Comrade Lukács, how do you see your own life and the era of history in which you have lived? In five decades of revolutionary and scientific work you had your share both of honours and of humiliations. We also understand that your life was in danger after the arrest of Béla Kun in 1937. If you were to write an autobiography or personal memoir, what ultimate lessons would you draw from it all? What has it meant to have been a Marxist militant for fifty years?

To answer you briefly, I should say that it was my great good fortune to have lived a rich and eventful life. I regard it as my particular privilege that I experienced the years 1917–19. For I come from a bourgeois background—my father was a banker in Budapest—and even though I had adopted a somewhat individual oppositionism in Nyugat,footnote1 nonetheless I was part of the bourgeois opposition. I would not venture to say—I could not—that the purely negative impact of the First World War would have been enough to make a socialist out of me. It was undoubtedly the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary movements in Hungary that followed it which made a socialist out of me, and I remained true to this. I regard this as one of the most positive aspects of my life. It is another question, whether or not the totality of my life moved up or down, in whatever direction, but it can be said to have had a certain unity. Looking back, I can see that the two tendencies in my life were, firstly, to express myself, and secondly, to serve the socialist movement—as I understood it at any one time. These two tendencies never diverged, I was never caught by any conflict between them. It frequently emerged later—in my own opinion as well as that of others—that what I had been doing was incorrect, and this too I can state with a certain equanimity. In those cases, I think I was right to reject my old views which I afterwards held to be wrong. In the final analysis, I can say with tranquillity that I tried at all times to say what I had to say as best as I could. But as to what is the value and the shape of my life’s work, on this I cannot pronounce—it is not my concern. History will decide that in one way or another. For my own part, I can be satisfied with having made the effort and I can say in this respect I am content: which does not mean, of course, that I am satisfied with the results of these efforts. During the short time that remains for me, I shall do my best to express certain ideas more accurately, justly and scientifically, for Marxism.

Can a man be content with his state? Does such a state exist at all?

To be frank, a writer may experience this state from time to time, while writing. It happens that I feel that I’ve managed to express what I wanted to. It is a different question, how it will look three days later. All I am saying is that this state does exist.

You were not only a witness to the history of this century, but also an active participant. If you were now to make a balance-sheet of your youthful ideals and dreams—the development of socialism from the Hungarian Soviet Republic to our time—what would it include?

One must make a distinction here between subjective and objective elements. Subjectively, I would say, it was already clear by the 1920’s—let alone today—that those very intense hopes with which we followed the Russian Revolution from 1917 on were not to be fulfilled: the wave of world revolution, in which we placed our confidence, did not come to pass. The fact that the Revolution remained limited to the Soviet Union is not the result of one man’s theories, but of the facts of world history. One’s subjective hopes remain unfulfilled in this sense. On the other hand, someone who calls himself a Marxist—and will, therefore, regard himself as a student of history—must know that no great social transformation has taken place overnight. Millennia passed before primitive communism became a class society. Or, to give an example from historical times, we can now follow the history of the dissolution of societies based on slavery and can conclude that it took eight hundred, nearly a thousand, years of crises for it to evolve into feudalism. Consequently, the more one is a Marxist, the more one should have known that a decisive change like the transition from capitalism to socialism could not be concluded in a matter of weeks or months, or even years, and that the period in which we live is only the very beginning of the transition, and who knows how many decades, or even longer, will pass before the world can enter the era of true socialism. Anyone who wants to be a Marxist must detach his own expectations from the evaluation of events. It is natural that subjectively everyone would like to see the era of true socialism, but a Marxist will know from the experience of his own life that such changes do not take place from one day to the next.

How should Marxist philosophy relate to the great philosophical wealth of our era? What part of it can be accepted as valuable or as a stimulus to further development?