Korsch, Karl
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  1. Introduction to Capital 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1932
    Marx's book on capital, like Plato's book on the state, like Machiavelli's Prince and Rousseau's Social Contract, owes its tremendous and enduring impact to the fact that it grasps and articulates, at a turning point of history, the full implications of the new force breaking in upon the old forms of life. All the economic, political, and social questions, upon which the analysis in Marx's Capital theoretically devolves, are today world-shaking practical issues, over which the real-life struggle between great social forces, between states and classes, rages in every corner of the earth.
  2. Introduction to the Critique of the Gotha Programme 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1922
    Next to the Communist Manifesto of 1847-8 and the 'General Introduction' to the Critique of Political Economy of 1857, the Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875 is, of all Karl Marx's shorter works, the most complete, lucid and forceful expression of the bases and consequences of his economic and social theory.
  3. Karl Marx 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1938
    It is the purpose of this book to restate the most important principles and contents of Marx's social science in the light of recent historical events and of the new theoretical needs which have arisen under the impact of those events. In so doing we shall deal throughout with the original ideas of Marx himself rather than with their subsequent developments brought about by the various 'orthodox' and 'revisionist, dogmatic and critical, radical and moderate schools of the Marxists on the one hand, and their more or less violent critics and opponents on the other hand.
  4. Leading Principles of Marxism: A Restatement 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1937
    Marx's study of society is based upon a full recognition of the reality of historical change. Marx treats all conditions of existing bourgeois society as changing, ie more exactly, as conditions in the process of being changed by human actions. Bourgeois society is not, according to Marx, a general entity which can be replaced by another stage in a historical movement. It is both the result of an earlier phase and the starting point of a new phase, of the social class war which is leading to a social revolution.
  5. Lenin as Philosopher
    Some additional remarks to Anton Pannekoek's recent criticism of Lenin's book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1938
    Both in his revolutionary materialist philosophy and m his revolutionary jacobinic politics, Lenin hid from himself the historical truth that his Russian revolution, in spite of a temporary attempt to break through its particular limitations in connection with the simultaneous revolutionary movement of the proletarian class in the West, was bound to remain in fact a belated successor of the great bourgeois revolutions of the past.
  6. The Marxism of the First International
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1924
    On 28 September 1864 it was decided at an international meeting of workers in London to found the International Workingmen's Association. On 25 July 1867, Karl Marx wrote the preface to the first edition of the first volume of Capital. Within one single period of history, in the 1860s, both aspects of Marxism attained their full realization: the new autonomous science of the working class attained its developed theoretical form in literature at the same time as the new autonomous movement of the proletariat achieved its practical form in history.
  7. Marxism and Philosophy 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1923   Published: 1970
  8. A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1946
    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.
  9. The Present State of the Problem of 'Marxism and Philosophy'
    An Anti-Critique
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1930
    A fundamental debate on the general state of modern Marxism has now begun, and there are many indications that despite secondary, transient or trivial conflicts, the real division on all major and decisive questions is between the old Marxist orthodoxy of Kautsky allied to the new Russian or 'Leninist' orthodoxy on the one side, and all critical and progressive theoretical tendencies in the proletarian movement today on the other side.
  10. Three Essays on Marxism 
    Leading Principles of Marxism; Introduction to Capital; Why I Am a Marxist
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
    In these essays Korsch offers his thoughts on basic Marxist ideas.
  11. Why I am a Marxist 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1935
    For the Marxist, there is no such thing as 'Marxism' in general any more than there is a 'democracy' in general, a 'dictatorship' in general or a 'state' in general. There is only a bourgeois state, a proletarian dictatorship or a fascist dictatorship, etc. And even these exist only at determinate stages of historical development, with corresponding historical characteristics, mainly economic, but conditioned also in part by geographical, traditional, and other factors. With the deferent levels of historical development, with the different environments of geographical distribution, with the well-known differences of creed and tendency among the various Marxist schools, there exist, both nationally and internationally, very different theoretical systems and practical movements which go by the name of Marxism.
  12. The Workers' Fight against Fascism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1941
    We do not propose to discuss the 'task' of the workers. The workers have already too long done other people's tasks, imposed on them under the high-sounding names of humanity, of human progress, of justice, and freedom, and what not. It is one of the redeeming features of a bad situation that some of the illusions, hitherto surviving among the working class from their past participation in the revolutionary fight of the bourgeoisie against feudal society, have finally been exploded. The only 'task' for the workers, as for every other class, is to look out for themselves.