Karl Korsch

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.

Karl Korsch was born in the small rural village of Tostedt (near Hamburg) to Carl August Korsch and his wife Therese on August 15, 1886. Although Karl’s father worked as a secretary in a city hall bureau, he was deeply devoted to studying the philosophy of Leibniz in his private life. Always longing for something more urban and intellectual, Carl August made the decision to relocate his family west to a village just outside Meiningen when Karl was eleven years old. The move not only allowed the elder Korsch to obtain employment at a local bank (where he eventually rose to the position of vice president), it also gave his children the opportunity to receive a better education. Karl, who showed great intellectual promise at a young age, excelled as a student during his years of schooling at Meiningen.

Beginning in 1906, Korsch successively attended universities in Munich, Geneva, and Berlin, studying various subjects in preparation for a more concentrated study in the field of law. Korsch then entered the University of Jena (incidentally, the same university that awarded Karl Marx his doctorate in philosophy in 1841) to begin working on his law degree in 1908. When he was not occupied with his studies, Korsch was extremely active in the Freie Studenten, a left-of-center student group which pushed for further liberalization of the school’s code of behavior. Korsch also found time to become editor of the student newspaper, to which he also contributed articles. In addition, Korsch organized and participated in lectures that featured prominent socialist speakers such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Liebknecht. Surprisingly, all of these extracurricular activities did not seem to have the slightest detrimental effect on Korsch's academic performance since he managed to graduate aa doctor of law from the University of Jena's law school with the highest honors in 1910; his thesis title was Die Anwendung der Beweislastregeln im Zivilprozess und das qualifizierte Geständnis. It was around this time that Korsch met Hedda Gagliardi (de), whom he would eventually marry in 1913.

Korsch received a grant in 1912 to travel to England and work on translating and writing a commentary to a legal text by Sir Ernest Schuster. During this time, Korsch became a member of the Fabian Society, a reform-minded socialist organization. Korsch’s stay in England came to an end in the summer of 1914 when he received orders to report to his military regiment at Meiningen for maneuvers. Despite being opposed to a war that he knew was on the horizon, Korsch nevertheless made the decision to return to his native country because in the words of his wife: “He wanted to be with the masses, and they would be in the army.” At the start of the war, Korsch initially held the rank of lieutenant but was quickly demoted to sergeant for daring to voice his objections to the German Army’s invasion of neutral Belgium. However, these disciplinary measures did little to shake Korsch of his pacifist convictions; throughout the war, he refused to carry any sort of weapon into battle. According to Hedda Korsch, Karl’s rationale for going into combat unarmed was “that it made no difference, since you were just as safe with or without a weapon: the point was that you were safe neither way.” Instead of fighting, Korsch made it his personal mission to save as many lives as he could. As the conflict wore on, Korsch was decorated several times and was even re-promoted to the rank of captain. More important than these official accolades, Korsch’s strong moral character and reputation for bravery under fire helped him garner the respect of many of the men in his company. When widespread unrest began to sweep through the German military in 1917, this company established a soldiers’ soviet with Korsch being elected by his fellow soldiers to serve as one of this soviet’s delegates. This "red company" was one of the last to be demobilized, a process which occurred in January 1919.

From 1917 to 1933, he was active in leftwing politics in Germany, leaving on the night of the Reichstag fire. After a brief stay in England and Denmark, he and his wife settled in the USA in 1936, teaching at Tulane University, New Orleans, and working at the International Institute for Social Research, New York City.

Karl Korsch died in Belmont, Massachusetts on October 21, 1961.

Korsch studied in London between 1912 and 1914, becoming a member of the Fabian Society. In 1913 he married Hedda Gagliardi, a grandchild of feminist Hedwig Dohm, who would be closely involved in his theoretical work. Hedda Korsch from 1916 was a teacher at the free school Wickersdorf. Korsch's wartime experiences in Germany radicalised him, especially the ferment within the leftwing parties of Germany following the Russian Revolution. Korsch focused his studies and writings on working-out a replacement economic system for workers' councils to implement across Germany, published under the title What is Socialization? in March 1919. Korsch joined the German Communist Party in 1920. He became Communist Minister of Justice in the regional Thuringian government in October 1923.

Korsch attributed the failure of the German revolution to the lack of ideological preparation and leadership of the working class. Accordingly, he turned his focus to developing workers' organisations into bodies subjectively capable of realizing revolutionary opportunities. In contrast to what seemed to him a materialist fatalism, he thought it would be possible to galvanize workers' organisations into bolder political action if more effort was put into educating workers in the deeper theory of Marxism.

In 1926 he formed the Entschiedene Linke (Determined Left) with Ernst Schwarz. It initially attracted 7,000 members, before joining the Communist Workers Party of Germany in June 1927.

In his later work, he rejected orthodox Marxism as historically outmoded, wanted to adapt Marxism to a new historical situation, and wrote in his Ten Theses (1950) that "the first step in re-establishing a revolutionary theory and practice consists in breaking with that Marxism which claims to monopolize revolutionary initiative as well as theoretical and practical direction" and that "today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias."

Korsch was especially concerned that Marxist theory was losing its precision and validity – in the words of the day, becoming "vulgarized" – within the upper echelons of the various socialist organizations. His masterwork, Marxism and Philosophy, is an attempt to re-establish the historic character of Marxism as the heir to Hegel. It commences with a quote from Vladimir Lenin's On the Significance of Militant Materialism: "We must organize a systematic study of the Hegelian dialectic from a materialist standpoint."

In Korsch's formulation, Hegel represented at the level of ideas the real, material progressiveness of the bourgeoisie. Alongside the extinction of 'Hegelianism' around 1848, the bourgeoisie lost its claim to that progressive role in society, ceasing to be the universal class. Marx, in taking Hegel and transforming that philosophy into something new, in which the workers would be the progressive class, himself represented the moment at which the revolutionary baton materially passed from bourgeoisie to workers. To Korsch, the central idea of Marxian theory was what he termed "the principle of historical specification". This means to "comprehend all things social in terms of a definite historical epoch". (Korsch, Karl Marx, p. 24) He emphasizes that Marx "deals with all categories of his economic and socio-historical research in that specific form and in that specific connection in which they appear in modern bourgeois society. He does not treat them as eternal categories." (op. cit., p. 29f.)

Korsch's stance had ramifications which were unpalatable to the official Communist Party structure – not least, casting the Party's own ideological weaknesses as the only material explanation for the failure of the revolution. Published in 1923, Marxism and Philosophy was strongly opposed by Party faithful and other left-wing figures, including Karl Kautsky and Grigory Zinoviev. Zinoviev famously said of Korsch and his fellow critic Lukács, "If we get a few more of these Professors spinning out their theories, we shall be lost." Over the subsequent five years, the German Communist Party gradually purged all such dissenting voices. Korsch survived within a current known as the Resolute Lefts, until his expulsion in April 1926. He remained a communist deputy to the Reichstag.

Korsch's critique was not accepted into Marxist–Leninist communist theory. It remained the property of communist dissenters and academics for several decades. Within those currents, particularly in Germany, Britain, Hungary and Italy, his influence varies from group to group, but became more significant with the brief revival of revolutionary politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Korsch taught and befriended Bertolt Brecht, the Marxian playwright, who said he picked Korsch to instruct him in Marxism due to his independence from the Communist Party. He also instructed Felix Weil, the founder of the Institute for Social Research, from which the highly influential Frankfurt School was to emerge. He also influenced the German Marxist historian Arthur Rosenberg. Indirect disciples include Franz Jakubowski and Nildo Viana. Sidney Hook attended Korsch lectures in Berlin in 1928.

• 1932: 'Geleitwort zu Kapital'. Berlin ('Introduction to Capital'); reprinted 1971 in Three Essays on Marxism.
• 1935: 'Why I am a Marxist'. In: Modern Quarterly, Vol. IX no. 2, April 1935, p. 88 - 95 (part of a symposium with other contributions Why I am Not a Marxist by Alexander Goldenweiser, George Santayana and H. G. Wells, and Why I am a Marxist by Harold Laski); reprinted 1971 in Three Essays on Marxism.
• 1937: 'Leading principles of Marxism: a Restatement'. In: Marxist Quarterly (published by the American Marxist Association), Vol 1/3, Oct-Dec 1937, p. 356 - 378; reprinted 1971 in Three Essays on Marxism.
• 1938: Karl Marx, London: Chapman & Hall / New York: John Wiley & Sons. Originally published as part of a series "Modern Sociologists". Reissued 1963. Published in original German version 1967. Translated in Italian, French, Spanish and Greek. Many times reissued.
• 1971: Three essays on Marxism, introduction by Paul Breines, New York: Monthly Review Press (This contains the essays 'Why I am a Marxist', 'Introduction to Capital' and 'Leading Principles of Marxism: a Restatement'). Also published in London 1971 by Pluto Press.
• Marxism and philosophy, London: NLB, 1972.
• Revolutionary Theory, edited by Douglas Kellner, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977 (A good collection, with a 60-page introductory essay on Korsch's life and work by Kellner).
• Ten Theses on Marxism Today, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1950/ten-theses.htm. Published in Telos 26 (Winter 1975-76). New York: Telos Press.A Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works) in German is edited by Offizin Verlag, Hanover, Germany.

• According to WorldCat there has been a publication in 1936 (London); but we may suppose that's a mistake