Lucien Goldmann argues that Martin Heidegger's 'Being and Time ... cannot be understood without the realisation that it constitutes largely ... a debate with ... Lukacs' work History and Class Consciousness. (Immanuel Kant, NLB, 1971, p 25.)
The Hungarian Marxist Lukacs published History and Class Consciousness in 1923. It drew upon the same philosophical sources as Heidegger, but interpreted these as intellectual forms of alienated social relations - as analysed by Marx. Lukacs' solution to the problem of alienation is the collective subject of the working class. In another book Goldmann shows that Heidegger's Being and Time is dealing with the same problem, alienation, but re-locates it in the human condition, where Lukacs locates it in capitalist society (Lukacs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979; and also see A Arato and P Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism, Pluto, 1979, p203.)
Heidegger's concept of the "they" is one of the alienated masses. The "they" live in inauthenticity. Jacob Segal argues that the "they" is not a sociological category. Clearly he is right that it is not an explicitly sociological category. But I think the evidence that it is a disguised socio-economic category is available.
Heidegger writes on the inauthenticity of wage labourers:
'The Being-with-one another of those who are hired for the same affair often thrives only on mistrust. On the other hand, when they devote themselves to the same affair in common, their doing so is determined in a manner in which their Dasein ['being-there' or 'determinate being'], each in its own way, had been taken hold of. They thus become authentically bound together...' (Being and Time, p159)
In this passage one can see that inauthenticity is associated with hired hands, whereas authenticity comes from devotion to service. Here the echo of the fascist labour gangs is unavoidable. As the wage-labour relation is seen as inauthentic and alienating worker from employer, the relation of service is preferable. Is this a fanciful interpretation? I think not, as this article of Heidegger's addressed to students on the virtues of labour service shows. Though Heidegger's style is more transparent the argument is essentially the same as in the above passage from Being and Time:
'The new educational mode of our German youth proceeds through work service. Such service affords a basic experience of toughness, of closeness to earth and tools, of the rigour and severity of the most simple physical work, and thereby of the most essential within the group. ... Such a service brings the basic experience of a daily experience ruled by the discipline of work in an army camp ... Such a service secures the basic experience of the origin of all authentic comradeship that comes from the demands of a great common danger ... that has nothing to do with mere enthusiastic reciprocal exchange'
(Martin Heidegger, 'The Appeal to Work Service' from a student paper on January 23, 1934, quoted in Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, Temple UP, 1989, p 122-3)
Heidegger uses the same category of authenticity in this Nazi appeal to indicate the superiority of labour service over relations of 'reciprocal exchange', ie wage labour.
The inauthenticity of wage labour could still imply a common approach between Lukacs and Heidegger's mutual criticism of inauthenticty/reification. But Heidegger strictly cuts off that approach, rejecting Lukacs argument for a working class collective subject:
'Furthermore, the "they" is not something like a 'universal subject' which a plurality of subjects have floating above them.' (Being and Time, p166)
Lukacs sees the solution to alienation as social revolution, Heidegger sees the solution to inauthenticity as labour service.
Incidentally, another discovery of Farias' knocks a hole in the legend that Heidegger rejected the biologistic racism of the Nazis. Heidegger on blood and soil:
'The spiritual world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture, nor is it merely an arsenal for usable knowledge and values; it is the force of the deepest preservation of its powers of earth and blood ...'
(in Farias, p 102, references Die Selbstbeheitung der deutschen Universitat, Breslau, 1934, p13f.)
This is doubly interesting because it also counts against Jacques Derrida's argument that Heidegger's compromise with Fascism arose through a lingering commitment to the idea of Spirit. But as Heidegger makes clear above, the rational concept of Spirit that one finds in German philosophy of the nineteenth century is to be subordinated to the irrational appeals of blood and soil.
Lastly, these are Lukacs' comments on Heidegger, which I still think have pertinence for him and his followers today:
'As a confession of a citizen of the 1920s, Heidegger's way of thinking is not without interest. Sein und Zeit is at least as absorbing reading as Celine's novel, Journey to the End of Night. But the former, like the latter, is merely a document of the day showing how a class felt and thought, and not an "ontological" disclosure of ultimate truth. It is only because this book is so well suited to the emotional world of today's intellectuals that the arbitrariness of the pseudoargumentation is not exposed.' (Lukacs, Existentialism or Marxism, in Marxism and Human Liberation, p256)
'Heidegger's descriptions are related to the spiritual conditions prompted by the crisis of post-war imperialistic capitalism. There is evidence for this not only in the influence exercised by Being and Time, far beyond the sphere of the really philosophically-minded - it was repeatedly singled out for praise and censure by philosophical critics. What Heidegger was describing was the subjective-bourgeois intellectual reverse side of the economic categories of capitalism - in the form of course, of a radically idealistic subjectifying and hence a distortion.' (Lukacs, Destruction of Reason, Merlin, p 500-1)
Lukacs' citing Bloch:
'Taking eternal death as goal makes man's existing social situation a matter of such indifference that it might as well remain capitalistic. The assertion of death as absolute fate and sole destination as the same significance for today's counterrevolution as formerly the consolation of the hereafter had. This keen observation casts light too on the reason why the popularity of existentialism is growing not only among the snobs but also among the reactionary writers.' (Existentialism or Marxism, in Marxism and Human Liberation, p257)
-- Jim heartfield