The Last Phase of Romantic Anti-Capitalism: Lukacs' Response to the War

Fehér, Ferenc; Wikoff, Jerold

doi:10.2307/487676

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Lukács agreed with many disillusioned intellectuals of his generation that they were living in an age of intense cultural and spiritual crisis (Fehér, 1977). Especially in his early, pre-Marxist writings, he argued that capitalist civilization represented a brazenly materialistic and God-forsaken social order that had destroyed the last vestiges of genuine community.…”

Section: Lukács: 'Riddle Of the Commodity-structure'mentioning

confidence: 95%

Marxism and the convergence of utopia and the everyday

Gardiner

2006

History of the Human Sciences

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The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions.

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Section: Lukács: 'Riddle Of the Commodity-structure'mentioning

confidence: 95%