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A Non-Dogmatic
Approach to Marxism
by Karl Korsch
The documents here assembled are not meant as a contribution to the discussion for or
against Marxism that has been conducted in this magazine for so many months. There is no
use in discussing controversial points in any social theory (not even in that social
theory which is commonly described as religion) unless such discussion is part of an
existing social struggle. There must be several possibilities of action for the party,
group, or class to which the social theory in question refers. The difference may concern
social aims, tactics, forms of organization, or the definition of the enemy, of allies,
neutrals, or the master plan (if any) to be based on one or another way of judging a given
social situation or development. Yet the result of any such materialist discussion must in
all cases “make a difference” in respect to the actual behavior not of an
individual nor of a small group of people, but of a veritable collectivity, a social mass.
In this materialist sense, it is not even sure that the particular social theory called
Marxism has ever been the subject of a discussion in this country.
Various people have been asked from time to time why they are, or why they are not,
Marxists, just as they might have been asked why they believe, or do not believe, in God,
in science, or morality; in race, class, democracy, victory, peace, or the impending
destruction of all civilization by the atom bomb. There has also been some philological
and interpretative effort spent on settling the question of “what Marx really
meant.” Last but not least, there has been far too much of that most senseless of all
discussions which aimed at deciding which particular shade of the theories of Marx, Engels
and the several generations of their disciples up to Lenin, Stalin, or, let us say,
Leontov, represents the most orthodox version of the Marxist doctrine. Or, one step
higher, which of the various methods used at different times by Hegel, Marx, and the
Marxists truly deserves to be called the genuine “dialectical” method.
As against that altogether dogmatic approach which had already sterilized the
revolutionary Marxist theory in all but a few phases of its century-long development in
Europe, and by which the attempted extension of Marxism to the US has been blighted from
the very beginning, it is here proposed to revindicate the critical, pragmatic, and
activistic element which for all this has never been entirely eliminated from the social
theory of Marx and which during the few short phases of its predominance has made that
theory a most efficient weapon of the proletarian class struggle.
The documents reprinted below result in part from an earlier attempt at reemphasizing
just this element of the Marxist theory — an attempt that was made by the present
writer and a group of associates in Germany in the early thirties and which was then
temporarily interrupted by the anti-Marxist violence of the Hitler government. Of the four
documents two date still farther back to similar attempts that had been made in 1894 and
1902 by such non-dogmatic Marxists as Lenin and Georges Sorel. They were used as models
and as points of departure by the group of 1931 when it started on its new attempt at
de-dogmatizing and reactivating the Marxian theory.
The Lenin piece of 1894 (Document III) was directed against a book in which
the economic and sociological theories of the famous Narodniki theorist, Mikhailovski, had
been critically attacked by the then “Marxist” (later, bourgeois) writer, Peter
Struve. Of this important work of Lenin, unfortunately only a small part has appeared in
English (Selected Works of Lenin, vol. I) and that part does not include the
chapter from which we have taken the piece printed below. The particular interest of our
document lies in the fact that just on that occasion Lenin, himself a materialist critic
of the idealist “subjectivism” of the Narodniki, found himself in a position in
which he had to extend his materialist criticism, with equal fervor, to the abstract and
lifeless “objectivism” of Struve. In order to make Lenin’s argument fully
understandable, we quote the sentence of Struve which aroused Lenin’s ire. Struve had
found fault with Mikhailovski’s opinion that there are “no unsurmountable
historical tendencies which serve as starting points as well as obligatory limits to the
purposive activity of the individual and the social groups.” Lenin is quick in
discovering the non-revolutionary implications of this Struvean comment on Mikhailovski.
“This,” says Lenin, “is the language of an objectivist, and not that of a
Marxist (materialist).” And from this point of departure, Lenin embarks on his
demonstration of the important differences which separate the principles of the
“Objectivists” on the one hand, from those of the “Marxists”
(Materialists) on the other hand.
Document IV tries to bring out more distinctly the non-dogmatic character of
Lenin’s antithesis to Struve’s objectivistic version of the traditional Marxist
doctrine. For this purpose and for a series of further experiments in loosening up and
de-dogmatizing certain parts of the Marxist theory, the group of 1931 made use of the
similar experiment made by Sorel in 1902. According to Sorel, the six theses reproduced in
Document II below result from a process of “extracting the strictly
scientific elements of history from the theory of historical materialism.” In this
critical reformulation of historical materialism by one of the most scientific and most
pragmatically minded interpreters of Marxism in modern times, the least important point
is, in the view of the writer, Sorel’s special emphasis on the role of legal concepts
and the legal profession. What really matters is the attempt to clarify the various
concatenations that exist between the general terms of the materialist theory and of which
the law and its professional exploiters seem to be only one of a number of possible
illustrations. Most important, however, is the form in which Sorel has changed into a
positive inspiration for unfettered scientific research what till then must have seemed to
many historians a somewhat authoritarian laying down of the rules of writing history. (A
different impression might have been derived, perhaps, from a closer acquaintance with the
remarkably free application that had been made of the new “critical and materialist
method” by Marx himself. Yet the new weapon of the revolutionary class struggle had
already lost much of its critical edge in the hands of the first generation of the Marxist
scholars at the time of Sorel’s writing. And it is no secret that since then
revolutionary Marxism has lost out completely against the “stabilizing”
influences that were expressed theoretically in the growth of the old and the new Marx
orthodoxy — from Kautsky to Stalin. So the Sorelian operation has to be performed
once more.)
Finally, we have added a document which is meant to do for the famous “dialectical
method” what Sorel and Lenin did for historical materialism. The “Theses on
Hegel and Revolution” translated in Document I were first written in German
for the centenary of Hegel’s death, in 1931. As will be seen, they approach from a
totally opposite direction the whole tangle of difficulties which beset the problem of the
Hegelian dialectic and its (modified or unmodified) use by Marx and Engels. Dialectics is
here considered not as a kind of super-logic, that is, not as a set of rules to be applied
by individual thinkers in the process of thinking — just like ordinary logic, and
distinguished from the latter only in the sense in which so-called “higher”
mathematics is distinguished from those simpler and, in fact, long outdated rules which
are taught as “elementary mathematics” in our schools today. It is treated
rather as a number of characteristic phenomena that can be observed from without in the
sequence and development of thoughts in a given historical period.
The first “non-dogmatic” result of this changed approach is that a man does
not become a revolutionary by studying dialectics but, on the contrary, the revolutionary
change in human society affects among other things also the way in which the people of a
particular period tend to produce and to exchange their thoughts. Materialist dialectics,
then, is the historical investigation of the manner in which in a given revolutionary
period, and during the different phases of that period, particular social classes, groups,
individuals form and accept new words and ideas. It deals with the often unusual and
remarkable forms in which they connect their own and other people’s thoughts and
cooperate in disintegrating the existing closed systems of knowledge and in replacing them
by other and more flexible systems or, in the most favorable case, by no system at all but
by a new and completely unfettered movement of free thought passing rapidly through the
changing phases of a more or less continuous or discontinuous development.
Secondly, it appears by implication (from theses II and III) that there is no reason to
boast of the fact that both Marx and Lenin, after a first violent criticism and
repudiation of the old Hegelian “dialectic,” have returned at a later stage, in
a mood of disenchantment and partial frustration, to a very little qualified acceptance of
that same philosophical method that, at its best, had reflected the bourgeois revolution
of an earlier period. Here as in many other respects, the unfettered development of the
Marxian theory does not point backwards to old bourgeois philosophies and ideas, but
forward to a non-dogmatic and non-authoritarian, scientific and activistic use of the
Marxian as well as all other theoretical formulations of the collective experience of the
working class.
DOCUMENT I
Theses on Hegel and Revolution
(Karl Korsch, 1931)
I. The Hegelian philosophy and its dialectical method cannot be understood without
taking into account its relationship to revolution.
1) It originated historically from a revolutionary movement.
2) It fulfilled the task of giving to that movement its conceptual expression.
3) Dialectical thought is revolutionary even in its form:
a) turning away from the immediately given — radical break with the hitherto
existing — “standing on the head” — new beginning;
b) principle of contradiction and negation;
c) principle of permanent change and development — of the “qualitative
leap.”
4) Once the revolutionary task is out of the way and the new society fully established,
the revolutionary dialectical method inevitably disappears from its philosophy and
science.
II. The Hegelian philosophy and its dialectical method cannot be criticized without
taking into account its relationship to the particular historical conditions of the
revolutionary movement of the time.
1) It is a philosophy not of revolution in general, but of the bourgeois revolution of
the 17th and 18th centuries.
2) Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does not reflect the entire
process of that revolution, but only its concluding phase. It is thus a philosophy not of
the revolution, but of the restoration.
3) This twofold historical nature of the Hegelian dialectic appears formally in a
twofold limitation of its revolutionary character.
a) The Hegelian dialectic though dissolving all pre-existing fixations, results in the
end in a new fixation: it becomes an absolute itself and, at the same time,
“absolutizes” the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian philosophical system
that had been based on it.
b) The revolutionary point of the dialectical approach is ultimately bent back to the
“circle,” that is, to a conceptual reinstatement of the immediately given
reality, to a reconciliation with that reality, and to a glorification of existing
conditions.
III. The attempt made by the founders of scientific socialism to salvage the high art
of dialectical thinking by transplanting it from the German idealist philosophy to the
materialist conception of nature and history, from the bourgeois to the proletarian theory
of revolution, appears, both historically and theoretically, as a transitory step only.
What has been achieved is a theory not of the proletarian revolution developing on its own
basis, but of a proletarian revolution that has just emerged from the bourgeois
revolution; a theory which therefore in every respect, in content and in method, is still
tainted with the birthmarks of Jacobinism, that is, of the revolutionary theory of the
bourgeoisie.
DOCUMENT II
Theses on the Materialistic Conception of History
(Submitted to the 1902 Convention of the Société Française de
Philosophie,
by Georges Sorel)
1) For investigating a period (of history) it is of great advantage to find out how
society is divided in classes; the latter are distinguished by the essential legal
concepts connected with the way in which incomes are formed in each group.
2) It is advisable to dismiss all atomistic explanations; it is not worthwhile to
inquire how the links between individual psychologies are formed. What can be observed
directly are those links themselves, that which refers to the masses. The thoughts and
activities of individuals are fully understandable only by their connection with the
movements of the masses.
3) Much light is thrown on history if one is able to clarify the concatenation between
the system of productive forces, the organization of labor, and the social relations that
rule production.
4) Religious and philosophical doctrines have traditional sources; yet in spite of
their tendency to organize themselves in systems totally closed to all outside influences,
they are usually somehow connected with the social conditions of the period. From this
viewpoint, they appear as mental reflections of the conditions of life and often as
attempts to explain history by a doctrine of faith.
5) The history of a doctrine will be fully clarified only when it can be connected with
the history of a social group that makes it its task to develop and apply that particular
doctrine (influence of the legal profession).
6) Assuming that revolutions do not have the effect to make possible a greater
extension of the productive forces that are obstructed in their development by an outdated
legislation, it is still of the greatest importance to examine a social transformation
from this point of view and to investigate how the legal ideas are transformed under the
pressure of a universally felt need for economic emancipation.
DOCUMENT III
Materialism Versus Objectivism
(Lenin, 1894)
The objectivist speaks of the necessity of the given historical process; the
materialist (Marxist) determines exactly the given economic form of society and the
antagonistic relations arising from it. The objectivist, in proving the necessity of a
given series of facts, always runs the risk to get into the position of an apologist of
those facts; the materialist reveals the antagonisms of classes and thereby determines his
own position. The objectivist speaks of “unsurmountable historical tendencies”;
the materialist speaks of the class which “directs” the given economic order and
thus, at the same time, brings forth one form or another of resistance by the other
classes. Thus, the materialist is, on the one hand, more consistent than the objectivist
and reaches a more thorough and more comprehensive objectivism. He is not satisfied with
pointing to the necessity of the process, but clearly states the economic form of society
underlying the content of just that process, and the particular class determining just
that necessity. In our case, for example, the materialist would not content himself with
referring to “unsurmountable historical tendencies”; he would point to the
existence of certain classes which determine the content of the given order and exclude
any possibility of a solution but by the action of the producers themselves. On the other
hand, the materialist principle implies, as it were, the element of party, by committing
itself, in the evaluation of any event, to a direct and open acceptance of the position of
a particular social group.
DOCUMENT IV
On an Activistic Form of Materialism and on
the Class and Partisan Character of Science
(Karl Korsch, 1931)
1) There is little use in confronting the subjectivist doctrine of the decisive role of
the individual in the historical process with another and equally abstract doctrine that
speaks of the necessity of a given historical process. It is more useful to explore, as
precisely as possible, the antagonistic relations that arise from the material conditions
of production of a given economic form of society for the social groups participating in
it.
2) Much light is thrown on history by countering every alleged necessity of a
historical process with the following questions: a) necessary by the action of which
classes? b) which modifications will be necessary in the action of the classes faced by
the alleged historical necessity?
3) In the investigation of the antagonistic relations existing between the various
classes and class fractions of an economic form of society, it is advisable to consider
not only the material but also the ideological forms in which such antagonistic relations
occur within the given economic form of society.
4) The content of a doctrine (theoretical system, any set of sentences and operational
rules used for the statement and application of a theory or belief) cannot be clarified so
long as it is not connected with the content of a given economic form of society and with
the material interests of definite classes of that society.
5) There is no need to assume that the objectivity of a doctrine will be impaired by
its methodical connection with the material interests and practical activities of definite
classes.
6) Whenever a doctrine is not connected with the material interests of a definite class
by its own proponents, one will often be justified in assuming that the proponents of such
doctrine aim at defending by it the interests of the ruling classes of the society in
question. In these cases the theoretical uncovering of the class function of a given
doctrine is equivalent to a practical adoption of the cause of the classes oppressed in
that society.
7) From this state of affairs, and from its theoretical recognition, springs the
objective and subjective partisan nature of science.
This article by Karl Korsch (1886-1961) originally appeared in Politics magazine (New York, May 1946).
Other Korsch texts include
Marxism and
Philosophy (1923; New Left Books, 1970); L’Anti-Kautsky (1929; Champ
Libre, 1973); Karl Marx (1938; Russell & Russell, 1963); Ten Theses on Marxism
Today (1950); Three Essays on Marxism
(Pluto Press, 1971); and Douglas Kellner (ed.), Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory
(University of Texas, 1977). Many of these works, along with
a few other articles, can be found at the
Karl Korsch Archive.
See also A.R. Giles-Peters’s Karl Korsch: A Marxist
Friend of Anarchism.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxism-philosophy.htm
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