In 2023, R.M interviewed Melbourne socialist Daniel López on Lukacs and more. R.M. is a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, in Melbourne.
“Hegel must not be treated as a ‘dead dog’, but even so we must demolish the ‘dead’ architecture of the system in its historical form and release the extremely relevant and modern sides of his thought and help them once again to becomes vital and effective force in the present.” — Georg Lukács. original 1922 Preface to History and Class Consciousness
In 2002, at the age of 15, Daniel Andrés López looked up “socialism” in the phone book. He found — and joined — the Australian Socialist Alternative (SAlt), a post-Cliffite1 Trotskyist cadre organisation whose founders were expelled from the ISO over the question of the possibility for mass socialist organizing, activity and recruitment in the early 90’s. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR, the ISO hoped that the final defeat of Stalinism – 50 years later than expected – would lead to a global flourishing of Trotskyism. However, SAlt’s founders were far more pessimistic and assessed that the 90’s were a period of de-politicization and that their tactics and organisation should reflect this. Today, SAlt survives as Australia’s largest ostensibly Marxist organisation by far, with over 500 members nationally, mostly centered in Melbourne.
However, in the early 2010’s, after three years employed as an organizer with the organisation, López developed a growing frustration with what he saw as the ‘internal limits’ in Socialist Alternative, and the theoretical dogmatism and rigidity of historical thinking amongst his comrades. This played out in several disputes over practical matters of organisation, while, uncontroversially at the time, he had slowly been developing independent positions on questions of philosophy and history. As he says, he ‘retreated from being an organizer and started to look around for theory’, with the intent ‘to just become an intellectual within the group’. In regards to theory, the Socialist Alternative, following in the ISO/SWP(UK) tradition2, encourages engagement with the work of Hungarian Marxist-Intellectual György Lukács, particularly with his 1923 book History and Class Consciousness. López explains:
For SAlt, HCC is the recommended reading to answer the question as to why class consciousness is so retrograde – how do we explain ideology? How do we explain the deficiency in class consciousness? Indeed, this is a flavor of SAlt’s (and the ISO’s) more heterodox Trotskyism. [PC]
In 2014, López, a history and social theory major, began his PhD studies3 in philosophy and set himself the research task of ‘systematizing’ Lukács’ 1920s political philosophy. He was encouraged to pursue a more serious study of theory, and Lukács specifically4, by SAlt founding member Sandra Bloodworth. The end result of this study was his major work titled ‘Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute’, a colossal book of over 600 pages, published by Historical Materialism in 2019. In the final product, López’s goal mutated from the original ‘systemization’ into what he labels as delivering “a speculative reading of Lukács”. In short, he describes this task as making conscious the scientific method (of knowledge claims) deployed by Lukács in his most radical works of the 1920’s, and rendering the consciousness of that method as an essential aspect of comprehending the whole of this work. With this, he reevaluates the content of these works from the standpoint of the unity of this method and the content.
In parallel with the course of writing this book, tensions regarding his philosophical break compounded within SAlt, deepening further when he was offered to take up the role of the Australian editor-at-large at Jacobin magazine in 2019, which was experiencing a rapid growth in its international readership in the post-2015 millennial neo-social democratic moment. This culminated in a fierce conflict over López’s offering of soft, critical support for the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the US, for which he was internally castigated within SAlt as a ‘mealy-mouthed reformist twaddler’ and an ‘intellectual backslider’.
Although López admittedly ‘picked this fight’ as an opportunity to make a stand on the question of the possibility of socialist praxis in the present, as a “strategy for smashing the Democratic Party and building a new Socialist Party in the USA”, he never expected it would reach such heights of polemic. Indeed, this conflict was further fueled by what he describes as a paranoia within SAlt that the contemporaneous collapse of the ISO could be, in part, blamed on the rise of Jacobin and the DSA. After a long internal expulsion debate, he eventually resigned under duress in 2019, after 17 years of service to the organisation.
In his resignation letter, Lopez writes about the harsh reception of his “ambivalence about the necessity of insurrection and [his] theoretical skepticism towards the contemporary applicability of a model of socialist revolution derived from the October Revolution of 1917”. He characterizes the consequences of this response, by saying:
[The] overarching message is that skepticism is dangerous, demoralizing and a threat to socialist organizing. This argument is profoundly authoritarian. It also gives license to any number of spurious, counterfactual and self-contradictory assertions. […] The only alternative to skepticism is dogmatism. [RL]
He quotes, in his letter, a succinct formulation by SAlt founding member Mick Armstrong, who writes “You can’t develop a positive perspective or strategy on the basis of skepticism and agnosticism. It is paralyzing.”. Despite the Socialist Alternative’s strict adherence to certain ideological positions, López remains the only member in the 30 year history of the organisation to have ever been expelled for political disagreements.
While insisting that his book on Lukács, which came out after his expulsion, should not be read as a ‘break up note to Socialist Alternative’, López expounds the liberatory effect that Lukács had on his political thinking:
It enabled me to see the structure of revolutionary socialist thinking that existed within SAlt, and I found it to be a nostalgic nihilism that believes that you can systemise the revolution of 1917. […] I could see that the highest version of SAlt’s politics, philosophically, is Lukács. That is, the Socialist Alternative’s nostalgic mythology of the October Revolution is epitomized in Lukács’s philosophy of praxis. […] Thus, I didn’t regard the leadership of Socialist Alternative as an intellectual authority anymore. [PC]
In jest, this author remarks to him that he was perhaps ‘kicked out for taking Lukács too seriously’, to which he laughingly replies is ‘not wrong’, however, as previously mentioned, it is no heresy to read Lukács in SAlt. Rather, the confidence to pick that fight over Sanders was in part due to his intellectual work.
López describes that intellectual work, in brief terms, as an elucidation of Lukács’ Philosophy of Praxis, his method, as structured in three stages:
- Sociological-historical critique.
- Philosophical critique (qua German Idealism).
- Politics as the actualisation of praxis.
However, after grasping the aforementioned limits of Lukács’s method, he delivers a twist:
Instead of seeing politics as the highest goal or highest order of thought, as it is for Lukács, I came to regard philosophy as the highest order of thought. In the book, I advocate the reversal of the last two stages of Lukács’ method; political theory becomes the prolegomena to philosophy and philosophy becomes a vantage point from which to regard politics rationally. Not in the sense that philosophy can dictate to politics, but rather that philosophy gives you a freedom within politics to think about the conceptual structure of politics. [PC]
Concurrently with his PhD, López had undertaken a serious study of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This was profoundly influential on him and the writing of his book. Indeed, he models his twist of Lukács on a similar logical move of Hegel’s, specifically referencing that in the final chapter on Spirit Hegel ‘leaves behind political thinking as such, and turns instead to the self-knowledge of spirit, namely, art, religion and philosophy’. López also considers this aspect of his work as taking up Gillian Rose’s task of a ‘reformation’ of Marxism, as outlined in the final chapter of her 1991 work “Hegel Contra Sociology”, that is, to undertake a so-called ‘Philosophical critique of Marxism’ via Hegel’s speculative philosophy. To be clear on the stakes here, by ‘contra sociology’, Rose means, in large part, ‘contra the Sociological Marxism of Lukács’. But what is it about Lukács’ Marxism that is ‘sociological’ for Rose? She sees him as having inherited the ‘neo-Kantianism’ of his teachers of Sociology – particularly Durkheim, Weber and Simmel 5. In this way, Lukács’ thinking, at certain moments, is said to fall below the threshold of a fully-Hegelian philosophical self-knowing. Very briefly, López describes this ‘speculative’ mode of thinking by saying that:
Dialectical thinking proceeds through opposites and does so endlessly – one can always find the opposite of anything – whereas Speculative thinking understands that that is the structure of thought in principal and in general and tries to create a logic and a methodology that can move through those opposites within the coherence of a whole. [PC]
Regarding his book as a contribution to Rose’s project of Reformation, López writes:
This book argues that the radicalism of Lukács’ Philosophy of Praxis may only be sustained by philosophy itself. So, instead of a rejection of Lukács’ Philosophy of Praxis, this study will ultimately argue that Lukács’s philosophical framework from the 1920’s may form a pathway from Marxism back to Hegelian philosophy proper. [LPA]
Thus López’s theoretical break culminates in a return to philosophy – a return to the critical self-consciousness of the bourgeois revolutionary epoch of 1789-1830. However, he maintains that disagreements over the role of Philosophy within Marxism should not form the basis for sectarianism, In his resignation letter, he writes:
Philosophically, I am not a Marxist but a Hegelian. I take this position because I don’t believe that Marx possesses a coherent philosophy, even though I regard his social theory, theory of history, politics and political economy as indispensable. […] Philosophical differences should not be allowed to become organisational boundaries. I also believe that Marxism is incomplete and that no current within Marxist thought has developed a satisfactory answer to the problem of socialist transformation. […] Every tradition claiming connection with the Russian Revolution has failed. [RL]
López reflected on Lukács in his piece “The Marxist Ideology, or, History and Class Consciousness After One Hundred Years”, where he summarizes his view of the present task:
What I propose — with and against Lukács — is not the abandonment of our tradition, but that we re-gather its ruins on a superior, more rational basis. We need a self-reflexive, critical Marxism that rejects the fetishisation of tradition and orthodoxy as ideological and mythological. Only a self-critical Marxism can honestly confront our failures. [MI]
He continues, arguing that:
[T]o build a better historical materialism, we must […] complete Lukács’s injunction in HCC, that “historical materialism both can and must be applied to itself.” In short, the self-knowledge of capitalist society [i.e. Marxism] must come to know itself. That is, it must become a philosophy, in the genuinely Hegelian sense. […] If we follow this Lukácsian method to its most radical conclusion, the resulting revolution in theory may deliver to the Left a political philosophy that can free our emancipatory conviction from orthodoxy, tradition and ideology. [MI]
Shaped, as he is, by his experience in the Socialist Alternative, López’s viewpoint remains a unique registration of the culmination of the crisis of Marxism of the last hundred years, one which is deeply influenced by the Marxism of György Lukács.
References
[HCC] – Lukács “History and Class Consciousness” (1923)
[HCS] – Rose “Hegel Contra Sociology” (1991)
[LPA] – López “Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute” (2019)
[RL] – López “Resignation Under Duress” (Socialist Alternative Internal Bulletin, August 2019)
[PC] – Private Communication with López, (February/March 2023)
[MI] – López “The Marxist Ideology, or, History and Class Consciousness After One Hundred Years” Spectre Magazine (2023, https://spectrejournal.com/history-and-class-consciousness-at-100/)
1 A potentially dubious characterization, however, used here in reference to SAlt’s (re-)engagement with Lenin contra various forms of late 20th century ‘Leninism’. See e.g. S. Bloodworth ‘Lenin vs. “Leninism”’, Marxist Left Review, January 2013 (https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/lenin-vs-leninism/).
2 See e.g. John Rees, The Algebra of Revolution: the Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition (Routledge, 1998)
3 Lopez undertook his PhD at La Trobe university, where, coincidentally, several “second generation” Budapest-school Marxists held positions – that is, students of the students of the elder-Lukács – like Agnes Heller who had taken up exile in Australia following expulsion from the USSR, and they continued a tradition of critical engagement with Marxism centering around the journal thesis eleven. Lopez encountered this clique, however their influence on his research was limited.
4 See D. A. Lopez “Georg Lukács’s theory of revolution”
5 See C. Cutrone “Gillian Rose’s “Hegelian” critique of Marxism”
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