Introducing György Lukács – and why his ideas matter today

Arguably lesser known, György Lukács is perhaps one of the most important Marxists of the 20th century. A Hungarian philosopher who began writing his work as a literary theoretician, he was radicalised by the first world war and the Russian revolution. It was in 1923 that he wrote his most significant work, History and Class Consciousness, an analysis of Historical Materialism, and his substantial ideas on reification and commodity fetishism. Lukács would later go on to write a lengthy preface in 1967 critiquing his own analysis, believing himself to have made mistakes post his experience of the 20th century and the discovery of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts. Despite this, the book remains a pivotal feature of Marxist philosophy, becoming possibly more relevant now than in 1923 as the ideology of the capitalist order further tightens its hold on the world.

It is the section ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ where the fundamental ideas that Lukács was grappling with can be found. Here I can only give a broad understanding of Lukács and his work on alienation, reification, totality and working class consciousness. I hope to show how Lukács’ analysis explains how capitalism creates alienation through its dependence on commodification, and the universalising of the capitalist order across the planet. 

Hegel points the way

Lukács drew largely on the German philosopher Hegel to create the foundations for his philosophy. Hegel offered a break with Kantian thought, an influential strain which Lukács would refer to as bourgeois. As against Kant, Hegel refused to view reality as individual to each person, but instead as a shared reality by all beings. The recognition of each other creates the social relations that make society, rather than society being something which happens to us.

This idea is subsequently taken a step further by Marx to say that the fundamental building block of society is human labour, which underpins social relations. Hegel’s method, known as ‘Hegelian dialectics’, aided Marx in developing his own conception of history, a conception fundamentally at odds with other thinkers of his age.

For Hegel, knowledge of one’s own existence comes through recognition of another person. An encounter with another person shows the limits of one’s selfhood. Hence the apparent contradiction that selfhood faces its negation in the presence of another selfhood. The many possibilities that exist within the eyes of another person appears as the “night of the world”. In other words, you see that another person is as complex as yourself, that they are a human being. Within this lies the nub of Hegelian dialectics. The conflict of the contradiction that there is a world outside of yourself, and in order to maintain that you are an individual, a dialectical process (aufheben in German) occurs, whereby something is preserved yet destroyed and consciousness emerges from this at a higher level than it was previously.

There is much more that could be written about Hegel but this understanding was key for Marx. He took this dialectical act but instead of solely centering the recognition of other beings, he placed the actions of a person – their labour –  into a broader process of dialectics. It is not simply the selfhood of a person but their material interaction with the world around them which are included in recognition. This is the next step to which Marx took Hegel’s dialectics, advancing the theory to include the material instead of just the world of ideas. A person is not only understanding their own selfhood, and that of others by seeing other people, but also by witnessing the products and the actions of labour. The world the worker creates allows for the recognition of a person’s existence.

Alienation from the world

As Marx writes about in the 1844 Manuscripts, it is this awareness of a person’s role in creating the world around them which is obscured by capitalism and it is here where the Marxist conception of alienation can be understood. The alienation created by capitalism lies in the inability to understand the product and activity of a worker’s labour in the world and instead to view both as something alien to them.

Lukács expands on this idea of alienation (which he developed before Marx’s 1844 manuscripts were discovered). It is not simply that the worker is alienated but that they view this alienation as a natural aspect of existence due to a process called reification. Reification is treating a concept or social relations as if they were real concrete things, and for Lukács’ it springs directly from Marx’s understanding of the commodity.

In Chapter 1 Section 4 of Capital entitled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’,  Marx provides a comprehensive  description of the commodity and how it works. “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 . . .” The core of capitalism, and reification, can be found in this description.  A commodity appears as something very normal and natural but once analysed critically, its hidden essence becomes clear. 

Marx describes how the act of a person’s labour can transform something from the material world into something useful to them – whereby a piece of wood becomes a table, to use his example. Yet when the table ‘steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something else again.’ Under capitalism, objects and products of labour no longer simply appear as useful to us, they appear as commodities with abstract values attached. The transformation of the wood into a table has an obvious use value; a person required a table and used their labour power to transform a piece of wood into a table. However under capitalism, as the table becomes a commodity, it inhabits an exchange value, something beyond the labour power and the use value. It is this alien exchange value that is the source of alienation and reification as it makes a worker’s labour independent from themselves. To put simply, they can no longer witness the need nor their ability to create as the commodities exchange value appears as the inherent value.

Lukács notes that the commodity structure has always existed but in our time under capitalism it has invaded all aspects of life and has masked this intrusion using reification. For Lukács, the commodity form has affected every aspect of human existence in capitalism but while alienation may be felt, the source has been concealed. However, it is not that the worker accepts their subservience or that they are blind to it. Rather, they actually see the order of capitalism and their own alienation as natural and unchanging. As capitalist society is centered around the commodity, all human relations must be done through its logic of exchange and thus the alienation that is felt through this logic is understood as an intrinsic logic of the world. The value of the commodity becomes the value of society and due to reification, becomes understood as the order of reality.  In capitalism, this manifests as the capitalist order appearing as natural and unchanging and centering the commodity to every aspect of the individual’s life. The famous quote attributed to the cultural theorist Frederick Jameson that “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” can be read through an understanding of Lukacs to illustrate the all encompassing nature of reification. If it is read with an understanding of reification, rather than reading that life cannot exist without capitalism, it now appears as  a recognition that one cannot conceive of a reality without capitalism. Reification creates the appearance that the capitalist economy works as just an aspect of nature. It appears like the sun or the moon, impossible for life to exist without, an inevitability – not just an economic system but reality itself

Reification everywhere 

One aspect of reification which remains even more prevalent today is that of time. For Lukács, the commodity has come to structure time itself. Reification of space and time occurs as the worker views the hours of a day through their labour time. There is work time and rest time, the morning shift or the evening shift;  all time is understood in its relationship to labour time. The weekend is free time from labour that is limited, annual leave is earned through work and must be justifiably spent to be worth the labour that was put into acquiring it. Retirement is a luxury earned by giving a lifetime of labour time.  The amount of sleep is also conditional to labour time. Reification seeps through every aspect of life in capitalism. Pursuit of art, labour for the sake of enjoyment and even the act of doing nothing become the responsibility of the individual to perform in spite of their time oppression.

One way to think about rent is as the reification of space. The rent value on a property does not align with the endowments that a property has – the fertility of the soil the property stands on or its proximity to natural resources. Rent is the value the landlord places upon property, either through their own desire for money or referring to the abstract reification of “market value”. The reification of space is especially pertinent in modern Ireland. No property even holds the presence of being valued according to location or size – all material, recognisable values have vanished. A property may be riddled with mould and rot, located away from any community or amenities and yet it maintains a reified value, completely apart from the actual existing reality of the space. This is what Lukács means by space time being affected by capital. Space is the material reality inhabiting a value which does not match up to its reality, and capital transforms the free form nature of time into an alien set of restrictions that come to shape reality itself for the worker.

Totality 

Through all these reifications, the masking of the totality of the capitalist order takes form. It controls every facet of human reality, from the movements of states to the interpersonal relationships of people. In controlling every feature of modern life, capitalism is not just an economic system, but a state of being. The foundations and mechanics of capitalism become veiled, annihilating everything pre its creation and replacing all values to that of the commodity.

Reification affects the capitalists themselves. A joke used by the philosopher Slajov Zizek to illustrate this follows as such. A man believes himself to be a kernel of corn and checks himself into a psychiatric facility. After treatment, he no longer believes he is a kernel of corn and leaves the hospital, only to run back in after encountering a chicken on the street. When asked why he is afraid to be eaten when he knows that he is not a kernel of corn anymore, the man replies “yes but does the chicken know that.” Zizek reimagines the joke instead as a capitalist learning of marxist dialectics yet running back to the Marxist after encountering a commodity. “But you know they are reified abstractions that do not hold value” states the Marxist. “Yes but do they know that” replies the capitalist. The joke illustrates that the system appears alien to even those who uphold it. The totality of capitalism means that its origins and limitations have become mystified to both the capitalist and the worker. Even though the entire system is created by human social relations and real people, it takes the form of something outside of the human, acting upon us without our involvement.

A way out

Lukács believes there is a way out of reification and alienation: through the consciousness of workers which arises in the immediacy of revolution. What Lukács means here is that by making the workers themselves a commodity (their labour power being the sole energy that drives capitalism), in fighting back and with mass struggles, they can de-reify the ideology which has kept them from seeing the truth of the system. Returning to Hegel, the worker, alienated by everything around them, finds recognition of their selfhood and the selfhood of the other in another alienated worker. In that revolutionary moment of recognition and solidarity the truth of the reified capitalist order is revealed to them. The unintended consequence of alienating and reifying the life of the worker becomes the trigger to working class consciousness.

Lukács’ hugely influential work was born from his lived experience of participating in revolutions and surviving the Stalinist purges. It gives us an extremely prescient understanding of how capitalism maintains its own existence through ideology and alienation. He shows how alienation and reification are the integral mechanism of capitalist ideology  and can only begin to be overcome with the actuality of revolution, revolutionary movements and concrete struggles against the capitalist order.