Historical Materialism
Lukács refuses to grant any revolutionary potential to the new Modernist schools, but in doing so, he is forced to defend his thesis in a controversial way. Marxist thought holds that each new advance in society merely hastens the eventual revolution. But certainly the Modernist schools are a new advance, and so they must have some revolutionary potential. Lukács is therefore forced to either declare that Modernism is not historically necessary, or to debate the Marxist concept of inevitability. Since he has already incorporated the development of Modernist movements into his thesis of social totality, he must take the latter position. As he writes:
- For Marxism the acknowledgment of a historical necessity neither implies a justification of what actually exists (not even during the period when it exists), nor does it express a fatalistic belief in the necessity of historical events … Even less would it occur to a Marxist to see thereby any fatalistic necessity in the development from capitalism to socialism. (1047)
Read more about this topic: Realism In The Balance
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