Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism

0535791 - FLÚ 2021 RIV NL eng M - Část monografie knihy
Feinberg, Joseph Grim
Georg Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism.
Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism. Leiden: Brill, 2020 - (Smulewicz-Zucker, G.), s. 186-202. Studies in critical social sciences, 166. ISBN 978-90-04-35758-7
Institucionální podpora: RVO:67985955
Klíčová slova: G. Lukács * reification * critical theory * standpoint theory * Marxism
Obor OECD: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004430082_011

In this paper I take up an idea that was central to Lukács’s best-known work “Reification and the Standpoint of the Proletariat”, but which subsequently became the object of extensive criticism and is now one of Lukács’s least accepted ideas: that the antinomies of bourgeois thought can be overcome when looked at from “the standpoint of the proletariat.” Lukács’s diagnosis of modern consciousness is still widely discussed and drawn on for its penetrating analysis of how the commodity economy structures and imposes limits on thought. But Lukács’s proposed response to this situation has been much less readily accepted: the notion that there exists a privileged subject-object of history that can transgress these limits, and that this subject-object is the proletariat. In this paper I do not aim to revive and defend Lukács’s original conception of “the standpoint of the proletariat,” but rather to return to and reinterpret certain of the key conceptual moves made by Lukács in developing this idea. In particular, I would like to draw attention to the ways in which Lukács de-emphasizes the sociological understanding of the proletariat as a set of people defined positively by the fact that they earn wages, in favor of a negative understanding of the proletariat as an entity excluded from bourgeois society, and thus capable of viewing this society, in a sense, from outside, grasping it in its totality. Although this conception is implicit in Lukács’s essay, it is not explicitly laid out in full. I will try to show, however, that this conception is most appropriate to the structure of Lukács’s argument in this essay, and I will reflect further on the significance of this shift in perspective-from within bourgeois society to this position of relative outsiderness. In light of contemporary discussions of the so-called “white working class” opposed to immigrant laborers, at a moment when the political urgency of understanding how and in what ways workers are included within or are excluded from the privileges of national-bourgeois societies, I argue that the concept of exclusion should be seen as central to the concept of the proletariat.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0313724