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Georg Lukacs, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic. Translated by Esther Leslie, with an Introduction by John Rees and a Postface by Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso, 2000.
As John Rees (as well as Laszlo Illes, whose introduction to the Hungarian edition of Lukacs's text is also included in this volume) points out in the introduction to Tailism and the Dialectic, this text may necessitate a reevaluation of our assumptions concerning Lukacs's intellectual development after the publication of History and Class Consciousness (1-2, 40). Written in 1925 or 1926 (1, 39), this newly discovered text demonstrates that rather than abandoning the views expressed in History and Class Consciousness immediately after its condemnation by the official, Soviet-dominated communist movement, Lukacs was defending this work as late as two or three years later. Arato and Breines have pointed out that the "Lukacs debate" has to be understood in terms of the broader movement towards a "Bolshevization" of the Third International that aimed at the elimination of all internal dissent (1979, 186). Tailism and the Dialectic shows that Lukacs's first reaction to these developments was to criticize them in the name of Bolshevism itself.
Even more important, however, Tailism and the Dialectic illustrates that-as both John Rees and Slavoj Zizek, who has written a provocative postface to this volume, point out (27, 152-3)-Lukacs's commitment to a critical Marxist theory was not satisfied by the more modest, and arguably more innocuous, role of "cultural critique." As Lukacs makes clear in his response to its critics, History and Class Consciousness and its discussion of reification were not intended as a piece of "cultural criticism" but, above all, as a contribution to the political vision and strategy of the working-class movement (47-8). In this sense John Rees is right to point out that History and Class Consciousness created an opening for the rethinking of emancipatory politics on the basis of Marx's concept of alienation (16).
The critics Lukacs is responding to in Tailism and the Dialectic are the Soviet philosopher Abram Deborin and the Hungarian philosopher and Lukacs's comrade in the Hungarian Communist party, Laszlo Rudas. Before we discuss the main arguments of this text we have to point out, however, that Verso's edition provides, in...