Franz Jakubowski

Franz Jakubowski (10 June 1912, Posen, Province of Posen, Prussia, Germany, now Poznan, Poland – 1970, U.S.) was a Western Marxist theorist. Born in Prussia, he grew up in what was then the Free City of Danzig. His father was a doctor. From 1930 to 1933 he studied law in Heidelberg, Berlin, Munich and Breslau, before completing his studies in political science at Basel University. After student activism and the agitational role he would briefly play in Danzig, Jakubowski abandoned Europe, and settled in the USA, changing his name to Frank Fisher and marrying Elisabeth Spanjer. There he would play a part in establishing the Alexander Herzen Foundation, a publisher of samizdat soviet literature.

Contribution to theory

Jakubowski published his only major work, a book based on his doctoral thesis, in Danzig, 1936. It is entitled Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism, ISBN 0-85031-154-3 and may be seen as an extension to the seminal work of Karl Korsch on the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic to Marxian thought. Jakubowski rehearses for the reader the steps Marx and Engels took away from Hegel, via Feuerbach, to their 'historical materialist' position. Its unique contribution to Marxian thought is the clarity of its exposition of the relationship between subject and object in Marxian theory.

Ideology and Superstructure also offered a critique of competing interpretations of Marxian thought, particularly that associated with Karl Kautsky and that with Max Adler.

Influence

History has not been kind to Jakubowski. His one contribution is still read in certain small Marxist political currents, and occasionally touches the fringes of academic study, for example, a brief review in the journal Radical Philosophy by British philosopher Kate Soper.