Rethinking Lukacs: Violence, Power, and Symbolic Activity

Peterson, Richard

doi:10.5840/radphilrev2024918142

Radical Philosophy Review

Volume 27, Issue 2, 2024

Richard Peterson

Pages 229-255

https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev2024918142

Rethinking Lukacs
Violence, Power, and Symbolic Activity

Lukacs’ analysis of reification is potentially fruitful for analyzing structural (or institutional) violence as well as cultural or symbolic violence. But he did not make an explicit theme of such violence. Thanks to the neglect of violence, Lukacs did not explore the politics of nonviolence. Perhaps this reflects the secondary place of violence and nonviolence in the tradition of working class politics on which he drew. The later emergence of anti-colonial politics (for example, as theorized by Gandhi and Fanon) included a more explicit focus on violence and nonviolence, as did evolving anti-racist and feminist struggles. While in the meantime many such movements have typically retreated from (or even questioned) the more systematic focus of anti-capitalism and the construction of socialism, they have developed violence as a more explicit and politically relevant theme. In pursuing these themes, I hope to show that Lukacs’ critique of reification can identify and help challenge the structural violence that is imposed by the expansive commodification of capitalist economies. Doing so requires that we attend to functions of symbolic activity in experience generally as well as more specifically in contexts of violence. Elaborating on some of the philosophical aspects of this claim is the task of the first section of this paper. From there I will turn to themes of symbolic activity that are useful for social theory and then proceed to conceptions of violence and of power. These themes bear on the problem of compromised agency that figures prominently in Lukacs’ thought.

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