Spontaneity of the Masses, Activity of the Party | Georg Lukács

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First appeared in Die Internationale, III/6, 1921 (Editor’s note). FROM: LUKÁCS, Georg. Tactics and Ethics, 1919-1929. London: Verso, 2014. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, December 2022. Available as a pdf here.

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Spontaneity of the Masses, Activity of the Party

Georg Lukács

There is no difficulty in making a distinction between on the one hand, the discussion about the correctness or incorrectness of the new ‘open’ tactics of the United German Communist Party (VKPD)¹ and, on the other, the discussion as to whether or not the March Action² was correctly led. This was clearly demonstrated at the meeting of the Central Committee on 7 and 8 April, where Comrade Paul Franken put forward an amendment to Paragraph 12 of the guiding principles³ of the Central Bureau. The proposal was that, from the sentence, ‘the Central Committee therefore approves the political and tactical position of the Bureau’, the words ‘and tactical’ should be deleted. Although the amendment was rejected by the great majority of the Central Committee, paragraph 6 of the guiding principles nevertheless shows, as does Comrade Paul Frölich’s essay entitled ‘Offensive’ in the recent issue of Internationale (3, no. 3, 1921), that the March Action was in no sense a classic example of the new tactical line, but rather a defensive struggle forced on the party in the midst of its preparations for the intellectual and organizational re-orientation demanded by the new tactics. Which in no way means that the lessons of the March Action are not pertinent to the efforts within the party to develop the new tactical approach and do not have to be made full use of. It means simply that the problem of offensive tactics can be discussed – to some extent at least – independently of the concrete results and concrete criticisms of the March Action.

Those who oppose the new tactics – and they do so for overtly or unconsciously opportunistic reasons – base their arguments essentially on three points. First, they argue that, as long as it is ‘correctly’ understood, the revolutionary offensive in no respect signifies a new departure for the United German Communist Party; they even set out to prove that the tactic of the ‘Open Letter’⁴ was itself already an offensive tactic. Secondly, they claim to have exposed the March Action as a putsch launched in the spirit of Bakunin or Blanqui. And thirdly, they are concerned to demonstrate that the theoretical conflict which has now become acute in the United German Communist Party is nothing more than the old conflict between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, which first came to light as far back as 1904 in Rosa Luxemburg’s articles dealing with the organizational questions of the Russian party.⁵

We have no intention of entering into a semantic slanging-match armed with quotations from Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. To produce passages from Marx ‘for’ or ‘against’ the putschist nature of the March Action would be futile, just as any attempt to protect the reputation of Rosa Luxemburg against charges of opportunistic leanings would be undignified.

Interview: Jean-Paul Sartre on Maoism

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“Originally published in Number 28 of Actuel and reprinted in Tout Va Bien, Number 4, February 20-March 20, 1973, pp. 30-35. It was conducted by Michel-Antoine Burnier. English translation is by Robert D’Amico”

FROM: Telos, Summer 1973, vol. 1973, no. 16, pp. 92-101. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, December 2022. Available as a pdf here.

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On Maoism—interview with Jean-Paul Sartre

For more than two years you have been director of La Cause du Peuple. You have sold the paper on the streets, you write militant articles, you work on the new daily Liberation, and you have participated in many of the Maoists’ meetings and actions. You seem much closer to them and more engaged with them than you were previously with the Communist Party and with liberation movements such as the Algerian FLN. How do you explain this, and did you make this decision at the outset?

Sartre: I accepted the directorship of La Cause du Peuple after the arrest of the two preceding directors in the spring of 1970. The Maoists did not think they had a base of support broad enough to carry out the clandestine operation which the government tried to force them into. To meet both this process and repression, they came and asked me to help them. That represented, moreover, a new attitude on their part of interest in intellectuals and in finding out how intellectuals could be of service to them. They mistrusted “super-stars” but, at the same time, they appealed to well-known intellectuals who could avert Marcellin’s attacks. They turned to the notion of “celebrity” back against the bourgeoisie—and they were right. I feel that the well-known writer has a double role: he is himself, and also the public thing called a celebrity over which he has no control unless he recovers it to serve in a completely different ways. That is what I did with La Cause du Peuple.

At the beginning, it was clear that I was not in agreement with the Maoists, nor were they with me. I took a legal and not a political responsibility. I simply gave my name so the paper could continue and the militants could act and write as they intended to. In the same way, I accepted the directorship of Tout Va Bien; and under the same conditions I was a witness at the trial of militants from Vive la Revolution and of Roland Castro. Through a series of actions and struggles since then, I have been drawn progressively closer to the conceptions of La Cause du Peuple.

Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49) | Frederick Engels

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MARX, Karl; ENGELS, Frederick. Marx & Engels: Collected Works, vol. 26, pp. 120-128, 2010. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, with minor stylistic corrections, November 2019. Available as a pdf here.

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Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49)

Frederick Engels

On the outbreak of the February Revolution, the German “Communist Party,” as we called it, consisted only of a small core, the Communist League, which was organized as a secret propaganda society. The League was secret only because at that time no freedom of association or assembly existed in Germany. Besides the workers’ associations abroad, from which it obtained recruits, it had about thirty communities, or sections, in the country itself and, in addition, individual members in many places. This inconsiderable fighting force, however, possessed a leader, Marx, to whom all willingly subordinated themselves, a leader of the first rank, and, thanks to him, a programme of principles and tactics that still has full validity today: the Communist Manifesto.

It is the tactical part of the programme that concerns us here in the first instance. This part stated in general:

“The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.”

“They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.”

“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.”

“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”¹

From “Great Realism” to Realism | Istvan Szerdahelyi

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From: ILLÉS, László; JÓZSEF, Farkas; SZABOLCSI, Miklós; SZERDAHELYI, István (eds.). Hungarian Studies on Georg Lukács. Vol. 1. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993, pp. 300-328. Translated by Iván Sellei. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, April 2022. Available as a pdf here.

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From “Great Realism” to Realism

Istvan Szerdahelyi

 

I. How did Realism become “Great?”

1. The problem of “Great Realism”

Among the terms that Georg Lukács used in his aesthetic, the most controversial one has been “great realism.”

According to a commonly held view, the essence of Lukács’ conception of realism did not change between the 1930s and his death: “Eventful as Lukács’ external life was, his works show unbroken development from the early 1930s. He did not renounce any tenet, neither did he come up with remarkable new one.”¹ Yet sponsor of this view are divided into two groups. The members of the first group content that, for Lukács, the term “great realism” never functioned as a category, and that the adjective is unimportant. This view is expressed, for example, in monographs by Helga Gallas and István Hermann,² which confine themselves to discussion of realism and do not mention the term “great realism.” In a similar manner, Miklós Lackó states that “in the early 1930s, Lukács plunged into Berlin literary polemics almost in full and complete possession of his conception of realism in art.”³ Hermann declared that

Lukács never used the concept “great realism” in that form. He did write of great realist writers, but the word great operated as an adjective. Once I asked him what he meant by greatrealism. He said he did not know, for, if such a concept existed, there should be little, middle, and intermediate realism as well.⁴

To be sure, the term “greatrealism” is written this way, that is, in one word, only by some of his pupils and—recently—translators, while Lukács himself always wrote it in two words. Yet the controversial issue is not the term as it appears in written form, but the concept. And Lukács’ above statement cannot be considered as the final word in the debate, as it is widely known that, although he did not use such terms as “little, middle, and intermediate realism,” he did use such terms as “pedestrian,” “superficial,” and “limited” realism.

Freud’s Psychology of the Masses | Georg Lukács

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From: JÁNOSSY, Ferenc (org.). Reviews and articles from Die rote Fahne. London: The Merlin Press, 1983, pp. 33-36. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, November 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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Freud’s Psychology of the Masses

Georg Lukács

It cannot be our aim in this review—for space already precludes it—to portray Freud’s psychological system and to give an evaluation of it, even in outline. That would require a treatise in itself—which, to be sure, would be no bad thing, since on the one hand Freudian psychology signifies a certain advance compared to common psychology, but on the other, like most modern theories, is very liable to mislead anyone not heeding the totality of social phenomena; liable to offer him one of those panaceas for explaining every phenomenon that are so popular today—without forcing him to come to terms intellectually with the real structure of society.

Every psychology so far, Freudian psychology included, suffers in having a method with a bias towards starting out from the human being artificially insulated, isolated through capitalist society and its production system. It treats his peculiarities—likewise the effect of capitalism—as permanent qualities which are peculiar to ‘man’ as ‘Nature dictates’. Like bourgeois economics, jurisprudence and so on, it is bogged down in the superficial forms produced by capitalist society; it cannot perceive that it is merely assuming forms of capitalist society and in consequence it cannot emancipate itself from them. For this reason it is similarly incapable of solving or even understanding from this viewpoint the problems besetting psychology too. In this way, psychology turns the essence of things upside down. It attempts to explain man’s social relations from his individual consciousness (or sub-consciousness) instead of exploring the social reasons for his separateness from the whole and the connected problems of his relations to his fellow-men. It must inevitably revolve helplessly in a circle of pseudo-problems of its own making.

Revolutionary Dialectics against “Tailism” | Michael Löwy

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FROM: THOMPSON, Michael J. (ed). Lukács Reconsidered: critical essays in politics, philosophy and aesthetics. London: Continuum Books, 2011, pp. 65-74. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, November 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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Revolutionary Dialectics against “Tailism”: Lukács’ Answer to the Criticisms of History and Class Consciousness

Michael Löwy

History and Class Consciousness (HCC) is certainly Georg Lukács’ most important philosophical work, and a writing that influenced critical thinking throughout the twentieth century. Next to the dialectical method, one of the most important aspects of the book is the central place occupied by the subjective dimension of the revolutionary struggle: class consciousness. In fact both dimensions are directly linked: a dialectical understanding of history and of politics leads necessarily to a dialectical approach to the subject/object relation, superseding the one-sided vulgar materialist interpretation of Marxism, where only the “objective conditions,” the level of development of the forces of production, or the capitalist economic crisis, play a decisive role in determining the issue of historical processes. No other work of those years was able to offer such a powerful and philosophically sophisticated legitimation of the Communist program. However, far from being welcome in official Communist quarters, it received an intense fire of criticism soon after its publication in 1923. No exclusions were pronounced—such practices were still impossible in the early 20s—but it was obvious that the kind of revolutionary dialectics represented by HCC was hardly acceptable to the dominant philosophical doxa of the Comintern. For many years scholars and readers wondered why Lukács never answered to these critical comments. It is true that in the 1930s he did indulge in several “self-critical” assessments of his book, rejecting it had an “idealist” piece. But there exists no evidence that he shared this viewpoint already in the early 1920s: on the contrary, one could assume, for instance from his book on Lenin, in 1924, or his critical comments on Bukharin in 1925, that he did not recant his philosophical perspective.

Dialectic of the Concrete Totality | Karel Kosík

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KOSÍK, Karel. Dialectic of the Concrete Totality. In: Telos Fall, 1968, vol. 1968, no. 2, p. 21-37. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, November 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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Dialectic of the Concrete Totality

Karel Kosík

I. The World of Pseudo-Concreteness and its Destruction

The dialectic deals with the «thing in itself». But the «thing in itself» is not immediately given to man. In order to come to comprehend it, it is necessary not only to exert a certain effort, but also to make a detour. Because of this, dialectical thought distinguishes between the representation and the concept of the thing. By this it does not simply mean to distinguish two forms or two degrees of knowledge of reality, but first and foremost two qualities of human praxis. The primordial and immediate attitude of man with respect to reality is not that of an abstract knowing subject, of a thinking head that speculatively considers reality. Rather, it is that of a being that acts objectively and practically. It is the attitude of a historical individual who performs his practical activity in relation to nature and other men, and pursues the realization of its own ends and of its own interests within a determinate set of social relations. As such, reality does not present itself to man first as an object to be intuited, analysed, and theoretically comprehended—whose opposite and complementary pole is precisely the abstract knowing subject existing outside of the world and separate from it—but as the field in which he performs his practic-sensible activity and upon which that immediate intuition of reality will rise. In the practical-utilitarian relationship with things—where reality reveals itself as the world of means, ends, tools, exigencies, and efforts to satisfy them—the individual creates for himself, in «concrete contexts», his own representation of things and elaborates a whole correlative system of notions which catch and fix phenomenal aspects of reality.

On the Later Lukács | Nicolas Tertulian

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From: TERTULIAN, Nicolas. “On the Later Lukács.” In: Telos, 1979, 40, pp. 136-144. Translated by David S. Parent. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, September 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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On the Later Lukács

Nicolas Tertulian

For Lukács, aesthetics and the philosophy of history were always closely connected. His Theory of the Novel analysed as an expression of the “epoch of complete guilt” (Fichte) and culminated in the aspiration for a “new world,” of which Dostoevsky was to be the “new Homer.” The hard lessons of history corrected the young Lukács’ Utopianism and led him to modify his literary preferences: Balzac replaced Flaubert, Fielding replaced Sterne, Tolstoy replaced Dostoevsky.¹ The discovery of the complicated ruses of history, resulting in the breakdown of a recti-linear conception of historical progress, is the source of the cult of the “grand realism” in Lukács’ aesthetics in the 1930’s. Respect for the complex mediations of the historical process was the root of his opposition to the Stalin era’s simplistic simplifications of literature, as well as his refusal to accept the reductive simplifications of historical process was the root of his opposition to the Stalin era’s simplistic politicization of literature, as well as of his refusal to accept the reductive simplifications of avant-garde art.

A socio-historical explanation of the aesthetic and philosophical thought of the later Lukács, as it took shape in his two last great works, Aesthetics and Ontology of Existence, ought to begin with his ambivalent attitude toward the established political regimes in Eastern Europe. Lukács’ aesthetic and philosophical elaborations bear the mark of a determined stand toward the reality of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras (as Adorno would say, they are “cryptograms”). On the political level, he sought to promote structural reforms through a constructive opposition within the social systems of “real existing socialism” while theoretically he wanted to be a spokesman of an effective de-Stalinization of these regimes.

Lukács’ Ontology | Nicolas Tertulian

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Original from: TERTULIAN, Nicolas. “Lukács’ Ontology.” In: ROCKMORE, Tom (ed.). Lukács Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1988, pp. 243-273. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, September 2021, with minor corrections. Available as a pdf here.

Nicolas Tertulian (1929-2019) was a director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, philosopher and writer. His main books focus on Lukács’ later works and, others, with the Heidegger-Lukács intellectual relation.

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Lukács’ ­Ontology

Nicolas Tertulian

Georg Lukács died in June 1971 without having given his imprimatur for the complete publication of his last, great philosophical work, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins (On the Ontology of Social Being).

We can ask ourselves if the voluminous manuscript of more than two thousand pages (including the Prolegomena, written in the year before his death) appears like a gigantic torso which still needed a basic revision and polishing; or if, on the contrary, we confront here a more or less completed work,¹ a true terminus ad quem of an exceptionally long intellectual itinerary. In any case, study of the text which became Lukács’ opus posthumum, his true philosophical testament, clearly indicates its importance apart from any hypotheses we can formulate on the ultimate intentions of its author with regard to it.

As concerns the genesis of the Ontology, more precisely the gestation process of the work and the deep reasons which led Lukács to undertake it, we can formulate a certain number of hypotheses in relation to indications present in his correspondence and in relation to the results of research undertaken in the Lukács Archives in Budapest. There is no doubt that the Ontology began against the background of the project of an Ethics. A letter sent by Lukács on May 10, 1960 to his friend Ernst Fischer enables us to specify the moment when he had finished the composition of the first part of his great Aesthetics.² “I am still in the transitional period after a birth,” Lukács wrote to Fisher,

The aesthetic manuscript is ready and I need now to place myself within the atmosphere of ethics. That is not an easy task, since the entire nervous system needs to be directed to perceive and to associate otherwise than it has been accustomed in recent years. I am afraid this rearrangement will take at least a few weeks, if not months. Only then can the really fruitful thought begin. Accordingly, this transition will be accomplished.

The Final Struggle | José Mariátegui

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Original in Spanish: “La lucha final.” In: El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy. (Obras Completas, 10th ed.). Lima: Biblioteca Amauta, 1987, 3:29–33.

English edition (translated by the editors): VANDEN, Harry E.; BECKER, Marc B. (Eds.). José Carlos Mariátegui: an anthology. New York: NYU Press, 2011, 389-395. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, July 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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The Final Struggle¹

José Carlos Mariátegui

I.

Madeleine Marx, one of the most restless women of letters and most modern in contemporary France, has gathered her impressions of Russia in a book bearing this title: C’est la lutte finale… .² The sentence of singer Eugene Pottier³ acquires a historical highlight. “It is the final struggle!”

The proletarian revolution in Russia welcomes this cry—the ecumenical cry of the worldwide proletariat. The massive battle cry and hope that Madeleine Marx heard in the streets of Moscow, I have also heard in the streets of Rome, Milan, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and Lima. It embodies all of the excitement of an era. Revolutionary crowds believe in engaging in the final struggle.

Is the final struggle truly engaged? For those sceptical creatures of the old order this final struggle is just an illusion. For the ardent fighters of the new order it is a reality. Au-dessus la Melée,⁴ a new and enlightened philosophy of history, suggests otherwise: illusion and reality. The final struggle of Eugene Pottier‘s stanza is both a reality and an illusion.

Problems of Religion and Irrationalism in Georg Lukács’ Life and Work | József Lukács

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From: Hungarian Studies on Lukács. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993, Vol. 2, pp. 578-590. Translated by Iván Sellei. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, July 2021, with minor grammatical corrections. Transcriber’s notes have been marked with [T. N.]. Available as a pdf here.

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Problems of Religion and Irrationalism in Georg Lukács’ Life and Work¹

József Lukács

At a cursory glance it may seem as though delving into the problematic of religion and religiosity was not a concern of particular significance in the oeuvre of Georg Lukács. And indeed, although Lukács wrote an important work on the destruction of reason, and devoted profound critical analyses to the interrelationship of religion, art, and science, as well as to the nature of religious utopias, the fundamental orientation of his oeuvre was under the auspices of positive categories as, for instance, totality, history, realism, dialectics, the characteristics of artistic reflection, labor, reproduction, and the social alternatives.

When, however, instead of looking at the titles of chapters in Lukács’ books, we consider the course of his intellectual development, the seminal importance of the question of religion is bound to emerge. In the first place, the precondition of Lukács’ conversion to Marxism-Leninism was his efforts to acquire the Marxists scientific approach to problems and Marxists consciousness, shedding the naive and belief-like interpretation of the most important questions of world view and, later on, of socialism. Secondly, as Lukács was a committed advocate of the revolutionary working-class movement, he considered it imperative to subject the irrationalism of the era of imperialism to radical criticism, and, just like Marx, he regarded the sagacious and competent analysis of religion as a key precondition of all social criticism.

To avoid any misunderstanding: he could differentiate between entering into a political alliance with the religious representatives of progress, and assessing the ideology that these personalities stood for. On the one hand, he rejected the convergence of Marxism and religious belief and, on the other hand, he appreciated that, for example, Simone Weil, a religious thinker, had an affinity with the left wing. Such an attitude on Lukács’ part could only be the result of the full recognition of the lessons of a strenuous life, one that Georg Lukács devoted to the struggle against inhumanity of capitalism and the creation of mankind’s genuine history: socialism and communism.

The Legacy of 1848 and the Dilemmas of Democratic Revolutions | István Mészáros

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We reproduce here a short article by István Mészáros on the ‘1848 Revolutions’, their short-lived aspects and consequences.

From: MOGGACH, Douglas; BROWNE, Paul Leduc (eds.). The Social Question and The Democratic Revolution: Marx and the Legacy of 1848. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2000, pp. 43-46. Available as a pdf here. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, February 2021.

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The Legacy of 1848 and the Dilemmas of Democratic Revolutions

István Mészáros

The principal legacy of 1848 is the forceful intervention of the working class (and in more general terms: of the popular masses) in shaping historical events, highlighting some insoluble structural deficiencies of the established social order and thereby forcing onto the socio-political agenda many unresolved problems for the future.

The Second Republic (1848) in France at first aspires at being a “Social Republic,” by instituting major reforms. Armand Barbes formulates the demand that political reforms should be only means to social reforms. This remains a great dilemma ever since, in that political reforms are often used simply to strengthen the established order, without any serious intent for introducing significant social change. Indeed, often the social reforms which had to be instituted under popular pressure are later undone by conservative or restoratory political acts. For example, in the middle of the revolutionary ferment in Paris, February 25, 1848, sees the proclamation of the “Right to Work” and the establishment of a National Network of Workshops in order to do away with the curse of unemployment. Hardly four months later, however, on June 21, the measure is annulled and the National Network meant to help the unemployed is abolished.

The structural problem of unemployment is more acute today than ever before, despite repeated programmatic efforts to overcome it, as formulated even by some genuine liberal democratic politicians (e.g., Lord Beveridge in his famous book: Full Employment in a Free Society). The “Right to Work” seems to be an elusive ideal, but a stubbornly recurring one.

The Aesthetics of Hunger | Glauber Rocha

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“Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha marks, in this book, the rediscovery of the modernist Antropofagia in the 1960s. ‘The Aesthetics of Hunger’ is Rocha’s iconic manifesto for a Third World Cinema, defining a negative mode of production to industrial cinema (and, consequently, a refusal of Western colonizing forms) but also an epistemology of the oppressed. Six years later, however, Rocha’s attitude had phased into a full scope critique of modern ‘oppressive’ reason, to which he contrasted the praise of unreason as the ingredient for the magic and dream of revolution.” (Ed. note)

MARQUES, Pedro Neves (ed.). The Forest & The School. Berlin: Archive Books, 2015, pp. 202-209. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, February 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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The Aesthetics of Hunger

Glauber Rocha

Dispensing with the informative introduction that has become characteristic of discussions about Latin America, I prefer to examine the reactions between our culture and civilized culture in broader terms than those which characterize the analysis of the European observer. Thus, while Latin America laments its general misery, the foreign observer cultivates a taste for that misery, not as a tragic symptom but merely as a formal element within his field of interest. The Latin American neither communicates his real misery to the civilized man, nor does the civilized man truly comprehend the misery of the Latin American.

Fundamentally, this is the situation of the arts in Brazil: to this day, only distortions of the truth (a formal exoticism that vulgarizes social problems) have been widely communicated, provoking a series of misunderstandings which go beyond the arts and contaminate the political domain.

Marx: the Method of Political Economy as an Ontological Critique | Mario Duayer

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Mario Duayer was a professor at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who undertook a heavy task of translating Karl Marx’s works into Portuguese, while at the same time, arduously re-invigorating Marxian investigations through the theoretical developments produced by both Georg Lukács and Moishe Postone. Duayer has recently passed away in January 2021, due to the COVID pandemic, which has been allowed to devastate Brazil.

OLIVA, Antonio; OLIVA, ÁNGEL; NOVARA, Iván (eds.). Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: the philosophy of real abstraction. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 113-129.

Translated by Anahí Prucca. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, January 2021. Available as a pdf here.

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Introduction

This chapter deals with the so-called question of the method in Marx. The debate around the methodological issues in the Marxist tradition are mainly based on the famous text entitled ‘The Method in Political Economy’, which appears in the introduction of the Grundrisse (Marx 2011a). Though unfinished and not published by the author, it constitutes the only work in which Marx deals explicitly with the issues relative to the method. It is then natural that it is the obligatory reference for the theoretical arguments on the Marxist method.

As the chapter consists in a critical contribution inside the Marxist tradition, it is worth warning, and not just for convention, that other dimensions of the work of the authors here mentioned are not being questioned: the critical commentaries concentrate only in their interpretations of the ‘Method…’, It is even important to recognize the value of these works in the divulgation of the Marxist text, as well as being of importance to enlarge and enrich important aspects which surge from it.

A Tribute to István Mészáros (1930–2017) | Terry Brotherstone

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BROTHERSTONE, Terry. (2018). A Tribute to István Mészáros (1930–2017). In: Critique, 46 (2), 327–337. Transcribed by V. S. Conttren, November 2020.

Available as a pdf here.

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The Marxist political philosopher István Mészáros, who was born in 1930 in Hungary, died in the UK on 1 October 2017. He had lived in England or Scotland most of the time since he left Budapest after the brutal suppression of the anti-Stalinist revolution in 1956. Following a stroke in September, he was being cared for at Margate in Kent, near the house at Ramsgate where, a few years previously, he had moved with his books from the home in Charles Dickens’s much-loved town of Rochester that he had shared—until her premature death in 2007—with his near-life-long companion and co-thinker, Donatella Morisi. As Hillel Ticktin has written, Mészáros’s death is “a loss to the left and to humanity” of a man dedicated to “enlightening people on the nature of the movement to socialism.” Marxism has lost one of the most creatively original and impassioned thinkers of the second half of the 20th and the early 21st centuries.

«Under-labouring» for ethics: Lukács’ critical ontology | Mario Duayer

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Article written by Mario Duayer and João Leonardo Medeiros. From: LAWSON, Clive (Ed.). Contributions to Social Ontology. New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 103-123.

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The objectivity of values is based on the fact that they are moving and moved components of the overall social development.
G. Lukács

Introduction

Over the last 30 years or so critical realism has advanced its project of elaborating an ontology that can rival the empiricist ontology implicit in both positivist and idealist traditions. The ontology resulting from this collective effort should be capable of furnishing science, whether natural or social, with an explicit philosophical foundation. As early as in his first work Bhaskar (1997: 10) employed the Lockean expression «under-labour» to refer to the supporting role played by philosophy (particularly ontology) in scientific development.¹ According to him, in under-labouring for science philosophy would function as a «second-order knowledge», insofar as the knowledge produced by it would be «a knowledge of the necessary conditions of knowledge» (Bhaskar 1979: 10).

Obviously, a philosophy for science such as proposed by critical realism presupposes that truth makes a difference. Against most fashionable theoretical contemporary doctrines for which truth is nothing but a «fifth wheel», critical realism seems to concentrate most of its efforts in demonstrating the relationship between knowledge and human practice as follows:

If the fundamental norm of theoretical discourse is descriptive or representative adequacy or truth, the fundamental norm of practical discourse is the fulfilment, realization or satisfaction of human wants, needs or purposes. If there are real grounds (causes) for belief or action, then it is possible that we are mistaken about them, and if we fail in truth we may also fail in satisfaction (Bhaskar 1986: 206).