3.3.3. Lukács and Stalinism
Although Lukács’ Destruction of Reason is silent on Stalinism and the old Lukács’ aesthetic theory glorifies socialist realism that played such an important role in Soviet culture under Stalin, it would be a mistake to characterise Lukács as a Stalinist. In other places he clearly criticises Stalin. While in exile in Moscow, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Afairs (NKVD) accused him of being a spy of the Hungarian police and confined him in the Lubyanka prison in 1941 (Lukács 1983, 115). It is also important to note that Lukács during the Stalinist Rákosi era in Hungary (1949–1956) remained distanced from political appointments and was never a member of the Hungarian Communist Party’s Central Committee (116), whereas he became one of six members of the Central Committee at the time of Hungarian uprising of 1956 (129). He was a political supporter of the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviets and became the minister of culture in Imre Nagy’s reform-communist government that was in ofice from 26 October until 4 November 1956, when the Soviet invasion of Hungary ended the revolution.
In his article Reflections on the Cult of Stalin, Lukács (1962) criticises Stalin’s concept of the dialectic as ideology:
The Stalinist tendency is always to abolish, wherever possible, all intermediate factors, and to establish an immediate connection between the crudest factual data and the most general theoretical propositions. […] Stalin’s unscrupulousness in this matter reached the point of altering the theory itself if necessary. [...] For him, in the name of partiinost, agitation is primary. Its needs determine [...] what science must say and how it must say it. […] In the famous Chapter IV of the Short History, Stalin defines the essence of dialectical and historical materialism. […] Stalin’s propagandistic simplifications (often vulgarizations) at once became the unique and absolutely binding norm and the utmost limit of philosophical investigation. If anyone ventured, appealing for instance to Lenin’s philosophical notes, to go beyond the definitions of Chapter IV or simply to supplement them, he was courting ideological condemnation and could not publish his researches. […] All science and all literature had to serve exclusively the propagandistic demands formulated above, by Stalin himself.
Theodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge
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