...Projekte sind, die sich sowohl in epistemologischer als auch materieller Hinsicht der Befreiung widmen. Was wir zunehmend erleben, ist die Erosion der Universitätsautonomie, während Regierungen die Universitäten in Unternehmen verwandeln, die den Interessen multinationaler Konzerne dienen.

www.marxists.org/archive/luna...

'..., but impractical, foreign to all, like a rare metal, unable to enter into any chemical combination with others, Hölderlin perished. But he died a great man. And from his grave grows a living tree, to which many now go to worship.'

'Hölderlin...immediately set himself an absurd task. Being a poet-messiah, a harbinger of peace, a fighter for new paths that seemed clear to him, paths of enthusiastic romanticism, merging with the essence of existence and a culture built on it, not inferior to anyone and anything...'

'...The mistake of these people is that they did not bend, they did not come to terms with reality, that they wanted to move on, but that is also their achievement. They perish, but some bright gleam remains of them, which can show the way to others.'

'Hegel...no doubt had Hölderlin in mind when he spoke of the sacrifices of the great, too uncompromising spirit...such a protester deserved his end, was guilty of it, but to a certain extent, his guilt is at the same time his merit...'

'...taking one or another human organ into its hands, processes them, completes its type, sometimes breaking the person himself.'

In his lecture at the Communist Academy on pathological and social factors in the history of literature Lunacharsky took Hölderlin as example:

'I pointed out in my exposition that the social element (the classes in their struggle)...'

It’s like Lukács’s early tragic sensibility about alienation grounds his later insistence on dialectical self-transformation in theory, the need for a living, dynamic Marxism that constantly critiques and renews itself to avoid becoming static/ideological to ensure its revolutionary potential.

And without this dialectical rigour, theory risks turning into an ideological apparatus, reproducing the fetishistic immediacy of capitalist social forms, forfeiting its capacity to effect genuine political rupture.

His later Marxist theory moving beyond this metaphysical perspective through a dialectical method offers a way to understand alienation not as a fixed, tragic condition but as a social process that can be critically examined and overcome.

Important bc. the failure to sustain a dialectical consciousness, rooted in the Hegelian logic of mediation and negation, marks the precise moment when Marxist theory risks becoming complicit in the very reification it seeks to dismantle.

Interesting to see how Lukács’s early, pre-Marxist thought is shaped by a romantic anti-capitalism that sees alienation as a deep, almost metaphysical split between the self + world. The irreparable rupture seems to inspire his later interest in social transformation.

De-individuation isn’t just about automation, it’s about stripping people of the space to think, respond, and transform. When civil servants are replaced by AI, it’s not efficiency, it’s the slow dismantling of human agency in public life. The result isn’t just de-skilling, it’s dehumanising.

This is why we have such a profound loss of human dignity and freedom, disguised as liberation from alienation, deepening our self-alienation under the vast networks of imperial liberal capitalism. The human spirit is no longer essential, just a small function in a much larger system.

Like Babbage’s reduction of spirit to mechanical virtuality, this whole dynamic doesn’t subordinate human freedom to a divine will but instead to to autopoietic cybernetic systems, where the apparent individual control we have is itself pre-programmed within these systems.