> 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.
It's true that Marx's ontology isn't "materialist" is the sense Kolakowski treats as self-evident. It conceives relations as "internal" rather than "external" and has logical space for the ideas of objective and knowable "values" and self-determination.
These ontological ideas underpin it's conception of human being as the being able to actualize self-conscious reason as rational self-determination. The latter expresses the fully developed "virtues" required to know and actualize universal intellectual, aesthetic and ethical "values" in the end in itself activity that constitutes "freedom" as understood within the framework of these ontological and anthropological ideas.
The requisite "virtues" exist initially as only as a "potential," an "in itself," and require an "educational" process for their full development and actualization. Marx claims, again sublating Hegel, that this occurs through "self-estrangement" within the labour process understood as a system of "internal relations" that works as a "steeling school."
This eventually develops individuals with the "virtuosity" required to create "the ensemble of the social relations" "which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man."
This educational process substitutes rational self-determination for instinctive determination, the latter opposing the development of the former. This is why it's "a long and painful process."
The epistemology derived from these ontological and anthropological assumptions makes "experience" elaborated as "sensuous human activity, practice," the ultimate ground for rational belief. Rational self-consciousness is consciousness of "activity" conceived in this way, this self-consciosness also being able to ground the ontological and anthropological assumptions underpinning the epistemology.
This explains the idea of "science" associated with these assumptions, an idea very different from the "materialist" one dogmatically insisted on by Kolakowski. That's the idea found in Hegel's elaboration of "the dialectic" as "the higher dialectic of the conception," the idea that makes it "the business of science simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness."
This is the idea of it repeated by Marx in the 1843 letter to Ruge and implicitly made use of in the 1881 draft letter to Vera Zasulich.
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal."
Ironically, "science" in this sense does provide a rational basis for critique including a rational basis for critique of these ideas themselves.
Marx's analysis of the developmental consequences of the relations constitutive of capitalist wage labour and of the Russian peasant commune, for instance, turns out to have been badly mistaken. Neither proved to be consistent with the degree of "development of individuality," of "the integral development of every individual producer," Marx anticipated.
The "materialist" conception of "science," in contrast, produces a conception of "experience" that logically entails radical skepticism.
It's an instance of the "subjectivist" view of experience, the view that our experience is necessarily constituted by an "epistemological frame" that makes reality as it is in itself unknowable.
Experience constituted in this way can't provide a rational basis for for grounding the ideas that constitute the frame. This is then self-contradictorily made the basis, by some, of the idea that there are many kinds of "truth," each one constittuted by a particular "epistemological frame."
This doesn't stop those who hold this position from rejecting the "epistemological frame" I just attributed to Marx on the ground that it's inconsistent with the "materialist" frame.
Ted