Karl Korsch (1886-1961)

“Marxism as an historical phenomenon is a thing of the past. It grew out of the revolutionary class struggles of the first half of the nineteenth century, only to be maintained and re-shaped in the second half of the nineteenth century as the revolutionary ideology of a working class which had not yet regained its revolutionary force. Yet in a more fundamental historical sense, the theory of proletarian revolution, which will develop anew in the next period of history, will be an historical continuation of Marxism. In their revolutionary theory, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels gave the first great summarization of proletarian ideas, in the first revolutionary period of the proletarian class struggle. This theory remains for all time the classical expression of the new revolutionary consciousness of the proletarian class fighting for its own liberation.” – The Crisis of Marxism, 1931

Books (pdfs):

Marxism and Philosophy (1923) – by Karl Korsch

Karl Marx (1938) – by Karl Korsch

Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory – edited by Douglas Kellner (1977)

Karl Korsch: A Study in Western Marxism – by Patrick Goode (1979)

---

The workers’ councils in the theory of the Dutch-German communist left (Bourrinet)

by Phillip Bourrinet (libcom)

To Serge BRICIANER (1923-1997), Council Communist.

Die Arbeiterräte werden einmal das Wesen
Der ganzen Menschheit auf Erden
So als in Blumen in einer grossen Garbe
Das höchste Sonnenlicht zusammen gelesen.
Sie sind das Höchste des Allegemein-Seins
Sie sind das Verwerfen des Alleins-Seins,
Darin jeder Mann, Frau und zartes Kind
Allein sein einzig Ziel, die Menschheit findet.
Die Arbeiterräte sind darum wie das Licht
Sie sind der Friede, die Ruhe und das Heil,
Sie sind die Wahrheit und die Quelle der Wahrheit.
Sie sind die Festigheit im grossen Ganzen
Der Menschheit, die Knotepunkte der Arbeit,
Sie sind das Gluck der Menschheit – sie sind das Licht.
(Herman GORTER, De Arbeidersraad)

The decisive importance of the Workers’ Councils for the New Workers’ Movement, born from the ruins of the First World War, was still noted before the revolutionary wave of 1917-1921, which let grow up these organisations from huge proletarian earthquake in so different countries as Germany, Hungary, Austria and Russia. It is in this last country, where appeared in 1905 the first Workers’ councils, that that last organisation’s form seemed to be the final form of the first Workers’ self-government since the Commune of Paris.

The contribution of the Dutch Left, or rather of the Dutch-German Left, for the theoretical reflection on the Workers’ councils, is not only a simple recognition of this form of revolutionary praxis of the proletariat on the way of its emancipation. It holds initially in the recognition of the spiritual factor, i.e. factor consciousness, to give life to the struggle’s forms of the proletariat.

Initially, without any philosophy of action, the proletariat should be unable to emancipate itself. The objective factors (those of the crisis), those of organisation (trade unions and party) of leading minorities were not enough. Was absent an essential factor: the factor of the masses, animated by consciousness of its revolutionary aim.

For that the contribution of Dietzgen is fundamental to explain the birth of the Dutch Communist left and the development of the theory of the Workers’ Councils by Pannekoek.

Mattick and Council Communism in Miserable Times: Critique Between Defeat and Crisis

A reading list by A New Institute for Social Research, 2021

See also: Theses on the Council Concept

A few accounts of the emergence of the tendency

• Pozzoli, “Paul Mattick and Council Communism”
• Bonacchi, “The Council Communists Between the New Deal and Fascism”
• Baum, “The Frankfurt School and Council Communism”
• Canne-Meijer, “Origins of the Movement for Workers’ Councils in Germany”
• Mattick, “Council Communism”
• Roth, Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick

New theory, new practice

• Living Marxism, “Against the Stream”
• Canne-Meijer, “The Rise of a New Labor Movement”

Against and beyond the old movements

• Korsch, “Marxism and the Present Task of the Proletarian Class Struggle”
• Wagner, “Theses on Bolshevism”
• Appel, “Marxism and State Communism”
• Mattick, “Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler”
• Rühle, “The Struggle Against Fascism Begins With the Struggle Against Bolshevism”

The critique of organization

• Pannekoek, “Party and Working Class”
• Mattick, “Pannekoek’s ‘Party and Working Class'”
• Pannekoek, “General Remarks on the Question of Organisation”
• Moss, “On the Impotence of Revolutionary Groups”
• Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organisation”

From depression to fascist war

• Korsch, “Planning New Depressions”
• Living Marxism, “The Future of Unemployment”
• Mattick, “The Great Depression and the New Deal”
• Langerhans, “The Next World Crisis, the Second World War, and the World Revolution”
• Adorno, “Theses on Need”
• Living Marxism, “The Jitterbugs”
• Living Marxism, “The War is Permanent:”Part One, Part Two
• Coffinet, “What Destroyed Democracy?: An Analysis of Capitalist Technology”
• Adorno, “Novissimum Organum”
• Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State”
• Mattick, “How New is the ‘New Order’ of Fascism?”
• Rühle, “Which Side to Take?”

Mattick’s critical theory vs. postwar society

• Mattick, “Nationalism and Socialism”
• Mattick, “The Economics of Cybernation”
• Mattick, critical introduction to the GIK’s Fundamental Principles
• Mattick, Critique of Marcuse
• Mattick, “Capitalism and Ecology”
• Mattick, “The Crisis of the Mixed Economy”
• Mattick, “The Destruction of Money”
• Mattick, “Authority and Democracy in the United States”
• Mattick, “The New Capitalism and the Old Class Struggle”
• Mattick, interview with Lotta Continua
• Mattick, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?
• Marramao, “Theory of Crisis and the Problem of Constitution” 

The original content of the communist program (Bordiga, 1958)

By Amadeo Bordiga

The original content of the communist program is the obliteration of the individual as an economic subject, rights-holder, and agent of human history

Marxism and property

One topic that we have frequently found ourselves occupied with is that of the formula which in the communist program correctly counterposes the post-bourgeois historical era to the current one. To this topic was dedicated the old study in the first issue of Prometeo on “Property and Capital” ^[1]. We discussed, and at our last meeting in Turin ^[2] we returned to it with thoroughness, the most common propagandistic formula of pre-war socialism: the abolition of private property in the means of production (and of exchange). We use the parenthesis because this is how it is written in a fitting text by Engels.

The noun abolition has never been satisfactory. It reeks of a volitional act, and as such it is good for anarchists and (logically) for reformists. The adjective private raises the question of whether the relationship which we denote by the word ‘property’ should disappear in communist society, or only change its subject.

Endnotes 5: The Passions and the Interests

THE PASSIONS AND THE INTEREST (2020)

Endnotes.org.uk

We Unhappy Few

Error 

Contours of the World Commune

Revolutionary Motives

To Abolish the Family

The Passion of Communism

Life Against Nature

Notes from the Chemo Room

International Council Correspondence / Living Marxism / New Essays, 1934-1943

---

(source)

Introduction

Brought together here are references to all the publications by the International Council Correspondence-group in Chicago, Illinois, USA, originally named “United Workers’ Party”; the party-name was dropped early 1936. The periodical was published in ever bigger volumes with ever longer articles but appearing ever less frequent, discontinued in 1943.

The whole series of periodicals: International Council Correspondence; Living Marxism (International Council Correspondence); and New Essays, but without the pamphlets, was reprinted in 1970 in five volumes: in photographic reproduction of reduced size without transcription, edition, annotation or source, by the in 2015 still existing Greenwood Reprint Corporation , Westport, Connecticut, under the general title “New Essays”; with a short introduction in the first volume by Paul Mattick sr. (see below).

---

The first volume can also be found as pdf at: libcom.org , in a much smaller file of lower resolution and without optical character recognition. For complete scans in a better resolution but also without (searchable) optical character recognition, also see libcom.org , posted by Stephen, 13 May 2014; in September 2015 we were unaware of the existence of this publication as proper references to the whole series and tables of content were missing; since, we have given permission to libcom.org  to reproduce the scans made by us.

An anonymous incomplete table of contents, apparently originally compiled by Bjarne Avlund Frandsen (a source is not given), and amended, with links to html-versions of some of the texts, can be found at marxists.org . One might doubt the attribution of some articles to Paul Mattick; sources are not given.

Another one, with some texts and some French translations attached (1) at: La Bataille socialiste  (libertarian marxist blog).

---

Among the original group in Chicago: Paul Mattick, Rudolf (Rüdiger) Raube, Carl Berreitter, Al Givens, Kristen Svanum, Allen Garman (edited Paul Mattick’s essays), Frieda Mattick; later joined by: Karl Korsch, Walter Auerbach (author and co-author with Paul Mattick), Fritz Henssler (negociated possible mergers with other journals), and the New York group: Walter Boelke, Wendeling Thomas, Hans Schaper, Emmy Tetschner, Mary MacCollum. Living Marxism in Chicago in the late 1930’s: Jake Faber, Emil White, Sam Moss, Dinsmore Wheeler (edited Paul Mattick’s essays), Fairfield Porter (financial contributor), Ilse Mattick (2). A regular outside collaborator was Anton Pannekoek. Finally there was Jos. Wagner. For a somewhat “sociological” yet informative introduction to this group, see: The Council Communists between the New Deal and Fascism / Gabriella M. Bonacchi (1976).

A Communist Life

by Felix Baum

Along with the return of economic crisis and social struggles around the world, the term “communism”—supposedly discredited once and for all by the experience of Russia and its satellite states in the 20th century—seems to be enjoying a certain comeback in recent years. Conferences on “the idea of communism” attract significant crowds, books by professed communists like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek find readers and grab media attention. However, more often than not this (surely limited) comeback does not seem to be driven by a genuine desire to retrieve the emancipatory content the term carried in the writings of Karl Marx and like-minded critics, as well as in practical movements from the 19th century onwards. Rather, maîtres-penseurs like Badiou and Žižek prefer to pose as enfants terribles, defending Maoism and flirting with Bolshevik terror, hence reaffirming precisely the unholy traditions with which a “communism” for the 21st century would have to break.

In his new biography of Paul Mattick, a German-born worker who immigrated to the United States in 1926 and later emerged as one of the most important radical critics of his time, Gary Roth tells the story of a largely forgotten current in the 20th century that early on made a rupture with the statist caricatures of communism to which today’s media-savvy leftist intellectuals are still holding fast.¹ Noting that this story is about “bygone eras in which a radicalized working class still constituted a hope for the future,” Roth steers clear of melancholy and nostalgia, instead seeking a justification for his work in the more recent reconfiguration “of the world’s population into a vast working class that extends into the middle classes in the industrialized countries and the pools of underemployed agricultural workers everywhere else.” In fact, though far from constituting a sustained, consistent assault on existing conditions, some recent struggles of parts of this class, most notably the “square movements” that spread from North Africa via Europe to Istanbul, exhibit certain traits—horizontal self-organization (or “leaderlessness), direct mass action against state forces, a focus on occupations—that point much less to the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition than to the one Roth describes, commonly referred to as council communism, though the resemblances should certainly not be exaggerated.

Ritual

Capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital.

Jacques Camatte, Against Domestication

Ritual is a magazine of contemporary politics. We assume as a foundational premise the proposition that, under existing conditions, life is routinely dominated and continually transformed by capitalism. We aim to grasp just how this domesticated human being, homo economicus, is perpetuated across space and time, and how it attempts to express itself as a response to a transformative and transforming capitalist hegemony. Ritual is a critical platform for tracing the cultural, philosophic, and socioeconomic threads that mark the interface between human life and capital.

JEAN CASSEUR / ARTICLE

THE SHADE OF SWORDS

“When you don’t find purpose and meaning in life, the only thing you look forward to is death.”

KD GRIFFITHS AND JJ GLEESON / ARTICLE

KINDERKOMMUNISMUS

K.D. Griffiths and J.J. Gleeson present a revolutionary-speculative proposal for the abolition of the family based on a materialist analysis of the relationships between the family, gender, and the reproduction of capitalism

ABE CABRERA / ARTICLE

TOWARD SAVAGERY: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN ECO-EXTREMIST THOUGHT IN MEXICO

Abe Cabrera analyzes the ideological trajectory of the Mexican eco-terrorist tendencies, Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje/Reacción Salvaje

EMILY MUNA / HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

RED FLAG OVER BABYLON: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE IRAQI COMMUNIST PARTY

Emily Muna offers a brief summary of the history of the Iraqi Communist Party from the 1920s to the present

EMANUEL SANTOS / POLEMIC

THESES ON THE STATE, ITS FORM, FUNCTION, AND FUTURE

A left-communist assessment of the state

PROMETEO / POLEMIC

SEIZE POWER OR SEIZE THE CAMPUS?

Reflections on the failures of the 2014 Wheeler Hall Occupation—small thoughts put forward by Prometeo

JURAJ KATALENAC / INTERVIEW

ENVISIONING COMMUNISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER HUDIS

Juraj Katalenac in conversation with Peter Hudis, author of Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Haymarket, 2013) and General Editor of Verso’s The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg

GMIL / COMIC

FIRST AS TRAGEDY

a comic by Great Moments in Leftism