Marxism and Philosophy

by Karl Korsch, Fred Halliday (Translator)

English, German (translation)

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, Economics

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Karl Korsch (August 15, 1886 – October 21, 1961) was a German Marxist theoretician. Along with György Lukács, Korsch is considered to be one of the major figures responsible for laying the groundwork for Western Marxism in the 1920s.

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Korschs anti-dualism is an important intervention within the marxism of his time. Korsch has no patience for Marxism that sees ideology as a mere "distorsion" of economic realities rather than a "force" within the reality of the individual embedded in his social-being. Economism fails because it misunderstands how Marx never considers economic forms to be external to social articulation, all econoic forms(wage labour, commodity, value) are always already socially articulated, they are not mere inanimate "materials" that are given.

I however think that for his pros, he enters into tension between this and old tropes of determinism at certain points.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (first published in 1923) occupies a seminal position in twentieth-century Marxist thought, both as a theoretical intervention in post–World War I debates and as a precursor to later currents in Western Marxism. Written in a period of profound political upheaval, the work challenges prevailing orthodoxies within the Marxist movement and interrogates the relationship between Marxism and philosophy in a way that sought to restore critical and revolutionary vitality to the tradition.


At its core, Korsch’s text is a critique of the positivist and economistic distortions that had come to dominate Marxist theory, particularly within the Second International. He argues that the severing of Marxism from its philosophical roots—especially the dialectical heritage inherited from Hegel—reduced it to a deterministic social science and stripped it of its critical, historical, and revolutionary dimensions. For Korsch, the attempt to treat Marxism as a purely “scientific” theory, free of philosophical mediation, was not only intellectually misleading but also politically disarming in the face of capitalist crisis and proletarian struggle.


Korsch insists that Marxism cannot be understood as a self-sufficient economic or sociological doctrine, but must be grasped as a “theory of social revolution” that is itself historically situated. He emphasizes that philosophy and Marxism are not separate disciplines but moments within a unified process of social critique. In this sense, Marxism and Philosophy is both an analysis of Marxism’s development and a polemical call to return to its dialectical method, wherein theory and practice are inseparably linked.


One of the enduring contributions of Korsch’s work is its insistence on the historicity of Marxist categories themselves. He highlights that Marxism must continually renew itself through engagement with the contradictions of capitalist society rather than ossify into dogma. This argument presaged later developments in critical theory, particularly in the Frankfurt School, as well as in the work of figures such as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and, later, Louis Althusser.


However, the book is not without its tensions. Critics have noted that Korsch’s call for the reintegration of philosophy into Marxism risks reinstating speculative tendencies that Marx himself had sought to overcome. Furthermore, his rejection of “orthodox” Marxism was received with hostility by both Communist Party authorities and more traditional Marxist theorists, contributing to his marginalization within the movement. Yet it is precisely this unorthodox stance that has secured the book’s long-term relevance.


Stylistically, Korsch writes in a dense and polemical register, reflecting both his engagement with German idealist philosophy and the political urgency of the moment. While this can render the text difficult for readers unfamiliar with Hegelian categories, the rigor and intensity of the analysis underscore the seriousness of Korsch’s intervention.


In retrospect, Marxism and Philosophy stands as a foundational text of Western Marxism. It reasserts the importance of philosophy within Marxist theory, not as an abstract discipline but as a mode of critical reflection inseparable from revolutionary praxis. Korsch’s insistence on the historical and dialectical character of Marxism anticipated many of the debates that would shape critical theory in the twentieth century. For scholars and students of Marxism, the book remains an indispensable, if challenging, resource for understanding the contested legacy of Marxist theory in the modern era.


Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy is more than a polemic against the dogmatism of his time; it is a profound meditation on the dialectical unity of theory and practice. Its enduring significance lies in its demand that Marxism remain a living, critical, and revolutionary force. While difficult in style and sometimes ambiguous in content, the text continues to provoke reflection on the meaning of Marxist theory in historical context and its relevance for ongoing struggles against domination and alienation.

GPT

[Kristofer Dubbels]

By convention of Marxology, Marx’s career has been divided into 2 major phases, with the mid to late 1840s constituting the dividing line between the two. In his earliest phase, Marx was primarily a philosopher - that is, a social and political theorist deeply influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach. Marx then moved from a philosophical critique of the world to a critique of the discipline of economics, the legitimating ideology of the capitalist mode of production itself. This broadly corresponds with a shift in emphasis within Marx’s writings away from “alienation” and towards “exploitation” as a guiding theme. This is the traditional account of things, and variants of it occur throughout the canon of Western Marxism up to the present.

As Karl Korsch tells it, from 1845 on, Marx’s thought ceased to be philosophical. That is, “scientific socialism” is characteristically scientific rather than philosophical. Marxism, for Korsch, is thoroughly anti-philosophical. However, Korsch immediately runs into at least one difficulty he appears not to register: surely the “new materialist and scientific standpoint” of Marx and Engels after 1845 is itself still a philosophy? Korsch never elaborates what is meant by “philosophy,” a term that was in contention from multiple standpoints at the time he wrote Marxism and Philosophy. Wittgenstein leveled a broad critique of philosophy tout court in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922, from a distinctly non-Marxist vantage point. What we now know as logical positivism was in its infancy, attempting to precisely demarcate philosophy from science and mathematics. A few years later, Heidegger would question post-Socratic philosophy, and eventually champion “thinking” as an alternative to philosophy altogether.

The lack of clarity around “philosophy” is here accompanied by a lack of clarity around its apparent other, “science.” Given that Marx and Engels understood their thought to be scientific socialism, this creates immediate difficulties. Korsch, in contrast to Lukacs, does not appear particularly bothered by the nature of science itself; behind Korsch’s profession of dialectics, he appears comfortable with something rather close to positivism.

These are deep, radical problems not only for Korsch, but for Marxism itself. “Science” was problematized by Lukacs, and Horkheimer and Adorno would eventually come to question not only science, but the far broader category of “enlightenment” itself. Korsch here does identify 1845 as the site of an important break within Marx and Engels’ thought; Althusser would later dedicate a significant amount of effort to identifying the exact site of Marx’s “epistemological break” between the problematic of alienation and that of exploitation, the latter purportedly the more “scientific” category. But Althusser also suffered from the same parochialism that appeared to afflict all the great Parisians of the time - he was apparently unaware of the revolutionary work in philosophy of science being conducted in the United States contemporaneously by Thomas Kuhn, W.V.O Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and others.

Science aside, we might wonder just how to categorize “dialectics” - Marx’s “anti-philosophical” thought is still dialectical, as Korsch reminds us repeatedly. So it can’t be that dialectics is itself philosophical; it would seem it must be something else. Is it a science? Significantly, Korsch begins Marxism and Philosophy with an epigram from Lenin: “We must organize a systematic study of the Hegelian dialectic from a materialist standpoint.” Lenin, in his “On the Question of Dialectics” asserted that “dialectics is a property of all human knowledge in general” and utilizes examples from science and mathematics to illustrate his point. This would seem to be a metaphysical claim - if we conceive of metaphysics as something like the most general account of how it is that things hang together, then Lenin is doing metaphysics. Is metaphysics not philosophy? Or is dialectical metaphysics no longer philosophy?

Later in “On the Question of Dialectics”, Lenin further asserts that “...no natural science and no materialism can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground [emphasis mine].” It would seem that, at least here, Lenin does conceive of materialism as itself being a philosophy, or at least being philosophical. (We should note that Korsch could not have been familiar with this then unpublished text of Lenin’s.)

In his rejection of philosophy, Korsch (as far as I can tell) was primarily restating positions already found in Marx and Engels; any shortcomings in his position are shared by Marx and Engels themselves. But his meditations on the relationship of theory to practice are, as far as I am aware, adding something decidedly new to Marxism. Indeed, the title of the book aside, it would seem that the primary motivating problem for the book isn’t the relationship of philosophy to Marxism, but rather the relationship of revolutionary theory to revolutionary practice.

Marx was aware that his own thought took place in history. His takedown of bourgeois political economy was made possible through this awareness that his own thought emerged in history. “Always historicize” is a slogan from Jameson, but it is surely also Marx’s own. Korsch’s novel contribution, then, is to historicize the decline of revolutionary theory itself. That is, Korsch applies the Marxist historicization to Marxism itself. This is where Korsch is ultimately the most interesting and suggestive. But Korsch also runs into a number of difficulties; the later recognition of these difficulties, addressed in “The Anti-Critique” also included in this volume, leads him out of Leninism altogether, and, perhaps, finally out of Marxism altogether. More on that below.
Korsch articulates a conception of history as a unified totality of “social being” and “social consciousness” (81). As he explains:

There is one unified historical process of historical development in which an ‘autonomous’ proletarian class movement emerges from the revolutionary movement of the third estate, and the new materialist theory of Marxism ‘autonomously’ confronts bourgeois idealist philosophy. All these processes affect each other reciprocally. (45)

Marxism is the “expression” of the revolutionary proletariat. German idealism is the theoretical expression of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. These four moments (Marxism, revolutionary proletariat, German idealism, revolutionary bourgeoisie) form a single historical process (45). It would seem, then, that there is a homology between Marxist theory and revolutionary proletarian practice on the one hand, and German idealism and revolutionary bourgeois practice, on the other.

But this is where Korsch begins to lose me. He asserts over and over that theory is itself a “concrete reality” which forms part of the totality. That is, it is in some sense as “real” as practice. But then the exact nature of the relationship of revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice is obscure. However, we know for certain what Korsch doesn’t think. He describes the vulgar Marxist conception as consisting of three degrees of reality:

(1) The economy, which in the last instance is the only objective and totally non-ideological reality; (2) Law and the State, which are already somewhat less real because clad in ideology, and (3) pure ideology which is objectless and totally unreal (‘pure rubbish’). (82)

Having established that theory and practice form different moments of the same historical totality early in the text, he later says:

Intellectual life should be conceived in union with social and political life, and social being and becoming (in the widest sense, as economics, politics or law) should be studied in union with social consciousness in its many different manifestations, as a real yet also ideal (or ‘ideological’) component of the historical process in general. (81)

And later,

The translation of the dialectics from its mystification by Hegel to the ‘rational form’ of Marx’s materialist dialectic essentially means that it has become the guiding principle of a single theoretical-practical and critical-revolutionary activity (94).

Perhaps I am being obtuse, but this obscures more than it elucidates. Theory and practice are themselves different moments of a single “activity”? Of course, describing the fundamental nature of society and reality is not easy - but there is something distinctly mystifying about Korsch’s formulation.

In a later text also collected in this volume, “The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy’: An Anti-Critique”, Korsch has dramatically revised his assessment of how his own thought relates to Lenin. Published 6 years after Lenin’s death, with Trotsky in exile and midway through the first five-year plan, Korsch now sees his emphasis on a dialectical materialism as entailing not only a radical critique of the Second International, but of the Third International as well. Kautsky and Lenin are now attacked together. From this we can also the seeds of Korsch’s apparent eventual abandonment of Marxism altogether:

… ‘orthodox Marxists’ [such as] Kautsky and Lenin made a permanent virtue out of temporary necessity. They energetically defended the idea that socialism can only be brought to the workers ‘from outside’, by bourgeois intellectuals who are allied to the workers’ movement. (114)

Of course, a weaker version of this idea of Kautsky and Lenin could already be found in “The Communist Manifesto”:

…entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Korsch then drops a series of bombshells that will form the basis for a rejection not just of Lenin and Kautsky, but Marx and Engels:

Marx and Engels had initially conceived their revolutionary theory in direct relation to the practical revolutionary movement, but when this died down they could only continue their work as theory. … Nevertheless it is clear that the 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. Thus two processes unfolded side by side in relative independence of each other. One was the development under novel conditions of the old theory which had arisen in a previous historical epoch. The other was the new practice of the workers’ movement. (116)

That is, Marxism continued to develop after the height of the workers movement in the 1850s, according to Korsch (104, 135). When proletarian practice was revived in the final third of the 19th century, it adapted Marxist theory as an ideology, rather than a “true theory” (114). This gap between theory and practice becomes a chasm in Soviet Marxism - Lenin’s orthodoxy stood in glaring contrast to his practice (141). Lenin was, above all, a political thinker who, using the language of orthodoxy, developed a novel revolutionary political practice. Apparently working backwards from a critique of official Soviet Marxism, Korsch eventually finds the root of the problem of Stalinist repression in Lenin and Kautsky. (We might here question Korsch’s understanding of the proletarian character of the labor movement in the 1850s in light of subsequent historiography - see, for example, William H. Sewell, Jr.’s Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848).

Here, Korsch inches toward a resolution of the difficulty discussed at the outset. Ideology, it would seem, is a concrete reality; indeed, the concrete effect of Marxist orthodoxy has apparently been judged to be, on balance, overwhelmingly negative. It would seem, then, that the only way out is through further revolutionary practice, liberated from the ideology of Kautskyist-Leninist-Stalinist materialism. It would seem, at this point, that such a liberation does not entail a return to Marx; it was the previous adoption of Marxist orthodoxy in an alien practical context as an ideology that ultimately led to the Stalinist degeneration. What role there is for Marxism at this juncture is unclear; more significantly, it now becomes unclear what role there is for revolutionary theory at all. It would seem that Korsch is arguing that Kautskyist-Leninist orthodoxy is imposed from outside the proletariat. The only hope for revolutionary theory and practice, then, would be for a proletarian revolutionary theory to break from the fetters imposed on it by the orthodoxy. It might seem, then, that Korsch’s emphasis on the revolutionary nature of dialectics is again relevant - to emphasize the dialectics against Leninist materialism is precisely to wage revolutionary struggle in theory.

But Korsch’s “Anti-Critique” is addressed primarily to clarifying underlying issues in Marxism and Philosophy without clarifying the main thesis of the original text. By 1930, several significant developments have occurred within bourgeois philosophy. It is unclear what Korsch makes of any of it. Wittgenstein famously declared in the Tractatus:

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. … The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions,” but to make propositions clear.

For Wittgenstein, philosophy is not a body of doctrines. And, at least on one reading, he would seem to be ultimately criticizing theorization itself (curiously, this notion looks suspiciously like a theory). How does this understanding of philosophy compare to Marx’s own dialectical anti-philosophy?
In a different register altogether, Heidegger concludes his seminal 1929 “What is Metaphysics?” with the assertion that

So long as man exists, philosophizing of some sort occurs. … Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. (Basic Writings 110)

With Wittgenstein and Heidegger we have two transhistorical conceptualizations of “philosophy”. For all the effort dedicated to the critique of philosophy as such, for Marx and Engels (and Korsch), it would seem “philosophy” meant something like “the doctrines of German Idealism, except for the dialectical method, which can be applied to human thought, and also nature itself.”

Likewise, for logical positivism generally, the attempt to demarcate philosophy from science was prompted in part by tremendous scientific upheavals that occurred at the dawn of the 20th century, after Marx and Engels’ deaths. Marx and Engels themselves lived through - and were quite well aware of - one particular revolution in the sciences, the firestorm produced by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But they did not live to see the revolutions in physics prompted by Einstein or Bohr. Lenin was aware of Einstein but it did not appear to prompt him to reflect in any profound way on the nature of scientificity itself; for Lenin, as Korsch explains in his “Anti-Critique”, theory itself was always subordinate to the practical concerns of making the revolution. Had Lenin been aware of Russell or the Vienna Circle it is unclear that the encounter could have prompted any modification in his views.

But what of Korsch? He sees the decline of dialectical thought as a sign of stagnation in thought altogether. He never interrogates the truth of dialectics altogether - he does not interrogate at all that is perhaps precisely the underdetermined nature of dialectics that made it so useful for Lenin’s polemics. Rather than being a powerful and precise critical tool, we might wonder if instead it explains too much. Indeed, we might wonder if the commitment to dialectics acted as a fetter on Marx’s thought and, by extension, on Korsch’s.

So - why read Korsch at all today? He is surely an important figure from the standpoint of anyone interested in the intellectual history of the world Communist movement. But historical interest aside, what can be said of the value of his ideas for the present? I would wager that even if Marxism and Philosophy does not provide satisfactory answers to the questions it poses, those questions have an enduring importance to anyone interested in the nature of the relationship of theory to practice, and the nature of a thought in a post-capitalist society. Surely these are very abstract questions, but it is precisely in the context of world-historic political struggle that Korsch originally posed them. The contemporary left could benefit from pondering these problems, even if their resolution must wait for a time yet to come.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought this one was kind of a mixed bag. There are a couple of strange translation errors that confused me (it refers to the “seventh section of chapter 24 in das kapital” (this chapter only has 5 sections; I eventually determined it was referring to the chapter as a whole, which is in part 7 of the book), and Korsch seemed to spend a lot of time repeating himself without becoming any more clear.

However, his philosophical discoveries are interesting and unusual. His interpretation of dialectical materialism is notably more thoughtful and less deterministic than the usual “religion of history” criticism liberals often toss at Marxism. His explicit criticisms of post-great-war Marxism were simple, creative, and decisive (he castigates official Marxism-Leninism not for being unmaterialist, as Marxists usually do, but for being *undialectical*!). He brings a new stance to the debate on the philosophical differences between Marx, Engels, Lenin, & the CPSU that I had formerly believed I understood. An interesting book.

[Raya Paul Gracchus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ts pamphlet emo (enlightened me outrageously).

[lena ∵ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favourite book that I've read so far this year, though the edition (which isn't available on goodreads) is in Czech and also contains Korsch's On Marxist Dialectic and On Materialist Dialectic. The main premise of the main text is a "call to action" for Marxists to return back to and emphasise the dialectic more, as to not fall into the trap of Marxism becoming a stagnant ideology, an "inverse thinking" as Korsch puts it. Even though the text might be more difficult to read at points, it displays the shortcomings of Marxism and Marxists that haven't properly understood Marx's dialectic in a very striking manner. It also clears up some of the fog that surrounds Marxism with it's relation to science and philosophy and tries to "put it back on the right course", so to speak. Korsch, along with Lukács, who is also mentioned several times in the book, form an important baseline for the positive and negative critique of Marxists from a left position. These striking remarks and pitfalls of which Korsch warns of can be seen developed later in the Soviet Union, especially Marxism becoming something of a sacred text, an ideology, not a critique (of political economy) as Marx understood it.

Also "a Marxist critique of Marx" just sounds cool.

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The interesting volume consists of an introduction by the translator, Fred Halliday, 'Marxism and Philosophy' (1923), 'The Present State of the Problem of 'Marxism and Philosophy'' (1930), 'Introduction to the 'Critique of the Gotha Program'' (1922), and 'The Marxism of the First International' (1924). The author, Karl Korsch, was deeply involved with left-wing politics in Germany and obviously was still idealistic about Marxism when he wrote these works. Later he became disillusioned about Marxism. Especially once he was no longer associated with any left-wing organization or engaged in a specific activist struggle.

In the works under discussion, he praises Marx and Engel's writings, and generally criticizes moderates. He says that many do not understand Marxism and its relationship to the philosophical trends that preceded it.

He says that Marxism would lead to freedom; unfortunately, that was not the case wherever it was tried. Marxism sounds good on paper - very similar to the "meek inheriting the earth" or the "people control, government obeys." But democracy does not seem to be compatible with communism - unless it's "democracy" within the one-party state.

Marx had said that capitalism would turn into communism - but that is predicated on the assumption that workers in the capitalist countries would be industrial workers, have some education, and be involved in their communities (have some social consciousness). This was not the case in several of the countries in which communism was implemented.

Marxism was similar to Christianity - they both assume that people are good, and will behave accordingly. Yet the fact that we still need to have police departments around the world, means that people are not always good. And capitalism is not the reason this is true since people were always "fallible" one way or another.

These belief systems assume that people will automatically share and be charitable, and selfless. However, we did not get to the "Kingdom of Heaven" when Christian monarchs ruled Europe for hundreds of years. Far from it - the ideology/belief system was simply used to bolster the system of hereditary monarchy and also justify launching wars that had to be paid for with peoples' blood. Yet the same thing happened under communism. That ideology was also used to justify the self-perpetuation of a ruling elite called the dictatorship of the proletariat, although the proletariat had little say in the system or the choice of rulers (similar to the lack of input under a monarchy). In both cases, terror was used to enforce obedience to the rulers.

There probably were true communist believers just as there were true Christian believers - but the reality is different. Neither system panned out. Human nature perhaps isn't always selfless, sacrificing and good. The ideologies want to make docile servants of the people - serving either a monarch, or a dictator, in the name of a devout ideology or belief system. This is why Christianity failed as a belief system to organize human society, and communism also failed.

Jesus and Marx were both idealists - they did not, or could not, accept the fact that people are often quite weak and greedy, they are perhaps not always driven by noble objectives. Christianity was popular first among the lowest classes - slaves - etc. Not surprising since it promised a kind of equality. Communism too spread like wildfire among those who had nothing - since it promised at least something under communism. But the assumption in each case is that people are going to want to work their whole lives for nothing, with no opportunity to accumulate (money, goods, property) - for a reward in the afterlife under Christianity or a commendation medal or vacation at best under communism. People were expected to be more or less monk-like - abstemious and austere - and to be happy with their simple lives. The only joy being prayer or reading the works of Marx or other communist philosophers (like Korsch, perhaps). How many people can actually tolerate that sort of joyless life? Some can, but many can't. That enforced austerity under a strict theocracy or communism was where Marx and Jesus failed - they did not take into account human nature, they thought they could change human nature by a stroke of the pen, or by giving a speech. But did they?

Here are the quotes:

From The Introduction by Fred Halliday:

"Karl Korsch was born on 15 August 1886 in Todstedt, near Hamburg. His father was a bank official who came originally from an East Prussian family of small farmers."

"Between 1912 and 1914 Korsch [studied] ....in London. He joined the Fabian Society, and was strongly influenced by the syndicalist movement. In his early years, he believed that these emphasized the positive content and actively democratic aspects of socialism, by contrast with the orthodox Marxism of the Second Intentional which he thought defined itself merely negatively as the abolition of the capitalist mode of production."

"...after the November 1918 overthrow of the Kaiser and the declaration of the Weimar Republic, much of Europe, and particularly Germany, was in a state of revolutionary ferment. The Spartacist rising in Berlin (January 1919) and the Munich Soviet Republic (April 1919) were both bloodily suppressed. But for two years there was an active and widespread movement for workers' councils inspired by a varied set of Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas."

"When the [workers' councils] movement was at is height [Korsch] ... concentrated on elaborating a hypothetical economic system for a national economy based on workers' councils."

"As...the councils' movement declined, Korsch tried to analyze the reasons for the failure of the upsurge of 1918-20. While other Marxists correctly stressed the absence of a revolutionary organization to seize power, Korsch emphasized that the theoretical and cultural preconditions for such a seizure of power were also lacking."

"Korsch ascribed the defeat of the German November Revolution to the absence of ideological preparation and political leadership."

"His book 'Arbeitsrecht fur Betriebsrate' ('Labor Law for Factory Councils'), written in 1922, was based on a course of lectures he gave to workers, and represented an attempt to provide a proletarian law for workers' councils."

"It assumes throughout that the suspension of political life in the Soviets in Russia was a merely temporary occurrence, imposed on the Bolsheviks by famine and Civil War."

"Like Korsch, Gramsci tried to theorize the spontaneous movement of workers' power released by the 1914-18 war."

"Korsch, on the other hand, went on to develop his theory of the subjective preconditions for revolution by a critique of orthodox Marxism for its failure to provide such a theory."

"...Gramsci...also stressed the need for struggle in the realm of civil society, in culture and ideology, since the power of the ruling class was protected by its ideological predominance, or hegemony, over all classes of capitalist society."

"...Marxism and Philosophy, published in 1923. ...starts by arguing that neither Marxists nor bourgeois philosophers had seen the historical connection between Hegel's dialectical idealism and Marx's dialectical materialism. They had also failed to understand why Hegelian philosophy died out in the 1840s. To do so would be to see the dialectical and material relationship between idealism and the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase, before 1848. Since Hegel's idealism expressed this heroic epoch of bourgeois development, it died out when the bourgeoisie ceased to be revolutionary. The new revolutionary class was the proletariat, which found its theoretical expression in dialectical materialism. Hence the historical relationship between bourgeois philosophy and Marxist materialism could only understood within the basic Marxist materialist outlook itself. Marxism is not a philosophy but the heir of philosophy. The Second International had obscured this relationship because it has itself ceased to be revolutionary."

"The mistake of vulgar Marxism was to fall into a 'transcendental underestimation' of the resilience of the intellectual and ideological apparatus of bourgeois society."

"The material base of any society is in its socioeconomic structure. This must be overthrown in practice if its intellectual superstructure is to be overcome in theory."

"The [Hamburg insurrection's] great defeat of October 1923 [when it was successfully suppressed by the army] led to the banning of the KPD [German Communist Party] and the loss of fifty per cent of its membership."

"[Korsch] ... became a Communist deputy to the Reichstag, a post he held until 1928."

"...Korsch...opposed... the official view that capitalism had achieved a temporary stabilization and that a revolution was no longer immediately possible."

"[At] The Tenth Congress of the KPD in July 1925...the Korsch-Katz group...were opposed to the New Economic Policy and Katz's group judged that the Soviet State was now a 'dictatorship of the Kulaks' and referred to Stalin as a Bauernnapoleon [peasant Napoleon]. Korsch argued that the Comintern had become an instrument of Russian foreign policy, and that the theory of 'stabilization' reflected the needs of a defensive state trying to form an alliance with world capitalism."

"The Korsch-Katz faction at first tried to fight within the KPD and the Comintern, but at the sixth Plenum of the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist International, in February-March 1926, orders were given for a more thorough pure of the German Party. Korsch was attacked by Bukharin for his analysis of the Comintern. Denounced by Zinoviev as 'an insane petty bourgeois', Korsch was given an ultimatum to relinquish his Reichstag seat or face expulsion from the KPD. He refused to comply with this and was expelled in April 1926. He remained politically active for two years and kept his place in the Reichstag (in 1927 he was the only deputy to oppose the Soviet-German Trade Agreement). However, the ultra-left were driven out of the KPD and soon fell apart into many small groups."

"In September 1925...Korsch's followers consolidated around the journal Kommunistische Politik..."

"...in 1928 Kommunistische Politik ceased to appear and Korsch's period as a member of a political organization was over. After 1928 Korsch continued to write and to lecture, and began a close intellectual friendship with Bertolt Brecht who had first started to attend Korsch's lectures on Marxism two years earlier. In February 1933, on the night of the Reichstag fire, Korsch gave his last political talk and had to flee from Germany the same night."

"In his 1931 'Theses on Hegel and the Revolution' Korsch ...argued hat Hegel's philosophy was the culmination of the ideology of the Enlightenment which expressed the fulfillment and the limits of bourgeois thought."

"In exile Korsch continued his theoretical work and in 1938 he published 'Karl Marx' - an analysis of Marx's mature theory rather than a biography. 'Marxism and Philosophy' studies the emergence of Marxism from classical bourgeois philosophy; 'Karl Marx' shows how it simultaneously emerged from classical economic theory. Ricardo, like Hegel, took bourgeois thought to its limits and in doing so revealed the inner contradictions of it as a class ideology."

"'Karl Marx,' however, explicitly contrasts the 'pre-scientific' philosophical analysis of alienated labor in the early writings to the later scientific analysis of commodity fetishism in 'Capital.' Korsch always stressed the superiority of Marx's later works, while equally insisting that Marx's economic theory was not a merely analytical system, but a revolutionary critique of the capitalist social order."

"[The] ...aim [of Korsch's concern with philosophy] was to show that Marx transcended 'philosophy' and yet inherited the dialectical interrelation of theory and practice that characterized classical idealism, giving it for the first time a materialist foundation."

"Korsch's exile was marked by a deepening of his relationship with Brecht."

"In spite of their political differences, Korsch and Brecht kept up their relationship till Brecht's death in 1956. After 1933 Korsch and Brecht lived in Denmark and worked together, and when Korsch emigrated to the USA in 1936 they corresponded with each other. Korsch's 'Karl Marx' inspired Brecht to try to rewrite the 'Communist Manifesto' in hexameters, along the lines of Lucretius's 'De rerum natura'..."

"From 1936 to his death in 1961 Korsch lived in the USA. He taught sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans between 1943 and 1945, and from 1945 to 1950 he worked with the International Institute of Social Research, New York."

"By the early fifties, however, Korsch was evidently afflicted by the isolation of his position and by an increasing pessimism. In exile, cut off from any direct relationship to political struggle, and writing at the height of the Cold War, he fell into despair, reneging any connection with Marxism. However, after 1953 his hopes for change in the Soviet Union revived, and his later years were marked by an increasing interest in the colonial world."

"Korsch was one of he most interesting and original, if erratic, Marxist theorists in the West during the twenties and thirties. Among his contemporaries, he had an exceptional knowledge and understanding not only of the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, but also of the classical bourgeois thinkers who preceded them. The key to his fate is provide by his own constant emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, for he himself and his work, were victims of the Stalinization of the European workers' movement after Lenin's death. Refusing to accept the bureaucratized political leadership of the KPD, he lapsed into ultra-leftism and became cut off from the working class; in exile, he ended by abandoning Marxism. His personal trajectory was only one of the many fatal consequences of the defeat of the socialist revolution in Western Europe after the First World War."

From Mr. Halliday's Note on this Edition:

"Translation of Korsch poses a number of problems. These are partly due to the difficulties generally associated with the translation of Hegelian terminology into English. They are also partly due to the highly involved and labyrinthine prose which Korsch adopted in 'Marxism and Philosophy,' which becomes at times a torrent of parentheses, qualifications, repetitions and reformulations. The aim of this translation has been to provide clear and readable English version of the German; sentences have frequently been broken up and restructured to make them more accessible."

[Pierce Nienhaus · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for Marxists, especially those wishing for a greater comprehension or clarity of application of historical materialism in terms of the theoretical and practical. Korsch brilliantly puts this all together to assail the ‘orthodox Marxist’ theorists of the Second International and provide his own historical materialist account of the historical significance of Marxism as it necessarily developed from bourgeois idealist thought and Hegel, as well as the history of Marxism and explanation of its historical revisions as a consequence of the changing state of the worker’s movement.
Korsch’s work is made decidedly rich by his exceptional knowledge for the work of Marx and Engels, but also that of their bourgeois critics and historians — the product is a comprehensive and holistic assessment of the significance and real meaning and intention of Marxism and scientific socialism as the tool of the proletariat.
The inclusion of his other works here, Anti-Critique, Intro to Critique of the Gotha Programme and the Marxism of the First International provide an interesting demonstration of the somewhat evolution of Korsch’s views, particularly as they pertain to Lenin. While Korsch does not change hardly anything about his original thoughts in Marxism and Philosophy, save his meaning of “ideological dictatorship” of the proletariat, he develops a more critical perspective of not just Lenin’s ‘epigones’, but also of Lenin’s philosophy itself, specifically the problem of Lenin’s bourgeois materialism (Pannekoek has a more in-depth critique of this in his Lenin as Philosopher).
All in all, Korsch is a welcome authority on Marxism and is able to be honest about the degeneration of the Soviet state and with the Bolshevization of the Comintern and communist parties outside of Russia. Genuinely, one of my favorite books I’ve ever read.

[Lilé · Rating 5 out of 5]

exceptional

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

An attempt at situating dialectical materialism as the philosophy of the working class and its relation to their revolutionary struggle. Good defense of Marxism against the vulgar theoreticians of the revisionist Second International. Should be read alongside Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Can serve as preparatory reading for Mao's On Contradiction and On Practice.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Korsch could be considered an early advocate for the notion that Marx's method was the "rational kernel" of Hegel's "mystical shell." Needless to say this was not a popular idea in the early 1920's, and Korsch paid dearly for it.

At any rate, this short work should probably be considered a landmark in the history of Marx's dialectical method, and in consideration should not play second string to Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, published merely months later.

Hitherto we have only used the dialectical method, which Hegel and Marx introduced into the study of history, to analyse the philosophy of German idealism and the Marxist theory that emerged from it. But the only really 'materialist and therefore scientific method' (Marx) of pursuing this analysis is to apply it to the further development of Marxism up to the present. This means that we must try to understand every change, development and revision of Marxist theory, since its original emergence from the philosophy of German Idealism, as a necessary product of its epoch (Hegel). More precisely, we should seek to understand their determination by the totality of the historico-social process of which they are a general expression (Marx).

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rather lengthy Introduction and copious Notes sections made this a quick read but also quite shallow and dry. It doesn't help that I don't think Marxism is a philosophy, so much of what Korsch is peddling I'm not buying. He drops a lot of names, many obvious ones, but considering the expansiveness of Marxist scholarship in 2023, all too many of his references are borderline anachronistic, mildly discredited, or hardly ever read these days. I didn't find much of interest here, and having read a decent amount of texts circumnavigating Marxism, I will admit to being surprised this text is so well-respected. Maybe it is more Korsch's body of work than this specific selection. Either way, an uninspiring read.

[Differengenera · Rating 3 out of 5]

could be one of the first works of Marxology, in the sense of dry Jesuitical litigations of what Marx meant via correspondence, unpublished articles and so forth. Korsch is trying to make sense of the failure of the Second International here, and making the case that they failed to take Marx's ideas seriously enough, leading them into philistinism and reformism on questions such as the state and revolutionary intellectual culture, you can see Korsch circling some of the same questions that Gramsci would deal with via a more involved + generative lexicon.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

A polemical little book on Marxism as a philosophy of social revolution, and the challenges that then-recent developments posed to the political-philosophy projects claiming to be Marxist, with neither social-democratic nor communist parties quite up to the challenge. Augmented with shorter pieces, which e.g. explicate Korsch's quarrel with Bolsheviks, and a solid foreword. Not as entertaining as the author's disciple Brecht, but altogether more readable than I feared.

[Claude · Rating 4 out of 5]

Points ultimately to the need to see Marxism not just as philosophy or anti-philosophy but as a means of understanding bourgeois society in its totality (which includes much more than economics as a reflection of material relations of production) as well as revolution comprising the abolishment of that totality and nothing less. Which is nice.

[Uriah Marc Todoroff]

Started off pretty annoyed by all the footnotes, but I wonder if that level of engagement with one's interlocutors is part of the Marxist method. Eventually I got on board with them, and they took me back to a simpler time than the questions of today (i.e. the principle antagonist is plain old Soviet Marxism, not the highly complex forms of Western Marxism that grew up out of that antagonism).

[Ian Szabo · Rating 1 out of 5]

For some reason this is often presented as an introduction to Marxist Philosophy- it's mostly based on mangled Hegelianism and baffling historical claims to make a dogmatically sectarian argument.

It's genuinely depressing this gets compared to the masterpiece of Marxist Hegelianism that is Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness.

[Jordan Ecker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is fine but I learned very little from reading it because it is so polemically engaged in the debates of its time to the point that today, despite my ideological sympathy for Korsch, it comes across as trite or inscrutable.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Korsch's afterword of 1930 is a compelling critique of the ossification of Russian Leninism and deserves to be read in addition to the main text.

[Benjamín Beroíza · Rating 3 out of 5]

La obra de Karl Korsch acentúa precisamente todos los puntos en los que más discrepo con Carlos Pérez Soto.

[Wyatt Browdy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1930 rejoinder is a great criticism of Lenin’s dialectic and that of the 2nd International

[Gulliver's Bad Trip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um tentativa de resgate do materialismo dentro dos círculos marxistas pós-1917 através do desenvolvimento do idealismo hegeliano (contra a situação vigente de desleixo até à desconsideração da filosofia na sua época):

[...] Que os deuses eternos cuidem das verdades divinas e eternas! Todas as verdades que disseram ou dirão respeito a nós, seres terrenos, são de natureza terrena e, portanto, estão submetidas - sem qualquer privilégio - à "caducidade" e a todas as outras chamadas "insuficiências" dos fenômenos terrenos. Contudo, de outra parte e ao contrário do que freqüentemente imaginou o antigo "materialismo", nada no mundo do homem é um ser morto, um jogo cego de forças inconscientes e de matéria sem sentido - assim como não o são as "verdades". Todas as "verdades" humanas são sobretudo, como o próprio homem que as pensa, um produto - e um produto humano, à diferença dos chamados puros "produtos da natureza" (que, enquanto naturais, não podem ser, no sentido próprio da palavra, "produtos"!). Elas são, pois, em termos mais precisos, um produto social, criado ao mesmo tempo que outros produtos da atividade humana pela cooperação dos homens no marco da divisão do trabalho, nas condições naturais e sociais de produção de uma época determinada da história da natureza e da história humana.

[Ceena · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب تقدیم به محور مقاومت و اون دسته از خودچپ پندارهای عزیزی است که برای مارکس علم به پا میکنند و زیرش سینه میزنند! کسانی که هنوز باور دارند مارکس به گفته خودش هگل رو سر و ته کرد و بدتر از اون روی کل فلسفه خط بطلان کشید چرا که "فلاسفه همگی دنیا رو تعبیر کرده اند، مسئله بر سر تغییر آن است". قطعا کتاب کوتاه و جالبی است برای مسئله مهم رابطه مارکسیسم با فلسفه. ترجمه کتاب بسیار شیوا و پاورقی ها به اندازه و با درایت فراهم شده بود

[Jonas Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant book by another overlooked Marxist theoretician.

Not very fond of his anti-critique, but his initial essay and the smaller ones that follow are brilliant. The introductory essay by Fred Halliday on his life and thought is also extremely worth reading. This guy led a spectacularly interesting and fruitful life.

[Ivan Labayne]

Maraming bright tidbits sa history ng Marxist movement --mula life-altering to tsismisan levels. Central ang dogmatism ng Second International at ensuing repercussions para sa Kilusan. Nagpapatuloy ang mga bagay, lampas sa Second International at Korsch

[Isabella]

this really made everything click for me