Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought by György Lukács

Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought Reviews

• 
  Robert Maisey

  I really enjoyed this short, reasonably accessible (if you can forgive the slightly dated 1920s Marxist prose - everything is *concrete*) text.
  
  Brilliant introduction to Leninist dialectics as a mode of thought, as opposed to a set of prescriptions. There's nothing in here about how you to organise your party or how to sell your newspaper, but lot's about how to engage analytically with your circumstances and translate that analysis into practical action.
  
  Would recommend.
• 
  sologdin

  Written in part as an elegy upon Lenin's decease, and in part as insurance against author's own impending liquidation--for his magnum opus,
  History and Class Consciousness, had been "condemned by Soviet authorities in 1924 at the fifth World Congress of the Comintern" (Jay,
  Marxism & Totality, at 103)--this book is a funny little thing.
  
  Jay avers that even Lukacs' enemies recognized the HCC as "the first book in which philosophical Marxism ceases to be a cosmological romance and thus a surrogate 'religion' for the lower classes" (loc. cit. at 102). According to Kolakowski, no friend of marxism, the HCC "criticized Engels' idea of the dialectic of nature" and "disputed the theory of 'reflection' which Lenin had declared to be the essence of Marxist epistemology" (Kolakowski,
  Main Currents of Marxism: The Breakdown, at 260). In jolly commie land, that means your ass.
  
  It is unlikely that this slim volume can be properly understood without reference to the HCC; I'm not going to make that reading here--it's too hard. But one should rest assured that all of the generic hegelocommietalk herein actually signifies something.
  
  In this context, Lukacs publishes this study of Lenin. It begins poorly with a bizarre declaration that "historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution" (9). Um, yeah? We can measure "the stature of a proletarian thinker" with reference to "the extent to which he is able accurately to detect beneath the appearances of bourgeois society those tendencies towards proletarian revolution which work themselves in and through it to their effective being and distinct consciousness" (id.). In what can only be considered a very limited or backhanded compliment, Lukacs submits that "by these criteria Lenin is the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working-class movement since Marx" (id.). The remainder of the book works through standard marxist categories of analysis in evidencing this thesis.
  
  The key concern is that the "actuality of the revolution" is the "core of Lenin's thought" (11). This means that theory is transformed into praxis by the dialectical revolutionist. So, against the Mensheviks and Bernstein/Kautsky types, Lenin did not accept that the backward Russian empire was unsuitable for socialism for lack of successful bourgeois revolution in economics or politics; rather, "the bourgeoisie had ceased to be a revolutionary class" having allied with the "old ruling powers," a "compromise which springs from mutual fear of a greater evil and not a class alliance based on common interests" (20). This sleight of mind allows the bolsheviks to seize the state, despite the prior dispositions of marxist theory to the contrary.
  
  Lenin is presented as inferior to Hilferding in economics and to Luxemburg on the issue of imperialism--but Lenin trumps because of "his concrete articulation of the economic theory of imperialism with every political problem of the present epoch" (41). In the penultimate chapoter, Lenin is presented as a compromiser, practitioner of realpolitik, contrary to the posturing of Herr Pipes in his sophomoric histories.
  
  1967 coda backs off the primary text in some ways, suggesting that Lenin's theory of imperialism is invalid after all (91). Some odd references to Shakespeare in the postscript, and a surreal fundamentalist bit about "human salvation" early in the primary essay (11).
  
  Jay presents this volume as one in which "virtually all residues of his ultra-leftist sectarianism were purged from the argument" (loc. cit. at 120). Kolakowski, for his part, correctly summarizes this text as using "the notion of Totalitat to describe the core of Lenin's doctrine," but then goes way off the rails into disingenuous fantasy by suggesting Lukacs' position is that Lenin "discerned the revolutionary trend of the age independently of particular facts and events, or rather in the facts themselves, and united all current issues" (loc. cit. at 267).
  
  Anyway, recommended for western marxists and rabid but bored anti-communists.
• 
  Tyler

  After the Soviet state arose and before Stalin's iron heel came down this fleeting snapshot captured a true Marxist revolution. Lukacs's polemic is at once too good to dismiss and too hostile to its own ideas to redeem. Such contradictory moments within the same work make up a dialectic whose relevance to socialism just may be more important than the book itself. But how so can a book negate its own content?
  
  The reading gives a trenchant, brilliant explanation of the ideas that, exactly 100 years ago, guided the Russian Revolution. The theme exalts Lenin's genius, with Lukacs telling the story of how one man breathed life and fire into a socialist uprising. But this theme comes back to haunt his exposition. The portrait he hangs in the pantheon of Marxist thinkers offers viewers a subjective guarantee of objective theoretical advances. In the postscript, written decades later, the true flaw of the earlier presentation battens upon the unwary like vampires at sunset.
  
  Lukacs identifies ideas too closely with persons. A more precise title might say, "Lenin: A Study on the Synthesis of his Thought." The admiring writer lauds Lenin for certain ideas better associated with Trotsky. The "unity" in the title is actually Lenin's program. But in these pages a reader could be forgiven for imagining the revolution to be the work of a single superhero. Without Lenin the uprising could not have succeeded. On the other hand, he didn't cook it up out of thin air.
  
  All's the worse then, when after decades in Stalinist parties and concentration camps, this writer pens a postscript in which he repudiates both Marx and Lenin over eleven sloppy pages. The earlier logic of argumentation gives way to gauzy impressionism. Here Lukacs turns Lenin into a grandfatherly caricature, the somewhat doting and batty darling of the post-Stalinist kindergarten.
  
  At the heart of the postscript lies the notion that there was no alternative to Stalin. Here the author's quest for superheroes backfires. His point hinges on the relevance of counterfactuals, the "what-if" here pertaining to the Left Opposition. Because they so completely vanish as the negative pole in his appraisal of Stalin, Lukacs's assertion of the inapplicablility of counterfactuals to the study of history takes on the aura of a factual determination. The author's earlier none-other-than-Lenin now implies none-other-than-Stalin.
  
  Such studied amnesia turns those final pages into a sleight of hand. But the blindness runs deeper. The author treats the whole interwar period as a blank space yielding no historical facts. Lukacs informs us that Lenin's theory of imperialism has been disproven. After World War I, he writes, no other worldwide imperialist wars predicted by Lenin occurred -- again with the amnesia. The non-historical, post-Marx world of Hungary in 1967 becomes the repository of a spotless future free of the past.
  
  The author writes off Lenin as a dead horse. It reminds me of a masking of Lenin's original work by Penguin Classics in
  The State and Revolution. Heigh-ho! Today's pundits get so bent out of shape about socialism. But if the horse is dead, my how they do keep beating on it.
  
  For the rest of us, readers can judge from the juxtaposition of the author's contrasting worldviews the potency of the respective ideas. There lies the value to the study of Marxism of this unique and engaging discourse.
  .
• 
  Henrique Valle

  Depois preciso reler, li com a minha bunda
• 
  A. Redact

  Marking this one as read and writing something to help me remember that I've read it, but I don't feel qualified at this point to make a comprehensive judgment about the book. I lack a firm enough understanding of the actual historical events and the competing historiographies of the USSR to critically evaluating Lukacs' own interpretations and assessments of events and party leadership.
  
  However, I found Lukacs' discussion of the role of the dialectical entanglement of imperial war (i.e. the senseless expansionist violence of WWI) and revolution in Lenin's thought to be fascinating. I feel like there's a semi-analogous relationship (or might be in the near-future, as material conditions deteriorate) between coming climate collapse and revolution now. At this point we have little reason to believe that this formation of the neoliberal "democratic" state has the capacity to divert global social collapse in the coming decades. Under current conditions the neoliberal state seems to still have the capacity to fight off any kind of immanent left-wing attack from within its own institutions, but it has no ability to act on the scale and with the agility necessary to avoid the coming collapse.
  
  If this is true, we, as citizens of neoliberal nations, appear to be in a position of direct antagonism with our own countries--if we allow them to persist, effectively preventing any kind of change necessary to avoid complete social collapse in the near future, we are allowing them to kill the future of our children's children. Like the conscripted workers sent to die on the frontlines of WWI, we are in a position where a revolutionary attack on the state would be an act of self-defense, not aggression. They have limited our options to us and our future or them and their continued, violent inaction.
  
  It's unclear whether or not the starkness of this choice will ever be comprehensible on a wide enough scale to motivate revolutionary struggle against the states that have trapped us in the hot car of climate change. But it's hard to see a way out that doesn't end in either the mass starvation and death of billions of regular people across the globe or a direct and forceful confrontation with the institutions that allow a tiny group of ruling elites to dominate our lives. I think our greatest hope at this point is the inevitable moments of destabilization that are already baked into the climate change timeline that we are locked into, and the opportunities that these moments will present us to possibly avert complete disaster.
• 
  Rhys

  An interesting assessment of Lenin's thought - his theoretical insights combined with the Realpolitik of revolution & civil war.
  
  Quoting Shakespeare, Lukacs summarizes Lenin's approach: "The readiness is all."
  
  
• 
  William West

  This might seem to some like nothing more than a concise explication of the principle themes of Lenin's writings. Indeed, it is that and it functions quite well in that regard. However, it is also much more a work of Lukacsian philosophy than it might at first seem. Whether this makes this short work more or less valuable depends on your opinions regarding Lukacs's brand of Hegelianism.
  
  Throughout the book, Lukacs argues that Lenin's thought distinguishes itself from other Marxists by its focus on the actuality of the revolutionary situation. Lenin's work purges itself of the utopianism and metaphysics that so many thinkers who tackle Marxist dialectics, Lucaks tells us, and "theorizes" about the matters at hand, in the historical situation. This, at first, sounds militantly materialist. Was Lukacs, in fact, an arbiter of Althusserian Maoism, a school of thought that would go on to, indirectly at least, use Lukacs's philosophy as a theoretical punching-bag?
  
  The answer is no. Perhaps Lukacs doesn't want to fully admit it, being a "Marxist materialist" and all, but in fact it is not theory that pierces through to reality for Lucaks, but reality that, because of the interventions of Lenin and his Bolsheviks, reaches the heights of theory. To put it another way, it is not so much that becoming coalesces into being for Lukacs as that being becomes becoming. Material history becomes one with the Idea of the Revolution.
  
  In the afterwards to the text, written in the 1960s, Lukacs bemoans the superhuman image of Lenin constructed by the Stalin regime. But in the same few pages he describes Lenin as a Hegelian superman, in which the individual and collective come together, a thinker in which practice and theory fuse into one.
  
  It is true that Lukacs hated Stalinism, but did not his brand of dialectical messianism not contribute to setting the stage for political absolutism? Lukacs's work reminds me of a philosophical equivalent of the Russian futurist movement which strove to instill a sense of the universal in certain geometric forms. Similarly, Lukacs seeks a philosophical totality through the gyrations of history. We are told that Stalin hated the Soviet avant-garde, yet did not the formalist impulse to deliver all that could be said and known through one image not pave the way for a totalitarian aesthetic in which Stalin's face became that of "the people"?
• 
  Pedro H.

  Publicado em 1925, logo após a morte de Lênin, o livro de Lukács — como reconhecido pelo autor — não é uma investigação sobre as categorias fundamentais do pensamento leniniano, mas antes, uma tentativa de desvelar o seu procedimento como forma de elucidar suas principais contribuições teóricas e políticas, contrapondo o legado de Lênin tanto a seus interlocutores no contexto da Segunda Internacional — em sua incapacidade de ligar a prática cotidiana com a teoria revolucionária, característica comum aos desvios à esquerda e à direita — quanto, de forma implícita, à fetichização de suas categorias que tomava forma no seio da Internacional Comunista.
  É nesse sentido que está a principal contribuição de Lukács, ao demonstrar como a articulação dialética entre Universalidade, totalidade e singularidade subjacente ao pensamento teórico e político de Lênin é o que fundamenta sua praxis enquanto teoria verdadeiramente realizada. Vemos essa realização, por exemplo, nas remissões aos debates sobre: a relação entre organização, consciência e luta; as implicações políticas do imperialismo tanto internamente à classe trabalhadora, quanto na relação entre países no debate sobre a guerra e as lutas de libertação nacional; na mútua relação entre as condições objetivas e subjetivas do processo revolucionário; no papel do partido, dos conselhos e do uso do Estado como instrumento de construção para as bases reais para o socialismo etc. Por esse motivo, o livro de Lukács é um poderoso auxílio a uma leitura não enrijecida do pensamento de Lênin.
  Quanto à edição da Boitempo, seu principal defeito é a falta de notas que digam quais os textos citados pelo autor, explicada talvez pelo momento editorial, que precede a atual minúcia que hoje se vê nos livros da editora.
• 
  Sugarpunksattack Mick

  Extremely sympathetic and brief assessment of Lenin's thought presented as exhibiting a coherence both from work to work, but as the well deserved decedent of Marx and Engels. Lukács presents Lenin as redemming the dialectic of Marx from poor interpretations (think Bernstein 'Evolutionary Socalisim') and moving the dialectic forward. Good introductory text that summarizes each work and is worth reading before diving into primary source material.
• 
  Daniel

  A short but urgent book, and quite enjoyable as a result, although most claims are remarkably sweeping. Nevertheless, many of these do stand up to scrutiny and are animated by the energy of the time in which they were written; as a consequence, the 1967 postscript is a bit drab by comparison.
• 
  Augusto Delgado

  Valid attempt to gather the elements that formed Lenin's framework that updated Marxism during his time, and immediately after the Bolsheviks victory . Unfortunately it falls short, with tangled language (perhaps it's the translation) that makes one long for this book's subject's clarity and straightforwardness.
• 
  Matthew

  It is what it says on the tin, and does the job both very well and very concisely. Very much worth a read to see Lenin's project in overview with a laser focus on the methodology and contributions of Lenin to Marx's thought.
• 
  Pedro Corrêa

  Leitura interessantíssima para aqueles que desejam entender os nexos que ligam e separam revolução burguesa e revolução proletária.
• 
  Eurethius Péllitièr

  While it's a good quick read, it is more simply a justification of Lenin rather than his actual thought (in my opinion) which makes it lack wholistic content (which it accepts in the opening)
• 
  Burak

  Bir yöntem olarak Leninizmi dogmatik ve şabloncu olmayacak şekilde çok iyi anlatan bir eser
• 
  Ella

  Mindblowing
• 
  Lukas Stock

  Lukács may not make you a Leninist, but Lenin’s thought is presented in clear and concise language such that you’ll definitely understand Leninism better.
• 
  Derek

  This short pamphlet is Lukacs at his best. This is a passionate and well reasoned defense of Leninism and a good introduction to understanding some of Lenin's more controversial political choices.
• 
  Helen

  Liked it, but not in a couldn’t put it down sort of way.
  
• 
  Ciro

  No idea what the other reviewer means by calling this 'hagiography' -- if anything that's an accurate description of the 1967 Postscript, that goes on and on about Lenin's wonderful personality. Unfortunately any work that sees Lenin's thought as the continuation of Marxism without calling him a dictator is seen by leftists as dogma, whatever that means.
  
  This work was the first attempt to synthesize Lenin's thought, and probably an impressive achievement for 1924.
  
  Lukacs bases Lenin's conception of the party on "the strictest selection of party members based on proletarian class consciousness" (paraphrased), but that's only correct in the context of building the foundations of the party in the early 1900s (the classic misinterpretation of "What is to be Done?" as timeless dogma) as well as during the period of reaction (1907-1912). In periods of revolutionary upswing like 1905, 1913-14, 1917, Lenin basically took what was the Menshevik position in 1903, precisely because for him party organization was something dynamic and attached to the state of the class struggle, not a fixed principle. Lukacs at least acknowledges this last point, but I think the error betrays an ultra-leftism that I also get from his theory of "the actuality of revolution".
  
  He makes the great point that Lenin's genius isn't based on 'realpolitik' or 'practical cunning' and so on, but on a purely theoretical advantage: making theory concrete. According to Lukacs, for example, Luxemburg's theory of imperialism is more sophisticated from an economic perspective, but Lenin's remains superior because he made it a concrete question, that is, attached it to the political issues of the day. There's a thread running through Lenin's assessment of class forces in Russia, his theory of imperialism, and his revolutionary tactics.
  
  Overall, it's a decent survey, probably mostly limited from the time in which it was written. I wouldn't recommend just because of what I regard as 1. overly academic/eclectic language for an introductory work (what else could Verso market to leftist hipsters?) and 2. an ultra-left interpretation of Lenin's tactics, which might be a result of Lukacs's context (the 1920s), not sure though.
  
• 
  C

  The first 90 pages of this book are primarily hagiography. Which is a shame because overall Lukacs was undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, and certainly one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Marxist thinker of the 20th century. But Lukacs interjects that no, Lenin is in fact the true genius of our time, since Marx. Where as Marx gave us the theoretical cunning to wage class warfare, Lenin consummately put it into practice.
  
  Lenin's true genius, according to Lukacs, was to always be aware of the 'actuality of revolution' at all moments. All his books, essays, and actions, need to be considered in their historical moment, while simultaneously considering how Lenin saw the revolution as actually becoming, not just possible, or inevitable.
  
  The Postscript to the book prevented me from giving it a slightly lower review. Lukacs acknowledges that he was a bit overzealous in his praise of Lenin, and then offers some insightful criticisms both of his own book, and Lenin too. Lenin and Leninism is not a ready made theoretical-practical apparatus that can be applied today, nor does his theory of imperialism have much to tell us. Also Lukacs is quite critical of Stalin, the perversion of Stalinism, and calls for a new practical outlet of Marxian theory.
  
  Overall a good book to read about Lenin in the historical context of the 1920s, but this is certainly not a timeless piece of philosophy, or theoretical insight.
• 
  Jack

  This is a hugely underappreciated piece of work. In less than 100 pages Lukács makes the case that Lenin was a thinker on par with Marx, and the only thinker to be so since Marx at that time.
  
  His use of the dialectic helps the reader in understanding the dialectic itself, and in fact his dialectic cuts against his later self criticisms and establishes a clear break from the Lukács we read in this work, and the Stalinist Lukács of later years.
  
  This is more than just sycophancy; Lukács tackles - briefly as it may be - important questions for revolutionaries today to understand. a highly recommended read (or reread) for all revolutionary socialists.