29.07.1999
Lukács, Brecht and bureaucratic socialism - Fraught relationships
Phil Watson reviews ‘Aesthetics and politics’ (Verso, 1999)
This book is the perfect starting point for those who wish to comprehend the awesome contribution that 20th century Marxism has made to the exegesis of modern culture. What we have here is a set of debates between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno (alongside an endpiece by Fredric Jameson) that should dispel forever the contemporary notion that Marxism is only a refuge for the dogmatist and the fool.
There are many rich seams to be mined here. This review will consider one of the most fascinating. How was it that Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht owed a considerable formal loyalty to a Stalinised international communist movement? Adorno is particularly scathing of Lukács, claiming that the Hungarian writer adapted “his obviously unimpaired talents to the unrelieved sterility of Soviet claptrap” (p151).
Similarly we are confronted with Brecht’s reaction to the 1953 workers’ rising in the GDR where, “bewildered and unnerved”, he “reacted to this revolt of the masses with a mixture of truculent bluff and sentimental pathos” (p142). Adorno’s barbed critique of Lukács makes it quite clear that we are not dealing with cases of impaired intellect. Both Lukács and Brecht were deeply cultured individuals whose relationship with the various bureaucratic leaderships was noticeably fraught.
In Brecht’s case we can contrast his unwillingness to break from Stalin with conversations that Walter Benjamin recorded in diary form between 1934 and 1938 (pp86-99). Here we see an author who appears to be genuinely perturbed about events inside the USSR. In August 1938, Benjamin quotes Brecht as saying: “In Russia there is a dictatorship over the proletariat. We should avoid dissociating ourselves from this dictatorship for as long as it still does useful work for the proletariat - ie, so long as it contributes towards a reconciliation between the proletariat and the peasantry ...” (original emphasis, p99). This essentially confused statement exhibits perfectly Brecht’s contradictory self-doubt in relation to Stalin’s rule.
It is this side of Brecht that writers often turn over into judgements on his aesthetic practice. Terry Eagleton contrasts Lukács, whose writings “rejoined at crucial points the counterrevolutionary betrayals of Stalinism”, with Brecht, whose “critical, concrete, agnostic interrogating, ran counter to the whole weight of Stalinist orthodoxy, but which, in its associated prudence, could find a certain nervous accommodation within it” (T Eagleton Walter Benjamin London 1981, p86). Whilst Eagleton’s emphasis on “nervous accommodation” is undoubtedly correct, such a compromise was aided, and not impeded, by Brecht’s artistic theory and practice.
The radical shift that marked both has made Brecht generally more acceptable figure on the revolutionary left than the much maligned Lukács. Certainly on the surface his contribution may appear as if it is at odds with Stalinism or any sort of dogmatism. However, this is nothing but an illusion.
Stalinist art, as manifested in ‘socialist realism’, exhibited a similar disrespect for the ‘autonomy’ of the artistic sphere, whose formal laws became violated by the incursion of an immediate political need. In both Brechtian and Soviet art theories there is a difficulty in appreciating art as a sensuous object - both blur the lines between distinct social practices. Eagleton’s dictum that Brecht’s vision ran counter to that of Stalinism is little more than a conflict of appearance. Looked at in this light, Lukács’s preservation of reason as the property of the formal artistic object (erroneously criticised by Eagleton in op cit pp85-86) becomes a more effective counterpoint to Stalinism, in that artistic integrity is not seen as dependent on political correctness. However, as Terry Eagleton has perceptively observed, “Realism [as represented by Lukács’s literary theory] and modernism [related here to Brecht’s practice], like signifier and signified, are the binary terms of an imaginary opposition ...” (T Eagleton op cit p89). Brechtian practice is an important facet of any critical-dialectical complex, but in the context of Stalinism’s voluntaristic abstraction, Lukács was the more dangerous theorist.
In the light of Brecht’s theoretical practice, his accommodation to Stalinism becomes relatively easy to understand. But what of Lukács, someone we have identified as a potentially more effective critic. In reality, Lukács’s relationship to the ruling bureaucracies of the Soviet Union and Hungary was similarly fraught, veering between relative acceptance, humiliating self-criticism and ideological banishment. Yet, as Lukács himself observed, the practical outcome of such periods of potential excommunication was that the party leaders could not swallow him or spit him out: he had stuck in their collective throat (I Eörsi [ed] Georg Lukács: record of a life p10). The Hungarian Socialist Workers Party even lacked the courage to formally expel Lukács after his involvement in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 (ibid).
Such a bond can only be explained by the particular ideological juncture in which Stalinism functioned. The control of the bureaucracy inside the Soviet Union and countries such as Hungary was premised on the practical negation of the workers’ revolution, hence the elaboration of a hybrid ‘Marxism-Leninism’ to complement such practice. However, in terms of legitimacy it was more helpful for this ideology to be erected on the basis of Marxism itself, even if this half of the ideological contradiction became dysfunctional in an everyday sense and made its bureaucratic carriers distinctly uncomfortable.
Lukács gives us a example of how this ideological constellation worked in his autobiography. He recalls how Stalin launched an attack on Plekhanov in 1930: “If you only consider Stalin’s chief purpose in this argument [bureaucratic control], then obviously you have a Stalinist way of thinking, but for me it still had one extremely important consequence: Stalin’s criticism of Plekhanov gave me the idea of making a similar critique of Mehring ... [who] introduced Kantian aesthetics into Marx ... Plekhanov introduced what was essentially a positivistic aesthetics. The way I interpreted Stalin’s critique of the Plekhanov orthodoxy was to see it as a view which rejected the idea that Marxism was just one socio-economic theory among others. Instead Stalin saw it as a totalising world view. This implied that it must also contain a Marxist aesthetics which did not have to be borrowed from Kant or anyone else” ibid p86).
Lukács is here drawing attention to the manner in which he exploited a specific juncture where Stalin was attempting to establish theoretical control over various ideological spheres, something couched within the “totalising world view” of Marxism. Thus Lukács was able to utilise this space to develop his own idea of a specifically Marxist aesthetic.
By accepting the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ and the leadership of Stalin in the mid-1920s, Lukács effectively provided himself with a social and economic justification for his accommodation to the realities of bureaucratic deformation. However, the suspicion remains that Lukács identified himself more closely with the ideological realities we have sketched above. He referred to party discipline as a “higher, abstract level of loyalty. A public figure’s loyalty involves a deep and ideological relationship to one or other historically given tendency - and it remains loyalty even if, on a particular issue, there is not complete harmony” (ibid p13). Such reasoning is entirely comprehensible within the structure of Stalinism, a historical phenomenon that chose to practically negate the revolution while simultaneously - if begrudgingly - affirming it.
Eagleton states that under Stalinism, Lukács became “the Idea that entered upon real, alienated existence - the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions, and indeed, at base, the opium of the people” (T Eagleton op cit p84). What was true for Lukács was true for the liberatory essence of Marxism inside the Stalinist ideological system. Lukács turned out to be one of the major person-ifications of this contradiction. Here we have a Marxist philosopher who incurred widespread enmity and displeasure, yet his services could not entirely be dispensed with.
It is Theodor Adorno who perhaps launches the most scathing attack on Lukácsian doctrine in the pages of Aesthetics and politics (pp151-176). In particular, Adorno criticises Lukács’s adherence to ‘reflection’ theory, claiming that such a category cannot conceptualise the specificity of aesthetic practice in relation to the “consciousness of the actual world” (p159). As we have seen from Adorno’s reply to Benjamin, he was concerned to preserve the ‘autonomy’ of the artistic object.
In fact a defence of ‘reflectionist’ doctrine is in no way dependent on a dogmatic, undialectical reading of this concept. In a discussion of this topic, Lukács asserted that the “objectivity of the external world is no inert, rigid objectivity fatalistically determining human activity; because of its very independence of consciousness it stands in the most intimate indissoluble interaction with practice” (G Lukács Writer and critic, and other essays London 1970, p29). There is thus the dialectical space for the artist to work out the concretisation of reality on the basis of particular aesthetic laws. Lukács is simply uninterested in exaggerating surface appearance (ie, an unmediated reflection) at the expense of abstraction.
Adorno is just one of many writers unable to comprehend the manner in which Lukács, rather than simply subordinating himself to the crass narratives of ‘Marxism-Leninism’, exploited the ideological dynamic of Stalinism in a positive direction. Michael Löwy, in a problematical discussion, considers Lukács’s development of a ‘realist’ trajectory in his essays of the mid-1920s, linking this with Lukács’s apparent support for Stalin and ‘socialism in one country’. By thus standing on the ground of a materially and spiritually impoverished ‘socialism’, Lukács tore the social base away from a fully rounded critique of bureaucratic rule. Nevertheless, Löwy makes the nonsensical claim that Lukács’s development of realism (in essays such as ‘Moses Hess and the problems of idealist dialectics’) provided the basis for his support for Stalin. In particular, Löwy argues that such writings lack “the dialectical revolutionary harmony of History and class consciousness”, the implication being that this earlier standpoint would be the more effective in saving Lukács’s revolutionary blushes (M Löwy Georg Lukács - from romanticism to Bolshevism London 1979, p196).
Löwy’s reasoning is highly dubious. Lukács’s espousal of the proletariat as the ‘identical subject-object’ in History and class consciousness is in reality a Hegelian device that borders very closely on the psychological structure of Stalinism. The voluntarism practised by the bureaucracy in the ‘planned’ economy could not know real, sensuous, objective practice, precisely because objectivity was filtered and understood through subjectivity. For all intents and purposes, objectivity was annulled in favour of appearance.
Through a discussion of Marx’s Economic and philosophical manuscripts Lukács opposed this annulment of objectivity in Hegel’s Phenomenology (and hence the concept of the ‘identical subject-object’), counterposing instead an historical approach that sought to overcome alienation in its particular capitalist form, rather than the externalisation of all human activity (G Lukács The young Hegel London 1975, p540). Hegel’s proposed ‘annulment’ of objectivity was the root of his spiritualism, and the subsequent deformation of his system into a history of appearances. Lukács therefore retained an objective emphasis in his philosophical system (albeit one dialectically transcended and preserved), well placed for a critique of puerile Stalinist subjectivism. If Lukács had retained the idealist substrate of History and class consciousness,he would, in all probability, have become a mere apologist for the bureaucracy. The fact that Lukács developed his critical standpoint after seeming to fall in behind Stalin is utterly mystifying for the likes of Adorno and Löwy.
Aesthetics and politics, as its title implies, has the immense value of linking in Marxist theories of art with the key political problems of the 20th century. Aesthetic theory needs to be understood within its own problematic. However, this increases our need for an understanding of its historical context. Never has this been more true than in the careers of Brecht and Lukács. In this sense we can quote the Brechtian maxim, “Don’t start from the good old things, but the bad new ones” (p99), with a very heavy heart indeed.
Phil Watson