In the immediate years after the Russian Revolution, optimistic assessments of the proletariat’s actuality were certainly more justified than in the years between 1933 and 1945 or today. But HCC overall avoids overstressing the actuality of the proletariat’s revolutionary consciousness and puts more stress on the proletariat’s reified consciousness. Lukács, therefore, speaks of an “ideological crisis of the proletariat in which proletarian ideology lags behind the economic crisis” (HCC, p.305). Reification is “the necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalist society” (HCC, 197). “The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immediacy together with the bourgeoisie” (HCC, 196). The proletariat can fail “to take this step” of becoming “the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality”. Capitalism constitutes at the same time potentials for the “quantitative increase of the forms of reification” and the “undermining of the forms of reification” (HCC, 208).
Revolutionary consciousness is no automatism, the proletariat “can be transformed and liberated only by its own actions” (HCC, 208). “History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at issue” (HCC, 208). “Above all the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity” (HCC, 168).
Lukács argues that there are three sources of the “bourgeoisification of the proletariat” (HCC, 310, Verbürgerlichung in the German original): the emergence of privileged sections of the working class (HCC, 304–305), the effects of capitalism’s structures of reification on consciousness (HCC, 310), and the taming influence of reformist social democratic parties and unions. Revisionist social democracy is an ideology with which “the proletariat falls victim to all the antinomies of reification” (HCC, 197). For Lukács, the communist party plays an important role in the development of proletarian class consciousness. “The struggle of the Communist Party is focused upon the class consciousness of the proletariat” (HCC, 326).
Chapter Three | History and Class Consciousness 2.0
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Ideology and Reified Consciousness