2.4. Conclusion
For Lukács, work understood as the active, conscious teleological positing of changes so that use-values are created in order to achieve goals is the foundation of humans and society. He opposes the dualist separation of the realms of work and ideas. Teleological positing – the conscious and active production of changes by realising subjective intentions in the objective world – is the common feature of the economy and culture. Teleological positing means that ideas are a guiding and goal-setting dimension of work so that culture is immanent in work itself. Lukács argues that mental work creates and communicates ideas as social use-values and is therefore a specific form of teleological positing.
Lukács’ dialectical ontology of society can inspire us to think about the relationship between culture and economy. It provides an ontological foundation for conceiving cultural work as consisting of physical and informational cultural work that form a dialectic. Digital work is then a specific form of cultural work that creates digital media technologies, digital content, or digital data. It consists of physical and informational digital works that are interconnected and organised in the form of various social relations. In contemporary global capitalism, digital work takes on the form of an international division of digital labour.
For Lukács, a specific form of cultural work – ideological labour – creates ideologies. In ideology, an object masks a subject. Ideologies are produced and communicated by concrete humans and groups in specific labour processes and under particular working conditions. With the rise of advertisingfinanced social media platforms, a new form of ideology has emerged that justifies the capitalist Internet by foregrounding the social-use value these media enable in order to mask the commodification of data and the logic of capital accumulation.
For Lukács, class struggle is an essential implication of Marxist theory that aims at overcoming alienation and reification. He argues with Marx that alienation can only be abolished through social struggles, which includes ideological struggles (1986b, 653). Alienation can ‘only be sublated by a fundamental economic-political-social revolution of the whole system as general and objective mass phenomenon’23 (698). The bottom line of the political economy of the contemporary landscape of cultural and digital labour is that we need political struggles for an alternative Internet and alternative media that are redesigned within an alternative political and societal framework.
Lukács’ Ontology allows us to understand the broader totality of capitalism and how its moments are related. Teleological positing is an ontological concept that shows how the economy and culture are connected. All culture is posited with specific purposes, which shows that it always has an economic dimension, although it is not only economic, but has as meaning efects all over society. Lukács also integrates the notion of reification that he introduced in History and Class Consciousness into the Ontology. Teleological positing in class-based society reverses means and ends so that exploitation, domination and ideological control emerge as attempts to instrumentalise humans. The tasks that remain are social struggles that aim to overcome class and domination.
Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar
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