Upload
rogger-metchel-paath
View
213
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
7/30/2019 Prie_Daniel Du - Lukacs's Reification&Heller's Theory of Need in Marx
1/6
Lukacs'Reification
and
Heller's Theory of need in Marx
By: Daniel du Prie
2001
A little over a decade after the "collapse of Communism", it might appear that
Marxist theory has been relegated to little more than an historical or even
archeological artefact with little relevance to or influence over an ever encroachingand expanding, globalising capitalism. Socialism "proper", as a state economic model
and ideology seems to have been banished to the margins of the world scene. The
disastrous results in terms of the dictatorships and totalitarianism that have ensued
wherever an attempt has been made to implement a socialist model; the Fukuyaman
proclamation of the "end of history" after communism collapsed, this end being
equated with the eschatological triumph of free-market capitalism; and the insistence
of multinational enterprises and capitalist governments on the expansion of global
capital appear to some extent to have marked the death of socialism and marxist
critique.
However, it cannot be denied that fundamental contradictions remain and are
increasing in intensity. Recent events, such as often violent demonstrations whenever
and wherever bodies seen to be representative of global capitalism, such as the World
Trade Organisation, meet, and the upsurge in anti-western sentiment, especially in
Islamic middle-eastern nations, point to a trend that now denies the triumphant mood
in the West during the early nineties. Magnus and Cullenberg referred to these already
in 1994 in their Introductions to Derrida's Specters of Marx :
Given the difficulties some democratic, free market economies are experiencing
including the plight of the homeless, the lack of adequate health care, environmental
degradation, and enormous debt burdens what sort of model for the future do we
have? And what is one to make of the destructive, even violent "nationalisms" which
have followed in the wake of the collapse of communism, not to mention virulentforms of ethnocentrism and xenophobia perhaps not seen since Hitler's Germany?
What does this imply then forthe global economy and life throughout our shared
world? (viii)
Derrida also takes note of the economic contradictions undermining the "end"
of history:
And how can one overlook, moreover, the economic war that is raging today both
between [the United States and the European Community] and within the European
Community? How can one minimize the conflicts of the GATT treaty and all that it
represents, which the complex strategies of protectionism recall every day, not to
mention the economic war with Japan and all the contradictions at work within the
trade between the wealthy countries and the rest of the world, the phenomena ofpauperization and the ferocity of the "foreign debt", the effects of what [Marx's]
1
7/30/2019 Prie_Daniel Du - Lukacs's Reification&Heller's Theory of Need in Marx
2/6
Manifesto also called "the epidemic of overproduction" and the "state of momentary
barbarism"it can induce in so-called civilized societies, and so forth? (1994: 63)
We have seen the effects of the GATT conflicts in cities like Seattle and
Melbourne, with large-scale demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation.
Much more powerful, shocking and consequential a symbol of late capitalist
contradictions, however, is the destruction of the towering World Trade Centre inNew York by suicide bombers earlier this year and the ensuing "War on Terrorism"
waged by the West upon Afghanistan.
It seems though, that with the "end" of history, the West has also experienced
the loss of history. A truly critical (self-)analysis, requiring at least a depth consistent
with that of the Marxian tradition is patently lacking in light of the virtually automatic
and instant response of what has been widely dubbed as the "War on Terrorism" (as
opposed to, say, " Yet another War in Afghanistan").
What of the 'reality' of socialism though? Feher, Heller and Markus (1983)
have argued that, whatever else they have been, those countries which have defined
themselves as socialist have been anything but. Socialism has not yet actually existed:
The new society, the 'dictatorship over needs', is neither a novel, modified
form of (state) capitalism, nor is it socialism it is 'something else'. It is a social
formation completely different from any that has existed in European or world history
to date and it is equally different from any relevant conception in terms of which
socialism, either 'scientifically' or in a utopian manner, has ever been conceived (221).
As they go on to explain, one of the reasons for this spectacular failure of
socialism to become a real social formation is that,
Marxism (and socialist theories in general) were much too self indulgently
value-free, in the positivistic sense typical of nineteenth-century theories, to makeunambiguously clear the conditions, the fulfilment of which would constitute
socialism (and conversely, the conditions, the want of which constitutes an anti-
capitalist formation, which however cannot and should not be identified with
socialism) (Feher, Heller & Markus, 1983: 229).
Both Lukacs' concept of reification and Heller's analysis of the Marxist theory
of needs, which I attempt to elucidate here, are themselves attempts to counter this
positivism inherent in Marxism, which has tended to plague socialism to its extreme
detriment wherever it attempts to engender itself as a social reality. This type of
curbing of positivism in Marxian critique has appeared elsewhere also, for example in
Baudrillard's [Symbolic Exchange] which tends to criticise the valorisation andnaturalisation of the concept "work" over and against that of (excessive) "play", and in
Derrida's already cited Specters of Marx (1994), which highlights particularly that
historically sited Marxism and communisms are mediated by the societies, cultures
and traditions in which they appear and argues for a plurality of Marxism(s) and even
of the proper name Marx.
Concepts such as Lukacs' 'reification' and Heller's 'dissatisfaction' are still
valid, especially in light of the triumphant 'self-indulgence' and 'positivism' of
capitalist theories, such as globalisation and economic rationalism, which are now
attempting in a similar manner that appears to many people as more dictatorial than
democratic, at the least in a 'sinister' manner, to become global social realities. For
this reason I have digressed somewhat: too often university essays can seem abstractexercises, with little relevance to the 'real' world, but in digressing onto recent
2
7/30/2019 Prie_Daniel Du - Lukacs's Reification&Heller's Theory of Need in Marx
3/6
historical contradictions, I want to highlight that Marxist theory need not die
peacefully at all, or simply be an academic exercise in a theory which is only of
historical interest.
Both Lukacs in his analysis of reification and Heller in her analysis of needs in
Marx posit as central effects of commodifaction the fact that the worker becomes
dominated by and alienated from his own activity and labour power the effect of
commodification is fundamentally one of estrangement and alienation. Heller (1974:
48) defines this as follows:
In alienation (and particularly in capitalism) the end/means relation inherent in
labour is turned upside down and becomes its opposite. In commodity producing
society, use value (the product of concrete labour) does not serve to satisfy needs. Its
essence consists, on the contrary, in satisfying the needs of the person to whom it
does not belong. The nature of the use value that the worker produces is all the same
to him; he bears no relation to it.
Hence, the worker in modern capitalism is alienated from his labour as
concrete because its product serves to satisfy the needs of someone else, not his own.What the worker performs for himself is 'abstract labour' (48) which he performs for
another in exhange for money in order to satisfy his own necessary needs, which
labour appears then as an obectivated commodity when rendered as concrete. The
result is that "capitalist industry and agriculture do not produce for needs, nor for their
satisfaction. The end of production is the valorisation of capital, and the satisfaction of
needs (on the market) is only a means towards this end" (49).
Lukacs renders this alienation in terms of the reification of the commodity:
What is of central importance here is that because of this situation [commodity
reification] a man's own activity, his own labour becomes something objective and
independent of him, something that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien toman (1971: 86,87).
Although Lukacs sources his analysis of reification in the section in Marx's
Capital entitled 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof' (Lukacs, 1971:
86), we can see the essence of both of the above citations in Marx's Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts . In these, in a much stronger tone than is used in, say,
Capital , Marx already develops the themes of alienation, commodity reification and
the concept of the worker's needs and their satisfaction, or the impossibility of
satisfying these under capitalism. In terms of reification and the alienation of man's
labour, Marx writes:
the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretchedof commoditiesthe wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power
and magnitude of his production The worker becomes all the poorer the more
wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker
becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates Labour
produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity
and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general (Marx, 1997:
60-62).
This process has the direct effect of alienating the labourer from the object in
the capacity of the product of his labour:
The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but
to the object. Whatever the product of his labour, he is not. Therefore the greater thisproduct, the less he is himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not
3
7/30/2019 Prie_Daniel Du - Lukacs's Reification&Heller's Theory of Need in Marx
4/6
only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside
him , independently, as something alien to him (62)
This is a process of instrumentalisation that is affecting the worker. It results
in " estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product" (63), which in turn directly
affects the needs of man and how they are satisfied, which is the focus of Heller's
analysis. As a result of alienation, man's need becomes ever greater, but the only wayhe can respond to his need is in the selfish objectification of the other:
Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money becomes ever greater if he
wants to master the hostile power [which is the need as alien power placed in him by
the other, so that the other may attempt to satisfy his own need which turns humans
into mere means towards an alien end: that of profit]. The power of his money
declines in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production: that is, his
neediness grows as the power of money increases (82).
The culmination of the alienation of labour and subservience of man to alien,
'imaginary' (82) needs is the triumph of money [defined in 'The Fetishism of
Commodities' as the ultimate form "of the world of commodities that actuallyconceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social
relations between the individual producers" (Marx, 1954: 76)], as virtually
omnipotent, taking the natural place of the human being, relegating humans to
something like the "mist enveloped regions of the religious world" (72) from wich, by
analogy, the Fetishism itself was originally derived:
The less you are , the less you express your own life, the more you have , i.e., the
greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.
Everything [taken] from you in life and in humanity, [is replaced] for you in money
and in wealth ; and all the things you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and
drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art,
learning, the treasures of the past, political power all this it can appropriate for you it can buy all this: it is true endowment (84).
However, the one thing it specifically cannot do, is fulfil human need, for
money only wants to create and multiply itself, whilst the worker, finally, may only
own as much as will make him want to go on living, needing always more, in a
perpetual cycle of dissatisfaction.
Lukacs' concept of reification is particularly elucidated in the essay
'Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat' especially in the section 'The
Phenomenon of Reification' which appears in History and Class Consciousness
(1971). The term 'reification', however, is a rather unwieldy one, and suffers from a
symptom that foreign terms often tend to suffer when translated into English: thetendency to use uncommon or obscure terms in English. (We note a similar fate in the
translation of Freud's "das Ich", literally "the I", rendered as "the Ego"; and "das Es",
literally "the it", rendered as "the Id".) The term "reification" is hardly an everyday
word, and its verb form "to reify" is defined by the Encarta World English Dictionary
as, "to think of or treat something asbtract as if it existed as a real or tangible object".
The original German term is "Verdinglichung" (Lukacs, 1923), which conveys the
sense of the process of being changed into a thing. That which is changed is the
"relation between people" (Lukacs, 1971: 83) which "takes on the character of a
thing" (83).
The key impact of Lukacs' analysis lies in his invocation of the wordconsciousness . As Johnson (1984: 10-11) draws out, Lukacs locates the revolutionary
4
7/30/2019 Prie_Daniel Du - Lukacs's Reification&Heller's Theory of Need in Marx
5/6
dynamic in the social existence of the worker, as opposed to mechanical economic
laws which are supposed to inevitably and automatically transform capitalism into
socialism. Lukacs consequently relates consciousness to the whole of society (1971:
51) in order to infer or impute consciousness to the proletariat "as if they were able to
assess" (51) their objective situation. This is may be identified as the anti-positivist
strain in Lukacs' thought, which is later specified in his criticism of "vulgar Marxism",which "bases itself on the 'natural laws' of economic development which are to bring
about these transitions by their own impetus and without having recourse to a brute
force lying 'beyond economics'" (239). However, because - as argued above - humans
are, in capitalism, become completely subservient to and in thrall to perpetually
generated imaginary needs (which might be defined as 'luxuries') which they are all
too busy attempting to satisfy, the worker is continually persuaded of his subjective
value in terms of his consumptive power mediated by money even if this
subjectivity is only in the end a 'false consciousness'. Therefore the proletariat cannot
become aware in order to analyse its situation with a view to achieving true
consciousness and revolution. In the end, Lukacs is forced to rely on the Communist
Party as a mediating power for the imputation of a revolutionary class consciousness.
Heller's analysis of needs in Marx on the other hand, specifically the analysis
of radical needs, proposes that "the worker becomes conscious of the contradiction
between the need to develop his personality and the "accidental" character of his
subordination to the division of labour" (Heller, 1974: 90). This consciousness is
precipitated by the emergence of radical needs, which are needs which capitalism is
structurally incapable of satisfying. However these needs "cannot be 'eliminated' from
capitalism because they are necessary to its functioning it is not the Being of radical
needs that transcends capitalism but theirsatisfaction " (76). Where dissatisfaction of
radical needs then becomes a historical reality, the possibility of transcending
capitalism also becomes real. Take for example the notion of 'free time':[The worker] is convinced that from a certain point onwards capitalism is incapable
of shortening labour time any further: the need for free time then becomes in
principle a radical need, which can only be satisfied with the transcendence of
capitalism. When related to the need for free time, the character of "radical needs" is
brought out in a particularly striking manner: it is produced by capitalism itself, by
its contradictory character, and thus belongs to the very functioning of capitalism
At the same time, need itself mobilises the working class into transcending capitalism
(91).
Heller's analysis of needs in Marx thus offers the possibility of the working
class becoming conscious of its own situation and revolting against it in a manner
which Lukacs' theory of reification cannot. Lukacs in History and Class
Consciousness is forced to arbitrarily and unconvincingly rely on the party as
mediator of the revolution however the question remains, If the proletariat is
incapable of coming to consciousness, what will guarantee that the Party is any more
unfalsely conscious than the proletariat it is supposed to represent? It would appear
that the history of the Communist Party has shown that there is no guarantee of this
whatsoever. As Heller reminds us:
As yet, history has not answered the question as to whether capitalist society in fact
produces this "consciousness exceeding its bounds", which in Marx's day did not
exist, and whose existence Marx therefore had to project (1974: 95).
5
7/30/2019 Prie_Daniel Du - Lukacs's Reification&Heller's Theory of Need in Marx
6/6
LIST OF REFERENCES.Derrida, J (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New
InternationalNew York: Routledge.Feher, F; Heller, A and Markus, G (1983)Dictatorship over Needs Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Heller, A (1974) The Theory of Need in Marx London: Allison & Busby.
Johnson, P (1984) Marxist Aesthetics: The foundations within an everyday life for an emancipated
consciousness London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Lukacs, G (1923) Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien ber marxistische Dialektik Berlin:Malin Verlag.__________ (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics London: MerlinPress.Marx, K (1954) Capital Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing._______ (1997) The Marx Reader(ed. C. Pierson) Cambridge: Polity Press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.Eagleton, T (1976)Marxism and Literary Criticism London: Methuen & Co.Kearny, R (1986) Modern Movements in European Philosophy Manchester: Manchester University
Press.Heller A and Ferenc F (eds.) (1986) Reconstructing Aesthetics: Writings of the Budapest SchoolOxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lukacs, G (1962) The Historical Novel London: Merlin Press.
6