The reading for this week, Georg Lukacs's "The Phenomenon of Reification" (the first part of his longer essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," 1922), our first reading from his collection of essays, History and Class Consciousness (1923), is a crucial one in the Platypus syllabus.
I've attached a diagram for discussing the commodity form in capital, central to Lukacs's exegesis of Marx in "The Phenomenon of Reification."
Lukacs's essay is, first of all, an exegesis of Marx's book Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867).
The opening paragraph of Lukacs's essay is key to his purposes in interpreting and elaborating upon Marx:
"To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself."
-- Marx: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right.
"It is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of
commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set
out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its
fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is
no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and
there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the
riddle of commodity-structure. Of course the problem can only be
discussed with this degree of generality if it achieves the depth and
breadth to be found in Marx’s own analyses. That is to say, the problem
of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as
the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem
of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the
structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the
objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective
forms corresponding to them."
-- So, for Lukacs, the commodity form is both objective and subjective. To get at what Lukacs is calling our attention to, we need to pay attention to the titles of both the overarching essay, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" and its first part on which we are focusing this week, "The Phenomenon of Reification." Lukacs is posing the question of what is the relationship between the "consciousness" of the proletariat and the phenomenon of "reification," or, how does reification condition consciousness?
Lukacs is known, rightly as a "Hegelian Marxist," that is, a Marxist who emphasizes the Hegelian roots of Marxism. The key phrase from Hegel in Marx is "necessary form of appearance." This meant, for Marx, following Hegel, that forms of appearance are necessary. With respect to "proletarian consciousness," this means that
the working class, as a political agent, is bound to work within and through forms of "reified" appearance, as subjects of capital. So, the question for Lukacs is, what is the form of appearance of social reality in capital? Following Marx, Lukacs regards this as the "commodity form."
Another way of putting it is that Lukacs is concerned with the "subjectivity of the commodity form." This means that the commodity form is not only a form of constraint but also, importantly, a form of agency. It is the form of human agency and participation in capital, the form of humanity in modern society.
As Lukacs is quick to point out, this is not merely a matter of economics, but of all aspects of social and indeed individual life in capital. The question is, how does the (social) world appear to those within it?
The category of
the commodity form is trick because it refers, at once, to two different aspects: 1.) the objective social reality; and 2.) its subjective forms of appearance. In order to try to get at this duality, Lukacs introduces the term "reification" (not found in Marx). Reification is the subjective effect of the objective operation of the commodity form. But, because the commodity form is dialectical in its operations, so are the reified forms of appearance it gives rise to.
The paradox of cause and effect is key to the discussion of reification in a dialectical sense. It is not the case that the commodity form in the cause and reification is the effect. As Lukacs evokes with his opening epigraph from Marx, the radical basis of humanity is humanity itself: there is no other "underlying" essence. As Lukacs concludes the first part of his essay, at the conclusion of our reading for this week,
"By confining itself to the study of the ‘possible conditions’ of the
validity of the forms in which its underlying existence is manifested,
modern bourgeois thought bars its own way to a clear view of the
problems bearing on the birth and death of these forms, and on their
real essence and substratum. Its perspicacity finds itself increasingly
in the situation of that legendary ‘critic’ in India who was confronted
with the ancient story according to which the world rests upon an
elephant. He unleashed the ‘critical’ question: upon what does the
elephant rest? On receiving the answer that the elephant stands on a
tortoise ‘criticism’ declared itself satisfied. It is obvious that even
if he had continued to press apparently (critical’ questions, he could
only have elicited a third miraculous animal. He would not have been
able to discover the solution to the real question."
-- In other words, the reality of capital is "turtles all the way down." There is no underlying reality to which we can have access, in the sense of capital's "objective truth." There are only (subjective) forms of appearance. And we can only know them in their "birth and death," that is, as a function of historical transformations these forms of appearance -- we ourselves -- undergo. So the question is how does (the historical process of objective-subjective) "reification" appear to its subjects?
Marx himself provided the most pithy ways of thinking about this:
"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that
by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The
nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the
stomach or from fancy, makes no difference."
-- In other words, capital as a form of society appears, subjectively, as the amassing and circulation of commodities.
Marx stated further that,
"A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily
understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer
thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So
far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it,
whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it
is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those
properties are the product of human labour. . . .
"Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour,
so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form
itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed
objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of
the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure,
takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and
finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social
character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social
relation between the products.
"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the
social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective
character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation
of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to
them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between
the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of
labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same
time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. . . .
"[T]he existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value
relation between the products of labour which stamps them as
commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical
properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it
is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes,
the fantastic form of a relation between things."
-- In the last sentence, the translation misses something, which is that Marx's original word was not "fantastic," but "phantasmagorical," a key difference. What was a "phantasmagoria," a shadow-play or lantern-show, in which the silhouettes of objects and their projected shadows are indistinct: the charm of the phantasmagoria is the play of objects and their shadows.
Just as object and shadow are confused in the phantasmagoria, in capital cause and effect are indistinct and apparently reversible. Cause and effect, and therefore also, means and ends, experience important reversals in capital.
The most fundamental sense in which this is true is with respect to conscious, subjective agency in modern society. Modern society thinks that it uses capitalist means to achieve and
advance human ends, whereas, for Marx, humanity in capital experiences itself in "alienated form," and capital is not a means, but an end that humanity serves: humanity is the means for capital's own ends. Modern society is not the society of enlightened, emancipated human beings, but the society of emancipated capital, or, the realization of value in the commodity form, to which human beings are subject. Capital is not merely the effect of human activity, but capital is the cause for which our form of humanity is the effect.
But this was, for Marx, the effect, not of the commodity form and capital per se, but rather of what happens to the commodity form of labor-time as a function of the Industrial Revolution. For industrial capital, unlike preceding manufacturing capital (the era of Smith, Kant, Constant, Hegel, et al.), is self-contradictory. The value-form of the commodity of labor time became
self-contradictory and thus alienated from itself, or "reified" as a form of appearance.
There are a few key passages from Lukacs's "Phenomenon of Reification" that bear upon the relation between the commodity form, alienation and reification.
Lukacs emphasizes that "a new perspective is not feasible on the soil of bourgeois society," and that to "know" the value form of the commodity in all its social operations and effects would be tantamount of overcoming it. This is because what Lukacs calls the empirical social conditions of "exploitation" (of the workers by the capitalists) must be distinguished from the effect of the "domination" of society by the value-form of capital, both "logically" and "historically." Exploitation is not the cause but the effect of capital as a social form. Hence, the social ("class") struggles of the workers against their
exploitation by the capitalists is not identical with overcoming their social domination in capital.
-- As Horkheimer had pointed out in our earlier reading (from Daemmerung, Notes 1926-31), "The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom," what spells the worker's doom is not his exploitation by the capitalist but rather the domination of the capitalist by capital that prevents him from being able to exploit the worker but leaves him unemployed. The struggle for freedom from domination of the self-contradictory form of humanity in capital is not identical or reducible to the struggle against exploitation.
The centrality of this insight to the Platypus project's approach to the question of the history of Marxism and the Marxian approach to the problem of capital is inestimable.
It is in this sense that we can say
rightly that ours is the only political project inspired by and true to the insights articulated by Lukacs and those who followed him, such as Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adorno, and therefore why we are the only actual "Marxists" -- the only true followers of Marx today.
We in Platypus owe our point of departure to
Lukacs's recovery and elaboration of Marx, which he achieved not only by
reading Marx, but by interpreting the significance of Marx's insights through
the political thinking and action of Lenin and Luxemburg in the crisis of
Marxism in war and revolution 1914-19.
As we will see in subsequent readings and discussion, Lukacs was digesting and teasing out the implications of the controversies in the preceding era of 2nd Intl. Marxism whose most salient results were the Russian and German Revolutions of 1917-19.
Lukacs's recovery of Marx was conditioned by political events in history that gave a renewed purchase and restored depth to Marxism as a philosophy of freedom, how Platypus approaches it.
By contrast, Marxism otherwise disintegrated into a form of "historical analysis," on the one hand, and a political ideology on the other. It thus ceased to be critical and became instead an affirmation of forms of appearance of society in capital. Marxism itself became "reified."
This is what Lukacs was addressing, how
Marxism was (inevitably) bound up with the reified forms of appearance in capital. When Lukacs addressed "reification," he had first and foremost in mind the social democratic workers' movement and what Marxism had become in it as the "phenomenon of reification" with which the working class had to contend in attempting to get beyond capital, but in and through its "reified" forms of appearance.
Lukacs's critique of "contemplation" should hence not be regarded as a call to action as a solution. Rather, Lukacs was concerned with how forms of action had become "reified." "Contemplation" was not a spatial relationship (i.e., apart from action), but rather a temporal one: the inevitably and hence necessarily "post-festum" character of consciousness.
In coming weeks this will be addressed (in our further discussion of Lukacs and then of Korsch's works) as the question
and problem of "historical consciousness," the only way to work within and potentially beyond the reified forms of appearance in consciousness of capital.
-- Chris
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