![]() ![]() The reification confronting the proletariat differs little from the rigid immediacy imprisoning the bourgeoisie. It is no accident that the issue of the of labor emerges in third section of essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in which Lukács discusses immediacy and mediation. Dualism of Wage-Labor: Labor-Time and the Soul Here, we trace emergence of the question of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” and the ambiguity it causes in the Hegelian-Marxian tradition. His 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and later works, The Young Hegel and The Ontology of Social Being, constitute a trajectory in his theorization of labor. In that chapter, labor is philosophically defined as the fundamental teleological positing that forms the model for social praxis. The outcome of this project, on which he was working in the 1960s, was The Ontology of Social Being, one chapter of which was devoted to the question of labor. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and his encounter with Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The first attempt produced his book The Young Hegel, in which the discussion of labor is associated with his reading of G. Only now, thirty years later, am I attempting to discover a real solution to this whole problem in the ontology of social existence, on which I am currently engaged. My first attempt to put this plan into practice came early in the thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first draft of my book The Young Hegel (which was not completed until autumn 1937). ![]() Once I had gained a definite and fundamental insight into what was wrong with my whole approach in History and Class Consciousness, this search became a plan to investigate the philosophical connections between economics and dialectics. ![]() 2 He described his own development in the following way: In the same preface, Lukács later wrote that labor, characterized by its “teleological system,” should be taken as “the original form and model” of all human praxis. In his preface to the 1967 edition, he wrote that “the purview of economics is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labor as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing.” Thus, labor refers not only to the historical phenomenon of reification (that is, wage-labor), but also stands for a more general, even ontological, question. Lukács’s later criticism of History and Class Consciousness revolved around the issues of labor and human praxis in general. In this sense, labor under capitalism not only determines the lowest point of reification, but also forms “the vantage point of the proletariat.” 1 On one hand, labor is reduced to the pure abstractness of labor-time, which marks the nadir of capitalist reification on the other, it is within the immediate experience of reified labor that the proletarian consciousness is rendered possible. ![]() The question of labor becomes especially crucial in the third section of History and Class Consciousness, where the young Lukács argues that the proletariat will become conscious of being the object-subject of history. The idea of phantom (or phantom-like) objectivity derives from Karl Marx’s discussion of commodity and labor in Capital. His 1922 essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”-the central piece of his work History and Class Consciousness, famously opens with the phrase phantom objectivity. The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years. ![]()
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