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39 | Lukács: Social Totality and the Commodity Form (Patreon)

Published:
2022-05-30 10:01:01
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2026-06
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Content

In this episode we discuss the work of György Lukács, focusing on the reification essay from his seminal 1923 book History and Class Consciousness. We talk about why it’s not great that the commodity form has penetrated every aspect of social life, why we need to retain the category of totality in spite of loud protests from postmodernists, and what’s special about the standpoint of the proletariat. Welcome to capitalism, folks: real contradictions and necessary illusions abound. But it’s not over yet!

patreon.com/leftofphilosophy | @leftofphil

References:

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1972) 

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

Paul Bowman

Enjoyed that. It's certainly made me rethink the value of social totality as a concept. I had previously mainly associated it with the target of Althusser's critique in "Object" - i.e. the foundation of structural-functionalism, where every component is the way that it is in order to fulfill it's role in the internal relations of the organically-unified totality. A kind of hideous circularity that gives rise to ideas of ideology as being produced by the system in order to keep the system running, as if there were some transcendent external deus ex machina able to design things that way (also how change even happens in such a circularly self-reproducing is a massive problem). So yes, perhaps "another social totality is possible". One less tied to the "interiority" of all relations (as Delanda would put it). On the standpoint itself. No mention of Lukács' later self-critique in his 1967 introduction where, in a bit of self-critique, he says he should have started with the category of labour rather than the commodity. An update that was seized on by Hartsock - for reasons not unrelated to the fact that at the time (and place) she was writing, a lot of women's work in the sexual division of labour, was unwaged and uncommodified. Unfortunately, this separation of the standpoint from generalised commodity relations, even though Hartsock was a Marxist feminist, opened the floodgates to the recuperation of standpoint theory by liberal frameworks (after all, extraction of unpaid labour can be seen as an injustice without challenging liberal norms of "fair exchange"), With the unfortunate results we see today - i.e. standpoint theory being thoroughly appropriated by bourgeois individualistic liberalisms, both radical and centrist

Anton W

as a non-specialist who has struggled to understand lukacs, this rocked. thank you. and holy shit you all were a riot on this episode. the left needs its own stand-up comedians, and you might be fit for the gig. but who the fuck thought it would be professional philosophers.

Anton W

i'm also super psyched that there's gonna be a bloch episode <3

ceifeiro

This one was so good that it made me go out and get a paperback of History and Class Consciousness. A lot of the things that more contemporary marxian thinkers say about the labor-power, the labor process, "fictitious" forms of capital and the inversion of our ideas seems to be present in its various chapters.