notes to Korsch
Christopher Cutrone
http://platypus1917.org/2009/02/15/notes-on-feb-15-reading-korsch-marxism-and-philosophy-1923/
Also, my article on Korsch can be found at:
http://platypus1917.org/2009/09/03/book-review-karl-korsch-marxism-and-philosophy/
I want to make a few other points now, in light of the overall trajectory of the primary reading group syllabus, and addressing Korsch's seminal essay from 1923 after our prior readings of essays from Lukacs's 1923 book History and Class Consciousness the last two sessions of the reading group.
Lukacs and Korsch are known as resuscitating the "Hegelian" dimension of Marxism after its neglect in certain respects in the 2nd International. In this, they followed Luxemburg and Lenin (and Trotsky). The issue of Marx's "Hegelianism" has been a vexed one for Marxists, with many Marxists rejecting Hegel or even rejecting Marx's early work as evincing bad Hegelianism. On the other hand, many Marxists who have championed the Hegelian dimension of Marxism have done so in terms of Marxism as a "philosophy" -- or, really, as an "epistemology" (means of knowledge) or as a "method" of analysis. What this means is that either Marx is a Hegelian philosopher or that Marx employs a Hegelian method. But neither characterizations will do. It is crucial that Lukacs and Korsch's sharp differences and departures from such conventional approaches be registered in our reading of them.
The key is in recognizing Marxism as a "dialectical" form of *politics*. This is indeed how Lukacs and Korsch could have ever in the first place been motivated to explore the neglected Hegelian dimension of Marxism and Marx's own work, which was as a result of their inspiration by Lenin and Luxemburg's political perspectives and practice. Lenin and Luxemburg motivated Lukacs and Korsch's reconsideration of Marx.
So, the question, for Lukacs and Korsch, was, in what ways could Marx and his followers Lenin and Luxemburg, be grasped as evincing a "dialectical" approach to both thinking and political action. This turns on the relation between, or a dialectic of theory and practice.
Just as the title of Lukacs's book is History and Class Consciousness, raising the question of what is the relation of history and consciousness (of political agency), the title of Korsch's essay is "Marxism and Philosophy," raising the question of what the relation is between philosophy and Marxism.
As I point out in my prior reading group notes and in my Korsch essay linked above, while Lukacs's book as the word "history" in its title, it is more of a "philosophical" investigation into Marxism and history, whereas Korsch's essay, while having the word "philosophy" in its title, is actually an investigation into the history of Marxism, the history of the changing relation between Marxism and philosophy, or theory and practice.
It is important to register that, for Korsch, Marx was not a political philosopher so much as he was a philosophical politician. Korsch is concerned with characterizing Marxism as a form of politics, including a form of "intellectual action." Marxism is a "philosophy" only insofar as it could be regarded as an "anti-philosophy" as well, because Marx and Engels regarded themselves as transforming philosophy as much as or as part and parcel of transforming society.
Marxism is not a new philosophy as much as it is a recognition and activity in furtherance of the possibility of transforming philosophy. This is similar to the fact that Marxism is not a new politics so much as it is a recognition and further activity of the potential transformation of politics. Marx sought to push the crisis of philosophy further just as he sought to advance the crisis of politics and social agency in bourgeois society/capital.
This is what gives Lukacs and Korsch's works their peculiarity, for they are metacommentaries on a not yet complete attempt to push a crisis and potential transformation. They are thus not histories or analyses nor are they philosophical arguments. They are not theoretical works in a conventional sense -- generalizing from phenomena -- but rather the works we read by Lukacs and Korsch are themselves attempts to make a political intervention -- into the transformation of Marxism they see as having been commenced by Lenin and Luxemburg.
That Lukacs and Korsch both recoiled from and abandoned and renounced their own attempted interventions in this process speaks to the difficulty of not only what they were trying to do, but the difficulty of what Lenin and Luxemburg attempted, which was not simply (!) social revolution, but, as part and parcel of this, the transformation of Marxism itself, its self-overcoming necessitated by the crisis of Marxism in war and revolution 1914-19 (or, more broadly, from 1895, Engels's death and the dawn of the "revisionist dispute" in Marxism that emerged in the wake of this, and 1923, the coincidence of Lenin's incapacitation and the definitive ebbing of the post-WWI revolutionary wave). If they had been successful, their own forms of political action and thought would have been transcended -- left behind as relics of the past. Because they were not successful, they stand as enigmatic monuments to the historical problem of Marxism, or, as standing riddles
in the task of Marxism as a philosophy of history.
This is precisely what gives Lukacs and Korsch's works their bedeviling "metaphysical" character, what goes on under the rubric of "Hegel(ianism)." It's what gives them their character, however frustrating, as "philosophical" works. This is where the end of Robert Pippin's short 2003 essay "On Critical Theory" that we read earlier in the syllabus, attains its saliency: "Perhaps [philosophy] exists to remind us that we haven't gotten anywhere." (Or, to provoke recognition of *how* and *why* we haven't gotten anywhere.) Or, put another way, what it means to say that Marxism has (unfortunately) become a "philosophy." This is the problem that Korsch (and Lukacs) set about trying to address.
-- Chris