From Reification to Critical Theory - 1

From Reification to Critical Theory - 1

The Russian Revolution revolutionized Marxist
theory. It created official Soviet Marxism as well
as its anti-Christ -Western Marxism, Inspired
by the Russian Revolution and the Hungarian
Revolution of 1919, George Lukacs's History and
Class Consciousness ([I9221 197 1) is one of the
foundation texts of Western Marxism. It established
the core and positive heuristic of a new
branch of Marxism, critical theory, by resurrecting
the Hegelian moment of Marx's early works.
Lukacs's essays attacked the "mechanical"
Marxism of the Second International for their
slavish adherence to laws of development that
repressed the human volition upon which they
rested. Both the successful and failed revolutions
highlighted the importance of class consciousness
in the revolutionary process. Class consciousness,
according to Lukacs, is the perspective
the working class would have if it could see
the totality. It is a consciousness imputed to the
working class -not a necessary but an objectively
possible consciousness.
However, Lukacs's lasting contribution was
his analysis of why the working class might not
achieve a view of the whole and thus become a
revolutionary subject. His theory of reification
elaborated P1, that men and women enter relations
which are "indispensable and independent
of their will," by drawing on the analysis of fetishism
of commodities in Capital volume I. Reification
referred to the way in which products
become objects, divorced from their production.
It affects not only commodities but also facts and
relations. It leads to a fragmented, atomized, and
isolated consciousness rather than a revolutionary,
totalizing class consciousness. In The Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts ([I8441
1975), which were not available to Lukacs, Marx
described this process as alienation: As the subjective
authorship of production is lost, the product
becomes a power over its producer who then
is alienated from the production process, from
fellow producers and from the essence of the
human species. It is an eloquent testimony to the
coherence and power of the Marxist research
program that Lukacs felt compelled to fill out the
core of Marx's intellectual project by reinventing
and elaborating then unknown writings of Marx

From Imperialism to Dependency - 2

From Imperialism to Dependency - 2

Indeed, one can reconstruct Lenin's argument

as follows. The more international capital becomes

(i.e., the more it does not recognize national

boundaries), the more states will compete

with each other for capital. The autonomy of states

refers to their "freedom" to induce capital to invest

within particular national boundaries. The

changing status of the state in relation to capital

is akin to the transition from serf to wage laborer,

from bondage to formally free labor. In short,

increasing formal autonomy, far from indicating

an increasing strength of the state, reflects a

transformation in the character of its subordination

to capital. This transformation of world capitalism

is reflected in recent theorizing about the

autonomy of the state. Such a vision of the world

economy sheds light on current interest in "dependent

development" and "bringing the state

back in" (Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol

1985). But if my analysis is correct, to recognize

the formal autonomy of the state is also to recognize

its actual weakness in the present configuration

of world capitalism.

What, then, is the significance of imperialism?

Imperialism is the vehicle though which capitalism

becomes truly international, whereby it plants

itself in economically underdeveloped countries

and from there repatriates profits to core countries.

But once capitalism has established itself at

a world level, direct political control of less developed

countries is no longer necessary and colonialism

loses its raison d'etre. The external

constraints of capitalism become internalized

within countries in the form of class alliances and

class formation (Cardoso and Faletto 1979). As

Warren (1980), has put it, imperialism is the pioneer

of capitalism, or turning Lenin on his head,

capitalism is the highest stage of imperialism.