In his final book The Ontology of Social Being, Lukács (1986) repeats this criticism of Stalinism. He for example speaks in it of ‘Stalin’s brutal manipulation’5 (722) and that ‘Stalin’s ideology brought it about to reify Marxism itself’ (600).6 ‘It is important to note that Stalin in such cases acted based on purely tactical considerations and used the theoretical analysis of the particular historical situation as pure means of propaganda for his already taken decision’ (499).7
Lukács (1991) argues that Stalinism was economically reductionist and focused its politics of how to catch up with and overtake Western capitalism on rapid industrialisation. Questions of socialist democracy were ignored. Stalin argued that the ‘party must commit itself to build the industrial base of socialism with the greatest speed regardless of the human cost to the population and without certainty that these draconian measures would produce the requisite industrial foundation (Lukács 1991, 113). Lukács considers the Soviets that emerged in the Paris Commune of 1871 and in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 as expressions of grassroots socialist democracy (125–126, 144). Stalin reified the dialectic (130) and ideologically dressed up totalitarian bureaucracy that opposes socialist democracy as Marxism: Stalin destroyed ‘every tendency that might act as a precondition for socialist democracy. The Soviet system practically ceased to exist’ (133). Stalinism
brands every dissenting viewpoint as an enemy of the people. Anyone who does not agree with the oficial, tactically determined party decisions is judged as a subversive, or the direct tool of the agents of imperialism. An efort is made to destroy them with the organized means of the government apparatus. That was the method of the Great Purge Trials. […] The preservation of Stalinism is the greatest barrier to the rise of socialist democratization inside the domains of socialism. It is equally the major barrier to international cooperation and the integrating of all people striving for a renaissance of the genuine method of Marx (169).
All knowledge stands in relations to nature and society because humans act within natural and social environments. Lukács considers only art that is a socialist reflection of political life as true art, whereas Adorno and others see such an understanding as instrumental and stress the importance of abstracted, experimental, and autonomous knowledge in art. Lukács understood the notion of reflection (Widerspiegelung) as a realistic mirroring of reality in art. Mirroring is a category that can create the impression that all knowledge strives to be an exact mapping of nature and society.
3.3.4. Adorno on the Truth of Art
In contrast to Lukács, for Theodor W. Adorno (1997) the truth of an artwork lies in an autonomous aesthetic logic that is not subsumed under the logic of domination so that it constitutes a diferent, non-instrumental logic. Art
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Critical Theory of Communication