Tactics and Ethics Political Writings 1919-1929

The articles and essays collected in this book were written during the decade of Lukács’s life when he was most active in politics. The first texts mark his transition from an anti-bourgeois aestheticism to Marxism and the newly founded Hungarian Communist Party. They are followed by material which displays the full range of his activity and thought during the subsequent ten years. Some of these essays were written when Lukács was deputy commissar of education in the embattled, short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Others include the famous article on parliamentarianism which earned its author the respectful yet severe criticism of Lenin.

The volume includes short studies on German revisionism, Bukharin’s Marxism, and Karl Wittfogel, and longer pieces on Lassalle and Moses Hess. The collection ends with the theses Luckás wrote, under his cover name “Blum”, in opposition to the policies of the Third Period of the Comintern.

Georg Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary’s Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.