On the one hand, men make their own history. History is the product of human deeds, be they conscious or unconscious. The history of emerging class consciousness is a history of achieving ever more deliberate control over the shape of that history, a deliberate control that will only be fully transparent and voluntary in a society of revolutionary communism. On the other hand, the terms by which men make their history are dictated by inherited material conditions: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Thus Marxists famously claim that history is shaped by laws of evolutionary development.
Georg Lukacs insists that a proper understanding of Marxist history must incorporate these two dimensions—history is the product of human will constrained by structural tendencies bound up with the existing conditions of society.
To take on board only one of these two dimensions—an omnipotent will OR eternal laws—is to think one-sidedly.
Those who believe that history is determined by natural laws (like the overly scientific materialist Marxists) are prone to the dangers of passivity, while those who favor a purely Promethean vision of historical change make the mistake of Great Manism.
In “Class Consciousness” he summarizes the two visions. First, against a vision of history as governed by immutable law:
In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. The objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilized in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, people fail to realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen, flax, etc” (49 in Livingstone)So the problem with the law-based theory of history is that it reproduces a mistaken reification. It forgets that what we call “laws” are themselves human creations and are therefore ultimately subject to human control. By forgetting that fact, we transform something WE create into an ALIEN FORCE that constrains us. “Supply and demand” are not laws of the universe, but artifacts of unintentional human construction.
Second, against a vision of history as the putty of omnipotent will:
In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the “spirit of the people” or in “great men.” It can therefore only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organization would be aesthetic, as if it were a piece of art.Marx transcends these one-sided errors. He shows that history is both created and law-like, subject to the control of human will but characterized by certain structural tendencies.
Lukacs makes this point again in his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat:”
As a result of its incapacity to understand history, the contemplative attitude of the bourgeoisie became polarized into two extremes: on the one hand, there were the “great individuals” viewed as the autocratic makers of history, on the other hand, there were the “natural laws” of the historical environment. They both turn out to be equally impotent—whether they are separated or working together—when challenged to produce an interpretation of the present in all its radical novelty (158).Many socialists—even vulgar Marxists—are too quick to accept a vision of history as governed by natural laws. So doing, they fall into a destructive fatalism. It is critical, therefore, to distinguish “fact” and “tendency” (183). The proletariat, Lukacs argues, is the true revolutionary agent, and as such embodies the dialectical solution to the central problem of German idealism: overcoming the gap between subject and object, between agency and world.
The proletariat consciously makes its own totalizing history, thus combining will and reason, the revolutionary power of the voluntarist agent and the objective reality of a rational order. Lukacs summarizes:
The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the—objective—aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention (149).Very interesting.
What strikes me as also interesting is the similarity between Lukacs’ diagnosis of the two failed, one-sided visions of history, and the dichotomy Tocqueville offers between democratic and aristocratic history. Tocqueville writes in a chapter of Democracy in America titled “On Certain Tendencies Peculiar to Historians in Democratic Centuries:”
Historians who write in aristocratic centuries generally attribute everything that happens to the will and humor of certain individuals, and they are likely to impute the most important revolutions to the merest of accidents. They shrewdly elucidate the smallest of causes and often fail to notice the greatest (569 in the Goldhammer translation).This is a mistake akin to Lukacs’ one-sided bourgeois historian who imagines that great men and contingency drive history. Historians in democratic societies, Tocqueville continues, fall into the opposite extreme:
Most of them attribute almost no influence over the destiny of the species to the individual and no influence over the fate of the people to citizens. On the other hand, they ascribe great general causes to the most insignificant particular facts (569).Like Lukacs, Tocqueville criticizes this deterministic approach to history as yielding a pathetic, helpless passivity:
Thus historians who live in democratic times not only deny certain citizens the power to act on the fate of the people but also deny peoples themselves the ability to shape their own destiny, thereby making them subject to either inflexible providence or a sort of blind fatality. According to such historians, the destiny of every nation is irrevocably fixed by its position, origin, antecedents, and nature, and nothing it does can change that. They see each generation as firmly linked to the preceding one, and in this way they proceed backward in time, from era to era and necessary event to necessary event, all the way back to the origin of the world, forging a long, closely linked chain that encompasses and binds the entire human race (572).Tocqueville favors the aristocratic history at least as a corrective to democratic passivity: “The historians of Antiquity taught men how to command; today’s historians teach little but how to obey.” (Fair enough, but perhaps Tocqueville's famous proclamations of the "providential fact" of democracy make him a teacher of passivity).
Still, I see plenty of truth in the joint Lukacs-Tocqueville diagnosis. We today are slaves of forces the economists purport to understand: Supply and Demand, Bond Spreads, Gresham’s Law.
On the one hand, shouldn’t we believe—with Marx and Lukacs and Tocqueville’s aristocratic historian—that these economic forces are simply inventions of human institutions? Shouldn’t that imply that we can change them should we so desire?
(I distinctly remember failing to understand in 2008 how the entire global economy could collapse all at once. I recall asking my father, an economist “if everyone is bankrupt, can’t we just reset and start over?” I know that was a stupid question, but I'm not entirely sure why).
Yet at the same time, OF COURSE these laws are real. Even if they aren’t fundamental facts of the universe, they are structural tendencies that OF COURSE constrain what we can and should do.
Gramsci says something helpful about this. He writes about the problem of economic “laws:” how can we simultaneously recognize their existence AND their contingency? Gramsci writes:
Given these conditions in which classical economics was born, in order to be able to talk about a new science or a new conception of economic science (which is the same thing), it would be necessary to have demonstrated that new relations of forces, new conditions, new premises, have been establishing themselves, in other words, that a new market has been “determined” with a new “automatism” and phenomenism of its own, which present themselves as something “objective”, comparable to the automatism of natural phenomena. Classical economics has given rise to a “critique of political economy” but it does not seem to me that a new science or a new conception of the scientific problem has yet been possible. The “critique” of political economy starts from the concept of the historical character of the “determined market” and of its “automatism”, whereas pure economists conceive of these elements as “eternal” and “natural”; the critique analyses in a realistic way the relations of forces determining the market, it analyses in depth their contradictions, evaluates the possibilities of modification connected with appearance and strengthening of new elements and puts forward the “transitory” and “replaceable” nature of the science being criticized; it studies it as life but also as death and finds at its heart the elements that will dissolve it and supersede it without fail
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It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by “regularity”, “law”, “automatism” in historical facts. It is not a question of “discovering” a metaphysical law of “determinism”, or even of establishing a “general” law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. Even the law of large numbers, although very useful as a model of comparison, cannot be assumed as the “law” of historical events (412).(See here for more on Gramsci’s views of historical materialism and the balance of agency and determinism). Lukacs and Gramsci hope to make sense of a Marxist theory of history that is simultaneously historicist and rational. That is the permanent problem of dialectical history.
But I suppose the niggling fear for the communist (or any generally sane person) is that we have already reached the end of history, and that the structural regularities that govern bourgeois capitalism are, in fact, here to stay. Perhaps calling market forces mere products of reified consciousness will prove hopelessly utopian. Violently breaking things—a practice I oppose—may be the only way to find out.
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