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History Class Consciousnesssss

History and Class Consciousness (1923) (the major work)

Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm#n35

• First document of Western Marxism
  • Studies effects of class membership upon “mind’s capacity to apprehend external reality” (182 Marxism and Form)
  • Middle-class ideology refuses to “come to terms with the category of totality itself (Jameson compares this with Marx’s own critique of political economy, which is only about details and doesn’t fit them in a general schema)
• Jameson: Lukacs is the first one to apply problem of philosophy (Kant’s transcendental ego; Hegel’s Absolute Spirit; both of which try to create totality) to social reality
  • Also the first one to see it as affiliated with class identity (ie, it’s a bourgeois failing)
• Our relation to objects
  • Middle class: sees it as static, not in terms of production or use
  • See them through contemplation rather than through history: thus, no possibility of change
  • Also illustrates link of Kantian problems with Lukacs social analysis: middle class can’t see the source of what’s going on, the underpinning, just as Kant says we can understand everything except things-in-themselves, the conditions of thought itself (Jameson: capitalism is “first thing-in-itself” 186)
    • (Further note: Hegel tries to solve this problem by showing dialectic of subject and object
• Proletarian consciousness
  • Provides solution for the limitations of bourgeois consciousness
  • Don’t see world in static fashion b/c don’t have the leisure to do so
  • His alienation prevents him to see anything else as an object: he himself knows he’s an object
    • Yet his self-consciousness, when it does come, is privileged: it is self-consciousness of the object, so the proletarian will understand the nature of capitalism better then bourgeois
  • Lukacs: “his consciousness is the self-consciousness of merchandise itself…the revelation to consciousness of capitalist society based on commodity production and exchange” (187)
  • Because we see the world through a model of commodities, this view is significant
• Understanding Commodities
  • Bourgeois: static object without history: timeless and natural; frozen, reified
  • Proletariat: as in a process of change, production (they help making it, so see interrelationships, causal chains, tools and raw material coming together): melts the reification
• Why does it matter? Well, the way to go is change: praxis, action; the realm of the proletariat
  • Thing-in-itself now seen as a mystification, as a silly, wrong abstraction
  • Real world is process, becoming
  • Now we see world as result of social process, not of nature: that consciousness is created by mode of production, and that the one we need (prol) is the true mover and shaker of the world (the worker)
• Vision of the World
  • Instead of a static picture, you have “forces at work within the present, a dissolving of the reified surface o the present into a coexistence of various and conflicting historical tendencies, a translation of immobile objects into acts and potential acts and into consequences of acts.” (189 Marxism and Form) (how does this relate to symbolism?)
  • Jameson notes that this seems to describe novels more than knowledge (190), esp b/c Lukacs always liked narration as the combination of subject and object, “neutralizing” them: not about things-in-themselves or about just people, but somewhere in between
• Elaborates on ideology, reification, class consciousness, false consciousness, alienation
  • Reification: social relations are objectified due to commodity culture, so class consciousness is prevented
  • Marxism will always struggle with its dialectical opponents, revisionism and utopianism
• Take up Lenin’s ideas even better than Lenin did
  • ie, follow Marx’s methods, not any of his actual theses: “scientific” method, not a “sacred” book
  • but realize that “scientific” means you have to see that objectivity is the result of an historical period, so many “scientific” laws are not laws at all, for example political economy
• “Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity”
  • Romantic bourgeois “individual” is just ideology: truth is social

Chapter on Reification: “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”

• Best-known part of the book
• Opening salvo points to centrality of commodity for capitalism: it is the central structuring agent (structural: do not study commodity in isolation!)
  • “For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure.”
  • Basic Definition of Commodity Structure
    • Commodity: something produced for exchange value, not use value
    • “Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ��phantom objectivity�, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”
    • Both an objective state and subjective (state of consciousness—“the subjugation of man’s consciousness”—and an object)
    • A peculiar quality of modern capitalism ONLY because only now does the exchange of commodities can “influence the total outer and inner life of a society:” the commodity has recreated society in its own image, hen commodity is “universal category for society as a whole”
      • Primitive societies, exchange was “episodic” only (only true barter happened at the margins, w/exchange w/other tribes, which Marx says is the beginning of the dissolution of primitive society, b/c barter spreads to interior of society, “decomposing” it) (cf Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).
      • Transition: Commodity begins exerting influence on society, a “negative influence at best,” and the human element of exchange recedes into background (merchant becoming more central). Money and interest-bearing capital are at the forefront of this mystification, while serfdom and slavery also contribute, being a mask of servitude/dominance relations that are really just productive relations.
      • Next step: Human labor is abstracted and seen as exchangeable, and the division of labor occurs. Why so bad? Your characteristics, your characteristics and abilities are converted into objective parts of you that you “own” and can be made sold
      • Then: “greater rationalisation, the progressive elimination of the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker.” (ie, monotonous repetition of a single part of construction of commodity)
      • Finally: the society organized around commodity form, independent of whether quantitatively industrial production of commodities dominates or not: it’s about the commodity form taking over social organization, not about the proportionate takeover of factory form, for example
• Marx’s Classic Definition of Reification and Commodities
  • “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men�s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses … It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” (Capital 1, 72)
  • Object becomes objective for laborer because it appears as autonomous from him and can control him
  • Objectively: creation of a market: appearance of objects with values that exist in relation to each other, with discoverable laws that appear to spring up independently of man, like they always will and always have had these qualities (most importantly, political economy): the forces seem invisible and uncontrollable
  • Subjectively: “a man’s activity estranged from himself;” his labor is a commodity subject to non-human, objective laws: Man’s Labour is separated from Man. You see your own labor as a commodity you can exchange. That’s when commodity form becomes universal: man’s labor is abstracted (ie, “formal equality of human labor”) and incorporated into a commodity.
  • Requirement for commodity culture: man’s labor is abstracted and seen as exchangeable, judged in relation to other types of labor as seen in commodities: not between people, but within objects: “the social life of objects”
• Taylorism
  • basic description, source: wikipedia: also called “scientific management,” analyzing “workflow processes” to increase productivity, height from fin de siecle to WWI, esp in Italy and Germany, but replaced by Fordism (which includes Taylorism) @ end of WWI; also used by Lenin to theorize Soviet labor and used in Soviet Union 1920s-30s (using Fordism and Taylorism to catch up w/Americans) and kept up through Cold War; 1920s-30s “quality control” due to Taylorist policies
    • Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1905 Shop Management, 1911 The Principles of Scientific Management
    • Study the worker, watch the movements, and then make recommendations to streamline the process (“task-based” theory)
    • an extreme division of labor
      • Even encourages the “manager” b/c someone has to herd them, and this won’t be the capitalist
    • Determine the best method by watching current workers; pick the worker best for the job (personality: psychologically must be good choice for the particular task at hand); train those folks in the new method; minimize interruptions; provide financial incentive for increased output
    • rigidifies hierarchy, authority (management versus labor)
  • distinct from Fordism, which is part of America’s Progressive Era “Efficiency Movement”
    • Mass production methods to create identical, standardized parts; high wages; term coined in 1916
    • Unskilled labor replaces skilled labor as process is broken down to tiny processes (division of labor)
    • Use of moving assembly line (1913), where machines arranged in chronological order of use (not grouped accg to similarity)
    • Paternalism: taking care (whether you like it or not) of workers like a family
    • Most in use 1945-1970; 1960s-70s people rethinking it
      • Generally refers to mass production, mass consumption due to high wages from mass production
    • More Sophisticated analysis of Fordism: “spatial” arrangement of labor
    • Gramsci: Fordism (intensified, monotonous labor) dominant from 1945-70 but its negative attributes still present in globalization and post-Fordism (ie inequality)
    • Fordism in Western Marxism: “regime of accumulation” of mass production and consumption esp after 1945, when it incorporated “Keynsian demand management”
    • In Western Europe, Taylorism came before Fordism. After WWI, Europe gets away from Taylorism and moves towards Fordism.
    • Fordism/Taylorism link: Fordism at the level of the production line uses Taylorist policies (Taylorism can be “inside” Fordism)
  • Back to Taylorism: “modern ��psychological� analysis of the work-process (in Taylorism) this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker�s soul”
  • Mere averages of work-time (ie to complete a specific object) are computed and then face worker as something alien, a fixed law that the worker must conform to (even though originally it came from the worker).
  • Secret Nice Thing: he did advocate rest times, but no one really listened to this part
  • Upshot: Efficiency is king, so the human element is gone, so workers have to work harder: he didn’t say that his workers should be machines, but many commentators picked up on this assumption
  • Taylorism is the worst part of this process because his personality, his psychology, is bundled for him by capitalists and presented to him as an alien object

Continuation of Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat

• Rationalization
  • A part of specialization of labor
  • Calculation becomes supreme because the need for efficiency requires precision work more and more: laws proliferate
  • Even changes commodity: “the mathematical analysis of work-processes denotes a break with the organic, irrational and qualitatively determined unity of the product.”
    • “war on the organic manufacture of whole products based on the traditional amalgam of empirical experiences of work”
  • Work becomes a part of a process of “rational specialized systems,” not creation of a unified item
  • Production of object no longer has anything to do with use value
  • Messes up worker
    • The worker’s subjective, idiosyncratic qualities are seen as “mere sources of error”
      • Personality is “fed into an alien system”
      • The worker isn’t a master, but a mechanical part of a system that is pre-exists him and is independent of him: worker obeys the fixed laws of a closed system rather than actively creates
      • Worker is an isolated atom, not a member of a community
• Worker Becomes Quantity
  • Because you have wages for a particular time: it’s not the worker you hire, but one hour or six hours: quality turns into quantity
  • Bergsonian critique of modern time: “Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum” when the worker becomes merely 1 hr of abstract labor time
• The Factory
  • A microcosm of the whole capitalist society
    • “The fate of the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole” b/c of the evolution of the “free” worker selling labor power as commodity
    • Society must “satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange”
  • All natural relations are replaced by reified ones
  • Everyone is determined by unified field of “natural” economic laws: hence individuals are “atomised” and the social is the factory
    • It’s an illusion that people are atomised, but it is necessary for capitalist society to survive (people have to conceive of themselves as commodity owners ready to exchange: b/c your labor power is your only commodity, you self-objectify, and are dehumanized)
• Effect on Commodities
  • Objects Are Distorted Too
  • Commodities seen as a species of their own, related only to each other, not to social relations; and to get them you must make rationalized calculations (separation from natural need)
  • Seen as more than use-values: original, material quality of object (“authentic substantiality”) is replaced by its commodity value
    • Thus, “a new objectivity” for the commodity”
  • Money is not even discerned from its potential use as capital (more specifically, as to buy actual capital, land, machines, etc): money is seen by itself to generate money, which for Marx means that you only see “form,” no “content” (what it can be used for): interest is seen as the main property of capital, which Marx calls the “fetish of capital”
    • This is the perversion of commodity in its “highest form,” says Marx, where money is totally divorced from actual relation to production, seen as having independent existence from production entirely
    • Great Marx quote about it, Capital III: “enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur Le Capital and Madame La Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time as mere things.”
• Capitalism Spreading To All: “ghostly objectivity” of commodity transforms man’s consciousness
  • Legal and political systems designed in capital’s image: both are rationalized, systematized, quantified; they are not based on tradition or empirical observation or “material dependence,” but rationality of capitalist system
  • Tradition associated with flexible, irrational, humanist: though stable, it adapts to individuals
    • “antagonism between the traditional and empirical craftsmanship and the scientific and rational factory”
  • Calculation replaces caprice
    • Great example: bureaucracy which is “formal standardization” of various branches of civil employment as all obeying same laws
    • Not just for worker: worker faces a machine, but entrepreneur faces mechanical system, just as scientists do (here we see the power of the dialectic as Jameson sees it: to connect two disparate epiphenomena): “not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness.”
• Total knowledge of what’s going on, total rationality in the system, would abolish capitalism
  • Competition is only possible through irrationality, despite the need of rationalization of other parts of production
  • Bourgeois can’t be honest with themselves
• No wholeness
  • “The specialisation of skills leads to the destruction of every image of the whole.”
  • Notes that the contemporary critique of science as only being fragmentary doesn’t take into account fact that capitalist life makes it so
    • Science itself has to avoid ontological questions: can’t ask itself necessary questions about its own rules, production, necessity
• Critique of Political Economy
  • Can never understand use-value
    • Tries to get by on understanding raw materials and circulating capital
  • Emphasis on “laws” makes it a closed, partial system
    • Laws can’t understand crises
  • Cannot understand its “substratum,” society (takes as given)
• Philosophy
  • The sciences all need it to understand their own conditions of being
    • And indeed philosophy acts like the various sciences are the given, the substratum out of which philosophy theorizes
  • This is awful: philosophy can’t take these for granted
    • Treated things as given is like the “what is the world based on?” the elephant “what’s he standing on?” turtle…etc
  • But it’s not addressing concrete basis of life, so it’s not working at present: “concrete material totality of what can and should be known”
  • Philosophy should be devoted to unmasking and defeating reification: to show that reified world is not the only possible world

Notes

• Doesn’t it seem that Lukacs’ recommendations for modern writers about understanding the historical novel resembles Marx’s recommendation that people understand the conditions of their subjugation?
• L castigates Simmel’s Money as examining money independent from capitalist structure
• L’s ultimate example of reification in everyday life: Kant’s explanation of marriage as “sexual communication” in which people exchange the uses of their sexual organs for the duration of their lives. (1797 Metaphysics of Morals)
• L could have been talking about Comte here: “All these things [various branches of formal laws: science, math, etc] do join together into what seems to the superficial observer to constitute a unified system of general ��laws�”
  • L says that b/c they ignore the concrete, they are incoherent, and people only see this during crises, when relations between systems are revealed as superficial, adventitious: hence Engels’ definition of “the ��natural laws� of capitalist society as the laws of chance” in The Origins of the Family
  • The belief that social laws are natural and fit together perfectly is illusory, and crises in bourgeois life are really the times in which they must realize the connections are illusory, that the “partial systems” don’t actually add up (the similarity, the belief that they are all part of an eternal, coherent system, is only a formal quality, not concrete fact): the capitalist system, incl production itself, is irrational and ruled by chance