Georg Lukács and Organizing Class Consciousness Georg Lukács and Organizing Class Consciousness by Robert Lanning MEP Publications MEP Publications University of Minnesota 116 Church Street S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55455-0112 Copyright © 2009 by Robert Lanning All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lanning, Robert. Georg Lukács and organizing class consciousness / by Robert Lanning. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-930656-77-5 1. Lukács, György, 1885-1971--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Philosophy, Marxist. 3. Social conflict. 4. Class consciousness. I. Title. B4815.L84L36 2009 335.4’11 -- dc22 2009015114 CONTENTS Chapter One Class Consciousness and Reification 1 Chapter Two Historical Necessity as Self-Activity 31 Chapter Three The Concept of Imputed Class Consciousness 55 Chapter Four Common Sense and Market Rationality in Sociological Studies of Class 77 Chapter Five Being Determines Consciousness 109 Chapter Six Consciousness Overemphasized? 125 Chapter Seven Class Experience, “Substitution,” and False Consciousness 143 Chapter Eight Imputed Class Consciousness in the Development of the Individual 165 Conclusion 193 Reference List 197 Index 205 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank David S. Pena for his thorough editing of the manuscript, and Erwin and Doris Grieser Marquit for seeing this project through its stages of development. I would also like to acknowledge Erwin’s editing of twenty volumes of Nature, Society, and Thought (1987–2007), a journal that exhibited an important balance between politics and scholarship. Chapter One Class Consciousness and Reification To be scientific, sociologists must ask not merely what some member of a social group thinks today about refrigerators and gadgets or about marriage and sexual life, but what is the field of consciousness within which some group can vary its ways of thinking about all these problems. —Lucien Goldmann This study is concerned with class consciousness and is undertaken primarily through the work of Georg Lukács. Mention of Lukács generally brings to mind his major concept of reifica- tion. Reification is the antithesis of class consciousness, of con- sciousness able to engage in the making of a socialist revolution. Discussions of reification and class consciousness may be carried out with relative ease at some levels of academic exchange, but the conversation may alter course significantly with the introduc- tion of another of Lukács’s concepts that is the mediating element between reification and class consciousness: imputed class con- sciousness. Without this mediating element, reification and class consciousness remain a comfortable dichotomy worthy of per- petual discussion that is unable to dissolve the distance between the two concepts and incapable of resolving the contradiction between given reality and future possibility. The mediating of imputed class consciousness, however, carries with it the sense that the consciousness of people in a class, the working class, has undergone some organization through processes of socialization, education, or other forms of 1 2 LUKÁCS & ORGANIZING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS politicization of their interests, behaviors, and aspirations. This organization of consciousness as an intervention in the lives of people is seen to be antithetical to an ideological perspective satisfied that the discussion of this contradiction is an adequate means of addressing problems the two terms might suggest. This is relatively safe ground from which to sustain the dichotomy as a buttress against another problem raised by discussions of Lukács and his work: communism and its possible influence on the organization of social movements and on consciousness itself. To argue, as Lukács did, that the development of class consciousness must begin before the working class can reasonably expect to attain power, means that this goal cannot be left to evolutionary development, or to the period of socialism itself, nor can it be developed by osmosis from mere descriptions of oppression nor from analyses of class cultures when the latter, for the most part, are formed from the demands and needs of capitalism. The post-Soviet period, especially, provides secure ground for some analysts of class to promote working-class consciousness as the mere awareness by workers of their subordination to a more powerful class while possessing sufficient common sense to survive a manageable tension and develop a culture distinguishable from the capitalist mainstream, while still existing in the concrete reality of capitalism. This approach is necessarily limited by its accompanying features: a significant measure of anticommunism; the “culturation” of Marxism that separates such analyses from the taint of the more committed, orthodox perspective; assessments of the deficiencies of working-class movements; and claims that working people have made similar judgments and found the old partisan politics wanting. Informing this cultural approach to the working class is a celebration of the quiet, calculative pragmatism that is claimed to be the sufficient common sense of the worker in the late-modern period. Let us consider, however, the case of the 1992 methane gas explosion at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, in which twenty-six miners died. By their own account, the coal miners believed conditions of work in the Westray mine were abysmal and life threatening. They knew that neither the managers of the Class Consciousness and Reification 3 company nor the provincial mining inspectors and politicians in the government of Nova Scotia were concerned about adherence to the regulations set out in the Coal Mines Regulation Act of Canada and the provincial Health and Safety Act. Both of these acts were established, ostensibly, to protect the lives and livelihoods of workers. Neglecting the provisions of such legislation endangered the life of each member of the underground crews. The conditions of work in the Westray mine are now a matter of public record. The public inquiry into the explosion at Westray heard testimony that miner Stephen Lilley refused one day to remain underground while acetylene torches were being used, a practice that, according to the testimony of several miners, was common (Westray 1995–96, 3948, 3967, 4623–24). The volatility of methane gas in the presence of a single spark is instantly and extensively destructive. Lilley’s mining knowledge made him an example of skill and responsibility among his fellow workers, but his refusal to work in unsafe conditions resulted in his suspension for several days. Lilley walked out of the mine knowing his co-workers were aware of such unsafe practices and apparently knowing that refusal of unsafe work was protected by provisions of the Nova Scotia’s Occupational Health and Safety Act. When he returned to work after his suspension, apparently neither he nor anyone else was prepared to take up a longer struggle over the unsafe conditions of the mine. Lilley’s suspension, however, was not lost on his co-workers, but the lesson the miners drew from it did not acknowledge the history of struggles to establish such state protection and the likelihood of safer conditions had the mine been organized by a trade union. Rather, according to miner Wayne Cheverie, the lesson learned was, “If you refused unsafe work, you were threatened with your job or intimidated into submission” (Richard 1997, 149). When Stephen Lilley was suspended, he left the mine alone, perhaps hoping to make a point or to rally others to collective action in exercising their right to protect themselves and others. When he returned to work, nothing had changed, and when he began that shift, it was also the last day of his life and that of twenty-five others who died in a methane explosion. 4 LUKÁCS & ORGANIZING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS The Westray tragedy is the late-modern archetype of reification. It has been analyzed in many ways: as another example of criminal disregard of workers’ lives and their families by corporations (Jobb 1994; McCormick 1999), as a problem of media reportage (McMullan 2005), and as a problem of family dynamics in literary representations (McKay 2003; O’Neill and Schwartz 2004). Glasbeek and Tucker (1992) come closest to the complexity of the problem in their brief analysis of it. I will not offer a complete analysis of the events at Westray here, but the focus on a specific theoretical and political perspective is relevant to understanding some factors in selected sociological analyses of class that contribute, if only indirectly, to the occurrence of such disasters and similar social problems: the condition of reification, the absence of class consciousness, and the enormous failure of a form of class analysis that rests on the sanctity of subjectivities, thereby avoiding the necessary relationship between reification and class consciousness and the indispensable mediating element in this relation. Class as a quantitative measure, or as the “lived experience” of culture, has fairly recently become the antidote to what is seen as an imposition of politically motivated ideology on working people who are merely struggling to survive and who, when social resources are more equally distributed, will be able to achieve more comfort in their class milieu or move beyond it. But this approach and the accompanying claims of failed philosophical and political ideals, seem designed to suffocate exploration and discovery of meaningful alternatives to the present social