2.1.1. History and Class Consciousness
Georg Lukács was one of the twentieth century’s most well known Marxist philosophers. His book History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Lukács 1923/1971) is among the most influential studies of the proletariat and reified consciousness. History and Class Consciousness focuses on the analysis of class-consciousness, ideology, and reification. Labour is a strongly subordinated and rather neglected topic in the book. Language and communication play no role at all in it. In a preface written for the new 1967 edition, Lukács (1923/1971, xvii) acknowledges the neglect of labour in the book: ‘It is true that the attempt is made to explain all ideological phenomena by reference to their basis in economics but, despite this, the purview of economics is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labour as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing’.
Lukács had an ambivalent position towards his own book. In the 1967 preface, he characterised History and Class Consciousness as ‘ethical idealism’ (1923/1971, x), ‘revolutionary messianism’ (xiv). He writes that it did not begin ‘its analysis of economic phenomena […] with a consideration of work’ (xx) and that it ‘equates alienation with objectification’ (xxiv). One should, however, see that these comments do not refute the importance of ideology critique and the understanding of ideology as reified thought in class-based societies. Rather, Lukács expresses the need that ideology critique is part of a larger critical theory of society that he did not elaborate in the 1920s. The project of establishing such a theory was undertaken in his last book, in the Ontology of Social Being. It is a theory of production in society, including the production of use-value and value, physical and cultural commodities as well as the production of ideologies. One could say that the Ontology is a broader framework that encompasses History and Class Consciousness.
Lukács died in 1971. Shortly before his death in 1971, some of his students conducted interviews with him that together with a New Left Review interview from 1971 was published as his autobiography (Lukács 1983). In it, Lukács (1983, 77) repeats his criticism of History and Class Consciousness, but also says that it ‘is even today better and more intelligent than many of the things that bourgeois writers scrawl about Marx’ (77). He also says that in the Ontology, the ‘concept of labour is the hinge of my analysis’ (173) and stresses the importance of ontology in Marxist philosophy.
2.1.2. Adorno, Lukács and Ontological Philosophy
The Ontology of Social Being was as entire book first published in German in the year 1986. Excerpts from it were published in English in 1978 (Lukács 1978a, 1978b, 1978c). Adorno died in 1969 and Horkheimer in 1973. They therefore had no opportunity to read and comment on Lukács’ final book. One can, however, certainly say that Lukács’ approach formulated in this book encompasses ideology critique in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. In 1960/1961, Adorno gave lectures on the overall topic of Ontology and Dialectics (Ontologie und Dialektik) at the University of Frankfurt. These lectures have posthumously been published in German (Adorno 1960/1961).
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Critical Theory of Communication