DAVID BLACKâS VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korschâs Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korschâs account of the different historical phases of the question of âphilosophyâ for Marx and Marxism. Black questions Korschâs differentiation of Marxâs relationship to philosophy into three distinct periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. But attempting to defeat Korschâs historical account of such changes in Marxâs approaches to relating theory and practice means avoiding Korschâs principal point. It also means defending Marx on mistaken ground. Black considers that Korschâs periodizationâhis recognition of changesâopens the door to criticizing Marx for inconsistency in his relation of theory to practice. But that is not so.
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GEORG LUKĂCS INTRODUCED the notion of totality as a major theme for Western Marxism in his work History and Class Consciousness, where he wrote,
It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts, is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science...Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science.
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THE ASSUMPTION THAT ROSA LUXEMBURGâS CORPSE has significance for the state of the German Left, though perhaps not her body, is tempting. Luxemburg was a Polish socialist involved in a European socialist movement during a time when there was no sovereign Polish state. She was successively a member of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. As is well known, she also cofounded with Karl Liebknecht the Spartakusbund, and was briefly co-leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In 1918â19 the socialist revolution in Germany was betrayed by the SPD, which is responsible for Luxemburgâs murder. Her murder matters as the pure expression of precisely that revisionism that Luxemburg had so ably critiqued. However, Jerzy Sobotta, writing in Platypus Review 16 (October 2009), does not seem to be interested in this legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, the legacy of free thought and revolutionary Marxism.
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TO QUOTE ALDOUS HUXLEY and to paraphrase Atiya Khan in her Platypus Review article âThe poverty of Pakistanâs politics,â I represent âa sad symptom of the failure of the intellectual class in time of crisis.â In Khanâs telling, it is the intellectual Left which failed (in) Pakistan, and under its sad banner now congregate blind and mute liberals such as myself. It is a strong, and harshly delivered, criticism and I take it very seriously.
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Ben Blumberg
For the American Left in the first half the 20th centuryâcommonly referred to as the âOld Leftââ the task of advancing freedom entailed a thoroughgoing critique of the racist institutions in American society, a socioeconomic and historical analysis of their origins and contemporary function, as well as practical efforts to eradicate these structures. In other words, racism was the challenge faced by the American Old Left. However, to a large extent it evaded the very challenge it set for itself by accepting the characterization of the black populationâs political situation as âthe Negro problem.â Only the best of the Old Left pushed against this characterization. The New Left, seeking to overcome the Old Leftâs shortcomings and receiving a great impulse from the demands of the Civil Rights movement to do so, would nevertheless come to reenact the previous generationâs failings. This brings forth an uncomfortable question: if Marxists in the United States were unable to meet the challenge of raising racism to the level of a transformable reality, then to what extent can we speak of an American tradition of Marxismâa Marxism adequate to the situation of American capitalismâat all?
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