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In December 2012 Red Banner‘s fiftieth issue featured then finance minister Michael Noonan, leading the charge of austerity analysed in an article in that same issue.

Socialist Classics: Karl Korsch, ‘Marxism and Philosophy’

Maeve Connaughton discussed a book on the need to fight capitalism on all fronts in Issue 49 (December 2012)

Karl Korsch’s activity as a socialist began in 1917 when, conscripted into a world war he opposed, he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, a left-wing breakaway from the mainstream labour party which had supported that war. In 1920 he followed the majority of the Independents into the Communist Party, formed at the end of 1918. By then revolution was underway in Germany, with the spread of workers’ councils challenging the authority of the Weimar republic which arose on the ruins of the defeated empire. Korsch was active in the movement practically and theoretically, writing pamphlets to spread a knowledge of Marxist principles. The publication of Marxism and Philosophy in 1923 arose directly from this activity.

Korsch begins by highlighting how little attention the Marxism of the previous forty years or so paid to philosophy:

The prominent Marxist theoreticians of the period regarded concern with questions that were not even essentially philosoph­ical in the narrower sense, but were only related to the general epistemological and methodological bases of Marxist theory, as at most an utter waste of time and effort. …they made it quite clear that the elucidation of such problems was totally irrelevant to the practice of proletarian class struggle… that their Marxism by its very nature had nothing to do with philosophy…

This mirrored the conventional turn away from classical philo­sophy, and specifically from the philosophy of Hegel. The principle of dialectics—of understanding things in constant change, conflict and development—was revolutionary, and the capitalist class was hurrying to put its street fighting days behind it from 1848 on. But dialectics was “quite deliberately rescued” by Marx and Engels to become a core element of the socialism they put forward.

And it was no accident that they did so at that particular time. The capitalists were abandoning their revolutionary impulse at the same time as the young working class was beginning to put forward its own claims to change the world: “the Marxist system is the theoretical expression of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat… only the ‘other side’ of the emergence of the real proletarian movement; it is both sides together that comprise the concrete totality of the historical process”.

But it is not just the emergence of Marxism that can be seen in such a historical context, but its subsequent growth or lack of it. “This means that we must try to understand every change, develop­ment and revision of Marxist theory, since its original emergence from the philosophy of German Idealism, as a necessary product of its epoch… apply Marx’s principle of dialectical materialism to the whole history of Marxism…”

The revolutionary movement of which Korsch was part had obviously rejected the out-and-out reformism which openly pro­claimed that capitalism could be made acceptable. But it also had to reject the ‘orthodox’ Marxism which had sought to defend the theory against reformist attack. This ‘Marxism’ had proved unequal to the political crisis brought forth by the world war, at first trying to hold together right and left, and finally setting its face against the revolutionary wave which followed the war. But to blame “the cowardice, or deficient revolutionary convictions” of its spokespersons would be “thoroughly non-Marxist”, he insists.

In reality, “the decline of the original Marxist theory of social revolution into a theoretical critique of society without any revolution­ary consequences is for dialectical materialism a necessary expression of parallel changes in the social practice of the proletarian struggle”. As capitalism underwent an unprecedented expansion in Europe after 1848, labour movements could find a niche for themselves as an opposition entirely within the bounds of capitalist society, winning concessions through trade union or political activity. Open reformism was the theoretical aspect of this practical activity.

But ‘orthodox Marxism’ “merely sought to reject the new reformist theories”, without any positive content of its own:

with all their orthodox obsession with the abstract letter of Marxist theory they were unable to preserve its original revolu­tionary character. Their scientific socialism itself had inevitably ceased to be a theory of social revolution. Over a long period, when Marxism was slowly spreading throughout Europe, it had in fact no practical revolutionary task to accomplish. Therefore problems of revolution had ceased, even in theory, to exist as problems of the real world for the great majority of Marxists, orthodox as well as revisionist. …even for the orthodox Marxists they had wholly lost the immediacy with which the authors of the [Communist] Manifesto had confronted them, and receded into a distant and eventually quite transcendental future.

The keynote of Marxism is “the unbreakable interconnection of theory and practice”, the link between understanding the world and changing it: “This revolutionary will is latent, yet present, in every sentence of Marx’s work and erupts again and again”. But this much was lost on most of those who avowed themselves his most steadfast disciples, who “in fact divided the theory of social revolution into fragments”. Marxism “is incompatible with separate branches of knowledge that are isolated and autonomous, and with purely theoretical investigations that are scientifically objective in dis­sociation from revolutionary practice”, yet Marxists began to present it as a series of disparate observations with little or no real connection to the class struggle, a tool which could be wielded with no revolu­tionary implications by people with no particular political affiliation. As a result, “a unified general theory of social revolution” was down­graded to a series of unconnected criticisms which “no longer necessarily develop by their very nature into revolutionary practice; they can equally well develop into all kinds of attempt at reform, which fundamentally remain within the limits of bourgeois society and the bourgeois state”.

Marxists in general tended to regard ideologies as unreal, outgrowths of economics which didn’t need to be confronted as such. In fact, they are a crucial part of the overall reality of capitalist rule: “the material relations of production of the capitalist epoch only are what they are in combination with the forms in which they are reflected in the pre-scientific and bourgeois-scientific consciousness of the period; and they could not subsist in reality without these forms of consciousness”. There is no such thing as a capitalism which has no ideological aspect, and no socialism could refuse to take that aspect on. A Marxism “unconcerned with overthrowing and superseding these ideologies themselves” would be as ridiculous as one which imagined that capitalism could be defeated on the economic field alone, with no need for political struggle. “But no really dialectical materialist conception of history (certainly not that of Marx and Engels) could cease to regard philosophical ideology, or ideology in general, as a material component of general socio-historical reality—that is, a real part which had to be grasped in materialist theory and overthrown by materialist practice.”

It is dangerous to think that the revolutionary movement can just muddle along without tackling problems of theory and philosophy, or that the revolution will sort out all such stuff by itself:

In the period of revolutionary transition, after its seizure of power, the proletariat must accomplish definite revolutionary tasks in the ideological field, no less than in the political and economic fields—tasks which constantly interact with each other.… To avoid these questions in the period before the proletarian revolution leads to opportunism and creates a crisis within Marxism… To evade a definite stand on these ideological problems of the transition can have disastrous political results in the period after the proletarian seizure of state power, because theoretical vague­ness and disarray can seriously impede a prompt and energetic approach to problems that then arise in the ideological field.

Marxism and Philosophy retains its relevance for today’s socialists. The predominant attitude on the left towards philosophical discussion resembles nothing so much as the ‘orthodox’ Marxism that Korsch criticises. We too have developed in a period where social revolution hasn’t set the historical agenda, and as a consequence Marxism has had no mass revolutionary movement among the working class to express. It has sustained itself as a negative critique of capitalism. This is usually expressed in terms of politics directly and simplistically reproducing economic self-interest, and ideologies are rarely tackled on their own ground. Revolution has become a distant prospect to be hoped for, with no connection to present-day activity, activity which revolves around reform within the parameters of capitalism. While no necessary connection to revolution is evident, proclaiming an idealistic loyalty to the concept of a future revolution serves to ward off the evil spirit of naked reformism. The arrival of real revolutionary prospects would catch the biggest majority of the left unawares, and ill prepared to face the theoretical tasks that such a period would throw up. Korsch’s attempt to wake up socialists to the necessity to confront capitalism on all fronts, including the philosophical front, has a lot to teach us today.

Marxism and Philosophy was met with a hostile reaction. Un­surprisingly, its arguments were rejected by spokespersons for the orthodox Marxism Korsch criticised so forcefully. But the leadership of the Communist movement were no more sympathetic. “We cannot tolerate such theoretical revisionism of this kind”, announced a leader of the Communist International. A crude division was increasingly laid down as a line to be toed in Marxist theory, between physical existence which was ‘real’ and ideas which merely reflected it. Korsch’s refusal to rip the two apart made a mockery of this caricature of Marxism.

He was a prominent figure in the Communist Party of Germany by now, and suffered in the decline it underwent after the last gasp of the German revolution gave out in 1923. Like other Communist parties, it was brought strictly into line with policy and practice laid down in Moscow, and such a party could have no place for Korsch. At the same time, his own reaction to the defeat was mistaken. He argued that the revolutionary wave hadn’t subsided at all, that Communists should refuse to work alongside social democrats, even forming breakaway unions of their own. He was expelled from the party in 1926, but continued as an original Marxist thinker for many years.

A new edition of Marxism and Philosophy in 1930 gave him an opportunity to reply to his critics and expand on his original argu­ments. His ‘Anti-Critique’ noted the way that “the two confessions of the old Marxist orthodox church” united to attack the book. In the “fundamental debate on the general state of modern Marxism” that was now underway, the old pre-war orthodoxy and the new Leninist orthodoxy were on the same side against “all critical and progressive theoretical tendencies in the proletarian movement”.

Theoreticians of both the Second and Third Internationals continued to divide thought from action, with the first no more than a passive mirror image of the second. “In so doing they destroy both the dialectical interrelation of being and consciousness and, as a necessary consequence, the dialectical interrelation of theory and practice.” For both wings of the movement, Marx’s drive to revolution had been replaced by the hope for reform, and “formal avowals of the Marxist system as a whole emerged as a kind of theoretical defence and meta­physical consolation”. The lack of revolutionary practice produced a futile row over doctrinal purity:

not one but several different tendencies, all of them invoking Marx and fighting each other for the ‘genuine ring’—the right to claim the succession of true ‘Marxism’. It is best simply to cut through the Gordian knot of these dogmatic disputes and place oneself on the terrain of a dialectical analysis. This can be expressed symbolically by saying that the real ring has been lost. In other words, dogmatic calculations of how far the different versions of Marxist theory correspond to some abstract canon of ‘pure and unfalsified’ theory should be abandoned.

While details here and there could be improved, there was only one specific phrase from Marxism and Philosophy that Korsch felt the need to reformulate. He had stated that, after taking power, the working class would have to exercise an “ideological dictatorship” against the ideas of capitalism. To differentiate this from “the system of intellectual oppression established in Russia today”, he pointed out the basic nature of true working-class revolutionary rule:

First of all, it is a dictatorship of the proletariat and not over the proletariat. Secondly, it is a dictatorship of a class and not of a party or party leadership. Thirdly, and most importantly, as a revolutionary dictatorship it is one element only of that radical system of social overthrow which by suppressing classes and class contradictions creates the preconditions for a ‘withering away of the state’, and thereby the end of all ideological constraint. The essential purpose of an ‘ideological dictatorship’ in this sense is to abolish its own material and ideological causes and thereby to make its own existence unnecessary and impossible. From the very first day, this genuine proletarian dictatorship will be distinguished from every false imitation of it by its creation of the conditions for intellectual freedom not only for ‘all’ workers but for ‘each individual’ worker.… This is what concretely defines the Marxist concept of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.… Socialism, both in its ends and in its means, is a struggle to realize freedom.

Korsch’s idea of Marxist philosophy was based on the reality of such a vision, on the conviction that a victorious working class could challenge oppression all along the line, in thought as well in action—or rather, in thought inextricably linked to action.

Kevin Higgins (1967-2023)

Kevin Higgins first got in touch with Red Banner in 2001. This in itself was a sign that we were doing something right. A person we had no prior contact with had come across the magazine, and liked it enough that he wanted to take some part. And the articles he sent us were good stuff: straight-down-the-line socialist politics, well written, engaging arguments. Add to this his offer to write and review for us regularly, and Kevin was quite the catch.

By then he was back in his native Galway. That’s where he was first involved in socialist politics, before moving to England where he took a prominent local part in the fight against Thatcher’s poll tax, narrowly avoiding jail. He fell out with the left there, however, and found himself in a familiar position: still committed to a socialist view of the world, but unable to swallow the shenanigans that too often bedevil organisations espousing it. Red Banner was premised on the belief that you could effectively embrace the first while rejecting the second.

Kevin contributed a number of book reviews to the magazine. They showcased the acerbity of his wit and his politics, wrapping sound political instincts in well-wrought prose. We had always wanted to discuss culture in an intelligent way which was rare on the left: making hard political arguments while recognising the autonomous significance of art. Kevin’s reviews were a practical demonstration of this, their presence far more persuasive than any theoretical exposition would have been. On a practical level, Kevin ended up as ‘our man in Galway’, leaving copies of the magazine into Charlie Byrne’s bookshop, collecting the few euros from sales for us, and generally spreading the word.

Having an aversion to the type of verse which is occasionally tacked on to left-wing practice, we had followed Plato’s precedent and decided that poetry was not for Red Banner. Kevin persuaded us to change this policy, arguing that it would be worth it as long as poetry was subjected to no less a critical rigour than prose. He became our unofficial poetry editor, contributing poems of his own and encouraging other poets. Anything along the lines of “Thatcher is a cow / Get her out now”, he specified, would not be welcome. There were some such productions to be rejected, but this mini-cultural revolution opened the magazine to some really good poetry over the years. We featured reviews of Kevin’s collections, positive while critical, an approach which Kevin himself appreciated greatly. Such discussion played a role in making Red Banner a real forum for examining where art and politics meet or collide or whatever, and that was always a central concern of Kevin’s work.

That work wasn’t universally popular, of course. Red Banner was warned in writing that he wasn’t a socialist at all, but in fact a dangerous renegade. This kind of idiocy only vindicated Kevin’s barbs at the left, however, his assertion that some of them had a perilous problem with anyone disagreeing with their good selves. Partly in response to this, we did a fascinating interview with Kevin on Poetry, politics and the left.

The benefits of his work for Red Banner went in both directions. He contributed articles, poems and reviews to the magazine, shaped its cultural attitudes, helped to get it out in the world (or at least that part of the world known as Galway). But this involvement also gave Kevin a platform, an unashamedly left-wing arena where he could engage, a link to a project committed to the ongoing elaboration of socialist ideas. As he became a bona fide famous poet, he could be forgiven for leaving a small left magazine like ours behind. He never did, never refused a request for an article, never withheld a helping hand.

His steadily growing fame as a poet was well deserved. His work brought the experiences and dilemmas of being a socialist into the mainstream of poetic reflection. It crystallised the injustices that angered him, linking the big ticket anti-capitalist demonstration with the mundane dehumanisation the system inflicts on people every day. And all the time, the political drive never overwhelmed the art but nourished it. His contempt for sectarians of the left was equalled if not surpassed by his contempt for ex-socialists sliding into positions of power, big and small. One bizarre distinction his poetry brought him was expulsion from the British Labour Party for verses ridiculing Blairism.

Kevin’s health became a concern in recent years, and he was struck with the leukaemia which took him from us a month ago. It is truly disheartening to realise that we have no more of his poems or articles to look forward to. Worse that there will be no more chances to chat with him across a coffee or a plate of chips in Quay Street or Dame Street, no more of his interested and interesting conversation to savour, no more of his spirited laughter to enjoy. He will be missed, he will be remembered, and his voice will still be heard.

The Hidden Connolly 48

Articles by James Connolly in Issue 48 (June 2012), unpublished since his execution, discussed the limits of political freedom, and capitalist internationalism.

Political Freedom
In theory and practice

[The Workers’ Republic, September 29 1900]

Perhaps nothing more clearly illustrates the unreal character of the political freedom enjoyed under the British Constitution than the financial penalty exacted from the individual or party seeking entry into Parliament. Nominally, we are aware, there is no property qualification required in a parliamentary candidate; it is only necessary that the person so aspiring should be a male, of sound mind, and have reached adult age. Than this, of course, if we except the exclusion of the fair sex, nothing could be theoretically more free and open, but when we come to examine the practical working out of the electoral laws we find them to be heavily weighted with provisions which effectually nullify this privilege, and operate to restrict the choice of the electors in the matter of candidates to those who are rich men, or are prepared to be the political tools of rich men.

The first barrier to the candidature of working class representatives who are not financed by members of the master class is the necessity of depositing a large sum of money as returning officers’ expenses. In practically every other country in the world the expenses of elections are paid by the governing body to which the elections are being made (as they are in municipal elections in this country); but in Great Britain and Ireland the cost of elections to Parliament is placed upon the shoulders of the candidate. The State thus evades its responsibility, and in so doing heavily handicaps the poor in their political struggle with the rich.

An election for a compact city constituency would cost each candidate before his nomination any sum from £100 up, and a contested election for a rural constituency would cost proportionately more—the cost increasing with the number of polling booths, clerks, etc., required, and decreasing in accordance with the number of candidates for the seat. This, be it known, refers only to strictly official expenses and does not include that other large item embraced in the cost of printing, issuing and posting election literature, hiring of committee rooms, and other expenses incidental to the propaganda and organisation involved in a contested election. The official expenses are the price which the candidate must pay for permission to contest the seat; the remainder of the cost may be high or com­paratively moderate according to the manner in which the seat is fought, and also according to the number of voluntary workers willing to assist.

After the election the candidate, if successful, finds that the working class member is still further penalised by the necessity of serving his country in Parliament without the right to claim recom­pense from Parliament for doing so. Members of the British House of Commons are not paid for their services to the State. They are public servants (?) without salary. This of course operates, and is intended to operate, to exclude from Parliament all but members of the master class and their political lackeys.

In nearly every European country legislators are paid for their services, but the result has been a plentiful crop of working class representatives in Continental legislatures—a result not likely to commend itself to the British ruling class which has therefore shown bitter antipathy to every proposal to pay members of Parliament for their attendance to duty.

Yet until Payment of Election Expenses and of Members is guaranteed by the State, elections in this country will and must remain merely battlegrounds for the Rich.

America and England

[The Workers’ Republic, October 27 1900]

England has just passed through the throes of a General Election, and the United States of America are about entering on a Presidential contest. In both struggles the Irish people take a lively degree of interest; in the English General Election because Ireland itself is a participator in the contest, and in the Presidential contest because of the close ties of kinship which bind so many of our people with the citizens of America, as well as the belief entertained by many Irishmen in the anti-English attitude of one of the contending parties. The Home Rule press of this country has in the most industrious fashion endeavoured to impress upon its readers the view that the hopes of Ireland should be centred upon the success of the Liberal Party in England, and of the Democratic Party in America, but in the arguments it uses in support of its own contention it betrays the in­consistent and entirely incoherent nature of its attitude upon the matter.

The English Liberals are to be supported and encouraged because, we are told, they are still with some exceptions in favour of Home Rule, and therefore deserving of our assistance and sympathy as the party from which we are to expect that legislative independence which will enable us to make an honourable alliance with the British Empire.

The American Democrats are also, according to the Home Rule scribes, worthy of support because they are declared by prominent Irish-Americans to be bitterly anti-English, and inveterate foes of the British Empire.

Thus we are to be friends with the Liberals because if they had their way we would have a local legislature of our own, and would be no longer mere subjects, but rather recognised partners in the British Empire.

And we are to hope for the success of the American Democrats because they profess to hate that British Empire the Home Rulers and Liberals desire Ireland to make terms with.

Stated thus baldly, stripped thus of the meretricious verbal tinsel with which the Irish capitalist journalist clothes the subject, these propositions look as absurd as any Socialist could wish, but they are, nevertheless, vested with a deep political meaning for those who care to look beneath the surface. No thinking man could really reconcile two such opposing ideas as are involved in the Home Rule attitude towards those elections, without some other reason than these avowed. What then is the secret of the attitude of the capitalist press of this country, the secret of their fondness for the English Liberal and the American Democrat? The reason is that both these parties represent in their respective countries, and to the world at large, the interests of that middle class to which our Home Rule leaders and newspaper owners belong. The political contradiction involved in supporting both parties at once disappears in face of the all-controlling class interests which both champion. In America the Democrats stand for the cause of the middle class, the small employer crushed beneath the competition of the huge capitalist combinations known as trusts, and himself crushing the wage worker who in his turn is also fighting for a human existence; in England the Liberals champion the small employer and professional classes against the landowner and the working class on the other; and in Ireland the Home Rulers fulfil similar functions as the political expression of the class interests of the petty capitalist.

And in all three countries the political parties concerned adopt the same methods of warfare, viz., cajoling the working class voters by fair words, in order that they might afterwards betray them. Thus the apparent contradiction is explained. The Home Rule pressmen are well aware that the deceitful phrases of English Liberalism, the anti-Imperialist platform of the American Democracy, the patriotic “gags” of Irish Home Rulers, all mean one and the same thing, are all but the various disguises which different national conditions render it imperative that the middle class should adopt in furthering an end identical in all countries, and that end the perpetuation of their own class rule.

But the wheels of progress will roll steadily onward despite all such trickery. The victory of Toryism today will probably be followed by the triumph of McKinley in America in November,¹ and then the revolutionary working class, unhampered by the presence of a go-between, can prepare to storm the political citadels of the conquerors and conquer them in their turn.

Notes

1. The Conservatives won a landslide victory in the British election, and the Republican candidate William McKinley did go on to hold the US presidency.