Karl Korsch

Karl Korsch is best known to students of Marxism for two works: Marxism and Philosophy (1923) and Karl Marx (1938). Both these books reflect the changing fortunes of the revolutionary workingclass movement in Europe. In the early 1920s, until the defeat of the German Communist Party (KPD) in October 1923, which was followed by a series of reverses in other countries, this movement was in the ascendant. During the period there was a fruitful examination of the foundations of Marxism by revolutionary Marxists, in which all the basic questions of Marxism were reexamined: namely, the relation of Marxism to its predecessors, the validity of its economic analyses, and the connection between Marxist science and political action. The best-known part of this debate concerns the first question — the Hegelian dimension of Marx’s thought. The revival of interest in this problem was initially stimulated by various remarks of Lenin, which were acted on by a number of writers.¹ The most significant contributors to this debate sympathetic to such a philosophical examination of Marxism were Korsch and Lukács. The discussion was soon cut short as Stalin’s faction in the Comintern began to gain control. Thus at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, the first after Lenin’s death, both Korsch and Lukács were subjected to a crude, demagogic denunciation by Zinoviev.²

Karl Korsch was born on 15 August 1886 in Tostedt on the Lüneberg Heath.¹ Like many other Marxist intellectuals, he came from a family upwardly mobile from the lower middle class. Originally his father was from a farming background, but by hard work he rose to be the vice-president of a bank in Meiningen, where Korsch went to grammar school (Gymnasium).² After taking his Abitur, he began to make the rounds of the universities in the normal fashion of German students of that period. He spent most of his time at Jena, but visited Geneva and Berlin, and also had one term in Munich.³

By the time Korsch had finished his legal work with Schuster, it was the summer of 1914. He was summoned by his regiment in Meiningen to report for extraordinary manoeuvres. His return to Germany was apparently not from patriotic motives, but because he did not wish to be imprisoned somewhere as an alien without any contact with the mass of socialist workers, even when they were misguided enough to support a patriotic war. This meant being in the army, so he was in uniform training recruits before the war actually started. Because of his complaints against the violation of international law by the march through Belgium, he was demoted to the ranks. His form of protest against the war was never to carry a rifle or sabre, because he personally did not intend to kill people. Instead he considered it his mission to bring home alive as many soldiers as possible. However he carried out his military duties with enough ability to be eventually awarded the Iron Cross (first class) and to be recommissioned. Towards the end of the war, his company was all for revolution and for ending the war by not fighting any longer. His company was not demobbed until January 1919 because the government did not want to let the soldiers loose in a volatile political situation.¹

The second phase of Korsch’s writings on the struggle by the working class for direct control over production concerns the factory councils (Betriebsräte) rather than the more broadly based workers’ councils (Arbeiterräte). This change reflects the changed focus of political life during 1920–2. In this period, the Arbeiterräte were non-existent, having in fact lost most of their effectiveness by the end of 1919. As Korsch pointed out:

already in November 1919 only a tiny band of ‘municipal workers’ councils’ was left … of the revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ councils of … 1918 … but since the end of 1919 we have no longer had political councils in the revolutionary sense.¹

The immediate post-war years had seen Korsch closely involved with the concrete political problems of the day—first the socialisation movement, then the factory councils. But at the same time he was writing on the basic aspects of Marxism, as they related to such problems, for example in the Quintessenz and the Introduction to the Critique of the Gotha Programme. His next work, Marxism and Philosophy¹ seems to mark a departure. At first sight, the relation indicated in the title seems to be only a ‘history of ideas’, and of the most arid variety, tracing the influence of A upon B, and, in the case of Marxism, requiring the painstaking exegesis of fragmentary texts. This might give interesting information about the genesis of Marx’s ideas, and the logic of their development, but it does not seem to have that relevance to practice with which Korsch was always concerned. Yet at the time it was thought that this apparently scholastic question did have a bearing on practical problems of the highest importance; so mulch so that in 1924, the year after Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy and Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness were published, it became the centre of heated debates in the Communist International. To understand why this was so, the debate has to be seen in its political context. Since this is only partly made explicit in Marxism and Philosophy, a brief sketch will be offered here.

For the next five years after the appearance of Marxism and Philosophy, Korsch was intensively involved in party political activity. In bewildering succession he found himself a Communist Minister in a regional government (1923); in a leading position in the left turn made by the KPD (1924) after the defeat of the German revolution; attacked as an ‘ultra-left’ as the party turned rightwards (1925); finally, expelled from the KPD, and the leader of a small splinter group around the periodical Kommunistische Politik.

In 1928 Korsch’s mandate to the Reichstag expired (he did not stand again) and the Kommunistische Politik group dissolved itself.¹ During this period, Korsch concentrated on literary activity. Up to the time of writing Karl Marx (1936onwards), the two most important works were Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (The Materialist Conception of History) in 1929 and the Anti-Critique to Marxism and Philosophy in 1930. The sure touch which he had shown in earlier writings had temporarily deserted him. In fact, in these years, Korsch was looking for a direction. For example, he later considered writing a long introduction to a German edition of the works of Antonio Labriola. In his opinion Labriola was ‘the best interpreter of the Marxist method and in particular of its methodological … foundations; at the same time a fundamental Hegelian’.² There were two other reasons for his interest in Labriola. First, Labriola stood at a turning point: after him came the syndicalists in France and the revisionists in Germany. Secondly, the significance of Labriola for the development of Marxism in the West is a striking parallel to the meaning of Plekhanov for the development of Marxism in the East.³ However, this remained an unrealised project and The Materialist Conception of History was the only book he wrote; his Anti-Critique to Marxism and Philosophy is only an extended essay.

In 1928 Korsch’s mandate to the Reichstag expired (he did not stand again) and the Kommunistische Politik group dissolved itself. His main work was now to be the organisation of a Marxist study circle whose members were for the most part middle-class intellectuals. The circle he directed in the last few months before Hitler’s seizure of power (from November 1932 to February 1933) the ‘study circle for critical Marxism’, had a study programme significantly entitled ‘What is living and what is dead in Marxism’. Four of the eight meetings discussed philosophical questions such as the application of dialectical materialism to the natural and social sciences.¹ The circle held its meetings in an experimental school in Neukölln, Berlin, the ‘Karl Marx School’, at which Korsch’s wife was a teacher.² The circle was attended by Lukacs,³ but probably the most well-known figures it influenced were Brecht and Döblin.

The previous chapter ended with the publication of Karl Marx in 1938. This was to be Korsch’s last major work, although until 1946 he continued to write a certain number of articles each year, but no more books. Thereafter, he published very little, his last article appearing in 1954, seven years before his death. This whole period covers twenty-three years, longer than that between What is Socialisation? (1919) and Karl Marx (1938), yet to deal with it fully requires a much shorter chapter than any previous one. Why was this period so barren? There are, I feel, two main reasons for this: the difficulties he encountered in emigration, and the lack of an influential Marxist movement during his years in the USA. I shall deal with these factors before examining his writings of this period.