Studies in Critical Theory

Historical Materialism

Reconciliation and Utopia: Reading Lukacs in an Era of Global PandemicThis paper will draw on the philosophy of Georg Lukacs in order to discuss the question of &quot;reconciliation&quot; between the Left and the state in an age of global pandemic. I propose to adopt Lukacs&#x27;s notion of reconciliation as a way of addressing responses, on the Left, to policies such as vaccination programmes, lockdowns and travel restrictions, which have been driven by apparatuses of the capitalist state in many countries around the world. The concept of Versöhnung or reconciliation plays a central role in Lukacs&#x27;s oeuvre, especially in writings from the late 1920s and 1930s such as his essays on Moses Hess and on Hölderlin’s Hyperion, as well as his major study The Young Hegel. Lukacs&#x27;s focus on reconciliation has been widely interpreted as symptomatic of a turn from an earlier, utopian phase, towards a more &quot;realist&quot; phase in which Lukacs seemingly adapted to existing orders of things and made compromise with the Stalinist &quot;Thermidor,&quot; hence abandoning his earlier revolutionary impulse. Lukacs&#x27;s grappling with the question of reconciliation, however, can suggest open questions to those struggling for communism in a non-revolutionary age of natural disasters and global emergencies. Re-reading Lukacs&#x27;s essays, reconciliation emerges as a vexed, contradictory and immensely productive concept, which today cannot be limited to the acceptance of the capitalist state in the absence of viable alternatives. Rather, the dialectic of reconciliation could show how re-discussing the unsolved paradoxes of Lukacs&#x27;s realism might pave the way to reimagining the concrete utopia of communism in the twenty-first century.Filippo Menozzi, Liverpool John Moores University The Failure of Socialization and the Birth of Social Research: Felix Weil, Karl Korsch, and the Political Origins of the Frankfurt School At the age of 25, in 1923, the Jewish German-Argentinian socialist Felix Weil founded the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt with an endowment from his father, the grain merchant Hermann Weil. Felix Weil was a student of Robert Wilbrandt, a socialist professor from the University of Jena, who sat on the Socialization Commission during the German Revolution of 1918-1919 along with Kautsky, Schumpeter, Hilferding, Heimann and Lederer. Wilbrandt encouraged Weil to turn an essay on socialization into a dissertation, which was eventually published in 1921 in Karl Korsch’s book series on socialism, a series inaugurated by Korsch’s own 1919 pamphlet on socialization (Korsch was Wilbrandt’s assistant in Jena). Weil’s thesis, Socialization: an Attempt at a Conceptual Foundation, with a Critique of the Plans for Socialization, has never been translated, and almost never commented upon. In this talk, I will discuss the content of this thesis, and place it in dialogue with Korsch’s book on socialization as well as the contemporaneous socialization debate of the time. My claim is that the immediate pre-history of the Frankfurt School is the little-studied socialization debate during the German Revolution, and more specifically, the failure of the Socialization Commission to implement any of its proposals. Understanding this failure is key to understanding the birth of the Institute for Social Research and its specific form of critique of capitalism and social democracy in Germany. Without this background, the theoretical and political framework of those who founded the Institute for Social Research remains occluded, and its legacies confusing. Furthermore, the work of Weil and Korsch on socialization is relevant to the present on its own terms, as the question of socialization over the economy becomes ever more urgent in times of housing crises, mass unemployment, and climate catastrophe. Jacob Blumenfeld &amp; Carl von Ossietzky Universität OldenburgThe Standpoint of the Proletariat TodayWhoever intends to actualize Lukács’ notion of ‘the standpoint of the proletariat’ today will face significant challenges. Even within Frankfurt School critical theory, whose development owes much to History and Class Consciousness, the idea that the proletariat could become the ‘identical subject-object’ of history, restoring the unity of a world disintegrated by capitalist reification, has been subject to harsh criticisms. Owing to Lukács’ reliance on an idealist philosophy of history and a romantic conception of society as a totality, so his critics have argued, the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ turned out to be not only theoretically equivocal but also practically ineffective.Many of the recent approaches to reification attempt to avoid these problems by abandoning altogether the assumption that the proletariat could play such a role in history. They seek to provide new definitions of reified and non-reified life without holding that a specific social class could be the bearer of a radical transformation of society leading from one state to the other. As a consequence, two issues that for Lukács were inextricably linked, the diagnosis of reification and the prospect of a revolution carried out by the working class, appear no longer amenable to a unified approach. However, the disjunction between these issues has contributed to the obfuscation of a central question: How can collective struggles against reification emerge on the basis of the very contradictions of the capitalist order? Without the reference to the potential ‘gravediggers’ of capitalist reification, its critique cannot but assume fatalistic or resigned tones, or else find its foundation in ideals or ontologies detached from current social processes.The critique of reification thus finds itself today in a paradoxical situation: abstaining from relying on the proletariat or any other specific social group as the bearer of a radical transformation of society, it tends to build a gap between reified and non-reified forms of life – a “hiatus irracionalis” between theory and practice, as Lukács already noted – in a way that obfuscates the question of how one could collectively move from one to the other in actual social reality. In this paper, I claim that a reinterpretation of Lukács’ arguments concerning the transition from reified to revolutionary consciousness provides crucial elements to move beyond that paradox. Furthermore, I argue that such a reconstruction of Lukács’ phenomenology of (de)reification responds not only to conceptual problems associated with his essay but also to practical issues posed by the capitalist social order today – in particular, the dissemination of precarized ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ through a process of simultaneous bourgeoisification and proletarianisation.Arthur Bueno, University of FrankfurtMetabolism and productivism: nature, labour and value in Lukács’ ontologyIn the face of the ecological disasters that each year become increasingly tragic, human sciences and philosophy try, in very different ways, to theoretically grasp the underlying relations of these processes – in the best cases with the explicit intent to support social movements pushing forward ecological resistances. In the last two decades, in particular, there was a fruitful recovery of Marxian thought by what became known as the metabolic rift school. Besides responding to critical interpretations of Marx that dismissed his reflections as irrelevant – and even harmful – to contemporary environmental issues, this school built a theoretical approach to the cognition and the struggles against capital’s social metabolism. In broad terms, György Lukács occupies a singular place in these reflections. On the one hand, his works of the period immediately after his “conversion” to marxism are often associated with the origins of Western Marxism and with a rejection of the dialectics of nature, which contributed to regard environmental issues as secondary or to put it in an abstract plane. On the other hand, his “mature” ontological reflections reoriented questions about the relations between society and nature that seems to dialogue with the interventions of the metabolic rift school – especially if we take into account the influence of István Mészáros’ critical inheritance of lukácsian thought. Considering these questions, this talk intends to address aspects of Lukács’ interpretation of Marx, put forward in his The Ontology of the Social Being, to reflect upon metabolism, labor, society and nature. We will argue that Lukács’ analysis of praxis through labor is useful for a realist approach to contemporary ecological problems – in contrast, for instance, with constructionists or new materialists perspectives. Nevertheless, the talk will also stress that despite this fruitful aspect, Lukács’ ontological interpretation of marxian labor theory of value leads him to a productivist perspective that neglects natural limits – a position that seems very far from Marx’s, especially the latter “mature” reflections on capital and nature.Murillo Van Der Laan, (University of Campinas, Brazil)PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider making a donation, which would help us enormously in covering the costs of putting of this programme of events. Like all left organisations, HM has had a very tough period since the beginning of 2020 and our budgets are very stretched and bank balance is sinking all the time, with very little revenue coming in. If you can make a contribution to keep us afloat, please don’t hesitate! You can donate by selecting the &#x27;donation&#x27; ticket type at registration.Once you have registered, a link to the live session will be emailed to you on the day of the event. For any technical queries please contact historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.ukPlease consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL. www.brill.com/hima

"Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen": A book launch with Nicolas Helm-Grovas

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