{"id":109,"date":"2009-09-01T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=109"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:57","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:57","slug":"book-review-karl-korsch-marxism-and-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=109","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"korschmarxismphilosophy2008\"<\/a>Translated by Fred Halliday. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008.<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

<\/a>[Marx wrote,] \u201c[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.\u201d[1]<\/a> This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As scientific socialism, the Marxism of Marx and Engels remains the inclusive whole of a theory of social revolution .\u00a0.\u00a0. a materialism whose theory comprehended the totality of society and history, and whose practice overthrew it. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The difference [now] is that the various components of [what for Marx and Engels was] the unbreakable interconnection of theory and practice are further separated out. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The umbilical cord has been broken.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014 Karl Korsch, \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d (1923)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem of \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d \u2014 Korsch and Adorno on theory and practice<\/h2>\n

KARL KORSCH’S SEMINAL ESSAY \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d (1923)<\/a> was first published in English, translated by Fred Halliday, in 1970 by Monthly Review Press. In 2008, they reprinted the volume<\/a>, which also contains some important shorter essays, as part of their new \u201cClassics\u201d series.<\/p>\n

The original publication of Korsch\u2019s essay coincided with Georg Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s 1923 landmark collection of essays, History and Class Consciousness<\/a> <\/em>(HCC<\/em>). While Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s book has the word \u201chistory\u201d in its title, it follows Marx\u2019s Capital<\/em> in addressing the problem of social being and consciousness in a primarily \u201cphilosophical\u201d and categorial manner, as the subjectivity of the commodity form. Korsch\u2019s essay on philosophy in Marxism, by contrast, is actually a historical treatment of the problem from Marx and Engels\u2019s time through the 2nd International to the crisis of Marxism and the revolutions of 1917\u201319. More specifically, it takes up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which is considered the<\/em> \u201cphilosophical\u201d problem of Marxism.<\/p>\n

Independently of one another, both Korsch’s and Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s 1923 works shared an interest in recovering the Hegelian or \u201cidealist\u201d dimension of Marx\u2019s thought and politics. Both were motivated to establish the coherence of the Marxist revolutionaries Lenin and Luxemburg, and these 2nd International-era radicals\u2019 shared grounding in what Korsch called \u201cMarx\u2019s Marxism.\u201d Their accomplishment of this is all the more impressive when it is recognized that it was made without benefit of either of the two most important texts in which Marx explicitly addressed the relation of his own thought to Hegel\u2019s, the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts<\/em> (first published in 1932) or the notes for Capital <\/em>posthumously published as the Grundrisse <\/em>(1939), and also without access to Lenin\u2019s 1914 notebooks on Hegel\u2019s Science of Logic<\/em> (1929). Due to a perceived shortcoming in the expounding of revolutionary Marxism, the problem for Korsch and Luk\u00e1cs was interpreting Marxism as both theory and practice, or how the politics of Lenin and Luxemburg (rightly) considered itself \u201cdialectical.\u201d Both Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch explicitly sought to provide this missing exposition and elaboration.<\/p>\n

Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch were later denounced as \u201cprofessors\u201d in the Communist International, a controversy that erupted after the deaths of Luxemburg and Lenin. (Another important text of this moment was Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s 1924 monograph in eulogy, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought<\/em><\/a>.) In the face of this party criticism, Luk\u00e1cs acquiesced and made his peace with Stalinized \u201corthodoxy.\u201d Eventually disavowing History and Class Consciousness<\/em> as a misguided attempt to \u201cout-Hegel Hegel,\u201d Luk\u00e1cs even attempted to destroy all the existing copies of the unpublished \u201cTailism and the Dialectic,\u201d his brilliant 1925 defense of HCC<\/em>. (Apparently he failed, since a copy was eventually found in Soviet archives. This remarkable document was translated and published in 2000 as A Defence of History and Class Consciousness<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Korsch responded differently to the party\u2019s criticism. Quitting the 3rd International Communist movement entirely, he became associated with the \u201cLeft\u201d or \u201ccouncil\u201d communism of Antonie Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, et al. Though making a choice very different from Luk\u00e1cs and distancing himself from official \u201cMarxism-Leninism,\u201d Korsch also came to disavow his earlier argument in \u201cMarxism and Philosophy.\u201d Specifically, he abandoned the attempt to establish the coherence of Lenin\u2019s theory and practice with that of Marx, going so far as to critique Marx\u2019s own Marxism. Thus, in \u201cThe Present State of the Problem of \u2018Marxism and Philosophy:\u2019 An Anti-Critique\u201d (1930)<\/a>, included in Marxism and Philosophy<\/em>, Korsch argues that, to the degree Marx shared a common basis with Lenin, this was an expression of limitations in Marx\u2019s own critical theory and political practice. Indeed, for Korsch it was a problem of \u201cMarxism\u201d in general, including that of Kautsky and Luxemburg. Ultimately, Korsch called for \u201cgoing beyond\u201d Marxism.<\/p>\n

The complementary, if divergent, trajectories of Korsch and Luk\u00e1cs are indicative of the historical disintegration of the perspective both shared in their writings of 1923. Both had understood the \u201csubjective\u201d aspect of Marxism to have been clarified by Lenin\u2019s role in the October Revolution. <\/a>The figure of Lenin was irreducible, and brought out dimensions of the Marxian project that otherwise lay unacknowledged. As Theodor W. Adorno put it in private discussion with Max Horkheimer in 1956,<\/p>\n

I always wanted to produce a theory that would be faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin. .\u00a0.\u00a0. Marx was too harmless; he probably imagined quite na\u00efvely that human beings are basically the same in all essentials and will remain so. It would be a good idea, therefore, to deprive them of their second nature. He was not concerned with their subjectivity; he probably didn\u2019t look into that too closely. The idea that human beings are the products of society down to their innermost core is an idea that he would have rejected as milieu theory. Lenin was the first person to assert this.[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>In this discussion, Adorno also proposed to Horkheimer that they \u201cshould produce a reworked [version of Marx and Engels\u2019s] Communist Manifesto <\/em>that would be \u2018strictly Leninist\u2019.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

No less than Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, Korsch\u2019s \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d inspired the work of the Marxist critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School \u2014 Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the reputation of Korsch\u2019s work has been eclipsed by that of Luk\u00e1cs. <\/a>What the usual interpretive emphasis on Luk\u00e1cs occludes is that the Frankfurt School writers grappled not only with the problem of Stalinism but \u201canti-Stalinism\u201d as well.[4]<\/a> <\/a>Both Korsch’s and Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s post-1923 trajectories were critiqued by the Frankfurt School writers.[5]<\/a> <\/a>As Adorno put it in Negative Dialectics <\/em>(1966),<\/p>\n

First Karl Korsch, later the functionaries of Diamat [Dialectical Materialism] have objected, that the turn to nonidentity would be, due to its immanent-critical and theoretical character, an insignificant nuance of neo-Hegelianism or of the historically obsolete Hegelian Left; as if the Marxist critique of philosophy had dispensed with this, while simultaneously the East cannot do without a statutory Marxist philosophy. The demand for the unity of theory and praxis has irresistibly debased the former to a mere underling; removing from it what it was supposed to have achieved in that unity. The practical visa-stamp demanded from all theory became the censor’s stamp. In the famed unity of theory-praxis, the former was vanquished and the latter became non-conceptual, a piece of the politics which it was supposed to lead beyond; delivered over to power. The liquidation of theory by dogmatization and the ban on thinking contributed to bad praxis; that theory wins back its independence, is the interest of praxis itself. The relationship of both moments to each other is not settled for once and for all, but changes historically. Today, since the hegemonic bustle cripples and denigrates theory, theory testifies in all its powerlessness against the former by its mere existence.[6]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>In this passage Adorno was addressing, not the Korsch of the 1923 \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d but rather the later Korsch of the 1930 \u201cAnti-Critique,\u201d distanced from the problem Adorno sought to address, of the constitutive non-identity of theory and practice. Adorno thought, like Korsch and Luk\u00e1cs in the early 1920s, that Lenin and Luxemburg\u2019s theoretical self-understanding, together with their revolutionary political practice, comprised the most advanced attempt yet to work through precisely this non-identity.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

In Adorno\u2019s terms, both the later Korsch and official \u201cDiamat\u201d (including Luk\u00e1cs) assumed \u201cidentity thinking,\u201d an identity of effective theory and practice, rather than their articulated non-identity, to which Korsch had drawn attention earlier in \u201cMarxism and Philosophy.\u201d Such constitutive non-identity was, according to Korsch\u2019s earlier essay, expressed symptomatically, in the subsistence of \u201cphilosophy\u201d as a distinct activity in the historical epoch of Marxism. This was because it expressed a genuine historical need. The continued practice of philosophy was symptomatic expression of the need to transcend and supersede philosophy. Instead of this recognition of the actuality of the symptom of philosophical thinking, of the mutually constitutive separation of theory and practice, Korsch, by embracing council communism and shunning Marxian theory in the years after writing his famously condemned work, succumbed to what Adorno termed \u201cidentity thinking.\u201d By assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers\u2019 movement, Korsch sought their \u201creconciliation,\u201d instead of discerning and critically grasping their persistent antagonism, as would necessarily be articulated in any purported politics of emancipation.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Just as Adorno tried to hold fast to the Luk\u00e1cs of History and Class Consciousness <\/em>in the face of Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s own subsequent disavowals, the first sentence of Adorno\u2019s Negative Dialectics <\/em>reiterated Korsch\u2019s statement in \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d that \u201cPhilosophy cannot be abolished without being realized\u201d (97):<\/p>\n

Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed.[8]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Philosophy\u2019s end was its self<\/em>-abolition. What Korsch prefaced to his statement helps to illuminate what Adorno meant. Korsch specified precisely what \u201cthe realization of philosophy\u201d involves:<\/p>\n

Just as political action is not rendered unnecessary by the economic action of a revolutionary class, so intellectual action is not rendered unnecessary by either political or economic action. On the contrary it must be carried through to the end in theory and practice, as revolutionary scientific criticism and agitational work before the seizure of state power by the working class, and as scientific organisation and ideological dictatorship after the seizure of state power. If this is valid for intellectual action against the forms of consciousness which define bourgeois society in general, it is especially true of philosophical action. Bourgeois consciousness necessarily sees itself as apart from the world and independent of it, as pure critical philosophy and impartial science, just as the bourgeois State and bourgeois Law appear to be above society. This consciousness must be philosophically fought by the revolutionary materialistic dialectic, which is the philosophy of the working class. This struggle will only end when the whole of existing society and its economic basis have been totally overthrown in practice, and this consciousness has been totally surpassed and abolished in theory. (97)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was the original Marxist \u201cdefense\u201d of philosophy that Adorno reiterated in Negative Dialectics<\/em>. Over four decades previously, in 1923, Korsch had explicitly tied it to Lenin\u2019s treatment of the problem of the state in The State and Revolution<\/em> (1917). Just as, with the overcoming of capitalism, the necessity of the state would \u201cwither,\u201d and not be done away with at one stroke, so too the necessity of \u201cphilosophical\u201d thinking as it appeared in the epoch of capital would dissolve. This side of emancipation, \u201ctheoretical\u201d self-reflection, thought\u2019s reflecting on its own conditions of possibility, remains necessary, precisely because it expresses an unresolved social-historical problem.<\/p>\n

In \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d Korsch analyzed Marxism as emergent from and historically continuous with the \u201crevolt of the Third Estate,\u201d of the \u201cbourgeois\u201d liberal-democratic revolutionary epoch that preceded it. Korsch was concerned with Marx\u2019s continuity with Kant and Hegel. A problem that occurred to them, namely, of theory and practice, repeated itself, if in a more acute way, for Marx. It is a problem of the philosophy of revolution, or of the \u201ctheory of social revolution.\u201d This problem presents itself only insofar as it is conceived of as part and parcel of the social-historical process of transformation and not as contemplation from without. As it was for Hegel, Marx\u2019s fundamental \u201cphilosophical\u201d issue is this: How is it possible, if however problematic, to be a self-conscious agent of change, if what is being transformed includes oneself, or, more precisely, an agency that transforms conditions both for one\u2019s practical grounding and for one\u2019s theoretical self-understanding in the process of acting?<\/p>\n

Korsch addressed the question of revolution as a problem indicated by the liquidation and reconstitution of \u201cphilosophy\u201d itself after the crisis and \u201cdecay of Hegelianism\u201d (\u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d 29). Why did philosophical development take a hiatus by 1848 and only appear to resume afterwards? What changed about \u201cphilosophy\u201d in the interim? For Korsch recognized there was a curious blank spot or gap in the history of philosophy from the 1840s\u201360s, the period of Marxism\u2019s emergence. Korsch divided the relation of Marx\u2019s thought to philosophy roughly into three periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. These periods were distinguished by the different ways they related theory and practice: the first period was the critique of philosophy calling for its simultaneous realization and self-abolition; the second, the sublimation of philosophy in revolution; and the third, the recrudescence of the problem of relating theory and practice.<\/p>\n

Korsch\u2019s third period in the history of Marxism extended into what he termed the \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d beginning in the 1890s with the reformist \u201crevisionist\u201d dispute of Eduard Bernstein et al. against the \u201corthodox Marxism\u201d of the 2nd International \u2014 when the \u201crevolutionary Marxism\u201d of Luxemburg and Lenin originated \u2014 and continuing into the acutely revolutionary period of 1917\u201319, from the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the German Revolution and civil war of 1918\u201319, to the Hungarian Soviet Republic (in which Luk\u00e1cs participated) and the workers\u2019 council movement in Italy (in which Antonio Gramsci participated) in 1919.<\/p>\n

It was in this revolutionary period of the early 20th century that \u201cMarx\u2019s Marxism\u201d circa 1848 regained its saliency, but in ways that Korsch thought remained not entirely resolved as a matter of relating theory to practice. In \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d Korsch found that while Lenin and Luxemburg had tried to better relate Marxian theory and practice than 2nd International Marxism had done, they had recognized this as an on-going task and aspiration and not already achieved in some finished sense. In the words of the epigraph from Lenin that introduces Korsch\u2019s 1923 essay, \u201cWe must organize a systematic study of the Hegelian dialectic from a materialist standpoint\u201d (\u201cOn the Significance of Militant Materialism,\u201d 1922<\/a>). <\/a>If Marxism continued to be subject to a \u201cHegelian dialectic,\u201d thus requiring the \u201chistorical materialist\u201d analysis and explanation that Korsch sought to provide of it, this was because it was not itself the reconciled unity of theory and practice but remained, as theory, the critical reflection on the problem<\/em> of relating theory and practice \u2014 which in turn prompted further theoretical development as well as practical political advances. As Adorno put it to Walter Benjamin in a letter of August 2, 1935,<\/p>\n

The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.[9]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marxism was caught in the \u201cphantasmagoria\u201d of capital, while \u201cexploding\u201d it from within.<\/p>\n

For the Korsch of \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d Lenin and Luxemburg\u2019s \u201crevolutionary Marxism\u201d was bound up in the \u201ccrisis of Marxism,\u201d while advancing it to a new stage. As Korsch commented,<\/p>\n

This transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both the reasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticians like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxist theory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of [Social Democracy]. They thereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for these traditions weighed \u201clike a nightmare\u201d on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionary socioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these [earlier] evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival of original Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionary period not only the workers\u2019 movement itself, but the theoretical conceptions of communists which express it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxist system, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now come to life again. It also explains why the leader of the Russian Revolution [Lenin] could write a book a few months before October [The State and Revolution<\/em>, 1917] in which he stated that his aim was \u201cin the first place to restore <\/em>the correct Marxist theory of the State.\u201d .\u00a0.\u00a0. When Lenin placed the same question theoretically on the agenda at a decisive moment, this was an early indication that the internal connection of theory and practice within revolutionary Marxism had been consciously re-established. (67\u201368)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Korsch thus established the importance for what Adorno called the \u201chistorically changing\u201d relation of theory and practice, making sense of their vicissitudes in the history of the politics of revolutionary Marxism. Furthermore, by establishing the character of the crisis of Marxism as a matter of theoretical reflection, Korsch re-established the role of consciousness in a Marxian conception of social revolution, why the abandonment or distancing of the practical perspective of revolution necessitates a degradation of theory.<\/p>\n

Korsch and the 1960s \u201cNew Left\u201d \u2014 the problem of \u201cLeninism\u201d<\/h2>\n

The 1970 publication of Korsch was an event for the Anglophone New Left. <\/a>As Adolph Reed wrote, <\/em><\/p>\n

Leninism\u2019s elitism and denigration of consciousness had increasingly troubled me, but I feared I had no recourse without sacrificing a radical commitment. Korsch opened an entirely new vista, the \u201chidden dimension\u201d of Western Marxism, and led to Luk\u00e1cs, a serious reading of Marcuse, and eventually the critical theoretical tradition.[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reed\u2019s brief comment is cryptic and can be taken in (at least) two opposed ways, either that Korsch provided the redemption of Lenin or an alternative to Leninism.<\/p>\n

Such 1960s-era \u201cNew Left\u201d ambivalence about \u201cLeninism\u201d can be found in attenuated form in Fred Halliday\u2019s Translator\u2019s Introduction. In it, Halliday sticks closely to a biographical narrative of Korsch\u2019s work, seeking to bring out the coherence of Korsch\u2019s early and later periods, before and after \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d while acknowledging the \u201cerratic\u201d character of Korsch\u2019s thought over the course of his life, and calling Korsch\u2019s tragic trajectory away from Lenin and Luxemburg\u2019s revolutionary Marxism a \u201cfatal consequence\u201d of the failure of the revolution (26). By casting the issue of Korsch\u2019s work as \u201cinteresting\u201d (if \u201cerratic\u201d), Halliday remained somewhat equivocal about the relevance of Korsch\u2019s key text, \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d and thus about the continued pertinence of the revolutionary Marxism that Lenin shared with Luxemburg. What remained unresolved?<\/p>\n

Halliday also suggests that Korsch\u2019s pre-1917 interests in the \u201csyndicalist movement,\u201d the \u201cpositive content and actively democratic aspects of socialism, by contrast with the orthodox Marxism of the 2nd International which he thought defined itself merely negatively as the abolition of the capitalist mode of production\u201d (7\u20138), came to be expressed some years after the October Revolution, which witnessed \u201cthe decline in activity and the need for more critical reflection.\u201d At that time, Korsch returned to his earlier concerns, but with the tragic consequence of \u201clapsing into ultra-leftism and becoming cut off from the working class\u201d (26).<\/p>\n

Perhaps the motivation for Halliday\u2019s 1970 translation and publication of Korsch\u2019s \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d was an affinity, after 1968, with Korsch\u2019s moment of \u201ccritical reflection\u201d circa 1923. It may have expressed Halliday\u2019s hope that Korsch\u2019s further trajectory and fate might be avoided by the 1960s \u201cNew Left.\u201d In the wake of 1968, Halliday and others wanted to avoid the choice of either ultra-Leftism (\u201cLuxemburgism\u201d) and \u201cbecoming cut off from the working class,\u201d or official \u201cLeninism,\u201d and the 1923 Korsch seemed to provide a way out, through specific reflection on the problem of revolutionary political means and ends, in terms of articulating theory and practice.<\/p>\n

Forgetting the theory-practice problem \u2014 Korsch on spontaneity vs. organization and 1848 vs. 1917<\/h2>\n

In his 1930 \u201cAnti-Critique\u201d of the 1923 \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d Korsch wrote,<\/p>\n

When the SPD became a \u201cMarxist\u201d party (a process completed with the Erfurt Programme written by Kautsky and Bernstein in 1891) a gap developed between its highly articulated revolutionary \u201cMarxist\u201d theory and a practice that was far behind this revolutionary theory; in some respects it directly contradicted it. This gap was in fact obvious, and it later came to be felt more and more acutely by all the vital forces in the Party (whether on the Left or Right) and its existence was denied only by the orthodox Marxists of the Centre. This gap can easily be explained by the fact that in this historical phase \u201cMarxism,\u201d while formally accepted by the workers\u2019 movement, was from the start not a true theory, <\/em>in the sense of being \u201cnothing other than a general expression of the real historical movement\u201d (Marx). On the contrary it was always an ideology <\/em>that had been adopted \u201cfrom outside\u201d in a pre-established form. In this situation such \u201corthodox Marxists\u201d as Kautsky and Lenin made a permanent virtue out of a temporary necessity. They energetically defended the idea that socialism can only be brought to the workers \u201cfrom outside,\u201d by bourgeois intellectuals who are allied to the workers\u2019 movement. This was also true of Left radicals like Rosa Luxemburg. (113\u2013115)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to Korsch, the Revolution of 1848 and the role of the workers\u2019 movement in it had provided \u201ca rational solution for all the mysteries\u201d of the contradiction between theory and practice that later 2nd International Marxists tried to sidestep by simply adopting Marxism as an ideology. Korsch commented that,<\/p>\n

[A]lthough [Second International Marxism\u2019s] effective practice was now on a broader<\/em> basis<\/em> than before, it had in no way reached the heights<\/em> of general and theoretical achievement earlier attained by the revolutionary movement and proletarian class struggle on a narrower basis. <\/em>This height was attained during the final phase of the first major capitalist cycle that came to an end towards 1850. (116)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since the mid-19th century, Marxism, according to the Korsch of the \u201cAnti-Critique,\u201d had grown ideological. Even Marx\u2019s Capital<\/em> expressed a certain degeneration:<\/p>\n

[T]he theory <\/em>of Marx and Engels was progressing towards an ever higher level of theoretical perfection although it was no longer directly related to the practice <\/em>of the worker\u2019s movement. (117)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the mature theory of Marx (and its development by Engels and their epigones) was itself \u201canachronistic\u201d and thus unassimilable by the resurgent workers\u2019 movement of the last third of the 19th century.<\/p>\n

Korsch abandoned his 1923 conception of Lenin and Luxemburg\u2019s rearticulation of 1848 in the theory and practice of 1917\u201319, the \u201ctransformation and development of Marxist theory .\u00a0.\u00a0. effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism.\u201d Marx\u2019s Marxism, especially in his mature writings, could only be the elaboration of 1848, in isolation from the workers\u2019 subsequent actual political practice, to which it became ideologically blind and blinding. No adequate \u201ctheory,\u201d that is, no \u201cgeneral expression of the real historical movement,\u201d had emerged since. This non-identity and divergence of theory and practice that began in the period of Marx\u2019s maturity and continued into the 20th century meant, for the Korsch of the 1930s, that Marxism, even in its most revolutionary forms, as with Lenin and Luxemburg, had developed, not to express, but rather to constrain the workers\u2019 movement. <\/a>Marxism had become an ideology whose value could only be relative, not qualitatively superior to others.[11]<\/a> <\/a>When he died in 1961, Korsch was working on a study of Marx\u2019s rival in the 1st International Workingmen\u2019s Association, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.[12]<\/a> |\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #15 (September 2009). Abbreviated for presentation<\/a> at the <\/em>Historical Materialism<\/strong> conference, York University, Toronto, May 14, 2010.
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

<\/a>1<\/a>. Karl Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy <\/em>(1859)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>2<\/a>. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, \u201cDiskussion \u00fcber Theorie und Praxis\u201d (1956), in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften <\/em>(GAS<\/em>) <\/em>Vol. 19 (Nachtr\u00e4ge, Verzeichnisse und Register<\/em>) (S. Fischer, 1996), 69\u201371; quoted in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008<\/a>), 233.<\/p>\n

<\/a>3<\/a>. Claussen, 233; Horkheimer, GAS<\/em> 19, 66. Furthermore, while \u201cMarx wrote his critique of the [SPD, German Social-Democratic Party\u2019s] Gotha Programme in 1875[,] Adorno had for some time planned to write a critique of the Godesberg Programme [in which the SPD formally renounced Marxism in 1959]\u201d (Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 598).<\/p>\n

<\/a>4<\/a>. From Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the <\/em>Frankfurt<\/em> <\/em>School<\/em>: A Marxist Perspective<\/em> (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977):<\/p>\n

[Horkheimer wrote, in \u201cThe Authoritarian State\u201d (1940),]<\/p>\n

\u201cThe concept of a transitional revolutionary dictatorship was in no way intended to mean the monopoly of the means of production by some new elite. Such dangers can be countered by the energy and alertness of the people themselves. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [The revolution that ends domination is as far-reaching as the will of the liberated. Any resignation is already a regression into prehistory. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The recurrence of political reaction and a new destruction of the beginnings of freedom cannot theoretically be ruled out, and certainly not as long as a hostile environment exists. No patented system worked out in advance can preclude regressions. The modalities of the new society are first found in the process of social transformation.] The theoretical conception which, following its first trail-blazers [such as Lenin and Luxemburg], will show the new society its way \u2014 the system of workers\u2019 councils \u2014 grows out of praxis. The roots of the council system go back to 1871, 1905, and other events. Revolutionary transformation has a tradition that must continue<\/em>.\u201d (66)<\/p>\n

The Frankfurt School\u2019s respect for [Lenin] was due in large measure to his ability to retain the dynamic unity of party, theory and class, a unity subsequently lost. Marcuse\u2019s Soviet Marxism<\/em> [1958] is here representative of the entire Frankfurt School:<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the Revolution, it became clear to what degree Lenin had succeeded in basing his strategy on the actual class interests and aspirations of the workers and peasants. .\u00a0.\u00a0. Then, from 1923 on, the decisions of the leadership increasingly dissociated from the class interests of the proletariat. The former no longer presuppose the proletariat as a revolutionary agent but rather are imposed upon the proletariat and the rest of the underlying population.\u201d (66\u201367)<\/p>\n

Looking round for a possible practical<\/em> exponent of [the] views of the Frankfurt School, one immediately encounters the figure of Trotsky. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [Trotsky maintained that the bureaucratism of the USSR] completely disregarded Lenin\u2019s conception of the dialectical interaction of party and class. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [Trotsky wrote that] the Marxist theoretician must still retain the concrete historical perspective of class struggle:<\/p>\n

\u201c[The causes for the downfall of the Social Democracy and of official Communism must be sought not in Marxist theory and not in the bad qualities of those people who applied it, but in the concrete conditions of the historical process.] It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles, but rather of the struggle of living social forces, with its inevitable ups and downs, with the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard, and with the necessity which therefore arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. No one has bothered to pave in advance the road of revolutionary upsurge for the proletariat. [With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary to move forward on a road crisscrossed by countless obstacles and covered with the debris of the past.] Those who are frightened by this had better step aside\u201d [Trotsky, \u201cTo Build Communist Parties and an International Anew,\u201d July 1933<\/a>].<\/p>\n

The Frankfurt School, while upholding a number of principles (which became \u201cabstract\u201d in their passivity and isolation), did indeed, in this sense, step aside. (68\u201370)<\/p>\n

One is not without some justification in asking whether Council Communism could perhaps be a concrete embodiment of many of the principles of the Frankfurt School. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [But] the Council Communists did not point out the soviets\u2019 [workers\u2019 councils\u2019] own responsibility for the collapse of the revolutionary wave of 1918\u201319. (73)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>5<\/a>. The reverse was also true. Korsch, in distancing himself from his 1923 work that was so seminal for the Frankfurt School writers, also came to critique them:<\/p>\n

[Korsch] intended to try and interest Horkheimer and the [Frankfurt] Institute [for Social Research] in Pannekoek\u2019s book Lenin as Philosopher<\/em> (1938) [which traced the bureaucratization of the USSR back to the supposedly crude materialism of Lenin\u2019s 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism<\/em>]. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [Either] Korsch [or, the Director of the Institute, Horkheimer himself] would write a review for [the Institute\u2019s journal] the Zeitschrift<\/em>. .\u00a0.\u00a0. Yet no such review appeared. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [Korsch suffered] total disillusionment with the Institute and their \u201cimpotent philosophy.\u201d Korsch [was] particularly bitter about the \u201cmetaphysician Horkheimer\u201d (Slater, 73\u201374).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The record for Korsch\u2019s deteriorating relations with the Frankfurt Institute in exile is found in his private letters to Paul Mattick, editor of the journal Living Marxism: International Council Correspondence<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>6<\/a>. Translated by Dennis Redmond, 2001<\/a>. The first sentence of this passage, mentioning Korsch, is inexplicably missing from the 1973 Continuum edition of Negative Dialectics <\/em>translated by E. B. Ashton (see \u201cRelation to Left-wing Hegelianism,\u201d 143).<\/p>\n

<\/a>7<\/a>. In a lecture of November 23, 1965, on \u201cTheory and Practice,\u201d Adorno said,<\/p>\n

I should like to say that there is no intention here of advocating a relapse into contemplation, as was found in the great idealist philosophies and ultimately even in Hegel, despite the great importance of practice in the Hegelian system. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The late Karl Korsch .\u00a0.\u00a0. criticized Horkheimer and myself even more sharply, already in America and also later on, after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em>. His objection was that we had regressed to the standpoint of Left Hegelianism. This does not seem right to me because the standpoint of pure contemplation can no longer be sustained. Though we should note, incidentally, that the polarity Marx constructs between pure contemplation on the one hand and his own political philosophy on the other does only partial justice to the intentions of Left Hegelianism. This is a difficult question .\u00a0.\u00a0. although we cannot deny the impressive political instincts which alerted Marx to the presence of the retrograde and, above all, nationalist potential in such thinkers as Bruno Bauer, Stirner and Ruge. (Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics<\/em> [Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2008], 52\u201353.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>8<\/a>. Translated by Redmond<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>9<\/a>. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings<\/em> Vol. 3 (1935\u201338) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54\u201356; Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics <\/em>(London: Verso, 1980), 111\u2013113.<\/p>\n

<\/a>10<\/a>. Reed, \u201cPaths to Critical Theory,\u201d in Sohnya Sayres, Social Text<\/em> Staff, eds., The 60s Without Apology<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 257\u2013258; originally published in Social Text<\/em> 9\/10 (Spring\u2013Summer 1984).<\/p>\n

<\/a>11<\/a>. Such eclecticism on the Left has only deepened and become more compounded since Korsch\u2019s time, especially since the 1960s. However Marx may come up for periodic reconsideration, certain questions central to the Marxian problematic remain obscured. As Fredric Jameson has written,<\/p>\n

A Marx revival seems to be under way, predating the current [2007\u201309] disarray on Wall Street, even though no clear-cut political options yet seem to propose themselves. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The big ideological issues \u2014 anarchism, the party, economic planning, social classes \u2014 are still mainly avoided, on the grounds that they remind too many people of Communist propaganda. Such a reminder is unwanted, not so much because it is accompanied by the memory of deaths and violence .\u00a0.\u00a0. as simply and less dramatically because such topics now appear boring. (\u201cSandblasting Marx,\u201d New Left Review<\/em> 55 [January\u2013February 2009]<\/a>.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For further discussion of the fluctuating currency and fortunes of Marxian approaches as a feature of modern history, see my \u201cSymptomology: Historical transformations in social-political context<\/a>,\u201d The Platypus Review <\/em>12 (May 2009)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>12<\/a>. A. R. Giles-Peter, \u201cKarl Korsch: A Marxist Friend of Anarchism,\u201d Red & Black<\/em> (Australia) 5 (April 1973). (Available on-line at: http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/capitolHill\/Lobby\/2379\/korsh.htm<\/a>.) According to Giles-Peter, Korsch came to believe that the \u201cbasis of the revolutionary attitude in the modern bourgeois epoch would be an ethic Marx would have rejected as \u2018anarchist\u2019,\u201d and thus \u201cexplicitly rejected the elements of Marxism which separate it from anarchism.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Korsch himself put it, in \u201cTen Theses on Marxism Today\u201d (1950), translated by Giles-Peter in Telos<\/em> 26 (Winter 1975\u201376) and available on-line at: http:\/\/libcom.org\/library\/ten-theses-korsch<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Marx is today only one among the numerous precursors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the working class. No less important are the so-called Utopian Socialists from Thomas More to the present. No less important are the great rivals of Marx, such as Blanqui, and his sworn enemies, such as Proudhon and Bakunin. No less important, in the final result, are the more recent developments such as German revisionism, French syndicalism, and Russian Bolshevism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whereas Korsch in 1923 had grasped the essential and vital if transformed continuity between Marx and his precursors in the \u201crevolutionary movement of the Third Estate\u201d of the bourgeois liberal-democratic revolutions, by 1950 he wrote,<\/p>\n

The following points are particularly critical for Marxism: (a) its dependence on the underdeveloped economic and political conditions in Germany and all the other countries of central and eastern Europe where it was to have political relevance; (b) its unconditional adherence to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution; (c) the unconditional acceptance of the advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries and as objective preconditions for the transition to socialism; to which one should add; (d) the consequences of its repeated desperate and contradictory attempts to break out of these conditions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Translated by Fred Halliday. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008. Chris Cutrone [Marx wrote,] \u201c[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,18,8,17,20,19,16,6],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-11","tag-adorno","tag-conferences","tag-contra-anarchism","tag-historical-materialism","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":36,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3236,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions\/3236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}