{"id":125,"date":"2010-02-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=125"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:57","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:57","slug":"rejoinder-to-david-black-on-karl-korschs-marxism-and-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=125","title":{"rendered":"Rejoinder on Korsch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Police photo of Vladimir Il\u2019ich Lenin, taken after his arrest in 1895 for participation in the St. Petersberg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.<\/p><\/div>\n

DAVID BLACK\u2019S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition<\/a> (in Platypus Review<\/em> 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch\u2019s Marxism and Philosophy<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(Platypus Review<\/em> 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch\u2019s account of the different historical phases of the question of \u201cphilosophy\u201d for Marx and Marxism. Black questions Korsch\u2019s differentiation of Marx\u2019s relationship to philosophy into three distinct periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. But attempting to defeat Korsch\u2019s historical account of such changes in Marx\u2019s approaches to relating theory and practice means avoiding Korsch\u2019s principal point. It also means defending Marx on mistaken ground. Black considers that Korsch\u2019s periodization \u2014 his recognition of changes \u2014 opens the door to criticizing Marx for inconsistency in his relation of theory to practice. But that is not so.<\/p>\n

What makes Korsch\u2019s essay \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d (1923) important, to Benjamin and Adorno\u2019s work for instance, and what relates it intrinsically to Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s contemporaneous treatment of the question of the \u201cHegelian\u201d dimension of Marxism in History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, is Korsch\u2019s discovery of the historically changing relation of theory and practice, and the self-consciousness of this problem, in the history of Marxism. This meant that the matter was, from a Marxian perspective, as Adorno put it in Negative Dialectics<\/em>, \u201cnot settled once and for all, but fluctuates historically.\u201d<\/a>[1]<\/a> Indeed, as Adorno put it in a late essay,<\/p>\n

If, to make an exception for once, one risks what is called a grand perspective, beyond the historical differences in which the concepts of theory and praxis have their life, one discovers the infinitely progressive aspect of the separation of theory and praxis, which was deplored by the Romantics and denounced by the Socialists in their wake \u2014 except for the mature Marx.<\/a>[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However one may wish to question the nuances of Korsch\u2019s specific historiographic periodization of the problem of Marxism as that of the relation of theory and practice, both during Marx\u2019s lifetime and after, this should not be with an eye to either disputing or defending Marx or a Marxian approach\u2019s consistency on the matter. One may perhaps attempt a more fine-grained approach to the historical \u201cfluctuations\u201d of what Adorno called the \u201cconstitutive\u201d and indeed \u201cprogressive\u201d aspect of the \u201cseparation of theory and praxis.\u201d Korsch\u2019s point in the 1923 \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d followed by Benjamin and Adorno, was that we must attend to this \u201cseparation,\u201d or, as Adorno put it, \u201cnon-identity,\u201d if we are to have a properly Marxian self-consciousness of the problem of \u201cMarxism\u201d in theory and practice. For this problem of the separation of theory and practice is not to be deplored, but calls for critical awareness. Marx was consistent in his own awareness of the relation of theory and practice. This meant that at different times Marx found them related in different ways.<\/p>\n

By contrast, what has waylaid the sectarian \u201cMarxist Left\u201d has been the freezing of the theory-practice problem, which then continued to elude a progressive-emancipatory solution at any given moment. Particular historical moments in the theory-practice problem have become dogmatized by various sects, thus dooming them to irrelevance. So generations of ostensibly revolutionary \u201cMarxists\u201d have failed to heed the nature of Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s praise of Lenin and Trotsky\u2019s Bolsheviks in the October Revolution:<\/p>\n

All of us are subject to the laws of history. .\u00a0.\u00a0. The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities. .\u00a0.\u00a0. What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescencies in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first<\/em>, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones<\/em> up to now who can cry with Hutten: \u201cI have dared!\u201d This is the essential and enduring<\/em> in Bolshevik policy. In this<\/em> sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world. .\u00a0.\u00a0. And in this<\/em> sense, the future everywhere belongs to \u201cBolshevism.\u201d<\/a>[3]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bolshevik Revolution was not itself the achievement of socialism and the overcoming of capitalism, but it did nevertheless squarely address itself to the problem of grasping history so as to make possible revolutionary practice. The Bolsheviks recognized, in other words, that we are tasked, by the very nature of capital, in Marx\u2019s sense, to struggle within and through the separation of theory and practice. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was the occasion and context for Korsch\u2019s rumination on the theory and practice of Marxism in his seminal 1923 essay on \u201cMarxism and Philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the extended aftermath of the failed revolution of 1917\u201319, the crisis of the Stalinization of Third International Communism and the looming political victory of fascism, Horkheimer, in an aphorism titled \u201cA Discussion About Revolution,\u201d addressed himself to the same subject Luxemburg and Korsch had discussed, from the other side of historical experience:<\/p>\n

[A] proletarian party cannot be made the object of contemplative criticism. .\u00a0.\u00a0. Bourgeois criticism of the proletarian struggle is a logical impossibility. .\u00a0.\u00a0. At times such as the present, revolutionary belief may not really be compatible with great clear-sightedness about the realities.<\/a>[4]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is because, for Horkheimer, from a Marxian \u201cproletarian\u201d perspective, as opposed to a (historically) \u201cbourgeois\u201d one (including that of pre- or non-Marxian \u201csocialism\u201d), the problem is not a matter of formulating a correct theory and then implementing it in practice. It is rather a question of what Luk\u00e1cs called \u201chistorical consciousness.\u201d We should note well how Horkheimer posed the theory-practice problem here, as the contradiction between \u201crevolutionary belief\u201d and \u201cclear-sightedness about the realities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Horkheimer elaborated further that proletarian revolutionary politics cannot be conceived on the model of capitalist enterprise, and not only for socioeconomic class-hierarchical reasons, but rather because of the differing relation of theory and practice in the two instances; it is the absence of any \u201chistorical consciousness\u201d of the theory and practice problem that makes \u201cbourgeois criticism of the proletarian struggle\u201d a logical<\/em> \u201cimpossibility.\u201d As Luk\u00e1cs put it, in \u201cReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat\u201d (1923), \u201ca radical change in outlook is not feasible on the soil of bourgeois society<\/em>.\u201d Rather, one must radically deepen \u2014 render \u201cdialectical\u201d \u2014 the outlook of the present historical moment. The point is that a Marxian perspective can find \u2014 and indeed has often found \u2014 itself far removed from the practical politics and (entirely \u201cbourgeois\u201d) ideological consciousness of the working class. This has not invalidated Marxism, but rather called for a further Marxian critical reflection on its own condition.<\/p>\n

In a letter of February 22, 1881 to the Dutch anarchist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Marx wrote,<\/p>\n

It is my conviction that the critical juncture for a new International Working Men\u2019s Association has not yet arrived and for that reason I regard all workers\u2019 congresses or socialist congresses, in so far as they are not directly related to the conditions existing in this or that particular nation, as not merely useless but actually harmful. They will always ineffectually end in endlessly repeated general banalities.<\/a>[5]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How much more is this criticism applicable to the \u201cLeft\u201d today! But, more directly, what it points to is that Marx recognized no fixed relation of theory and practice that he pursued throughout his life. Instead, he very self-consciously exercised judgment respecting the changing relation of theory and practice, and considered this consciousness the hallmark of his politics. Marx\u2019s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em> (1852) excoriated \u201cbourgeois\u201d democratic politics, including that of contemporary socialists, for its inability to simultaneously learn from history<\/em> and face the challenge of the new<\/em>.<\/a>[6]<\/a> How else could one judge that a moment has \u201cnot yet arrived\u201d while calling for something other than \u201cendlessly repeated banalities?\u201d<\/p>\n

Marx had a critical theory of the relation of theory and practice \u2014 recognizing it as a historically specific and not merely \u201cphilosophical\u201d problem, or, a problem that called for the critical theory of the philosophy of history \u2014 and a political practice of the relation of theory and practice. There is not simply a theoretical or practical problem, but also and more profoundly a problem of relating theory and practice.<\/p>\n

We are neither going to think our way out ahead of time, nor somehow work our way through, in the process of acting. We do not need to dissolve the theory-practice distinction that seems to paralyze us, but rather achieve both good theory and good practice in the struggle to relate them properly. It is not a matter of finding either a correct theory or correct practice, but of trying to judge and affect their changing relation<\/em> and recognizing this as a problem of history<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Marx overcame the political pitfalls and historical blindness of his \u201crevolutionary\u201d contemporaries, such as the pre-Marxian socialism of Proudhon et al.<\/em> leading to 1848, anarchism in the First International, and the Lassallean trend of the German Social-Democratic Party. It is significant that Marx\u2019s Critique of the Gotha Programme<\/em> (1875) critiqued the residual Lassallean politics of the Social Democrats for being to the Right of the liberals on international free trade, etc., thus exposing the problem of this first \u201cMarxist\u201d party from the outset.<\/a>[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, following Marx, recovered and struggled through the problem of theory and practice for their time, precipitating a crisis in Marxism, and thus advancing it. They overcame the \u201cvulgar Marxist\u201d ossification of theory and practice in the Second International, as Korsch and Luk\u00e1cs explained. It meant the Marxist critique of Marxism, or, an emancipatory critique of emancipatory politics \u2014 a Left critique of the Left. This is not a finished task. We need to attain this ability again, for our time.\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #20 (February 2010). Parts included for<\/em> presentation on “Adorno and Korsch on Marxism and philosophy<\/a>” at the <\/em>Historical Materialism<\/strong> conference, York University, Toronto, May 14, 2010.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

<\/a>1<\/a>. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics<\/em>, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1983), 143.<\/p>\n

<\/a>2<\/a>. Adorno, \u201cMarginalia to Theory and Praxis,\u201d in Critical Models<\/em>, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 266. This essay, a \u201cdialectical epilegomenon\u201d to his book Negative Dialectics<\/em> that Adorno said intended to bring together \u201cphilosophical speculation and drastic experience\u201d (Critical Models<\/em>, 126), was one of the last writings he finished for publication before he died in 1969. It reflected his dispute with fellow Frankfurt School critical theorist Hebert Marcuse over the student protests of the Vietnam War (see Adorno and Marcuse, \u201cCorrespondence on the German Student Movement,\u201d trans. Esther Leslie, New Left Review <\/em>I\/233, Jan.\u2013Feb. 1999, 123\u2013136). As Adorno put it in his May 5, 1969 letter to Marcuse, “[T]here are moments in which theory is pushed on further by practice. But such a situation neither exists objectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism that confronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow” (\u201cCorrespondence,\u201d 127).<\/p>\n

<\/a>3<\/a>. Rosa Luxemburg, \u201cThe Russian Revolution,\u201d in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism<\/em> (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 80.<\/p>\n

<\/a>4<\/a>. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline<\/em>, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 40\u201341.<\/p>\n

<\/a>5<\/a>. Karl Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895<\/em>, trans. Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 387, <www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1881\/letters\/81_02_22.htm>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>6<\/a>. As Luxemburg put it in 1915 in The Crisis of German Social Democracy<\/em> (aka The Junius Pamphlet<\/em>, available online at <www.marxists.org\/archive\/luxemburg\/1915\/junius\/>),<\/p>\n

Marx says [in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em> (1852)]: \u201c[T]he democrat (that is, the petty bourgeois revolutionary) [comes] out of the most shameful defeats as unmarked as he naively went into them; he comes away with the newly gained conviction that he must be victorious, not that he or his party ought to give up the old principles, but that conditions ought to accommodate him.\u201d The modern proletariat comes out of historical tests differently. Its tasks and its errors are both gigantic: no prescription, no schema valid for every case, no infallible leader to show it the path to follow. Historical experience is its only school mistress. Its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey \u2014 its emancipation depends on this \u2014 is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors. Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life\u2019s breath and light of the proletarian movement. The fall of the socialist proletariat in the present world war [WWI] is unprecedented. It is a misfortune for humanity. But socialism will be lost only if the international proletariat fails to measure the depth of this fall, if it refuses to learn from it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>7<\/a>. Karl Marx, \u201cCritique of the Gotha Program,\u201d in Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 533\u2013534, <www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1875\/gotha\/>. Marx wrote, “In fact, the internationalism of the program stands even infinitely below<\/em> that of the Free Trade party. The latter also asserts that the result of its efforts will be ‘the international brotherhood of peoples.’ But it also does something to make trade international. .\u00a0.\u00a0.The international activity of the working classes does not in any way depend on the existence of the International Working Men\u2019s Association.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone DAVID BLACK\u2019S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch\u2019s Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch\u2019s account of the different historical phases of the question of \u201cphilosophy\u201d for Marx and Marxism. Black questions […]<\/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":[10,18,20,19,16,6],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-10","tag-adorno","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\/125","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=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3234,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/3234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}