What Marx and Engels Really Thought and Lukács' Subjectivist Revisionism

What Marx and Engels Really Thought

"The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought." (Engels, F. Dialectics of Nature, 2007, p.270)

For Marx and Engels, the working class is the true revolutionary class precisely because it can take stock of its dependence on nature as a whole by socialising the productive forces. This explains the above statement - the working class cannot ‘transcend' the objective world, but can understand how its behavior and needs are determined by and dependent on the natural world. Hence the importance for Engels of writing the Dialectics of Nature. Above all else, the revolutionary working class must be sober-headed and objective in taking stock of its situation, it cannot afford to think it can ‘create' history without due respect to the objective conditions,

"Bourgeois revolutions like those of the eighteenth century storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day- but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [crapulence] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions like those of the nineteenth century constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals -- until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! [‘Here is Rhodes, jump here', meaning ‘here is the difficulty, or ‘this is how we take power']" (Marx, K. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)

In the same work, Marx points out that "Men make their own history but they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing; they make it under circumstances directly transmitted from the past". In case our Lukács inspired post-modernist cultural theorists are not quite clear on how Marx and Engels thought all human existence to be, let us quote one of their more striking comments on the question of human freedom,

"As a natural, embodied, sentient, objective being he [man] is a suffering, conditioned and limited being, like animals and plants. The objects of his drives exist outside himself as objects independent of him, yet they are objects of his needs, essential objects which are indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his faculties." (Marx, K. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1959 p.204)

But just because mankind finds itself constantly limited by nature, this does not make humanity some sort of mindless cipher being pushed and pulled by fixed laws.

"To me there could be no question of building up the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it." (Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, 1947, p.19)

Engels is not subjectively creating laws to supposedly control and limit reality and human understanding of the natural laws that govern it, in the proscriptive manner of Judicial Laws, but is simply saying that objective laws describe rather than proscribe reality. Their ‘eternality' derives from the fact that, if nature is objective, it must always behave in the same way only if given the same circumstances,

"We know that chlorine and hydrogen, within certain limits of temperature and pressure and under the influence of light, combine with an explosion to form hydrochloric acid gas, and as soon as we know this, we know also that this takes place everywhere and at all times where the above conditions are present, and it can be a matter of indifference, whether this occurs once or is repeated a million times." (Engels, F. Dialectics of Nature, 2007, pp.237-8)

Thus Engels' task as he sees it is not to find laws which determine a never ending repetition of the same events, but simply to show that given the same conditions we will always get the same outcome. Without this principle, human knowledge slips into the particular, and the regularity between and predictability of events appears fortuitous. Marx applies exactly the same method in analysing capitalism - without this principle, the course of development of capitalist society would appear arbitrary and unpredictable. It is for these reasons that Engels said he did not attempt to ‘build up the laws of dialectics into nature'. Instead he believes that to understand the necessary eternality of natural laws it is necessary to look at the particular conditions in each case to determine if certain laws apply, and how,

"In a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion." (Ibid, p.64)

The working class, in struggling for and winning freedom, is actually gaining knowledge of how it is determined by nature. Without this sober approach, the proletariat will never come to power, or at the very least would not be able to remould society and labour in accordance with natural laws,

"At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someonestanding outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." (Ibid, p.183)

Hence the fact that both Marx and Engels sought the liberation of humanity not in heaven but in consciously controlling the means of production for all of society's ends,

"This regulation [of the natural world], however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order." (Ibid, p.184)

Consistent with the principle that humanity is a part of nature and determined by it, Engels has characterised freedom neither as pure, unlimited freedom, nor as non-existent. For Engels, humans are not passive, unconscious vessels for nature's ‘eternal laws', but conscious, active, practical beings, who, through labour, can grasp, master and exploit the laws of nature to their own end.

In conclusion, Engels' attempt at a dialectics of nature, that shows how the laws of human thought and society reflect those of nature, is based on the Marxist principle that nature precedes, determines and conditions mankind. Therefore according to the Marxist approach the only way for mankind to free itself is to uncover all of the hidden principles of nature and master them as a whole so that human society is no longer at the mercy of the blind laws of nature but in the hands of free, conscious humans. But freedom is not simply a matter of understanding the laws of nature. That is a necessary element, but not sufficient. Humans must also revolutionize society, get rid of capitalism, and establish a socialist society where people consciously and collectively determine their policies. In other words, within capitalist society we have gone a long way towards identifying the laws of nature, but we are hardly free since we do not control our own social relations but instead let them be determined by the laws of the market, etc.

Lukács' Subjectivist Revisionism

We can now analyse how and why Lukács' criticism of Engels differs fundamentally from the principles of dialectical materialism. Whereas a premise of this is that humanity or ‘subject' is a part of the whole of nature (note that this is not to say that ‘subject' is the same as nature, for nature constitutes all its various parts, such as planets, oceans, trees etc. as well as humanity; from the former things the ‘subject' evidently differs) Lukács assumes at the outset that the ‘subject' and the ‘object' are two different things, as if standing side-by-side. In criticising Engels, Lukács claims that dialectical laws cannot be applied to nature as independent of ‘subject' because dialectics is necessarily founded upon the interaction of ‘subject' and ‘object', "he [Engels] does not even mention the most vital interaction, namely the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves." (Lukács, G. op. cit., p.3) Lukács makes this point even clearer in the notes to the essay quoted from above,

"The misunderstandings that arise from Engels' account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels...extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics - the interaction of subject and object...are absent from our knowledge of nature." (Ibid, p.24)

Georg Lukács (1885-1971)

The implication of the above must be that the ‘subject' is in some way different from nature, otherwise we could not isolate a dialectics of society from an attempted dialectics of nature, i.e. Lukács is simply assuming that the ‘subject' is different and not a part of nature in speaking about a fundamental difference between the interaction of subject and object and the interaction of two objects. But if humanity is a part of nature, then its interaction with other objects of nature is not absolutely different in principle from the interaction of two objects independent of humanity. Lukács' language here equivocates from the principles of dialectical materialism in a subtle way. Whereas, as Lukács Gkadmitted 44 years later in his 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, Marx stated that "objectivity was the primary material attribute of all things and relations" (Ibid, xxxvi) Lukács speaks about ‘the subject' as if it were not a part of this objectivity. But Marx shows that, as with Engels, dialectical materialism necessitates that mankind its itself as an object.

Man lives from nature - i.e., nature is his body - and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature." (Marx, K. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

From one extreme to the other

A fundamental characteristic of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois thinking is to create false, absolute and mechanical dichotomies out of genuinely existing interrelated opposites, and then to swing from one side of this false dichotomy to the other. In reaction to the barbarism of Stalinism, such thinkers have falsely associated the dogmatism that goes with this with the materialism of Marx and particularly Engels. But the naïve response is equally dogmatic - to automatically flinch and recoil in a strange sort of intellectual snobbery from the realism and objectivism of Marxism. But if Stalinism was dogmatic because it did not understand nor want to understand genuine Marxism, only to repeat its stock phrases, sapping energy from its authority amongst the Russian people, then the stupid dogmatism of petit-bourgeois idealists who also do not want to understand genuine materialism is Stalinism's mirror image.

In fleeing from the mechanical interpretation of Marxism, Lukács and his followers have done a great disservice to Marxism by pretending that their idealism represents the real meaning of Marx's philosophy. Because their philosophy is at heart idealist and represents the outlook of petit-bourgeois intellectuals, the logic of their thoughts can ultimately only lead in one direction - capitulation to capitalism. Hence that those directly influenced by Lukács (particularly the Frankfurt School) have done exactly this, and spoke of the need to change one's mind and ‘spiritual values' before creating a new society. But we change the world and our ideas by labouring on the basis of necessity, not the ideological whims of professors.

Lukács said that the proletariat must not "take the world as it is" (Kolokwski, L.Main Currents of Marxism: The Breakdown, 1978, p.276). In the sense that for dialectics, no object remains as it is, this is true. But what is not true is that dialectical materialism considers ‘objective reality' to be a subjective concept that can be bent at the will of the united and class-conscious proletariat. In order to overcome the limited and strictly ‘here-and-now' psychology of an atomised capitalist society, the proletariat must grasp the world as it really is - the interconnection and constant flux of every objective thing based on definite objective laws. Furthermore, it must grasp its place amongst these laws of relations of objects, and show in practice that the whole of society is an expression of these laws, by consciously connecting mankind's objective needs and wants with the material world and using those laws to suit its ends.