Makers of Mode Marxism Karl Korsch

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in lyly-ine placarus utruune suele perera nun. -n a-. concrete material equivalent to revolutionary In 1923, two theoretical works appeared which shook the Third International and have continued to cause controversy to this day.

The first was History and Class Consciousness, by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs; the second, now the most bers of the German Communist Party (KPD), Karl Korsch.

Both books sprang from the massive upsurge of revolutionary working class activity which characterised the years following the first imperialist world war.

The Second International, sunk in the most craven reformism and revisionism, clinging in theory to an ossified 'orthodox Marxism' while betraying in practice all working class militancy, appeared to be dead and buried; and a new period of revolutionary advance and defeat called for a renewal of revolutionary theory.

Hegelian Both Korsch and Lukacs found that theory in 'Hegelian Marxism'-in a return to what they considered the truly dialectical, historical thrust of what Marx had learned from the German philosopher Hegel, as against the mechanical, dogmatic nature of Second International orthodoxy.

The unity of theory and practice demanded by both Korsch and Lukacs, then, can be seen above all in their own writing, based as it is in 'the political experience of the proletariat of their time.

In his philosophical writings, Hegel had emphasised the dialectical interaction of 'subject' and 'object' in history and the related dialectic of theory and practice.

For him, as an idealist philosopher, ' 'subject' meant 'Absolute Spirit' and 'object' its self-realisation in history; but it is not hard to re-write such ideas in Marxist terms.

class 'Subject then becomes the working class, which seizes the 'object' (capitalist society) and transforms it into the means of its own self-realisation.

What such a theory restores is a recogntion of the active, practical nature of the class, which grasps history and refashions it in its own image.

It also revives the funda+ 1 -ala Revolutionary German soldiers of the proletariat. For Hegel, "Absolute Spirit' develops by negating actual society; it is the antithesis of all that appears to be real.

If 'Absolute Spirit' is translated into 'working class' , its utter opposition to actual society becomes clear: its very 'essence' consists in 'cancelling' capitalism.

For Hegel also, theory or philosophy is no more than the expression of the movement of history.

Theory is no more than practice becoming conscious of itself. Once again, 'subject' (thought) and 'object' (practice) are interdependent.

Theory and It is easy to see how this too can ,be re-written in Marxist terms, as the unity of theory and practice.

If a return to Hegel allowed Korsch and Lukacs to launch a powerful assault on Second International orthodoxy, it also ran them into a good many problems.

For it is clearly absurd to think that you can merely 'translate' a full-blooded idealist like Hegel into materialist terms.

• To see the working class as a 'subject', actively creating history, is to risk reducing it to, some single metaphysical essence, ignoring its complex material conditions and unevennesses.

For Hegel, the subject creates history; for Marxism, it does so only unthin the conctraints nt concrete conditions.

The 'dialectical materialism' of Hegelian Marxism, as we shall see in the case of Karl Korsch, is therefore likely to be more dialectical than materialist.

Nor is it true to claim that theory, for Marxism, is no more than the 'expression' or reflection' of practice.

Marxist: theory is not simply the self-consciousness of the revolutionary working class: for that revolutionary self-consciousness can itselt only be formed, as Lenin insisted in What Is To Be Done? by the intervention from 'outside' of Marxist theory itself.

Marxist theory must develop in the closest possible relation to the praotical struggles of the revolutionary masses, as Lenin also insisted; but it cannot be reduced to the consciousness of those struggles, which will in any case always be uneven.

Reflection

There is no sense in which the theory of surplus value in Marx's Capital can be said to be merely a reflection' of revolutionary struggles, even though it is clearly worthless unless it is put to the service of such struggles.

We see here how the theoretical assumptions of Hegelian Marxism can lead to fatal political consequences.

• For if Marxist theory is DULL DEHUN equivalent to revolutionary consciousness, what becomes of the role of the revolutionary party? Either it is superfluous, or the party is no more than an 'expression' or 'elaboration' of revolutionary. consciousness-in which case the dialectical relation between party and class is completely ruptured.

Ultra-leftism

Another fatal political consequence which may flow from Hegelian Marxism is ultra-leftism.

For if the working class is seen as Hegel's 'negation' then it is possible to act politically on this assumption regardless of the actual material conditions and state of consciousness of the class itself.

The concrete working class is reduced to a mere counter in some metaphysical scheme of history: it is the idea of the class, not its reality, which is at stake.

The political career of Karl Korsch graphically illustrates some of these points. After the suppression of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin (1919) and the Munich soviet (1919), Korsch, like Antonio Gramsci, was a leading theoretician of the widespread movement for workers' councils.

But whereas Gramsci learnt from the defeat. of the councils the urgent necessity for revolutionary leadership, Korsch placed much less emphasis on the importance of the party:

Instead, he turned his attention to the problem of uniting theory and practice, of which Marxism and Philosophy was the major product.

Denounced as a revision-. ist at the Comintern's Fifth World Congress of 1924, Korsch moved into increasing opposition to the official Communist movement.

After a prominent career in the KPD (he was Communist Minister of Justice in the Thuringian government of 1923, and later one of the leaders of the party's left faction), Korsch was expelled from the party in 1926 for denying that capitalism had stabilised, demanding renewed emphasis on workers' councils, and criticising Soviet foreign policy for accommodation with world capitalism.

Independent

For two years he maintained an independent left group, which supported the Russian workers opposition' but opposed the Left Opposition led by Trotsky.

In 1927 the Left Opposition officially dissociated itself from Korsch's positions on the Soviet Union.

Exiled from Germany in 1933 by the victory of Nazism, Korsch produced his second major work, Karl Marx (1938); from 1936 to his death in 1961 he lived in the United States, finally abandoning Marxism altogether at the height of th Cold War.

Korsch's politic: development, then, wa from ultra-leftism to rear tionary disillusion.

He refused to recognis the conclusions of Leni and Trotsky in the perio after 1921: that the tide immediate revolutionar opportunities had ebber that international capitalist had won itself a breathin space, and that the Con munist Parties, rather tha dwindling their forces i adventurist: coups whic lacked mass support, mu turn patiently to the tas] of building a united fros with reformist working cla organisations.

No setbacks This blindness Wi related to the nature of h view of Marxism. For Hege the subject can know I real set-back: as the essen‹ of universal Reason, unfolds inexorably throug out history, cancelling ti obstacles in its path.

Trotsky, in contra: denounced such an idea 1921 as a mechanistic m interpretation of t Marxist approach history: mankind had n always • and inevitab moved upward, but h loviets spanned Germany

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Armed workers took control of the streets of Berlin at the end of 1918 RN : present day, major concory have been made by uplacahly opposed to the Trotskyism. s to Louis Althusser, -Paul Sartre, Karl Korsch ›werful body of 'Western developed, which has yet sessment by Trotskyists 'or revisionist politics of d against their theoretical heory? gleton examines the work ove, as an introduction to vork.

known long spells of stagnation.

It was not, of course, that, Lenin or Trotsky doubted that the Bolshevik revolution had opened an era of international proletarian revolution, for which the Communist Parties must be ceaselessly prepared; it was rather that such revolutionary processes were likely to prove complex and protracted rather than automatic.

Errors

Korsch's political errors do not completely invalidațe his theoretical writings.

The relations between politics and theory are not mechanical: it does not follow that a politically incorrect strategy can involve no valuable theoretical insights.

Indeed Marxism and Philosophy and Karl Marx are both works of outstanding theoretical value, among the masterpieces of Western Marxism'.

In Marxism and Philosophy Korsch sets out to perform a uniquely original task to apply the Marxist method to the history of Marxist philosophy itself.

He shows first how the death of Hegelian philosophy in the 1840s was e 1918-19 revolution Wednesday February related to the end of the revolutionary epoch of the European bourgeoisie, whose political hopes that philosophy embodied.

The heir to Hegel was Marxism--but Marxism is in that sense not itself a philosophy, but the inheritor of philosophy.

In the hands of Marx and Engels, Marxism is, indissolubly, a scientific analysis and a revolutionary critique: but just as Hegelian philosophy fragmented and degenerated once the bourgeoisie had passed from its heroic revolutionary phase, so Marxism declines into dogmatism in the Second International, given the defeats of the proletariat from 1848 onwards.

Supplement

And once Marxism has been thus reduced, it seems possible to 'supplement' it with scraps of bourgeois philosophy: thus it is not unusual to find Second International Marxists who are, privately, followers of idealists like Kant or Schopenhauer.

To this extent, Korsch's critique follows upon Lenin's own onslaught against neo-Kantian and other petty-bourgeois 'Marxists' in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

To this extent, but to no other. For Lenin's own philosophical writings receive quite as much of a savaging in Korsch's hands as do those of the reformists and 'orthodox' Marxists.

In a postscript to Marxism and Philosophy, written in 1930 after his expulsion from the KPD, Korsch fiercely attacks Lenin's interpretation of dialectical materialism • as fatally mechanistic.

In stressing materialismthat the material object is prior to and independent of the subject-Lenin, Korsch claims, sacrifices dialectics, ignoring the dialectical unity of subject and object involved in the act of knowledge.

Knowledge becomes merely a passive mirror of social reality. In consequence, theory is divided from practice: theory becomes an abstract discovery of truths which it is up to practice to 'apply' in reality.

The political result, Korsch argues, is ideological dogmatism and dictatorship.

Korsch's wild charges against Lenin must be placed in their political context.

As a dissident left-wing member of the KPD, he fell victim to the process of 'Bolshevisation' of the Communist Parties undertaken by Stalin in the aftermath of Lenin's death, which was indeed a matter of dogmatism and dictatorship.

Dogmatism

But his own Hegelian understanding of dialectical materialism led him inevitably to read back this ideological dogmatism into the work of Lenin himself.

It is quite true, as Korsch perceived, that a naive, disastrously undialectical theory of knowledge was current in certain quarters of the Communist movement.

The notion that truth consists in a simple 'copying' or 'photographing' of the object by the mind, if this is taken to deny the necessary, activity of the mind in knowing the process of change which produces the object (what Marx called 'practical consciousness'), is indeed no more than a variant of bourgeois empiricism.

But Korsch himseit, under the influence of Hegel, reacts in the opposite direction: there are points in Marxism and Philosophy where 'dialectics' seems to have abolished the distinction between subject and object altogether. (Not surprisingly, since for Hegel himself that distinction is at root unreal).

In this way Korsch's valuable insistence against mechanical dualism keels over into an assault on materialism itself The source of Korsch's error lies in a confusion of dialectical materialism and historical materialism which is characteristic of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition. ' He accuses Lenin of examining the relation between subject and object only 'from an abstract epistemological standpoint' rather than as an historical phenomenon, as a question of the actual ideological superstructure.

But this is to run together two issues which for Marxism are related but distinct.

Dialectical materialism'Marxist philosophy'-quite properly considers such problems in an epistemological way; historical materialism examines the actual relations : between 'consciousness' and 'social being' in concrete historical situations.

It is Korsch's Hegelian view of the relations between theory and practice which enables him to make this confusion.

We have seen that, for Hegelian Marxism, theory is no more than practice becoming conscious of itself; it has no relative autonomy' of the historical movement, of which it is reduced to a mere expression.

Thus, in criticising the 'orthodox' Marxism of the Second International, Korsch objects that Marxism in this phase was not a true theory, in the sense of being 'nothing other than a general expression of the real historical movement' (a quotation he Epistemology: the branch/ of philosophy dealing with the study of the nature of knowledge, its origin, foundations, limits and validity. takes from Marx), but Is instead an 'ideology' imported dogmatically from outside.

Korsch is correct to see that the Second International was indeed crippled by a dualistic separation between 'philosophy? and practice: the one was a set of lifeless dogmas held in almost total isolation from the other, (as Kautsky's work most vividly illustrates).

Defeat

And he is right too to grasp the political determinants of this fact: the defeat of working class insurgency. But his only alternative to such dualism is a reduction of theory to history, dialectical materialism to historical materialism: a monism.

The terms on which he can criticise the Second International for importing theory from the outside are also precisely the terms in which he will go on to attack Leninism.

Korsch's mistake can also be seen in his insistence that Marxism is not a philosophy. By this he means not only that it breaks with bourgeois philosophy; he means that it breaks with philosophy as such.

The early work of Marx and Engels, he considers in Karl Marx, was still affected by philosophical influences; but the later Marx goes on to break definitively with all philosophy, replacing it with scientific socialism. (In this view; Korsch in some ways interestingly prefigures the contemporary htalinist theorist, Louis Althusser);

Marxism is not philosophy, Korsch claims, because for it theory has no autonomous existence outside the objective movement of history.

No autonomous existence, true; but, once again, this does not mean that Marxist theory is nothing more than the reflection of real history in the brains of men and women.

Korsch's ultra-leftism extends not only to politics; it reaches to Marxist philosophy itself.

What is impressive about Marxism and Philosophy, however, is that despite its insistence that Marxism 'transcends' philosophy, it takes, philosophy itself extremely seriously.

By "philosophy' here he means actual ideological systems; and Korsch is properly scathing in his attack . on those Second International theorists for whom such systems are somehow 'unreal' • mere "illusions' or figments which will wither away once the mode of production is revolutionised.

Korsch, on the contrary, never underestimates the stubborness and tenacity of such systems, their reality as a material force and their power to resist changes in the economié base.

In this, once again, he is a forerunner of some of the most productive contemporary work on the nature of ideological institutions in class society.

Like Georg Lukacs, whose work will be examined in a subsequent article, Karl Korsch acutely raises the problem of the relationship between Marx and Hegel.

Clarify

It is a relationship which has yet to be fully clarified within Marxist theory: how far did Marx remain an Hegelian (as the quotation from him used by Korsch above might suggest), how far does historical materialism break definitively with Hegel's method and system?

In Marxism and Philosophy, Korsch writes that Marx and Engels':

"only problem was how to change the Hegelian dialectic from a method proper to a superficially idealist, but secretly materialist conception of the world, into the guiding principle of an explicitly materialist view of history and society".

Whether things are quite as simple as that can be legitimately . doubted: Korsch's own theory and politics stand as living testimony to the truth that idealism is not to be so easily discarded.

ARȚICLE:

ALTER IJAMIN

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Pag Review of "The Military Review of "The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky", Vol. I, "How the Revolution Armed". , published by New Park Publications, price £10: Wednesday February

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