XXX HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION(1967) in jograde step, as Hungary had already been a soviet republic This question has another, and for me a more important aspect, 19 ich gives the change reo This is not the place to discuss all these different views. Particu on. As the reader of these essays knows, my decision to take an larly as the text of the theses can scarcely be held to have active part in the Communist movement was infuenced pro- iny great value as a theoretical document today, even though for foundly by ethical considerations. When I took this decision I did not suspect that I would be a politician for the next decade th on the However, circumstances would have it so. When, in February of principle and of concrete detail. This was due in part to the 1919, the Central Committee was arrested, I once again thought act that in order to make the chief matters of substance more it my. duty to accept the post offered to me in the semi-illegal acceptable I had treated the issues too generally and did not give suficient force to particulars. Even so they caused a great sequence posts in the People's Commissariat for Education in the scandal in the Hungarian Party. The Kun group saw the theses as Soviet Republic and political People's Commissariat in the Red the purest opportunism; support for me from my own party was Army, illegal activity in Budapest, internal party confict in lukewarm. When I heard from a reliable source that Bela Kun Vienna and so on. Only then was I placed before a real alterna- was planning to expel me from the Party as a 'Liquidator,,I tive. My internal, private self-criticism came to the conclusion gave up the struggle, as I was well aware of Kuns prestige in the that if i was so clearly in the right, as I believed, and could still International, and I published a'Self-criticism', I was indeed ot avoid such a sensational defeat, then there must be grave firmly convinced that I was in the right but I knew also-eg. defects in my practical political abilities. Therefore, I felt able from the fate that had befallen Karl Korsch-that to be expelled to withdraw from my political career with a good conscience and from the Party meant that it would no longer be possible to concentrate once more on theoretical matters i have never participate actively in the struggle against Fascism. I wrote my regretted this decision.( Nor is there any inconsistency in the fact self-criticism as an 'entry ticket' to such activity as I neither that in 1956 I had once again to take on a ministerial post. I could nor wished to continue to work in the Hungarian move declared before accepting it that it was only for the interim, the nt in the circumstances. period of acute crisis, and that as soon as the situation became How little this self-criticism was to be taken seriously can be more settled I would immediately resig gauged from the fact that the basic change in my outlook under In pursuing the analysis of my theoretical activities in the ng the Blum Theses(which failed, however, to express it in an narrow sense I have by-passed half a decade and can only now even remotely satisfactory fashion) determined from now on all return to a more detailed discussion of the essays subsequent to my theoretical and practical activities. Needless to say, this is istory and Class Consciousness. This divergence from the correct not the place to give even a brief account of these. As evidence chronological sequence is justified by the fact that, without my that my claim is objectively verifiable and not merely the uspecting it in the least, the theoretical content of the Blum product of a wish-fulfilment, I may cite the comments made (in Theses formed the secret terminus ad quem of my development. 1950)by Joszef Revai, the chief ideologist of the Party, with The years of my apprenticeship in Marxism could only be held reference to the Blum Theses. He regards the literary views I to have reached a conclusion when i really began to overcome eld at the time as flowing directly from the Blum Theses. Every- the contradictory dualism that had characterised my thought one familiar with the history of the Hungarian since the last years of the war by confronting a particular question Party knows that the literary views held by Comrade Lukacs of importance involving the most diverse problems. I can now between 1945 and 1949 belong together with political views that outline the course of this development up to the Blum Theses by he had formulated much earlier in the context of political trends pointing to my theoretical works dating from that period. I think in Hungary and of the strategy of the Communist Party at the that by establishing beforehand the terminal point of that develop- end of the twenties. 10 ment it becomes easier to give such an account. This is particu-