[“Fracchia and Burkett on Tailism and the Dialectic: A Response,” Historical Materialism, Volume 23, Issue 2,

2015, pp. 228–238]

The Symposium on Tailism and the Dialectic:

A Defence of History and Class Consciousness

Andrew Feenberg

Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness has the peculiar status of a reviled classic. On

wonders why most of the commentary on this book consists in attacks rather than sober scholarly

readings. Perhaps this is connected to its ambiguous politics, caught between Leninism and

idealism, which is intolerable to many different types of readers. It is also true that Lukács’s

argument is complex and its meaning obscured rather than clarified by some of his rhetorical

choices. This symposium on Tailism and the Dialectic is, however, fairly balanced. Joseph

Fracchia and Paul Burkett are on the attack with powerful arguments along familiar lines,

criticizing Lukács for vanguardism and for rejecting the dialectics of nature, while the articles of

Paul Le Blanc and Michael Löwy offer a more charitable and to my mind more convincing

approach to the first theme.1 In this brief comment on the symposium I will defend Lukács’s

Defence in opposition to Burkett’s critique as well as to Fracchia’s, drawing on my forthcoming

book The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School.

Fracchia’s reading of Lukács’s theory of class consciousness and the party depends on a

one-sided interpretation of Lukács’s concept of reification. The result is a misunderstanding of

its implications for revolutionary politics. Fracchia argues that Lukács’s vanguardism is a direct

consequence of his belief that the proletariat is reified and therefore unable to progress beyond

Lenin’s famous trade-union consciousness. What Lukács called “proletarian class

consciousness” is in fact nothing other than the party line. Fracchia offers original arguments for
1
The symposium is published in Historical Materialism 21.3.

1
the conventional conclusion that for Lukács the party is the true subject of the revolution at the

expense of the proletariat.

By reification Lukács meant the appearance of capitalist society as a vast law governed

social machinery operating independent of the intentions and will of the individuals. Reification

is false because in reality the whole social system is based on practices and is not independent of

human intentions and will. On the other hand, reification is not merely an error because, as the

necessary appearance of capitalist society, it determines practices that conform with the

requirements of capitalism. Because they perceive the society and themselves in reified terms,

the individuals cannot join together to change the system. They are locked in to capitalist

practices that reproduce their oppression even as they seek personal advantage within capitalism.

It is true as Fracchia claims that Lukács argued that workers perceive immediate social

reality as reified in this sense, but in this he followed Marx who said that bourgeois and

proletarian alike are self-alienated. Marx added that their relation to alienation differed in that the

former are comfortable with it while the latter “feels itself destroyed by this alienation and see in

it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.”2 Similarly, reification is not

merely an obstacle to the development of class consciousness but also motivates resistance.

Hence Lukács wrote, “The quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist

in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the

worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral

existence.”3

Lukács argued that reification has different effects not just on the motivation but also on the

capacity for resistance. He claimed that the mechanization of labor leaves the proletariat less

2
Lukács 1971, quoted on p. 149.
3
Lukács 1971, p. 166.

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affected and better able to break with the immediate reified appearances than are privileged

employees such as bureaucrats and journalists who invest their personality in their jobs.4 Class

consciousness is thus not excluded by reification which, rather, forms the basis of the mediations

in which that consciousness consists. It is the difference in the relation to reification that is the

basis for class consciousness, not the immunity to reification’s effects which Fracchia seems to

consider necessary.

Although Lukács’s theory of reification does not explain his rather unorthodox Leninism, he

was certainly enough of a Leninist to believe in the importance of tactical leadership. This

troubles Fracchia. Lenin emphasized the instrumental function of the party far more than earlier

theorists, even to the point of provoking criticism for “Blanquist” putschism. In claiming that the

party is the “visible embodiment” of the class consciousness of the proletariat, Lukács was trying

to give Lenin’s concept of party leadership a hermeneutic twist. Against the exclusive focus on

instrumental effectiveness, he emphasized the ideological function of the party’s instrumental

actions. Those actions could be understood as attempts to spread class consciousness by

example. Thus Lukács did not see the party as the real subject of the revolution, manipulating the

ignorant proletariat on the basis of Marxist theory, but rather explained its role in orienting a

practical mass learning process. The assumption throughout is that progress toward class

consciousness and its spread among workers is possible, not that it is impossible as Fracchia

claims.

Löwy makes the important point that Lukács was attempting a synthesis of Luxemburg and

Lenin in History and Class Consciousness. Indeed, the second chapter retained the entirely

positive evaluation of Luxemburg, although most of it was written before his full acceptance of

the Leninist theory of the party. This would be incomprehensible if Lukács had adopted the
4
Lukács 1971, p. 99.

3
conception of party-class relations Fracchia attributes to him. How would Fracchia explain the

following sentence from the last and most Leninist essay in the book: “Rosa Luxemburg saw the

significance of mass actions more clearly than anyone…”?5

Fracchia is particularly bothered by Lukács’s claim that the party can know more than the

individual proletarians. But what is surprising about this? Of course well informed theoreticians

sitting in their armchairs can gain a better view of the “totality” than workers in their separate

local factories. But such theoretical knowledge is not enough. The real question is whether the

party can mobilize that knowledge practically. As Lukács puts it, the “theory of praxis

gradually…transforms itself into a practical theory that overturns the real world.’”6 That depends

in large part on whether spontaneous workers’ movements also bring something new and

important to bear on the situation, for example, concerning the timing and sequence of actions or

the local points of vulnerability of the system. This was the import of Luxemburg’s contribution

and Lukács agreed with it.

Despite Fracchia’s attempt to place Luxemburg and Gramsci in a “democratic” wing of

Western Marxism in contrast to Lukács’s “Eastern Western Marxism,” Luxemburg also argued

for the importance of party leadership and claimed that theory has a role to play in history.

Gramsci’s conception of the party is quite similar to Lukács’s. The party engages in the “cultural

deployment” of a worldview corresponding to the interests of the proletariat, which the class at

first misinterprets in terms of traditional common sense.

Lukács calls this worldview “class consciousness” and contrasts it with the actual thoughts

and beliefs of the individual proletarians. His innovation with respect to traditional Marxism is

the idea that the potential transcendence of the reified appearance of capitalist society

5
Lukács 1971, p. 298.
6
Lukács 1971, p. 240.

4
differentiates proletarian consciousness from other class determined relations to the system. Thus

even where most workers still accept bourgeois ideology, their life experiences stand in constant

tension with reification. The role of the party is to help activate the potential this tension creates.

This potential also underlies Marxist theory, which must transcend the reified appearances in the

elaboration of the critique of political economy. On Lukács’s account, then, Marxist theory is

essentially related to the being of the class and not simply imposed by bourgeois intellectuals.

One can of course reject the very notions of party leadership, theory and class consciousness, but

it is not helpful in understanding the history of the workers’ movement to overlook the nuances.

I agree with Fracchia that Lukács, like Lenin, exaggerated the role of the party, but I do not

think Lukács went so far as to substitute the party for the proletariat as the subject of the

revolution, reduced in his thought to its insurrectionary moment. This is not to disagree with both

Fracchia and Le Blanc that Lukács’s conception of the party is flawed by a lack of institutional

mechanisms supporting the practice of critique and inner party democracy to which Lukács

vaguely appeals. And it is also true that Lukács lacked a coherent concept of democratic

socialism, although he did believe workers’ councils would play a central role along with the

party. But these are problems that do not go the conceptual heart of History and Class

Consciousness as do the concepts of reification and consciousness which Fracchia blames for

Lukács’s errors. And these are problems of the communist movement as a whole, not specific to

Lukács.

There is a great deal more to say about Fracchia’s interpretation of Lukács’s Leninism.

Much of it is said by Le Blanc who among other things introduces biographical considerations

that refute Fracchia’s claim that Lukács completely ignored the real working class in the

speculative construction of his concept of the proletariat. Rather than summarizing Le Blanc’s

5
argument, I encourage the reader to find it in the symposium.

Burkett’s article concerns one of the most puzzling issues in History and Class

Consciousness, the problem of nature. Tailism and the Dialectic contains keys to solving the

puzzle but I am not convinced that Burkett has grasped their significance. It is true that the

passages in Tailism and the Dialectic in which Lukács discusses this issue is particularly

obscure.7 My interpretation, in any case, is rather different from Burkett’s.

Burkett notes that a main purpose of Lukács’s distinction between nature and society is to

substitute dialectical method in social research for positivist methods modelled on the natural

sciences. But Burkett complains that Lukács’s distinction also grounded his rejection of the

application of dialectics to nature. The dualism of nature and society that results is incompatible

with ecological Marxism because it denies the role of subjectivity in nature. That role is

exemplified by the labor process, which joins human beings and nature in a unified whole.

(Burkett also mentions the significance of animal subjectivity, but I will leave this aside as

irrelevant to my disagreement.)

For Burkett, the tip-off that Lukács regressed to a positivistic conception of natural scientific

research is his claim that nature is more “objective” than society. This justifies the relegation of

dialectical method to social issues, while leaving the natural scientists to carry on as before.

Burkett wants to follow in the footsteps of the early Marx who, in the Manuscripts of 1844,

famously demanded the unification of the separate natural and human sciences. Such a successor

science would favor the ecological project whereas the continuation of the present situation, in

which natural science is pursued without recourse to dialectical method, bears responsibility for

7
Lukács 2000, pp. 103-106, 113-118.

6
the environmental crisis.8

The critique turns on the meaning of “objective.” Why did Lukács view nature as more

objective than society? The answer to this question requires a distinction between

epistemological and ontological objectivity. Did Lukács mean that scientific knowledge of nature

is more objective in the sense of universal and reliable than the supposedly subjective knowledge

of society, or was he concerned with the actual role of human subjectivity in the workings of

nature as opposed to society? When in the first essay of History and Class Consciousness he

claims that nature lacks the essential determinations of the dialectic such as the unity of subject

and object, theory and practice, he clearly intends the latter. Nature is more objective than

society in the sense that human subjectivity plays a lesser role in the natural than in the social

world.

Burkett contests this point on the grounds that nature as the object of labor is thoroughly

entangled with human subjectivity. Indeed, like Marx, Lukács also argued that the scientific

conception of nature is ultimately shaped by the relation to nature established in the labor

process. This explains the several passages Burkett quotes in which Lukács affirmed the social

basis of natural scientific knowledge. Burkett complains that Lukács does not proceed from these

observations to a program of reform of natural scientific method. Lukács did not in fact propose

such a reform which he considered premature in the current state of Marxist theory and scientific

research. He noted that we do not understand many of the social processes involved in the

determination of scientific research by society and so cannot suggest a fundamental improvement

on the current practice of research, nor should we expect the passage from capitalism to

8
Burkett cites John Bellamy Foster’s claim that the “anti-scientific” trend in Western Marxism, presumably a
consequence of Lukács’s dualism, blocked the development of ecological Marxism. From this I conclude that
Foster, like Burkett is unaware that several of Marcuse’s last speeches were among early attempts to integrate
ecology to the Marxist critique of capitalism. The real obstacle was Marxist “orthodoxy” with its exclusive focus on
working class politics and political economy.

7
socialism to immediately revolutionize science although change is likely in the long run.

Lukács argued that the general orientation of science toward the world, its concept of its

object, i.e. nature, is determined by the level of development of the productive forces and the

mode of production. This is a separate question from the ideological determination of research

results which might be exposed by ideology critique and rectified within the general framework

of science as we know it. This does not exclude radical changes at the higher level of the concept

of the object of science, but nor does it suggest any way for a philosophically inspired dialectics

to intervene in its redefinition. The transformation of the concept of nature will come from

within science itself, which enjoys an access to the moving forces of history that is unique to the

research process. Just how far such a transformation will go toward unifying nature and society

is a question for future research, not a philosophical or political task in the present. Thus Lukács

disappoints Burkett out of what seems to me a commendable modesty.

But surely the development of ecological science, tracking the consequences of human

activity for natural systems and vice versa, suggests a missed opportunity, as Burkett argues.

Isn’t ecology a dialectical science unifying society and nature? Lukács’s distinction of nature and

society appears most questionable in this context. But in what does this distinction really consist?

The nature involved in production is largely absent from the discussion of the dialectics of

nature in History and Class Consciousness, which led Lukács’s early critics to the conclusion

that he was an idealist. In Tailism and the Dialectic, he attempted to correct this omission by

acknowledging the “metabolism” of humanity and nature in the labor process. In the course of

this discussion Lukács distinguished explicitly between two natures, the nature of natural science

and the nature of the labor process.

But now the issue gets complicated because the epistemological concept of objectivity is

8
involved in the ontological distinction between nature and society. If we attend carefully to what

Lukács actually said, rather than leaping ahead to conventional conclusions, it becomes clear that

the nature which lacks the essential determinations of the dialectic is the one studied by natural

science, not the object of labor. The nature which, according to Lukács, lacks a subjective

dialectic is not identical with the raw materials on which human beings work, but is a

representation abstracted from living nature. The question of the dialectics of nature concerns the

difference in the role of consciousness and practice in that representation vs. their role in social

systems. The problem he addressed with the contrast between natural scientific nature and

society is a methodological one and was not intended to institute a dualism of nature and society

generally.

Burkett, like most critics of Lukács, confounds the nature appropriated in labor with the

nature of natural science and so renders Lukács’s methodological distinction of nature and

society far more substantive than Lukács himself intended. Correspondingly, Burkett assumes

that overcoming the distinction will involve transforming science. But Lukács did not follow the

early Marx in dismissing contemporary science in the name of an imagined future science

unifying nature and society along lines anticipated in the labor process. He did not need to do so

to avoid positing an unacceptable dualism of nature and society. Surely his reluctance was due to

a realistic appraisal of the role and significance of the existing sciences in the social world,

which Marx too appreciated soon after writing the Manuscripts.

But this still leaves the question of why Lukács considered the dualism of the nature of

natural science and society so significant that he made a point of it in opposition to Engels and

the whole Marxist tradition. This question returns us to the concept of reification once again. The

core of the argument is expressed in this passage:

9
 What is important is to recognize clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects

of social activity) assume increasingly the form of objectivity of the abstract elements of

the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of

nature. And also, the subject of this ‘action’ likewise assumes increasingly the attitude of

the pure observer of these—artificially abstract—processes, the attitude of the

experimenter.9

Natural scientific systems are abstracted from the full complexity of the world, and especially

from human action, which is fine for the pursuit of knowledge of nature. But what happens when

social systems are treated in the same way, and not just by researchers but by entire populations

subordinated to them? What is the consequence of those populations simply observing the laws

regulating the social system rather than intervening to change them? This is reification and it is

precisely the mechanism of reproduction of the system.

In the case of nature, the condition for acquiring scientific knowledge is the abstention of

human agents from personal involvement once they have set up the mechanism of discovery.

This is what Lukács means by “the attitude of the pure observer.” Ending this abstention by

manipulating the research outcome, for example for personal advantage, would not advance

knowledge. Nor could a union of scientific researchers alter the laws of nature through their

protests and resistances. This is obvious to the researchers who know that they must actively

create the mechanism of discovery and abstain from modifying the results. Fulfilling these

conditions makes it possible to discover the laws of nature. Lukács calls this relationship

“contemplative” not because the experimenter is totally passive, but because he or she does not

aim to alter that laws but merely to discover them.

But the social case is more complex. In that case reification effectively hides the role of
9
Lukács 1971, p. 131.

10
human beings in the process of reproduction of the objects. The equivalent of the experimental

mechanism is all those practices that create a world governed by the economic laws of

capitalism. Reification obscures the role of those practices and isolates the individuals in the face

of the apparently lawful social world they unconsciously create. Their “contemplative”

relationship to society, their abstention from modifying the laws of social life, reproduces those

laws.

But this is not a necessary condition. De-reifying class consciousness enables the individuals

to recognize themselves in their objects. Since those objects depend for their very existence on

the isolation and passivity of the human agents that create and sustain them, consciousness

undermines the sway of the laws. Where the individuals break through the reified veil covering

the social institutions, they can come together to modify those institutions. The natural objects of

science, on the contrary, are not based on a subjective disposition of human agents and cannot be

changed by a change at that level but only through further research. This is what Lukács means

by distinguishing the subjective dialectic of theory and practice, subject and object from the

objective dialectics of nature which is merely descriptive.

The issue in the case of society is thus not one of knowledge of the laws alone, but also of

actual social life in which those laws are suspended by knowledge of them. This is a unique case

in which knowledge is always already action in the world with real material consequences.

Lukács explained this peculiar connection between the epistemological and the ontological levels

in terms of the notion of self-consciousness. Class consciousness is the self-knowledge of

capitalist society and as such immediately modifies that society by changing the role of the

proletariat.

This methodological distinction between nature and society makes better sense than a

11
division of the world into two separate externally related spheres. But it is not clear how the

distinction applies to the labor process. Can the object of science and the object of labor be

united? Burkett argues that ecological science crosses the line Lukács wants to draw between

science and society. And indeed, we are able today to cross that line far more easily than in the

early 1920s before the development of ecological science. However, technology already crossed

that line in Lukács’s day since it is a product of both knowledge of nature and social demands.

Technology is at the center of the human-nature metabolism in which industry consists. Lukács

objected to a reified technological determinism and argued for the social determination of the

productive forces, but he did not explain how this aspect of the theory relates to the distinction

between scientific nature and society. This connection now becomes relevant with the

development of ecology.

But does this refute Lukács’s view? Isn’t this precisely the sort of thing anticipated in his

position on the historical evolution of science? The science of ecology has emerged from the

changed social and economic relations of advanced capitalism, with its far greater scope of

action and far more destructive technologies than anything known during the founding of the

academic disciplines in the 19th century. As a result an interdisciplinary science of ecology has

been created which draws on many specializations invented in an earlier time when disciplinary

boundaries made more sense. This evolution raises questions about the social conditioning of the

inherited scientific knowledge as well as opening science to politics in new ways. We are

witnessing the evolution of the object of science, nature, before our very eyes just as Lukács

expected.

At the time of his writing, these were not the issues. He is clear and explicit on the historical

limitations of his discussion. He writes in Tailism and the Dialectic, “In no way do I want to

12
deny that the natural sciences contain elements of historical cognition. I do not deny that the first

steps of the ‘unified science of history’ demanded by Marx (Kant-Laplace, Darwin, etc.) is

contained in them….For these questions [of the application of the dialectic to nature] to be

important…it would be requisite to understand dialectically the necessary emergence of insights

from the objective, real process of history”10

This is the promise of a science of ecology that, in unifying the results of many conventional

sciences with knowledge of society, grasps the dialectical relationship of humanity and nature

scientifically. But it would be a mistake to think that something like Engels’s notion of the

dialectics of nature plays a significant role in this scientific revolution. Rather, the dialectic is

important for understanding technological interaction with nature which capitalist ideology

represents as a neutral application of scientific principles. In the environmental movement

technology is de-reified on an unprecedented scale as people question its inevitability and the

way of life it supports. This new tension between a technologically structured society and the

lives and health of the people who live within it resembles the tension Lukács identifies between

the political economic forms and the life process of the proletariat. The new technocratic alibis

for capitalist exploitation of human beings and nature are thereby undermined. The emergence of

social movements around ecological themes can thus be understood in terms of Lukács’s theory

of reification. This is not a refutation of his theory but its most striking confirmation.

References

Feenberg, Andrew (2014). The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School,

London, Verso.

Lukács, Georg [1923/71], History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
10
Lukács 2000, pp. 117-118.

13
translated by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.

—— 2000 [1925/6]: A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the

Dialectic, translated by Esther Leslie, London: Verso.

14