From Fabianism to Bolshevism

The starting point for Korsch’s life as a socialist was the reformist wing of prewar German Social Democracy associated with Eduard Bernstein and the Fabian Society in Britain. After his studies in Jena, a provincial city and university hub then undergoing a modernist transition, Korsch spent time in London with the Fabians, where he adopted a pragmatic and technocratic orientation to politics that betrayed a certain enlightened elitism.

The outbreak of World War I plunged Korsch into its constellation of barbarism; the first total war on the European continent produced technological massacres like an everyday commodity. Korsch was a cosmopolitan and humanitarian internationalist in his outlook at the time. Conscripted into the German military, he opposed the war from the start. His soldiering career ended almost immediately, wounded by shrapnel that killed members of his unit and consigned him to the infirmary.

Throughout the war years, Korsch firmed up a kind of politics of courage and truth, while his wife Hedda Korsch had joined the antiwar Independent Social Democrats (USPD), inspired by the Zimmerwald Conference. Hedda was the granddaughter of the well-known feminist campaigner Hedwig Dohm, who had polemicized against the war in Franz Pfemfert’s publication Die Aktion. Dohm’s “Auf dem Sterbett” [“On Her Deathbed”] denounced the patriotism that drove millions of young people to “march themselves to their own graves.”

In 1918, Korsch saw the November Revolution, which began with the Kiel mutiny of German sailors, as a revolution of the Fourth Estate and an effort to end the total war. One could contrast the revolution of the Fourth Estate with that of the bourgeois Third Estate, exemplified by the French Revolution of 1789. Its novelty for Korsch consisted in the combination of — indeed the unification of — intellectual and manual laborers, who were able to rise up and overturn the form of social modernity inaugurated by the Third Estate’s earlier revolution. This bourgeois modernity had not only led to the total war, but also entrenched the domination, subordination, and oppression of those who sold their ability to labor.

For Korsch, the revolution of the Fourth Estate was about liberating labor from such commodified exploitation. Korsch’s ideas about socialization underwent a transformation: having gone into the revolution with a technocratic orientation to socialist change inspired by Fabianism, political events and deliberations on bodies like the Socialization Commission showed him that plans were worth nothing without the power of workers to implement them.

After joining the USPD, Korsch successfully campaigned for a merger with the Communists alongside other notable figures like Werner Scholem. After participating in the mass struggles against the right-wing Kapp Putsch of 1920, Korsch recognized the need to build a powerful communist movement inspired by the Russian Revolution.

Inside the KPD, Korsch initially defended the united front tactic that called for campaigning alliances with reformists around defined goals. He formed a bloc with party leaders like August Thalheimer in the run-up to a planned insurrection in October 1923. Korsch’s commitment was the immediate political background to Marxism and Philosophy.

Korsch joined a short-lived coalition of Communists and left-wing Social Democrats in the state of Thuringia as justice minister. Soon the government collapsed and the would-be German October Revolution missed its chance. Korsch went into hiding as the authorities fired him from his post at Jena University and declared him to be an enemy of the state.

Berlin Years

Shortly afterward, Korsch moved to Berlin. An industrial center of class struggle, the German capital was also home turf for the KPD’s left-wing tendency — figures such as Scholem, Arthur Rosenberg, Arkadi Maslow, and Ruth Fischer — who rejected the previous leadership of Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler. Korsch joined them, although he was not fully committed to their perspective, and became for a time editor-in-chief of Die Internationale, the KPD’s theoretical organ.

At the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, Grigori Zinoviev attacked Korsch, claiming that he understood nothing of Karl Marx, and called for his removal from the editorship of Die Internationale. As a KPD member of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, Korsch had a platform to denounce the Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and the USSR as an undue compromise by the Soviet regime with the system of bourgeois nation-states. This initial criticism developed into a much broader argument against nascent Stalinism and the Soviet model of development, which Korsch saw as a form of state capitalism. He was eventually expelled from the KPD for these heretical positions.

Korsch was close to the dissenting Bolshevik tendency led by Timofei Sapronov, known as the Democratic Centralists. Although Sapronov and his followers joined the Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky, they disagreed with Trotsky’s characterization of the Soviet system, viewing it as state capitalist rather than any form of workers’ state. Korsch also rejected Trotsky’s insistence on working for reform of the Bolshevik Party, arguing by the late 1920s that a new party would have to be built based on working-class independence.

Korsch initiated the First Marxist Workweek, held on May 20, 1923, in Ilmenau, Thuringia. It was a significant regroupment of some two dozen communist intellectuals, including some of the most incisive left-wing thinkers of the twentieth century. It marked the birth of the Institute for Social Research, later popularly known as the Frankfurt School, with Felix Weil’s funding and support.

The event had a partisan, though independent, orientation to the renewal of Marxist theory. The three items on the agenda demonstrate the scope of this project. First, Eduard Alexander, a supporter of Rosa Luxemburg’s arguments about economic crisis in her work The Accumulation of Capital, introduced the problem of capitalist transformation and theories of crisis, against the backdrop of hyperinflation and the Ruhr crisis.

The second item to be addressed was the problem of dialectical method. This discussion centered on the presentation of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, which had just appeared, and the draft of Korsch’s own Marxism and Philosophy. Both authors were encountering each other for the first time. According to Detlev Claussen, the ideas Lukács put forward in History and Class Consciousness were the focus of attention at the event, although Korsch was the only one there competent to debate with Lukács.

Third, Béla Fogarasi, an ally of Korsch who was working as an editor of the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne, introduced the organization of Marxist research. The combination of Forgarasi’s practical experience in the Hungarian Revolution and his radical critique of bourgeois science confirmed the early objective of the Institute for Social Research to function as a collective committed to the sharpening of Marxist theory.

Marxism and Philosophy

Korsch’s contribution to Marxist theory has led to him being described as one of the founders of Western Marxism, a term that was only formulated at a later stage. It is more useful to read Korsch with the understanding that he sought to clarify Marx’s critique of political economy, revolutionary politics, and the status of philosophy within Marxism, all within the context of his hope for a revolutionary transition to communism.

Korsch’s thinking about Marxist theory operated at two interrelated levels. First of all, there were the pedagogical contributions he made, intended to educate workers and the KPD’s rank-and-file members as well as younger communist intellectuals and friends of the movement. Second, he was engaged in a scientific and philosophical effort to resolve substantial problems and lacunae within so-called orthodox Marxism.

This second level is apparent in Marxism and Philosophy, a remarkable essay whose opening lines speak about resolving the question of the relationship Marxism has to philosophy. Marxism and Philosophy was part of a much larger but ultimately unfinished project, drawing out the philosophical consequences of Marxism, as well as the character of the critique of political economy and the Marxist conception of law and the state. Korsch changed his plans for this project several times without completing it.

Texts in the history of Marxism like Marxism and Philosophy resist immediate reading; their complexity requires an attention to the overloaded arguments of the text, even if we can reconstruct these arguments. Yet one can discern a simplicity from which a complex problem arises. The simplicity is the questioning of the relationship that ideology has to workers’ revolution.

It is a question of a materialist dialectic. In the classical terms of base and superstructure, ideology is part of the superstructure. However, ideology is also a feature of any revolutionary transformation of the base, if the capitalist mode of production is to be superseded and living labor liberated. A dialectic must be able to reckon with the role of class consciousness in the transformation of history. This is the basic theme of Marxism and Philosophy.

To identify ideology and social revolution as a question meant trying to think about the conditions for a successful revolution in the West, thus posing  the connection such terms have to politics. Hence if Marxism and Philosophy is a “philosophical” work, it is also indubitably political.

After his expulsion from the KPD, Korsch was not reelected to the Reichstag. He now turned afresh to problems of Marxist theory. Korsch experienced a new beginning, exploring different fields of research.

We can find many of the provisional results Korsch arrived at in this period in his theses on the crisis of Marxism, G. W. F. Hegel and revolution, fascism and counterrevolution, and the partisan character of science. Korsch also published a critique of Karl Kautsky’s work The Materialist Conception of History and an updated edition of Marxism and Philosophy with a new Anti-Critique.

In the course of these theoretical explorations, Korsch came into contact with some of the most brilliant intellectuals who were active during the late Weimar years. He took part in discussions at Bertolt Brecht’s flat involving the novelist Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, among others. He gave talks at a philosophical group convened by Erich Unger and Oskar Goldberg, debating Hegel’s legacy and thought with figures such as the historian Arthur Rosenberg, who had also been a communist MP. These were years of creative ferment, snuffed out by the rise of Nazism.

Exile

After a last attempt to resist the Nazis as they came to power — his final letters before departing the country are signed “from house to house” — Korsch left Germany. He initially joined Brecht in the Danish town of Svendborg. In the urgency of defeat, he spoke about working on a book which is now thought to have been lost. A letter to Friedrich Pollock, written from Brecht’s farmhouse, suggests that his study was going to address revolution and counterrevolution since the July revolution of 1830 in France, examining German Nazism and Italian Fascism, and undertaking a critical revision of the Marxist-Leninist conception of revolution.

Korsch’s most elaborated and accomplished work from this phase of his life is his book Karl Marx, organized around a systematic reconstruction of Marxist theory. Herbert Levy suggested that Karl Marx “will in future times be regarded as one of the (few) essential Marxist works of the first half of the twentieth century.” Levy compared its significance to the work of figures such as Georgi Plekhanov, Antonio Labriola, and Rosa Luxemburg. However, there were only a few hundred copies of the book sold, and the London stock went up in flames during a German bombing raid in 1940.

After years on the move, going from Svendborg to London and Paris, Korsch made his way to the United States with assistance from Sidney Hook. Hedda was already teaching at Wheaton College in Massachusetts when he arrived in the country. Korsch’s time in the US was tragic in many ways, though not devoid of insights and partial victories. As Hook later wrote:

Korsch was never at home in America. Like most refugees, he was consumed with impatience, tinged with some contempt, at American naïveté and provincialism. The pragmatic re-evaluation of the past from the standpoint of the present, and the piecemeal approach to social reform, he dismissed as eclecticism.

Korsch was intimately engaged with the council communist journals of Paul Mattick. In Chicago and New York, those who worked on the journals were working class, and they were not oriented to intellectuals, but rather to activists in workplaces. Many of those who bought the journal were militants from groups like the Industrial Workers of the World and veterans of sit-down strikes. Korsch often spoke at meetings in New York organized by the council communists.

Reading Korsch’s letters during the war years is a moving and informative experience. Through them, one is able to track the fate, and the escapades, of his circle as they fled the extension of Nazi occupation across Europe, and the tense relations they had with the Frankfurt School under Max Horkheimer. Paul Partos, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and Heinz Langerhans, interned and deported to Southern France, were on the move to escape the Nazi onslaught, along with others who were supporters of Kommunistische Politik.

Korsch tried to raise funds and campaign for the refugees, and Hedda was involved with the Quaker refugee support. Karl joined her in this work, while acknowledging “there is not much I can do, as the present group of campers are not much interested in theoretical questions.” As a theoretician, though one engaged with the political conjuncture, Korsch constantly worked on the theoretical issues raised by Marx’s scientific work, writing for Dwight Macdonald’s Partisan Review. Throughout the war, Korsch defended an internationalist line of working-class and anti-fascist solidarity.

Unfortunately, Korsch’s life ended in 1961, at the age of seventy-five, just before the global student movements and the New Left kicked off. A figure of the old generation, he had continued to reflect on Marx’s theory and questions of global politics, in dialogue with some of the fascinating thinkers of his time who would go on to make substantial contributions in different fields, including Roman Rosdolsky, Daniel Guérin, and Harry Braverman. He remains a thinker who showed what it means to reflect theoretically, and with political principle, on the liberation of living labor.