Social Scientist

Lukács, Lenin, and the Actuality of the RevolutionAuthor(s): Prabhat Patnaik

Source: Social Scientist , Vol. 46, No. 1-2 (January–February 2018), pp. 3-10
Published by: Social Scientist

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 Lukács, Lenin, and
the Actuality of the Revolution

Prabhat Patnaik

The purpose of this note is to look at certain formulations in Györg Lukács’

little booklet called Lenin, published in 1924, shortly after Lenin’s death,
and to examine whether their validity extends beyond the specific historical
context in which they were made, and the specific theoretical perspective
which Lukács had at the time and within which they were made.

Preliminary Remarks
Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, was a landmark
in the development of Marxist theory. It was also hugely controversial. One
of the sharpest ‘official’ attacks on it came from Grigory Zinoviev, then
President of the Communist International, at the Fifth Congress of the
International in 1924, when he accused Lukács of ‘theoretical revisionism’.
Lukács himself was later self-critical about History and Class Consciousness,
and grew out of the position he had taken there. He described his views of
that time as ‘messianic utopianism’, and made the specific criticism about
History and Class Consciousness that it had treated nature as a societal cate-
gory. What this meant was that the book had downplayed the man–nature
dialectic by denying its autonomy, and hence, denying any determining role
for the economic element. The starting point for a study of the role of the
economy is the man–nature dialectic, which is a major driving force behind
technological progress and hence the development of social productive
forces. It is ipso facto therefore a major driving force behind the changing
economic arrangements that the development of productive forces entails.
Hence an assimilation of nature as a societal category meant a one-sided
emphasis on the man–man dialectic, to the exclusion of the autonomous
element in the development of the economic factor. Lukács was to develop a
more comprehensive Marxist theoretical position, taking account of his own
critique of his early work, in The Young Hegel which was published in 1938, a
full fifteen years after History and Class Consciousness, and which interestingly
was subtitled ‘Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics’.
But his book Lenin, published just a year after History and Class
Consciousness, was at too early a stage in this intellectual journey to show
any significant departure from the positions taken in the earlier work. This is
evident from the very first sentence with which the book begins: ‘Historical
materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.’ Historical material-
ism, which is a ‘scientific’ way of understanding human history (even though 3

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 Social Scientist

the term ‘scientific’ is not to be understood the way Bukharin had done in his
Vol. 46 / Nos. 1–2 / January–February 2018

Historical Materialism, which Lukács had criticised), is here simply derived

from the concept of the proletarian revolution. No doubt, one can argue
that arriving at historical materialism becomes possible only from the prole-
tarian standpoint, since the proletariat alone, being an oppressed class with
a Promethean role to play in abolishing all class exploitation, have nothing
to fear from scientific advance and hence stand for such advance, while the
standpoint of the ruling classes, on the contrary, promotes conservatism and
obfuscation, and becomes a roadblock on the path of scientific progress in
the matter of understanding social development. (Indeed, let alone vulgar
economy, even classical political economy had seen the bourgeois order as
the end of history.) But that is quite different from a perception of historical
materialism exclusively as the theory of the proletarian revolution.
Lukács himself, in a postscript to Lenin written in 1967, made this
point:
This work is a pure product of the mid-twenties. . . . The first sentence itself
demonstrates the prejudices of the time: ‘Historical materialism is the theory
of the proletarian revolution.’ No doubt this is the expression of an important
determinant of historical materialism. But equally certainly it is not the only,
not the determination of its essence. And Lenin, for whom the actuality of the
proletarian revolution formed the thread of thought and practice, would have
raised the most passionate protest against any attempt to reduce to a single
dimension and to cramp the real and methodological wealth – the social uni-
versality – of historical materialism, by such a ‘definition’.

Critics of Lukács often see Lenin as an effort on his part to mend fences
with the ‘official’ Communist leadership of the time by writing an adula-
tory book on Lenin. But it is clear from this very first sentence of Lenin that
Lukács had not compromised with, let alone abandoned, the theoretical
position he had taken in History and Class Consciousness.
Lukács’ Lenin, despite being rooted, as he says, in the ethos of the
mid-twenties, presents a picture of the relation between theory and prac-
tice, a picture derived from Lenin’s life and work, whose validity transcends
the context of that period itself. According to this picture, ‘concrete anal-
ysis of concrete conditions’ (which Lenin had emphasised as the essence
of Marxism) ‘is not an opposite of “pure” theory but the culmination of
genuine theory, its consummation– the point where it breaks into practice’.
‘Practice’ here of course means revolutionary practice. Just as the
dichotomy between theory and practice is bridged in Lukács’ formulation,
likewise the dichotomy between revolutionary practice and practice in
general is also bridged, which means that every practical issue of the time is
looked at from the perspective of the revolution. This is what Lukács means
by emphasising the ‘actuality of the revolution’, which, he says, occupied
4 centrality in Lenin’s thought.

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 Lukács, Lenin, and the Actuality of the Revolution

The Actuality of the Revolution

Prabhat Patnaik
Lukács’ conception of theory, namely that the highest level of development
of theory is when it breaks into practice, and his conception of the centrality
of the ‘actuality of the revolution’, which he underscores through his reading
of Lenin (and the whole book is really built upon this), are of course closely
connected. Theoretical development, to a point where it breaks into practice,
necessarily presupposes taking revolution as a practical project, i.e. accord-
ing centrality to the actuality of the revolution. And taking revolution as a
practical project – or taking the actuality of the revolution as the point of
departure from which all practical issues of the time are to be judged and to
which all theoretical development must lead up – was, according to him, the
perspective of Lenin, in contrast to all other revolutionary leaders of his time.
Lukács considers Hilferding, and certainly Rosa Luxemburg, to have
been superior to Lenin in their command over economics. He has the high-
est praise for Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation and imperialism
for its dialectical character, as expressed in its understanding that capitalist
accumulation can occur only on a soil, viz. its pre-capitalist setting, which
it is simultaneously in the process of continuously destroying. And yet,
notwithstanding the brilliance of Luxemburg’s theory which he admires,
Lukács considers Lenin to have been the greater theorist, because he devel-
oped theory to the point where it could break into practice in a way that
Luxemburg (not to mention Hilferding) did not.
Taking revolution as a practical project to which both theory and
practice must be related does not mean a belief in the imminence of revo-
lution. The centrality of the actuality of the revolution in Lenin’s thought
did not by any means arise from his thinking of the revolution as being
imminent. In fact, shortly before the February Revolution, according to
Krupskaya’s Memories of Lenin, Lenin was speaking to a group about the
approaching revolution, and he ended his speech by saying, ‘I do not know
if the approaching revolution will arrive in my life-time.’ Within days of
that speech, literally, the February Revolution had broken out. A belief in
the imminence of the revolution, in other words, has to be distinguished
from an methodological position based on the actuality of the revolution.
In fact, one can go further. The centrality of the actuality of the rev-
olution for Lenin’s thought, and hence, as Lukács suggests, for thought
that must always inform the Marxist revolutionary movement, does not
necessarily presuppose the specific existence of a revolutionary conjuncture
or a revolutionary situation. It is certainly true that in his time Lenin had
seen world revolution as having come not just on the historical agenda,
but on the immediate practical agenda as well. Towards the end of his life,
however, when he wrote Better Fewer But Better, he appeared to have turned
away from the prospects of a European revolution and put greater hopes on
China and India, even suggesting that since Russia, China and India together
accounted for a big chunk of the world’s population, the victory of the world 5

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 Social Scientist

revolution was assured. Lukács also notes in his 1967 Postscript that within
Vol. 46 / Nos. 1–2 / January–February 2018

a few years of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had already realised that the
kind of conjuncture that had made the Bolshevik Revolution possible and
that had presaged a world revolution, as noted by him in his speech to the
Second Congress of the Communist International, no longer existed.
In the period after the Second World War, even inter-imperialist
rivalry, which Lenin had seen as being central to the conjuncture in which
he had visualised the march towards a world revolution, has become muted.
The reason for such muting was initially the overwhelming dominance of
the US (which some writers referred to as a state of ‘super-imperialism’),
and subsequently the coming into being of an international finance capital
as the chief actor in world capitalism, which is specifically opposed to any
partitioning of the world that would impede its free cross-border flows
and that inter-imperialist rivalry typically engenders. In other words, it is
not just that a world revolution is not imminent today, as it appeared for a
while to be in Lenin’s time, but the very conjuncture in which it appeared
to have come on to the practical agenda in Lenin’s time no longer exists.
Does that then mean that according centrality to the actuality of the rev-
olution today would be erroneous reasoning? The answer is clearly ‘no’.
If the actuality of the revolution is seen as the basis for the develop-
ment of theory and of practice in general, then neither the question of the
imminence of revolution, nor even the question of its being on the practical
agenda at the time, makes any difference to this fact. The actuality of the
revolution as the methodological point of departure constitutes the essence
of Lenin’s thought; and Lenin’s greatness, according to Lukács, lay in the
fact that while it must constitute the essence of all Marxist revolutionary
thought, Lenin was quite unique among his contemporaries in giving
expression to this requirement.
The actuality of the revolution as the point of departure for the devel-
opment of theory and for practice in general, which Lukács considers the
essence of Marxism, represents a completely different approach from using,
say, ethical considerations, even what one may consider revolutionary
ethical considerations (as opposed to bourgeois or petty-bourgeois ethics),
as the basis of practice. The debate over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk clearly
exemplified this distinction. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Left
Communists, of whom Bukharin was the most prominent representative
at the time, opposed the treaty on the grounds of revolutionary ethics:
that a victorious proletarian revolution could not make compromises
with German imperialism. But for Lenin, the survival and advance of the
revolution as a practical project demanded the treaty: the actuality of the
revolution as the basis for practical decision was more important to him
than any consideration of revolutionary ethics in general.
This was not just a matter of realpolitik, as is often suggested; it was
6 more a question of redeeming the promise of the revolution to the people.

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 Lukács, Lenin, and the Actuality of the Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution had put forward the slogan of ‘land, peace and

Prabhat Patnaik
bread’; it owed to the people to deliver on these slogans, and a continuation
of the war would have been reneging on them. The actuality of the revo-
lution, in other words, is not a triumph of realpolitik over ethics; it entails
a specific conception of ethics, an ethics embedded in the actuality of the
revolution. The contrast is not between realpolitik or ‘pragmatism’ and
ethics, but between an ethics derived from the conception of the revolution
as a practical project and an abstract revolutionary ethics.
Some may argue that emphasising the actuality of the revolution also
underlay the imposition of a one-party dictatorship in the Soviet Union,
which a commitment to an abstract revolutionary ethics that recognised the
inviolable need for a multiplicity of parties, as the Bolsheviks themselves had
always done prior to the revolution, i.e. the need for not suppressing other
parties in the name of preserving the revolution, would have prevented.
Against this ‘however’, one can argue that the one-party dictatorship arose
not because of according centrality to the actuality of the revolution, but
because of not according adequate centrality to it, owing to a lack of under-
standing of the requirement of the revolution, of the fact that one-party
dictatorship which is supposed to defend the revolution also constitutes a
severe threat to it. Lenin became seized of this threat only towards the end
of his life, and his article, ‘The Trade Union Question and the Mistakes of
Trotsky and Bukharin’, was the only serious expression of his concern over
the threat to the revolution arising from excessive centralisation of power
(other than his Last Will and Testament and the Addendum to it). The point
to note, however, is that the mistake lay not in according centrality to the
actuality of the revolution, but in being insufficiently aware of its demands,
of which we have greater understanding today than at that time.
Lenin’s personal life and behaviour too, as Lukács emphasised, was
informed by an ethics derived from the actuality of the revolution, different
from the ethics that had informed the lives of revolutionaries before him
or in his time, of whom Eugene Levine could be taken as a classic example.
Levine had famously paraphrased the words used by a Prussian general
about soldiers, to say about Communist revolutionaries: ‘We Communists
are dead men on leave.’ Lukács, not in Lenin but elsewhere, contrasted this
view, and the asceticism and deliberate austerity in the life of a revolutionary
that it demanded, with Lenin’s attitude that celebrated the normality of life
in all its exuberance. Lenin’s attitude in this sphere was in keeping with his
view of the revolution as a practical project, and his ethics derived from it.
It may not be out of place here to see this contrast even in the contrast-
ing personal responses of Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin to rather similar sit-
uations that both had faced – a contrast that has often been cited to Lenin’s
disadvantage. When the workers’ uprising was failing in Berlin in January
1919, Rosa Luxemburg was asked by her comrades to leave Berlin for a safer
place of refuge; but she refused and stayed with the defeated workers, to be 7

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 Social Scientist

captured and killed. In the ‘July days’ in 1917, on the other hand, when the
Vol. 46 / Nos. 1–2 / January–February 2018

Bolsheviks were being hunted down in the wake of what was considered a
failed revolutionary uprising (which, Trotsky underscores, was not planned
by the Bolsheviks), Lenin had escaped to Finland to avoid arrest. The fact
that Luxemburg had stayed with the victims of counter-revolution (despite
not having supported the workers’ uprising that provoked it), while Lenin
had escaped, is often used by the latter’s critics to denigrate him.
But Lenin’s conduct derived entirely from his focus on the actuality
of the revolution. It was important for the revolution that he should leave
Russia, and he did. It was important for the revolution that he should leave
Russia to return another day to fight for the revolution, which he did. It had
nothing to do with his personal courage or nobility. On the contrary, those
who denigrate him for his conduct do so in the name of an abstract revolu-
tionary ethics, which has nothing to do with the actuality of the revolution.
These critics fail to understand that Marxism sees revolution as a practical
project, and therein lies its specificity.
Lukács certainly saw the actuality of the revolution as being central
not only to Lenin’s thought but to Marxism, and admired Lenin for having
embodied this perspective to a degree that no other revolutionary had done
since Marx. The question that arises, however, is the following: was this a
result of his ‘mid- (nineteen) twenties’ position, of which History and Class
Consciousness was an expression? Was according centrality to the actuality
of the revolution, as Lukács did in Lenin, which he attributed to Lenin
and for which he admired Lenin, merely a part of the thinking of the early
Lukács? Or was it something that would survive the transition from the
early to the late Lukács, from the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness
to the Lukács of The Young Hegel? Let us turn to this question now.
In discussing this question, we have to go beyond judging individuals
like Lenin and Luxemburg and look at the matter generally: the totality of
Marxist theoretical endeavour must be to develop theory to the point where
it breaks into practice, which means that this endeavour, in its totality, must
be informed by the actuality of the revolution. Likewise, the Marxist posi-
tion on a range of practical issues of the time must be determined keeping
in mind the actuality of the revolution. The actuality of the revolution, in
short, must be the criterion that determines the totality of the development
of Marxist theory and practice. Not that every individual theoretical advance
should self-consciously relate itself to the actuality of the revolution; nor
should its validity be judged on the basis of some preconceived idea about
what is demanded by the actuality of the revolution. Obviously, the usual
test for judging the validity of a scientific theory must be applied in its case,
but the Marxist discourse must always be engaged in drawing out the impli-
cations of all theoretical advances for the actuality of the revolution.
Looked at this way, the criterion of the actuality of the revolution is
8 not necessarily linked to any ‘messianic utopianism’; nor does it entail

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 Lukács, Lenin, and the Actuality of the Revolution

any commitment to the view that ‘historical materialism is the theory of

Prabhat Patnaik
the proletarian revolution’. What it suggests is that theoretical advances
within the tradition of historical materialism must be made to relate to the
actuality of the revolution. Indeed, according centrality to the actuality of
the revolution is a means of overcoming all dualism: between theory and
practice, between revolutionary and non-revolutionary practice, between
‘identity’ politics and revolutionary politics, between realpolitik and ‘princi-
pled politics’, and between ‘reform’ and revolution. And Lukács’ view that
this is central to Marxism can scarcely be disputed on the grounds of the
so-called ‘one-sidedness’ of his early theoretical position.

Illustrating the Argument

The difference between applying a general ethical criterion and the criterion
of the actuality of the revolution for determining a political stand is best
illustrated by referring to the position on globalisation that is taken today by
several major strands of the international Left. The fact that the Left always
stands for internationalism, the fact that a retreat to any kind of ‘nationalism’
is fraught with the danger of strengthening domestic reaction, has led many
on the Left to see the current phenomenon of globalisation as a positive
development. True, it occurs under the hegemony of globalised finance cap-
ital, but the objective, they argue, must be to overcome this hegemony with-
out retreating from globalisation, i.e. without different countries delinking
from globalisation and retreating into ‘nationalism’. The objective, in short,
according to this view, must be to go beyond ‘bourgeois internationalism’ to
proletarian internationalism without retreating into any form of nationalism.
This position, which appears attractive on general ethical grounds, does
not, however, take revolution as a practical possibility. There is very little in
today’s world by way of coordinated international working class struggles;
and there is absolutely nothing by way of coordinated international peasant
struggles. Waiting for a global uprising through coordinated international
working class struggles, therefore, is like ‘waiting for Godot’ in Samuel
Beckett’s famous play. It is to postpone any uprising against finance-led
globalisation into the infinitely distant future. Adherence to a general eth-
ical position that sees virtue only in a global uprising against globalisation
amounts in effect, therefore, to an abandonment of the revolutionary project
for the foreseeable future. This, ironically, has the effect of pushing the work-
ing class in every country, which has been severely hit by globalisation, into
supporting fascist and semi-fascist forces which rave against globalisation,
but have little by way of any concrete programme to improve the conditions
of the workers except by exporting unemployment to other countries. It
amounts, in short, to abandoning the actuality of the revolution.
By contrast, taking the movement of workers and peasants within partic-
ular countries forward, effecting a worker–peasant alliance against globalisa-
tion and an alternative agenda that necessarily must entail a degree of delink- 9

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 Social Scientist

ing from globalisation, and in the process strengthening the nation-state that
Vol. 46 / Nos. 1–2 / January–February 2018

now bases itself on an alternative class alliance, is the direction of progress

that the criterion of the actuality of the revolution would indicate. But failure
to see this on the part of major strands of the Left has greatly weakened the
Left globally, and allowed fascist and semi-fascist forces to come to the fore
(though there are indications, first with the Sanders campaign, and then with
the Melenchon campaign, that this flawed perception may be changing).
There is, however, a deeper issue here. The actuality of the revolution
must mean, as it meant for Lenin, the actuality of the world revolutionary
process. This must mean an understanding that different countries in the
world must pass through different stages of revolution, based on different
and changing class alliances. In particular, the revolutionary process in the
third world where substantial numbers of traditional petty producers and
peasants still exist, though they are daily getting more and more squeezed by
the process of globalisation, must follow a different trajectory from that in the
advanced countries. This trajectory must entail a degree of delinking from
the process of globalisation as it currently exists – that is, from the hegemony
of globalised finance capital. It must, therefore, entail some revival of the
inclusive anti-imperialist nationalism that had informed their earlier struggle
for national independence from foreign rule. Not to see this nationalism
as different from the aggressive aggrandising nationalism that was used by
metropolitan capitalist powers in their imperialist project during the period
of intense inter-imperialist rivalry, when finance capital had been nation-
based and had used as its ideology the ‘glorification of the national idea’ (as
Hilferding had put it), is to miss the significance of imperialism.
Lenin had expressed his reservations on the slogan of the United
States of Europe because of his concern with the actuality of revolution,
i.e. because the revolutionary movement necessarily developed unevenly
even among similarly placed countries (as in Europe), so that tying their
revolutionary upsurges into a single synchronous whole would have been
detrimental to the revolutionary cause. This is far more true when we are
talking not of more or less similar countries but of vastly dissimilar coun-
tries, such as those of the metropolis and of the third world, especially in
the context of imperialism, which continues to exist even today though in
an altered form. Re-centering the actuality of the revolution at the core of
Marxist thought, and judging all practical issues of the day with reference
to the actuality of the revolution, constitutes today a precondition for the
revival of the Marxist movement, which alone can take mankind from the
current quagmire into which it has been pushed by neo-liberal capitalism.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New

Delhi.
10

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