Georg Lukács, the ‘Dialectics of Nature’ and the ‘free creation of history’¶

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument¶

The article argues that Georg Lukács' denial of a dialectics of nature — the claim that dialectical laws apply only to human society and consciousness, not to the natural world — represents a fundamental break with Marxism that leads inexorably to political capitulation. This is not a marginal philosophical dispute but a question with direct political consequences: if the working class is understood as an "identical subject-object of history" that can "freely create" its own conditions without objective constraints, the result is a subjectivist voluntarism that, in practice, substitutes the Party for the class and ends in Stalinist conformism.

The central thesis is that Lukács' position, far from being a sophisticated "humanist" alternative to mechanical materialism, is itself rooted in petit-bourgeois idealism. It severs Marxism from its materialist foundations, denies the objective character of natural laws that condition all human activity, and ultimately provides no bridge between abstract revolutionary will and concrete historical conditions. The article insists that Engels' Dialectics of Nature is not a dogmatic appendage to Marxism but a necessary elaboration of the principle that humanity is part of nature, not outside it — and that freedom consists precisely in understanding and mastering natural necessity, not in escaping it.

Theoretical Grounding¶

The analysis draws on several interconnected Marxist concepts:

The dialectics of nature vs. dialectics of society. The article defends Engels' position that dialectical laws — the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, the negation of the negation — are objective features of both natural and social reality. This is grounded in the materialist premise that "our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws" (Engels). Lukács' restriction of dialectics to the subject-object relation in history is shown to presuppose an idealist separation of humanity from nature.

Commodity fetishism and reification. The article carefully distinguishes Marx's concept of commodity fetishism from Lukács' concept of reification. For Marx, fetishism describes how social relations between people appear as relations between things under capitalism — a distortion that can be overcome through revolutionary practice. For Lukács, reification becomes a more general epistemological condition in which treating objects as "law-governed, objective reality" is itself the problem. The article argues this subtly inverts Marx: where Marx saw alienated theory as unable to grasp the connection between humanity and the objective whole, Lukács treats the very recognition of objective laws as a form of reified consciousness.

The identical subject-object of history. The article subjects this Hegelian-derived concept to sustained critique. Lukács posits the class-conscious proletariat as the "identical subject-object" that overcomes the separation of thought and being. But the article demonstrates that this concept is internally contradictory: the proletariat as an actually existing class lives under reified conditions (wage labour, commodity production) and cannot "freely create history" without first transcending those conditions. The only way to resolve this contradiction is to assign the role of identical subject-object to the Party — a class-substitutionalism that mirrors Stalinist bureaucratic centralism.

Freedom and necessity. The article draws on Engels' formulation in Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature: freedom is the recognition of necessity, not its absence. Lukács' conception of freedom as the ability to "make our own history" without objective conditions is shown to be a species of idealist voluntarism that, in practice, leads to passive conformity when confronted with real historical obstacles.

The article situates itself within the Marxist tradition that insists on the unity of materialism and dialectics, rejecting both the mechanical determinism of Stalinist "diamat" and the subjectivist "Western Marxism" that emerged in reaction to it. It draws implicitly on Trotsky's critique of Stalinism as a bureaucratic deformation rooted in the isolation of the Russian Revolution, though this remains in the background.

Conjunctural Relevance¶

The article was published in 2008, at the tail end of the long post-war boom and on the eve of the global financial crisis. Its conjunctural relevance operates on several levels:

The persistence of "Western Marxism" as an academic orthodoxy. The article targets the continued influence of Lukács and the Frankfurt School within university humanities departments, where "cultural Marxism" had become a dominant framework. The article's polemic against "petit-bourgeois professors" who prefer "culture" to class struggle speaks directly to the academic Marxism of the 1990s and 2000s — a Marxism that had largely abandoned revolutionary politics for textual analysis, identity politics, and cultural criticism.

The political function of subjectivism. The article argues that Lukács' subjectivism leads logically to Stalinist conformism — a claim with contemporary resonance. In the post-1991 period, many former Marxists who had abandoned revolutionary politics found in Lukács and the Frankfurt School a way to maintain a "critical" posture toward capitalism without committing to working-class revolution. The article exposes this as a dead end: subjectivist Marxism, unable to connect its abstract ideals to concrete conditions, either capitulates to the existing order or substitutes moral exhortation for political strategy.

The environmental question. Though not explicitly addressed, the article's defence of a dialectics of nature has clear implications for contemporary ecological debates. If nature is merely a "social category" (Lukács), then environmental destruction becomes a question of consciousness rather than a material contradiction of capitalism. The article's insistence that humanity is part of nature and subject to its laws provides a Marxist foundation for understanding ecological crisis as rooted in the capitalist mode of production, not in a faulty worldview.

The crisis of reformism. The article connects Lukács' position to the "two-stage theory" in politics — the idea that socialism must be postponed until capitalism has fully developed. This was the theoretical justification for Stalinist popular frontism and, later, for Eurocommunism. In 2008, with the global financial crisis exposing the bankruptcy of reformist strategies, the article's critique of subjectivist voluntarism (which swings between utopianism and passivity) speaks directly to the political disorientation of the left.

Where the Argument Continues¶

The article is part of a broader body of work within the Revolutionary Communist International tradition that defends Engels' Dialectics of Nature against its critics. The argument continues in:

Alan Woods and Ted Grant, Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science — the most comprehensive defence of the dialectics of nature within this tradition, engaging with modern physics, biology, and cosmology.
Alan Woods, The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective — situates the Lukács debate within the broader history of idealism vs. materialism in philosophy.
In Defence of Marxism articles on the Frankfurt School — several pieces trace the political trajectory from Lukács through Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse to the abandonment of revolutionary Marxism.
Against the Stream episodes on "Western Marxism" — podcast discussions that develop the critique of subjectivism in relation to contemporary academic fashions (postmodernism, post-Marxism, etc.).
The RCI's political interventions on reformism and opportunism — the theoretical critique of Lukács is linked to practical political questions: the nature of the party, the relationship between class consciousness and objective conditions, and the rejection of popular frontism.

The article leaves underdeveloped the question of how a dialectics of nature relates to modern science — it gestures toward this but does not engage with post-1920s developments in physics, biology, or ecology. This is taken up in Reason in Revolt.

Connections¶

Engels, Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring — the primary texts Lukács attacks and the article defends.
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 — cited for the proposition that "man is a part of nature."
Marx, Capital, Volume I (Chapter 1: The Fetishism of Commodities) — the basis for distinguishing Marx's concept from Lukács' reification.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — the classic statement that "men make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing."
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923) — the target text, particularly the essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat."
Lukács, 1967 Preface to History and Class Consciousness — his own partial recantation, cited against his followers.
Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism — provides biographical and political detail on Lukács' Stalinism.
István Mészáros, Lukács' Concept of Dialectic — a sympathetic but critical account of the unresolved dualism in Lukács' thought.
Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory — a detailed academic study that the article engages with critically.

Key Quotes¶

"Lukács' claim that the dialectical laws of human society and thought cannot be applied to nature is strange — it has no precedent in dialectical thought."
"The idea that we have made reality loses its more or less fictitious character: we have... made our own history and if we are able to regard the whole of reality as history (i.e. as our history, for there is no other), we shall have raised ourselves in fact to the position from which reality can be understood as our 'action.'"
"One would have to imagine an identical subject-object the actions of which would have no unintended consequences and which would encounter no contingencies in its environment requiring it to adjust and transcend the given."
"The working class, in struggling for and winning freedom, is actually gaining knowledge of how it is determined by nature. Without this sober approach, the proletariat will never come to power, or at the very least would not be able to remould society and labour in accordance with natural laws."
"At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly."
"Whereas a premise of [dialectical materialism] is that humanity or 'subject' is a part of the whole of nature... Lukács assumes at the outset that the 'subject' and the 'object' are two different things, as if standing side-by-side."