Karl Korsch's Anti-Dogmatic Marxism
Nildo Viana
Karl Korsch is one of the most important thinkers in the history of Marxism. His contribution to the rescue of Marx's thought, deformed by social democracy and Bolshevism, and his discussion of materialist dialectics, as well as other aspects of his thinking, are permanent contributions to Marxist theory. This extremely important role for the development of Marxism, however, did not receive due recognition, obviously due to the predominance of pseudomarxism expressed in social democracy and Bolshevism, two positions criticized by him and in visible contradiction with the same. His works were fundamental to carry out another interpretation of Marx's thought and to deepen aspects of Marxism and one of the elements that stands out in his conception is the search for overcoming dogmatism. In this article we will briefly discuss his thinking and highlight what he called“Non-dogmatic Marxism” , something permanent in his works.
Karl Korsch was born in 1886 in Tolsted , Germany . Coming from a privileged social class , he studied law, sociology and philosophy. He received the title of doctor of law in 1911, from the University of Iena . He lived in England between 1912 and 1914, practicing and studying law. He returned to Germany thanks to the First World War, being incorporated into the army and wounded twice. Until that time he was a Simpati Zante socialism f abiano and after the war becomes revolutionary socialist, adhering to the USPD (Social Democratic Party Independent , dissent newly formed USP, German Social Democratic Party). With the emergence of the German Revolution of 1918, he radicalized and joined the merger of the independent socialists with the “communists” (KPD - German Communist Party), being elected deputy at the time of the Weimar Republic, with the strength of the workers' councils and several attempts of revolutions in the period (the final defeat of the German revolution was practically in 1921, although until 1923 there was still a strong radicalized workers' struggle). It is during this period of the German Revolution that he produced some of his main works and polemics, such as Marxism and Philosophy .
Korsch, from 1924 he became a full professor at the University of Iena and in the following years one of the main oppositionists within the KPD, until his expulsion in 1926. From 1928 he published articles and carried out other activities related to leftist positions (communism councils) and in 1933, with the rise of Nazism, he was forced to move to England, where he works as a teacher and writes one of his most important works, entitled Karl Marx . Then he passes through several countries, such as Sweden (living close to the German friend, the famous theatrologist Bertolt Brecht) and due to the Bolsheviks and false accusations of relations with Adolf Hitler , he finds it difficult to stay in the same country and lives briefly in the Netherlands and France, arriving in the United States in the second half of the 1930s. At that time, he closely follows the last great proletarian struggle before World War II, the Spanish Revolution, and supports anarcho-syndicalists, as well as writes several articles on the Civil War in Spain. In the United States, Korsch continues to work and write, and died in 1961 in this country. This brief biography serves to have a more contextualized notion of his production which we will analyze below.
The idea of a non-dogmatic Marxism emerges in Korsch's thinking from his own conception of Marxism. Korsch's reading of Marx's thought is based not only on a rigorous analysis of it, but also on a scholarly formation and an in-depth knowledge of Hegel's work. This, without a doubt, are the formal determinations of the process of constituting Korsch's Marxism, which has as its fundamental determination class struggles, especially the proletarian revolutions of the early 20th century (especially the German revolution, in which he participated) and the Spanish Civil War, in addition to the experience of the fascist counterrevolution.
The impact of the class struggle on Korsch's thinking, coupled with his reading of Hegel and Marx, allowed him to present a conception of Marxism quite different from that existing in his day and which was hegemonic thanks to social democracy and Bolshevism. The hegemonic conception of Marxism referred to the problem of orthodoxy and this, as in the nebulous world of religion, referred to sacred writings, especially by Marx and Engels (without differentiation between the two). Thus, after Marx's death, the authorized interpreter became Engels and, with his death, his authority was transferred to Karl Kautsky, at least until 1914, after which this role is attributed to Lenin, not without resistance and heresies . Later, Trotsky and Stalin would dispute the "real ring" , now of the new dogma called "Marxism-Leninism" and alongside Marx and Engels, Lenin's texts would also be sacralized (and again without differentiation).
Korsch's conception resumes historical materialism, and for that reason rescues the importance of the class struggle and the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to understand Marxism. Already in the early 1920s, he sought to understand what Marxism is, not only by reading the writings of Marx and Engels, but by understanding its content and its concrete historical formation. In his great work , Marxism and Philosophy , a set of essays published later as a book, he, in his controversy with social democracy, puts the essence of Marxism: “theoretical expression of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat” (Korsch, 1977). In other words, Marxism is not the work of Marx and it is not with dogmatic readings and quotes by this author that reality is understood and the proletarian struggle is carried out. This should not lead to the opposite error of thinking that Marx's work has no meaning or importance . Obviously, if Marx's work theoretically expresses the revolutionary movement of the proletariat , then it is the starting point and fundamental element for the advance of the proletarian struggle and the understanding of the reality of capitalist society. What changes here is that it is no longer just a question of reading and quoting Marx, it is necessary to understand his writings and his link with the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and understand this and the class struggle to advance Marxist thought.
The dogmatism criticized by Korsch consists of the process of seeking to resolve practical issues, understanding reality, only with quotes from some authors or works, without a deeper analysis of it, without contextualizing it and seeing which class it is expression in, and also without understanding its historicity and that in the face of changes in class struggles, it is necessary to go beyond past writings. That is why he opposed, taking inspiration from Hegel, on the one hand, ideology, frozen thinking of an era, and , on the other, theory, expression of reality ( Gombim , 1972 ). This new conception of Marxism, as opposed to the Social Democratic and Leninist conception (which Korsch, in the 1920s, will not yet be aware of until receiving criticism from the Bolsheviks), which understands it as a petrified thought composed of fixed and separate theses (" materialist philosophy " ; “Economic doctrine”, etc.) , will emphasize the critical revolutionary character of Marxism and its indissoluble link with the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat , breaking with any supposedly neutral and objective scientific ideology . Korsch takes up some fundamental categories of materialist dialectic, such as totality and historicity, which contradicts existing pseudo-Marxist dogmatisms. In this sense, Korsch's thinking acquires a radicality that was already found in Marx, but in another historical context and in the face of other problems, including the domestication of Marxism in universities and political parties.
Korsch synthesizes, in a much later text, precisely entitled A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism , his opposition to dogmatism and the character of his non-dogmatic conception, referring to the problem of dialectics:
“The first non-dogmatic result of this distinctive way of considering dialectics is that the study of dialectics does not make us revolutionaries, but that, on the contrary, it is the revolutionary transformation of society that acts, among other things, on the way men of a given period has to produce and change your thoughts. Materialistic dialectics is, therefore, the way in which, in a given revolutionary period, and during the various phases of that period, social classes, groups and particular individuals, create and assume new words and ideas. It is the search of forms, often desusadas and surprising as link their thoughts and those of others , collaborate in dissolving existing closed systems and replace them with more flexible systems, or, in the best cases, by any system, but u m a new movement of free thought, unimpeded, that quickly crosses the changing phases of a more or less continuous or discontinuous process (Korsch, 1982, p. 480).
Korsch's position is directly against the conception of petrified dialectic with its "laws". This is the reason why he compares Hegel and Marx, presenting the first as an expression of the bourgeois revolution, after the restoration , and the second as an expression of the proletarian revolution. Dialectical thinking is revolutionary thinking, even formally (Korsch, 1979 ). This revolutionary thinking is derived from its time and from the struggling classes. That is why, when discussing Hegel's philosophy, Korsch states that “with the further evolution of bourgeois society inevitably also disappears in bourgeois philosophy and sciences , once its revolutionary task, the revolutionary dialectical method, has been completed” (Korsch, 1979, p. 144 ).
The dialectic fluidization produced by Hegel comes with the revolutionary movement of his time, as well as its limits, because "it is not a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution in general, but the bourgeois revolution of s century s 17:18" (Korsch, 1979, p. 144) and does not express it in its entirety, but its final conclusion, not being the philosophy of the revolution but of the restoration. Korsch concludes:
“This double historical characterization appears formally in a double limitation of the revolutionary character of the Hegelian dialectic: a) the Hegelian dialectic, despite the dialectical fluidization of all the crystallizations found, produces as a result a new crystallization: the absolutization of the method itself and therefore of all the dogmatic content of the philosophical system built by Hegel on it; b) the revolutionary part contained in the formulation of the dialectical method is artificially accommodated by Hegel in the synthesis up to “circularity”, in the conceptual restoration of the reality given immediately and in the reconciliation with that reality, transfigured from the existing ”(Korsch, 1979, p. 145 ).
Marx's thinking, on the contrary, takes up the critical and revolutionary character of dialectics (Korsch, 1977; Korsch, 1983). This recovery not be must, of course, the genius of Marx ( although his intellectual development and learning you allow ram constitute a complex and profound version that would be difficult to occur without these determinations , but Korsch does not perform such a discussion ) , but the emergence of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. This link between Marx and Marxism, on the one hand, and the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, on the other, key to Korsch's non-dogmatic Marxism, had already been announced by Marx himself. At various times Marx announced that he started from the point of view of the proletariat (Marx, 1988), that the proletariat theorists were the communists (Marx, 1986) and that utopian socialism was a fragile expression of a moment when the proletariat was not yet it was constituted as a self-determined class (Marx and Engels, 1988), which Engels will deepen later (Engels, 1980 ).
In this sense, the revolutionary critical character of Marxism is derived from its link with the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and not due to s works or crystallized beliefs. Marx is linked to the proletarian revolution and for this reason the dialectical method assumes, in his works, a critical-revolutionary character.
Korsch always started from non-dogmatic Marxism to criticize social democracy , and especially Karl Kautsky (1971), as he did on several occasions . At one point he spoke in the name of Leninism [1] . Basically, his conception of Leninism was quite superficial. He conceived Lenin as a theoretician of and defenders of the soviets. This was the image of Bolshevism in Europe, at that time and with the media of that period and the situation of opposition to Russia and the period of repression and wars. His perception of Leninism was changing. Their fight at the III International against Leninists was done in the name of Leninism and the Soviets (workers' councils). Kors ch Lenin advocated a non - existent ideal and the Leninists, who were much more knowledgeable and close to the Leninist ideas were criticized for it and one of the argument s is that they would be in contradiction to the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leader .
However, it was only the mind after criticism of work Marxism and Philosophy and the translation of some works of Lenin as Materialism and Empireocriticismo (1978) , is that Korsch will reassess Leninism and qualify l the of "ideology," pseudomarxismo , or, as I sometimes put it, Marxism, but often in quotes. His perception of the true character of Leninism generated strong criticism of it, from the Preface to the book Marxism and Philosophy , suggestively titled Anticritica , to his later writings. However, in spite of his criticism of Leninism, he still maintained a certain perception linked to the hegemonic period of more radical Leninism (prior to Stalinism) and so he sometimes presented a robust interpretation in which he demonstrated to believe in some link between Lenin's work and Marx . This promoted problematic interpretations of the latter's thinking, such as the attribution of Jacobinism (Korsch, 1979) and even “centralism” (Korsch, 2011 to ; Korsch, 2011b), in the analysis of the Paris Commune (Marx, 2011), influenced by Leninist interpretation ( Lênin , 19 87 ; Viana, 2011a ; Viana, 2011 b ).
Undoubtedly, in addition to the influence of Leninist interpretation, another determination for Marx's misreading is the result of Korsch's anti-dogmatism. In this sense, the criticism of Marx is a demonstration of anti-dogmatism. However, anti-dogmatism can turn the other way around by becoming a dogma rather than an antidote against dogmatism. In other words, with the intention of being anti-dogmatic, it is possible to exaggerate the need for criticism and disconnection with the thought of an author who is fundamental to the revolutionary struggle, which can provoke disagreements not always with reason. Even so, Korsch's motivations were much more noble than those of others, such as those who intend to criticize Marx to replace him, or, as Freud would say, to " kill his father " to take his place.
The proposal for a non-dogmatic Marxism reinserts this conception in a perception that rescues historicity and totality. Korsch's principle of anti-dogmatism can be summed up in the idea defended in Marxism and Philosophy : " application of historical materialism to historical materialism itself ". What Korsch intends to do with this is to defend the coherence of Marxism. This conception demystified ideologies and all forms of consciousness, which came to be understood as social and historical products. Marx exposed this on several occasions and synthesized it in some formulas: “it is not consciousness that determines life, but life determines consciousness” (Marx, 1983) . The same was said by Korsch in relation to dialectics, which was reinterpreted by the pseudomarxists , as in the quote we made earlier . Even Korsch, as well as Lukács, Labriola, Mondolfo and others, noticed the differences between the thought of Marx and Engels, especially in the case of dialectic, dogmatized and hegelianized by the latter. When Marx and Engels were authors above criticism, Korsch did not succumb to this dogmatism and presented a conception of dialectic inspired by Marx and in opposition to Engels, although he did not always admit it (Korsch, 1977).
Korsch not only defended the principle of applying historical materialism to Marxism , but put it into practice in Marxism and Philosophy . He analyzed the history of Marxism in the light of the history of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and the whole of the class struggle . In this analysis, he identified three periods in the history of Marxism : the first, the birth of Marxism as a revolutionary theory, when the workers' movement had advanced and radicalized and Marx and Engels produced fundamental works; the second, marked after 1848 by the retreat of the workers' movement and the birth of social democracy; the third, marked by the resumption of the revolutionary workers' movement and the emergence of the works of Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. In his A nticrítica , Korsch makes a change in this periodization in order to remove Lenin, since he was a representative of the second phase and not of the third, therefore, his position was non-Marxist.
This analytical procedure was also used to analyze other later trends. His criticism of Stalin and Trotsky proves this. The basis of this criticism was the observation, somewhat obvious, that both of them drank from the same source, the Leninist ideology. This was nothing more than a "legitimizing instrument" of the Soviet Union, founded on the enslavement of the proletariat, where "socialism " was supposed to exist. [2] . Hence his thesis of the need for a “total and immediate break with Leninism which - apart from the character it had in the past - has now converted into its content and function into an apparently classless state ideology, but in reality, bourgeois and anti-proletarian ”(Korsch, apud. Kellner, p. 66). In his article on The Crisis of Marxism , he demonstrates that Marxism is in a difficult situation due to the workers' movement being in the same situation. The retreat of the workers' movement means the retreat of Marxism.
The fight against Leninism and its variants is a revolutionary demand based on the principle of totality. Rather than conceive - as many pseudomarxistas mechanistic and materialistic - the ideas as mere epifenô least Korsch understand that they are part of the whole and act on it, which means that ideas are part of the class struggle. It is precisely because of the principle of wholeness that Korsch stated that class struggle occurs everywhere ( 1973 ).
In his work entitled Karl Marx , he deepens the conception of historical specificity. He shows that for Marx's thought, a fundamental element is the recognition of the specificity of each historical moment, of each mode of production . This principle contributes to understanding Marxism itself, and the refutation of its character of science and philosophy, occurs in this bulge, because science is a social and historical product in contradiction with Marxism, in the same way as speculative philosophies. The expression “scientific socialism” must be understood in a specific and wide use, as Marx did not use science in the usual and hegemonic sense, but in the Hegelian sense, a totalizing knowledge of reality (without the ideological pretension of building “particular sciences”, neutrality , etc.). That is why he stated that Marxism is not a science, "in the bourgeois sense of the term" (Korsch, 1977).
In his later writings, he discussed Marxism in critical terms, according to his anti-dogmatic principle. This was sufficient for some pseudomarxists to claim that he "abandoned Marxism". This is due in part to his text on Marxism Today , which claims to be reactionary want to restore the social doctrine of Marx and Engels and underscores the importance of other trend s socialists, such as utopian socialism and anarchism . However, this supposed abandonment of Marxism is, at heart, a dogmatic approach that is more concerned with words than with things. In his latest text, O Tempo das Abolições , written after O Marxismo Hoje , he puts the need for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, of the State, of capital, of alienated labor. In other words, he defends the fundamental principles of Marxism and the proletarian revolution, elements that are inseparable for him .
That is why Karl Korsch's political link was with the so-called "council communism", a trend that emerged from the proletarian revolutions of the early 20th century through the formation of workers' councils and which expressed that moment of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle against the supposedly Marxist views expressed in social-democratic reformism and Russian Bolshevism. This dogmatic “Marxism” of political parties met opposition from the revolutionary workers' movement and its political and theoretical expression, advisory communism. Undoubtedly, it was due to these revolutions that there was a rupture between “party communists”, an avant-garde and leader bureaucratic tendency , and “council communists” , a trend that defended the self-organization and self-liberation of the proletariat. Undoubtedly, the latest trend rescued the critical and revolutionary character of Marxism and was therefore more in line with Karl Marx's ideas. Korsch was involved in this class struggle process, but it took some time to break through and to see the contradiction between theory and practice in the conceptions he called “pseudomarxists” and when he realized this he started to approach the various remaining groups of council communism and realize publications in magazines edited by such groups, in addition to maintaining contact with Pannekoek and Mattick, two of the main theorists of this trend. Finally, it is enough to realize that Korsch never abandoned his principle that Marxism is critical-revolutionary and not dogmatic, and despite some changes in his thinking, he maintained the coherence he demanded from the Marxist conception and hence his link and proximity to trends libertarians of their day.
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[1] This was enough for hurried and nominalist interpreters to find a "Leninist phase" of Korsch's thinking ( Kellner , 1982; Buckmiller , 1973). This was analyzed and criticized in more detail in another work (Viana, 2012).
[2] Korsch was one of several Marxist authors who understood that the Soviet Union was, at heart, state capitalism, having nothing to do with communism. As for the idea of "socialism", this was a Leninist invention that did not exist in Marx's thought and that, obviously, did not occupy Korsch's thought.