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Márkus’ office was in the Department of General Philosophy, not so far from M.A.K. Halliday’s^§MS0.3a in Linguistics. We don’t know whether they ever met, but surely they knew of each other’s work – language work, they both did, and more.

Márkus had been doing his Ph.D. in philosophy in Moscow when Stalin died. But, he told us, Sydney felt colder than Moscow in winter – nothing was properly heated because nobody believed it got cold there, a peculiarly Australian denial of reality as a consequence of which moderately cold days felt bitterly cold. He had come to Australia from Hungary in 1977, a political refugee of a rigidly Stalinist regime, exiled along with other members of the “Budapest School”: Maria Márkus, Agnes Heller, and Ferenc Fehér. They were sometime students and colleagues of the Hungarian social and literary philosopher, György Lukács.³⁵⁹

Lukács’ story as prelude:^§AS1.6a after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 in which he had been Director of the People’s Commissariat for Education, Lukács narrowly escaped execution. He fled to Vienna – Wittgenstein’s,^§MS2.1.1b and Neurath’s,^§MS2.1.1d and Grünbaum’s^§AS2.3c Vienna – where over the next several years he wrote the book for which he is most famed, History and Class Consciousness.³⁶⁰

Here is the thesis of History and Class Consciousness, not in its own terminology, but paraphrased in the terms we have been developing for this grammar. In a context of antagonistic interests, participants in meaning are often unable or unwilling to see what is in their own, truer interests. They live in the narrowness of a world that seems unchangeable – reification – where they gloss over or try to ignore the alienation. The processes of reification and alienation can only be seen from the perspective of sociability in general, disentangling the consequences of social differentiation whose antagonisms favor some kinds of people, some groups, at the expense of others. If and when participants come to realize this, they might be prompted to act, to do something to change the conditions of their living – to change fundamental patterns of meanings in the inseparable world of bodies, and objects, and spaces, and images, and texts, and sound, and speech. The commodity form and the late feudal, authority-dominated hierarchical administrative organization might be two of the things that can be changed. It is the oppressed who are in the best position to come to this realization and advocate for change.

For his time, Lukács’ terminology was “imputed class consciousness,” the consciousness that the proletariat would have if it were aware of its own interests, instead of being trapped in the seemingly inevitable, “reifying” realities of commodities and waged labor. The broader social perspective that would illuminate these iniquities, he called “the totality,” the system as a whole and its “dialectic” – its tension-ridden antagonisms creating contradictions that trended towards periodic crisis. Such illumination was only possible from the perspective of this working class, when it had risen to “class consciousness.”³⁶¹

As the twenties moved on, Lukács felt compelled to renounce his earlier views. He wrote a hagiography of Lenin.³⁶² He moved to Moscow, where he worked as a researcher in the Marx-Engels Institute and was one of the first to read Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts once their existence had come to light.^§AS2.3.2b He later described this reading as a moment of revelation.³⁶³

A 92-page manuscript in defense of History and Class Consciousness, written in response to his critics, was found by researchers in the Soviet archives in 1996. Across the front was scrawled the Soviet archivist’s note, “Destroy maybe? Incomprehensible script from a whinger who does not express his point of view clearly and straightforwardly.”³⁶⁴

Returning to Hungary after the Second World War, Lukács joined the political fray again. During the Hungarian uprising of 1956 – a whinger again – he joined the government of Imre Nagy as Minister for Culture. In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, Nagy and other ministers were executed, but Lukács once again narrowly escaped with his life.

Returning to Budapest from his studies in Moscow, György Márkus started to teach philosophy and work with Lukács. His first book was on Wittgenstein. He translated the Tractatus into Hungarian.³⁶⁵ Márkus began to write Language and Production while he was still in Hungary and finished it in Sydney.

The counterpoint for Márkus’ case in Language and Production is “the linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy – “argument from, or on the analogy of, language.”³⁶⁶ Analytical Philosophy^§MS1a and Logical Positivism^§MS2.1.1d were symptoms of this turn. So were Saussure,^§MS3d the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus,^§MS2.1.1a and Gadamer,^§AS1.2.3b each with their own focus on the circumstantial, self-referential, internal logic of language. This conception of language as a formal system of meaning reflected a turn away from Descartes, formerly the hero of egocentrically human-centered understandings of self-actualizing meaning, a tradition of philosophy which was to be extended by Kant and Hegel.

The achievement of the late Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, says Márkus, was to “identify ‘meaning’ with ‘use’ … in the ‘language games’ of particular ‘forms of life’.”^§MS2.3.2a “The acquisition of a language game is … an eminently practical process (‘the mastering of a technique’), guaranteed only by participation in the appropriate form of life.”³⁶⁷ This much, Márkus agrees. The meaning of language is its meaning embedded in life, not a meaning formally analyzable in isolation in terms of its own internal logic, its grammar.

But Márkus fundamentally disagrees with Wittgenstein’s implication that to participate, one must of necessity “play the game.” In Wittgenstein, “[w]hat is not possible … , at all, is the critique of a language game, (i.e. a form of life) as a totality … [O]ne can never have as a meaningful goal the conscious … transformation of a form of life.” Wittgenstein, says Márkus, would have us trapped inside our language games, leaving them “radically impenetrable to conscious reflection.” Not only in Wittgenstein, but in Saussure and Gadamer as well, “the ‘paradigm of language’ offers no possibility for uncovering the causal mechanism of historical change.”³⁶⁸ Nor to act upon the consequences of such uncovering.

The canvas for Márkus’ philosophy was wider than language and its logic. It was no less than, “how to create and maintain effective forms of human solidarity across, and in, all the non-accidental diversity of our beliefs, interests and aspirations.” This raises the problem of “‘unintended’ social control and compulsion,” not explicitly articulated in language and “embodying the domination of certain social interests.”³⁶⁹ To address this problem, Márkus returns to the Marx of the 1844 manuscripts. These were also Lukács’ moment of revelation.³⁷⁰

Instead of language, Márkus’ focus is on “productive activity,” in which language, bodies, things, and spaces are inseparable in a meaningful whole, the one form of meaning ever-ready to transpose for the other – now we are using the phraseology of our forms of meaning to gloss this idea.

The frame of reference for Márkus’ is consciousness, or in our terms, the play of material and ideal structures of meaning.^§MS3.1 In contrast to the passivity of language-bound philosophy, “human beings are not merely observers or suffering participants of the historical process as a fated flux of events but are, rather, active and conscious co-creators of their own history.”³⁷¹

Against the grain of prevailing forms of life and their language games, Márkus’ (and before him Lukács’, and Marx’s) agenda is “practical, namely to articulate the possibility, and thereby to promote the emergence, of a radical social praxis, here and now, able to overcome those concrete historical limits that have turned under contemporary conditions into the barriers, both to ‘life’ and the ‘consciousness’ of concrete, living individuals.”³⁷² Our word for this is “transformation.”^§AS2.5

György and Maria Márkus, Ágnes Heller, and Ferenc Fehér were forced to leave Hungary for Australia in 1977 because the leading faction in the Moscow-aligned ruling party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, had reached a point where the expression of any such hopes for social transformation had become intolerable.

Márkus wrote in an article about “really existing socialism” in the first volume of Praxis International, which later became a chapter in a book co-written with Heller and Fehér.³⁷³ Fundamentally different from the market, these societies had their own forms of domination and tissues of deception, bred of peculiar social antagonisms. These were quite different from those of the commodity and the “free” labour market.

At the heart of the system was “central bureaucratic planning” from which flowed “an integrated system of binding orders that aims to determine the essential characteristics of the economic behaviour of all subordinated units.” In this respect, the whole society was organized like a contemporary capitalist enterprise, driven by a logic of hierarchy that we would trace to essentially feudal roots.^§AS2.4.1 “This economy certainly functions through an uninterrupted process of conscious political decision-making taking the form of central plan-commands … , institutional requirements dictated by the existing system of social domination.”³⁷⁴

The logic of communication in “really existing socialism” was driven by the rhetoric of propaganda more than reification. Meanwhile, social antagonisms were articulated, notwithstanding the implausibly solidary rhetoric of the “general interest,” but in a three-layered tissue of deception.

At a first, legally sanctioned level, enterprise managers competed for state-dispensed resources “by simultaneously over- and underestimating their claims,” a form of “cheating” based “on what they can get away with, that is, on the power position of the concerned bureaucracy.” Behind this was another layer of deception, a “second economy” of informal or illegal trading, profiteering and corruption. And a “third economy” of unremunerated mutuality despite the system, when, for instance in times of shortage, people gave each other things and helped each other.³⁷⁵ The end came to most Soviet-style economies in the 1990s. With the implosion of “actually existing socialism,” the apparatchiks and operators in the first and second economies were perfectly positioned to steal the state.

Agnes Heller was the only one of the Budapest School to return to Hungary. After Australia, she had moved to New York to work in the New School for Social Research. Back in Hungary in the late 2010s, she encountered what she termed “the refeudalization of society,” this time in the form of corrupt relationships between ostensibly liberal democracy and the post-communist kleptocrats. “Take … Lorinc Meszaros. He was a nobody but in a few years he amassed enormous wealth and now is one of the richest people in the world. He basically has half of Hungary under his control … Of course, everybody knows that this is [Prime Minister] Orbán’s money, not Meszaros’ … [T]he oligarchy depends on politics, and not politics on oligarchy.”³⁷⁶ Nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism became their ideologies of choice, their propaganda of mass distraction.

“Hungary is removing statue of philosopher György Lukács: He was Marxist and Jewish.” So read a 2017 headline in the Hungarian Free Press.³⁷⁷ Márkus, Heller, and Fehér were also Jewish – that had been another dimension of their exile.

At dawn on March 31, 2017, the statue of Hungary’s most famous philosopher was removed from the park where it had stood for over four decades. The Lukács archive was closed on May 24, 2018, its books and manuscripts removed from public access.³⁷⁸ Such are the ignominies and agonies of history.

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³⁵⁹ György Lukács, 1920 [1978], The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, translated by A. Bostock, London: Merlin; György Lukács, 1957 [1963], The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, translated by J. and N. Mander, London: Merlin Press; György Lukács, 1978b, Writer and Critic, and Other Essays, translated by A. Kahn, London: Merlin; György Márkus, 1977, “The Soul and Life: The Young Lukacs and the Problem of Culture,” Telos (32):95–115.

³⁶⁰ György Lukács, 1923 [1971], History and Class Consciousness, Translated by R. Livingstone, London: Merlin Press.

³⁶¹ Ibid.; György Lukács, 1978a, The Ontology of Social Being, Volume 1: Hegel’s False and His Genuine Ontology, translated by D. Fernbach, London: Merlin Press; György Lukács, 1978d, The Ontology of Social Being, Volume 2: Marx’s Basic Ontological Principles, translated by D. Fernbach, London: Merlin Press; György Lukács, 1978c, The Ontology of Social Being, Volume 3: Labour, translated by D. Fernbach, London: Merlin Press.

³⁶² György Lukács, 1924 [1977], Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought, translated by N. Jacobs, London: Verso.

³⁶³ György Lukács, 1923 [1971], History and Class Consciousness, translated by R. Livingstone, London: Merlin Press, p. xxxvi.

³⁶⁴ György Lukács, 1925 [2000], A Defence of “History and Class Consciousness”: Tailism and the Dialectic, translated by E. Leslie, London: Verso, p. 41.

³⁶⁵ John Grumley, Paul Crittenden, and Pauline Johnson, eds. 2002, Culture and Enlightenment: Essays for György Márkus, Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 331.

³⁶⁶ György Márkus, 1975–79 [1986], Language and Production: A Critique of the Paradigms, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, p. 2.

³⁶⁷ Ibid., pp. 16–17.

³⁶⁸ Ibid., pp. 17–18, 38.

³⁶⁹ Ibid., pp. xv, 8, 11.

³⁷⁰ György Márkus, 1966 [2014], Marxism and Anthropology: The Concept of “Human Essence” in the Philosophy of Marx, Sydney: Modem-Verlag, pp. 7–11.

³⁷¹ György Márkus, 1975–79 [1986], Language and Production: A Critique of the Paradigms, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, p. 39.

³⁷² Ibid., p. 43.

³⁷³ Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Márkus, 1983, Dictatorship over Needs, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

³⁷⁴ György Márkus, 1981, “Planning the Crisis: Remarks on the Economic System of Soviet-Type Societies,” Praxis International 1(3):240–57, pp. 247, 246.

³⁷⁵ Ibid., pp. 248, 254–57.

³⁷⁶ http://politicalcritique.org/cee/hungary/2018/agnes-heller-orban-is-a-tyrant/

³⁷⁷ http://hungarianfreepress.com/2017/02/16/hungary-is-removing-statue-of-philosopher-gyorgy-georg-lukacs-he-was-marxist-and-jewish/

³⁷⁸ https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/lukacs-hungary-archives-marxism

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 298–303. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

György Márkus’ “Language and Production” §AS2.4.2b