Save the Georg Lukács Archive ▻http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2554-history-has-a-habit-of-intruding-save-the-lukacs-archive
By this time he had become a major figure in the world of ideas and his early works were being translated and starting to influence the New Left. For a brief time, he was treated by the New Left as one of the leading exponents of the Humanist Marxism that Althusser attacked. While it is possible to agree with Althusser that there is no subject called ‘Mankind’ who has been alienated by capitalism, it is less clear whether Lukács had such a figure in mind in the 1920s. It can be argued that there a major differences between the theory of reification that was developed in History and Class Consciousness and Marx’s theory of alienation, which remained in an unpublished manuscript until the 1930s. Lukács commented on the need to clarify this relationship in 1967, yet this remains to be done.
Nonetheless, all theories of totality had become suspect by the 1980s. With the end of the Cold War and the liberals’ talk of the “End of History”, his themes about class consciousness, historical tendencies and totality looked as out of place as a Lada in a Ferrari showroom. To many he was an embarrassment. Yet in the period of failing banks and political polarisation, perhaps 1923 is more timely than 1989. History has a habit of intruding – which is a very Lukácsian thing to say.
Certainly today people want to understand how capitalism works as a whole, how it is linked to all aspects of life. With the integration of the economic and the ecological crises, the search for totality is taking on even wider dimensions than during previous periods in the history of capitalism. The career of Georg Lukács is well worth preserving under such conditions.
The Archive is invaluable in this respect. Lukács wrote in German and Hungarian, and much of his work is unpublished or untranslated – either into English or German. There is nowhere apart from the archive where scholars and political activists can access this work.
cc @prac_6 @brunhilde @pguilli
Action : ▻http://www.save-georg-lukacs-archive.org
To put it in a nutshell, we should strive for an independent future for the GLA at its historical place – the former flat of Georg Lukacs in Budapest.