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A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic. By Georg Lukács, translated by Esther Leslie, introduction by John Rees, postface by Slavoj Zizek. London, New York: Verso. Cloth 2000, 182 pages, $23; paper 2002, 160 pages, $16.
Lukács's lost manuscript comes to one hundred pages (45-149) of text nestled amidst the commentary of others. The structure of the manuscript is as follows:
I) Problems of Class Consciousness:
1. Subjectivism.
2. Imputation.
3. The peasantry as class.
II) Dialectic of Nature:
1. Exchange of matter with nature.
2. Simple and higher categories of the dialectic.
3. Once again: exchange of matter with nature.
4. For us and for itself.
The text is Lukács's defense of his seminal work History and Class Consciousness (1923) against his principal intellectual attackers in the Comintern, Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas. Lukács argues that his book is a philosophical expression of Bolshevism and characterizes Deborin as a Menshevik and Rudas as a tailist. Lukács convincingly argues that these two, operating with an implicit Kantianism and uncritically importing a limited natural-scientific perspective into Marxist theory, are trapped in a subject-object dualism they cannot overcome and have completely missed the boat on the nature of dialectical consciousness and revolutionary praxis.
In part I, Lukács demonstrates that Deborin and Rudas are caught within a dualism of subject and object and therefore are incapable of addressing the nature of class consciousness, revolutionary praxis (as opposed to fatalism and spontaneity), and the Bolshevik party as the vehicle for the mediation of the objective and subjective dimensions of class struggle (see esp. 56, 63, 65, 67, 72, 75, 76, 79). Lukács argues at length for his conception of "imputed class consciousness"-that is, from the standpoint of the totality of the working-class situation and its interests rather than from that of immediacy. Mediation in contradistinction to immediacy is a central concept for Lukács. Also of note is the natural-scientific perspective of Lukács's opponents, the notion of "laws of history" on the objective side, and subjectivity and consciousness across the great divide.
Part II is of special importance. Lukács's criticisms of Engels's dialectics of nature and his remarks about the "contemplative" nature of scientific experiment have always been controversial, but here we see that the real...