukacs still developed Weber’s ideal type methodology. He returned to Budapest, where he became the leading figure of Budapest Sunday Circle. The members discussed about the end of liberal society. Most of the members of the group left Hungary after the revolution of 1919.

“If Faust could have two souls within his breast, why should not a normal person unite conflicting intellectual trends within himself changing from one class to another in the middle of a world crisis? In so far as I am able to recall those years, I at least find that my ideas hovered between the acquisition of Marxism and political activism on the one hand and the constant intensification of my purely idealistic ethical preoccupations on the other” (History and the Class Consciousness)
Gertrúd Jánosi (née Bortstieber)

World War I had radicalised Lukac’s thinking and he joined the Hungarian Communist party. After changing his view Lukacs accepted that terror was legitimate in the socialist context. Lukacs marriage to Jelena Grabenko, a Russian emigrant ended after some years and in 1919 he married Gertrúd Bortstieber. From 1919 to 1929 Lukacs lived in Vienna where he published History and Class Consciousness in 1923. It is a collection of essays about literature and politics. The work was born under a highly contradictory amalgam of theories from Kierkegaard  to Hegel and from Marx to Georges Sorel and Rosa Luxemburg. In it Lukacs argued that consciousness depends upon class position. Different classes have different forms of consciousness, but only proletariat’s point of view coincides with objectivity and truth. In freeing itself, the proletariat frees mankind. Socialism would abolish alienation with Lukac’s identification with objectification as a social category. Later in the preface to the new edition of the History and the Class Consciousness, Lukacs wrote “objectification is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in society. If we bear in mind that every externalization of an object in practice is an objectification that every human expression including speech, objectifies human thoughts and feelings, then it is clear that we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between men”.

History and the Class Consciousness was attacked by Gregory Zinovyev and the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. Lukacs was associated with the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. When Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, Lukacs emigrated to the Soviet Union where he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After World War II, Lukacs returned to Hungary where he was a professor of aesthetics and cultural philosophy at the University of Budapest. He served as editor of the Journal Forum and advocated “Socialist humanism” in the arts. In 1949 opposition political parties were outlawed and the Hungarian Communist Party proclaimed Hungary a People’s Republic. Lukacs writing did not gain approval of the new authorities and Jozsef Revai, the chief ideologist of the Party, attacked Lukacs’ “bourgeois realism”. Lukacs’ aesthetic theories have influenced Walter Benjamin and the French-Romanian theorist Lucien Goldman who devised the method of literary analysis known as “genetic structuralism” which sought to identify homologies or structural parallels between literary texts and the world views of social groups contemporary with the text.

Lukacs until his death clung to an ideology which seems more and more utopian – a vision of social paradise, an end of alienation of man for which there is no evidence in any Communist or other society.(Rene Wellek in a History of Modern Criticism)

Lukacs early writing reveals the immense amount of reading which he had undertaken in his youth. He was also interested in theatre and had translated Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck”. Poetry did not interest him much. Soul and Form a collection of essays established his literary reputation. He declared, “There is no system in life. In life there is only the separate and individual, the concrete to exist is to be different.”

Lukacs lecture series for Heidelberg were born under the influence of neo-Kantism, showed Lukacs’ interest in Hegel and Schiller which contrasts the ideal world found in the ancient past, and the modern world.

In The Historical Novel, Lukacs started from Sir Walter Scott’s novels to show the historical consciousness in literature. Lukacs did not consider Scott to be a great Romantic, but a great realist who depicted the conflict of classes.

Lukacs became interested in the work of Solzhenitsyn and praised his work as a rebirth of noble beginnings of Socialist Realism, but developed his version known as Critical Realism. Realism was not a “style” but the “basis of every literature”. He attacked modernism and attacked writers such as Joyce and Kafka, and nearly all major avant-garde writers in Western Literature who deviated from 19^th century Realism.

In his description of “reification” Lukacs was the first to re-introduce the ideas of alienation           as central to Marx’s thought. According to Lukacs the formal fragmentation of modernist texts participate in the process of reification. Realism is the only literary mode capable of representing the totality of society. Bourgeois thought is repeated in naturalism and subjectivism. Naturalism is a degraded form of realism and limits itself to description instead of narration. Subjectivist art elevates art as the product of the superior subjective consciousness of the creative artist.

“The goal of art is to provide a picture of reality in which the contradiction between appearance and reality, the particular and the general, the immediate and conceptual, etc. is so resolved that the two converge into a spontaneous integrity. The Universal appears as a quality of the individual and the particular, reality becomes manifest, and can be experienced within appearance.”(Lukacs in Writer and the Critic)