In this interview, conducted on 10 February 2023, John Bellamy Foster speaks with Daniel Tutt about the work of István Mészáros and Paul Baran, contemporary irrationalist tendencies in left ecological thought, intensifying global class struggles and the continued relevance of Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952), recently reissued with an introduction by Enzo Traverso by Verso in 2021. The interview is being made available in advance of a forthcoming special issue of Historical Materialism, for which Tutt is a co-editor, dedicated to Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason.
Daniel Tutt: I understand that you worked with the late István Mészáros, the Hungarian Marxist who was a great Lukács scholar and his personal assistant at one point. Do you think that Mészáros gained inspiration from The Destruction of Reason? I know that Mészáros, for example, would continually challenge the Left not to give into what Lukács in The Destruction of Reason calls ‘indirect apologetics’, and he diagnosed this tendency as neoliberalism became more and more sedimented into political life. Did Mészáros praise The Destruction of Reason?
John Bellamy Foster: I didn’t work with Mészáros in a formal sense, as I was never his student and we never wrote together, although I wrote forewords to some of his books at his request. We were very close friends. I went to graduate school at York University in Toronto partly with the idea of working with him, but, by that time, he had moved back to the University of Sussex. I first met him in the United States at the Socialist Scholars’ Conference in the 1980s. We had a lot of interactions through Monthly Review over the years. I visited him whenever I was in England, around every other year, between 2000 and his death in 2017 and we often corresponded. We were also in Venezuela together for a short visit with the government when Chávez was president. I took on much of the responsibility, along with others at Monthly Review, for the editing and publication of his books and articles. He (and his son, Giorgio, a professor at the University of Warwick) entrusted me with editing the manuscripts to his final, unfinished book, Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State. The first part of that book was published under its original title by Monthly Review Press in 2022. I am still working on editing the later parts, which will be published under the title Critique of Leviathan: Reflections on the State.
Mészáros was Lukács’s academic assistant and was chosen as the editor of Ezmélet (Consciousness), which was cofounded by Lukács, the composer Zoltán Kodály and the other figures of the Petőfi circle, which played a key role in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Lukács designated Mészáros as his successor at the Institute of Aesthetics and asked him to deliver the inaugural lectures on aesthetics as an associate professor of philosophy. However, Mészáros was forced to flee Hungary with his family following the Soviet invasion. Nevertheless, they were to remain lifelong friends. Mészáros was to write extensively about Lukács in Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, Beyond Capital and other works.
Mészáros always insisted on the critical importance of The Destruction of Reason, and we talked about it at various times, usually in the context of concrete developments. The three works by Lukács that Mészáros said would always stand ‘the test of time’ were History and Class Consciousness, The Destruction of Reason and The Young Hegel.1 In The Power of Ideology, Mészáros sharply criticised Adorno for attacking Lukács, including The Destruction of Reason, in Adorno’s 1958 review of The Meaning of Contemporary Reason. Adorno, as Mészáros pointed out, published his polemic against Lukács in the U.S. Army-founded and CIA-funded journal Der Monat (after which it was quickly republished in other CIA-funded publications in the United States and elsewhere), at a time when Lukács himself was still under house arrest for his role in the Hungarian Revolution.
DT: One of the most important claims in The Destruction of Reason is the historical periodisation Lukács offers regarding the imperial stage of monopoly capitalism and its relationship to irrationalism. Lukács shows how, even though irrationalism emerged out of neo-Kantian thought and the retreat of intellectuals after the 1848 revolution, it experienced its heyday in the latter part of the nineteenth century up through the Second World War. Your argument is that during late imperialism, exemplified since 2008 by globalised monopoly-finance capital, irrationalist epistemologies have arisen that portray the capitalist social order as natural and untranscendable. Can you say a bit more about this relationship between imperialism and the rise of irrationalism in intellectual life? What is it about imperialist social conditions that make irrationalist epistemologies more appealing?
JBF: In applying a historical materialist critique to the process of the destruction of reason, Lukács, periodised the growth of irrationalism in terms of the imperialist or monopoly stage of capitalism. Lenin said that ‘imperialism, in its briefest possible definition is the monopoly stage of capitalism’, and it was in this sense that Lukács was, of course, referring to it in his study.
Lukács’s thinking on imperialism is perhaps most explicit in his little book Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought. Here, Lukács indicated that Lenin, in a way distinct from any other thinker at the time, envisioned imperialism ultimately in terms of what it meant for the transformation of class politics within the imperialist states themselves. Imperialism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as explained in Lenin’s analysis in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, was associated with the growth of the great capitalist monopolies of production and finance, and the struggle of the great powers to extend colonisation and imperial control to the entire world, each at the expense of the others. It was the conflict over the imperial division of the world that led to the First World War, out of which emerged the Russian Revolution, and then—after a brief interval, which included the Great Depression—the Second World War. In the First World War, the international socialism movement was split, as most of the socialist parties joined the war efforts of their respective states. From that point on, the questions of class and imperialism were hopelessly entwined, with class struggle in the advanced capitalist states understood as curtailed by the accommodation of parts of the working class and the left with the imperialist system. Monopoly capitalism, which was inseparable from imperialism, meant a new order of concentrated economic power, which generated tendencies toward corporatism and fascism, undermining the working-class movement, with the ruling class relying at critical moments on the mobilisation of the volatile lower-middle class as the rearguard of system.
Imperialism, or monopoly capitalism, was complemented, according to Lukács, by the growth of irrationalism in philosophy, which legitimated in the realm of thought the growing unreason in society as a whole and represented an attempt to weaken the socialist critique by indirect rather than direct apologetics. The irrationalist tradition frequently attacked the bourgeois order, but in doing so presented the evils of capitalism in terms of primordial instincts, intuitions, myths, magic, vitalistic forces, nihilism, the will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’, and a deep social pessimism.
Lukács completed his book in 1952 and it was published in 1953. During this time, the Korean War was taking place, France was engaged in a war to regain its colony in Indochina and the U.S. had just detonated the first thermonuclear device in the Marshall Islands. Although these events are often presented exclusively in terms of the Cold War, for Lukács and most Marxist thinkers, they were manifestations of imperialism. In these conditions, a continuing irrationalist ideology, conducive to monopoly capitalism, was to be expected.
DT: I understand that, when The Destruction of Reason was published in the early 1950s, some Marxists such as Isaac Deutscher claimed that the work advocated a shift in the focus of Marxist ideological struggle towards irrationalism versus rationalism as the primary mode of ideological analysis. What do you make of this shift in the ideological struggle towards making irrationalism the primary object of Marxist struggle? Deutscher said that it brought with it a possible downside in that it made the critique of aesthetics possibly confused. For example, as you likely know, Lukács criticised abstract expressionism in art as irrationalist. But he also, against what Adorno argued, did not criticise psychoanalysis as irrationalist in The Destruction of Reason. So how do we separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, if we are committed to centring irrationalism vs. rationalism in intellectual critique? The question seems to be one of how to carefully dissect and isolate truly pernicious irrationalist tendencies in thought, which as you know are quite ubiquitous.
JBF: Deutscher’s criticism of Lukács was interesting but somewhat removed from any meaningful historical context. In his ‘Georg Lukács and “Critical Realism”’, originally broadcast on the BBC in 1968, Deutscher was reviewing Lukács’s Essays on Thomas Mann.2 Most of the pieces had been written in the 1930s and ’40s during the rise of Nazism in Germany and the Second World War, although some of what was included in the volume went back as far as 1909. For Lukács, Mann represented the highest, most enlightened bourgeois reason. Although he recognised its historical limitations, Lukács saw the position symbolised by Mann, who strongly opposed Hitler, as complementing socialism in the Popular Front struggle against irrationalism and Nazism. It was this Popular Front approach that Deutscher, coming from a different Marxist tradition than that of Lukács, criticised since it made the battle against irrationalism pivotal, presumably at the expense of the revolutionary project. However, in the context of the 1930s and ’40s, when the struggle against fascism was at the forefront, Lukács’s attempt to find a common ground between classical bourgeois reason and socialist reason can be seen as entirely defensible.
By 1968, when Deutscher was writing, things, of course, looked different. There is no doubt that Deutscher was right that Lukács’s critique of irrationalism—he specifically mentioned The Destruction of Reason—represented an attempt to join with the more enlightened, rational bourgeoisie against outright fascist tendencies. Deutscher criticised this. Yet, there are times, I believe, where such alliances are essential from a revolutionary perspective. Today, for example, a Popular Front-style abolitionist struggle against fossil capital, if that could be accomplished, might be a rational short-term strategy in order to save humanity from planetary catastrophe in the near future. Marx and Engels were not hesitant to draw on G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectical reason, despite its bourgeois idealist character. They allied themselves with the more progressive sections of the bourgeoisie at certain critical junctures in the attempt to transcend the worst irrationalisms of the capitalism of their day. One only has only to think of Marx’s letter, as General Secretary of the First International, to Abraham Lincoln, congratulating him on his re-election because it meant ‘Death to Slavery’.3
If we are taking a historical-materialist approach there is, of course, a certain general way of looking at questions of materialism, dialectics, history, reason and critique that arises from that tradition, rooted in a revolutionary orientation to working-class struggle and the movement toward socialism. ‘The confrontation of reality with reason’, as Paul Baran called it in ‘On the Nature of Marxism’, is an essential part of the philosophy of praxis.4 Lukács saw philosophical irrationalism as having developed as a way of defending bourgeois society intellectually by means of the cultivation of unreason, providing an indirect apologetics for the system and, at the same time, an intellectual scaffolding for extreme reaction, nihilism and destruction. The fact that the same irrationalist philosophical systems that Lukács was criticising continue to carry weight in our time should be of central concern for a Left that is seemingly unable to confront reality with reason or to connect reason with an emancipatory class project. There is no doubt that Lukács in The Destruction of Reason was focused not on irrationalism in general, but rather with those forms of irrationalism that were considered to be the very height of European culture, which not only defended capitalism’s permanent horrors, but, in many ways, encouraged an exterminationist outlook, explicit in Martin Heidegger’s Nazi-era work, if not also in Friedrich Nietzsche.
DT: What accounts for the frustration with the argument Lukács is making against irrationalism on today’s Left? For example, many people on the Left today passionately defend irrationalist thought, especially in the wake of the huge popularity in modern academia of poststructuralism, left-Heideggerian thought, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and various forms of Nietzscheanism. Some people think irrationalist thought has done some good for the Left. If postmodernism is being called out as irrationalist, many people seem to take issue with that accusation because they see how the Right has turned postmodernism into a sort of dog whistle that is used to demean queer theory and other minority struggles. How might we defend Lukács’s use of irrationalism with greater nuance and care to these dynamics?
JBF: In answering this question, it is useful to look at the epilogue (sometimes called the postscript) to Lukács’s Destruction of Reason, which so outraged some Western Marxist intellectuals, to see what is at issue here. In his conclusion to the collection on Aesthetics and Politics brought out in 1977—containing writings by Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Lukács—Fredric Jameson could not be clearer in its denunciation, reflecting the general stance of Western Marxism at the time. Not even ‘the most hardened apologist for Lukács’, Jameson wrote, will ‘want to deny’ that of the many texts of Lukács that served to discredit Marxism, the ‘outrageous postscript to Die Zerstörung der Vernunft is the least worthy of rehabilitation’.5
Why did Jameson and so many others consider the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason beyond rehabilitation? Writing during the Korean War, Lukács condemned the U.S. imperium as embodying the continuity of monopoly capitalism after the Second World War, in ways that represented a less-than-complete break with the irrationalist system (Adolf Hitler’s Germany was also a product of monopoly capitalism). In his epilogue, Lukács singled out for attack James Burnham (a leading U.S. Cold War intellectual who sought to legitimate monopoly capitalism as a new form of managerial capitalism), Walter Lippmann (one of the key founders of neoliberalism) and Karl Jaspers (a virulent critic of Marx and Freud), along with the then-ongoing rehabilitation of Heidegger and Carl Schmitt (both leading irrationalist thinkers who were among the chief intellectual supporters of Hitler). The underlying premise behind this newly emerging form of irrationalism, Lukács contended, was ‘the impossibility of exit’ from the system (see his discussion of Jaspers). All of the horrors of the new capitalist hegemony under the U.S. were thus justified in this new irrationalism by the notion of the end of history. Irrationalism had not been entirely defeated, Lukács argued, but was being resurrected on these grounds, in which the door to the future was now said to be closed. Today, not even the most ‘hardened opponent’ of Lukács on the Left could deny that he was largely correct. His characterisation of the U.S. in his epilogue was not unlike that of W.E.B. Du Bois at the same time, who decried in no uncertain terms the imperialism, racism, class domination and irrationalism of capitalism.
The frustration being expressed by sections of today’s Left, when confronted with the notion that Lukács’s critique of the destruction of reason is directly applicable to contemporary left philosophy, is almost identical to Jameson’s reaction in the 1970s to Lukács’s epilogue, and with essentially the same causes. Jameson was clearly reacting to the sharpness of Lukács’s criticisms of Heidegger, Schmitt, Jaspers and Lippmann and the harshness of his description of the U.S. imperium. And, given that Jameson was mostly aghast at Lukács’s charges laid at the foot of Heidegger, it clearly struck a chord even then. Today, the substance of Lukács’s critique of Heidegger seems almost mild compared to what the Western Left has been forced to admit in the face of the evidence. Indeed, Lukács’s entire critique in The Destruction of Reason, including the epilogue, has, as Mészáros said, stood ‘the test of time’, only gaining strength in the seventy years since it was written.
The truth is that, rather than directly challenging capitalism from the Marxist perspective in line with reason and the material interests of the working class, Western academics still professing to be on the Left abandoned Marxism altogether, seeking to criticise modernity and humanism by drawing on the irrationalist tradition emanating from the Right. In the process, the various ‘post-’ thinkers walked into a trap, partly set for them and partly of their own making. One only needs to think of how aghast the Western Left was when Heidegger’s Nazi writings, which he always refused to repudiate, came out one after the other at his own request in his Collected Works, even emended in some places to reinsert his full exterminationist views, which had, in some places, been deleted by editors, showing how deeply this was organically bound up with his entire philosophy. It is a mark of the strength of the commitment to philosophical irrationalism in the academy today that Heideggerian thought has still not been abandoned at this point, even with the publication of his Black Notebooks. Instead, new efforts are being made to rehabilitate him once again, given the repercussions that the rejection of his thought would have for generations of putatively left thinkers (who had essentially taken his works, in preference to the whole Hegelian-Marxian tradition) as their fundamental basis.
I don’t take seriously the notion that the Western Left, in facing up to the irrationalism that has penetrated into its thought, would thereby be in danger of falling prey to the dog whistles of the Right with respect to issues of trans people, race or gender. Choosing Hegel and Marx over Nietzsche and Heidegger can hardly play into the hands of the Right. Although the record is, of course, not unblemished, the struggle against racism, misogynism, homophobia, transphobia and all other forms of discrimination has always been strongest on the Marxist Left, integrated with the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle. When Lukács attacked the U.S. imperium in the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason, he did not, like so many at the time on the European Left, ignore race. Rather he singled out the system of ‘lynching’, on which the U.S. power structure was based.
The Right, of course, has no real problem with a Left that eats itself up in indirect apologetics for the capitalist system and foments philosophical irrationalism, complementing in many ways the irrationalist Right itself. A left tradition that relies on racist and misogynist as well as antiworker and antisocialist figures such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Heidegger and Schmitt, and sees its inner logic as one of antihumanism, while downplaying imperialism, naturally plays into reactionary hands, losing contact with genuinely radical and revolutionary struggles around the world.
DT: I wonder what Lukács’s study tells us about the responsibility of the intellectual. If, as Lukács seems to argue, ideas are never innocent, how should we understand this reality? What does The Destruction of Reason tell us about the vocation of the Marxist intellectual? Is there an implied ethical claim being made by Lukács in this work?
JBF: Lukács began working on The Destruction of Reason in 1948, at the time that he wrote ‘On the Responsibility of the Intellectuals’, which was a precursor to his argument. Here he raised the issue of the tendency, already visible on the French Left, ‘to bring the frank nihilism of the pre-fascist Heidegger into accord with problems of today’, thereby turning ‘cynicism into sham’. Lukács insisted that the Western intelligentsia was at a turning point. Either intellectuals chose to be ‘helpless victims, will-less helpers of a barbaric reaction’, or they would choose to be ‘path-breakers and champions of a progressive turn in world history’.6
The whole of The Destruction of Reason was thus about the responsibility of the intellectual to adhere to critical reason rather than irrationalism and carried within it a strong ethical imperative. Lukács raises this issue somewhat obliquely in the conclusion, where he stated: ‘By no means does one have to be a socialist to sense the urgency of the problem [the growth of irrationalism] and to take a vigorous stand in finding a solution. Already in the twenties, Thomas Mann wrote: “I said that things would only go well with Germany and that she would only find her feet when Marx has read Friedrich Hölderin—an encounter which, by the way, is beginning to happen.”’7 For Lukács, the real point here was not so much the forging of a relation of Marx to Hölderin (symbolic of the poles of German culture), but rather the relation of Marx to Mann, since, in Lukács’s own terms, Marx represented the zenith of socialist reason and Mann that of conscious bourgeois reason—both of which were in opposition to irrationalism.
I wrote an article on Lukács’s ethics for Ezmélet in November 2021, the English version of which appeared in Monthly Review in February 2022.8 The ethical problem occupied Lukács from the very beginning of the October Revolution in Russia, which led to him to state his fundamental ethical rationale (countering his earlier views) for joining the Bolshevik Revolution in his ‘Tactics and Ethics’ (1919). ‘[T]he individual’s conscience and sense of responsibility’, he wrote there, ‘are confronted with the postulate that one must act as if on one’s action or inaction depended the changing of the world’s destiny.’9 Here, he was emphasising the relation between ‘self and selfhood’, that is, whether one’s reason and ethics were guided by the individual self or by the general interest (selfhood) of humanity. ‘Ethics’, he wrote in his Aesthetics ‘is the crucial field of the fundamental, all-deciding struggle between this-worldliness and other-worldliness, of the real superseding/preserving transformation of human particularity.’10 Dialectical reason itself pointed to the necessity of a higher ethics embodied in the social development of each individual human being.
A primary responsibility of the intellectual in the face of the irrationalism and exterminationism of our time is actively to oppose the destruction of reason that currently separates critical-dialectical thought from the class-based, inclusive revolutionary praxis that constitutes the future of history. In the past, Marxist theorists have often charged conformist tendencies on the Left with the retreat from class or abandonment of the emancipatory project. Today, when the very survival of humanity is in the balance, it is essential to recognise that a crucial, strategic part of this overall struggle is the defence of very process of “the confrontation of reality with reason,” which the penetration of irrationalism into the Left has placed in question. This requires what Jean-Paul Sartre called a commitment to ‘impossible revolutions’.11
DT: In your article ‘The New Irrationalism’, you discuss how the New Materialist philosophies of immanence in ecological thinking such as Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour are deeply informed by irrationalist strains of thought, from vitalism to left-Heideggerian antihumanism. What is your advice to students of Marxism and ecology for addressing these limitations from the perspective of a rationalist orientation?
JBF: Probably the greater part of my work in the last two decades has been devoted to Marxian ecology. The ecological field has in general been realist and materialist in orientation, heavily influenced by natural science and firmly opposed to historical capitalism. Marxian ecology and ecosocialism have played a major and growing role in the understanding the planetary environmental crisis and its roots in the system of capital accumulation, influencing not only theory and science, but also on-the-ground movements all around the world.
I was thus surprised, then, by the emergence over the last decade or so of a growing irrationalism within the ecological discussion emanating primarily from the Left, chiefly within the posthumanist currents, including the new vitalistic materialism, Latourian-style hybridism, actor-network analysis, object-oriented ontology and the like. Such analyses are wilfully ignorant of ecology as a discipline, removed from the science, unversed in Marxian ecology and unconnected to environmental movement. They adopted a pure ethical stance, as if that were the whole problem, and sought to promote a new animism under the name of a so-called new materialism. In this view, the world cannot be understood in materialist terms, encompassing the emergence of new organisational forms and integrative levels. Instead, it is necessary to import vitalistic elements, supernatural or paranormal processes and object-oriented flat ontology. This analysis is explicitly antihumanist, antinaturalist, antiscience, antidialectical. The very concepts of nature and humanity are abandoned while a clownish thinker like Slavoj Žižek, in support of these irrationalist trends, pronounces that ‘ecology is a new opium for the masses’.12
Much of this new-materialist irrationalism draws on and distorts materialist or materialist-oriented thinkers like Epicurus and Spinoza. Marxism is a frequent target. In some posthumanist-oriented analyses, Marx’s critique of commodity value is entirely deconstructed so that commodity value or the value form is attributed to all ‘work’, performed by energy in the universe in the sense of physics, thereby making any meaningful critique of capitalism as a political-economic system impossible. It was the philosophical decentring of the critique of political economy that Lukács singled out in his ‘On the Responsibility of Intellectuals’ as the most pernicious tendency of the irrationalism of the post-war period. Dialectics itself is reduced to either dualism or monism, excluding mediation, totality and emergence.
More recently, figures like Latour, Bennett and Morton have taken Marx on directly in the form of the rejection of his critique of commodity fetishism, and of fetishism altogether. They argue that Marx’s perspective, by basing its argument on the critique of the mystification of human social relations seeing these as simply as relations between things/commodities and thus reified, thereby discriminates against all nonhuman persons. Such nonhuman persons, we are told, can include everything from Adorno’s plastic dinosaurs to a chocolate, a lump of coal, a microbe—all of which are seen on the same flat ontological plane, together with human beings and all other living species. In a kind of empiricist irrationalism that excludes abstraction, everything is converted into a vast web of imbroglios, bundles and hybrids. The critique of commodity fetishism is transformed by Morton into a celebration of things over humanity, to the point that the whole question of human agency gets lost.
In his book Humankind, Morton has charged that Marx, when he described the machine process in his treatment of constant capital in Capital, was guilty of an anti-ecological, anthropocentric viewpoint in that he failed to see the coal, oil and grease used up in the process as ‘nonhuman persons’. Morton and Bennett tell us that stones and other inanimate objects think, exercise will and exhibit agency, thereby replicating the irrationalist claims of Schopenhauer, while falsely attributing such views to Spinoza as well. On this basis, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the real ecological challenges facing humanity and the need for revolutionary social transformation, Marx and the entire Marxist tradition is faulted for being unecological in failing fully to recognise earthly spectres, phantom-like objects, the paranormal and the symbiotic real. Because Marx’s analysis does not focus on everything from the earth below to the stars above, as well as all human-made manufactured commodities, as constituting a universe of nonhuman persons he is prone to anthropocentrism. Thus, we are told by Morton that either ‘Marx’s anthropocentrism is a profound feature of his thought,’ or else it is “a bug” in his thought (the position Morton himself prefers). (Likewise “Heidegger’s Nazism is a bug, not a feature.”)13 Marx’s notion of ‘social metabolism’, which, for him, was part of the ‘universal metabolism of nature’, is so distorted by Morton that it is transformed into a mere ‘human economic metabolism’ and is then subjected to criticism as anthropocentric on that false basis.
It was my encounter with the irrationalism entering the ecological realm from the supposed Left, challenging all forms of revolutionary ecological praxis, along with Earth System Science, Marxism and dialectical critical realism, that first got me concerned about the way in which irrationalism was disorganising the Left, removing it from the realm of necessary action and constituting an indirect apologetics for the capitalist system. This led me back to Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason.
DT: You end your article ‘The New Irrationalism’ by invoking Baran, who once said that we have to deploy reason to establish an ‘identity of the material interests and needs of a class [or class-based social forces] with … REASON’s criticism of the existing irrationality’.14 You go on to suggest that the most likely geographical location for this to take place resides in the Global South. While I think that’s a compelling argument, I wonder what your thoughts are on the prospects of the class struggle in the U.S. What might be some practical lessons Lukács might offer the U.S. and even the European Left in its struggle to address the new age of imperialism and monopoly capitalism we are facing today?
JBF: Baran was born in 1910 in Nikolaev, Ukraine in the Tsarist Russian Empire. He was trained in economics at the Plekhanov Institute of Economics in Moscow and the University of Berlin. He entered the U.S. on a Polish passport, studied economics at Harvard, worked in the Second World War for the Strategic Bombing Survey under John Kenneth Galbraith and ended up as a tenured professor of economics at Stanford, eventually coming under attack in McCarthyite fashion for his defence of Cuba. He was a central figure at Monthly Review. In the early 1930s he had worked as an assistant to Friedrich Pollock at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Hence, Frankfurt School themes with respect to critical reason pervade his thought. He was famously the author of The Political Economy of Growth (1957), which was the founding work in post-war Marxist dependency and imperialism theory. He and Paul Sweezy later wrote Monopoly Capital, which was published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death.
Baran’s point in the letter to Sweezy that I quoted in ‘The New Irrationalism’ was that what he called ‘the crux’ of the Marxian view was the combining of dialectical critical reason with the material interests of class-based movements. Hence, an attack on reason was, in many ways, as effective in capitalism’s ideological fight against Marxism as an attack on the reality of the working class itself. For Baran, intellectual irrationalism was all the more readily turned into a weapon against the working class and third world populations because it reflected the elemental irrationalism of monopoly capitalist society itself. It is no accident that the final chapter of Monopoly Capital was titled ‘The Irrational System’.
Baran was above all a critic of imperialism and monopoly capitalism. For Baran and Sweezy, revolution in the late twentieth century was largely confined to the vast revolt against imperialism in the periphery of the capitalist system and to those movements within the advanced capitalist world, including those of the racially oppressed, that adopted a strong anti-imperialist as well as class-based politics. The reality was that a large part of the primarily white working class in the advanced capitalist states had accommodated itself to the U.S. dominated imperial order. This dynamic continues today, and accommodation to the imperialist world order has thus far characterised the bulk of the so-called Western Left, impeding any revolutionary standpoint. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s 2000 book Empire is considered one of the more successful left studies of last couple of decades, but its fame had much to do with the way it was lauded by the leading organs of the mainstream media such as the New York Times, Time Magazine and Foreign Affairs (the publication of the Council of Foreign Relations, known as ‘the imperial brain trust’) for declaring that ‘Imperialism is over’. This was rooted in an analysis that drew at critical points on the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Schmitt, via the French Left, to argue for ‘the end of the functioning of the dialectic’.15 Failing to identify with those parts of the world where revolution was taking place, accommodating itself with imperialism and ceasing to war with monopoly capitalism, much of the intellectual Left turned to mere discursive forms of analysis. Here, irrationalism and subjective idealism become the dominant modalities, and to refer to ‘post-’ does not mean going beyond mere Nietzschean rejection.
Nevertheless, conditions are such that class struggle is once again intensifying in both Europe and North America at present, as well as in the Global South. As I write this in early February 2023, massive strike waves have been occurring in Britain and other parts of Europe. Almost a million French, primarily working-class, protestors are confronting the French government and police over the extension of capitalist austerity to pensions, raising the age at which they can be received. In the U.S., the union movement is reviving from a previous low.
Given the planetary ecological crisis, escalating war, stagnation and financialization and increasing polarization of wealth and power on world scale, absolutely nothing in the political, economic and ideological structure of society at present can be considered stable. We are in a new age in which the various so-called post-philosophies will likely fade, as working-class humanity once again seeks to overturn the alienated, irrationalist world. Now more than ever, in our time the responsibility of the Left is to engage in a revolutionary struggle on a planetary scale with the aim of creating a world of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, that is, a socialism for the twenty-first century.
Notes:
- ↩ See István Mészáros, ‘Barbarism on the Horizon: An Interview with István Mészáros’, MR Online, 31 December 2013, available from: https://mronline.org/2013/12/31/meszaros311213-html/ (last accessed 19 September 2024).
- ↩ See Isaac Deutscher, ‘Georg Lukács and “Critical Realism”’, Marxism in Our Time, ed. Tamara Detuscher (Berkeley, CA: The Ramparts Press, 1971), pp. 283—93. https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1965/lukacs-critical.htm
- ↩ Karl Marx, Letter to Abraham Lincoln, 23 December 1864, in Marx and Engels Collected Works. Marx and Engels: 1864—1868, vol. 20 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), pp. 19—21, here p. 19.
- ↩ Paul Baran, ‘On the Nature of Marxism’, The Longer View: Essays Toward a Critique of Political Economy, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp.19—42.
- ↩ Fredric Jameson, ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, in Fredric Jameson (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 2007, pp. 196—213, here p. 201.
- ↩ Georg Lukács, ‘On the Responsibility of the Intellectuals’, Telos 3 (spring 1969), pp. 123—31, here pp. 126 and 131, respectively.
- ↩ Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Verso, 2021).
- ↩ John Bellamy Foster, ‘Lukács and the Tragedy of Revolution: Reflections on “Tactics and Ethics”’, Monthly Review, vol. 73, no. 9 (February 2022), available from: https://monthlyreview.org/2022/02/01/lukacs-and-the-tragedy-of-revolution/ (last accessed 19 September 2024).
- ↩ Georg Lukács, ‘Tactics and Ethics’, in Tactics and Ethics, 1919—1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 3—11, here p.8, with minor amendments.
- ↩ Georg Lukács quoted in István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), p. 400.
- ↩ See Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History (New York: Monthly Review) 2012.
- ↩ See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses’, available from: https://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm (last accessed 19 September 2024).
- ↩ Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017), p. 30, 91.
- ↩ Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, 3 February 1957, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), p. 154.
- ↩ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 378.