Socialist Reading Series III: Georg Lukacs' "Class Consciousness" [Part 3]
Section 1 Part B: The Limits of Bourgeois Thought
Part A here; Lukacs’ text here
B. The Limits of Bourgeois Thought
To the best of my knowledge, neither Marx nor Engels claim that they were the first to discover what Lukacs calls “the essence of scientific Marxism” discussed in the part A. The fact that something more than an appeal to individual psychologies is needed to explain why history unfolds as it does must have been apparent to other people. Being sensitive to this problem, however, is not by itself sufficient for grasping what its solution must be.
Specifically, Lukacs tells us that bourgeois thinkers1 are aware of the fact that “the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them,” but they tend to assume that if that is the case, then those motor forces must have the status of laws of nature. Their attempts to offer a full explanation of any given particular historical phenomenon, then, become a matter of specifying which laws of nature—when coupled with which motives or set of motives—would produce that phenomenon.
Lukacs says that this approach is indicative of a more “primitive” level of knowledge, but it’s worth pointing out that from a certain perspective, it makes sense. Consider the rough division we used in part A to distinguish the proper object of history: on the one hand there are events that are the result of natural forces—rock slides, forest fires, monsoons, etc.—and then there are events that are the result of people’s desires and motivations—getting a beer from the fridge, writing or reading an essay, etc. On the one hand, there are events that are explained by appeals to the laws of geology, physics, and meteorology; on the other hand, there are events that are explained by appeals to the psychologies of individuals. If these two categories are exhaustive, then finding out that something more than an appeal to individual psychology is needed to explain some phenomenon means that we must appeal to a law of nature. So, why is it a mistake?
As we shall soon see, the problem with the approach becomes apparent when we consider the possibility that the two categories above are not exhaustive. What’s missing is what Lukacs calls “social institutions.”
These institutions are, on the one hand, independent of the will of any given individual. Consider, for example, the institution of marriage: one does not become married to (or divorced from) another person by virtue of setting their desires in motion. Putting aside the fact that the other person also has to have certain desires in place, there is also the fact that being married requires certain recognition from other entities (the State, the Church, the Community, etc.) that are independent of the will of the individual(s) in question.2 Perhaps more importantly, however, the institutions’ independence of one’s will does not mean, on the other hand, that they must therefore operate according to some eternal laws of nature.3 Even if it can be shown that everywhere where we find people, we also find some practice of monogamous pairing that is recognized by the community in which it occurs, it does not follow that there is some law of nature that people pair, or, more specifically, that they must pair in the way we currently observe. Rather, such social institutions constitute contingent ways of arranging society that then binds that society according to certain ways of relating to each other. Crucially, these institutions have a specific history which we can trace and submit to critical analysis.
This is, of course, not true when it comes to (genuine) laws of nature. Although there is a specific history of how Robert Boyle came to confirm the relationship between gas, pressure, and volume, it is not true that Boyle’s Law itself has a history such that, for example, there was a time before it held, a time in which it held for some but not all gasses, and a time in which it came to hold for all of them.4
The mistake that bourgeois thinkers tend to make, then, goes something like this: they begin by identifying a particular phenomenon situated in a particular social institution (or set of institutions), then they work backwards to establish what principle or law of nature must hold so as to produce that phenomenon. In doing so, they come to obfuscate the actual history of how that phenomenon arose and, ultimately, end up giving the wrong explanation.5
As an example of this mistake, here is how Adam Smith (a frequent target of Marx’s ire) explains how division of labor arose:
This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in no view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given, or whether, as seems more probably, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contract…In a tribe of hunters or shepherds, a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison, with his companions; and he finds at last that he can, in this manner, get more cattle and venison, than if he himself went to the field to catch them. From a regard to his own interest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armourer. Another excels in making the frames and covers of their little huts or moveable houses. He is accustomed to be of use in this way to his neighbors, who reward him in the same manner with cattle and with venison, till at last he finds it his interest to dedicate himself entirely to this employment, and becomes a sort of house-carpenter.
- Chapter 2 “Of the Principle which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour” (emphasis mine)
Pay attention to what’s happening here. Smith has noticed the fact that some nations are wealthier than others and he wants to explain this phenomenon. He has also noticed that wealthier nations engage in specialized division of labor, and he correctly reasons as to how and why this institution makes the production process more efficient. So far so good. However, when he next turns to explain why this practice arises—when he turns to explaining the principle which gives occasion to this division of labor—he simply posits that there is a general tendency for people everywhere to 1) truck, barter, and trade commodities and, 2) to make contracts when exchanging those commodities.6 The social practices of trading commodities and making contracts is simply presented as a kind of law of nature that kicks in when people live together. In turn, what’s supposed to substantiate these claims is a story about the natural propensity for some people to already be more efficient than others at producing things for the purpose of exchanging them for other things. In short, Smith assumes the institution of contractual commodity exchange (and the pursuit of efficiency that comes with such an institution) that he observes in his time as simply eternal principles of social relations.
It is in relation to explanations like this that we get this really nice quote from Marx:
Man’s reflections on the forms of social life and consequently also his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters…have already acquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher not their historical character (for in his eyes they are immutable) but their meaning.
Adam Smith comes to the phenomenon of division of labor after the fact has already been established. The division of labor as the organizing force in society already appears to him as something natural and established. And instead of seeking to understand how things came to be this way—instead of seeking its historical character—he simply tries to grasp its (current) meaning by eternalizing it. Consequently, his understanding of the forms of social life ends up being incomplete at best, or incorrect at worst (sorry, Mr. Smith!).7
The error here can be explained in different (simpler?) terms. Principles are exceptionless things; if it can be empirically established that something goes against a purported principle, then the purported principle is not a principle at all. To use Smith’s story once again, if it is purported that it is a law of nature that all people everywhere will engage in division of labor for the purpose of commodity production, then any instance in all of history in which people lived differently serves as a counter-example that must be accounted for or else be forced to “regard the institutions of the present as eternal laws of nature which for ‘mysterious’ reasons and in a manner wholly at odds with the principles of a rational science were held to have failed to establish themselves firmly, or indeed at all, in the past.”8
Not only so, but, crucially, erring in this direction also obscures the real nature of the (social) institutions that are responsible for producing the phenomena we’re interested in understanding. The true nature of those institutions is that they are “relations between men” and, as such, they are different in kind from the relations between, say, chemical properties, or matter in an electrical field. The former can be changed; the latter cannot.
To understand this point, one only needs to remember that at one point in time the relation between ruler and ruled was thought to be a divine right of kings, passed on through their blood, and sanctified by God’s will. The social institution of political rule was thus considered by at least some significant portion of the world to be a kind of immutable law of nature despite the fact that, as the American and French Revolutions showed in practice, it was no such thing. No law of nature was invalidated when Louis XIV was beheaded because there was no law of nature that dictated his rule. His execution only showed political rule to be what it has always been: an institution characterized by one social arrangement among many.9
What’s key here—and what tends to be overlooked in the bourgeois way of thinking—is the possibility that the current social institutions in which we find ourselves can be subject to the same mystification. If, for example, one thinks of all of history leading up to the present moment as the story of capitalists-in-embryo coming to liberate the entrepreneurial spirit by fulfilling the economic laws of the market, then one will fail to see that the present moment, too, is constituted by social relations between people. To put it bluntly, it is not a law of nature that there should be such a thing as the owner of the factory, to whom all profits must go; this is just another contingent fact about how the world currently happens to be that can be changed.10
The alternative to committing this error of fossilizing history into a formalism, Lukacs tells us, is to banish “everything meaningful or purposive” from history by sinking into absolute particularism.
What does he mean by this? On the strongest reading, to do this is to simply deny the existence of any systematic principle whatsoever as playing any role in the development of history. In other words, it is to insist on the claim that nothing more can be extrapolated from understanding some event in history that would be of any use in any other circumstance. It is, in a sense, to go back to the mistaken view of history that we discussed in part A wherein history consists of nothing more than the catalog of one event causing the one after it.
That doesn’t mean engaging in history would become a useless endeavor. If you wanted to know why the French Revolution happened, you could, for example, point to the debt taken by the Crown during the American Revolution, the rising cost of domestic grain, the women’s march on Versailles, the storming of the Bastille, the King’s flight from Paris, etc. linking each of these in a causal chain leading to the fall of the Monarchy. And that very well could give you a pretty good understanding of that particular event. However, you would not be able to say anything more than “this is just what happened at this particular time under those circumstances.” You would not be able to generalize to some claim like “peasants who can’t feed themselves or their family tend to get angry—monarch should avoid those situations if they want to keep their heads.”11 Rather, you would have to simply insist on a kind of historical agnosticism in which anything may very well follow from anything independent of what has happened before.
To be sure, this is a consistent position—in fact, it is so consistent that it has been taken up in other areas of philosophy—but, crucially, it does not appear to be a position on which something like a scientific study of history can be built.12 One can, of course, deny that such a project is possible at all, but to do so would be to deny the assumption we accepted in part A that history is social science; i.e., the fight would be somewhere else, not here.
In any case, I think Lukacs is right when he says that in committing this error, history can “only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organization would be aesthetic, as if it were a work of art.” If there really is nothing to history than learning the specific particular order in which things occurred, then, if its only use would be in seeing something like the beauty of various events ordered chronologically. There may in fact be such value, but, once again, it is not the value of scientific rational understanding.13
Okay, let’s take stock because although we’re only a couple of pages into the actual text, we’ve actually covered a ton of Marxist theory.
We started by arguing that a social science of history—a full systematic understanding of why things happen—requires something more than an appeal to individual psychologies. What this “something more” might mean, however, is by no means clear. This posed the “problem” of history. Bourgeois thinkers’ solution to this problem was to find universal principles or laws of nature whose application would lead to the present. In positing such principles, however, they ultimately end up positing that things happened the way they happened because the laws of nature to which we’re all subject to dictated that they should happen this way.14 Not only that, but because the task these bourgeois thinkers set for themselves always starts from the current moment and the principles they establish must result in the present moment, it also turns out that all the laws of nature aim must necessarily aim at the present—thus, it turns out that, for example, all of history aimed at producing capitalism and the nation state!15 How fortunate.
This is a highly deterministic picture; the notion that any one or any group of people could have done things different—the very contingency of history—is dispensed with. As such, all actual differences in social arrangements, anything that speaks to another way if which things could have been should people have acted otherwise must either be ignored or clumsily explained away. Little remains but a dogma affirming the necessity of the present.
Seemingly, this error could be avoided by wholly rejecting the appeals to laws of nature as solving the problem of history. But to do that would be to transform history “into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied best in the ‘spirit of the people’ or in ‘great men.’” In other words, it would be to just say that stuff happens because some people do certain things. But that doesn’t solve the problem. We know that some things happen because certain people do certain things, and we know that at least some of those things happen because those people want or intend for them to happen. But we also recognize that, on the one hand, people’s wills aren’t (fully) determinative of what actually happens, and that, on the other hand, a full explanation would also tell us why people have the kinds of wills that they do (this is just the stuff from part A).
Whereas the appeal to eternal principles presented us with a radically deterministic picture of the world, the denial of such principles presents us with a wildly voluntaristic one. Thus, we seem to be trapped in a dilemma.
In part C, we’ll begin by discussing how Marx is supposed to have resolved this dilemma (spoiler: we already talked about the necessity of understanding social institutions) and cover the topic of fetishism, but since we’ve gone on long enough for now, let’s stop for now.
These are, roughly speaking, Enlightenment thinkers through Hegel, as well as the Anglo philosophers in the twentieth century and most contemporary economists and political theorists.
And as the struggle for marriage equality shows us, recognition from these entities matters quite a bit!
Notice that this is how at least some reactionary elements have tended to think about the matter: the Bible says it’s “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” That is, the institution of marriage is a law dictated by God Himself! (Aside: were Adam and Eve married?)
I’m aware that I’m not actually getting into any substantive discussion of law-hood in the philosophy of science. Apologies.
I think it’s fair to say that the charge here is similar to the charge that they’re engaging in “just-so” stories.
Smith doesn’t use the term ‘commodities’ in this section, but it’s clear that that’s what he’s talking about: goods with a certain use-value that are produced for the purpose of exchange. In this case, bows are made so that they can be ultimately exchanged for venison.
I really don’t mean to pick on Smith here. This is a trap that a lot of thinkers fall into. Hell, I did it a ton during my philosophy ‘career’ and still catch myself doing it all the time. It’s also not a trap that even all Marxists avoid. The so-called “analytical Marxists”, for example, tended to make this mistake when it came to the role of technology by positing a kind of technological improvement drive that is always operant and which serves as the driving force of history. In their defense, Marx does say some things that encourage that reading (although his also says quite a lot of other things that discourage it. There’s a ton of stuff in Vol. II of Capital, for example, that I think makes the view that Cohen and company hold unsustainable. But that’s a whole other can of worms).
To return to the example mentioned earlier, it would be like saying “oh yeah, Boyle’s Law is a law for sure. It just didn’t hold until 1548, and then only in France until 1923.”
In this respect, the Ancient Greeks were much farther along in their political theories than the absolutist monarchists of Europe that followed them. Whatever we say about Aristotle or Plato, at least they were clear that political rule was always a social matter.
I don’t want to give the impression that arguments against communism rest on opponents literally saying “it is a law of nature that Jeff Bezos owns his factories.” Quite to the contrary, most people will say something along the lines of “it’s nice in theory, but it could never work in practice” (assuming incorrectly that the core of Marxist theory is primarily concerned with ‘being nice’ or ‘not being selfish’). However, the reasons why people claim that “it could never work in practice” end up appealing to social relations in the present and treating them as laws of nature. The idea that nobody could be motivated to, say, pick up garbage unless they were motivated by the forces of the market is one such example.
Notice that this generalization is not a law of nature!
I have in mind Hume and his followers. It’s been quite a while since I did any Humean philosophy, and I’ll admit that the philosophy of science angle in which there are only regularities (even in the hard sciences) but no laws wasn’t my specialty. I’m not sure what (if any) views Humeans have on history and the only “famous” Humean I’ve seen comment on Marx was embarrassingly bad (like so bad that I’m skeptical they even read any of it), so maybe they just stay clear. I suppose the point I want to make is that if you go the Humean route here you’ll have to make some pretty substantial changes to your entire ontology such that the regularities of history would also have to seep through as regularities in economics, politics, and so on. I don’t see a world in which history is fully particularistic, but property rights are not. (Do Humeans believe in rights? I’m showing my ass here)
Is there no middle ground? Of course! Perhaps we might say that that middle ground can be captured by saying something like: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Of course, it also follows that what is happening now is simply in anticipation of the future.
Hence, why Lukacs says that “bourgeois thought must come up against an insuperable obstacle, for its starting-point and its goals are always, if not always consciously, an apologia for the existing order of things or at least the proof of their immutability.” But it’s important to note that the adoption of this method constitutes such an apology at any given point in time.