In histories of Marxism, Karl Korsch’s name is often linked with that of Georg Lukács. Two Central European intellectuals, from Germany and Hungary, respectively, Korsch and Lukács were both radicalized by the impact of World War I and aligned themselves with Russia’s October Revolution and the Communist International that was formed in its wake.
In 1923, the two men published works that sought to give revolutionary Marxism a more elaborate philosophical content: Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy and Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. The response in some quarters of the newly formed communist movement was distinctly frigid. Grigory Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader who served as chairman of the Comintern during the 1920s, dismissed the pair as “professors spinning out their theories.”
Korsch and Lukács sought to play a role as leaders of their national communist parties: Korsch served as a communist MP in the German Reichstag, while Lukács took up a position as commissar for education and culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Yet their paths sharply diverged from the second half of the 1920s. Korsch was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1926, while Lukács remained within the movement throughout the Stalinist period and beyond.
Having been driven from Germany by the Nazi takeover, Korsch went first to Britain and then the United States, where he continued to work as an independent Marxist thinker until his death in 1961. Korsch died before his writings were rediscovered by intellectuals of the New Left, with the first English translation of Marxism and Philosophy appearing in 1970.
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Auteur: Darren Roso
