7—
Revolutionary Rationalism:
Luxemburg, Lukács, and Gramsci

Despite a tenuous consensus among orthodox theoreticians within the Second International, several independent Marxists refused to ratify the standard interpretations of historical materialism. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, retained a basic confidence in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat; in this regard, she remained faithful to Marx's original understanding. As the reformist implications of orthodoxy gradually became apparent, Luxemburg and other revolutionary theorists on the left wing began to elaborate their own reading of Marx. The outbreak of world war and the Russian Revolution of 1917 finally combined to shatter the outlook of orthodox social democrats, the former by undermining their gradualist and internationalist program; the latter by rekindling revolutionary aspirations.

In the years immediately succeeding the revolution, Marxist philosophy underwent a renaissance and a metamorphosis, bolstered by a renewed hope for imminent social change. The leading figures in the revival of Marxist philosophy in the West—Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci—had in common an acquaintance with the Hegelian sources of Marxian thought and a dissatisfaction with the evolutionary positivism of orthodoxy. Spurred on by the practical example of Lenin as a resolute revolutionary, Lukács and Gramsci proceeded to redraw the boundaries of Marxian theoretical discourse.

Rosa Luxemburg and the Necessity of Socialism

Rosa Luxemburg stands as the key transitional figure between

orthodox Marxism and later theorists like Lukács. Although she joined Kautsky in attacking the revisionists at the turn of the century, she eschewed orthodoxy to develop an independent perspective, rooted in a relatively sanguine assessment of the proletariat and its potential for militantly pursuing its true class interests. In opposing neopositivist and neo-Kantian versions of Marxism, Luxemburg reaffirmed Marx's original rationalism within a new historical setting.

Unlike Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg viewed Marx's theory primarily as supplying a "method of investigation," rather than a system of unimpeachable categories. Her Marxism always remained open-ended and tentative: "It is not true that socialism will arise automatically and under all circumstances."^[1] For her, as for Marx and Engels, history did not comprise an entity independent of consciousness and practice, but instead the field of subjective intervention through action. Socialist theory disclosed and analyzed historical and economic tendencies leading to the collapse of capitalism; yet without the contributions of an ongoing class struggle, these tendencies remained barren of real meaning. Where Plekhanov had claimed that the cause of historical progress "lies outside man," Rosa Luxemburg asserted that "only the working class, through its own activity, can make the word flesh."^[2]

Luxemburg perceived the primary task of socialism as the return of the human world to conscious control. The central mystery of economics for her revolved around the rise of hypostatized social structures: how did a fixed social order develop in opposition to human intentions and volition? "In this manner the problem faced by scientific investigation becomes defined as the lack of human consciousness in the economic life of society."^[3] The vitality of any social institution rested on the "active, untrammelled and energetic" participation of the "broadest masses of the people." The lack of such conscious participation condemned not only the alienated objectivity of capitalist social relations but also any political movement that shunned democracy.

If the proletariat was in fact to break the spell of blind necessity, then a central task of socialist theory and practice had to be the development among proletarians of an understanding of their common interests and the possibilities for a more equitable world. Social democratic leadership ought to enable the proletariat to "learn to take hold of the rudder of society, to become instead of the power-

less victim of history, its conscious guide."^[4] It was a task dictating a persistent struggle against bourgeois pattens of thought within the proletariat. Particularly after experiencing working-class chauvinism during World War I, Luxemburg refused to presume an innate proclivity toward socialism on the part of the proletariat. "The immediate mission of socialism is the spiritual liberation of the proletariat from the tutelage of the bourgoisie, which expresses itself through the influence of nationalist ideology."^[5] Yet Luxemburg, unlike Lenin, refused to vest the fate of the proletariat in the hands of an enlightened vanguard. The struggle for socialism depended on the conscious spiritual commitment of each individual proletarian. "Socialism must be created by the masses, by every proletarian. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken. That is socialism ."^[6]

In advancing such views, Luxemburg rejoined Marx's original position on the centrality of proletarian commitment and class struggle to the attainment of communism. At the same time, she emphasized the necessity of history: again like Marx, she combined hopes for the creative intervention of men in history with a deterministic theory of the tendencies to crisis and collapse inherent in capitalism. She shared with Marx the belief that the revolutionary initiatives of the proletariat flowed necessarily from its rational reaction to the contradictions of capitalism. Yet precisely because she retained Marx's rationalist and deterministic framework, it is interesting to note her reaction to World War I and the dissolution of the Second International.

Despite the cosmopolitan and antimilitarist line taken by the Second International, the German Social Democrats failed to resist the furies of nationalism unleashed by the onset of World War I. The extent of chauvinism among the working classes of Europe indeed suggested that the subjective conditions for socialism might be far more problematic than previously suspected. Such doubts concerning the eagerness of the proletariat for an international socialist revolution in turn threw into question the strict necessity of socialism, since in Luxemburg's eyes socialism was inevitable only insofar as the subjective condition of militant class struggle could be fulfilled. Her writings during the war urgently expressed her mounting uncertainty, as well as her unshakable conviction that a socialist society, in spite of setbacks, remained imperative.

While she still foresaw the inevitable collapse of capitalism, Lux-

emburg now defined two competing historical outcomes, both of them in some sense necessities, one leading to socialism, the other to barbarism. The individual thus was confronted with a choice. "The world rule of imperialism is a historic necessity, but likewise its overthrow by the proletarian international. Side by side the two historic necessities exist in constant conflict with each other. And ours is the necessity of socialism. Our necessity receives its justification with the moment when the capitalist class ceases to be the bearer of historical progress, when it becomes a hindrance, a danger to the future development of society."^[7]

It is an odd necessity that requires ulterior justification; and it is an odd necessity that needs to be chosen to become necessary. But then, what was only implicit in Marx's synthesis of reason and necessity becomes explicit in Rosa Luxemburg's last writings: the "historic mission" of the proletariat was precisely "to transform historical necessity into reality."^[8] Without a conscious political struggle waged by committed workers, socialism remained not merely devoid of content, but, so to speak, unnecessary. Ironically, in proportion as she admitted the possibility of barbarism, Luxemburg increasingly insisted on the necessity of socialism, if civilization was to avert catastrophe. "Socialism has become necessary not merely because the proletariat is no longer willing to live under the conditions imposed by the capitalist class but, rather, because if the proletariat fails to fulfill its class duties, if it fails to realize socialism, we shall crash down together to a common doom."^[9] A new historical situation thus revealed that any Marxist version of historical necessity which incorporated men at its foundation had to be radically different from the orthodox understanding of necessity, with its reassuring but arid laws of historical development.

Georg Lukacs:
The Reification of Subjectivity

The Russian Revolution transformed the practical context of Marxian theory. Socialism no longer appeared a distant goal; militant action no longer seemed futile; the gloomy urgency of Rosa Luxemburg's wartime essays was replaced by a new spirit of combative optimism. With the end of the war and the collapse of social order in Germany and Hungary, a fluid historical situation emerged, foster-

ing apocalyptic hopes. Revolutionaries could believe in the "imminence of world revolution and the total transformation of the civilized world," as Georg Lukács has recalled.^[10] The example of Lenin himself fueled such hopes. Against Marxist gradualism, with its cautious evolutionary positivism, Lenin epitomized the primacy of human action; this radical figure who had seized history by the reins attracted a new stratum of Western intellectuals to Marxism. Such communists as Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Korsch brought to Marxism a fresh set of theoretical perspectives, coupled with an activist orientation.

The subjective and spiritual dimensions of Marxism slighted by orthodoxy were suddenly revived. Theorists expressed renewed interest in the nature of class consciousness and a refurbished faith in the revolutionary capabilities inherent in the proletariat. Events now suggested that Marx's original prognosis of proletarian militancy was not wholly mistaken. Socialism could appear plausibly as the inevitable rational goal of modern history: not coincidentally, the Marxist revival coincided with a Hegelian revival in several theoretical circles.

Lukács, a thinker influenced by Max Weber and Georg Simmel as well as Hegel, stands at the beginning of the contemporary renaissance of Marxist philosophical studies. In The Theory of the Novel , his last major pre-Marxist work, Lukács had described the modern era as "an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality."^[11] When Lukács transported this aesthetic yearning for wholeness into Marxism, he resurrected Marx's own hopes for a qualitatively new form of life.

He also briefly resurrected Marx's rationalist optimism, a rebirth vividly conveyed in his first Marxist essays, collected in Tactics and Ethics and published in 1919. The messianic significance of the Russian Revolution decisively colored his prose: "The message of reality," exclaimed Lukács, "Marxist reality, the unity of the historical process, is quite clear: the revolution is here ." The imminence of revolution invested the situation of the proletariat with an extraordinary moral urgency. Every proletarian, he asserted, was impelled to attain a clear sense of his true class interest, which necessarily surpassed the "merely given" to comprehend a "world-historical mission." While only Marxism could provide "intellectual leadership"

in this ongoing process "of making social development conscious," the inner essence and momentum of history seemed relatively unambiguous: for Marx had properly perceived world history "as a homogenous process, as an uninterrupted revolutionary process of liberation."^[12]

The temper of these essays was impatient, impetuous, demanding, of a piece with a romantic reading of Lenin's accomplishment: "Decisions, real decisions, precede the facts ." One telling indicator of Lukács's optimism at this stage was his doctrine of the party. After describing orthodox socialist parties as the "external organizational expression" of the proletariat's immaturity, its "inability to impose its will and its interests on society," he proceeded to praise the Bolsheviks for dismantling the traditional party organization, and enabling "the proletariat to take all power into its own hands. . . . The parties have ceased to exist—now there is a unified proletariat ".^[13]

The illusion of a revolution without political parties quickly dissipated, however: rationalist optimism gave way to rationalist pessimism. Under the impact of revolutionary setbacks in Hungary and Italy in 1919, and confronted with Lenin's critique of his position as "ultra-Leftist" in 1920, he was driven to reformulate his outlook and specifically to reconsider his position on the party. By 1923, when History and Class Consciousness was published, additional reasons for a reassessment could be found in Lukács's own theory of reification. The importance of this book was twofold. Not only did he analyze the formation and function of class consciousness, he also sharply posed the problems involved in liberating men from fixed and falsifying forms of thought. The rationality of the proletariat—its understanding of its "world-historical mission"—could no longer be taken for granted as an emergent result of historical development.

His theory of reification took as its starting point Marx's discussion in Capital of commodity fetishism. The development of capitalist society had created "the fetishistic character of economic forms, the reification of all human relations, the constant expansion and extension of the division of labor which subjects the process of production to an abstract, rational analysis, without regard to the human potentialities and abilities of the immediate producers; all these things transform the phenomena of society and, with them, the way in which they are perceived."^[14] Under the reign of capital, society was mobilized for the accumulation of surplus value, rather

than the cultivation of human capacities—an omission which took its toll on the victims of the system and their understanding of their situation. Here Lukács invoked Max Weber as well as Karl Marx: within modern society, most men had become prisoners of bureaucratic routine and instrumental manipulation, creatures of closed categories. The reification represented in commodity exchange thus infected the subjects of exchange: the worker, enmeshed in unthinking activities overseen by the capitalist, was in thrall to bourgeois forms of thought.

For Lukács, as for Marx, the individual in a commodity form of exchange was immediately confronted with a "fantastic relation between things," rather than the actual relation between men which produced this appearance. One of Marx's main tasks in Capital had been the penetration of appearances such as the "free exchange" of wages for labor power to reveal the exploitative logic of capital. He also seemed to follow Marx in deriving fetishistic forms "from the primary forms of human relations."^[15] But he refused to join Marx in premising theory on the concrete activity of real individuals. Instead, he asserted that "no path leads from the individual to the totality."^[16]

Indeed, by 1923 Lukács felt that the prevalent reification of bourgeois society had prevented most individual workers from acquiring a "true, concrete self-knowledge of man as a social being ." The categories of bourgeois consciousness presented, not the reality of domination, but the unreflected appearance of free exchange. Marxist theory thus decisively outstripped proletarian practice: "We must never overlook the distance that separates the consciousness of even the most revolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat."^[17] Lukács thus reserved the possibility of true consciousness for classes alone; only a class as a whole could attain a "total point of view," and grasp the essential social relations. Sundered from Marx's original premise of individuals producing in society, and questioning the capacity of even the most enlightened individual workers for self-emancipation, his theory proceeded to present modern history as an ongoing struggle, not between interested individuals involved in antagonistic class relations, but between two conceptual entities, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

The conceptual proletariat, catalyzed by a true class consciousness, became the general subject of a true history in his eyes. But the empirical proletarians did not immediately coincide with their con-

ceptual essence—a situation which only the enlightened efforts of the Communist Party could rectify. He thus assigned to the party the sublime role of bearing the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat, the "consciousness of its historic vocation," although he departed from Leninist orthodoxy by emphasizing the cultural and pedagogical aspects of the party's mission.^[18] Nevertheless, for Lukács as for Lenin the concrete subjects of history—these particular proletarians—were deemed incapable of educating themselves, of acquiring a proper grasp of the social totality. Like the Great Legislator in Rousseau, the party in Lukács appeared a slightly fabulous creature—as if only the gnosis of the party's illuminati, by divining the "final goal," could rescue workers from the falsifying forms of thought typical of bourgeois society. Moreover, since Lukács tended to portray the subject of history ideally, as a collective "we," the individual workers threatened to become relatively inconsequential elements in a rigidly teleological movement governed by the party's interpretation of history and its "objective possibilities." Perhaps this is the real meaning of Lukács's remark that reification "over-individualizes" men: the quest for a unified totality here led, first, to the abandonment of real individuals as an ontological premise of theory, and then to an attenuation of individuation as a goal of communism.^[19]

But these were not the critical aspects of his contribution. Instead, subsequent Marxists fastened on his understanding of class consciousness, and his insights, however problematically linked to a defense of the Leninist party, into the importance of a materialist pedagogy able to raise interests to the level of rational action. As the foremost philosopher of a genuinely dialectical theory of history, Lukács stimulated a new concern with the subjective aspects of Marxist theory, while redirecting attention to the human basis of revolutionary practice. If his own theory in History and Class Consciousness veered toward conceptual rigidity, perhaps this was but a by-product of his steadfast adherence to Marx's original rationalist hopes in an increasingly unpromising situation.

Gramsci:
Socialism Beyond the Necessity of Reason

Despite his heresy in treating authentic class consciousness as the

demiurge of a true history, Lukács, like Rosa Luxemburg, retained Marx's necessitarian language. While he insisted on the importance of purposive action by the proletariat, he also presumed a rational end of history, which established the "concrete meaning" of each prior historical stage: "The objective evolution [of the economy] only gives the proletariat the possibility and the necessity [sic ] of changing society. But this transformation itself can only come about as the—free—action of the proletariat itself."^[20] Both Lukács and Luxemburg thus advanced a concept of necessity that protected the proletariat's freedom to act; yet neither seriously doubted that when the proletariat finally did act, it would do so rationally, and thus bear out the necessity of communism. Here, as elsewhere, they preserved and extended Marx's rationalist understanding, although in Lukács's case only through the medium of an enlightened vanguard party.

Against this backdrop, Antonio Gramsci's studies assume a special significance. Like Lukács, Karl Korsch, and the Council Communists (particularly Anton Pannekoek), Gramsci was sensitive to the subjective aspects of social theory, what the Council Communists called its geistige factors. Gramsci, again like Lukács, came to Marxism indirectly, through the philosophy of Benedetto Croce and the Italian Hegelians, and under the influence of Georges Sorel and, later, Henri Bergson. In 1919, at a point when he was already committed to socialism, Gramsci had declared that "man is above all else mind, consciousness," and he greeted the Russian Revolution accordingly, as "The Revolution Against Capital ." "The Bolsheviks have denied Karl Marx, and they have affirmed by their action, by their conquests, that the laws of historical materialism are less inflexible than was hitherto believed."^[21] Gramsci never abandoned his interest in the geistige elements of society, an interest he brought to Marxism in the form of such concepts as "consent" and "intellectual and moral leadership."

The Marxism of Gramsci's notebooks, compiled while he was imprisoned under Mussolini's regime, differed from the Marxism of Lukács and Luxemburg. Unlike these predecessors, Gramsci assigned the labor process a central significance for elaborating the philosophy of historical materialism. As a consequence, Gramsci insisted on the inseparability of homo faber from homo sapiens ; he also portrayed individuals, via labor, as actively shaping a world of objects and norms. "Ever man, in as much as he is active, i.e., liv-

ing, contributes to modifying the social environment in which he develops . . . in other words, he tends to establish 'norms,' rules of living and of behavior."^[22] His eloquent appreciation of the individual's creative efficacy in labor permitted Gramsci to restore "individuals producing in society" at the basis of Marxian theory.

One must conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality, though perhaps the most important, is not, however, the only element to be taken into account. . . . The humanity which is reflected in each individuality is composed of various elements: 1. the individual; 2. other men; 3. the natural world. . . . Each one of us changes himself . . . to the extent that he changes . . . the complex relations of which he is the hub. . . .  If one's own individuality is the ensemble of these relations, to create one's own personality means to acquire consciousness of them, and to modify one's own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations. But these relations, as we have said, are not simple. Some are necessary, others are voluntary. . . . It will be said that what each individual can change is very little, considering his strength. This is true up to a point. But when the individual can associate himself with all the other individuals who want the same changes, and if the changes wanted are rational, the individual can be multiplied an impressive number of times, and can obtain a change which is far more radical than at first sight seemed possible. . . . Up to now the significance attributed to these supra-individual organisms [that the individual is related to] (both the societas hominum and the societas rerum ) has been mechanistic and determinist; hence the reaction against it. It is necessary to elaborate a doctrine in which these relations are seen as active and in movement, establishing quite clearly that the source of this activity is the consciousness of the individual man who knows, wishes, admires, creates . . . and conceives of himself not as isolated but rich in the possibilities offered him by other men and by the society of things of which he cannot help having a certain knowledge.^[23]

Gramsci also diverged from Lukács and Luxemburg on the issue of necessity in history. Instead of preserving Marx's deterministic rhetoric, Gramsci openly challenged causal explanation in social theory. His interest in Bergson and Sorel facilitated his elaboration of a Marxism critical of its own rationalist premises. Earlier in the century, Sorel had criticized Marxism for relying on an unprovable notion of progress in rationality; Marx, he charged, had covertly assumed the Hegelian notion of a Weltgeist guiding history toward socialism. However useful as myth such a notion might be, it had

nothing to do with science; the socialist revolution would be absolutely unpredictable.^[24] Gramsci took over and refined such skepticism.

He pointed out the intimate connection between necessity and rationalism in social theory. "It would appear that the concept of 'necessity' in history is closely connected to that of 'regularity' and 'rationality.'"^[25] Not only did necessity depend on rationality, the rationality of social acts depended on their "necessity," on their predictable and regular occurrence. "If social facts cannot be predicted, and the very concept of prediction is meaningless, then the irrational cannot but be dominant."^[26]

Gramsci thus faced a series of dilemmas. Predictability averted irrationality, but was prediction possible? How could such prediction proceed? What did it involve? Gramsci dismissed making mechanically objective laws the basis of social predictions. Such laws inappropriately excluded the subjective factor from history. "Objective always means 'humanly objective' which can be held to correspond exactly to 'historically subjective.'"^[27] He rejected most "so-called laws of sociology" as having negligible value: "They are almost always tautologies and paralogisms."^[28] In the realm of human affairs, Gramsci in fact denied the possibility of any "purely 'objective' prediction." "Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a program for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory. . . . If one excludes all voluntarist elements, or if it is only other people's wills whose intervention one reckons as an objective element in the general interplay of forces, one mutilates reality itself."^[29]

But rather than simply discarding the concept of social prediction as meaningless, Gramsci reinterpreted it. He argued that prediction could be viewed as a practical act, instead of a mechanical accounting of some quasi-natural and purely objective causality. Prediction would then so thoroughly involve subjective factors that a primary guarantee of the truth of a prediction would lie in the practical resolve of the predictor to make it true. "One can 'foresee' to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result 'foreseen.' Prediction thus reveals itself, not as a scientific act of knowledge, but as the abstract expression of the effort made, the practical way of creating a collective will."^[30]

As a result of his investigations, Gramsci abandoned entirely the

concept of prediction applied to history. While the theorist still investigated "how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism," Gramsci's Marxism ignored any misplaced imperatives to construct a closed causal system of general laws.^[31] He also refused to take the rationality of human action for granted; the problem was precisely to cultivate a rational subject, dedicated to realizing the goals of communism. This interest animated all of his investigations into ideological hegemony and intellectual leadership.

Communists had, as their crucial task, "to demonstrate that the necessary and sufficient conditions already exist to make possible, and hence imperative, the accomplishment of certain historical tasks." The accomplishment of these tasks was imperative not because they were "historically inevitable" but rather "because any falling short" would increase "the necessary disorder" and prepare the way for "more serious consequences."^[32] In other words, Gramsci posed again Rosa Luxemburg's alternatives: socialism or barbarism. Action oriented toward the progressive end of history, communism, laid the grounds for a creative politics that might "dominate and transcend" given conditions, even as "one still moves on the terrain of effective reality."^[33] Gramsci, like Lukács, thus restored to Marxism its pedagogical concerns and teleological dimension; the achievement of communism required the purposeful intervention of enlightened proletarians.

Although Gramsci's thought remained incomplete, what fragments do survive in his prison notebooks suggest that Gramsci had a sharper understanding than his contemporaries of the inadequacies of Marxism, both as a necessitarian outlook, and as a theory presupposing a rationalist view of man. With Gramsci, Marxism began to appear more as a political art than a natural science: there is something of Machiavelli's virtù and Bergson's intuition in his description of the great political leader. After his own fashion, he anticipated a sense of subjectivity new to Marxism, beyond either positivism or rationalism.