Just Curious

Karl Korsch (1886-1961)

The next book I am going to commnent on is Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy.

Korsch is a forerunner of the school of critical theory, that has been dominating Marxian philosophy in the west since 1930s. Today it is one of the three major branches of philosophies in the West, the other two being phenomenology and exietentialism. The word "postmodernism" in fact was created by critical theorists like Theodor Adorno.

Born in Todstedt and raised in Thuringia in a petty bourgeois family, Korsch determined early in his life to become a lawyer. After a rigourous education every German lawyer has to undertake in the Universities of Munich, Berlin, Geneva and Jena, he obtained his Juris Doctorate at Jena in 1910.

After two years of research fellowship at the London School of Economics (1912-1914), Korsch was forced to return to Germany after the War broke out. Despite being a pacifist who refused to bear arm, he was wounded twice and was decorated twice with the coveted Iron Cross.

Upon his discharge from the army, Korsch was appointed to a professorship in law at the University of Jena. It was about the same time, at around 1919, that he became a communist militant.

Following the failed communist uprising in Germany in 1919-1921, Korsch started to write extensively on why and how the proletariat had failed, reaching his famous conclusion simulteneously with Georg Lukacs of Hungary and Antonio Gramsci of Italy. (A ground-breaking thesis that could be used to explain the culture war today in the U.S.) Namely, that the proletariat was philosphically and psychologically un-prepared to seize power, and that a material overthrowing of the economic infrastructure and and demolishing of the political superstructure of a bourgeois society must be preceded by the thorough refutation and abolishment of the bourgeois ideology, be it fundamentalist Protestanism or the "cult of property rights."

In 1923, Korsch was elected to the Thuringian Diet, and joined the Government of that state as Minister of Justice the same year. In fact, he accepted to lead the Justice Department in order to better facilitate an all-out armed rebellion. After the failure of the Hamburg uprising in 1924, he resigned his post, and was elected instead to the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic.

During the period 1929-1933, Korsch vigorously defended the Republic he despised so much against the encroachment of the Nazis. Following the burning down of the Reichstag in February in 1933, he was forced to flee.

Korsch pretty much spent the rest of his life in exile, in Denmark, England and finally in the United States. He became more or less cut off from the intellectual world. In order to support his family, he was forced to accept a professorship in the law school of Tulane University, and lived in a segregated society that never failed to thoroughly disgust him for a couple of years.

In 1945, he accepted a position in the Institute of Social Research at Columbia University, where he spent his next five years writing on sociology. It was also in New York where he collaborated with Kurt Lewin, of MIT, to establish the modern science of organizational dynamics.

Karl Korsch died in Massachusetts in 1961, a man whose passion was revitalized by the revolutions that have broken out everywhere in the Third World.

posted by James Chang @ 10:26 AM