Rejoinder to David Black

On Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy

Chris Cutrone

DAVID BLACK’S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch’s account of the different historical [...]

Chris Cutrone

KARL KORSCH’S SEMINAL ESSAY on “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923) is a historical treatment of the problem from Marx and Engels’s time through the 2nd International to the crisis of Marxism and the revolutions of 1917–19 in Russia, Germany and beyond. More specifically, Korsch took up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which he considered the “philosophical” problem of Marxism. Korsch, like Georg Lukács and the thinkers in Frankfurt School critical theory, was inspired by the “subjective” aspect of Marxism exemplified by Lenin’s irreducible role in the October Revolution. Korsch was subsequently denounced as a “professor” in the Communist International and quit the movement, embracing council communism and shunning Marxian theory, writing an “Anti-Critique” in 1930 that critiqued Marxism as such, and by 1950 actively seeking to liquidate the difference between Marxian and anarchist approaches. In so doing, Korsch succumbed to what Adorno termed “identity thinking.” By assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement, Korsch abandoned his prior discernment and critical grasp of their persistent antagonism in any purported politics of emancipation.

I am writing with some very brief notes on Adorno’s last writings from 1968-69, the “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” “Resignation,” “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”),” and the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence of 1969.
The center of Adorno’s critique of the 1960s New Left was their romantic opposition to capitalism, found, for example, in [...]

I am writing with some brief, partial notes from our discussion at UChicago at yesterday’s (Sun. 3/8/09) reading group, on several essays from Georg Lukacs’s 1923 book History and Class Consciousness.
I want to emphasize and discuss in particular a couple of passages, from the (original, 1922) Preface, and the essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919).
Specifically, [...]

Michael Löwy
Walter Benjamin occupies a unique place in the history of modern revolutionary thought: he is the first Marxist to break radically with the ideology of progress. His thinking has therefore a distinct critical quality, which sets him apart from the dominant and “official” forms of historical materialism, and gives him a formidable methodological superiority.
This [...]