*From The Archives- Proletarian Revolution And The Fight Against War

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *A Short Note On History And The Individual- A Tale Of Sorts

Click on title to link to the early Russian Marxist George Plekhanov's essay "The Role Of The Individual In History" that forms the philosophical backdrop to this little anecdotal commentary. Yes, I know, when the deal went down Plekhanov was on the wrong side of the Russian revolution of 1917 but every Russian Marxist, including Lenin and Trotsky, notes the debt they owe to the early Plekhanov. A debt we acknowledge here as well.

Commentary

I have spent no little amount of ink in this space over the last year giving some personal and political reminiscences concerning that key year of my youth, 1968. Among them I included my last ditch efforts to stay within the bourgeois political world fighting to elect Robert Kennedy as president- and then Hubert Horatio Humphrey. I still blush over that one. I do not propose to continue on, for the most part, in that vein this year as I believe that I have adequately made most of the important points already.

I do, however, have this one comment to make that may shed some light on a question that has plagued me since early in my youth, although I may have not been able to articulate it that way then. The question: What is the relationship between the individual and the flow of human history? As a long time Marxist I could make a long intellectual argument concerning this subject and the linked relationship between the two, and have done so in the past. Here I merely propose to use a personal event in my life to highlight the vagaries of the historical process even for one who firmly believes that history has some connectedness.

The impetus for this little saga is the fact that this year marks the 40th anniversary of my induction, as a draftee, into the American army in 1969. (Yes, I know that I am drifting perilously close to that oft-cited habit that I have cast scorn on in this space concerning oddball commemorations by others-but bear with me here.) That event hardly made me unique as some two million plus men (mainly) revolved through military service during that period. Although draft resisters got far more attention at the height of the opposition to the Vietnam War, and at some level rightly so, far more young men were like me- hating the war but patriotic or fearful enough of the alternatives (jail or exile) to be drafted. I certainly was no Bolshevik at the time and did not enter the military along with other working class kids with the idea of “bringing the war home” to use the parlance of the times. That understanding came later after my military service had ended.

I would, in any case, rather speak here of consequences of my military service and not the political wisdom of it. Many who served during that Vietnam War period came home shattered, forlorn, broken or otherwise afflicted. Some just came home and put it behind them, one way or another. A few of us became permanent oppositionists to bourgeois society. That is the point I find interesting and an appropriate subject for comment lo these many years later.

No question that had I not been drafted that I would have gone along on some kind of left-social democratic parliamentary track and today, probably, would be going ‘ga-ga’ over ‘comrade' Obama. Or worse. Moreover, as I have noted previously in commenting on other personal political anniversaries I came to opposition later than most of my “Generation Of ‘68” but find that I have stayed the course better for all that, certainly better than the vast majority who have made their peace with this imperialist society.

That, my friends, is what this little tale is all about. I did not have any input into the contours of Vietnam War strategy, or the opposition to it. That was left to “the best and brightest” of the Kennedy/Johnson cabal on the one side or professional pacifists/and social-democratic organizations like the Communist Party or Socialist Workers Party on the other. Yet, my time of decision was that during that time period and thus I was compelled to make judgments based on that reality. I ask: is that or is that not one of those little vagaries of history that Marx mentioned? Humankind makes its own history, although not always to its own liking. Nevertheless humankind makes it. That truth and the fight to put us in a position to “like" our own creation are what have kept me going. Enough said.

On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-Introduction to Capital (1932)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
Karl Korsch 1932

Introduction to Capital (1932)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First Published: as the introduction to Korsch's edition of Das Kapital in Berlin 1932;
Translated: by T. M. Holmes from the text as reprinted in the Ullstein paperback edition of Volume I, 1970;
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden, for marxists.org 2003;
Proofread: by Chris Clayton 2006; Ulli Diemer 2011.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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. Karl Marx proved himself to posterity to be the great forward-looking thinker of his age, in as much as he comprehended early on how decisive these questions would be for the approaching world-historical crisis. But even as great a thinker as Marx could not have grasped these questions theoretically and incorporated them in his work, had they not already been posed, in some form or another, as actual problems in the real life of his own epoch.

Fate treated this German veteran of ‘48 in a peculiar way. He was banished, by both republican and absolutist governments, from the original context of his practical activity, and thus removed in good time from the narrow, backward conditions of Germany, and projected into the historical mainstream which was to be the setting for his real achievements. By the age of 30 Karl Marx had achieved, through his study of Hegel’s thought, a profound and comprehensive, albeit philosophical, grasp of life. But now, precisely in consequence of the forcible transposition of his fields of operation, before and after the failed revolution of 1848, he was able, during his successive periods of exile, firstly in Belgium and France, and later in England, to come into immediate theoretical and practical contact with the most progressive developments in the real life of that time.

On the one hand there were the French socialist and communist movements, advancing beyond the achievements of the great Jacobin-bourgeois revolution towards new, proletarian objectives; and on the other hand the fully developed structure of modern capitalist production, with its corresponding relations of production and distribution, which had emerged in England from the Industrial Revolution of 1770-1830. These elements of Marx’s vision – French political history, English economic development, the modern labour movement – all ‘transcended’ the contemporary scene in Germany, and Marx devoted decades of thought and research to the incorporation of these elements into his scientific work, especially into his magnum opus, Capital. It was this combination of sustained energy and wide-ranging vision that lent to Capital the extraordinary vitality by virtue of which it remains entirely ‘topical’ in the present day. One might even say that in many respects it is only now beginning to come into its own.

‘The ultimate objective of this work’ is, in the words of the author, ‘to reveal the economic laws of motion of modern society.’ This statement already implies that Capital is not meant to be simply a contribution to the traditional academic study of economics. It is true, of course, that the book did play an important part in the development of economic theory, and has left its imprint on the technical literature of the subject right up to the present day. But Capital is also, as its subtitle declares, a ‘Critique of Political Economy’,[1] and this rubric signifies much more than the adoption of a critical attitude towards the individual doctrines advanced by this or that economic theorist; in Marx’s terms it signifies a critique of political economy as such. Looked at from the standpoint of Marx’s historical-materialist approach, political economy is, after all, not just a theoretical system involving true or false propositions. It embodies in itself an aspect of historical reality – or, to be more precise, it is one aspect of the ‘modern bourgeois mode of production’ and of the social formation that is built on it, one aspect, that is, of the particular historical reality which is critically analysed in Capital from its inception through its development and demise to its eventual transition to new and higher forms of production and society. If we think in terms of the academic categories we are used to today, then Marx’s Capital appears to be more an historical and sociological, rather than an economic theory.

But even this revised definition of Marx’s work, and the series of similar qualifications we might add, do not succeed in characterising the full range and depth of the Marxian scientific method and its subject matter. Capital does not belong to any one discipline, but neither is it a kind of philosophical allsorts, for it deals with ‘a quite definite object from a quite particular standpoint. In this respect Marx’s work may be compared with the famous book by Darwin on the Origin of Species. Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of organic nature, so Marx revealed the laws governing the course of human history. Marx approached these laws in two ways: on the one hand he outlined the general historical law of development, which is called ‘historical materialism’, and on the other he propounded the particular law of motion of the modern capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society it gives rise to. The comparison of Marx with Darwin is not based simply on the pure coincidence of historical dates (though it is true that the Origin of Species and the first part of Marx’s work on capitalism, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, both appeared in 1859). As Marx himself suggested, and as Engels made clear in his speech at Marx’s graveside, the comparison expresses a much deeper connection than this. In one of those profound and exquisite, though often seemingly digressive footnotes with which Marx almost overloads Capital, he relates how Darwin first drew his attention to the ‘history of natural technology’ that is, to the ‘formation of plant and animal organisms as installments for the sustenance of plant and animal life’. And he poses the question:

‘Does not the history of the productive organs of social man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former but not the latter?’

These remarks express perfectly the relation between Darwin and Marx, stressing not only what they have in common, but also the distinction between them. Darwin’s study deals with natural history in the narrower sense, whereas Marx deals with a practical socio-historical developments which man not only experiences, but also shapes. Marx, however, unlike some of the modern obscurantists and demi-theologians of the so-called ‘humanities’, did not draw the conclusion that the description and study of man’s social life permits a lesser degree of intellectual and empirical rigour and a higher ratio of subjectivity than the natural sciences themselves. Marx was inclined to work from the opposite position, and explicitly set himself the task of outlining the economic development of society as a ‘natural-historical’ process.

We are not yet in a position to judge whether, or to what extent, Marx carried out this imposing project in Capital. That could only be decided in some future age, when, as Marx anticipated, his theory would no longer be subjected to the ‘prejudices of so-called public opinion’, but would be assessed on the basis of a truly ‘scientific criticism’. As things stand at present, however, this is still a long-term prospect.

While it might be impertinent to attempt such a definitive judgement at the present time, it is appropriate to provide this edition of Marx’s Capital with an indication at least of the rather peculiar relationship between the realized and the unrealized portions of the work.

Marx’s work on economics presents itself to us today as a gigantic torso – and this aspect is not likely to be substantially altered by the appearance of the hitherto unpublished material still extant. Let us leave out of account for now the very broad outlines of Marx’s earlier drafts, in which the critique of political economy is not yet isolated from the critique of law and government, from ideological forms in general, is not yet distinguished as an autonomous and primary object of investigation – even then there remains an enormous gap between what Marx planned and what he actually carried out in his work.

In 1850 Marx settled in London where ‘The enormous material on the history of political economy which is accumulated in the British Museum; the favourable view which London offers for the observation of bourgeois society; finally the new stage of development which the latter seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia’ decided him to begin his political-economic studies again ‘from the very beginning’. In the period after his arrival in London Marx commented twice on the overall plan of the political-economic work he had in mind, firstly in the manuscript of the ‘General Introduction’, written down in 1857, but subsequently ‘suppressed’ until Kautsky published it in the Neue Zeit in 1903 and secondly in the ‘preface’ to the Critique of Political Economy, which made its appearance in 1859. Here is the first of these two comments: ‘The order of treatment must manifestly be as follows: first, the general abstract definitions which are more or less applicable to all forms of society ... . Second, the categories which go to make up the inner organization of bourgeois society and constitute the foundations of the principal classes; capital, wage-labour, landed property; their mutual relations; city and country; the three great social classes, the exchange between them; circulation, credit (private). Third, the organization of bourgeois society in the form of a state, considered in relation to itself; the ‘unproductive’ classes; taxes; public debts; public credit; population; colonies; emigration. Fourth, the international organization of production; international division of labour; international exchange; import and export; rate of exchange. Fifth, the world market and crises’.

Two years later Marx published ‘the first two chapters of the first section of the first book on capital’ as a separate part (some 200 pages long!) entitled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He began the Preface to this work with these words: ‘I consider the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; state, foreign trade, world market. Under the first three heads I examine the conditions of the existence of the three great classes which make up modern bourgeois society; the connection of the three remaining heads is self-evident.’

Only a fragment of the first half of these comprehensive plans is realized in the work on capital that was actually completed, partly by Marx himself, and partly by others. At the end of 1862, when he had already decided that the ‘continuation’ of the Critique of Political Economy should be published by itself under the title Capital, he wrote to Kugelmann that this new book (by which he meant not only Volume I of Capital as we know it today, but all the other parts too!) ‘really only deals with those matters which should form the third chapter if the first section, namely capital in general’. For a variety of reasons, some internal to the work and others extraneous, Marx decided at about this time to cut down appreciably on the overall plan which he had maintained virtually unaltered up until then. He decided that he would present the whole of the material in three or four books, the first of which would deal with the ‘productive Process of Capital’, the second with the ‘process of Circulation’, the third with the ‘structure of the Overall Process’ and the fourth with the ‘History of the Theory’.

Marx himself only completed one of these four books of Capital. It appeared as Volume I of Capital in 1867 and a second edition followed in 1872. After Marx’s death his friend and literary collaborator Friedrich Engels pieced together the second and third books on the basis of the available manuscripts. They were published as Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital in 1885 and 1894. There are also the three volumes entitled Theories of Surplus Value, which were published by Kautsky between 1905 and 1910, again on the basis of Marx’s manuscripts, and which may be thought in a sense to stand for the fourth book of Capital. Strictly speaking, however, they are not a continuation of Capital but an incomplete version of an older manuscript which Marx wrote as early as August 1861-June 1863. This was not intended to be a part of Capital but forms the continuation of the Critique of Political Economy of 1859. Engels himself planned to publish the critical part of this manuscript as Volume IV of Capital after excising the numerous passages he had already used to build out Volumes 2 and 3. But what Marx does in Volume I runs counter to this intention. Not even that part of the manuscript that had already been published in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is taken over unaltered, but is rather submitted to a thorough revision in the first three chapters of the new work. One of the most important tasks of future editors of Marx will be to provide a complete and unabridged version of the manuscript of the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy for this is the earliest central exposition of Marx’s system of thought, and indeed the only one that he ever completed himself.

Although there is an enormous gap between the project that was contemplated and the work that was completed, Marx’s Capital, even the first volume on its own, impresses us both in form and content, as a finished and rounded whole. We should not imagine that while Marx was at work on Volulme I he saw the other volumes completed in his mind’s eye, and deployed in the first book a strictly apportioned one-quarter of all his thoughts on the subject. This conception is discredited by something that Rosa Luxemburg emphasized 30 years ago in an excellent study of Capital. She wrote that decades before the appearance at last of the third volume in 1894, ‘Marx’s doctrine as a whole had been popularized and accepted’ in Germany and in other countries ‘on the basis of the first volume’, which revealed ‘not a trace of theoretical incompleteness’.

There is little sense in trying to solve this apparent contradiction between the content and the reception of Capital by saying that this first volume already gives a complete picture of the relation between the two great classes in modern bourgeois society, the capitalist class and the working class, as well as describing the overall tendency of present-day capitalist development towards socialization of the means of production, while the questions that are dealt with in the subsequent volumes, the circulation of capital and the distribution of the whole surplus value between the different forms of capitalists’ income (such as profit, interest, ground-rent, and trading profit), are of less theoretical and practical relevance for the working class. Quite apart from the fact that Marx’s theory in Capital states that there are three and not two basic classes in bourgeois society (capitalists, wage-labourers and landowners), it would be an unthinkable over-simplification of the theory to say that it derives the laws of motion and development of modern society solely from the sphere of production and the convicts and contradictions arising in this sphere, and that it does not take account in this connection of the process of circulation too, and of the structural integration of both aspects in the overall process.

The real answer to the problem is that the investigation Marx undertakes in the first volume is only formally limited to the productive process of capitalism. In actual fact, in his treatment of this aspect, Marx grasps and portrays the totality of the capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that emerges from it. He describes and connects all its economic features, together with its legal, political, religious, artistic, and philosophical – in short, ideological – manifestations. This comprehensiveness is a necessary consequence of the dialectical mode of description, an Hegelian legacy which Marx appropriates formally intact, despite his materialistic ‘reversal’ of its philosophical-idealist content. The dialectic may be compared with the modern ‘axiomatic’ method of the mathematical sciences, in so far as this method uses an apparently logical-constructive procedure to deduce from certain simple principles the results already arrived at through detailed research.

This is not the place to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of applying the dialectical method to political economy. Suffice it to say that this method is used, with consummate skill, in Capital, and that its employment for an examination of the process of production implies the necessity of including in this investigation the whole of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society based upon it. Now there are a number of difficulties which arise for the uninitiated reader precisely out of the peculiar ‘simplicity’ of the conceptual development of the first few chapters of Capital. These difficulties are bound up with the dialectical mode of description, and I shall deal with them later on.

This, then, is the most important reason why the first volume of Capital shows ‘no trace of theoretical incompleteness’, why this, the only part of the work finished of by Marx himself, gives, despite the author’s explicit and oft-reiterated limitation of its formal purview to the ‘productive process of capitalism’, a much greater impression of unity than does the complete work formed by the addition of the subsequent volumes. But there is another reason too, and that is the artistic form which Volume 1 achieves as a whole, in spite of a style that often seems stiff and unnecessarily constrained. Marx once wrote a placatory letter to Engels in response to his friend’s good humoured complaints about the protracted delay in producing this work; the words of this letter are applicable not only to Capital, but also to some of Marx’s historical works, especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

‘Whatever shortcomings they may have, the merit of my writings is that they are an artistic whole, and that can only be attained by my method of never having them printed until they lie before me as a whole. This is impossible with the Jacob Grimm method, which is in general more suited to works not diametrically constructed.’ (Marx: Letter to Engels, 31st July, 1865)

Capital presents itself to us then, as a ‘fantastic whole’ or a ‘scientific work of art’: it has a strong and compelling attraction for any reader who comes to it free from prejudice, and this aesthetic attraction will help the beginner to overcome both the alleged and the genuine difficulties of the work. Now there is something rather peculiar about these difficulties. With one qualification, which will be elaborated in due course, we can safely say that Capital contains, for the kind of audience Marx had in mind (‘I assume of course they will be readers who want to learn something new, who will be prepared to think while they are reading’), fewer difficulties than any of the more-or-less widely read manuals on economics. The reader who is at all capable of thinking for himself is hardly likely to meet serious difficulties, even with terminology. Some sections, such as chapters 10 and 13-15, on ‘The Working Day’, ‘co-operation’, ‘Division of Labour’, and ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’, and Part 8 on ‘Primitive Accumulation’, all of which Marx assured Kugelmann would be ‘immediately comprehensible’ to his wife, are indeed so predominantly descriptive and narrative – and the description is so vivid, the narration so gripping – that they can be immediately understood by anyone; and these chapters together constitute more than two-fifths of the whole book.

There are a number of other chapters, however, which do not belong to this descriptive type, and yet are virtually as easy to read, besides having the additional merit that they lead us directly to the heart of Capital. That is why I want to recommend to the beginner an approach that diverges somewhat from Marx’s advice on a suitable start for the ladies (wherein we may sense a certain deference to the prejudices of his own time!). I hope that the approach I recommend will enable the reader to attain a full understanding of Capital just as readily, or even more readily than if he were to begin with the difficult opening chapters.

It is best, I think, to begin with a thorough perusal of Chapter 7 on ‘The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value’. There are, it is true, a number of preliminary difficulties to be overcome, but these are all internal to the matter in hand, and not due, as are many difficulties in the preceding chapters, to a really rather unnecessary artificiality in the presentation. What is said here refers directly and immediately to palpable realities, and in the first instance to the palpable reality of the human work process. We encounter straightaway a clear and stark presentation of an insight essential for the proper understanding of Capital – the insight that this real-life work process represents, under the present regime of the capitalist mode of production, not only the production of use-values for human needs, but also the production of saleable goods – commercial values, exchange-values, or to put it simply, ‘values’. In this chapter the reader becomes acquainted, in the context of actual production, with the dual nature of the capitalist mode of production, and with the split character of labour itself, in so far as labour is carried out by wage-labourers for the owners of the means of production, in so far, that is, as proletarians work for capitalists. Given these insights the reader will be in a better position later on to understand the far more difficult investigation in the first three chapters, of the dual character of commodity-producing labour and the antithesis of commodity and money.

But we are not really in a position to tackle this just yet. For the time being we shall leave aside altogether those first chapters which have proved such a stumbling-block for generations of Marx readers, even though a considerable amount of their content would be accessible to us after having studied Chapter 7, especially the analysis of the ‘Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value’ in the first two sections of the first chapter. Marx declared, in the Preface to the first German edition that he had ‘popularised’ his treatment of these matters ‘as much as possible’ compared with their presentation in the Critique of Political Economy. But the third section on the ‘Form of Value’ is nowhere near as easy; in the thirteen years between 1859 and 1872 Marx revised this section no less than four times, and it does ‘indeed deal with subtleties’. Nor is the fourth section, on the `Fetishism of Commodities' very easy to read, but this is for different reasons, which will be gone into presently. The brief second chapter is quite easy, but the third is again extremely hard for the novice.

It is better then for the complete beginner not to try to come to grips at this stage with the opening chapters. After working carefully through Chapter 7, he should briefly scan Chapters 8 and 9, and then proceed to Chapter 10, on ‘The Working Day’, which is, as we have already said, a highly readable chapter. We should also observe that it is extremely important for its content, and that it marks, in some respects, a climax in the book. The eleventh chapter, with its ingeniously abstract arguments, which are only ‘simple’ in a dialectical sense, should certainly be passed over for the present, and from the twelfth we should pick out only as much as is necessary to understand the quite lucid distinction Marx draws in the first few pages between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ surplus-value. This is the distinction between increasing the surplus labour expended for profit by means of the absolute prolongation of the working day (Chapter 10), and increasing surplus labour by relatively curtailing that proportion of labour?time necessary to gain the subsistence of the worker himself, which is achieved by means of a general increase in the productive capacity of labour.

After this we move on to Chapters 13-15, which again were recommended by Marx as particularly easy reading. These chapters are easy, but in rather varying degrees. The simplest is the long fifteenth chapter on ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’, which represents, both in form and content, a second climax of the work. The thirteenth and fourteenth chapters, on the other hand, both present greater conceptual difficulties. The fourteenth chapter in particular, although it contains a few very simple passages, also introduces some distinctions which are difficult and intricate at first sight. It is advisable to proceed from the first sections of this chapter, which discusses the ‘Two-fold Origin of Manufacture’, straight to the fourth and fifth sections, which deal with ‘Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division of Labour in Society’, and ‘The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture’.

By this time the reader has already come to a preliminary understanding of a large and crucial matter. He has become acquainted with the actual process of work and production, the very heart of capitalism. It is now a matter of situating the process of work and production in its surroundings, and in the general process of which it is one phase. To this end we should turn next to Chapter 6 on ‘Buying and Selling of Labour-Power’, and then to Part VI on ‘Wages’, leaving out Chapter 22 on ‘National Differences of Wages’, which is rather difficult, even for the specialist, and reading for the moment just Chapters 19, 20 and 21.

The next step is Parts VII and VIII, which locates the process of production in the uninterrupted flow of reproduction and accumulation, that is in the continual process of self-perpetuation and self-development – up to a certain limit – of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that issues from it. Part VIII on ‘The so-called Primitive Accumulation’ is again one of the portions of the book which Marx recommended, as especially easy, for Frau Kugelmann and is justly famous for its breath-taking pace and electrifying verve. Besides being easy to read, this part which includes Chapter 33 on the ‘Modern Theory of Colonisation’, represents in an objective sense a third climax of the book. But the reader who is prepared to work eventually through the difficult parts as well as the simpler passages of the book should save this part up until he really does come to the end of Part 7, for Part 8 was intended by Marx as a final crowning touch to his work.

There are a number of reasons why this is advisable. In the first place the preceding chapters of Part 7 may also be classed by and large with the less arduous portions of the book, and so present no special hindrance. Furthermore, the beginner who comes to the chapter on ‘primitive accumulation’ too soon may well be misled into thinking, along with Franz Oppenheimer and many others, that the Marxian theory of primitive accumulation is the theory of Capital, or at best its essential basis, whereas in fact it is merely one component of the theory, indispensable but not predominant within it. It seems advisable therefore to read Parts 7 and 8 in the order in which they stand, and then, having achieved a provisional grasp of the general shape of the whole work, to proceed with a closer study of its detail.

There are two points above all which must be elucidated if we are to gain a deeper understanding of Capital. We have already touched upon the first point if mentioning that mistaken estimate of the significance of Part 8 in the overall theoretical framework of the book – a misjudgment that has wide currency both within and outside the Marxist camp. It is not just a question of this part however, but also of a number of other sections scattered throughout the book, and not developed into chapters in their own right. Among these passages are the fourth section of Chapter 1, on the ‘Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’, the third section of Chapter 9, on ‘Senior’s “last hour”’ the sixth section of Chapter 15 on ‘The Theory of Compensation’, and, perhaps most intimately connected with on ‘primitive Accumulation’, the two sections of Chapter 24 on the ‘Erroneous Conception by Political Economy of Reproduction on a Progressively Increasing Scale’ and ‘The So-called Labour Fund’.

All these discussions, and a large number of other similar passages too, have this in common, that they represent a critique of political economy – in a more specific sense than that in which the whole work purports to be, as its subtitle declares, ‘A Critique of Political Economy’. The critical intention of these passages is immediately obvious from the kind of language they use, from their explicit reference to the ‘misconceptions’ of individual economists (like Senior) or of political economy as such, and from their description of the matter in hand as a ‘secret’ or as something ‘so-called’, masking something really quite different.

We may call these passages ‘critical’ then, in the narrower sense of the word, but on closer consideration we and that they in turn divide into two different types of rather unequal importance. The first type is that of ordinary academic criticism, where Marx, from his superior theoretical position, entertains himself and his readers with gleeful devastation of the aberrant quasi-scientific theories of post-classical bourgeois economists. To this category belong such passages as the brilliant demolition in Chapter 9 of the ‘theory’ of the well-known Oxford Professor Nassau Senior, on the importance of ‘the last hour’s work’, and the refutation of another ‘theory’ discovered by the same ‘earnest scholar’ and still surviving today in bourgeois economics, the ‘theory’ of the so-called ‘abstinence’ of capital. These parts of Marx’s economic critique are among the most enjoyable passages in the book, and usually conceal beneath their satirical-polemical exterior a considerable fund of pertinent and significant insights, conveyed to the reader in what we might call a ‘playful’ manner. Strictly speaking however, these passages do not belong to the essential content of Capital: they might appropriately have been incorporated in the fourth book Marx projected, on the ‘history of the theory’, of which he wrote to Engels (31st July, 1865) that it was to have a more ‘historical-literary’ character in comparison with the theoretical parts (ie, the first three books), and that it would be the easiest part for him to write, since all the problems are solved in the first three books, and this last one is therefore more of a recapitulation in historical form’.

The second category of specifically ‘critical’ arguments in Capital are of a quite different kind. There are a considerable clamber of passages here which are less bulky but extremely important as regards their content. There is, for example, the delineation of that conflict over the limits of the working day, a conflict that cannot be resolved by reference to the laws of commodity exchange. Most important of all there is the final section of Chapter 1 on the ‘Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’, and the final part of the whole work on ‘The So-called Primitive Accumulation’ and the ‘secret’ it contains.

The Marxian ‘critique of Political Economy’ begins, as an economic theory, with the conceptual clarification of the real economic laws of motion and development of modern bourgeois-capitalist society.

This critique maintains the most scrupulous scientific consistency in order to follow through to their logical conclusion all the propositions advanced on this topic by the great economic theoreticians of the classical, ie revolutionary, period of bourgeois development, and concludes by exploding the very framework of these economic theories. Although in the section on the process of production and again, in the section on reproduction and accumulation, everything which can be said in economic terms about the origin of capital through surplus-value or unpaid labour is already stated, there still remains after all an unsolved problem to be elucidated, which proves in the last analysis, to be non-economic in character.

This problematic residue may be expressed in the following question: what was the origin, before all capitalist production began, of the first capital, and of the first relationship between the exploiting capitalist and the exploited wage-labourer? Already in the course of the economic analysis itself Marx had repeatedly pursued his line of enquiry almost to the point of posing this question – only to break off there each time; but now, in the final part of his work, he returns to this problem. First of all his critique destroys with merciless thoroughness the answer given to this ‘ultimate question’ of bourgeois economics not only by the straightforward champions of capitalist class-interests (Marx calls them the ‘vulgar economists’), but also by such ‘classical economists’ as Adam Smith. Marx shows that theirs was not an ‘economic’ answer at all, but simply purported to be historical, and was in fact nothing more than legendary. Finally he addresses himself, with the same merciless and methodical realism to this ‘economically’ unsolved and still open-ended question. He too proposes not an economic, but an historical answer – although in the last analysis his solution is not a theoretical one at all, but rather a practical one that infers from past and present history a developmental tendency projecting into the future. It is only when we appreciate clearly the way in which Marx deals with the question of ‘primitive Accumulation’ that we can understand the proper relation of this final part to the foregoing parts of his book, and also the position within Part 8 of the penultimate chapter, which concludes the historical examination of the origin and development of the acculturation of capital with a treatment of the ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’. These considerations also make clear the compelling methodological reasons why ‘The So-Called Primitive Accumulation’ belongs at the end, and not at the beginning or in the middle of Capital. It was for these reasons that Marx positioned it there, and, for the same reasons, the reader too should save it up until the end.

The other point which has still to be elucidated, concerns not the connection between the individual sections and chapters, but the way in which the thoughts and concepts themselves are developed. It also concerns the few really grave difficulties raised by certain parts of Marx’s work which we have not discussed yet – difficulties experienced not only by the untutored, but also by those who are at home in the subject, but are not philosophically trained. It is these difficulties that are chiefly responsible for the oft-reiterated complaint about the ‘obscurity of Capital’. The passages in question are, above all, the third section of the first chapter on the ‘Form of Value’, which we have already mentioned briefly, and one or two passages closely connected with it in Chapter 3, dealing with ‘Money’. Then there are a few other, rather less difficult parts, among them Chapters 9, 11 and 12, which we have also mentioned before, considered now in their proper relation to Chapters 16 to 18 on ‘Absolute and Relative Surplus Value’, which are often regarded superficially as a simple recapitulation of Chapters 9, 11, and 12. All these difficulties are integrally bound up with what is called the ‘dialectical method’.

The explanation Marx himself gave (in the Afterword to the second German Edition) of the importance of this method for the structure and exposition of Capital, has often been misconstrued – whether honestly or not – to mean simply that in the formulation of his work, and in particular of the chapter on the theory of value, Marx flirted here and there with the peculiar mode of expression of the Hegelian dialectic. When we look closer however, we recognise that even the explanation given by Marx himself goes much further than that. It implies in fact that he fully espoused the rational kernel (if not the mystical shell) of the dialectical method. For all the empirical stringency which Marx, as a scientific investigator brought to his observation of the concrete reality of socio-economic and historical facts, the reader who lacks a strict philosophical training will still find the very simple concepts of commodity, value, and form of value, rather schematic, abstract, and unreal at first sight. Yet these concepts are supposed to anticipate entirely, to contain within themselves, like a germ as yet undeveloped, the concrete reality of the whole process of being and becoming, genesis, development, and decline of the present-day mode of production and social order – and the concepts do indeed anticipate these realities. It is only that the connection is obscure or even invisible to the common eye. But the one who is aware of the connection, the author himself, the ‘demiurge’ who has re-created reality in the form of these concepts, refuses to betray the secret of his knowledge at the outset.

This is true above all of the concept of ‘value’. It is well known that Marx invented neither the idea nor the expression, but took it ready-made from classical bourgeois economics, especially from Ricardo and Smith. But he treated the concept critically, and applied it, with a realism quite untypical of the classical political economists, to the actually given and changing reality around him. For Marx, in contrast with even Ricardo, the socio-historical reality of the relations expressed in this concept, is an indubitable and palpable fact. ‘The unfortunate fellow does not see,’ wrote Marx in 1868, about a critic of his concept of value, ‘that, even if there were no chapter on ‘value’ in my book, the analysis of the real relationships which I give would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of the method of science. Every child knows that a country which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but for a few weeks, would die. Every child knows, too, that the mass of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labour of society. That this necessity of distributing social labour in definite proportions cannot be done away with by the particular form of social production, but can only change the form it assumes is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change, in changing historical circumstances, is the form in which these laws operate. And the forms in which this proportional division of labour operates, in a state of society where the interconnection of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange-value of these products.’

Compare this passage, however, with the first few pages of Capital, and consider what immediate impression these pages make on the reader who knows nothing as yet of the realistic ‘background’ to the author’s arguments. Initially, it is true, there are a number of concepts introduced here which are taken from the ‘phenomenal’ realm, from the experience of certain facts about capitalist production. Among these concepts is the one that expresses the quantitative relationship of various kinds of ‘use-values’ being exchanged for one another, the idea, that is, of ‘exchange-value’. This empirically-coloured notion of the contingent exchange relations of use-values promptly gives way however, to something quite new, arrived at by abstraction from the use-values of the commodities, something which only appears in the ‘exchange relationship’ of commodities, or in their exchange-value. It is this ‘immanent’ or inner ‘value’, arrived at by disregarding the phenomenon, which forms the conceptual starting point for all the subsequent deductions in Capital. ‘The progress of our investigation,’ declares Marx explicitly, ‘will show that exchange-value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or is expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider the nature of value independently of this, its form.’

Even when this progression is followed through we are not returned to anything like an empirical, immediately given phenomenon. We move instead, through an absolute masterpiece of dialectical conceptual development unsurpassed even by Hegel, from the ‘Form of Value’ to the ‘Money Form’, and then proceed to the brilliant, and, for the uninitiated, correspondingly difficult, section on the ‘Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof’. Only here do we learn that ‘value’ itself, unlike the corporeal commodities and the corporeal owners of commodities, is not something physically real, nor does it express, like the term ‘use-value’, a simple relationship between an available or manufactured object and a human need. ‘Value’ reveals itself instead as an ‘inter-personal relationship concealed beneath a reified exterior’, a kind of relationship integral to a definite historical mode of production and form of society. It was unknown, in this obscured and reified form, to all previous historical epochs, modes of production, and forms of society, and it will be just as superfluous in the future to societies and modes of production no longer based on producing commodities.

This example illustrates the structure of Marx’s descriptions of things. Not only has that structure the intellectual and aesthetic advantage of an overwhelming force and insistence; it is also eminently suited to a science that does not submerge the preservation and further development of the present-day capitalist economic and social orders but is aimed instead at its subversion in the course of struggle and its revolutionary overthrow. The reader of Capital is not given a single moment for the restful contemplation of immediately given realities and connections; everywhere the Marxian mode of presentation points to the immanent unrest in all existing things. This method, in short, demonstrates its decisive superiority over all other approaches to the understanding of history and society in that it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; it regards every historically developed form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Anyone who wants to derive from his reading of Capital not just a few glimpses of the workings and development of modern society, but the whole of the theory contained in the book will have to come to terms with this essential characteristic of Marx’s mode of presentation. We should be deceiving ourselves if we were to think we could find a less strenuous access to Capital by reading it, so to speak, ‘backwards’ rather than from beginning to end. Not that it would be impossible to read it like that. If we did, we should certainly be spared, for example, the trouble of coming to grips in Chapter 11 with a number of laws concerning the relation between ‘Rate and Mass of Surplus-value’, all of which are valid only if we disregard the possibility of ‘Relative Surplus-value’ – which is not even raised until the next chapter. We should be spared the discovery in Chapter 16 after working through a similarly ‘abstracted’ treatment of the laws of relative surplus-value in the preceding chapters, that ‘from one standpoint any distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value appears illusory’ inasmuch as it transpires that ‘relative surplus-value is absolute, and absolute surplus-value is relative’; and the discovery then that both categories in fact merely represent abstract elements of real, concrete surplus-value – which reveals itself in turn as nothing more than one, highly abstract factor in the overall descriptive development leading up towards the actual phenomena of the economic reality around us.

All this we could avoid. But it is precisely upon this stringent method that the formal superiority of the Marxian analysis depends. It is a method which leaves nothing out of account, but which refuses to accept things uncritically on the strength of a superficial common-or-garden empiricism soaked in prejudice. If we cancel out this feature of Capital we are left in fact with the quite unscientific perspective of the vulgar economics Marx so bitterly derided. Vulgar economics ‘theorises’ by consistently invoking appearances against the laws that underlie them, and seems in practice only to defend the interests of that class whose power is ensconced in the immediately given reality of the present moment.[2] It seems not to know, or not to want to know, that beneath the surface of this immediate reality there lies a profounder dimension, more difficult to grasp, but just as real; a dimension that embraces not only the given reality itself, but also its continual alteration, its origins, development and demise, its transition to new forms of life in the future, and the laws governing all these changes and developments. It may well be advisable all the same, even for the reader who is prepared in principle to submit to the dialectical progression of the argument in Capital, to scan a few pages of Chapter 16 before reading Chapter 11. This will reveal in advance something of the tendency of the argument in Chapter 11, a tendency we find on closer inspection to have begun much earlier even than this.

We have adduced a number of examples to illustrate the ‘dialectical’ relationship between an initially rather abstract treatment of a given object or nexus, and the subsequent, increasingly concrete, treatment of the self-same phenomenon. This mode of development, which characterizes the whole structure of Marx’s Capital, seems to reverse, or to ‘stand on its head’ the order in which given realities are ‘naturally’ regarded by the non-scientific observer. There is, as Marx declares repeatedly, no concept of wages in his analysis before the nineteenth chapter; there is only the concept of the value (and sometimes the price) of the ‘commodity labour-power’. Not until Chapter 19 is the new concept of ‘wages’, which ‘appears on the surface of bourgeois society as the price of labour’, ‘deduced’ from the preparatory concept.

This dialectical mode of presentation is also connected with something else which the dialectically uninitiated (in other words the vast majority of present-day readers, whatever their academic qualification) find difficult to understand at first. This is Marx’s use, throughout Capital and in his other works too, of the concept and principle of ‘contradiction’, especially the contradiction between what is called ‘essence’ and what is called ‘appearance’. ‘All science,’ said Marx, ‘would be superfluous if the outward appearance of things coincided exactly with their essence,’ The reader will have to get used to this basic principle of Marxian science. He will have to get used to the sort of comment that is often made in Capital, to the effect that this or that ‘contradiction’ shown to be present in some concept, or law, or principle (in, for example, the concept of ‘variable capital’), does not invalidate the use of the concept, but merely ‘expresses a contradiction inherent in capitalist production’. In many such cases a closer inspection reveals that the alleged ‘contradiction’ is not really a contradiction at all, but is made to seem so by a symbolically abbreviated, or otherwise misleading, mode of expression; in the case we have just mentioned of ‘variable capital’ this is pointed out by Marx himself. It is not always possible, however, to resolve the contradictions so simply. Where the contradiction endures, and the anti-dialectician persists in his objection to it, even as function of a Strictly Systematic logical-deductive treatment of concepts, then this opponent will have to be placated with Goethe’s remark on metaphorical usage, which Mehring refers to in his interesting study of Marx’s style: ‘Do not forbid me use of metaphor; I could not else express my thoughts at all’

Marx employs the ‘dialectical’ device at many crucial junctures in his work, highlighting, in this way, the real-life conflicts between social classes, or the contrast between the realities of social existence and the consciousness of men in society, or the contrast between a deep-going historical tendency and the more superficial, countervailing tendencies which compensate, or even over-compensate for it in the short-run. These tensions are all pictured as ‘contradictions’, and this can be thought of as a sophisticated kind of metaphorical usage, illuminating the profounder connections and interrelation between things. Exactly the same could be said of that other dialectical concept of the ‘conversion’ of an idea, an object, or a relationship into its (dialectical) opposite, the conversion, for instance, of quantity into quality. This is not used so often as the concept of contradictions but it occurs at a number of decisively important points.

A number of appendices are provided to assist the practical use of this edition of Capital. These include notes on English coins, weights and measures etc mentioned in the book. But in addition to these we have also included an appendix of great theoretical importance. This contains Marx’s famous recapitulation of his political and economic studies and the general conclusions to which they had given rise, which appeared as the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859. This resumé provides a penetrating insight into Marx’s development as a student of society and economics, and into the essential features of his materialist conception of history. This was the conception he had worked through to in the mid-forties, leaving behind both Hegelian philosophical idealism and revolutionary-democratic political idealism. From 1845 he worked with Engels towards the completely matured version of this theory which received provisional formulation in the Preface of 1859.

Here Marx explicitly condemns what is obvious anyway from the pages of Capital, that he did not remotely intend to turn his new principle into a general philosophical theory of history that would be imposed from the outside upon the actual pattern of historical events. The same can be said of Marx’s conception of history as he himself said of his theory of value; that it was not meant to be a dogmatic principle but merely an original and more useful approach to the real, sensuous, practical world that presents itself to the active and reflective subject. Fifty years ago Marx parried certain mistaken conceptions about the method of Capital, entertained by the Russian sociologist and idealist Mikhailovsky, by explaining that Capital, and in particular the conclusions arrived at in Part 8 on Primitive Accumulation, was not intended as anything more than an historical outline of the origins and development of capitalism in Western Europe.

The theories propounded in Capital may be said to possess a more general validity only in the sense that any searching, empirical analysis of a given natural or social structure has a relevance transcending its particular subject matter. This is the only conception of truth compatible with the principles of a strictly empirical science. The present development of European and of a few non-European countries already demonstrates to some extent that Capital may justly claim to possess such validity. The future will confirm the rest.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Footnotes
1. The sub-title, that is, of the second German edition, to which Korsch refers throughout. In this translation, however, quotations and chapter-numeration has been brought into line with the most accessible English editions (Moscow, and Lawrence and Wishart). These are based on the 1887 Moore-Aveling translation, itself based on the third German edition which was published after Marx's death.


2. One line of the German text has been jumbled at this point. I have supplied a probable reading by inference from the immediate context - trans.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-The Spanish Revolution (1931)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*******
Karl Korsch

The Spanish Revolution (1931)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First Published: in Die Neue Rundschau, September 1931
Translated by Karl-Heinz Otto, Andrew Giles-Peters, and Heinz Schutte
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I
The last foreign minister of the fallen Spanish monarchy, Count Romanones, reports that the overpowering victory of the republican parties (who in the municipal elections of April 12, 1931, obtained the overwhelming majority of votes in almost all - 47 out of 51! - provincial capitals) and the fall of the Bourbon monarchy which resulted in a few hours "was a surprise for all." And Leon Rollin, correspondent of "New Europe," who is familiar with the most intimate secrets of the Spanish opposition, has explicitly confirmed it. It was a surprise for the king, who had wanted these elections "sincerismis" (most sincerely) (and had at the same time providently transferred the greatest part of his fortune across the border); it was a surprise for the European press which still a few weeks ago had celebrated the last Spanish autocrat during his short visit to Paris and London as the "first politician of Spain." And it was a surprise also for the victorious oppositionalists themselves who had only counted on victory in the big cities and already had prepared for new revolutionary action.

Instead of this, in one blow the whole old order collapsed without any attempt at resistance. The hitherto most reliable pillars of the monarchy, the army and the church, abandoned the king almost immediately and put themselves at the disposal of the persecuted émigrés, the sentenced traitors of yesterday who formed the revolutionary government of today. They offered the new government the same traditional loyalty and fidelity with which already in 1808, after the abdication of Ferdinand VII enforced by a Napoleon, a deputation of the grandees of Spain addressed the new King Joseph put on the throne by Napoleon: "Sire, the grandees of Spain have at all times been famous for their loyalty to their sovereign, and your majesty will also find in them the same fidelity and devotion." The infamous chief of the monarchist Civil Guard, General Sanjurjo, did the same. This general, who had changed over to the republic from the monarchy immediately after its fall and was received with open arms by the new republican power holders, is the same person who later at the time of the Cartes elections suppressed, in the name of the republican-conservative Interior Minister Maura, the alleged conspiracy of the popular revolutionary hero Ramon Franco, and a month after that the real general strike and insurrection of the urban and rural workers in Seville and Andalusia. General Sanjurjo used such brutal measures that the conservative English "Daily Mail" congratulated the revolutionary Spanish government for its strength of character proven on this occasion.

But all of this was still in the future in the beautiful spring days of April. This revolution of April, 1931, was later gloriously characterized by its leaders and eyewitnesses as more a fiesta than a fight. This was indeed for the Spain of today the "beautiful revolution," following the description by Karl Marx of the French Revolution of 1848, which was followed even in the same year by the social catastrophe of the June defeat of the Paris proletariat and on December 2, 1851, by the coup d'etat of the third Napoleon. In Marx's well-known characterization, written in the middle of the previous century for revolutionary France, it was "the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because the conflicts which erupted in the revolution against the monarch were underdeveloped and slumbered side by side, because the social war, which formed its background, had only developed in a lofty existence, the existence of the phrase, of words."[1]

Indeed it is striking how little, in these first months between the municipal elections of April and the meeting of the constituent assembly (Cortes) in July, the newly formed provisional government, so aptly designated by the "Economist" as "republican-conservative and moderate socialist," was concerned with the social and class demands of the proletariat which required acute, practical immediate fulfilment. There is a striking difference between the two last European revolutions, which were unleashed in Russia in 1917 through the crisis of the world war, and in Spain through the new "peaceful" world economic crisis which has overtaken the world since the autumn of 1929. This difference is partly explained by the basically changed general European situation of today compared with the one of 1917-1920. It depends, on the other hand, on the thoroughly peculiar character of the Spanish workers' movement, which is not new but has already developed for the past sixty years.

First of all, there was never and does not exist in Spain until this day practically any Communist party. Neither are there signs that such a party might emerge in the near future. There was a time when the agricultural workers, vegetating in indescribable poverty in Andalusia and Estremadura, and the permanently overworked peasants of Galicia and Asturias, gaining from their tiny parcels of land a miserable support and the hated rent ("fuero") for an unknown landowner, listened attentively when they heard about the dividing up of the agricultural soil in the Soviet Union. But all this today is long gone. What appears today under the name of "communism" in the revolutionary movement in Spain is, as the Cartes elections of June 28 should have proven even to the foreign doubters, still only the shadow of a shadow. There are but three weak Communist sects, which are fighting more amongst themselves, and with the real revolutionary organizations of the Spanish proletariat, than with the bourgeois class enemy. Of these, one follows the orders of Stalin, the second those of Trotsky, while the third group alone, the Catalonian Federalist Communists led by the Spaniard Maurin, can be looked upon as a relatively home-grown product of the Spanish labor movement. None of these three directions exerts an effective practical influence within the Spanish labor movement. None of them is represented in the Cortes even by one single deputy.

However, the two branches of the workers' movement to be found in Spain which are also strong social forces have not in these first months dimmed the happy spring morning of the young Spanish revolution through an all too radical mounting of their particular class demands. It is not surprising that one of these two directions, the Social Democratic reformist party and union movement, has refused to raise these radical demands in the light of its whole statesmanlike and state-maintaining tradition, formed already during the pre-war period. But it must appear strange and surprising, to the highest degree for the other direction, the syndicalist revolutionary movement, not to have raised radical demands, in the light of the whole historical character of this movement. "If one looks at the workers' movement south of the Pyrenees only from the viewpoint of threats it contains to social peace, then the danger does not appear to come so much from socialism as from anarchism; of course less under the ideological form which it still had a few years ago, and in the platonic theories to which some survivors of the International may still commit themselves, and not even in the individual deeds of a number of fanatics, but rather from the new point of view of revolutionary syndicalism through which it can reorganize itself."

This historical prognosis, which was put forward by the bourgeois social politician Angel Marvaud in 1910, has been confirmed by the real development to a surprising degree. Today, after twenty years of further development of Spanish social democracy, which from its beginning represented a tendency of state preservation, and after the success accelerated by the war of the same state maintaining tendency in all other European social democratic parties also, the Spanish social democratic party stands, in spite of its extremely small number of members, with its 130 mandates as the strongest party in the constituent national assembly (Cartes). With its three ministers it is directly participating in the new bourgeois-republican governmental power, and even within this governing coalition, it is only still formally on the left wing, while in actual fact, however, it is much more on the right. It stands to the right of the radical bourgeois-revolutionary tendency which is represented in the present cabinet by the foreign minister Lerroux. And it stands far to the right of the federalist republican parties in Catalonia, Andalusia, and Galicia, in particular to the right of the popular-federalist party of the Catalonian state president Macia, who still to this day opposes in his area all demagogical instructions of the Madrid guardians of order with a stiff-necked and successful resistance.

The most glaring illustration of this character of today's Spanish governing socialists is provided by the fact that its leader, Largo Caballero, the present republican labor minister and at the same time chairman of the Social Democratic National Trade Union (UGT), possesses the dubious fame that he had already under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera participated in the government as a state councillor. At a time when the whole radical bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the revolutionary part of the working class fought with all means the unconstitutional regime of the dictatorship, and even the liberal and conservative ex-minister from the pre-dictatorship period boycotted the dictator and all his undertakings, there was a Spanish party loyal to the government, and that was the Spanish Social Democrats. They supported even the so-called joint committees (a kind of arbitration committee) which had been introduced by the dictator in imitation of Mussolini's labor-charter, and used the thus created indirect governmental organization for the coerced formation of a factual monopoly benefiting these hitherto relatively weak trade unions in their fight to eliminate the syndicalist trade unions prohibited and prosecuted by the dictatorship.

The fall of the dictatorship and the monarchy did likewise change this condition very little and not at all to the advantage of the revolutionary section of workers. The "joint-committees" of the dictator are still retained by the republic unchanged today, as are the direct measures of repression which the present "revolutionary" government applies to striking syndicalist workers through the Sanjurjos and Pistoleros they inherited from the dictatorship. But they serve much less the general purpose of a "defense of the state" than the much more palpable task of strengthening the reformist trade unions of the republican minister of labor Largo Caballero, who is also a reformist trade union secretary, through the renewed suppression of the syndicalist trade unions of the National Federation of Labor (CNT).

The aversion of the present Spanish social democratic party to energetically pursue any revolutionary proletarian class demands goes so far that the party considered their victory in the Cortes elections as being most inopportune. In accordance with a secret plan of the coalition parties, the Social Democrats were meant to be the opposition in the constituting National Assembly-now this role will perhaps be taken on by the right wing after some time. The socialists would have rather not been further participants in a bourgeois coalition government for a considerable period since by nature the freshly turned-over revolutionary ground calls for a new positioning of societal forces at great speed. Now, however, after their surprisingly large electoral victory, they had to be satisfied with announcing their categorical rejection of participating in a bourgeois government while simultaneously directing the three socialist ministers to remain on their posts until the final promulgation of the new constitution. In fact they can count themselves lucky in not having gained the absolute majority in the elections, for the discrepancy between their socialist talk and bourgeois deeds would have been much more embarrassing. And the pressure of the masses to part company with the bourgeois politicians and follow the course of the social revolution of the proletarian class would have assailed them with much greater force.

The tactics employed by the other line of the Spanish workers' movement were far more noteworthy than this "moderate" bearing of the Social Democrats during the initial developmental phase of the Spanish revolution now already coming, or so it seems, to an end. Anyone who in these weeks spent some time among the revolutionary workers of Spain and observed not only their theoretical programmes, but more so their practical activities and actual stance toward the new situation brought about by the April revolution, could not help considering the following impressions: perhaps there was a newly founded consciousness of power, or as I would rather suppose, the newly won freedom of movement was naively seen as a new era that would continue undisturbed after so many years of oppression. In any case, this whole great mass of workers, after sixty years of revolutionary propaganda and direct action, and a recent eight-year period of immensely accelerated powerful oppression from which they arose to a new life, was, nonetheless, still fanatically bound to their old revolutionary goals even today. Although they were still independent, active, and prepared for any sacrifice, at this one historical moment they never thought to wage from the beginning the "open warfare" against this new republican state that they theoretically declared against every form of state, with their traditional vigor or with still increased severity at the end. The bourgeois republic corresponded in no way to their programmatical demands; it only provided the momentary release from an immense pressure and compliance with some small but humanly practical and important wishes such as the freeing of their prisoners, a pause for breath in the never-ending persecution and a partial recognition of their organizations. Thus the revolutionary workers did not immediately oppose the new republic in a hostile manner, but were first and foremost concerned with consolidating their revolutionary mass organization, the syndicalist CNT, which had, after almost complete destruction, in less than two months gained a strength of 600,000 members and was still rapidly increasing its members, as well as looking after all other possible centers, so as to fashion a really free and autonomous worker's life in accord with their concept. When in mid-June they gathered in Madrid 432 delegates from all parts of Spain, representing industrial and rural workers, for their first national congress, they affirmed their traditional principles and expressly stated that this congress of the CNT "regards and will relate to the constituting Cortes as it would to every oppressing power." At the same time, however, they put forward a plan of minimum demands which they directed to this same Cortes, concerning those areas of social life they considered at this time as most important, namely: education and the school system ("as long as the state exists, one has to demand that the evil of analphabetism be eliminated!"), the freedom of the individual, freedom of speech and the press, the right of coalition and strike, the elimination of unemployment in city and country, and the breaking of the narrow bourgeois property concepts where they hinder the fulfilment of these productive demands.

One notices at first sight that among these demands there is not one which could not have been managed by a radical bourgeois and democratic revolution that was true to its own principles. In fact, there was not one demand that has not been recognized even by the liberal monarchists of the pre-revolutionary regime as theoretically justifiable. But nevertheless, at this hour not a single one of these demands has been fulfilled in revolutionary Spain, nor is their fulfillment being seriously considered. The provisional government, aghast at a definite and immediate break with the old powers, already during its first hour was concerned to again fetter, in concert with these old powers, as quickly as possible, this freedom-movement of the revolutionary forces created unavoidably in the movement of violent overthrow. It took advantage of the strike of telephone workers, beginning on July 6th in Barcelona as, at first, a mere trade union matter, later followed by strikes of solidarity in the remaining parts of the country, to provoke the uprising in Seville and the whole of Andalusia. It then put down this movement with brutal force and on July 24, 1931, ultimately prohibited by decree the syndicalist organizations in all of Spain, and thereby put the syndicalist movement "outside the law." With this complete return to the methods of the old militarist-reactionary system of suppression, the provisional government of the new Spanish state has, as it wished and intended, prevented the ongoing tendencies of a proletariat dissatisfied with the bourgeois revolution. Thereby and at the same time, it also impeded immensely the progress toward those immediate tasks recognized by itself, and which are regarded today, by the overwhelming majority of all classes of the Spanish people, as not postponable.

II
The immediate tasks of the present bourgeois revolution in Spain are above all the following: (1) creation of a new form of state which will at once maintain a large uniform economic area commensurate with the development of modern production and will satisfy the stormy and relentless demand of Catalonians, Galicians, and Basques for autonomous government of their own affairs in the fields of education, culture, public works, transport, law and police. (2) The immediate and complete separation of church and state, church and school, together with a return (without compensation) of those mobile and immobile goods of the people that are today possessed by the church: several thousand monasteries, and other institutions of the dead hand. Finally (3) the chief and central task - on the solution to which in all great revolutions of the last centuries the whole development, victory or defeat of the revolutionary principle decisively depended, from the great French Revolution of 1789 to the great Russian Revolution of 1917-the core task is and was in all cases the implementation of the agrarian revolution. The unsuccessful solution to this task already caused the last Spanish revolution of 1868 to fail and the Spanish republic of 1873 likewise to expire.

Of all the questions, as they stand today and fill the agenda of the Spanish revolution, the relatively easiest one to answer is that of so-called federalism. When viewed superficially from outside, it appears as a catastrophic danger to the new republican statehood when the Madrid central government (where there are also some followers of federalist Catalonia In. the parliament!) now permits the constituting Cortes not only to submit a unitarian, but an extremely centralist constitutional concept, and when at the same time the Catalonian "State-President" Macia arranged in his area a formal plebiscite which determined with an overwhelming majority, almost unanimous, a quite different concept of the constitution for the united Catalonian provinces, namely the so-called Catalonian Statute. But already the British "Economist" points to, and rightfully so, the extraordinary watering down of privileges which had actually been demanded in this statute "for the independent Catalonian State within the Spanish Republic," and which would not even measure up to what in the unwritten constitution of the British Empire is called "dominion status." And another prosaic Englishman calls what is presently formed under the name of "Generalidad de Catalunya" (as a cross between a state and a mere utilitarian association of provinces), in a highly disrespectful manner, "a kind of glorified county-council."

Be that as it may, one sees that the former extreme separatist Macia and his followers have already dampened their original demands for independence to a high degree. The stick lies with the dog. It is not accidental that the Catalonian state leaves to the central Spanish state authorities such matters as foreign relations, declarations of war, and post, as well as "indirect taxes and custom's duty." The Catalonian bourgeoisie is well aware that just because Catalonia is industrially the most developed region of Spain, it will also in the future be dependent on the total Spanish market for the sale of their products which today are secured by high tariffs, Already several decades ago the well-known revolutionary ideologist Miguel de Unamuno accused the Catalonian bourgeoisie in a similar situation, that during their negotiations for Catalonian autonomy, "they had exchanged their soul for a custom tariff."

On the other hand, through this intelligent moderation of the Catalonian demands, the Madrid central government is put in a position where it can hardly refuse its agreement to this quite acceptable proposal. When it hitherto has done so, when Madrid and Barcelona today oppose each other apparently on this question like two enemy camps, then it is in this case not merely a formal political controversy of principles. The concern here is not just a more general contrast between a backward servile and bureaucratic and courtly atmosphere of Madrid and the quite different atmosphere of Catalonia, which is not only industrially, but also socially much further developed (where incidentally the working class takes up a quite different position in public life than anywhere else in Spain since here it follows indivisibly the revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist line). The prohibition of syndicalist organizations decreed by the Madrid central government for the whole of Spain is in Catalonia to this day officially and actually being ignored.

Far more critical for the continuation of the Spanish revolution than the controversy between centralism and federalism is the unavoidable struggle between the old republican state and the real reactionary main force of the old monarchist Spain, the Catholic church. It is not as if the church were opposing the new republican state power with any kind of open enmity; quite to the contrary, the Catholic church (which has been until the fall of the dictator Primo de Rivera a loyal follower of the dictatorial regime and until the overthrow of Alphonse XIII, a true ally of the monarchy) put herself firmly behind the new republican state right from the day of the collapse of the monarchy. She did not even withdraw her fullest confidence from a government that had condoned the storming of monasteries in May, a government in which two loyal sons of the Catholic church served in the most important functions (the minister-president Aleala Zamora and the minister of the interior Miguel Maura). And when the reactionary Archbishop of Toledo, the infamous Cardinal Segura, had to flee Spanish soil due to a careless statement, it was the Bishop of Taranza who immediately referred Spanish Catholics by means of a pastoral letter to the young German republic, where Catholicism bloomed as peacefully as had never been the case under the Kaisers.

Yet just in this prudent conforming by the church to its defeat, suffered with the fall of the Catholic monarchist state order, there lies one of the greatest dangers for the future development of the Spanish revolution. Both as a national Spanish and international European power, the Catholic church very soon after the critical twelfth of April has begun a masterly battle of retreat, which at the same time already bore the seeds for a new attack. The Catholic party was the first and the only one of those old parties defeated in the April 12 elections who gathered together their followers and a large section of former monarchists (as well as their leading newspaper "El Debater" and their parliamentary group "Accion National") for the elections to the constituting Cartes on June 28. At the same time, it organized immediately on an international scale all leading Catholic newspapers of Europe in a unified defensive campaign against the alarming secularization of the new republican affairs of state in Catholic Spain: the "Vie Intellectuelle" of the French Dominicans, the "Correspondent" of the Catholic school "Montalernbert," the "Etudes" of the Jesuits, the "Vita e Pensiero" edited by scholars of the Milan Catholic University and the German "Hochland." The tendency represented today by all these modern Catholic newspapers is best expressed by "Vie Intellectuelle" which clearly and succinctly characterized on May 10 the emerging new situation: "It is said that the church has lost the battle. It is said too rashly. At worst she has lost a battle not of her own making, but rather that of her ally, the monarchy. Now there will be a battle to be fought, and this time in her own domain-and that is the battle of democracia cristiana. One must compare this with the declaration given by the present minister-president, Aleala Zamora, during the first days following the setting up of the new republic: "It is imperative that we have the cooperation of the elements of order, of capitalism, and the clergy, because without them the republic would be ephemeral and ultimately doomed, since her failure would infinitely protract the possibility of stabilizing this regime." Thus one can build up a sufficiently clear picture of one of the possible ways in which the republic can develop and will develop, when the radical break with the reactionary power, so far strenuously being avoided by the present republican powers, is not in the course of events violently enforced and accomplished by new and stronger societal forces.

The only form in which one can expect the unleashing of such new societal forces in today's condition of the Spanish revolution-which, however, is already clearly indicated by the recent revolutionary upheavals in Andalusia-is the confrontation with the agrarian question pending now by historical necessity-and it probably will take this form. One would have to write a separate essay if one were to sketch merely an approximate picture of the most miserable and suppressed position of the Spanish rural workers and the so-called independent small holders, whose hopeless misery indeed equals that of the landless workers. Or, of the monstrous contrast between the giant estates of the large property owners and the slavish life of the farm workers ("braceros"), spiced still with regularly occurring periods of endless unemployment, of their ever and again flaring and desperate revolts being crushed bloodily time and time again, of the waste and retarded growth of the agricultural production capacity thus conditioned. All parties representing the public consciousness of Spain have unanimously recognized these unbearable conditions for a very long time. But all well-meaning projects of reform have repeatedly come to nothing against the thousand secret and open obstructions whim were bound to arise in a country where the king, the officer-corps, the church and the leaders of the pseudo-parliamentary government parties of the ever-changing restoration period 1876-1923 were all rooted to their whole being, with all their power and privileges and emoluments in huge land estates.

All these forces, and their willing instruments, ruled society officially and unofficially: the ordinary countryside and the little and middle-sized towns were exploited by brutal profiteering for personal interest and the infamous "kaziks" who prepared the ground for election on behalf of the governing men in Madrid. All agrarian conditions in Spain have thus been resting for five hundred years now in one and the same disconsolate immutability, whim in recent times has become all the more pressing and inflammatory due to the manifold scientific and experiental evidence for the technical possibilities and economic productivity of a radical reform. Apart from this we must recognize the fact that a progressive industrial development has only taken place in a few provinces in the east and northeast, and that agricultural production in Spain therefore determines the whole economic and social life of the nation to a far different degree than in the industrially developed countries. The agrarian problem therefore is of immense significance to the fate of the present Spanish revolution. At the same time one could guess the fatal and ultimately insoluble problems a revolutionary government is confronted with when it meekly avoids any interference with dusty medieval privileges instead of solving this great problem with fortitude and disregard. And one can see, as the present "provisional government" has, that the first minute and insufficient projects toward social reform can only be won during and after an already progressing agrarian revolt which this government suppressed by bloody repression.

We cannot any better characterize the circumstances into which the provisional government of the Spanish republic is already today visibly deeper and deeper enmeshed than by recapitulating the description given by an open enemy of this government, who is at the same time one of Spain's largest landowners, Count Romanones, who wrote in the article in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" which we have already mentioned:

In the last instance it will not be the big cities which will force their guidelines on this new political order but rather the country. People in the country are less interested in the political regime than in the question of distribution of the land. And it is among the day workers in the fields where we find the greatest threat of the present hour.

The rural agitation, particularly in the Andalusian provinces, must not be neglected when one knows how to apprehend the lessons of history. What happened in the provinces between 1870-92, with "the Black Hand," a kind of Mafia of Camorra organization in the south of Spain, with the rising of rural workers in Jerez, with the convulsions of Cordoba, Espejo, Montjlla, etc; all these events will repeat themselves now with greater destructive force. The mentality of the Spanish rural populace is the same today as it was sixty years ago; the economic conditions of their life have not changed for the better and the means for containing them are weaker than yesterday. This rural populace is less isolated than half a century ago. It is in contact with its brothers in the cities, and is in some places organized in societies with most extreme convictions, and is far more inclined towards violent and tumultuous action than in 1873. Neither does this require any goading from Moscow; their souls have already experienced frightful storms before the winds of Russia blew over them; not only can the Soviet propaganda induce them to an uprising but it is rather their own tendency, developed through the social conditions under which they have lived for centuries.

As far as these well chosen words, fitting for more than one purpose, of Count Romanones are only a characterization of the present actually pertaining situation, we need not add anything. If, however, the unspoken purpose of his description is to frighten the hesitant and indecisive statesmen of the republic with these terrifying difficulties of fulfilling their task, then one must say that such a task as the radical solution to the agrarian problem in present-day Spain cannot be conjured away by little diplomatic tricks and playful magic - the more so when the task is clearly situated in the whole objective situation and is regarded with urgency by the overwhelming majority of all the people's classes. Whether those men who were called to the leadership of the first phase of the Spanish revolution through the election of April 12 and June 28 wish to further or hinder it, the starting point and content of the second phase of this revolution will nevertheless be the struggle over the agrarian revolution.

Note

[1] Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy’

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
********
Karl Korsch 1930

The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy’
– An Anti-Critique (1930)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Written: by Karl Korsch in 1930, as a response to criticisms of Marxism and Philosophy;
Source: Marxism and Philosophy. Karl Korsch, translated and with an Introduction by Fred Halliday, Monthly Review Press, 1970;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden for marxists.org, 2004, in its entirety.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I
Habent sua fata libelli [To each text its own fate]. In 1923 there appeared a work on a ‘problem of the greatest theoretical and practical importance: the relationship between Marxism and Philosophy’. It had a rigorously scientific character, but did not deny that the problem was practically related to the struggles of our age, which were then raging at their fiercest. It was prepared to receive a biased and negative theoretical reception from the tendency which it had attacked in practice. It might, on the other hand, have expected to get a fair and even friendly reception from the tendency whose practical orientation it had represented in theory, and with the tools of theory. The opposite occurred. The evaluation of Marxism and Philosophy by bourgeois philosophy and science evaded its practical premises and consequences, and interpreted its theoretical theses in a unilateral manner. Its representatives were therefore able to adopt a positive attitude towards the theoretical content of a work they had travestied. They did not provide a concrete presentation and criticism of the real theoretical and practical conclusion which all the analyses of the book served to establish and develop. Instead they unilaterally selected what, from the bourgeois point of view, was supposed to be the ‘good’ side of the work — its acknowledgment of intellectual realities. They ignored what was indeed the ‘bad’ side for the bourgeoisie — its call for the total destruction and abolition of these intellectual realities and their material basis: these goals were to be accomplished by a revolutionary class engaged in material and intellectual, practical and theoretical action. Bourgeois critics were thus able to hail a dissociated conclusion of the book as a scientific advance.[1] On the other hand, the authoritative members of the two dominant tendencies of contemporary official ‘Marxism’ sensed at once, with an unerring instinct, that this unassuming little book contained a heretical rejection of certain dogmas. Despite all their apparent disagreements, the two confessions of the old Marxist orthodox church still held these in common. They were therefore quick to denounce the book before their assembled Councils for containing views that were a deviation from accepted doctrine.[2]

At both Party Congresses in 1924 the relevant ideological authorities reacted by condemning Marxism and Philosophy as heretical. What is at once most striking about the critical arguments on which they based this condemnation is the complete identity of their content — a somewhat unexpected one for tendencies whose theory and practice diverge in all other respects. The Social Democrat Wels condemned the views of ‘Professor Korsch’ as a ‘Communist’ heresy, and the Communist Zinoviev condemned them as a ‘Revisionist’ heresy. The difference, however, was merely terminological. In point of fact there is nothing new in the arguments directly or indirectly advanced against my views by Bammel and Luppol, Bukharin and Deborin, Béla Kun and Rudas, Thalheimer and Duncker, or other critics belonging to the communist movement. (Their attacks are connected with the recent inquisition against George Lukács which I will discuss later.) They have merely repeated and developed ancient arguments of that leading representative of the other camp of official Marxism Karl Kautsky, theoretician of the Social Democratic Party. Kautsky wrote a detailed review of my book in the theoretical journal of German Social Democracy.[3] He was under the illusion that in attacking my work he was attacking ‘all the theoreticians of Communism’. The real dividing line in this debate, however, is quite different. 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.

This general situation of contemporary Marxist theory explains why the great majority of my critics were far less concerned with the more limited set of questions defined by the title ‘Marxism and Philosophy’, than with two other problems which the book did not treat thoroughly but only touched upon. The first is the conception of Marxism itself which lies behind all the propositions in my text. The second is the more general problem of the Marxist concept of ideology, or of the relationship between consciousness and being, onto which the specific problem of the relationship between Marxism and Philosophy eventually debouched. On this latter point the theses I put forward in ‘Marxism and Philosophy’ agree in many ways with the propositions, founded on a broader philosophical basis, to be found in the dialectical studies of George Lukács, which appeared about the same time under the title History and Class Consciousness. In a ‘Postscript’ to my work I stated I was fundamentally in agreement with Lukács and postponed any discussion of the specific differences of method and content that remained between us. This was then quite incorrectly taken — especially by Communist critics — as an avowal of complete accord between us. In fact, I myself was not sufficiently aware at the time of the extent to which Lukács and I, despite our many theoretical similarities, did in fact diverge in more than just a few ‘detailed’ points. This is one reason — there are others which this is not the place to discuss — why I did not then respond to the insistent demand of my Communist assailants to ‘differentiate’ my views from those of Lukács. I preferred to allow these critics to go on indiscriminately assimilating the ‘deviations’ of Lukács and myself from the one ‘Marxist-Leninist’ doctrine which alone brings salvation. Today, in this second unaltered edition, I cannot again state that I am in basic agreement with Lukács’s views, as I once did. The other reasons which previously restrained me from any full exposition of our differences have also long since ceased to apply. Nevertheless, I still believe to this day that Lukács and I are objectively on the same side in our critical attitude towards the old Social Democratic Marxist orthodoxy and the new Communist orthodoxy. This is, after all, the central issue.

II
Marxism and Philosophy advanced a conception of Marxism that was quite undogmatic and anti-dogmatic, historical and critical, and which was therefore materialist in the strictest sense of the word. This conception involved the application of the materialist conception of history to the materialist conception of history itself. The orthodox critics of both old and new schools opposed this. Yet their first dogmatic counter-attack came in the guise of an extremely ‘historical’ and apparently quite ‘undogmatic’ accusation. They charged that my work showed a quite unjustified preference for the ‘primitive’ form in which Marx and Engels had originally founded their new dialectical materialist method, as a revolutionary theory that was directly related to revolutionary practice. I was alleged to have ignored the positive development of their theory by the Marxists of the Second International; and to have also completely overlooked the fact that Marx and Engels themselves had modified their original theory in important ways, so that it was only in a later form that it achieved its full historical elaboration.

It is clear that this raises an issue of really major importance for the historical materialist view of Marxist theory. It concerns the successive phases of development through which Marxism has passed from its original conception up to the situation today, where it is split into different historical versions. It also involves the relationship of these different phases to each other and their significance for the general historical development of theory in the modern working-class movement.

It is perfectly obvious that these different historical phases are bound to be evaluated in quite different ways by each of the dogmatic ‘Marxist’ tendencies which compete with each other in the socialist movement of today and which, even on the theoretical level, clash with greatest bitterness The collapse of the First International in the 1870s prefigured the collapse of the pre-1914 version of the Second International on the outbreak of the World War, in that both produced not one but several different tendencies, all of them invoking Marx and fighting each other for the ‘genuine ring’ — the right to claim the succession of true ‘Marxism’. It is best simply to cut through the Gordian knot of these dogmatic disputes and place oneself on the terrain of a dialectical analysis. This can be expressed symbolically by saying that the real ring has been lost. In other words, dogmatic calculations of how far the different versions of Marxist theory correspond to some abstract canon of ‘pure and unfalsified’ theory should be abandoned. All these earlier and later Marxist ideologies must on the contrary be seen in a historical, materialist and dialectical perspective as products of a historical evolution. The way one defines the different phases of this evolution, and their relations to each other, will depend on the angle from which one starts such an analysis. In my work, there is a discussion of the connection between Marxism and philosophy, and for this purpose I have distinguished three major periods of development through which Marxism has passed since its birth and in each of which its relation to philosophy has changed in a specific way.[4] This particular approach is valid only for the history of Marxism and Philosophy. This is particularly true for the second period I distinguished, which is too undifferentiated for other purposes. I dated this second period from the battle of June 1848 and the subsequent years of the 1850s, which saw an unprecedented new upswing in capitalism and the crushing of all the proletarian organizations and dreams that had arisen in the previous epoch. In my schema, this period lasted up to about the turn of the century.

It would be quite possible to argue that this was too abstract a way of analysing the ties between Marxism and philosophy. For it involved treating an extremely long period as a single unity, and ignoring historical changes within it that were of great importance for the whole history of the workers’ movement. Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century there was no such decisive change in the relationship between Marxism and philosophy as that which occurred at the mid-century. For it was then that philosophy expired, affecting the whole of the German bourgeoisie, and in a different way the proletariat as well. However, a full history of the relationship between Marxist theory and philosophy after 1850 would naturally have to make certain other major distinctions in this period, if it were not to be content with tracing only the very general outlines of the process. In this respect my work did leave open a great number of questions. Yet as far as I know they have not been broached by anyone else. For example, in a famous passage at the end of his work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels refers in 1888 to the German workers’ movement as the ‘heir of classical German philosophy’. This might have been taken as more than just the first sign of the approaching third phase, when Marxism and philosophy began to interact positively once again. For Engels himself refers in his introduction to ‘a kind of rebirth of classical German philosophy abroad, in England and Scandinavia, and even in Germany itself’ — although this at first only involved the revisionist Kantian Marxists who were applying the bourgeois slogan ‘Back to Kant’ to Marxist theory. I described the dialectical materialist, critical revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels in the 1840s as an ‘anti-philosophy’ which yet in itself remained philosophical. It would be necessary to make a retrospective analysis of the four decades from 1850 to 1890 to show how this ‘anti-philosophy’ later developed in two separate directions. On the one hand, socialist ‘science’ became ‘positive’ and gradually turned away from philosophy altogether. On the other hand, a philosophical development occurred, apparently in conflict with the former but in fact complementary to it. This is first to be found in the late 1850s, in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, and then later in those of their best disciples — Labriola in Italy and Plekhanov in Russia. Its theoretical character may be defined as a kind of return to Hegel’s philosophy and not just a return to the essentially critical and revolutionary ‘anti-philosophy’ of the Left Hegelians in the Sturm und Drang period of the 1840s.[5]

This philosophical tendency of the later theory of Marx and Engels is not just to be found in the altered attitude to philosophy in Engels’s Feuerbach. It also had definite implications for the further development of Marxist economics: clear signs of this are already present in Marx’s 1859 Critique of Political Economy and in Capital. It had even more evident consequences for Engels’s special topic of the natural sciences: they may be seen in his Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring. Given all this, one can only regard the ‘German workers’ movement’ as the ‘heir of classical German philosophy’ in so far as it ‘absorbed’ Marxist theory as a whole, including its philosophical aspects, with the birth of the Second International.

But these are not the issues raised by those who have criticized the three periods I outlined in the history of Marxism. They have not tried to show that this periodization was useless even for the specific purposes of my investigation. They prefer to accuse me of tending to present the whole history of Marxism after 1850 in a negative light, as a single, linear and univocal process of decay suffered by the original revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels — not only in the domain of the relation of Marxism to philosophy, but in every domain.[6] They love to attack this position, though I have never adopted it. They compete with each other in pointing out the absurdity of a view they themselves have invented and attributed to me; that Marx and Engels were responsible for the degeneration of their own theory. They never tire of proving the undoubtedly positive nature of the process that led from the original revolutionary Communism of the Manifesto to the ‘Marxism of the First International’ and then to the Marxism of Capital and the later writings of Marx and Engels. Having first argued that the later Marx and Engels made a significant contribution to the development of Marxist theory, which no one denies, they end by slipping into a claim that the ‘Marxists of the Second International’ made a ‘positive’ contribution to it too. This is where it becomes obvious that there was a dogmatic preconception behind these attacks from the outset, though they all pretend to be concerned with the historical accuracy of my account of the development of Marxism after 1850. What this really involves is a straightforward dogmatic defence of the traditional and orthodox thesis that the theory of the Second International was basically Marxist all along (according to Kautsky) or at any rate until the ‘original sin’ of 4 August 1914 (according to the Communists).

Kautsky is the clearest example of orthodox Marxist prejudices about the real historical development of Marxism. For him, it is not only the theoretical metamorphoses of the different Marxist tendencies of the Second International, but the ‘extension of Marxism undertaken by Marx and Engels with the Inaugural Address of 1864 and concluded with Engels’s introduction to the new edition of Marx’s Class Struggles in France in 1895’ which ‘broadened’ Marxism from a theory of proletarian revolution into a ‘theory valid not only for revolutionary phases but also for non-revolutionary periods’. At this stage, Kautsky had only robbed Marxist theory of its essentially revolutionary character: he still, however, professed to regard it as a ‘theory of class struggle’. Later he went much further. His most recent major work, The Materialist Conception of History, eliminates any essential connection between Marxist theory and proletarian struggle whatever. His whole protest against my alleged ‘charge’ that Marx and Engels impoverished and banalized Marxism is merely a cover for a scholastic and dogmatic attempt to base his own betrayal of Marxism on the ‘authority’ of Marx and Engels. He and others once made a pretence of accepting Marxist theory, but have long since denatured it out of recognition, and have now abandoned the last remnants of it.

Yet it is exactly here that the theoretical solidarity of the new Communists with the old Marxist orthodoxy of Social Democracy emerges. Communist critics like Bammel argue that in my work ‘concepts like “the Marxism of the Second International” are obscured by an excessively abstract and schematized problematic’. This accusation conceals a dogmatic attempt to defend the ‘Marxism of the Second International’ whose spiritual legacy Lenin and his companions never abandoned, in spite of some things they said in the heat of battle. As Communist ‘theoreticians’ tend to do in such cases, Bammel avoids taking any responsibility himself for trying to rescue the honour of Second International Marxism. Instead he hides in Lenin’s ample shadow. He tries to explain to the reader what he means by attacking the allegedly ‘abstract and schematic’ way in which Marxism and Philosophy obscures the ‘Marxism of the Second International’, and he does this in standard scholastic fashion by quoting a sentence of Lenin in which he once acknowledged the ‘historical contribution of the Second International’ to advancing the modern workers’ movement.[7] Lenin was a great tactician and he made this remark in a highly complex tactical situation, when he was referring to the International’s practical contribution and not to its theoretical one. But Bammel stops short of his intention of extending Lenin’s praise of the good aspects of Social Democratic practice to Social Democratic theory. Instead of drawing this clear conclusion, he mumbles in ‘an excessively abstract and obscure way’ something to the effect that ‘it would not be difficult to show that it would be quite possible to say somewhat the same thing about the theoretical foundation of Marxism’.

Since Marxism and Philosophy I have written a study elsewhere of the real historical nature of the ‘Marxism of the Second International’. What happened was that the socialist movement reawoke and grew stronger as historical conditions changed over the last third of the nineteenth century; yet contrary to what is supposed, it never adopted Marxism as a total system.’ According to the ideology of the orthodox Marxists and of their opponents, who share much the same dogmatic ground, it is to be believed that the whole of Marxism was adopted in both theory and practice. In fact all that was even theoretically adopted were some isolated economic, political and social ‘theories’, extracted from the general context of revolutionary Marxism. Their general meaning had thereby been altered; and their specific content usually truncated and falsified. The endless asseverations of the rigorously ‘Marxist’ character of the programme and theory of the movement do not date from the period in which the practice of the new Social Democratic workers’ movement approximated most to the revolutionary and class-combative character of Marxist theory. In this early period the ‘two old men in London’, and after Marx’s death in 1883, Friedrich Engels alone, were directly involved in the movement. Paradoxically, these asseverations date from a later period when certain other tendencies were gaining ground in both trade union and political practice, which were ultimately to find their ideological expression in ‘revisionism’. In fact, at the time when the practice of the movement was most revolutionary, its theory was essentially ‘populist’ and democratic (under the influence of Lassalle and Dühring) and only sporadically ‘Marxist’.’ This was the result of the impact of the periods of economic crisis and depression in the 1870s the political and social reaction following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, the Anti-socialist laws in Germany, the defeat of the growing socialist movement in Austria in 1884 and the violent suppression of the movement for an eight-hour day in America in 1886. However, the 1890s saw a new industrial boom in Europe, especially in Germany, and therewith the first signs appeared of a ‘more democratic’ use of state power on the continent of Europe. This process included the French amnesty for the Communards in 188o, and the lapsing of the anti-socialist laws in Germany in 1890. In this new practical context, formal avowals of the Marxist system as a whole emerged as a kind of theoretical defence and metaphysical consolation. In this sense, one can actually invert the generally accepted relationship between Kautskyian ‘Marxism’ and Bernsteinian ‘revisionism’, and define Kautsky’s orthodox Marxism as the theoretical obverse and symmetrical complement of Bernstein’s revisionism.[10]

In the light of this real historical situation, the complaints of orthodox Marxist critics against my work are not only unjustified but null and void. I am alleged to have a predilection for the ‘primitive’ form of the first historical version of the theory of Marx and Engels, and to have disregarded its positive development by Marx and Engels themselves , and by other Marxists in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is claimed that the ‘Marxism of the Second International’ represents an advance on original Marxist theory. Yet in fact it was a new historical form of proletarian class theory, which emerged from the altered practical context of the class struggle in a new historical epoch. Its relationship to the earlier or later versions of the theory of Marx and Engels is very different from, and essentially more complex than, the way it is presented by those who talk of a positive development, or conversely of a formal stagnation or regression and decay of Marx’s theory in the ‘Marxism of the Second International’. Marxism is therefore in no way a socialist theory that has been ‘superseded’ by the present outlook of the workers’ movement, as Kautsky maintains (formally he refers only to its earlier version, the ‘primitive Marxism of the Communist Manifesto’, but actually he includes all the later components of Marx and Engels’s theory as well). Nor is Marxism what it was claimed to be by the representatives of the revolutionary tendency within orthodox Social Democratic Marxism at the start of the third period towards 1900 or what some Marxists still consider it to be. It is not a theory that has miraculously anticipated the future development of the workers’ movement for a long time to come. Consequently it cannot be said that the subsequent practical progress of the proletariat has, as it were, lagged behind its own theory or that it will only gradually come to occupy the framework allotted to it by this theory.” When the SPD became a ‘Marxist’ party (a process completed with the Erfurt Programme written by Kautsky and Bernstein in 1891) a gap developed between its highly articulated revolutionary ‘Marxist’ theory and a practice that was far behind this revolutionary theory; in some respects it directly contradicted it. This gap was in fact obvious, and it later came to be felt more and more acutely by all the vital forces in the Party (whether on the Left or Right) and its existence was denied only by the orthodox Marxists of the Centre. This gap can easily be explained by the fact that in this historical phase ‘Marxism’, while formally accepted by the workers’ movement, was from the start not a true theory, in the sense of being ‘nothing other than a general expression of the real historical movement’ (Marx). On the contrary it was always an ideology that had been adopted ‘from outside’ in a pre-established form.

In this situation such ‘orthodox Marxists’ as Kautsky and Lenin made a permanent virtue out of a temporary necessity. They energetically defended the idea that socialism can only be brought to the workers ‘from outside’, by bourgeois intellectuals who are allied to the workers’ movement.[12] This was also true of Left radicals like Rosa Luxemburg who talked of the ‘stagnation of Marxism’ and explained it by contrasting Marx to the proletariat: the one had creative power because he was armed with all the resources of a bourgeois education, while the other remains tied to ‘the social conditions of existence in our society’, which will continue unaltered throughout the capitalist epoch.[13] The truth is that a historical fact provides a materialist explanation of this apparent contradiction between theory and practice in the ‘Marxist’ Second International, and a rational solution for all the mysteries which the orthodox Marxists of that time devised to explain it. The fact is this. The workers’ movement at that time formally adopted ‘Marxism’ as its ideology; yet although its effective practice was now on a broader basis than before, it had in no way reached the heights of general and theoretical achievement earlier attained by the revolutionary movement and proletarian class struggle on a narrower basis. This height was attained during the final phase of the firs major capitalist cycle that came to an end towards 1850. At that time, the workers’ movement had achieved a peak of development. But it then came to a temporary yet complete halt, and only revived slowly, as conditions changed. Marx and Engels had initially conceived their revolutionary theory in direct relation to the practical revolutionary movement, but when this died down they could only continue their work as theory. It is true that this later development of Marxist theory was never just the production of ‘purely theoretical’ study; it was always a theoretical reflection of the latest practical experiences of the class struggle which was reawakening in various ways. Nevertheless it is clear that the theory of Marx and Engels was progressing towards an ever higher level of theoretical perfection although it was no longer directly related to the practice of the worker’s movement. Thus two processes unfolded side by side in relative independence of each other. One was the development under novel conditions of the old theory which had arisen in a previous historical epoch. The other was the new practice of the workers’ movement. It is this which explains the literally ‘anachronistic’ height which Marxist theory reached and surpassed in this period, generally and philosophically, in the work of Marx, Engels and some of their disciples. This is also why it was wholly impossible for this highly elaborate Marxist theory to be effectively and not just formally assimilated by the proletarian movement, whose practice reawakened during the last third of the nineteenth century.[14]

III
Orthodox Marxists, whether Social Democrats or Communists, have a second major criticism. This concerns my thesis in Marxism and Philosophy that there needs to be a new appraisal of the relation between philosophy and Marxism in the third phase of the development of Marxism which began at the turn of the century. In the period before this, various trends within Marxism had neglected and minimized the revolutionary philosophical content of the teaching of Marx and Engels — a neglect which took various forms but had a common outcome. By contrast, Marxism and Philosophy aimed to re-emphasize this philosophical side of Marxism. In doing so it stood opposed to all those groups within German and international Marxism which had earlier appeared as consciously Kantian, Machian or other philosophical ‘revisions’ of Marxism. The most prominent of these trends, which developed among the dominant centrist group within Orthodox Marxist Social Democracy, came more and more to adopt an anti-philosophical, scientifico-positivist conception of Marxism. Even such orthodox revolutionaries as Franz Mehring paid tribute to this view by endorsing its disdain for all philosophical ‘fantasies’. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that my conception of the revolutionary tasks of philosophy today was if possible even more antagonistic to a third trend. This was a tendency which had mainly emerged from the two factions of Russian Marxism and was now chiefly represented by the theoreticians of the new Bolshevik ‘Marxism-Leninism’.

Both Georg Lukács’s studies on dialectical materialism and the first edition of my own work appeared in 1923. As soon as they became known, they were attacked with extraordinary hostility by the Party press in Russia and everywhere else. This was mainly due to the fact that the leadership of the Russian Party, under the slogan of ‘propagating Leninism’, had by then begun their campaign to ‘Bolshevize’ the ideology of all the non-Russian Parties that belonged to the Communist International.[15] This coincided with a sharpening of the struggle among Lenin’s successors for the legacy of Leninism (which had begun during his lifetime), and with the events of October and November 1923 in Germany which constituted a major defeat for the political practice of international Communism in the West. The central element of this ‘Bolshevized’ ideology was a strictly philosophical ideology that claimed to restore the true unfalsified philosophy of Marx. On this basis, it aimed to combat all other philosophical tendencies within the workers’ movement.

As it moved westwards, this Marxist-Leninist philosophy encountered the works of Lukács, myself and other ‘Western’ Communists which formed an antagonistic philosophical tendency within the Communist International itself. This then led to the first real and direct philosophical discussion between the two revolutionary trends that had developed within the pre-war Social Democratic International. These were united only superficially in the Communist International, although their disagreements had hitherto been confined to political and tactical questions.[16] For certain historical reasons to be mentioned below, this philosophical discussion was only a weak echo of the political and tactical disputes that the two sides had conducted so fiercely some years before. It was soon obscured by the factional disputes that from 1925 onwards emerged in the Russian Party and which were then fought out mote and more fiercely in all the other Communist Parties. In spite of this, the discussion did have a certain importance for a time within the overall development. For it was a first attempt to break through what a Russian critic, who was extremely well informed on the theoretical situation on both sides, called the ,mutual impenetrability’ that had hitherto prevailed between the ideological positions of Russian and of Western Communism.[17]

Let us sum up this philosophical dispute of 1924 in the ideological form that it took in the minds of those who participated in it. It was a dispute between, on the one hand, the Leninist interpretation of Marx and Engels’s materialism[18] which had already been formally canonized in Russia and, on the other hand, what were alleged to be views that ‘deviated’ from this canon in the direction of idealism, of Kant’s critical epistemology and of Hegel’s idealist dialectic. These were the views of George Lukács; and a number of other theoreticians in the German and Hungarian Communist Parties who were regarded with varying degrees of justice as his supporters.[19]

In the case of Marxism and Philosophy, this accusation of an ‘idealist deviation’ was partially based on attributions to the author of views which he had never expressed in his work: in some cases he had explicitly rejected them, as in the case of his alleged denial of the ‘dialectics of nature’.[20] However, attacks were also directed at views that really did occur in Marxism and Philosophy, and especially against its repeated dialectical rejection of ‘naive realism’. The latter included both ‘so-called sound common sense, the worst metaphysician’, and the normal ‘positivist science’ of bourgeois society; it also included the sad heir of positivism today, namely, a vulgar-marxism that is devoid of any philosophical perspective. For all these ‘draw a sharp line of division between consciousness and its object’ and ‘treat consciousness as something given, something fundamentally contrasted to Being and Nature’ (as Engels pointed out against Dühring as early as 1878).

Because I then believed that this view was self-evident to any materialist dialectician or revolutionary Marxist, I assumed rather than spelt out this critique of a primitive, pre-dialectical and even pre-transcendental conception of the relation between consciousness and being. But without realizing it I had hit on the very key to the ‘philosophical’ outlook which was then due to be dispensed from Moscow to the whole of the Western Communist world. Indeed it formed the basis of the new orthodox theory, so-called ‘Marxism-Leninism’. The professional exponents of the new Russian ‘Marxism-Leninism’ then replied to this supposedly ‘idealist’ attack by repeating the ABC of the ‘materialist’ alphabet they had learnt by heart.[21] This they did with a naivete that can only appear as a ,state of philosophical innocence’ to corrupt ‘Westerners’.

I think that the specifically theoretical debate with Lenin’s materialist philosophy, which Lenin’s epigones have followed to the letter despite grotesque inconsistencies and crying contradictions in it, is itself of secondary importance. This is because when he was alive Lenin himself did not base this philosophy on any essentially theoretical formulation. Instead, he defended it on practical and political grounds as the only philosophy that was ‘beneficial’ to the revolutionary proletariat. He contrasted it with ‘harmful’ systems derived from Kantian, Machian and other idealist philosophies. This attitude is clearly expressed in his intimate correspondence on ‘philosophical’ questions with Maxim Gorki in the years following the first Russian Revolution of 1905. Though they were personal friends, they disagreed philosophically and Lenin tried again and again to persuade Gorky that ‘a member of the party has the duty to oppose a particular theory if he is convinced that it is completely incorrect and harmful’, and that the most important thing to do in the case of such an ‘absolutely unavoidable struggle’ is ‘to ensure that the essential practical work of the party is not impaired’.[22] Similarly the real importance of Lenin’s major philosophical work does not lie in the philosophical arguments he uses to combat and ‘refute’ the various idealist tendencies in modern bourgeois philosophy; of these Kantianism had influenced the revisionist tendency within the socialist movement of the period, while Machian ‘empirio-criticism’ had influenced the centrist tendency. The real importance of Lenin’s work rests in the extreme rigour with which he tried in practice to combat and destroy these contemporary philosophical trends. He regarded them as ideologies that were incorrect from the standpoint of party work.

One vital point must be made here.[23] The author of this supposed restoration of the true materialist philosophy of Marx was quite clear about the kind of theoretical work Marx and Engels had carried out after finishing once and for all with the idealism of Hegel and the Hegelians in the 1840s:[24] ‘They limited themselves in the field of epistemology to correcting the mistakes of Feuerbach, to mocking at the banalities of Dühring, to criticizing the mistakes of Buchner, and to emphasizing dialectics — which is what these authors, who were very popular in working-class circles, lacked most of all.’ ‘Marx, Engels and Dietzgen did not bother about the basic truths of materialism. These were being hawked around the world by dozens of pedlars. They concentrated on preventing these basic truths from being vulgarized and simplified too far, from leading to intellectual stagnation (“materialism below, idealism above”), and on preventing the valuable fruit of the idealist system, Hegel’s dialectic, from being forgotten. These were the gems which idiots like Buchner, Dühring and co. (as well as Leclair, Mach, Avenarius, etc.) were unable to extract from the dungheap of absolute idealism.’ To put it briefly: a result of the way existing historical conditions affected the philosophical work of Marx and Engels was that ,they tended rather to distance themselves from vulgarizations of basic materialist truths than to defend these truths themselves’. Similarly, in their political work ‘they tended more to distance themselves from vulgar versions of the basic demands of political democracy than actually to defend these basic demands’. Lenin, however, argues that present historical conditions are, in this respect, completely different. He and all other revolutionary Marxists and materialists must now make it a leading priority to defend, not basic democratic political demands, but the ‘basic truths of philosophical materialism’ against their modern opponents in the bourgeois camp and their agents in the proletarian camp itself. These truths must be deliberately linked to the revolutionary bourgeois materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and spread among the millions and millions of peasants and other backward masses throughout Russia, Asia and the whole world.[25]

It is clear that Lenin is not primarily concerned with the theoretical problem of whether the materialist philosophy he propounds is true or untrue. He is concerned with the practical question of its use for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, or — in countries where capitalism is not fully developed — of the proletariat and other oppressed classes. Lenin’s ‘philosophical’ standpoint basically appears, therefore, to be a specific, if disguised version of the position which in a different form had already been discussed in the first edition of Marxism and Philosophy. This position was strongly criticized by Marx as a young man when he wrote of the ‘practically-oriented political party which imagines that it can supersede philosophy (in practice) without realizing it (in theory)’. Lenin decides philosophical questions only on the basis of non-philosophical considerations and results. He does not judge them on the basis of their theoretical and philosophical content as well. In so doing he commits the same mistakes as according to Marx the ‘practically-oriented political party in Germany’ committed. The latter believed it was accomplishing its justified aim of the ‘negation of all philosophy’ (in Lenin, of all idealist philosophy) because ‘it turns its back on philosophy, looks in the other direction and mutters irritable and banal remarks about it’.[26]

Any discussion of Lenin’s position on philosophy and ideology must pose one initial question on which a judgement of Lenin’s specific ‘materialist philosophy’ has to depend. According to a principle established by Lenin himself, this question is a historical one. Lenin argued that there had been a change in the whole intellectual climate which made it necessary when dealing with dialectical materialism to stress materialism against certain fashionable tendencies in bourgeois philosophy, rather than to stress dialectics against the vulgar, pre-dialectical and in some cases explicitly undialectical and anti-dialectical materialism of bourgeois science. The question is whether there had been such a change. What I have written elsewhere shows that I do not think this is really the case. There are some superficial aspects of contemporary bourgeois philosophy and science which appear to contradict this, and there certainly are some trends which genuinely do so. Nevertheless the dominant basic trend in contemporary bourgeois philosophy, natural science and humanities is the same as it was sixty or seventy years ago. It is inspired not by an idealist outlook but by a materialist outlook that is coloured by the natural sciences.[27] Lenin’s position, which disputes this, is in close ideological relation to his politico-economic theory of ‘imperialism’. Both have their material roots in the specific economic and social situation of Russia and the specific practical and theoretical political tasks that seemed, and for a short period really were, necessary to accomplish the Russian Revolution. This means that the ‘Leninist’ theory is not theoretically capable of answering the practical needs of the international class struggle in the present period. Consequently, Lenin’s materialist philosophy, which forms the ideological basis of this theory, cannot constitute the revolutionary proletarian philosophy that will answer the needs of today.

The theoretical character of Lenin’s materialist philosophy also corresponds to this historical and practical situation. Like Plekhanov, his philosophical master, and L. Axelrod-Orthodox, the latter’s other philosophical pupil, Lenin wanted very seriously to be a Marxist while remaining a Hegelian. He thereby flouted the dialectical materialist outlook that Marx and Engels founded at the start of their revolutionary development. This outlook was by its very nature unavoidably 9 philosophical’, but it pointed towards the complete supersession of philosophy; and it left one single revolutionary task in the philosophical field, which was to develop this outlook by taking it to a higher level of elaboration. Lenin regards the transition from Hegel’s idealist dialectic to Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism as nothing more than an exchange: the idealist outlook that lies at the basis of Hegel’s dialectical method is replaced by a new philosophical outlook that is no longer ‘idealist’ but ‘materialist’. He seems to be unaware that such a ‘materialist inversion’ of Hegel’s idealist philosophy involves at the most a merely terminological change whereby the Absolute instead of being called ‘Spirit’ is called ‘Matter’. There is, however, an even more serious vice in Lenin’s materialism. For he is not only annuls Marx and Engels’s materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic; he drags the whole debate between materialism and idealism back to a historical stage which German idealism from Kant to Hegel had already surpassed. The dissolution of the metaphysical systems of Leibniz and Wolff began with Kant’s transcendental philosophy and ended with Hegel’s dialectic. Thereafter the ‘Absolute’ was definitively excluded from the being of both ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’, and was transferred into the dialectical movement of the ‘idea’. The materialist inversion by Marx and Engels of Hegel’s idealist dialectic merely consisted in freeing this dialectic from its final mystifying shell. The real movement of history was discovered beneath the dialectical ‘self-movement of the idea’, and this revolutionary movement of history was proclaimed to be the only ‘Absolute’ remaining.[28] Lenin, however, goes back to the absolute polarities of ‘thought’ and ‘being’, ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’, which had formed the basis of the philosophical, and even some of the religious, disputes that had divided the two currents of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[29] Hegel, of course, had already surpassed these dialectically.

This kind of materialism is derived from a metaphysical idea of Being that is absolute and given; and despite all its formal claims to the contrary it is no longer fully dialectical let alone dialectically materialist. Lenin and his followers unilaterally transfer the dialectic into Object, Nature and History and they present knowledge merely as the passive mirror and reflection of this objective Being in the subjective Consciousness. In so doing they destroy both the dialectical interrelation of being and consciousness and, as a necessary consequence, the dialectical interrelation of theory and practice. They thereby manage to pay an involuntary tribute to the ‘Kantianism’ that they attack so much. Not content with this, they have abandoned the question of the relationship between the totality of historical being and all historically prevalent forms of consciousness. This was first posed by Hegel’s dialectic and was then given a more comprehensive elaboration by the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. Lenin and those like him have revised it in a retrograde way by replacing it with the much narrower epistemological or ‘gnoseological’ question of the relationship between the subject and object of knowledge. Nor is this all. They present knowledge as a fundamentally harmonious evolutionary progress and an infinite progression towards absolute truth. Their presentation of the relationship between theory and practice in general, and in particular within the revolutionary movement itself, is a complete abandonment of Marx’s dialectical materialism and a retreat to a totally abstract opposition of pure theory, which discovers truths, to pure practice, which applies these laboriously discovered truths to reality. ‘The real unity of theory and practice is achieved by changing reality in practice, through the revolutionary movement based on the laws of objective development discovered by theory’ — these are the words of one of Lenin’s philosophical interpreters, and he has not departed one iota from the teachings of the master. With them, the grandiose dialectical materialist unity of Marx’s revolutionary practice collapses into a dualism comparable to that of the most typical bourgeois idealists.[30]

There is another inevitable consequence of this displacement of the accent from the dialectic to materialism. It prevents materialist philosophy from contributing to the further development of the empirical sciences of nature and society. In the dialectic method and content are inseparably linked. in a famous passage Marx says that ‘form has no value when it is not the form of its content’.[31] It is therefore completely against the spirit of the dialectic, and especially of the materialist dialectic, to counterpose the dialectical materialist ‘method’ to the substantive results achieved by applying it to philosophy and the sciences. This procedure has become very fashionable in Western Marxism. Nevertheless, behind this exaggeration there lies a correct insight — namely, that dialectical materialism influenced the progress of the empirical study of nature and society in the second half of the nineteenth century above all because of its method.[32]

When the revolutionary movement and its practice came to a halt in the 1850s, there inevitably developed an increasing gap between the evolution of philosophy and that of the positive sciences, between the evolution of theory and that of practice: this has already been explained in Marxism and Philosophy. The result was that for a long period the new revolutionary conceptions of Marx and Engels survived and developed mainly through their application as a dialectical materialist method to the empirical sciences of society and nature. It is in this period that one finds statements, especially by the later Engels, formally proclaiming individual sciences to be independent of ‘all philosophy’, and asserting that philosophy has been ‘driven from nature and from history’ into the only field of activity left to it: ‘the theory of thought and its laws — formal logic and dialectics’. In reality, this meant that Engels reduced so-called ‘philosophy’ from an individual science above others, to an empirical science among others.[33] Lenin’s later positions might appear at first glance to be like that of Engels, but they are in actual fact as distinct as night and day. Engels considered that it was the crucial task of the materialist dialectic to ‘rescue the conscious dialectic from German idealism and to incorporate it in the materialist conception of nature and of history’.[34] Lenin’s procedure is the inverse. For him the major task is to uphold and defend the materialist position which no one has ever seriously thought of questioning. Engels goes on to make a statement that is in keeping with the progress and development of the sciences; he says that modern materialism whether applied to nature or history ‘is in both cases essentially dialectical and does not in addition need a philosophy which stands above the other branches of knowledge’. Lenin, however, insistently carps at ‘philosophical deviations’ that he has discerned not only among political friends or enemies, or philosophical ideologues, but even among the most creative natural scientists.[35] His ‘materialist philosophy’ becomes a kind of supreme judicial authority for evaluating the findings of individual sciences, past, present or future.[36] This materialist ‘philosophical’ domination covers all the sciences, whether of nature or society, as well as all other cultural developments in literature, drama, plastic arts and so on; and Lenin’s epigones have taken it to the most absurd lengths. This has resulted in a specific kind of ideological dictatorship which oscillates between revolutionary progress and the blackest reaction. Under the slogan of what is called ‘Marxism-Leninism’, this dictatorship is applied in Russia today to the whole intellectual life not only of the ruling Party, but of the working-class in general. There are now attempts to extend it from Russia to all the Communist Parties in the West, and in the rest of the world. These attempts, however, have precisely shown the inevitable limits to any such artificial extension of this ideological dictatorship into the international arena outside Russia, where it no longer receives the direct coercive support of the State. The Draft Programme of the Communist International, of the Fifth Comintern Congress of 1924, called for a ‘rigorous struggle against idealist philosophy and against all philosophies other than dialectical materialism’, whereas at the Sixth Congress, held four years later, the version of the Programme that was finally adopted spoke in a much more general way of the struggle against ‘all manifestations of a bourgeois outlook’. It no longer described ‘the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels’ as a materialist philosophy, but only as a ‘revolutionary method (!) for understanding reality with the aim of its revolutionary overthrow’.[37]

IV
It is only recently that ‘Marxist-Leninist’ ideology has made such claims outside Russia, and the change in Comintern policy I have mentioned may indicate that these claims are now going to be abandoned. Nevertheless, the deeper problem of Lenin’s ‘materialist philosophy’ and of Marxism-Leninism has not been resolved. The problem of Marxism and Philosophy must be reopened, together with the broader issue of the relation between the ideology and the practice of the revolutionary workers’ movement. This poses a concrete task in relation to Communist ‘Marxism-Leninism’. A materialist, that is a historical, critical and undogmatic analysis has already been made of the character of the ‘Kautskyian’ orthodox Marxism of the Second International. This must now be unflinchingly extended to the ‘Leninist’ orthodox Marxism of the Third International; and it must be applied to the whole history of Russian Marxism and its relation to international Marxism. For the ‘Marxism-Leninism’ of today is only the latest offshoot of this history. It is not possible to provide a more concrete elaboration here. One can only indicate a very general outline of such a materialist account of the real history of Marxism in Russia and elsewhere. Even so it yields a sobering conclusion. Russian Marxism, which was if possible even more ‘orthodox’ than German Marxism, had throughout its history an even more ideological character and if possible was in even greater conflict with the concrete historical movement of which it was the ideology.

Trotsky’s perceptive critical analysis of 1908 showed that this was true of the first phase of its history. The Russian intelligentsia had previously been brought up in the Bakuninist ‘spirit of a simple rejection of capitalist culture’, and Marxism served as an ideological instrument to reconcile them to the development of capitalism.[38] It is also valid for the second phase, which reached its climax in the first Russian Revolution of 1905. At that time all revolutionary Marxists in Russia, not least Lenin and Trotsky, declared themselves to be part of ‘the flesh and blood’ of international socialism and for them this meant orthodox Marxism. On the other side Karl Kautsky and his Neue Zeit were in complete agreement with orthodox Russian Marxism on all theoretical questions. Indeed, as far as the philosophical foundations of its theory were concerned, German orthodox Marxism was more influenced by Russian Marxism than itself influential on it, since the Germans were to a considerable extent under the sway of the Russian theoretician Plekhanov. Thus a great international united front of Marxist orthodoxy was able to sustain itself without major difficulty, because historically it was only necessary for it to exist in the realm of ideology and as ideology. This was true both in the West and in Russia, and in Russia even more than in Central and Western Europe. Russian Marxism is now in its third phase and it still exhibits the same ideological character and the same inevitable concomitant contradiction between a professed ‘orthodox’ theory and the real historical character of the movement. It found its most vivid expression in Lenin’s orthodox Marxist theory and his totally unorthodox practice;[39] and it is now caricatured by the glaring contradictions between theory and practice in contemporary ‘Soviet Marxism’.

This general character of Russian Marxism has persisted without fundamental change into the ‘Soviet Marxism’ of today. Involuntary confirmation of this is provided by the position of the above-mentioned Schifrin, a political opponent of the ruling Bolshevik Party, on the general philosophical principles of Soviet Marxism. In an article in Die Gesellschaft (IV, 7), he made what looked like a fierce attack on ‘Soviet Marxism’, but from a philosophical point of view this really concealed a defence of it. He claims that Soviet Marxism ‘wants to make a sincere attempt to reinforce Marxism in its most consistent and orthodox form’ against degenerate ‘subjectivist’ and ‘revisionist’ tendencies (e.g. ‘neglect of the master’s most important statements'), that have emerged as a result of the insuperable difficulties that it is facing. The same bias is even clearer in another article of Schifrin in Die Gesellschaft of August 1929. In this, Schifrin discusses the latest work by Karl Kautsky, the leading representative of German orthodox Marxism, and although he is very critical of most of Kautsky’s individual positions, he greets Kautsky’s book warmly as the beginning of a ‘restoration of genuine Marxism’. He assigns Kautsky the ‘ideological mission’ of overcoming the various kinds of ‘subjectivist disintegration of Marxism’ that have recently appeared in the West as well as in ‘Sovietized Russian Marxism’, and of overcoming the ‘ideological crisis’ that this has caused throughout Marxism.[40] The article is particularly clear evidence of the philosophical solidarity of the whole orthodox Marxist movement down to this day. In his critique of contemporary Soviet Marxist ‘Leninism’ and in his attitudes to contemporary ‘Kautskyism’, Schifrin completely fails to see that both of these ideological versions of orthodox Marxism have emerged from the traditions of earlier Russian and international Marxism. Today they only represent evanescent historical forms that date from a previous phase of the workers’ movement. Here, in this assessment of the character of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and of ‘Soviet Marxism’, one can see the full and fundamental unity of outlook between the old and the new schools of contemporary orthodox Marxism: Social Democracy and Communism. It has been seen how Communist theoreticians reacted to Marxism and Philosophy by defending the positive and progressive character of the Marxism of the Second International. Now, in the periodical of German Social Democracy, one can see a Menshevik theoretician entering the lists to defend the ‘generally valid’ and ‘compelling’ philosophical features of the Marxism of the Third International.

This ends my account of the present state of the problem of Marxism and Philosophy — a problem that since 1923 has been changed in many ways by new theoretical and practical developments. The general outlines of my evolution since then are clear enough, and I have therefore refrained from correcting all the details of what I then said in the light of my present position. In only one respect does it appear to be necessary to make an exception. Marxism and Philosophy argued that during the social revolution a ‘dictatorship’ was necessary not only in the field of politics, but also that of ideology. This led to many misunderstandings, especially in the case of Kautsky. In his review of my book he showed both that lie had misinterpreted my positions and that he had certain illusions about the conditions prevailing in Russia. Thus as late as 1924 he stated that ‘dictatorship in the realm of ideas’ had ‘never occurred to anyone, not even to Zinoviev and Dzherzhinsky’. I now think that the abstract formulation of this demand in my book is genuinely misleading, and I must emphasize that the pursuit of revolutionary struggle by what Marxism and Philosophy called an ‘ideological dictatorship’ is in three respects different from the system of intellectual oppression established in Russia today in the name of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. First of all, it is a dictatorship of the proletariat and not over the proletariat. Secondly, it is a dictatorship of a class and not of a party or party leadership. Thirdly, and most importantly, as a revolutionary dictatorship it is one element only of that radical process of social overthrow which by suppressing classes and class contradictions creates the preconditions for a ‘withering away of the State’, and thereby the end of all ideological constraint. The essential purpose of an ‘ideological dictatorship’ in this sense is to abolish its own material and ideological causes and thereby to make its own existence unnecessary and impossible. From the very first day, this genuine proletarian dictatorship will be distinguished from every false imitation of it by its creation of the conditions of intellectual freedom not only for ‘all’ workers but for ‘each individual’ worker. Despite the alleged ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom of thought’ in bourgeois society, this freedom has never been enjoyed anywhere by the wage slaves who suffer its physical and spiritual oppression. This is what concretely defines the Marxist concept of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. With it disappears the otherwise apparent contradiction between a call for ‘ideological dictatorship’, and the essentially critical and revolutionary nature of the method and the outlook of Communism. Socialism, both in its ends and in its means, is a struggle to realize freedom.