română/
tranzit.org/

tranzit.ro/ bucurești/ cluj/ iași/ sibiu/

Georg Lukács, “Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat”, in History and Class Consciousness

Reading seminar: Legacies of modernity 2014-2015

Coordinated by Alex Cistelecan

Special guest: G.M.Tamas

19 June 2015, 5 pm.

tranzit. ro/ Cluj,
str. Brassai S. nr.5, Cluj

For our last meeting in the series of seminars on the Legacies of Modernity, we invite you to a discussion of a nodal text from the Marxist tradition. A work situated at the intersection of three lines of fracture, which concentrates in itself the emancipatory praxis and theory of the 20th century precisely by distributing its subsequent divergent paths. Firstly, in Lukacs’ own philosophical trajectory, where it represents the highest expression of his early revolutionary commitment, abandoned later in an ever growing compromise with the rigors of Stalinism; secondly, as the common target of the critiques formulated from both extremes of the Left spectrum, denounced both by social-democracy and the Comintern; and finally, as a paradoxical meeting point of both directions that would come to define – in their very separation – the history of Marxism in the 20th century: on the one hand, its translation into revolutionary practice by Lenin; on the other hand, its survival as mere theory in what would come to be known as ‘Western Marxism’.