Georg Lukács (1885-1971)

One of the early leaders of the Communist Party of Hungary; a famous Hungarian philosopher and literary critic. His work History and Class Consciousness (1923) is acknowledged as the initiator of the thought of “Western Marxism”, which is different from and opposite to Leninism.

Lukács was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. His father was the president of the Hungarian Integrated Credit Bank. During the University, Lukács studied law, national economics, literature, art and philosophy successively, and obtained a doctorate degree in economic and political sciences in 1906 from the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvar, and he completed his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Budapest three years later. During this period, Lukács was mainly interested in German classical philosophy and modern western philosophy, and was influenced by the thoughts of Simmel, the life philosopher, and Max Weber, the sociologist. During his college years, Lukács heavily read works of Marx and Engels.

Inspired by the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia, an armed proletarian revolution broke out in Hungary in October 1918 and the Hungarian Communist Party was founded in November. Lukács took an active part in the revolution and joined the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918.

In March 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was founded, and Lukács served as the People’s Commissar (minister) responsible for Culture and Education. In August of the same year, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown and the revolution was defeated and Lukács was exiled to Vienna. During this period, Lukács collected eight articles written in the past few years and published them under the title of “History and Class Consciousness” in 1923. Lukács’s understanding and interpretation of Marxism in this book, the categories of reification, objectification, totality, class consciousness and the unity of subject and object which he put forward, won many people’s approval and support within the international Marxist theoretical circles, and has become an important theoretical foundation for some theorists to oppose the so-called wrong tendencies advocated by the classic writers of Marxism (Marx, Engels, Lenin), such as the accusations of the so-called mechanism, fatalism and economic determinism in the classic writers of Marxism. Since this work of Lukács was severely criticized and attacked by the leaders and theorists of the Communist International, Lukács made several self-critique within the Communist Party. But subjectively Lukács had a strong belief in Marxism all through his life, and in his later years he put forward the slogan of “Reviving Marxism”.

Especially when Lukács republished the History and Class Consciousness in 1971, he made a reevaluation in the newly written preface, which said: “the book’s view had “slipped into idealistic speculation”. If it could “become revolutionary practice, it would be a miracle”.

In 1971, when he interviewed with the reporter of the New Left Review, he pointed out: “In the 1920s, Korsch, Gramsci and I tried in our different ways to come to grips with the problem of social necessity and the mechanistic interpretation of it that was the heritage of the Second International. We inherited this problem, but none of us—not even Gramsci, who was perhaps the best of us—solved it. We all went wrong, and today it would be quite mistaken to try and revive the works of those times as if they were valid now. In the West, there is a tendency to erect them into ‘classics of heresy’, but we have no need for that today.”

Lukács devoted himself to the study of Marxist theory at the Marx and Engels Institute in Moscow, Soviet Union, and participated in the editing work of the first edition of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as well as the Complete Works of Marx and Engels. Later theoretical works mainly include Young Hegel, Existentialism or Marxism, The Destruction of Reason, etc. After the end of the World War II, Lukács returned to Hungary as a professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Budapest University and was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until his death in 1971.