Lukács’ Critique of Quantification
In HCC, Lukács develops a critique of the logic of quantification that he sees at the heart of reified thought and bourgeois consciousness. It lies in the “nature of capitalism to” reduce “the phenomena to their purely quantitative essence, to their expression in numbers and numerical relations” (HCC, 6). Capitalism uses the sciences in order to assess and optimise investments, labour-time, capital accumulation, commodities, power, etc. Capitalism is the society of accumulation that is based on the logic of capital, which is transferred into different realms of society, such as politics and culture, in order to accumulate not just money, but also decision-power and definition-power. In order to accumulate, you need to assess existing quantities as foundation for identifying strategies of how to increase them. At the end of the process, the result is quantified in order to identify strategies of what to do when the accumulation process starts all over again. Capitalism has to develop ever newer forms of rationalisation and new methods of production in order to increase productivity, reduce costs and accumulate capital. The history of capitalist technology is therefore a history of rationalisation and the development of ever newer methods of quantification.
If we follow the path taken by labour in its development from the handicrafts via co-operation and manufacture to machine industry we can see a continuous trend towards greater rationalisation, the progressive elimination of the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker. (HCC, 88)
Modern philosophy has developed together with technologies of rationalisation (HCC, 113). Lukács argues that reification’s reduction of totalities to partialities is not limited to the economy, but also affects bureaucracy, the state, the law, and culture (HCC, 98–100).
The logic of computing is reductionist and anti-dialectical: “The methodology of the natural sciences which forms the methodological ideal of every fetishistic science and every kind of Revisionism reject the idea of contradiction and antagonism in its subject matter” (HCC, 10). Mathematical logic cannot see “the whole system at once” (HCC, 117). It reduces explanations to basic principles (reductionism) and believes in the exact predictability and calculability of the world (determinism) (HCC, 117). Lukács (HCC, 89–90) quotes Marx in order to show capitalism’s fetishism of quantification: “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day” (Marx 1847, 127). Lukács writes: “Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, whole separated from his total human personality)” (HCC, 90). In the essay The Question of Educational Work (first published in 1921), Lukács (2014, 91–92) argues that the bourgeois belief in the power of quantification and the natural sciences was reflected in the mechanical determinism advanced by both bourgeois economics and revisionist social democracy. Critical thought, in contrast, has to do “away completely with all forms of fatalism” (Lukács 2014, 93). It stresses human qualities such as the capacity of humans to change the world.
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