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

The totality is the territory of the dialectic—György Lukács, Political Writings, 1919 - 1929¹

Introduction

In one of the most compelling interventions on György Lukács’ analysis of totality and the discord between self and other, subject and object, Edward Said argued that the temporal apprehension of reality dominates History and Class Consciousness. The problematisation of temporality – or the dilemma of history – in resolving the ontological contradictions at the heart of capitalism through the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ is the central coordinate that Lukács elevates in his critique of political economy. The condition of reification that the proletariat confronts is, thus, resolvable in time through a collective apprehension in consciousness of human history. According to Said, for Lukács time ‘is the core of the great modern art form, the one that most perfectly expresses the transcendental homelessness of contemporary life’ (Said, 1995/2000, p. 460).² Hence, ‘the nature of history … is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 186; Said, 1995/2000, p. 461). Due to the limitations of his monochromatic focus on temporality, Lukács is therefore jettisoned as a thinker for the ‘hereness of today’, with Said turning instead to the spatial consciousness of Antonio Gramsci. The latter delivers a ‘situational complexity’ in grappling with terrain, territory, and the uneven geographical dislocations and relocations of space. In this view, Lukács is the ‘prototypical theorist of aesthetic temporality’ and Gramsci delivers a ‘spatial sense’ of the mediations of history (Said, 1995/2000, p. 458; see also Jessop, 2006; Morton, 2013a; Said, 1993, pp. 60–62).

The purpose of this article is to intervene in this debate through a critical reading of History and Class Consciousness, grounded in the conjuncture of its centennial anniversary. Our argument is that re-engaging with Lukács’ wider corpus for the ‘hereness of today’ enables an alternative appreciation of History and Class Consciousness as a contribution to the critique of political economy, socio-nature and the mediations constitutive of the production of space. As will be revealed shortly, the contribution of this article gravitates to the heart and soul of concerns in both International Political Economy (IPE) and radical geographical studies. With the ecological crises of capitalism, the exponential ascendancy of technological modes of control, and the assault on social reproduction, such a re-engagement enables us to mine for new transformative resources. Revisiting this classic text of Marxist philosophy and dialectics, then, entails examining the extent to which the ‘life-nerve of the dialectic’ in History and Class Consciousness (hereafter HCC) can travel to address concerns within political economy and radical geography today (Lukács, 1923/1971: xliii). For us, the term ‘life-nerve’ connotes the ever-shifting internal relations within socio-nature, suggestively pushing beyond Lukács’ own sometimes limited framing of revolutionary possibility. Returning to the intellectual resources of Edward Said (1983), this necessitates reflecting on his earlier deliberations on the worldliness of texts and ‘travelling theory’, and whether a once-insurgent theory can become a methodological trap if it is subsequently used uncritically, repetitively, and limitlessly (Said, 1983, p. 239). As such, theory can lose critical purchase, it can turn out to be dull and tamed, with its insurrectionary force domesticated, to become surrounded by orthodoxy. Consequently, as theory develops from a situation, begins to be used, travels, and gains wide acceptance it can become too encompassing, too ceaselessly active and expansive: ‘it risks becoming a theoretical overstatement, a theoretical parody of the situation it was formulated originally to remedy or overcome’ (Said, 1983, p. 239). Our first section therefore engages two prominent critics of Lukács – Jean-Paul Sartre and Moishe Postone – to consider the limits of HCC and whether Lukács’ method of dialectics and its core focus on temporality, totality, and class consciousness irrecusably reduces him to the past. These figures are spotlighted because of their standing as two pivotal and influential contemporaries of the Hungarian Marxist, one from a properly philosophical point of view (Sartre) and the other from critical theory (Postone). So, an engagement with their criticisms acts as an essential theoretical stress-test to help reveal what can be productively retrieved by engaging Lukács.

Exiting this mode of critique, in the second section we further the contrapuntal reading of Lukács and the critical consciousness of his contributions to distil his interdisciplinary relevance for IPE and radical geography. We argue this lies in engaging with his method and understanding of dialectics and totality. This critical consciousness therefore enables: 1) an understanding of the differences between situations and ‘awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported’; and 2) an awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by concrete experiences and interpretations to which it is in conflict (Said, 1983, p. 242). This mode of travelling theory, wedded to a form of critical consciousness, is known as transgressive theory that can travel to different locales, sites, and situations without succumbing to ‘facile universalism or over-general totalising’ (Said, 1994/2001, p. 452). It is an alternative mode of travelling theory that flames out, or develops away from, its original formulation, to restate and reaffirm new tensions and conditions. Rather than return to Lukács and his historical context in order to reduce him to the past – as part of a restrictive austere historicism – the purpose of our argument is to further an appreciation of ideas in and beyond their context (see Morton, 2003, pp. 127–129; Morton, 2007, pp. 25–29).

Through the means of travelling theory, a fresh reading of Lukács is then revealed in the third section to assert his spatial contribution to the critique of political economy and socio-nature and the mediations constitutive of the production of space. After all, Lukács argued that modern capitalism induces a fragmentation in the object of production and, as a consequence, of its subject too, so that ‘it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 89). The stakes of Lukács’ reflections on socio-nature are therefore examined in this third section to uncover tensions in his arguments about knowledge of nature, the mastery of nature, and the metabolic exchange between humanity and nature within capitalist social relations of production. What is revealed here is Lukács’ analysis of spatial power relations within capitalism carried through his theorisation of socio-nature, which stands precisely as a powerful and positive example of transgressive travelling theory. Our conclusion advances this argument by recognising that such a positive mode of travelling theory―deliberating on the possibilities opened up by travelling with Lukács to alternative situations―can raise new and meaningful reflections about totality and dialectics. The argument therefore concludes by asserting Lukács as central to critical IPE and radical geographical interests in methodological relationalism. It is possible to discern in Lukács a relational approach to analysing the metabolic internal relation of society and nature that interiorises theory and practice as well as whole and parts. Reflections on the production of space and socio-nature in critical IPE and geographical studies can therefore be ‘radicalised through conversations with a Lukácsian framework’ (Loftus, 2012, p. 73). By so doing, the possibilities and limits of totality and dialectics in György Lukács’ work are revealed to those interested in furthering methodological relationalism in their conceptions of the production of space and socio-nature.

The qualitatively new: Sartre and Postone contra Lukács

The concept of totality is central to Lukács’ theory and politics. Totality, as putative ‘real abstraction’, is a heuristic of sorts, which he believed was necessary to place front and centre to correct the encroaching positivism in the form of evolutionary Marxism that was gaining a foothold amongst his contemporaries (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 4 ff). The problem, as he saw it, was that positivist Marxism reproduced capitalist abstraction through reification, and in so doing sapped the vitality of proletarian praxis from any of its possible revolutionary pursuits. As such, in this section we deliver a theoretical stress test of Lukács in order to deliver an examination of the limits of theory and its capacity to travel. The first is levelled by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism, especially in Critique of Dialectical Reason, who sees Lukács as representative of everything wrong with abstract and essentialising totalitarian thought (Sartre, 1968/2004). The second is from Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination, an exegetical retread of Marx’s Capital, in which he undertakes an ‘immanent critique’ of capital and so highlights Lukács’ fundamental error in seeking to critique capital from the standpoint of labour, rather than recognising the necessity of critiquing and overcoming labour (Postone, 1996). These two figures are brought together for the similarity of their critiques, but also for the nuance they each provide in highlighting the stakes of Lukács’ project for both political (Sartre) and theoretical (Postone) purposes. We then close this section by engaging the recent work of Daniel López (2019), who takes seriously the critiques of Lukács but also sees value in resuscitating the Lukácsian project by highlighting labour’s potency as a process of becoming. This is an essential stepping-stone in linking to issues of totality and dialectics in the subsequent sections and our effort to recover a contrapuntal transgressive reading of Lukács that can travel.

Sartre gives a two-pronged assessment of Lukács (see also Smidt, 2019). First, he critiqued Lukács for his ‘idealist dialectics’ (Sartre, 2016). Second, and relatedly, Sartre censured Lukács’ flaccid theory of subjectivity. For Sartre, Lukács articulated a fixed telos in which class consciousness would merge with Being. Therefore, the future, fixed end of history was already established (in the abstract). It was merely humanity’s job – or the Party’s – to realise class consciousness (putatively in the concrete). This immunised the Party from any form of criticism, internal or otherwise. As the possessors of truth, the dogma of the Party, the dogma conditioned by the totality in their hands, ensured their legitimacy. Any individual components or potential dissonance must therefore submit to the overall ‘Hegelian idea … which creates for itself its own instruments’ (Sartre, 1963, p. 53). This teleological thought inverts Sartre’s existential commitment to existence preceding essence by prioritising essence (the future-to-come of totalised Being); the totality is given ultimate status which then subsumes the particularities of the manifold of concrete existence underneath it. Whereas Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1955, p. 57) praised Lukács for defending a ‘Marxism that incorporates subjectivity into history without making it its epiphenomenon’, Sartre would only see this incorporation as an embrace that smothers. This is because, ‘there could be no original meta-subject who created history, forgot its original creative act through the mystifying effects of reification, and then would regain it in the revolutionary act of becoming both subject and object of the whole’ (Jay, 1984, p. 352).

In Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre begins with an aporia: praxis (his technical term for subjectivity as labour) is not translucid to itself (Sartre, 1963, pp. 91–92). That is, praxis has no self-comprehension. This is more than the existential bad faith of his earlier and more familiar texts. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre takes up the Marxian mantle and seeks to develop the grounds for a new philosophical anthropology; he calls this project a ‘prolegomena to any future anthropology’ (Sartre, 1968/2004, p. 66). The goal of this project, according to Hazel Barnes (1963: xi), was to found a ‘new kind of Reason’, one that would supersede the inadequate ‘existing tools and methods of the natural sciences, of traditional sociology and anthropology’. Such a ‘new kind of Reason’ was required, for Sartre, precisely because under capitalism not only is praxis not self-aware but it is also constitutively barred from the means for self-comprehension. Sartre calls this ‘infinite seriality’ (Sartre, 1968/2004, p. 670). The (in)human condition under capitalism is serialised infinitely in that it produces capitalist subjects that are exploited and oppressed in relations of alterity, competition, and fungibility. This creates a landscape of socio-nature subject to economic alienation and political domination, which is something we will unpack later in our argument.

From this anthropological aporia, Sartre theorises what might be called a break or rupture from within the conditions of seriality. Such a fissure occurs not at the individual level but as a group; he calls this the ‘group-in-fusion’ (Sartre, 1968/2004, p. 345ff). The group for Sartre congeals under conditions of serial alienation and domination based on a common project. They share a common imminent external threat and, thus, what was once a social landscape of alterity, competition, and fungibility has now become an upsurging flash of commonality, mutuality, and essential belonging. Sartre uses the Storming of the Bastille as an historical example of a group-in-fusion that united for a common cause in the face of an imminent threat. ‘To the Bastille!’ was an immediate, spontaneous, and common clarion call that was taken up by each and for each, without concern for individual pursuits.

Sartre directed his ire towards Lukács because he believed Lukács’ concept of totality expressed the paradigmatic orientation of a Marxism in need of transfiguration, one that could not adequately theorise a break with the reproduction of capitalist abstraction.³ Further, we suggest that what Sartre identified in Lukács was precisely a theory of seriality. Termed ‘objective possibility’, Lukács (1923/1971, p. 51) related consciousness to the whole of society that in turn ‘makes it possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men [sic] would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation’. The irony, for Sartre, is that this framework of rationality posits a reified horizon that ultimately alienates those who it is supposed to motivate toward liberation.

According to Sartre, Lukács’ logic of the dialectic is not found in the materiality of subjectivity and its mediated relation with the conditions into which it is thrown, but in the future image that is posited as the possibility of proletarian self-realisation. An Aristotelian schema of potential and act can be detected here; one that espouses a notion of a formal cause that Sartre would reject. For Aristotle, an essence is assumed by the formal cause. As Kant (2004, p. 3) explains, ‘essence is the first inner principle of all that belongs to the possibility of a thing’. Thus, the essence of the realised is already contained in the possible, which means that the real is given only mediatory status insofar as it is already prefigured by its essence contained in the possible. Therefore, Lukácsʼ totality mediates any present practical ensemble by pulling its agents toward a fixed, prefigured, future possible. Regardless of its makeup, or its complexity or variation, any proletarian practical ensemble under these conditions would therefore be, in Sartreʼs terms, anti-dialectical insofar as it is conditioned by the serial reproduction of capitalist abstraction.

It is this latter conditioning that ties Sartre’s critique to Postone’s to deliver insights on Lukács that occupy similar grounds. Namely, that Lukács, in his zeal to theorise totality and the break therefrom, under-theorised the extent of capitalist abstraction and its social determinations. For Sartre, this takes the form of a serial existence that necessitates a concrete rupture from the constituent logic of abstract serial reproduction. For Postone, it requires an immanent critique of capital, not from the standpoint of labour but as a critique of labour itself. The dialectics of HCC, for Postone, also stand in opposition to the reinterpretations of the critique of political economy that understand praxis as immanent to the commodity form. Hence, in Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Postone criticises Lukács for elevating the standpoint of the proletariat, i.e. the objective character of labour, as the real Subject of the historical process. It should be first noted, however, that the fundamental point of contention is not Lukács’ historical theory of consciousness, that ‘argues powerfully for the intrinsic interrelatedness of subjective and objective dimensions of social life’ (Postone, 2003, p. 79). Instead, Postone specifically targets Lukács’ understanding of the activity of labour itself, which the latter sees as extrinsic to the historical logic of capital and, therefore, as something that needs to be fulfilled rather than overcome (Postone, 1996, p. 82). Lukács’ materialist theory of subjectivity is indeed highly regarded by Postone, as it is true to one of the central tenets of Marx’s mature works – that thought is socially embedded (Postone, 1996, p. 140). For Postone, however, this important insight vanishes the moment historically specific labour is grasped as ‘labour’, as an indeterminate category. According to Postone, a social critique from the standpoint of ‘labour’ not only underestimates the logical constraints imposed by capital but, crucially, it risks its very reaffirmation.

Postone adopts this critical stance towards Lukács in light of his reinterpretation of the category of labour. Particularly, he starts from the assumption that the essence of capitalist society cannot be equated with a transcendental notion of labour (which would be the ‘real’ source of value, the labour behind the veil of alienation) but with the form that labour takes specifically in capitalism, which is abstract and impersonal. Thus, Postone warns that an ‘objective’ grasping of labour remains within the epistemological framework of vulgar political economy, that is, the manifest, temporarily valid form of knowledge that is blind to its own historically specific ground (Postone, 1996, p. 138). Marx’s critical epistemology, by contrast, insists on the double character of commodity-producing labour, distinguishing between concrete, useful labour, and abstract human labour, its social form. Moreover, concrete and abstract labour should not be understood as extrinsically opposed (as a content ‘against’ its form) but as intrinsically intertwined: what is at stake is the same labour, a labour that is in contradiction with itself (Postone, 1996, p. 144). In this way Marx grounds the category of labour socially, according to Postone, following the method he had ‘inherited’ from Hegel – dialectics. Drawing on the above distinction, then, Postone assumes a particular stance concerning the category of abstract labour, grasping it not in physiological or transhistorical terms, as an early section of the first volume of Capital on the dual character of labour may suggest (1876/1990, pp. 131–137), but as a social determination, the ‘social substance’ of historically-specific value (Postone, 1996, p. 145).

Alternatively, when Lukács (1923/1971, p. 169) maintains that the proletariat ‘awakens and becomes social reality’ once it knows itself as an object, he suggests that the practice of the labouring class is in itself an independent force, as if labour qua substance were a ‘natural’ substratum outside the social forms. Indeed, as Lukács sees it, the self-awareness of the proletariat entails ‘the objective understanding of the nature of society’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 149). Labour is thus no longer an object of critique but becomes its own standpoint, a sort of elevated intellectual position from which the abstractions of capitalism can be analysed in an unbiased fashion. Specifically, for Postone, the above argument constitutes a break with the more immanent analysis that Lukács provides in the first two sections of the HCC reification essay, in which he grasps classical philosophical questions such as the subject–object relation in both cultural and historical terms (Postone and Brennan, 2009, p. 310). For instance, while discussing ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’, Lukács critically analyses how Kant’s transcendental dialectic displaces the question of the thing-in-itself (the ‘wholly unknown’ reality that escapes experience and knowledge) to accommodate the universalisation of rationalism. In so doing, Lukács also reflects on the relevance of pure and applied mathematics for the development of modern philosophy, stressing the totalising assumption of systematic rationalism according to which ‘every given aspect of the system should be capable of being deduced from its basic principle, that it should be exactly predictable and calculable’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 117). This historically grounded analysis of Western philosophy is, however, clearly at odds with an approach that considers the use-value of labour ontologically, placing it in opposition to the fixed form it takes under capitalism.

As mentioned earlier, Postone’s main disagreement with Lukács lies in the latter’s elevation of the proletariat as the historical Subject. Although this thesis appears most emphatically in the last third of the reification essay, its central articulating principle, the Hegelian concept of ‘totality’, is consistently addressed throughout HCC. Thus, Lukács speaks of ‘concrete totality’ as ‘the category that governs reality’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 10), the discernment of the unity of the whole made possible not by Hegel himself but by Marx’s transformation of the dialectic ‘into a science of revolution’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 27). What Postone notices here, however, is that Lukács’ reading of the categories of totality, and by extension praxis, differs significantly from the way the late Marx treats these categories: if Marx identifies the Hegelian totality in capital itself, i.e. in the contradictory and historically specific form of social relations, Lukács, conversely, identifies it in the activity of the proletariat, the ‘practical knowledge’ that ‘stands on a higher scientific plane objectively’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 163). Therefore, when Lukács posits the proletariat as the historical Subject, he is in fact outlining ‘the supersession of an earlier, apparently more abstract form of the totality by an apparently more concrete form’ (Postone, 1996, p. 83). In other words, because Lukács still grasps totality as a concrete ground lying beneath bourgeois mystifications, that is, in metaphysical and speculative terms, he is unable to see this notion as a manifestation of capitalism. According to Postone (1996, p. 174, 360–361), this distinction has important implications for the way Marx’s method is to be interpreted, for assessing the social metabolism of humans and nature within capitalist society, and for considering possibilities for overcoming social compulsion in an emancipated society. First, the transformation of Marx’s dialectic into the expression of the history-making practice of humanity would reaffirm the capitalist totality instead of criticising and looking for a way to overcome it (Postone, 1996, p. 82). Second, this open ‘realisation’ of labour as a concrete totality would not only realise capital as well but would decisively hinder the chances of its abolition or historical negation. Ultimately, then, ‘what for Lukács is the basis for emancipation, the future, is for Marx the basis for domination, the present’ (Postone, 2003, p. 89). In this manner Postone distances himself from Lukács in order to reassert the critique of political economy as an immanent critique of society, one that understands the categories that constitute social life as interrelated moments of a dynamic, historically unique ‘whole’.

As Sartre and Postone make clear, it is speculation about the existence of a proletarian meta-consciousness that most decisively damages Lukács’ inspiring interpretation of Marx’s method of dialectics and the ability of the theory to travel. Now, if we assume that a critique of capitalism becomes immanent (that is, dialectical in terms of its mode of exposition), then, how are we to understand the idea of agency that stands at the centre of Lukács’ theory of praxis? As noted before, Sartre’s philosophical anthropology would invoke the group-in-fusion that has the potentiality to cause a fissure within the infinite seriality of capital. Postone’s critical epistemology, on the other hand, would point toward the determinate historical transformation or ‘historical agency’ made possible by capital itself as a contradictory totality (Postone, 2009, p. 317). Yet, as López (2019) convincingly argues, in quickly dismissing the notion of the proletariat as the historical Subject, both approaches end up overlooking the possibility of reading this thesis as the starting point of a more open understanding of labour that could grasp it instead as a process of becoming. Specifically, in López’s words, ‘Lukács is clear that in order to become the actual subject-object of history, the proletariat must traverse an entire process of development spanning the whole social totality, in which the key dialectic is the interaction of theory and practice’ (López, 2019, p. 178). What emerges from the above, then, is the potential for a fully actualised and concrete form of praxis (López, 2019, p. 379) that, again, should not be confused with the hypostatised variant criticised by Sartre and Postone. As such, López manages to resuscitate what is perhaps the fundamental argumentative intent of Lukács’s oeuvre, namely the productive encounter between the immanent critique of capitalism grounded in the dialectic, and the philosophical inquiry concerned with thinking the ‘qualitatively new’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 144) that forms the basis of political emancipation. It is this decentred understanding of totality in Lukács as a process of becoming, intelligible through the dialectical method, that is only partially glimpsed by the existing scholarship, which we now unpack in moving towards a more transgressive appreciation of his travelling theory.

Totality is the territory of the dialectic

The category of totality as a specifically historical materialist approach to the immanent dimension of capital defines the originality of HCC. Our purpose here is to excavate Lukács’ dialectical view of totality to reveal the inner core of the often-concealed relations and mediations of capitalism. Although Lukács’ totality can be critiqued as deficient in its degree of openness, we suggest that there are key elements to his formulation that remain both useful and necessary to contemporary political economy analysis that do not necessarily result in a closed totality as some might suggest. Put differently, thinking about totality and recognising totalising logic does not entail totalitarian thinking.⁴ To pursue this argument, we advance two main points: 1) on the method of dialectics as the process of interiorising theory and practice, as well as whole and parts, which 2) informs the concept of totality as a category that aims to overcome the atomisation and isolation-effect of capitalism. Building on the dialectical mode of thought and the concept of totality, the metabolic interaction of society and nature is the focus of discussion in the main third section.

First, unpacking intrinsic relations that are constitutive of the socio-natural world entails a commentary on the standpoint of dialectics that permeates the Marxism of Lukács. In a sense, this primary point of departure recovers what Lukács (1923/1971: xlvii) referred to as the ‘ABC of the dialectical method’. Here, we agree with Goonewardena (2005, p. 59; 2018: p. 461) that ‘Marxism for Lukács is fundamentally a method, a method called dialectics, the core category of which is totality’. Therefore, distilling the relevance of Lukács for critical IPE and radical geography necessarily lies in engaging with both dialectical method and totality.

Lukács recognises the notion of totality as both the presupposition necessary to comprehend the social world and the result of history (Lukács, 1923/1971, pp. 21–22). This view is continuous with Marx himself who, after all, perceived primitive accumulation as the pre-history of capital, as both a process that presupposes capitalism as a mode of production and its result in terms of the complete expropriation of the conditions of labour (Marx, 1867/1990, pp. 873–875; Marx, 1894/1991, pp. 730–732). For Lukács (1923/1971, p. 8), the dialectical method is the simultaneous recognition and transcendence of immediate appearances to unveil the inner, though concealed, core of social existence. The distinction between inner relation and interaction is tellingly revealed by his approach to dialectics, with Lukács providing two clear examples that gravitate to the heart and soul of the concerns of IPE. The first example Lukács provides is an abstract simple one of causality that presages the parsimonious states-as-actors ‘billiard ball’ model in international politics: ‘if by interaction we mean just the reciprocal causal impact of two otherwise unchangeable objects on each other, we shall not have come an inch nearer to an understanding of society’. As he continues, there can be interaction between two billiard balls when one is struck by the other but ‘the interaction we have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwise unchanging objects’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 13, original emphasis). After all, positing an interaction between elements that are always-already separated as ontologically exterior is problematic in any attempt to understand their internal relation (Morton, 2013b). The second example is at a more concrete complex level and reflects on the dualist disconnection of the ‘state’ (or politics) from ‘economics’ (or markets), which has bedeviled IPE and its attempt to connect them through interaction but always based on the prior isolation of such phenomena. ‘Already the mechanical separation between economics and politics precludes any really effective action encompassing society in its totality, for this itself is based on the mutual interaction of both these factors’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 195). Hence ‘in a world where the reified relations of capitalism have the appearance of a natural environment it looks as if there is not a unity but a diversity of mutually independent objects and forces’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 70). For critical IPE, the false state/market dichotomy best represents how these forms are posited and separated when actually they should be treated as internally related (Bruff, 2011, pp. 85–87). The method of dialectics assists in transcending these reified categories of the social world and enables an understanding of social processes as a totality. Elsewhere summarised by Gramsci (1971, p. 435, Q11§22), the dialectic is then ‘the very marrow of historiography and the science of politics’.

The ontological claim that we are developing here is that a dialectical methodology works against separate, independent, isolated categories and facts to focus, instead, on multiple mediations that constitute a comprehensive system – a totality – with a historical character (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 230). As Andrew Feenberg (2015, p. 120) underlines, in treating the knowledge of the present as a historical problem, Lukács offered an alternative to, on one hand, the ahistorical categories of positivist science and, on the other, to the grappling of individual events as contingent and isolated phenomena. Totality can therefore refer to the structuring conditions of global capitalism as a system, which avoids arguments reliant on pure contingency, or a system ruled by chance (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 120). Nevertheless, there persist attempts to deny the primacy of totality, to dismiss it as ‘unscientific’, or to reflect more on the interaction of its parts so that ‘with the totality out of the way, the fetishistic relations of the isolated parts’ become dominant (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 9). In contemporary terms, the dismissal in IPE of a ‘narrow’ lens focusing on global capitalism in favour of the interaction of ‘complex intersectional dynamics’ would merely be the latest manifestation of these attempts to overthrow the methodological primacy of totality (see Best et al., 2021). This state-of-the-art intervention to delegitimise a focus on the totality of global capitalism is seemingly nothing less than an attack on some of the pioneering contributions to the critique of political economy and radical geography. In relation to the former, after all, it was Cox (1987, p. ix) who forged the study of world order by ‘classifying the totality of world production’ through a focus on different patterns in the social relations of production. Equally, in identifying geography for its timid approach to totality, it was Milton Santos (1996/2021, pp. 69–70) who sought more fully to explore totality’s value for building a critical theory and epistemology of space. As Lukács (1947/2013, pp. 190–191) qualifies:

The materialist-dialectical totality … is the concrete unity of struggling contradiction. This means, first, that without causality, there is no living totality. Second, that every totality is constituted out of subordinated totalities … Third, that every totality is historically relative as well; it is changeable, it can come apart and it exists as a totality under determinate, concrete-historical circumstances.

The conception of totality is therefore the methodological standard that needs to be re-examined and revisited against those approaches that actually ‘reconfirm the status of the concept of totality by their very reaction against it’ (Jameson, 1981/2002, p. 38).

The advance offered by Lukács (if not always satisfactorily realised) is to think in terms of totality while avoiding an overly prescriptive or fatalistic analysis to deliver a dialectical relation between subject and object. The way forward with Lukács, then, is to follow his strong guide in the original preface of HCC that Marx’s theory and method ‘must be constantly applied to itself’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. xliii). In other words, critical theory should turn to a dialectical understanding of totality against the totalitarian, reified, or fatalistic grasp of concrete historical problems. A Lukácsian framing of the dialectical method and totality thus inspires political economists to question the class-outlook of the methodological aspirations of the contemporary social sciences. This questioning arises from Lukács’ emphasis on the role of dialectical method in providing a departure from positivism and by establishing a vantage point based on the struggles of the proletariat (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 21).

Yet, to engage with this totality demands acknowledging the different, and contradictory, standpoints that (re)produce it. Recall that the first section of this article identified that the standpoint of the proletariat is a crucial moment in Lukács’ theorising and praxis that allows for the role of consciousness and experience. For Lukács, it was only the standpoint of the proletariat that could comprehend the totality of social relations because of its unique historical position as a unified subject-object. Or, put differently, proletarian consciousness was a process of becoming as ‘the self-consciousness of the commodity’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 168, original emphasis). In trying to resolve the gap between subject and object, through the proletariat, Lukács makes an important link between ideology, experience, and consciousness from the standpoint of a collective subject (Jameson, 1988, pp. 61–65). Yet, whilst claiming that the proletariat alone can comprehend the totality of social relations, Lukács also suggests there are multiple standpoints within this totality, some more revealing than others. Our world is, therefore, not immediately nor equally understood. Although numerous critiques of this emphasis on the unique subject position and subsequent privileged role of the proletariat can be raised, our argument is that the epistemological introduction of multiple standpoints is essential for thinking through the category of totality. After all, it is Lukács’ emphasis on the proletariat as collective subject that allows later standpoint theorists to avoid the privileging of certain experiences and the descent into a plural relativism of individual experience. It is also the category of totality that distinguishes standpoint theory from such relativism, as each standpoint is a vantage point onto something common: the totality of (capitalist) social relations (Weeks, 1998/2018, pp. 71–74). As Loftus (2012, p. 60) reminds us, ‘the standpoint as something to be achieved, not given’, is key. The proliferation of feminist and post-colonial standpoint theorisation thus owes much to this epistemological move. After all, Edward Said conjectured that Lukács was central to Frantz Fanon’s understanding of imperialism and reshaping of the relationship between coloniser and colonised (Said, 1993, pp. 346–348). Within the history of colonisation, apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world (Fanon, 1961/1990, p. 40). In turn, as Achille Mbembe argues, the colonial divisions of Fanon’s time in terms of apartheid, marginalisation, and structural destitution have today been replaced by global processes of accumulation and expropriation and new forms of violence and inequality. Within this totality, Fanon’s logic is still essential as ‘situated thinking, born of a lived experience that was always in progress, unstable, and changing’, but nevertheless able to collectively ‘walk with others toward a world created together unendingly, irreversibly, within and through struggle’ (Mbembe, 2017, p. 161). From Lukács to Fanon, to Said, and to Mbembe, then, the attempt to grapple with the notion of difference reproduced within a totality, rather than an emphasis on the slicing-up and fragmentation of knowledge where the pieces never fit together, is thus vital.

However, throughout much of HCC, Lukács’ open method runs counter to his own political conclusions that negate the immanence that underpin his categories. Yet, as described above, the interventions of his argument, and specifically his conception of totality as method, may offer another way out. In rescuing such immanence, our argument is that the category of totality is not closed nor unified but rather dynamic and emergent. Thinking of totality as a methodological aspiration, we can further avoid totalitarian conclusions; totality is not a unified condition with all contradictions resolved but is instead a commitment to internal relations and processes, demanding that we situate and contextualise our analysis within the totality. Lukács’ totality does not suppress difference and it does not result in reunification through the proletariat subject. It is a totality that is both inclusive and constituted by contradiction, a totality understood as method rather than unity (Jameson, 1988, pp. 67–68). As Jameson (1988, p. 60) affirms:

But ‘totality’ is not in that sense, for Lukács, a form of knowledge, but rather a framework in which various kinds of knowledge are positioned, pursued and evaluated. This is clearly the implication of the phrase ‘aspiration to totality’.

In sum, we share the argument that totality as immanent, or as ‘an interpretive horizon’ (Weeks, 1998/2018, p. 97), enables the grasping of the social world as a complex system, whilst understanding that reality will always be in excess of our representation of it. Returning to our earlier philosophical discussion to bring together the first two main sections of this article, our argument seeks to emphasise a decentred totality intelligible through the dialectical method (Lichtheim, 1970, p. 23). It is through these methodological points on 1) dialectics; and 2) totality as decentred that Lukács reveals how modern capitalism permeates the spatio-temporal character of phenomena (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 23). Not the least significant here are Lukács’ reflections on the reduction of space and time to a common denominator through commodity production and how ‘time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 90). An illustration on landscape and art that Lukács drew from Ernst Bloch serves as a bridge to reflect on space and nature as a social product, which is taken up more fully in the final section.

In The Principle of Hope Bloch refers to a series of landscape painters that present the bourgeois utopia of pleasurable Sunday afternoons (Bloch, 1954/1986, pp. 813–820). Among others, we are introduced to Édouard Manet (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863) and Georges Seurat (Un dimanche à la Grande-Jatte, 1884), that both come to represent a bourgeois Sunday afternoon as ‘the landscape of painted suicide’ and the ‘bottomless boredom’ of petit-bourgeois distance from nature (Bloch, 1954/1986, p. 814). Bloch comments on the reposefulness and spatiality of these depictions of landscape, as well as the primacy of space over time, the situationless aspects of the compositions, and the monumentalising of the naturalistic.

The repose of a settled nature appears, but of course precisely with restricted or sharply clipped objects and on the whole distant in every respect from the conflicts of the large city. An agrarian world uncontemporaneous with developed capitalism and its objects arises, a provincial landscape with profoundly viewed extensions into cheerfulness and order (Bloch, 1954/1986, p. 816).

For Bloch, these depictions of paradisial everyday life of the bourgeois Sunday of the nineteenth-century – with perhaps Diego Rivera (Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, 1946) standing as a critical twentieth-century counterpart – become an exhortation to ordering nature as a classless society. For Lukács, the contemplative ideology of the bourgeoisie is projected through the polarisation of ‘great individuals’ making history set against the historical environmental conditions of ‘nature’. We quote this passage at length because of its importance in understanding the production of nature:

When nature becomes landscape – e.g. in contrast to the peasant’s unconscious living within nature – the artist’s unmediated experience of the landscape (which has of course only achieved this immediacy after undergoing a whole series of mediations) presupposes a distance (spatial in this case) between the observer and the landscape. The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all. If he were to attempt to integrate himself and the nature immediately surrounding him in space within ‘nature-seen-as-landscape’, without modifying his aesthetic contemplative immediacy, it would then at once become apparent that landscape only starts to become landscape at a definite (though of course variable distance) from the observer and that only as an observer set apart in space can he relate to nature in terms of landscape at all (Lukács, 1923/1971, pp. 157–158, original emphasis).

The result is a separation of the object of nature from society: ‘a separation that is mediated by a projection of personal feeling into a subjectively particularised and objectively generalised Nature’, which is embedded in the topographical poems, journals, paintings and engravings of the countryside and its agricultural ‘improvement’ (Williams, 1973/2016, p. 193). More succinctly, ‘landscape production, therefore, is a moment in overall processes of uneven development’ (Mitchell, 1996, p. 34). Although such art throws light on these relationships, it remains an ideological rendering of geography, including the social production of nature, presenting a spatial utopia devoid of the nonsynchronous conditions of uneven development and its ‘multispatial dialectics’ (Bloch, 1954/1986, p. 820; Bloch & Ritter, 1977, p. 38; Lukács, 1923/1971, pp. 158–159). As Bloch (1923/2020, p. 13, original emphasis) states in his review of HCC: ‘the artist above all however is nature, creates like nature; in aesthetics the two criticisms of reason, the realms of necessity and freedom, ultimately come together’.⁵ Hence there is a need to turn to Lukács’ conception of space and nature as social products, which we pick up now in the final section.

The charnel-house of space and nature as a social product

It is through the nexus of dialectics and totality as decentred that Lukács offers a path to behold the metabolic exchange between society and nature. Here, it is nature as social category and labour as mediator of the internal relation of society and nature under capitalism that preoccupies Lukács. After all, as early as The Theory of the Novel (written across 1914–1915), Lukács draws on the distinction between ‘first nature’ (previously unaltered by human activity) and ‘second nature’ (social in origin) where, under capitalism, the estrangement of exchange-value and the commodity form takes hold. Alienation and reification in this ecology of ‘second nature’ creates a ‘self-made environment as a prison instead of as a parental home’, or as a ‘charnel-house of long-dead interiorities’ (Lukács, 1920/1971, pp. 62–64). As he asks us, ‘do people stand in an immediate relationship to nature, or is their metabolic interchange with nature mediated socially?’ (Lukács, 1925–26/2002, p. 96, original emphasis). Does Lukács thus convincingly and consistently provoke an understanding of the production and reproduction of socio-natures by human and nonhuman actors in everyday practices? Delving into a consideration of the direct confrontation with space and nature in HCC (and beyond) in this section reveals the travelling relevance of Lukács for studies of IPE and radical geography.

Going to the heart of the matter, Lukács (1925–26/2002, p. 108) asserts that ‘since its material foundation is a dialectical process, since the economic structure of society and exchange of matter with nature permanently find themselves in real dialectical interaction with one another, the objective interconnection is also always a dialectical one’. As the previous section argued, Lukács’ conception of dialectics in HCC developed an open method that brings together contradictory parts within a decentred totality and dialectical whole. To do so, Lukács first cleared the conceptual ground from the debris of bourgeois philosophy to assert the standpoint of the proletariat (López, 2019, pp. 399–423). Similarly, with the concept of nature, Lukács first critiques bourgeois ideologies of nature, then unearths Marx and Engels’ conceptualisation of nature, and last develops an original treatment of nature. Integrated within this threefold argument is an implicit theorisation of space that informs his understanding of nature through the politicised questions of uneven development and agrarian social relations in the Russian Revolution. Ultimately, the utility of Lukács’ categories concerning socio-nature will face similar challenges experienced by the limits of his theory to travel. In light of this, we arrive at a question with significant implications for contemporary political economy and radical geography: does Lukacs’ ecological (or ecosocialist potential) become undermined by a view of the absolute mastery of nature (or eco-Stalinist potential), referring to the unlimited technological development and arbitrary manipulation of nature as external? This question emerges organically when travelling into the ‘hereness of today’ with Lukács and the pressing concern to address social relations that do not lead to mass species extinction and runaway climate change.

The first treatment of nature in HCC is bound up with his critique of bourgeois thought. The Enlightenment conception of nature – briefly, that ‘man’ emerges from nature, the domain of necessity, and seeks to shape it in his image – provides the ideological substrate for reification. Lukács (1923/1971, p. 131) explains this recursive relationship between bourgeois conceptions of the laws of nature and the development of capitalism:

What is important is to recognise clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the objective forms of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature.

For the bourgeoisie, ‘it is a matter of life and death to understand its own system of production in terms of eternally valid categories: it must think of capitalism as being predestined to eternal survival by the eternal laws of nature and reason’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, pp. 10–11). This critique also extends to his engagement with more materialist interlocutors. Critiquing Soviet philosopher Abram Deborin, ‘it appears that subject = person (society); object = nature … and a true objectivity is achieved only by those things and connections that not only merely exist independently of people … but are also independent of the historical process of development of society’ (Lukács, 1925–26/2002, p. 115). In this way, Lukacs criticises both the bourgeois externalisation of nature from history and the same failing in many of his fellow Marxists.

Within the tradition of German idealism, which variously seeks to bridge the aporias of subject and object, history and nature, freedom and necessity, the latter terms are always-already considered as external from the realm of humanity even as human beings originate from them. Lukács quotes Giambattista Vico vicariously through Marx: ‘human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 112; Marx, 1867/1990, p. 493n.4).⁶ Marx’s view emerges, in part, from a critique of Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism (which held that God is an ideal reflection of human species-being rather than vice versa). Marx (1845/1974, p. 423) in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ insists that the philosopher’s failure to attend to human essence as an ‘ensemble of the social relations’ means he ‘is consequently compelled: to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual’. Just as Marx insists that human nature is historically transformed and socially produced, Lukács gives an account of the historical transformation of nature. While nature provides an ideological substrate for reification, the accomplishment of reification transforms nature into a ‘societal category’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 234). To be precise, reification transforms the content of nature qua societal category. With Lukács (1923/1971, p. 128):

That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e. nature’s form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned.

Thus, the condition of reification leads to the production of a ‘second nature’, ‘which evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier on with the irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the social relations which appear in this form)’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 128). The concept of second nature, then, is a dialectical unity of nature and society defined by the condition of reification. In López’s (2019, p. 93) summary, ‘nature takes its revenge for having been dominated by imposing its unfreedom on society’. As a result, Lukács’ revolutionary challenge is to abolish the unfreedom of ‘second nature’ through the creative and active transformation of humanity, society, and nature via the standpoint of the proletariat.

Layered within this account of nature is a treatment of space. The transition to capitalism is accompanied by a process wherein time loses its ‘variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable “things”’. Here Lukács suggests, therefore, that time sheds its qualitative nature, ‘in short, it becomes space’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 90). It appears here that Lukács’ perspective on space is what Henri Lefebvre would describe as ‘abstract space’: homogenous, quantifiable, and totalising (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 49–50, 287–289). Unlike Lefebvre, however, Lukács does not explicitly historicise the condition of abstract space as an outcome of, or ancillary to, the development of capitalism. Nevertheless, Lukács’ attention to the agrarian question and feudal landed property lends his approach to space a surprising potential to handle developmental unevenness and geographical differentiation. The debate over the then-ongoing Russian Revolution drove Lukács to engage with the historico–geographical variegation of capitalism, arguing, for example, that the appearance of world crisis ‘in time and space will take the form of a disparate succession of events in different countries at different times and even in different branches of industry in a number of countries’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 74). Critically, this fact drives ‘the fragmentation of the proletariat in time and space’ – i.e. the geographical divisions between national and regional territories as well as the historically differentiated development of capitalist social relations (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 80). In dialectical parallel, however, Lukács suggests that the development of capitalism led to the destruction of ‘the spatiotemporal barriers between different lands and territories’, and, thus, ‘the economic relations that directly determined the metabolic exchange between men and nature progressively disappear’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 19). A dialectical relation between homogeneity and differentiation marks Lukács’ geographical sensibilities, even if he does not take the step of explicitly historicising the production of space.

This dialectical relation is mirrored by his attention to the metabolic relation of nature and society. Critically, in 1967, Lukács (1923/1971, p. xvii) argues that his original argument was marked by the lacuna of ‘labour as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature’.⁷ While elements of this approach are present in 1923, the explicit role of labour as key to his ontology of social being expands his conceptualisation of nature by grounding it in the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production. Thus, Lukács (1925–26/2002, p. 100) argues a few years later that, ‘our consciousness of nature, in other words our knowledge of nature, is determined by our social being’. Lukács (1925–26/2002, p. 99) thus holds there is an increasing ‘predominance of the social moment’ within the ‘real forms of mediation that intervene between a person and nature’, which reflects at once the historical development from ‘first’ to ‘second’ nature and the transition from socio-natural relations grounded on feudal landed property to capitalist commodity production. This is the thread that connects Lukács to more recent contributions in radical geography and political economy that analyse how nature is determined by the logic of exchange-value so that ‘first nature’ becomes produced from within as a part of ‘second nature’, and urban space becomes urban capitalised nature in its commodification and subjection to the search for profit (see inter alia Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 229; O’Connor, 1998, p. 161; Smith, 1984/2008, p. 78). By grounding the metabolic exchange between humanity and nature in labour, Lukács gives a theorisation of nature that is capable, in principle, of accounting for the historical development and social production of nature. For that reason, there is a dialectical method in HCC that transcends the dualism of society and nature and ‘remains a unique resource for developing an immanent critique of everyday socio-natures’ (Loftus, 2012, p. 67).

Dwelling on this mediation of society and nature by labour, Lukács (1925–26/2002, p. 99) argues that nature is (increasingly) mediated by society, and this mediation is dialectical:

Marx really perceives use value as ‘the natural relationship between things and men’ … while exchange-value – which comes along later – ‘is the social existence of things’ … And the development [of capitalism] goes in the direction that ever more strongly emphasises the predominance of the social moment.

The resemblance here between Lukács and Neil Smith is striking. In Smith’s critique, bourgeois and reified ‘nature is generally seen as precisely that which cannot be produced … But with the progress of capital accumulation and the expansion of economic development, this material substratum is more and more the product of social production … it is in the production of nature that use-value and exchange-value, and space and society, are fused together’ (Smith, 1984/2008, pp. 49–50, 65, 68–69). ‘Second nature’ or ‘labour-mediated nature’ is, of course, a foundational category in much of the ecomarxist thought that has developed on and through Smith (for example, the notion of ‘cheap nature’, see Moore, 2015). In this way, we can see how Lukács is underappreciated as a theorist of socio-ecological relations. What are the thresholds of this once insurgent theory, where its critical purchase may be revealed as blunted and its insurrectionary force domesticated? What might we hold firm in the theory so that it can travel to different locales, sites, and situations to move beyond its confinements and address new tensions and conditions?

Even as Lukács’ reflections on space and nature offer valuable pathways for the development of ecosocialist theories, there are critical limitations within his conceptualisation of the dialectic of socio-nature. Chief among these are his tendencies towards what we call an eco-Stalinist variant of ecosocialist theory. At issue within this strand of theory is a vision of the conscious human and social domination of both ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, where the socialist state mediates the knowledge, consciousness, and mastery of nature. For Lukács, the consciousness of nature is equivalent to the knowledge of nature, and it is determined by the development of the mode of production and its forms of metabolic exchange (Lukács, 1925–26/2002, p. 100). Lukács is clear that ‘capitalist development produces the material preconditions for socialism (technology, machines, etc., Lenin on electrification)’ (Lukács, 1925–26/2002, p. 115). Lukács’ argument, here, attempts to show how the progressive elements of capitalism are blocked by its regressive elements – and, hence, how the revolutionary standpoint of the proletariat can surmount these limits. Thus, he applauds the capitalist mastery over nature even as he criticises its concomitant mastery over humanity:

The purest, indeed one might say the only pure form of the control of society by its natural laws is found in capitalist production. For is it not the world-historical mission of the process of civilisation that culminates in capitalism, to achieve control over nature? These ‘natural laws’ of society which rule the lives of men like ‘blind forces’ (even when their ‘rationality’ is recognised and indeed all the more powerfully when that is the case) have the task of subordinating the categories of nature to the process of socialisation (Lukács, 1923/1971, p. 233).

If we draw out the implications of this view, there is an eco-Stalinist mien within the critique of the capitalist production of nature that rests on the twofold claim that capitalist firms are capable only of exploiting nature towards their partial interests, whereas socialist states deploy their scientific and technical capacities in order to advance production in general. This process of socialisation, for Lukács, culminates in the role of the ‘Party as Knower’ and the revolutionary standpoint of the proletariat as the primary agent assumed to be capable of consciousness of the totality (see Holloway, 2002, pp. 80–88). Precisely because Lukács adheres to the post-revolutionary ‘withering away’ of the state, the transitional period of socialism is characterised by the state’s role – led by the Party – as mediator of the proletarian standpoint. Our contention, therefore, is that Lukács’ theory of nature is potentially marred by its eco-Stalinist alignment towards the mastery of nature. This is so even when he acknowledges much later that the objective reality of reification in terms of appearance and essence in bourgeois society ‘does not cease to exist in nature and society with the cessation of its particular manifestations in capitalist society’ (Lukács, 1935/1968, p. 122).

The conscious mastery of nature of eco-Stalinism may, in the abstract, be able to avoid the tragedy of the commons or be better attentive to climate catastrophe. However, it is precisely this eco-Stalinist mastery of nature that has been the subject of parallel critiques by ecofeminist, postcolonial, and Indigenous thinkers. To take a brief illustration of these tensions, and their material implications, consider Bathsheba Demuth (2019, pp. 280–281) on Soviet whaling in the Bering Strait:

After 1946, the Soviet factory fleet also filled the seas, the ships also grasping at last what the market had grasped first: the energy of whales. It was a maritime expansion of the Soviet promise to supersede the market and its alienating separation between labour and the value it produced. Whales were reclaimed to liberate people, not to be a fetishised commodity. But, in converting whales into production quotas, Soviet whaling made a fetish of the plan. In doing so, socialist whalers repeated the central blindness of commodity whaling.

This is the real environmental history that sits behind such questions of abstraction, of totality, and of the socio-nature relation. Our contention, however, is that we can develop an alternative conception of the dialectic of socio-nature through a recuperated Lukács-inspired conception of totality as the territory of dialectics, to deliver a theory that travels. After all, Lukács (1924/1970, p. 90) viewed his own theory of praxis as a part or moment, within a totality, that was aimed at the elimination of Stalinism. Following the argument of Shannon Brincat and Damian Gerber (2015, p. 889), ‘a liberated humankind, with its accompanying ‘second nature’, actualises itself through ‘first nature’ without reducing it into its own self-image: thus the dialectical understanding of the totality must, necessarily, be ecological’.

Conclusion: we all need the materialist dialectic

Through our engagement with and beyond History and Class Consciousness, we have delivered an appreciation of György Lukács for the ‘hereness of today’ to reveal the importance of the ‘life-nerve’ of the dialectic, the method and understanding of totality, and an emphasis on the spatial production of socio-nature. It is easy to dismiss Lukács as a critic who does not theoretically travel to our present, or to use him poorly – uncritically, repetitively and limitlessly. Instead, the aim here has been to highlight how a theory might grow from its original situation, how it can be used, how it travels to initiate new criticism without becoming a parody. By deploying Edward Said’s contributions to, and reconsiderations of ‘travelling theory’ – themselves reflections on Lukács theory of reification – we have rebuffed the view that Lukács gives an aspatial analysis of the social relations of capitalism. Instead of the spatial blindness with which he is charged and the reduction of his theory to the realm of temporality, our fresh reading of dialectics in and beyond HCC distils not only spatio-temporal insights relevant to the interests of political economists and radical geographers alike, but also contributes to the critique of the production of space and socio-nature. Our reading figures out the elements in Lukács’ theory that can and do travel, and how ‘its fiery core was reignited’ and can be invigorated (Said, 1994/2000, p. 452). Dialectics and totality are pivotal in this critical reading on two fronts. First, on dialectics, our conclusion is that ‘we all need the materialist dialectic’ (Althusser, 1965/1977, p. 173). Second, on totality, our conclusion is that it retains methodological potential and that simply ignoring it is ‘like describing a road without its setting in the landscape’ (Said, 1993, p. 132). Where next for political economists and radical geographers in this voyage of transgressive theory? We close with some reflections on thinking relationally in IPE about dialectics, totality, and the production of socio-nature that might redefine interdisciplinary debate towards connections rather than separations.

Flowing from the above arguments, it should be clear that HCC explicitly focuses on the internal relation between ‘parts’ and ‘whole’, which constitutes its dialectical view of a decentred totality. Here the dualist approach to thought and being, form and matter, is rejected. Consequently, across the dialectical development of a decentred totality it becomes evident how Lukács adds to a register of classical Marxist theorists that advance the philosophy of internal relations, which is regarded as the hallmark of historical materialism (Bieler & Morton, 2018, p. 9; Ollman, 1976, p. 276). It is this dialectical aspect of methodological relationalism that we regard as currently defining the most exceptional advances in contemporary critical IPE and radical geographical imaginaries (Jessop, 2001). Led most recently by Bruff (2021), there is an embedded internality to focusing on institutions, comparing capitalisms, analysing crises and contradictions, and considering post-capitalist futures founded on methodological relationalism. The notion of totality, we argue, is able to push forward this agenda for critical IPE and radical geographical studies. This is so because, ‘the category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity’ and, therefore, ‘only the dialectical conception of totality can enable us to understand reality as a social process’ (Lukács, 1923/1971, pp. 12–13, original emphasis). Translating this claim into a methodological proposal, Philip McMichael’s method of incorporated comparison and Gillian Hart’s relational comparison offer important blueprints for how relational analysis can be applied in critical IPE and geographical studies. First, the method of incorporated comparison is based on the idea of an emergent totality, defined as a historical process that can be discovered through the comparative analysis of its parts as well as forms of social struggle that are relationally constitutive (McMichael, 1990, p. 389, 391; Weber, 2007). Instances of capitalist transformation and state formation, then, can be understood as both differentiated outcomes and comparable social phenomena within a historically integrated process as part of a self-forming whole (McMichael, 1990, p. 386; Morton, 2013c, pp. 244–246). Second, the method of incorporated comparison signifies a relational understanding of the emergent totality and its parts to forge a regressive-progressive movement between the abstract concepts and their concrete form (Hart, 2018, pp. 374–375; see also Sartre, 1963, pp. 51–52, 148–149). ‘A processual and relational understanding refuses to take as given discrete objects, identities, places and events; instead, it attends to how they are produced and changed in practice in relation to one another’ (Hart, 2004, p. 98). Critically, both approaches demonstrate the necessity for empirical research to comprehend the totality, by both relating parts and whole and also levels of abstraction. For if the totality is ‘an interpretive horizon’, as Weeks (1998/2018, p. 97) suggests, it is not pre-given nor closed, but rather evolving through history and our interpretation of it. To wit, ‘Lukács offers the tools to consider the material and subjective effects of neoliberalism in a methodologically holistic manner’ (Short, 2018, p. 953). Returning to Lukács (1924/1970, p. 88), it is his relational method that can insert moments dialectically within a totality ‘to detect the part in the whole and the whole in the part’. A departure from the reified, alienating, and compartmentalised worldview of mainstream political economy (preoccupied with a focus on the philosophy of external relations) as well as constructivist political economy (enamoured by the surface appearances of everyday life and conjunctural conditions), is thus enabled. More than this, however, our reading of Lukács in the ‘hereness of today’ also suggests that our pathways in and beyond IPE can be fruitfully guided by his spatial and socio-ecological contributions to the critique of political economy.

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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).

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).