Comments on Chris Cutrone’s review of ‘Marxism and Philosophy’ by Karl Korsch

19 Nov 2009

[‘Philosophy] is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude… toward being and beings in general, and through which a historical-social situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life’. [Herbert Marcuse (1930), quoted in Seyla Benhabib’s introductiont, H Marcuse, ‘Hegel’s Ontology’ xviii]

Chris,

You write, ‘What the usual interpretive emphasis on Lukács occludes is that the Frankfurt School writers grappled not only with the problem of Stalinism but “anti-Stalinism” as well’. This statement is well-founded; considering how Korsch’s troubled relationship with Adorno and Horkheimer was paralleled by Sohn-Rethel’s during the same period; not to mention the later dialogues Dunayevskaya had with Marcuse and Fromm.

On ‘nonidentity’ versus the ‘identity of effective theory and practice’ you point out that for the earlier Korsch ‘constitutive non-identity’ was ‘expressed symptomatically, in the subsistence of “philosophy” as a distinct activity in the historical epoch of Marxism’, because it expressed a ‘genuine historical need… to transcend and supersede philosophy’; a ‘recognition of the actuality of the symptom of philosophical thinking, of the mutually constitutive separation of theory and practice.’ You relate this to Adorno’s reiteration of Korsch’s statement in Marxism and Philosophy that ‘Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized’ and you say that ‘This side of emancipation, “theoretical” self-reflection, thought’s reflecting on its own conditions of possibility, remains necessary, precisely because it expresses an unresolved social-historical problem’. You add that the later Korsch, ‘[b]y assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement… sought their “reconciliation,” instead of discerning and critically grasping their persistent antagonism, as would necessarily be articulated in any purported politics of emancipation’.

The later-Korsch, who I’ll come to later, is however already present in the earlier, which raises the question, of interest to both of us: what remains that is of value in Korsch’s ‘Marxism and Philosophy’?

Korsch (1923) quotes Engels’ notorious statement about Marx’s philosophy: ‘That which survives independently of all earlier philosophies is the science of thought and its laws – formal logic and dialectics. Everything else subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.’ But once ‘marxism’ is ‘superseded and annihilated as a philosophical object’, it is easily superseded as a ‘positive science’ of society once it is ‘falsified’ by its failed historical practice and illusory ‘ideological’ determinations. This annihilation of Marxism as a ‘philosophical object’ seems to me to be the basis for Korsch’s eventually downgrading of Marx to just another theoretician, no more important than Thomas More or Bukunin.

But the important issue is the ‘problem of the philosophy of revolution, or of the “theory of social revolution”’ for both Hegel and Marx, which you spell out:

‘How is it possible, if however problematic, to be a self-conscious agent of change, if what is being transformed includes oneself, or, more precisely, an agency that transforms conditions both for one’s practical grounding and for one’s theoretical self-understanding in the process of acting?’

This question, as well as addressing the problem of consciousness for the proletariat also conjures up the self-consciousness of ‘Marx the Philosopher’, as a self-described ‘disciple’ of Hegel, who, in ‘Capital’ didn’t so much ‘apply’ the Hegelian dialectic as recreate it. Korsch describes Marx’s pre-1848 period as characterized by ‘critique of philosophy calling for its simultaneous realization and self-abolition’, and the circa-1848 period as ‘the sublimation of philosophy in revolution’. Then there is the ‘curious blank spot or gap in the history of philosophy from the 1840s–60s, the period of Marxism’s emergence’; then there is everything in ‘Marxism’ up to 1917. Taking off from Raya Dunayevskaya’s (unfinished) critique of Korsch [Power of Negativity, 249-247], I have in my own research found that the tripartition Korsch applies to the history of ‘Marxism’ to be questionable. As you point out, Korsch’s 1923 work was accomplished without benefit of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts or the Grundrisse, or Lenin’s 1914 Hegel Notebooks. One might add that Korsch did not have full knowledge of the debates within the Communist League in the early 1850s – which I have investigated in my book on Helen Macfarlane.

George Lichtheim describes as the original insight of Marx’s ‘critical theory’ in 1843-44 as ‘the belief that a mere spark of critical self-awareness could ignite a revolutionary tinder heaped up by the inhuman conditions of life imposed on the early proletariat. In enabling the oppressed to attain an adequate consciousness of their true role, critical theory translates itself into revolutionary practice’. Consciousness was able to grasp ‘the total historical situation in which it is embedded… because at certain privileged moments a ‘revolution in thought’ acquired the character of a material force.’[George Lichtheim, ‘Lukacs’ 64-5].
By 1850 Marx was developing the perspective of ‘Revolution in Permanence’. This argued that, although revolutionary workers parties could and would march with the petty bourgeois radicals against the reactionary enemy, they would have to oppose all attempts by the bourgeois radicals to consolidate their position to the detriment of the workers. Dunayevskaya connects this concept with the ‘unchained dialectic’ and ‘absolute negativity’ of Hegel as appropriated by Marx in 1844. In ‘Helen Macfarlane’ I have probed the connection of ‘Revolution in Permanence’ to Blanquism. There was once a widespread myth that Blanqui actually coined the term ‘Revolution in Permanence’. Apart from the myth however, the Marx-Blanqui relation was important. Blanqui, it should be noted, was, like Marx, strongly anti-positivist. Blanqui regarded Comte and his ‘equilibrium’ theory of classes as counter-revolutionary. At the same time Blanqui was an implacable materialist, upholding not the Hegelian dialectic but the eighteenth-century French materialism of Holbach as the rightful inheritance of the proletariat, and as what gave the proletarian body its head. Blanqui also saw revolutionary organization as a science as well as an art, requiring a “natural” hierarchy.

Sam Bernstein says that in opposition to positivist equilibrium theory Blanqui ‘thought of democracy as a process, with a history and a future. In practice it meant a series of acts which climaxed in what was then designated as the social republic. And being a process, it could neither ignore the past nor be mummified like revolutionary relics… democracy, from Blanqui’s viewpoint, had to become socialism, or it would be nothing more than a convenient cover for any one, even for its enemies when they desire to disguise their intentions.’[S Bernstein, ‘Blanqui’, 227]

In 1850, at the very time Marx was writing about ‘Revolution in Permanence’, Louis Blanc, Mazzini and Arnold Ruge put out a grandiose international program, which they imagined might re-ignite the 1848 Revolutions. Their program rejected ‘the cold and unfeeling travail of the intellect’ in favour of the ‘instinct of the masses’ as ‘the people in motion’. To Marx’s mind this was tantamount to demanding that the people ‘have no thought for the morrow and must strike all ideas from the mind’ and that ‘the riddle of the future will be solved by a miracle.’[M & E, C W Vol 10, 529-31, quoted in D Black, ‘Helen Macfarlane’].

Within the German Communist League, Willich and Schapper argued that the counter-revolution in Europe would force the existing French bourgeois republic to fight against the anciens regimes of Europe and re-open the floodgates of Revolution. In practice this would mean that the Communists and Blanquists should find common cause with the petit-bourgeois democrats and nationalists of Europe, and set aside the Communist program of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. According to Marx, Willich and Schapper ‘demanded, if not real conspiracies, at least the appearance of conspiracies, and accordingly favoured an alliance with the heroes of the hour.’ [Marx, Herr Vogt, 28]

Marx, who was studying the economic situation in Europe closely, knew that with industry booming, the old order of Europe re-stabilized, and the bourgeoisie newly confident in its ability to rule, Schapper’s perspective was a fantasy. Marx said of Schapper’s proposals:

‘The revolution is not seen as a product of the realities of the situation but as the result of an effort of will. Whereas we say to the workers: you have 15, 20, 50 years of civil war to go through in order to alter the situation and to train yourselves for the exercise of power it is said: we must take power at once, or else we might as well take to our beds. Just as the democrats abused the word ‘people’ so now the word ‘proletariat’ has been used as a mere phrase.’ [M & E, C W Vol 10, 626-8]

Marx’s position was consistent with what he actually was to do in the years and decades that followed: writing Capital, building the First International etc. In 1850 Marx pointed out that, under present conditions in Europe, for the communists to make a revolution out of existing forces in the name of the proletariat they would have to describe the petty-bourgeoisie as proletarian and become their representatives. In his reply, Schapper did not try to refute Marx’s arguments. Instead he drew a division between the ‘party of theory’ and the ‘party of action’; and, somewhat prefiguring the arguments of the ‘socialist’ dictators of the underdeveloped world of the twentieth-century, said:

‘The people who represent the party in principle part company with those who organize the proletariat… The question at issue is whether we ourselves chop off a few heads right at the start or whether it is our own heads that will fall. In France the workers will come to power and thereby in Germany too. Were this not the case I would indeed take to my bed… If we come to power we can take such measures as are necessary to ensure the role of the proletariat. I am a fanatical supporter of this view…’ [M & E, CW Vol 10, 628-9]

As far as Marx was concerned, it was not Louis Blanc, but Auguste Blanqui who was ‘true leader of the French proletariat’. Blanqui, in a statement smuggled out of prison, which was circulated by Marx and Engels, accused his own organization of ‘hiding its banner, giving ground to the bourgeois republicans and sacrificing the future for the morbid need of uncertain support in the present’. Blanqui declared that: ‘Ideas are the standard of the masses. We must therefore be clear and blunt, and explain everything on pain of being sorely let down. Secrecy is the preliminary of duplicity, and I shall never be party it’. [M & E, CW Vol. 10, 587]

None of this figures in Korsch’s potted history of ‘marxism’. How then do we read Korsch’s 1950 thesis on what he sees as the points which are ‘particularly critical for Marxism’?:

‘(a) its dependence on the underdeveloped economic and political conditions in Germany and all the other countries of central and eastern Europe where it was to have political relevance’; (b) its unconditional adherence to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution.’

As I have indicated, in both cases Marx’s critique of, a) the revolutionaries failure to read the ‘economic and political conditions’, and b) the political forms of class collaboration (Blanc), terrorism (Mazzini) and conspiracies (Schapper – and, implicitly, Blanqui), suggests otherwise.

‘(c) the unconditional acceptance of the advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries and as objective preconditions for the transition to socialism; to which one should add; (d) the consequences of its repeated desperate and contradictory attempts to break out of these conditions’.

We now know, from the ‘late Marx’s’ writings on Russia, his Ethnological Notebooks and later editions of Capital that he did not see the ‘advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries’. Also, in the 1850 faction-fight, it is clear that Marx was opposed to ‘desperate and contradictory attempts’ by revolutionaries to break out of the social conditions.

As you point out, since the mid-19th century, ‘marxism’, according to the Korsch in the 1930 ‘Anti-Critique’, had grown ideological and that for him even Marx’s Capital expressed a certain ‘degeneration’:

‘[T]he theory of Marx and Engels was progressing towards an ever higher level of theoretical perfection although it was no longer directly related to the practice of the worker’s movement.’
But inasmuch as ‘practice’ found its representation in the practices of Lassalle, then perhaps, so much the worse for the practice. Marx’s attack on Lassalleanism in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha program is as realistic and objective as the 1850 critique of Willich/Schapper, except that the Critique of the Gotha Program is able to offer Capital Volume I as a ‘theoretical victory for our party’.

Korsch’s later opinion of the mature Marx’s work as ‘anachronistic’ does jar with Korsch’s earlier writing which argues that Hegel’s concept of the world-as-totality informed Marx’s analysis in Capital, and therefore needed to be reclaimed from the social democrats, for whom it was a theory of ahistorical laws governing production, separate from politics. In Hegel’s attempt to reconcile labour and society Korsch saw an affinity with the reformism of social democracy. The social democrats saw the property issue as a juridical problem of distribution solvable through changes in the form of the State, rather than a social problem of production which could only be solved by overthrowing the economic structure of society. Korsch’s writing on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program provides a real insight, which indicates to me that the 1875 critique was a continuation of the 1844 Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic. Korsch argued that, because during the ‘first phase’ of communism bourgeois Law and the bourgeois State will not have been totally superseded, the working class would need to control the whole economy, with workers councils playing a ‘constitutional’ role to guard against any tendencies in management practices that might lead to capitalist restoration through a bureaucracy.
[http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1922/gotha.htm]

Isn’t it odd that a year later, in 1923, Korsch praises Lenin for his Hegelian ‘critical reflection on the problem of relating theory and practice’, whereas in 1938 he dismisses Lenin for his Hegelianism. In 1922-23 Korsch had recognised that Hegel had regarded ‘revolution in the form of thought as an objective component of the total social process of a real revolution.’ But for Korsch, Hegel, in his quest for reconciliation with the results of the French Revolution, had preserved the position of thought as external to economic reality. By 1938 Korsch was stressing the ‘bourgeois’, rather than revolutionary, character’ of Hegel’s philosophy. Having broken with Leninism, Korsch dismissed the significance of Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks when they appeared in the 1930s and simply said that it was not surprising that Lenin was drawn to Hegel because ‘Leninism was merely an ideological form assumed by the bourgeois revolution in an underdeveloped country’. [Anton Pannekoek, Lenin and Philosophy, appendix by K Korsch; Korsch,‘Ten Theses on Marxism’, Telos #26 1975/76, Kevin Anderson, ‘Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism 175-80]

You say, ‘If Marxism continued to be subject to a “Hegelian dialectic,” thus requiring the “historical materialist” 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 of relating theory and practice — which in turn prompted further theoretical development as well as practical political advances.’

Korsch developed this view in 1923 whilst reflecting on the failure of German councilism and the contrasting achievements of the Bolsheviks. In other words he saw the connection between the ‘return’ to ‘communist practice’ of Marxism and the re-emergence of the Hegelian dialectic. After 1923, sans philosophy, his work regresses – although the influence it had (which I discuss in relation to the Situationists in a forthcoming work) was and is important.

David Black, co-editor, The Hobgoblin
P.S.
I’m amazed that Korsch could expect Horkheimer and co to publish Pannekoek’s critique of Lenin. Pannekoek wrote:

‘The first problem in the science of human knowledge, the origin of ideas, was answered by Marx in the demonstration that they are produced by the surrounding world. The second adjoining problem, how the impressions of the surrounding world are transformed into ideas, was answered by Dietzgen… Marx pointed out what the world does to the mind, Dietzgen pointed out what the mind does itself.’

Dietzgen, a self-proclaimed ‘materialist’ had recognised that thinking as well as objects could be the object of thought. But in a somewhat neo-Kantian manner, he argued that whilst ‘our brains do not grasp the things themselves but only the concepts’, the concepts for were quite adequate for ‘practical living’ in a rational human society run by the producers. Adorno would have seen this philosophy as quite at odds with his Lukacsian view expressed to Benjamin, which you quote:

‘The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness. . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria’.

As Walter Benjamin said of Dietzgen:
‘… Josef Dietzgen announced: “Labor is the savior of modern times… In the… improvement… of labor… consists the wealth, which can now finally fulfill what no redeemer could hitherto achieve.” This vulgar-Marxist concept of what labor is, does not bother to ask the question of how its products affect workers, so long as these are no longer at their disposal. It wishes to perceive only the progression of the exploitation of nature, not the regression of society. It already bears the technocratic traces which would later be found in Fascism.’ (Theses on the Philosophy of History #11)
[ends]