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| Lukacs |
The above title is just one of the many excellent lines in the pamphlet,
Chicago Surrealists: In memory of Georg Lukacs. I've always been mystified by the cult of Georg Lukacs, especially in the context of his capitulation to Stalinism. This pamphlet, first published in 1971 on Lukacs's death and lifted from the
Unkant website is an often amusing correction to the view that Lukacs is an important element in re-energising a revolutionary left.
I happened to look at the Counterfeit website and noticed that John and Lindsey's stooge Chris Nineham has a written a book on Lukacs which claims that the Hungarian fraud '
was the great theorist of revolution in the 20th century'. All of the articles in this pamphlet and in particular, Franklin Rosemont's
Contribution to the Critique of an Insipid Legend serve as a sparkling antidote to such idiocy.
Enjoy.
Pamphlet issued by the Chicago Surrealist group on the event of Lukács' death in 1971
Franklin Rosemont: Contribution to the Critique of an Insipid Legend
Hegel wrote, in 1796, in the diary of his sojourn through the Bernese Alps, that
"...the Christian imagination bas produced nothing but an insipid legend."1 It is not accidental that the images associated with Christianity - servility, sickness, corruption, weakness, degradation, masochism, cowardice, prostration - are the very images that define the life and work of Georg Lukács, who recently did us the long-overdue courtesy of dropping dead. Uniting the mystic's propensity for sudden conversion and the most obsequious realism since Aquinas, Lukács, for more than fifty years, specialized in adapting himself to, and justifying, the given reality in which he found himself. Thus his philosophical erudition and 'classicism' were put in the service of the reality of forced labor camps, the Moscow trials, 'socialist' realism, Stalin's destruction of the Bolshevik Party and the degeneration of the Communist International.
