{"id":667,"date":"2010-05-14T00:00:48","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T05:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=667"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:36","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:36","slug":"adorno-and-korsch-on-marxism-and-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=667","title":{"rendered":"Adorno and Korsch on Marxism and philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Presented on the panel “Reconsiderations in Western Marxism: Luk\u00e1cs, Korsch, Adorno, Marcuse,” with panelist Baolinh Dang, at the <\/em>Historical Materialism<\/strong> conference, York University, Toronto, May 14, 2010; and on the panel “Hegel, Marx, and Modern Philosophy,” with panelists Patrick Murray and Richard Westerman at the Weissbourd 2011 Annual Conference<\/a>, the University of Chicago, May 6, 2011. Excerpted from “Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy<\/a>” and “Rejoinder on Korsch<\/a>,” originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> (#15, September 2009, and #20, February 2010). <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The publication of Karl Korsch\u2019s seminal essay \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d in 1923 coincided with the publication of Georg Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s landmark collection of essays, History and Class Consciousness<\/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<\/em> treatment of the problem, from Marx and Engels\u2019s time, through the 2nd International, to what Korsch called the \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d and the revolutions of 1917\u201319. More specifically, Korsch\u2019s essay takes up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which Korsch considered the<\/em> \u201cphilosophical\u201d problem of Marxism.<\/p>\n

Independently of one another, both Korsch\u2019s 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 own Marxism.\u201d 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. In the face of this party criticism, Luk\u00e1cs acquiesced and made his peace with \u201corthodoxy,\u201d disavowing his work of 1919\u201324 as comprising a misguided attempt to \u201cout-Hegel Hegel.\u201d<\/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 and Paul Mattick. 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. Thus, in the 1930 essay \u201cThe Present State of the Problem of \u2018Marxism and Philosophy:\u2019 An Anti-Critique,\u201d Korsch argued 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 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. The figure of Lenin was irreducible, and brought out dimensions of the Marxian project that otherwise lay unacknowledged. No less than Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, Korsch\u2019s essay on \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. 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. Both Korsch\u2019s and Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s post-1923 trajectories were critiqued by the Frankfurt School writers.<\/a>[1<\/a>] Korsch, in the 1930 \u201cAnti-Critique,\u201d distanced himself from the problem Adorno sought to address, of the constitutive non-identity of theory and practice. Writing 40 years later, in Negative Dialectics <\/em>(1966), <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

In Adorno\u2019s terms, both the later Korsch and official \u201cdialectical materialism\u201d (including the later Luk\u00e1cs) assumed \u201cidentity thinking,\u201d an identity of effective theory and practice, rather than their articulated non-identity, to which Korsch and Luk\u00e1cs had drawn attention earlier. Instead of this recognition of the actuality of the symptom of \u201cphilosophical\u201d thinking, of the mutually constitutive separation of theory and practice, Korsch, by embracing \u201ccouncil\u201d communism, and shunning Marxian theory in the years after writing his famously condemned work, succumbed to what Adorno termed \u201cidentity thinking\u201d \u2014 just as Luk\u00e1cs had done in adapting to Stalinist \u201corthodoxy.\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

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 (\u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d in Marxism and Philosophy<\/em>, trans. Fred Halliday [NY: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008], 97). As Adorno put it,<\/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.<\/a>[2<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1923, Korsch had explicitly tied the question of \u201cphilosophy\u201d 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, specifically the critical reflection on the relation of theory and practice, 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

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, post-1848, extended into what he termed the \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d beginning in the 1890s with the reformist \u201crevisionist\u201d dispute of Eduard Bernstein 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 uprisings 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 own Marxism\u201d of 1848, as expressed in the Communist Manifesto<\/em>, 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). 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.<\/p>\n

For Korsch in the 1923 \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. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [T]he 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 later called the \u201chistorically changing\u201d relation of theory and practice, making sense of their vicissitudes in the history of the politics of Marxism. Furthermore, by establishing the character of the \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d 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

Adorno, in one of his last writings, the \u201cMarginalia to Theory and Praxis\u201d (1969), stated that,<\/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>[3<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to Adorno, 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<\/em> \u2014 and a political practice of the relation of theory and practice. Adorno noted that the relation of theory and practice is \u201cnot settled once and for all, but fluctuates historically.\u201d<\/a>[4<\/a>] There is not simply a theoretical or practical problem, but also, and more profoundly, a problem of relating<\/em> theory and practice. 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>. This is a function of the past\u2019s problematic legacy in the present.<\/p>\n

The revolutionary politics of Lenin and Luxemburg, following Marx, which inspired the Marxian critical theory of Luk\u00e1cs, Korsch and Adorno, recovered and struggled through the problem of theory and practice for their time, precipitating a crisis in Marxism, and thus potentially advancing it. Overcoming the \u201cvulgar Marxist\u201d ossification of theory and practice in the 2nd International opened the way to their critical<\/em> relation, which Adorno elaborated. This meant the Marxist critique of Marxism, or, a Left critique of the Left. This was not a finished but an on-going task. Adorno\u2019s focus, following Korsch, on the constitutive non-identity of theory and practice, is key to recovering a Marxian approach to the problem of an emancipatory, \u201cdialectical\u201d politics, an unresolved but neglected problem in the history of Marxism.\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>1<\/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 [Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the <\/em>Frankfurt<\/em> <\/em>School<\/em>: A Marxist Perspective<\/em> (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 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>2<\/a>. Translated by Dennis Redmond (2001)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>3<\/a>. Adorno, \u201cMarginalia to Theory and Praxis,\u201d in Critical Models<\/em>, trans. by 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), 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. by 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,<\/p>\n

[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><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>4<\/a>. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics<\/em>, trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1983), 143.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone Presented on the panel “Reconsiderations in Western Marxism: Luk\u00e1cs, Korsch, Adorno, Marcuse,” with panelist Baolinh Dang, at the Historical Materialism conference, York University, Toronto, May 14, 2010; and on the panel “Hegel, Marx, and Modern Philosophy,” with panelists Patrick Murray and Richard Westerman at the Weissbourd 2011 Annual Conference, the University of Chicago, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,18,8,20,19,16],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-10","tag-adorno","tag-conferences","tag-historical-materialism","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","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=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3228,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions\/3228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}