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Georg Lukács Radical Thinkers Georg Lukacs Tactics and Ethhs ipip-ip2p TACTICS AND ETHICS, 1919-1929 The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays GEORG LUKAcs VERSO London • New York This edition published by Verso 2014 This English-language translation first published by New Left Books 197 2 © Translation Michael McColgan 1972,1973, 2014 Introduction © Rodney Livingstone 1972 First published as Werke, vol. 2 © Hermann Luchterhand Verlag 1968 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 57 9108 6 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIF OEC US: 20 Jay Street,Suite 1010,Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1- 78168 -149-7 British Library Cataloguing in PublicationData A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed in the US by Maple Press INTRODUCTION by Rodney Livingstone vii TACTICS AND ETHICS Tactics and Ethics 3 'Intellectual Workers' and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership 12 What is Orthodox Marxism? 19 Party and Class 2S EARLY WRITINGS 19 19-1922 Speech at the Young Workers' Congress 39 'Law and Order' and Violence 41 The Role of Morality in Communist Production 48 The Question of Parliamentarianism 53 The Moral Mission of the Communist Party 64 Opportunism and Putschism 71 The Crisis of Syndicalism in Italy So The Q!lestion of Educational Work 91 Spontaneity of the Masses, Activity of the Party 95 Organization and Revolutionary Initiative 106 The Politics of Illusion - Yet Again 117 REVIEWS 1924-1925 Bernstein's Triumph: Notes on the essays written in honour of Karl Kautsky's seventieth birthday 127 N. Bukharin: Historical Materialism 134 Karl August Wittfogel: The Science ofBourgeois Society 143 The New Edition of Lassalle's Letters 147 MOSES HESS AND THE PROBLEMS OF IDEALIST DIALECTICS lSI BLUM THESES 1925-1929 227 Index of Names 255 Introduction BY RODNEY LIVINGSTONE For Georg Lukacs the decade 1919-1929 represents a period of sustained political activity, at first in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and subsequently in exile in Vienna. His direct experience of events in the turbulent period of history following the end of the First World War and the Russian Revolution furnished him with abundant Inaterial for a series of essays on political subjects. Of these only two, the monograph Lenin and the collection entitled History and Class Conscioumess have hitherto appeared in book-form in English.1 The present volume sets out to Inake good the lacuna. It contains allthe reInainingessa ys <apart from two minor reviews) from volume 2 of the GerInan edition of Lukacs's works.' The contents rangefrom the analysis of particular events or trends to the dis­ cussion of more general problems of a political nature and the revaluation of earlier figures such as Lassalle or Moses Hess. They doubtless vary in importance, but taken together they can be said to provide a full account of the development of Lukacs'sthought from the moment of his decision to join the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918 to the moment when he resolved to give up political activity in the face of the violent criticism provoked by the Blum Theses. Moreover, it should now become possible to site Lenin and History and Class Conscioumess in the context of his overall development. A number of the themes developed more fully in the latter work can be found here in embryo and since they often bear on matters of immediate moment they may help to elucidate that important but daunting text. There is a logic in Lukacs's decision to become a Marxist, but there can be no question of a smooth evolution from his earJier position. Even though a number of critics have rightly pointed to the connectionsbetween the different phases of his works, the persistence in his Inaturity of motifs I. Lenin, NLB, 1970; Histor, aru/Class Comd6usness, Merlin, London, 1971. 2. Werke, vol. 2, Luchterhand, Neuwied, 1968. It is worth recording that this volume does not aspire to completeness. For the omissions see the bibliography in V. Zitta, Georl Luktks: Marxism/Alimation, Di4lectics, Revolution, The Hague, 1964, pp. 266-9 and I. Meszaros, Luktks' Concept of Dialectic, with Biography, Bibliography and Documents, Merlin, 1972. VIII dating from his earliest, pre-Marxist writings, Lukacs himself has always emphasized the changes in his views and has never hesitated to reject lines of thought and even entire books which he regarded as erroneous or superseded. The problem has been compounded by the vexed issueof his various political recantations. But it is important to realize that even if we leave these aside we are still confronted with an oeuvre characterized by discontinuity, rapid changes of position and conflicts resolved only with difficulty. This is particularly true of his intellectual development during the First World War culminating in his commitment to Marxism. At the outbreak of war Lukacs was living in Germany, as a lecturer in aesthetics at Heidelberg. His career up to that point had been brilliant but not untypical of his generation of the Austro-Hungarian intelli­ gentsia.3 He was born in 1885 into a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest. His father was a director of the leading bank in Hungary and had been ennobled by the Hapsburgs. Lukacs himself used the honorific 'von' in his publications apparently until 1918. His development was precocious: his first writings appeared in print in 1902, he was a co-founder of the Thalia theatre in 1905 and contributed both to the radical journal Nyugat ('The West') and to OscarJ aszi's Huszadik Sz.dzad('The Twenti­ eth Century'), the organ of the Sociological Society. In 1906 he obtained his doctorate at Budapest University and in 1908 he was awarded a prize for his two-volume Development of the Modern Drama (which appeared in 1911 in Hungarian). In the same year the German version of The Soul and the Forms was published, a collection of literary essays on Stefan George, Novalis, Theodor Storm, Paul Ernst and on the essay form itself. This work established his reputation as a critic and had a significant influence,e.g. on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. In 1909/10 Lukacs went to Berlin and attended the lectures of the philosopher, sociologist and literary critic Georg Simmel. After extensive travels he finally settled in Heidelberg in 1912, where he made the acquaintance of Max Weber and members of the George circle (though there is some doubt whether he actually met George himself), and attended the lectures of the prominent neo-Kantian philosophers Rickert and Windelband. He also became friendly with their most important pupil, Emil Lask, whose ideas exer­ cised an important influence on his own . 3. Accounts of Lukacs's life and intellectual"development can be found in George Lichtheim, Lukacs, Fontana, London, 1970; Lucien Goldmann, 'Introduction aux pre­ miers ecrits de Georg Lukacs', in us Temps Modernes, no. 195, August 1962. See also the 1967 Preface to vol. 2 of the Werke in History and Class Consciousness, op. cit. Introduction ;x Lukacs seems to have had no difficulty in assimilating the culture of Wilhelminian Germany. By contrast, say, with Kafka, in whom the con­ flicting claims of German, Jewish and Czech cultural identities combined to exacerbate his own sense of estrangement, Lukacs does not seem to have experienced divisive pressuresof that kind. The increasing dominance of Hungary within the decaying Hapsburg empire and also the greater homogeneity of the small, almost entirely Jewish, bourgeois intelligentsia may have resulted in a greater cultural confidence. It has been pointed out, moreover, that unlike the Russian revolutionaries who for all their Westernizing retained contact with popular, Narodnik movements, the Hungarian left-wing intellectuals were much more deracinated, urban and Jewish in a predominantly rural, peasant country.4 Their assimilation to western ideas was thereby made easier and more absolute. At any rate the growth of Lukacs's views at this time accurately reflectsthe movement of thought in Germany and the extreme complexity we find in his position mirrors the crisis towards which German civilization was being propelled. German intellectual life at this time was characterized by the powerful thrust of the empirical sciences and the positivist philosophy which pro­ vided them with a rationale. Whereas in England positivism could be readily synthesized with existing traditions of empiricist and utilitarian thought, in Germany it came into direct collision with idealist traditions which endured, although decadent and under attack (e.g. by Nietzsche). In addition to, and reinforcing, technology and science, there was also the coarse materialism of the age of imperialism, whose cynicism, ruth­ lessness and chauvinism are documented in the novels of Heinrich Mann and the cartoonsof Georg Grosz. Both academic philosophers and creative writers were concerned therefore to produce a counterweight to what they saw as the dehumanizing forces of the modern world, the 'approach of nihilism' proclaimed by Nietzsche. What Lukacs found in Germany was a variety of ripostes to materialism which ranged from the wilder excesses of irrationalism and mysticism to the haughty individualism of the George circle. The position of neo-Kantianism in the spectrum of thought is par­ ticularly revealing for, paradoxically, Kant's dualism could be used both to strengthen and to undermine the supremacy of the physical sciences. On the one hand, the Marburg philosophers (Natorp, Cohen, Rudolph 4. For a description of Hungarian intellectual life see R. L. Tokes, Be/a Kun and the /lungarian Soviet Republic, New York and London, 1967, pp. 1-49. Stammler) upheld Kant's anti-metaphysical bias, and attempted to limit philosophy to logic and the theory of knowledge, insisting that its function was to provide a rationale for the special sciences.
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