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[Main Currents of Marxism, v.3, pp. 1024-1027]
9. The exposition of Marxist mythology. Commentary
Lukacs was, beyond doubt, an outstanding interpreter of Marx’s doctrine, and rendered great service by reconstructing it in a completely different way from that followed by the previous generation of Marxists. Besides emphasizing Marx’s profound debt to the Hegelian dialectic as the interplay of subject and object seeking identity, he was the first to show clearly that, in the dispute among Marxists between neo-Kantians and evolutionists, both sides were arguing from non-Marxian positions; and that Marx believed in a dialectic in which the understanding and transformation of the world were one and the same process, so that the dilemmas of freedom versus necessity, facts versus values, and will versus prediction lost their meaning. The questions that the theorists of the Second International put to Marx missed the point of his philosophy, as they presupposed an ‘objective’ historical process governed by its own laws; whereas, as Lukacs showed, in the historically privileged case of the working class, the ‘objective’ process coincided with the development of awareness of that process, so that free action and historical inevitability became one and the same thing. Lukacs certainly formulated a radically new and, I believe, correct interpretation of Marx’s philosophy, and from this point of view his achievement seems unquestionable.
However, the fact that Lukacs interpreted Marx afresh and more accurately than anyone before him does not mean that he was right to adopt Marx’s belief in the unity of theory and practice, freedom and necessity. Despite his intention, his work had the effect of revealing the mythological, prophetic, and utopian sense of Marxism which had eluded Marx’s more scientistic followers. The blurring of the distinction between descriptive and normative elements is in fact characteristic of the way in which a myth is apprehended by believers: narration and precept are not distinguished, but are accepted as a single reality. That which the myth commands or holds up to be worshipped and imitated is not presented as a separate conclusion but is directly perceived as part of the story. To understand a myth rightly is not only to understand its factual content but to accept the values implied in it. In this sense a disciple understands the myth differently from an outside observer—a historian, anthropologist or sociologist—he understands the myth in the act of self-commitment and, in this sense, it is right to say that it can be understood only ‘from within,’ by an act of practical affirmation. Such, in Lukacs’s view, is the position with Marxism. A non-Marxist cannot understand it properly, as to do so requires actual participation in the revolutionary movement. Marxism is not simply a theory about the world, which can be accepted by anyone whether or not he approves the values of the political Marxist movement; it is an understanding of the world that can only be enjoyed within that movement and in political commitment to it. Marxism in this sense is invulnerable to rational argument: outsiders cannot understand it correctly, and therefore cannot criticize it effectively. Thus, as Lukacs showed, the Marxist consciousness obeys the epistemological rules appropriate to a myth.
At the same time Lukacs pointed out the prophetic character of that consciousness, in that it does away with the distinction between will and prediction. A prophet does not speak with his own voice but with the voice of God or History; and neither God nor History ‘foresees’ any thing in the way that human beings foresee events over which they have no influence. With God, the act of foreseeing is identical with the act of creating the thing foreseen, and the same is true of the ultimate History in which the subject and object of action are identified with each other. (God never acts from without, but always immanently.) The historical subject that has identified its own consciousness with the historical process no longer distinguishes between the future it foresees and the future it creates.
The historical subject, as understood by Lukacs, embodies the Utopian consciousness par excellence. This consciousness appears in that very part of the doctrine that is directed against Utopian socialism, particularly in Marx’s belief, elucidated and emphasized by Lukacs, that socialism must not be treated either as an ordinary moral command, the result of an evaluative process, or as a matter of 'historical necessity.’ If the distinction between facts and values, between an act of pure cognition and one of moral affirmation, is not present in the proletarian consciousness, it is because socialism is not simply desirable or simply necessary, nor even both at once: it is a ’unity’ of the two, a state of things that realizes the essence of humanity—but an essence that already exists, not the arbitrary precept of a moralist. The socialist future of the world is not something that we desire as a matter of preference or that we foresee on the basis of a rational analysis of historical tendencies: it is something which already exists as a Hegelian reality of a higher order, which cannot be empirically perceived but is more real than all empirical facts. In the same way Lukacs’s ‘totality’ is real but non-empirical. Thus when speaking of the socialism of the future we need use either normative language or the language of scientific prediction. Socialism is the meaning of history and is therefore already present in today’s events. The typical utopian ontology presents the future not as something desired or expected but as the modus of being of the present day. It is Lukacs’s undoubted merit to have revealed this ontology, of Hegelian and Platonic origin, as a basic feature of Marxism.
In so doing, however, Lukacs gave Marxism an irrational and anti-scientific form. His conception of ‘totality’ protects it in advance from any rational or empirical criticism: for the totality cannot be deduced from any accumulation of facts or empirical arguments, and if the facts appear to be contrary to it, it is they that are wrong. This being so, it may be asked how we can possibly know the totality, or know that we know it. Lukacs replies that we can know it by means of a correct dialectical ‘method’; but on investigation it proves that this method consists precisely in relating all phenomena to the whole, so that we must know the latter before we can start. The method, and knowledge of the whole, presuppose each other; we are in an elementary vicious circle, the only way out of which is to assert that the proletariat possesses the whole truth by virtue of its privileged historical position. But this is only an apparent escape, for how do we know that the proletariat is thus privileged? We know it from Marxist theory, which must be right because it alone comprehends the whole: so we are back in the vicious circle again.
The only recourse is to say that the whole is not to be discovered by pure scientific observation but only by active participation in the revolutionary movement. This, however, involves a genetic criterion of truth: Marxism is true because it ‘expresses’ the proletarian consciousness, and not the other way about. But this is merely a criterion of authority: the truth must be recognized as such not because it is supported by ordinary scientific arguments but because it emanates from a historically privileged class, and we know that class to be so privileged because we are told so by the theory of which it is the exponent. Moreover, the mythology of the proletariat as an infallible class is reduced in Lukacs’s theory to pure party dogmatism. The content of class-consciousness is decided not by the class itself but by the party in which its historical interest is embodied: so the party is the source and criterion of all truth. On this basis the unity of theory and practice, of facts and values turns out to be simply the primacy of political commitment over intellectual values: an assurance given by the Communist movement to its members that they possess the truth by virtue of belonging to the movement. Lukacs’s Marxism implies the abandonment of intellectual, logical, and empirical criteria of knowledge, and as such it is anti-rational and anti-scientific.