By David Black
100 years of ‘History and Class Consciousness’
History and Class Consciousness, by the Hungarian communist philosopher, Georg Lukács, was published in 1923. The book drew a hostile reaction from the ideologists of the 1920s Comintern. That it did is ironic, given today Lukács is blamed by the Far Right for originating ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘critical race theory’ and other alleged wokenesses. Certainly Lukács’s book influenced the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and other cultural folk-devils, but I am unaware of any conspiracy theorist who appears to have understood a word of it.
Lukács highlighted a central insight by Marx which appeared to have been forgotten by most post-Marx Marxism: that advanced capitalism doesn’t just ‘rob’ the worker through extracting quantities of surplus-value; it also appropriates living labour in a qualitative inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this development as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’
Lukács takes up Marx’s theory of ‘metabolism’, which addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. Lukács analyzes how in capitalism, work, as a social-metabolic process, is reified and fragmented in a way that makes people incapable of recognizing the world beyond their own particular tasks as being of their own making. People are rendered passive and contemplative, no matter how ‘busy’ they are. The expert (or ‘virtuoso’) ‘lapses into a contemplative attitude vis-à-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties’:
‘This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their “owner” and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s “lack of convictions”, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’
As Guy Debord puts it in Comments of the Society of the Spectacle (1988): ‘For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations…’ Debord adds that these journalists are often in the precarious position of having to serve a range of interests they depend on for remuneration and the flow of information they rely on: that of the newspaper proprietor, broadcaster, political party, corporation, church, university, security agency, etc:
‘It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.’
The ‘lack of conviction’ can acquire the optics of loss of conviction, as evidenced by lurches in political loyalties from Left to Right or (less often, it has to be said) vice-versa. This unedifying move is tempting for the hack who is running out of things to say and stories to tell, because switching sides opens up a whole new spectrum to roam in.
Reification Analytica
In a recent essay, Christian Fuchs argues that Lukács’s critique of ideology and reified consciousness ‘remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data.. [It] allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification.’
Big date analytics embodies the latest tendency towards quantification of everything in society. Algorithms and mathematical analysis are applied to the data that is scraped and hoovered-up from the internet. By identifying patterns, relations and correlations it can predict human behaviour for purposes of surveillance, management and control. Fuchs quotes the former editor of the Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, as a representative of the uncritical fetishism of developments in big data. Anderson claims the new developments will bring about the ‘end of theory’: ‘With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves […] [When] faced with massive data, this [traditional] approach to science – hypothesize, model, test – is becoming obsolete.’
What applies to scientific research may also apply to journalism and may constitute the same dangers. Fuchs argues that the positivism about quantitative methodology disregards ‘ethics, morals, critique, theory, emotions, affects, motivations, worldviews, interpretations, political assessments, power, social struggles, or contradictions’. As the social sciences and humanities are colonised by computer science and business studies, critical theory and critical thinking generally are effectively rooted out.
On the other hand…
Whilst recognising that the new technologies are deeply embedded into the structure of capitalist domination, Fuchs sees alternative potentials and forces at work in the realm of digital technologies:
‘Lukács opposed deterministic analyses, which implies that although exploitation and domination are ubiquitous in capitalism, there is always the possibility for critical consciousness and critical action (praxis)… modern technology has created new potentials for co-operation and socialisation.’
The logic of the corporate digital giants is the subjection of the atomised individual to privacy violations, intransparent algorithms, targeted advertising and the like as a design principle. Socialist design would make social media truly social: based on collective production, co-operation and creative commons. It would protect privacy and promote transparency and the openness of algorithms as design principles.
(Christian Fuchs’s essay, ‘History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data’, is published in the journal Communication and Society, 2020)
