Article from Margin Notes 2
1920 is an important year in both Georg Lukács’s biography and the history of socialism. Following the October Revolution in 1917 and the end of the First World War in 1918, popular unrest across Europe quickly developed into attempts at socialist revolution. Lukács’s homeland of Hungary was one site of this revolutionary wave. Amidst an optimistic mood, the Third, Communist International was founded in early 1919 in the recently formed Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and held its first congress, which for a variety of reasons was only sparsely attended by international delegates. By the end of the year, nearly all of the revolutions that had sprung up had been defeated, at least for the time being. Despite the defeats of so many declared followers of the Russian example, more and more socialist organizations and parties aligned themselves with the new International in Moscow. 1920 would be the year of the Communist International’s Second Congress, which was its first truly international congress and, as a result, a decisive event for the future direction of the socialist movement.
In a 2020 paper on Lukács and the practice of intellectual history, Richard Westerman argued that the application of modern intellectual history methods—specifically that of the Cambridge School—to the work of Georg Lukács could “help renew” his work “by drawing out implied claims and assumptions that might hitherto have been hidden—thus pointing to latent and hidden possibilities in our own theoretical toolboxes.”
Westerman’s text focused on the philosophical context and content of History and Class Consciousness, arguing that it is necessary to situate Lukács in the context of Neo-Kantianism to properly understand him.
Lukács’s “Self-Criticism” is rarely referenced, but it provides crucial insight into how he conceptualized the failure of the Hungarian Revolution. Published mid-August 1920 in the Hungarian communist periodical Proletár, the text pairs startlingly frank admissions of naïveté, inexperience, and error with a serious attempt to describe the causes of the fall of the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat.
“Legality and Illegality” is a similarly suggestive text. Drafted in response to the flood of texts being published in the run-up to the Comintern’s Second Congress, it was the only essay reprinted without any alterations in History and Class Consciousness, indicating that Lukács had particular confidence in its argument for several years afterwards. Moreover, it was written in July of 1920, implying a potential overlap with the composition of the “Self-Criticism.” In the essay, Lukács performs a concealed self-criticism and reinforces the conclusions made in his post-mortem of the Hungarian Revolution.
My approach in this essay is to largely bracket Lukács’s pre-1919 biography and focus on his immediate political situation in 1920 instead of bracketing his immediate political situation in order to construct a biographical narrative or timeless political judgment. In this sense, I am giving precedence to the synchronic over the diachronic, or rather narrowing the scope of the synchronic to about a year. Lukács’s immediately political texts—I place in this category those that are principally and explicitly concerned with questions of organization, tactics, and strategy—are given precedence over more theoretical or philosophical texts, of which he wrote little in 1920. At a certain level, I am hypothesizing that the former holds the key to the latter and making experimental interpretations under that assumption.
Thus, I will be treating Lukács mainly as a political writer and activist in the Marxist tradition and not a philosopher as such. I acknowledge that this is an artificial hermeneutic device, but it is at least consciously artificial. Biographical studies do not even attempt to justify the construction of the biographical object, and perennialized political evaluations generally fail to go beyond dogmatic comparison with pre-established images of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, or whoever else the author alternatively idolizes or despises.
Sometimes Lukács’s own dishonest retrospective framing of his early Marxist writings as “ultra-leftist” and “messianist”
Intellectual-biographical and philosophical accounts of Lukács’s work often foreground the continuity between the pre-Marxist and Marxist periods of his biography, downplaying the importance of political context in the process. Michael Löwy’s use of the theme of “romantic anti-capitalism” in his classic Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism leads him to adopt this perspective at times. Arpad Kadarkay’s studies of Lukács are in general more concerned with the drama of his biography and the utility of the Magyar intellectual as novelistic figure in whom the drama of the 20th century in Central Europe is made incarnate than the content of Lukács’s thought, and so Kadarkay has no qualms passing by most of Lukács’s literary production and interpreting History and Class Consciousness as a book in which “Ideas transported out of philosophy are found […] meddling rashly in revolutionary practice.”
I demonstrate below that Lukács’s political positions developed in the context of the Hungarian Revolution and its aftermath through engagement with debates ongoing within the nascent Communist International, rather than as translations of prior philosophical positions into political terms. Lukács’s answers to the most important questions of the day show that he closely followed the back and forth between Paul Levi and Karl Radek, considered local particularities when evaluating tactics, and relented to superior arguments when presented with them. Far from being a zealot, Lukács often comes across as informed and reasonable. The evolution of the Magyar class-traitor’s arguments shows the truth of Jörg Kammeler’s judgment that the “real years of apprenticeship of Lukács’s Marxism can be seen as a process of permanent self-criticism.”
Within the existing literature, my argument is closest to that of the aforementioned Jörg Kammeler’s magisterial study Politische Theorie von Georg Lukács, but I have two major criticisms of his arguments. The first is that Kammeler, in correctly arguing that Lukács’s political ideas drew heavily on Rosa Luxemburg, often implies that these ideas were therefore in opposition to the politics being put forward by the Comintern: Kammeler claims, for instance, that Lukács took up the directives of the Comintern’s second congress “with characteristic modification.”
My second criticism is that Kammeler’s “practical-critical” mode of presentation did not go far enough.
Lukács’s “Self-Criticism” and “Legality and Illegality” are texts that strongly agree with arguments and conclusions made in the lead-up to the Second World Congress of the Comintern by authoritative figures like Grigorii Zinoviev and V. I. Lenin. Lukács’s orthodoxy is, however, not the focal point of my analysis here. Rather, the question becomes how and why a statement of like-mindedness so little resembles the documents it was written to support. This redirects the analysis to everything surrounding the core political claims of the essay: argument, rhetoric, authorial voice, genre, context, and so on. Analysis of these elements is necessary for an understanding of the discursive formation that Lukács’s writings were part of.
Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered was a significant point of reference for this paper. I have, in part, imitated that book’s structure: a relatively extensive review of discursive context followed by a relatively intensive analysis of a small number of texts. Quentin Skinner’s writings on method provided compelling principles for historical analysis that I have, to the best of my ability, tried to heed.
In my analysis of Lukács’s context, I employ a concept of discursive revolution, which is to be understood as a variation on Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolution.
While political discourse about principles, strategy, tactics, organization, etc. became increasingly regulated in the Comintern after the Second Congress in fall 1920, the development and subsequent enforcement of a systematic orthodoxy on all intellectual matters only properly began in 1922 alongside the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia.
The word revolution seems appropriate to describe the advent of Leninism as a distinctive discourse and political doctrine more because of its willed character than the radicality of the changes involved. With regard to the latter, the groundbreaking work of Lars Lih and associated revisionists like Eric Blanc on Russian Social Democracy and the Bolsheviks has argued that there was considerable continuity between the Marxism of the Second International and that of the Bolsheviks and early Communist International.
In summary, I argue that Lukács’s political stances were primarily influenced by his political context, not his philosophical background. Below, I analyze two texts (“Self-Criticism” and “Legality and Illegality”) and two major pieces of context (the Hungarian Revolution and the Second World Congress of the Comintern), arguing that these two texts, when placed in context, are key for understanding his political development. My analysis draws attention to questions of rhetoric, textual genre, and the texts’ places within the discursive formation of the Comintern. Inter alia, effort is made to demonstrate that the depiction of Lukács as a philosophically deluded “ultra-leftist” unmoored from practical considerations is mistaken.
Section 2 begins (2.1) with a brief review of the Hungarian Revolution, its aftermath, and Lukács’s activity during both. Following this, two major pieces of context are analyzed: the publication in which many of Lukács’s political writings appeared, Kommunismus, and the debate within the Hungarian communist movement about tactics. In the final subsection (2.4), I survey the various evaluations of the Hungarian Revolution made by participants and observers, closing out with an analysis of Lukács’s own contribution to this discussion, his 1920 “Self-Criticism.”
Section 3 is dedicated to the analysis of “Legality and Illegality” as a discursive act. In the first subsection, I provide some important context for the Second World Congress of the Comintern. Following this, I analyze the illocutionary dimension of “Legality and Illegality” and how the text serves as a performance of communicative acts. Finally, in Section 3.3 I analyze the content of “Legality and Illegality,” focusing on the multivalent meaning of the term “consciousness” in the text and its relation to the archive of Marxist discourse.
In the Conclusion (Section 4), I turn to consider the institutional and discursive relations emerging in the Comintern and how they affected Lukács’s literary production.
The bibliography of Lukács compiled by Maruyama Keiichi
Before 1919, Lukács was a career bohemian who published essays and the occasional book while primarily subsisting on allowances drawn from his father’s considerable fortune. His work and outlook was greatly influenced by the contemporary titans of the Central European intelligentsia, some of whom he had become personally acquainted with, and the classical German philosophers of the 19th century.
This would not, however, have necessarily been a sign of pernicious idealism to Marxists of the time. The leading intellectuals of Austrian Social Democracy unabashedly cited Kant and the Neo-Kantians on topics from ethics to epistemology, as did members of the various factions within the Russian socialist movement. As one of the leaders of the Austrian Social Democrats, Max Adler, argued in a review of Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism, it was not at all clear that the content of Marxist theory and politics had anything to do with ontological “Weltanschauungsfragen.”
Adler’s stance—Nikolai Bukharin’s could be adduced as another example—shows that terms and concepts that would be crucial to Lukács’s work such as consciousness and dialectic were up for debate in the early 20th century. It was not inconceivable that a Marxist could use language reminiscent of philosophical idealism while still being committed to revolutionary socialist politics. Nor was it inconceivable that someone committed body and soul to Marxism as a Weltanschauung could be against revolution: Plekhanov himself died in 1918 as a staunch opponent of the ascendant Bolsheviks. Marxism was undergoing a discursive revolution, and it would be fallacious to project the dogmatic enforcement of later Soviet dialectical materialism backwards onto the year 1920.
Within the communist movement, different figures had wildly different ideas about the future of philosophy and related theoretical endeavors. Some Russian Marxists argued that philosophy should cease to exist as an independently recognizable discourse. The followers of Plekhanov’s ideas in the USSR wanted to maintain philosophy as a discipline, but ultimately reduced to an auxiliary support of politics over the next several decades. Lukács’s texts, meanwhile, sometimes suggested a fusion of philosophy and politics. The relation between political and philosophical language, even within the oeuvre of a single author, was much more discursively problematic at this time than the future official discourse of Marxism-Leninism would suggest in retrospect.
Before joining the Party of Communists in Hungary in December 1918, Lukács had never been a member of any political party or movement.
This new republic was immediately imperiled by the military incursions made by the Little Entente—Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia—and the ongoing social and political turmoil. The Károlyi government had concluded an Armistice with the Entente that kept Hungarian troops out of much of the southern portion of the old Kingdom’s territory, undermining its legitimacy. Amidst this tumult, the Károlyi government resigned and was replaced by a Social Democratic government on January 8. With the Little Entente’s armies continuously advancing and the big Entente proposing further contraction of Hungary’s borders, the Social Democrats ultimately decided to form a joint government with the surging Communist Party on the 21st of March. The two organizations, which had been at each other’s throats just days ago, merged to become the Socialist Party of Hungary (renamed in June to the Hungarian Socialist-Communist Workers’ Party). Hungary was declared a council republic—it would eventually be officially named the Hungarian Socialist Federative Council Republic—and the new dictatorship of the proletariat began frantically attempting to reorganize society while simultaneously repelling a three-pronged military assault.
After acceding to power in March 1919, the Hungarian communists sent one of their own, Ernst Bettelheim, to Vienna under orders to organize a revolution. Bettelheim quickly usurped the leadership of the recently founded Communist Party of German Austria (KPDÖ) and then attempted to organize an insurrection in the summer, provoking the arrest of the party’s entire leadership and the violent quelling of the uprising in Vienna on June 15. The fallout of this debacle would birth years of factional infighting in the Austrian party, and no doubt contributed to the strife that would develop in the Hungarian one, too.
The day following the failed insurrection in Vienna, another Hungarian-backed attempt at revolution foundered in Slovakia.
Lukács briefly served as (Deputy) People’s Commissar for Public Education for the Council Republic and then, even more briefly, as the political commissar for a battalion belonging to the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army and later the entire Fifth Division.
Set to flee to Austria on a sealed train protected under diplomatic immunity, Béla Kun, the informal leader of the Council Republic, rashly ordered Lukács and his comrade Ottó Korvin to stay in Hungary and organize the party—or at least what was left of it—in clandestinity.
The communist émigrés who had fled Hungary for Austria, many initially detained by the authorities and threatened with deportation, would regroup in Vienna over the course of a few months. Over time, the party in exile tended to split into two factions: one based in Moscow centered around the former paramount revolutionary leader, Kun, and one based in Vienna centered around Jenő (Eugen) Landler, the former People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, and presently a member of the toothless Provisional Central Committee alongside Lukács, Kun, and a few others.
“Legality and Illegality” was written in July and published in September of 1920 in the weekly periodical Kommunismus, which proclaimed its status as the Zeitschrift der kommunistischen Internationale für die Länder Südosteuropas (periodical of the Communist International for the countries of South-East Europe) on its front page. Kommunismus was officially an organ of the Vienna bureau of the Comintern, but it was published and managed by the Communist Party of German Austria (KPDÖ). Lukács and other Hungarian émigrés were members of its editorial circle,serving under the editor-in-chief Gerhart Eisler (brother to both the composer Hanns Eisler and the infamous KPD leader Ruth Fischer).
The first issue of Kommunismus is unremarkable: the editorial introduction to the publication as a whole announces that “with the victories of the Russian Revolution, the workers movement of the whole world has entered a new epoch” and that “we are in the middle of the world revolution.”
Kommunismus sometimes flaunted its Comintern affiliation and published articles by authors who were on the outs with the Moscow-based Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) such as Anton Pannekoek (Vol. 1, No. 28/29, August 1, 1920) and Henriette Roland Holst (Vol. 2, Nos. 1-8, January-March 1921.)
The minority position of Kommunismus, exhibited in its apparent alignment with the Dutch communists, led to criticism from Moscow at a very early stage: Grigorii Zinoviev, the Chairman of the ECCI, threatened Lukács in particular with disciplinary measures because of his April 1920 article “Class Consciousness.“
Beginning in the fifth issue, published on the 22nd of February 1920, Kommunismus ran a series of articles responding to and criticizing the tactical directives disseminated by the West European Secretariat of the Comintern, directives which originated as excerpts from Karl Radek’s pamphlet Die Entwicklung der Weltrevolution und die Taktik der Kommunistischen Partei im Kampf um die Diktatur des Proletariats.
The first article in the series, written by László Rudas, criticized Radek’s argument that the intellectuals of Europe could be universally “won over” (gewonnen) to the side of the proletariat, as well as the “pathetisch-journalistisch” tone of the document and its lack of attention to several pressing issues. This was followed next week by Lukács’s article “Zur Frage des Parliamentarismus,” which further piled on Radek’s tactical proposals by criticizing the validity of participation in parliament during the offensive stage of the revolutionary process. This could scarcely have been well received by the Comintern leadership, and indeed Lenin himself would single out Lukács’s essay for criticism in June (see Section 3.1 below).
Immediately following this series of anti-Radek articles appeared Lukács’s essay “Organisationsfrage der dritten Internationale” in the March 15 issue of Kommunismus. The text illustrated a rather unique picture of the International, which at this time was still in its infancy and was yet to have its first genuinely international (and not merely Russian) congress. Jörg Kammeler ties the essay to the proposals made at a conference held on February 3, 1920 by the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern where support for a decentralized organizational model was first expressed.
In the essay, Lukács uses the language of idealism to argue that “the Second International viewed itself as reality, while the Third International is a regulative idea for the action of the proletariat, its unavoidable goal.”
Furthermore, the difficulties of coordination and communication between geographically dispersed parties—let alone underground ones—indicated the impracticality of lending strong authority to a central office or even the congresses of the new International, meaning that a decentralized structure was necessary. Thus, Lukács argued that “The [organizational] chaos can only be vanquished by solid principles and dynamic and elastic tactics,” which would construct proletarian unity “from below.”
The international’s destiny was, moreover, to be an illegal body, as for communists legality could only ever be a “transitory phase.” This was a relatively realistic evaluation at the time: The parties of Germany, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland were illegal at the time of writing; the IWW and the two nascent communist parties in the United States were still reeling from the First Red Scare; and numerous other parties (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Latvia, etc.) would be banned in the coming months and years. In this political moment, it was universally agreed that communist parties, whatever their structure, must be prepared to cope with repression and illegality.
The use of idealist jargon in “Organisationsfrage der dritten Internationale” should not distract from the practical concerns that occasioned the essay and Lukács’s attempt to solve the problems generated by them.
The chaos of the revolution left wounds in the party, wounds that developed into ever-more open factional strife in the years following 1919. After his brief imprisonment, Béla Kun left Vienna for Moscow in July 1920, leaving behind a few allies that would have to contend with Landler, the leader of the faction that would come to include everyone in the party who disagreed with Kun. Lukács, despite his seemingly Kun-esque leftism on many questions, quickly found himself aligned with Landler when confronted with Kun’s bureaucratic trickery and irresponsible politics.
Looking back decades later, Lukács attributed his support for Landler to the fact that Landler “had no programme which he could have used to appear before the world as the leader of the Communists. He simply concerned himself with the practical possibilities of reviving the Hungarian movement.”
Before getting into the debates, it is worth briefly mentioning what was not in contention, at least openly. All European communists, even the notoriously cautious Paul Levi, agreed that the continent’s political situation necessitated an offensive strategic stance.
Amongst the Hungarians, a debate about legality, illegality, and tactics was brewing, but it had different reference points than the one in, for instance, Germany. The communist party was completely illegal in Hungary, and former members of the Council Republic’s government were fugitives who risked death sentences if arrested. Completely abstaining from illegal activity was out of the question, as it would amount to total liquidation of the party. Moreover, both factions of the party agreed that revolution and proletarian dictatorship, not bourgeois democracy, remained their goal and differentiated themselves from the Social Democrats on this count.
The factions quarreled about whether or not it was desirable for émigrés to attempt illegal crossings back into rump Hungary and the successor states to join in the clandestine work and build the party. An initial effort to this effect had been organized in Slovakia circa August 1920 to little result, and in December of the same year a large cohort of communists embedded in a returning group of prisoners of war crossed into the realm of Admiral Horthy only to be immediately arrested. Communist émigrés would continue to make risky ventures back into Hungary in the following years, but these were increasingly restricted to temporary incursions by experienced cadres for specific purposes, rather than harebrained attempts to import a party wholesale.
The question of how communists should work in the Social Democrat controlled trade unions, which represented the only real avenue for party work within the bounds of legality, was another bone of contention.
By August 1920, real factional lines of battle were already forming, and sectarian strife would only intensify over the next several years.
Another crucial piece of context for Lukács’s writings from 1920 are the debates and discussions produced by the fall of the Hungarian Council Republic and failure of the Hungarian revolution. These controversies began almost immediately after the fall of the Council Republic at the beginning of August 1919. In what is probably the first summation written on the experiences of the Hungarian Council Republic, published on November 1, 1919 in the KPD organ Die Internationale, an anonymous “member of the Hungarian council government” listed ten facts that formed the “quintessence” of the causes of the Republic’s defeat:
Unprepared seizure of power
Too few politically reliable comrades
Merger with the Social Democrats
Sabotage by the former Social Democrats
Mistakes by the People’s Commissariats of the Interior by indiscriminate appointment of former Russian prisoners of war to office
Corruption
Hostility of the peasants
Dilettantish financial politics
Replacement of the old [military] officers
Military superiority of imperialist mercenary troops
This list encompasses most if not all of the causes that would be subsequently described in longer pamphlets from leading members of the government such as Béla Kun and Eugen Varga. The criticism of the “Russian prisoners of war,” by which the author surely meant Hungarians like Béla Kun and Mátyas Rakosi who had been captured by the Imperial Russian Army in the war and then converted to the Bolshevik cause, apparently proved too controversial, as the accusation does not appear in any subsequent retrospectives.
One factor is curiously absent from the above summary: internal reactionary forces. The primary villains conjured by the anonymous author are the Social Democrats within and the “imperialist mercenaries” without. Local counterrevolutionary forces had, in fact, organized themselves in the town of Szeged, which lay to the south of Budapest in the part of Hungary then occupied by France and Yugoslavia, but this counterrevolutionary movement refrained from undertaking any military actions until after the Council Republic had been overthrown by the Little Entente.
The anonymous article in Die Internationale was soon followed by Béla Kun’s pamphlet Von Revolution zu Revolution (From Revolution to Revolution)—the afterword says the manuscript was finished on November 7, 1919—which Kun wrote during his confinement in Austria and published under the pseudonym Blasius Kolozsváry in early 1920. As the title suggests, Kun argues for an immediate resumption of the offensive and generally avoids any extended analysis of the actual revolutionary process that had just unfolded in Hungary, explicitly stating that “this is not the place to unveil the history of the origin of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary.”
The Comintern’s top man in Europe, Radek, wrote the foreword to Szántó’s pamphlet. In it, he strongly argued against the apparently widespread prejudice that the republic was “a simple result of a compromise between party leaders,” insisting that it was instead “the result of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat“
Radek’s endorsement, if that is the right word, of the Hungarian Revolution was in many ways a barely concealed criticism of Paul Levi, who had written a critical article about the foundation of the council government just two days after its birth. The following passage from that text is key:
As far as we are concerned, the possibility for the dictatorship of the proletariat exists not when the bourgeoisie collapses but when the proletariat rises—when, in other words, it has acquired in the process of a constant revolutionary struggle the intellectual maturity, the determination and the insight to realise that salvation lies in its dictatorship alone; it will become possible when the last proletarian is filled with the belief in socialism.
Paul Levi quoted in Paul Levi, "The Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution" (1920) in *In The Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi*, ed. David Fernbach (Brill, 2011) 70-78; 71-72.
Paul Levi quoted the above sentence in his own “Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution,” which he wrote in June 1920 for Die Internationale, where Radek’s preface to Szántó’s pamphlet had also been reprinted. Levi had been courting the base of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) since Fall 1919 when he expelled the left-wing majority of the nascent KPD over the issue of parliamentarism, and the KPD had been forced to organize inside the USPD during periods when the party was banned. The upcoming Second Congress of the Comintern would prove to be an important step in his eventually victorious campaign to absorb the USPD left into the KPD. Radek’s extreme hostility to the very idea of working with Social Democrats and passion for red terror therefore represented a threat to his own political program, and so the debate about the Hungarian Revolution became an arena for leaders of the German communist movement to advance positions on their local politics. In this back-and-forth, the reality of the events that had transpired in the Carpathian Basin was increasingly lost.
Lukács finally offered his own views on the fall of the republic in an “Önkritika” (Self-Criticism) for Proletár, the Hungarian-language mouthpiece of the Landler faction, in August 1920.
Lukács’s contribution to the debate about the failure of the Hungarian Council Republic uniquely emphasizes not the compromise with the Social Democrats, but the substitution of the party by the “proletarian state.” He wanted to ask what the “roots of the failure” were instead of “what [they] would have needed to do in the moment.”
Lukács begins his argument proper by clearing some ground. One should not ask, as Paul Levi did, whether the communists were right to seize power, but rather if they were right to give up their organizational independence and merge with the Social Democrats. Even this question, however, leads him back to a more basic problem, namely that “In the moment of unification, there was organizationally no communist party.”
In fact, “the party and the leadership were not really aware how indispensable the party is for leading a revolution.”
As Béla Kun and others had already pointed out, the Hungarian movement prior to 1919 was only familiar with the “corrupt and compromise-happy”
The Hungarians only began to truly understand the importance of the party as their revolutionary government was already collapsing, and so just as in Russia after 1905, the emergence of a revolutionary party was only possible “after a failed revolution.” This conclusion leads Lukács to ask how, and indeed if, the other parties of the Comintern (particularly those of Western Europe) will solve this problem. He freely admits his own ignorance as to how they can move past the “stage of mere agitation and propaganda” and form a “closed mass party” before the revolution’s victory.
The argument of Lukács’s self-criticism gives the party a central role in the revolutionary process. It is the only organ capable of mediating the seizure of power and directing it towards radical social transformation. The experience of the Hungarian Revolution demonstrated that the “organ of the proletarian state” will become compromised if it is not led by a revolutionary party. Cadres capable of taking on the responsibility of leadership could only be forged through a drawn-out process that includes defeats. Where Levi asserted that the communists should not have entered government and Radek proclaimed that they should rather have hanged the Social Democrats after doing so, Lukács sought the true “roots of failure” and found them in the lack of a real party.
These debates show that the Hungarian Revolution quickly became a literary topos on which different authors attempted to define correct political doctrine and draw up “lessons.” The Hungarian authors variously defended and criticized themselves and their compatriots, and their summations became ammunition for non-Hungarian authors attempting to draw universally applicable lessons that could be communicated to the whole International. Lukács’s contribution to the literature more closely resembles that of the non-Hungarian authors in its eschewal of extended analysis in favor of generalized lessons, but it is distinctly humble and uncertain in a way that strongly contrasts with the texts of Radek and Levi as well as Lukács’s other political writings. I believe this uncertain tone was kept confined to this Hungarian-language text to save face and avoid looking like a pessimist, as pessimism and uncertainty were held in suspicion.
In June 1920, the eleventh issue of Die Kommunistische Internationale announced that the Second Congress of the Communist International was set to take place from July to August. It also contained an article by Lenin criticizing three Kommunismus articles—one by Lukács and two by Kun—on account of their anti-parliamentarism and lack of concrete analysis.
Lenin’s brief review was accompanied by a trove of texts for the Congress, among them the theses of the ECCI—that is, of Zinoviev—for the upcoming Second Congress on “the role of the communist party in the proletarian revolution” and “the communist party and the question of parliamentarism,” which warned against sectarianism and encouraged the “revolutionary” use of parliament. The subsequent July issue of Die Kommunistische Internationale contained more theses from the ECCI and Lenin’s “Theses on Fundamental Tasks of The Second Congress of The Communist International,” which generally agreed with the positions of the ECCI.
“Legality and Illegality” and Lukács’s “Self-Criticism” were thus written under the influence of Lenin’s criticism and the theses first proposed in Die Kommunistische Internationale and then adopted at the Second Congress with regard to legality, sectarianism, parliamentarism, and so on. Both texts indicate that Lukács took the opinions of the Bolshevik leadership—particularly Lenin—seriously and quickly discarded many of the proposals set forth in “Organization Questions of the Third International.”
Although the actual events of the Second Congress cannot have influenced “Legality and Illegality” or Lukács’s “Self-Criticism,” it is worth briefly describing the profile of the Hungarians and their predicament at the congress. The exiles in Vienna, Lukács among them, were unable to attend, so the Hungarians were represented by two Moscow-based followers of Kun: Endre Rudnyánsky, who would abscond to Romania after pilfering Comintern funds the following year, and Matyas Rákosi, the future leader of post-war socialist Hungary.
“Legality and Illegality” is a text that aimed to accomplish several goals. Following Skinner, I distinguish between the locutionary and illocutionary aspects of communication.
What did Lukács accomplish in publishing this essay, i.e., what illocutionary acts does he perform by way of language? I find two distinct acts worth noting: warning and self-criticism. These two acts are closely connected. Lukács is able to issue a warning because he has engaged in (and/or is presently doing) self-criticism about his—and the entire Hungarian leadership’s—failures in 1919. The self-criticism in “Legality and Illegality” is largely implicit. Because Lukács was writing semi-anonymously as “G L,” only someone who was already somewhat familiar with the major figures of the Hungarian communist movement would be able to immediately identify him as the author.
Even though this attempt at anonymity is half-hearted and easily seen through, it has consequences for the essay’s style. In the “Self-Criticism,” the first person plural pronoun identifies the author, who signed the text with his full name, as a member of the revolutionary government and the first person singular identifies the author as a particular member of that government, namely Georg Lukács. In “Legality and Illegality,” the first person plural is used as the pluralis modestiae (“We have made it a requirement…”) . The only singular first person pronouns used are also used in a purely stylistic manner: the phrase “von mir gesperrt” in a footnote and a use of ich (“Ich denke hierbei…”) that is, in principle, interchangeable with wir, although in context it strongly implies that the author is a Hungarian revolutionary.
Lukács (in the persona of the authorial entity “G L”) is also engaged in an act of self-criticism for his previous illegalist and anti-parliamentary articles in Kommunismus. Again, no explicit references are made to the fact that Lukács himself was once guilty of the “romanticism” he criticizes in the essay, but a reader who had been following his writings in Kommunismus over the past half-year and/or could identity “G L” as Georg Lukács would understand that this text was an implicit self-criticism. In relation to this, we can see Lukács’s denouncement of Narodnik-cum-White Army general Boris Savinkov as part of this self-criticism given that he had previously positively cited Savinkov vis-a-vis illegality in his 1919 Hungarian-language essay “Tactics and Ethics.”
In this way Lukács identifies himself as a veteran of the Hungarian revolution, who, taking account of his errors, offers a warning to the rest of the Comintern. Anonymity and generality are complementary here: Lukács assumes anonymity because he is a particular kind of person, a Hungarian communist, but because he is anonymous he cannot specify the particulars and must therefore remain at the level of generality.
The key rhetorical device of Lukács’s warning is the metaphor of disease, expressed on the very first page of the essay with Lenin’s keyword Kinderkrankheit (childhood disease, growing pain) and then with the word Übel (malady, illness) in Section 2 of the essay. Lukács distinguishes two major symptoms—reformism and putschism—and argues that both result from the “disease” [Übel] of “the inability to see the state as nothing more than a power factor.”
The mere use of the word Kinderkrankheit specifies who is afflicted by the disease (the Comintern) and what causes it (immaturity). Thus, even communists with a storied history in the old Second International, or even genuine Bolsheviks like Béla Kun, may now be mere children in comparison with the norm of the Third International sketched in Lenin’s pamphlet and mandated by the resolutions of the Second Congress.
The text’s displacement of the self of self-criticism safeguards it from falling into either the retrospective grandstanding that Lukács condemned in his Proletár “Self-Criticism” or the ritual of reconciliation under duress that self-criticism would become in later years. The acts performed through the text—warning and self-criticism—are connected to the enunciative modality employed by Lukács. Instead of claiming the delegated authority of a party leader, Lukács authorizes his warning by implying that he is a veteran of the Hungarian Revolution who is doubly qualified as both an immediate witness to the events and a reflexively aware commentator capable of criticizing himself.
At this point, I turn to the analysis of the locutionary dimension of “Legality and Illegality.” What was Lukács doing by writing this essay? What positions was he staking out? What did he want to convince his audience of? If, as I am arguing, Lukács is playing doctor in this essay, then what does he prescribe as the cure for the Kinderkrankheit that has been diagnosed? In a word, the cure is a certain kind of consciousness, Bewusstsein, but this word can be misleading.
The sense(s) given by Lukács to the word “consciousness” were conditioned by the archive of statements carried over from other discursive formations (Austrian, German, Hungarian, and Russian Social Democracy) and the functions assumed by the concept of consciousness in these statements. At the most fundamental level, the translation and reproduction of such statements across time and languages inevitably produces semantic drifts. This drift is accompanied by the proliferation of morphologically distinct concepts: zielbewusst, falsches Bewusstsein, Klassenbewusstsein, tred-yunionistskoye soznanie, politisches Bewusstsein, sozialistisches Bewusstsein, etc. The circulation and reproduction of the statements including these concepts crystallized into patterns of usage that entailed specific relations between the concepts, specified their relation to the objects of discourse, and implied the assumption of certain enunciative modalities in those who deployed the concepts.
The concepts could be sorted into a graded hierarchy—Lars Lih has reconstructed what this hierarchy looked like for Kautskyan “orthodox Marxism.”
With this background in mind, I think it is a mistake to throw Lukács into the flattened problematic of a philosophy of consciousness so hastily. Bewusstsein must always be read as a polyvalent term. I find three operative senses of consciousness in Lukács’s text, which I will call the metonymic sense, the political-theoretical sense, and the psychological sense.
The first of these is the most abstract. In the discourse of the Second International, talk about consciousness often functioned as metonymic talk about the organizational situation of the proletariat. One frequently finds words related to (Klassen-) Bewusstsein and Organisation placed side by side. The Hainfelder Programm of the Austrian Social Democrats states that “The bearer of [the] evolution [from capitalism to socialism] can only be the class-conscious and politically organized proletariat.”
By and large, then, Marxists saw the political party as the logical embodiment of the class-conscious proletariat, and an authority as important as Kautsky was not afraid to assert that under certain conditions they were literally identical. The splits in Marxism provoked by the first World War and the subsequent foundation of the Third International complicated this picture, but the basic argument that the most conscious layer of the proletariat was coextensive with the party continued to be recited. The Second Congress of the Comintern unanimously accepted Zinoviev’s “Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution,” which stated that “The Communist Party is a part of the working class, and moreover its most advanced, most class-conscious and therefore its most revolutionary part.”
And so, when Lukács writes that “the reform of consciousness is the revolutionary process itself,”
The political and theoretical sense of consciousness is multifaceted and difficult to pin down. The most deflationary approach would be to define it simply as assent to a set of propositions that define the revolutionary and Marxist outlook, with the lynchpin (at least for Lukács) being the doctrine of the abolition of classes at the hands of the proletariat and the philosophy of history that goes with it. The most inflationary approach would be to define it in the way that Lukács did in the essay “Tactics and Ethics.” He argued there that knowledge incorporating both the scientific sociology of class struggle and the Marxist philosophy of history is necessary to determine correct tactics—so far so good—but, leaning heavily on the language of German idealism, he further specified that a “self-consciousness” of “the given historico-philosophical situation”
The third and final sense of consciousness in Lukács’s formulations is the psychological. It is perhaps the most fugitive element in his thought given his repeated denial that (class) consciousness is a psychological phenomenon.
These three dimensions of consciousness shed light on the sometimes enigmatic nature of consciousness in Lukács’s early Marxist work on two levels. On the political level, each dimension is insufficient by itself, but together they cohere into something greater than the sum of its parts. Metonymic consciousness in the form of organizational strength is illusory if the organization is not committed to revolutionary theory and staffed by partisans. Theoretical consciousness that loses sight of the real, external basis of its content—the power of the proletariat organized into a party—and the psychological motivation that drives it becomes merely scientific. Psychological consciousness divorced from an organizational context and correct theory results in romanticism. The political form of the first deficit is reformism; that of the third is putschism. Between them is the wavering stance of intellectuals who dally with Marxism like Lukács himself before 1919.
On the discursive level, the diversity concealed underneath the signifier “consciousness” is connected to both prior social democratic discourse and ongoing political concerns as articulated in the debates conducted in publications like Kommunismus, Die Internationale, and Proletár.
Beyond the interpretations I have made of Lukács’s “Self-Criticism,” “Legality and Illegality,” and related texts as interventions into specific debates, many of Lukács’s others essays from the early 1920s can be seen as attempts to close gaps in the emerging discursive formation that would come to be known as Leninism.
In the early years of the Comintern, the process by which governing statements were produced, reproduced, and transformed was relatively transparent. Assertoric and/or imperative resolutions were drafted individually or collectively and then approved by committees made up of representatives from member parties. These resolutions were the primary, although not necessarily the first, enunciation of the governing statements that provided the rules for the discourse of the Comintern. During the approval process and subsequent dissemination through institutional organs, the content of these resolutions was subject to various transformations: treated as a general law and applied to a particular case; explained as a conclusion drawn from historical experience; justified as the extension of established principles; inverted into a corresponding defect; shifted from its original modality, whatever that may have been, into oughts, ises, musts, woulds, and ifs; and so on. As statements, resolutions occupied the ambivalent space between knowledge and tactics that characterizes political discourse. From one angle, political resolutions appear as the governing statements, but from another they appear to depend on and be derived from the archive of scientific and theoretical knowledge. While this relation was held in suspension during the time of the Second International, it would be resolved in favor of one side by the Third.
With the growing power of the ECCI following the adoption of the first set of binding resolutions at the Second Congress, both the production of statements and the rules for their transformation became increasingly regulated at every level, but especially at the primary level of institutional power. The ECCI was given the power to act with the authority reserved for congresses between congresses, which allowed its leaders to exert considerable influence on the direction of the congresses. The processes of Bolshevization and Stalinization would make the process of discursive production both less and less transparent and more and more restrictive as they matured.
The different enunciative modalities that Lukács adopts—and, in the case of his “Self Criticism,” does not adopt—in his texts testify to a different vision of discursive authority than the one that would crystallize in the Comintern. The heart of this vision is self-criticism, which was to be the difficult but necessary work of freely admitting errors, striving to correct them, and producing knowledge through this process. The unique perspective on international organization articulated in “Organisationsfrage der dritten Internationale” registers a similar line of thought in its protest against bureaucratic unity: if unity cannot be established by fiat, then how can knowledge? Self-criticism is a process that recognizes, defines, and solves problems in a manner fundamentally different from the circulatory pyramid of congressional centralism. Extrapolating from Lukács’s sketch, it can be inferred that the interpenetration of parties—having discarded their national affiliations—would transform the lonely subject of self-criticism into a collective, polyphonic subject for whom the task of self-criticism would be more than a punishment for the disobedient. The authority to produce, reject, and transform statements would be distributed throughout the field of action, rather than concentrated in representative central bodies (and the executive bodies that inevitably exert their power in between congresses). The relation between the general and the particular would be formed anew.
Lukács’s tendency to write within what his student István Mészáros called an “unhappy correlation” of subjective, particular historical processes and a singular, objective, and universal process was just as much a product of his political situation—including its institutional and discursive aspects—as of his intellectual background.
For better or worse, Marxists have long known that political writing is a kind of political speech, which is a kind of political act. Lukács was evidently aware of this as well: in both his early, principled self-criticism and his later, resigned attempts at it, he recognizes the political center of even his most philosophical arguments in a way that academic philosophical commentators, in the interest of warding off the spectre of totalitarian contamination, have not. A genuine historical engagement with Lukács’s work must patiently untangle these threads where appropriate and recognize the load-bearing structures woven amongst them where not.
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