Who Are You Calling Vulgar? Lukács, Kautsky, and the Beginnings of “Western Marxism”

Abstract

This essay reads Georg Lukács’s early thought in light of his vexed relationship to the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Though Lukács criticized Kautsky as the archetypal “vulgar Marxist,” Lukács’s larger project of promoting “class consciousness” follows from Kautsky’s own political and pedagogical work. For Kautsky, Social Democratic intellectuals had to transmute proletarian “class instinct” into class consciousness by disseminating a simplified version of scientific socialism, transmitting the conclusions but not the method of Marxist thought. But because Lukács had defined “vulgar Marxism” as the forgetting of Marx’s method in favor of his conclusions, “vulgar Marxism” turned out to be both the precondition and an obstacle to proletarian class consciousness and thus to revolutionary action. The essay then reads Lukács’s changing understanding of the role of the party as a response to this impasse: a response that can help us understand the heterogeneous tradition of “Western Marxism.”

Key Words:

• Karl Kautsky
• Georg Lukács
• Vulgar Marxism
• Western Marxism
• Worker Education

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the participants of the Drew University Vulgar Marxism Workshop for their comments and Eli Davey, Katja Guenther, Lars Lih, David Sockol, and the two referees for their insightful feedback.

Notes

1 For his analysis of the same problem, see Lukács (2002, 82–3).

2 The German translation gives végcél as Endzweck, though it is clear from the context that this is a translation of Endziel (Lukács 1962, 64).

3 Kautsky (1892, 105–6) denied any such tension. He wrote that it was wrong to think that revolution would happen “without human involvement,” such that all one had to do was “put one’s hands on one’s lap without doing anything and wait acquiescently.” He continued: “If one talks of the irresistibility and natural necessity of social development, obviously one presupposes that humans are humans, and not lifeless puppets.”

4 In his June 1919 “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism,” Lukács (1971, 239–40) praised Kautsky for his achievement in “awakening the class consciousness of the proletariat,” but since he distinguished this from recognizing the social determination of economic laws, it seems he was talking about the “unconscious” variety of class consciousness. That is why, despite his emphasis on class consciousness, Kautsky still sought to introduce socialism “without the active participation of the proletariat” (246).

5 In Martin Jay’s terms, the problem could be discussed as an incomplete understanding of totality. Though Second International Marxists had emphasized the final goal and thus had placed the present struggle in what Jay (1984, 31–2) called a “longitudinal” totality—a whole reaching from the past into the future—they had neglected to grasp the “latitudinal” totality, the recognition that laws ultimately depended upon a social context.

6 See, e.g., his July 1919 essay “Die Rolle der Moral in der kommunistischen Produktion,” which contains the implicit threat that the government might need to use force to encourage productivity (Lukács 1962).

7 In his June 1919 “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism,” Lukács also used the term “ideological crisis.” But that essay was revised for History and Class Consciousness, and at that point Lukács was predominantly talking about Social Democratic intellectuals like Bernstein and Parvus. Indeed, immediately after, he declared the success of the proletariat in achieving class consciousness (Lukács 1971, 228). The term was also added to the revised version of the “Class Consciousness” essay (Lukács 1971, 79; cf., Lukács 1920, 472).

8 The Anschauungsunterricht is a term from the school of Fröbel and Pestolazzi, who emphasized active and participatory learning, especially in preschool, an idea that was picked up by the movement for the Party School in the first decade of the twentieth century in Germany.

9 For a discussion of slogans used by Lukács and in Marxism more generally, see Mieszkowski (2016).

10 In making this argument I take a median position between Lukács’s critics—most famously Kolokowski (2005), who emphasize the independence of the party—and his defenders—like Löwy (1979) and Feenberg (2014), who emphasize the party’s subordination to the proletariat as a whole.

11 See Kavoulakos (2018) for the ways in which de-reification remains an “open project” even after the seizure of power.

12 On this point see Feenberg’s (2002, 66–9) argument about the difficulties faced by Lukács’s theory of the party when it becomes a state power.