The life-nerve of the dialectic: György Lukács and the metabolism of space and nature

Abstract

One hundred years that shook the world. This is one way of receiving History and Class Consciousness by György Lukács, a text that is considered by many to be one of the most important in Marxist philosophy and dialectics since its first appearance in 1923. However, in approaching its centenary, how does the focus on dialectics that is at the text’s centre travel to address contemporary interdisciplinary concerns in political economy and radical geography? This article delivers a fresh reading of dialectics in and beyond History and Class Consciousness to distil the relevance of Lukács for contemporary political economists and radical geographers that, it is argued, necessarily lies in engaging with his method and understanding of totality. The focus dwells on totality and the ‘life-nerve’ of the dialectic, referring to the process of interiorising theory and practice in constituting a relational approach to analysing the metabolism of socio-nature. By so doing, the possibilities and limits of both totality and dialectics are revealed to political economists and radical geographers interested in furthering the case for methodological relationalism in their conceptions of the production of space and socio-nature.

Keywords:

• Dialectics
• Lukács
• Marxism
• nature
• relational methods
• socio-nature
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lukács (1925/1972, p. 140, original emphasis). The authors would like to thank the members of the Past & Present Reading Group for the collective intellectual labour in reading György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness and celebrate the space of the group in successfully reproducing a commons contrary to the priorities of income generation within the contemporary neoliberal university, see: https://www.ppesydney.net/past-present-reading-group/. For feedback on earlier drafts, thanks are due to Seamus Barker and Andreas Bieler alongside the three anonymous reviewers of the submission and the Editorial Board at RIPE for their outstanding feedback and support. Finally, the paper was also presented at the 12th Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) workshop, University of Queensland, Brisbane (2-4 February 2022).

2 Here Said is paraphrasing Lukács on the novel form as an expression of ‘transcendental homelessness’, see Lukács (1920/1971, p. 41).

3 Also note Lukács’ rebuke in a public lecture in Milan (1947): ‘Today we see the philosophy of religious atheism in Heidegger and Sartre. In this development, the nihilistic element becomes ever stronger. In parallel with that, these conceptions remain open to every reactionary and decadent spiritual current’ (Lukács 1947/2013, p. 206).

4 Lefebvre (1986, p. 60) remarked, defending Lukács, that ‘the dialectical notion of totality is no more compromised by fascist “totalitarianism” than those of nation and socialism by Hitler’s National Socialism’.

5 The intersections and tensions between Bloch and Lukács are wonderfully presented in Cat Moir’s (2020) translation and interpretive essay.

6 Vico in The New Science (1744/1976, p. 96) affirms: ‘the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modification of our own human mind’, in contrast with, ‘the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows’.

7 The point of difference between the earlier and later stances on this question is that the later Lukács thinks both ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature are historical and societal categories subject to dialectics, whereas earlier he thinks ‘first nature’ is a non-dialectical subject and ‘second nature’ is an ideological illusion of the condition of reification. In both cases, ‘nature’ is a societal category, but the roles of dialectics and labour-as-mediator shift (see Loftus, 2012, pp. 60–65).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sirma Altun

Sirma Altun was awarded her PhD from the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, for which she received the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) Award for Dissertation Excellence. She is a full-time Lecturer at the Department of Politics and Economics at Ankara University.

Christian Caiconte

Christian Caiconte is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.

Madelaine Moore

Madelaine Moore is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld. She received her PhD from the International Centre for Development and Decent Work (ICDD) at Kassel University, which also received the 2021 Jörg Huffschmid Award. Her forthcoming book is Reproductive Unrest: Understanding Water Struggles over Social Reproduction (Manchester University Press, 2022).

Adam David Morton

Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is also a Visiting Professor at Staffordshire University in the School of Justice, Security and Sustainability (2022–2024). His latest books are the co-authored volume with Andreas Bieler, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), co-edited with Stuart Elden.

Matthew Ryan

Matthew Ryan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney and has previously published in Competition & Change.

Riki Scanlan

Riki Scanlan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney and has previously published in Journal of Australian Political Economy.

Austin Hayden Smidt

Austin Hayden Smidt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. His latest book is Sartre, Imagination, and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019).