Georg Lukacs

Cultural Marxist profiles

• He began his political life as a Kremlin agent of the Communist International.

• His History and Class-Consciousness gained him recognition as the leading Marxist theorist since Karl Marx.

• In 1919 he became the Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun Regime in Hungary. He instigated what become known as “Cultural Terrorism.”

• Cultural Terrorism was a precursor of what was to happen in European and American schools.

• He launched an “explosive” sex education program. Special lectures were organised in Hungarian schools and literature was printed and distributed to instruct children about free love, the nature of sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of the bourgeois family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children were urged to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church, and to ignore precepts of morality. They were easily and spontaneously turned into delinquents with whom only the police could cope. This call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian children was matched by a call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian women.

• In rejecting the idea that Bolshevism spelled the destruction of civilisation and culture, Lukacs stated: “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”

• Lukacs’ state of mind was expressed in his own words:

- “All the social forces I had hated since my youth, and which I aimed in spirit to annihilate, now came together to unleash the First Global War.”

- “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the speech.”

- “The question is: Who will free us from the yoke of Western Civilisation?”

- “Any political movement capable of bringing Bolshevism to the West would have to be ‘Demonic’.”

- “The abandonment of the soul’s uniqueness solves the problem of ‘unleashing’ the diabolic forces lurking in all the violence which is needed to create revolution.”

• Lukacs’ state of mind was typical of those who represented the forces of Revolutionary Marxism.

• At a secret meeting in Germany in 1923, Lukacs proposed the concept of inducing “Cultural Pessimism” in order to increase the state of hopelessness and alienation in the people of the West as a necessary prerequisite for revolution.

• This meeting led to the founding of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany in 1923 – an organisation of Marxist and Communist-oriented psychologists, sociologists and other intellectuals that came to be known as the Frankfurt School, which devoted itself to implementing Georg Lukacs’s program.

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