Karl Korsch’s “The Quintessence of Marxism” (1922), a text made reference to by Korsch in his “Introduction to the Critique of the Gotha Program” (1922), appears to have been translated into English only once: serialized in the pages of the Australian Workers’ Weekly, the official organ of the Australian Communist Party, across seven issues in July and August of 1924. The translation was prepared by Guido Baracchi, a founder of that Party and a labor movement activist, whose biography, Communism: A Love Story (2007) was written by Jeff Sparrow. Baracchi originally presented his translation with a foreword, retained here, that situates the text within Korsch’s pedagogical project. This historic document has been newly transcribed for publication in the Platypus Review by Natalya Antonova, Shane Hopkinson, and Liam Kenny.
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SINCE PLATYPUS IS A PROJECT primarily concerned with the question of Marxism and the Left, other questions lay close at hand: what is psychoanalysis? Why should the Left take interest in it? What is the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism?
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GERMAN REUNIFICATION WAS A TIME of general decline for all organizations to the Left of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).
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WE LEARN IN Die Platypus Review that the Antideutsch have failed. One can hardly object to these findings, as it was the Antideutsch’s goal to be the wrecking ball of the Left.
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If, in the end, the Hegelian system relates everything to the Absolute in which time is "erase[d],” it nevertheless determines the path to truth, to absolute knowledge as a temporal development of differences and thus elevates the new, the alien, the not-yet-conceptual to a necessary component of the process of knowledge: as its moment.
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