Lukac's Idealism serves Stalinism

THE 'New Left Review' specializes in a certain type of academic theorizing in the service of social-democratic and Stalinist bureaucracy.

In long-winded and high-sounding articles, they find justification for the treachery of the labour leaders and the ruling caste in the Soviet Union.

The Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs has : long been a favourite of theirs, and for the first of a series of New Left Books, they have chosen to publish a translation of his 1924 essay on Lenin.

As P. Anton correctly pointed out (Workers Press, May 29), this was the work in which Lukacs' idealism was. first put to the service of the stillevolving Soviet bureaucracy.

Published with the essay is a postscript comment written by Lukacs in 1967. It exhibits the way in which Lukacs, after participating in the 1956 Nagy government, has been able to continue to serve the bureaucracy, combining 'criticism' of Stalinism with its effective justification.

The 85-year-old professor brings to this task all his Hegelian sophistication, perverted over four decades of Stalinism.

In the postscript he says:

'Since the emergence of a Marxist critique of the Stalin era [where? From what standpoint!, there has also been renewed interest in the oppositional tendencies of the 1920s.

"This is understandable, if from a theoretical and objective standpoint very much exaggerhowever false the solutions offered by Stalin and followers to the developing crisis of the Revolution, there is no question that anyone else at that time could have provided an analysis of perspective which could have given a theoretical guideline to the problems of the later phases as well. A fruitful contribution to the renaissance of Marxism requires a purely historical treatment of the 1920s as a past period which is now entirely closed.* Carpet And so, with a few general academicisms, Lukacs attempts to brush the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the destruction of its leadership under a historical carpet. Even further, he tries to make himself out as an early critic of Stalinism.

'Certain of my comments on Lenin's behaviour contain, implicitly, some accurate criticism of Stalin's later development, which was then still hidden except for fleeting glimpses in Zinoviev's leadership of the Comintern.' Lukacs knows now, if he did not know already in 1924, that Lenin had called for Stalin's removal from office over a year before his death.

But in the 'broad sweep of generalization', of which Lukacs is a master, such 'detail' is conveniently lost.

In a previously published let196 (translated in "urve Smil 1963 under the title Reflections on the Cult Stalin') Lukacs suddenly reveals that he visited Trotsky on Prinkipo in 1931.

He mentions this only in order to comment:

'My meetings with Trotsky in 1931 aroused in me the conviction that he as an individual was even more inclined to "the cult of the personality" than Stalin' Here we can see all the corruption of the intellectuals that was so important to the development of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary tendency, remains important for its survival today.

In order to protect the bureaucracy against the rise of Trotskyism in the Soviet intelligentsia and working class, Lukacs will continue to his dying day to distort and falsify the history of the origins of Stalinism and the struggle against it. Lukacs coe aides the Neologica. duties he performed with such brilliance in the 1930s and 1940s.

He, above all others, tried to demonstrate the possibility • of carrying out theoretical work within the confines of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Fill in the form below and send to NATIONAL SECRETARY, SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE, 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, LONDON, SW4. Name Address True, runs the New Left' argument, he had to pay the price of an occasional lie, approval of the purges, omission of any reference to the work of Marxists under the ban of the But he was able to write some important books on French realist literature, the writings of Thomas Mann, the significance of Goethe.

In an interview published in the March-April New Left Review', Lukacs says:

'Anyone who reads my articles from the 1920s and 1930s will see that even at that time I was in disagreement with Stalin and Zhdanov's line. For example, the book I wrote on Hegel was diametrically opposed to Zhdanov's analysis of him.' But in 1948, when Lukacs' book "The Young Hegel' was published, he had already produced his essay on existentialism, which contains, not just philosophical analysis, but a vicious attack on the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty for his refusal to accept the Moscow Trials.

Admiration for the splendid assessments of Balzac and Stendhal cannot but be tinged with contempt when one recalls that they were written in Moscow in 1937-1938, when the purges were at their height, and that Lukacs has never made any attempt to condemn Stalin's murders to this day.

Is it possible to regard Lukacs as a Marxist on some far-off theoretical plane, while coexisting with the grave-diggers of the revolution on the less ethereal level at which Stalin's murder and slander machines operated?

Prostituted

Is it not rather necessary to see in Lukacs a brilliant brain, prostituted and corrupted by Stalinism and to seek the theoretical effects and causes of this corruption?

In the essay on Lenin, we can see the inception of this process and its philosophical form can be explored.

It was written immediately after Lenin's death, as the Soviet bureaucracy was beginning to make its mark on the Communist International through Stalin's faction.

In contrast with the Bolshevik tradition of the sharpest struggle for principles, the Comintern was : rapidly becoming a place where 'orthodoxy' was essential for anyone who wanted to get on.

Lukacs gives a formal description of some aspects of Lenin's work, in order to establish a new 'orthodox Leninism'.

This appears, in fact, to be the first time this word had been used. Significantly, Stalin used it as the title for his 1924 lecture 'Problems of Leninism', the 'revised' edition of which contained the original reference to 'socialism in a single country'.

Lukacs subtitled his essay on Lenin 'A Study on the Unity of his Thought'.

At the moment when the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution was accelerating rapidly, the defence of Lenin's heritage meant the theoretical and practical struggle to grasp the nature of this process.

But Lukacs instead gives formal account of the logical connection between the different parts of Lenin's work, and in this way helps to cover over process of its destruction.

Lenin's achievement in the construction and theoretical arming of the Bolshevik Party and the Third International is fossilized, reduced to a few logical formulas, an empty shell at the disposal of the conservative bureaucracy.

Before 1918, the young Lukacs had come from mystical idealism to anarcho-syndicalism and then to the Communist International. He was a member of the ill-fated government of Bela Kun in 1919 and had to go into exile in Vienna and Moscow.

In 123, his 'History and Class Consciousness' appeared.

This collection of essays was an attempt to adapt Marxism to Hegelian idealism.

Lukacs saw the dialectic as referring to the contradictory development of society, or only of class society. In opposition to Engels, he declares that it has no relevance to the movements of the natural world.

Lukacs made formal acknowledgement of these criticisms and, immediately after Lenin's death, tried to rehabilitate himselt with his 'orthodox' book on Lenin. And so the controversy of 1923 was never argued out.

In fact, the essay on Lenin contains precisely the same conceptions as the book of the previous year. Lukacs' method of adaptation to the bureaucracy is already in operation.

'Historical'

The word 'materialism' never appears in this book without the prefix 'historical'. On page 55 we read the following:

'For the dialectic is no more than the conceptual expression of the fact that the development of society is in reality contradictory, and that these contradictions (class contradictions, the antagonistic character of their economic existence, etc.) are the basis and kernel of all events.' This outlook opens the way for idealism.

If contradiction is only to be found in history, then the struggle of man against nature must be seen as arising outside the material world.

Marx, on the contrary, explains this struggle as arising within matter, and in its course man develops his powers to grasp the contradictions within nature and subjugate them to serve his needs.

The consequences of Lukacs essentially idealist position were developed in the rest of the book-and in the rest of his life.

While he can talk about Lenin's conception of the workrevolution in Russia, his theory of imperialism and of the state, Lukacs falsifies the core of Lenin's work: the revolutionary party. We shall see that this is closely related to his fundamental philosophical position.

In his chapter on "The Vanguard Party', Lukacs speaks only of the need of the working class for a centralized organization.

The word 'theory' does not appear.

For Lenin, the Party was the laboratory in which Marxism was developed. For Lukacs, it is an organization of individuals working with a ready-made set of ideas.

Of course, he quotes Lenin against dogmatism; but theory for Lukacs is an 'instrument' to work with, not the life of a class vanguard.

Lukacs describes the relation between the Party and the working class only in terms of tactics and organization.

Party and class are presented as abstract forms, quite external to each other, and theory outside both of them. Lukacs' idealism is thus in direct opposition to Lenin's materialist conception of the party.

For Lenin, the revolutionary practice of the Marxist Party, in which theory developed penetrated the working class, meant grasping the contradictions within the class.

Only in the process could the working class achieve consciousness of its historic role and take power into its hands.

Trotsky's struggle against Stalinism was founded on this conception of leadership, and deepened in the fight for the Left Opposition and the Fourth International.

Lukacs' idealism, in breaking with the Bolshevik method, helped to forge the ideological weapons with which the Stalinbureaucracy destroyed the Third International.

Marxist theory broke with idealist and mechanical materialIst philosophy in that it san itself in terms of the struggle to transform reality, not just to explain it.

Lukacs' method is adapted to the needs of the bureaucracy, in that it turns the forms of Marxist thought into means of justifying the decisions of the apparatus.

He views matter, as he depicts the working class and the Party, as without contradiction, and theory as outside both, not penetrating them in struggle.

It was this basic philosophical outlook which Lukacs employed to establish the conception of 'orthodox Leninism', and thus to provide theoretical justification for the bureaucracy.

It enabled him to co-exist with Stalinism for nearly half a century, and it is the method which underlies the outlook of many of the revisionist groups.

The 'New Left's' attempt to present Lukacs as a Marxist theoretical authority is thus no accident.

They would like to hold a relation to the modern bureaucracy similar to that of Lukacs to Stalinism.

But Lukacs' development was shaped by the defeats inflicted on the working class internationally in the 1920s and 1930s.

Today, the Fourth International fights to develop Marxist theory in an epoch of massive revolutionary struggles.

It will train a generation of intellectuals which will accomplish all that Stalinist corruption destroyed in Lukacs' generation, and much more.

DOCUMEN

CELIEBKNECHT MilE "A school that makes active children mostly useless subjects is a bad school? sit at desks studying