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.
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