It is no wonder, then, that anyone in the business of defending Marxism constantly encounters the plea for a simple guide for the perplexed through the obscurities of the dialectic. Moreover, assessing the significance of History and Class Consciousness involves an engagement with the debates - provoked especially by the writings of the French Communist theorist Louis Althusser - about the relationship between Marx's thought and that of the great German philosopher Hegel, the modern author of the dialectic.
#Dialectic example series#
But the book is a series of essays which pursues several connected themes in an often difficult philosophical language: one can learn a great deal from Lukacs, but doing so requires (as we shall see below) a labour of interpretation and criticism.
Georg Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1923) is one of the classics of Marxism. It is not true that nothing of value has been written on the subject. Various Stalinist textbooks on what Edward Thompson called 'diabolical and hysterical materialism' certainly did nothing to fill it, since they treated the subject as a set of formal 'laws' which could be learned by rote and applied just as mechanically. We have been suffering from this gap in Marxist literature ever since.
In the event, of course, he never completed Capital, and so never got round to explaining dialectics. Marx on several occasions promised that, once he had finished Capital, he would write a simple explanation of 'the dialectic'. THE SECRET OF THE DIALECTIC: A review of John Rees, The Algebra of Revolution (New Jersey, 1998) Issue 78 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM, quarterly journal of the Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
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