|
LUKACS AND KORSCH
George Lukacs
Karl Korsch All members of the Frankfurt School were keenly interested in the Marxian
theory, and combined their academic courses with a study of Marxism. At the time
Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch were producing exciting new interpretations of
Marxism, which deeply influenced the genesis of Critical Theory. Both Lukacs in History
and Class Consciousness and Korsch in Marxism and Philosophy broke
with official Communist and Social Democratic interpretations of Marxism as a
theory of ‘scientific socialism’, and stressed its philosophical and
Hegelian components. The early 1920s was a time of intellectual ferment and
radicalization in Weimar Germany, with intense struggles between the Left, Right
and Center. It was a time of rapid cultural change, breaking down old values and
searching for new - promoted by discussion of Freud, Expressionism, Hegel, Marx,
Heidegger, phenomenology, and what became known later as existentialism - as in
the 1960s in the US and elsewhere. The young radicals who would later join the
Frankfurt Institute were deeply influenced by these currents, and were
especially drawn to Hegel’s dialectical method and its appropriation and
development by Marx. They followed Lukacs and Korsch in appreciating the
Hegelian roots of Marxism, and they utilized the dialectical categories of
totality, mediation, and relative autonomy of the superstructures, and
reciprocal interaction between base and superstructure as fundamental elements
of their theory and method.
Korsch stressed the need to apply the historical materialist method
consistently to all social and intellectual phenomena, including Marxism itself.
In addition to the political and economic struggle that had previously been the
center of Marxian politics, Korsch stressed the importance of ‘intellectual
action’ and ‘ideological critique’ as fundamental components of
revolutionary struggle.
Orthodox Marxism at the time tended toward a reductionistic ‘economism’,
which interpreted the dynamics of history primarily in terms of economic
development in the ‘base’ that supposedly controlled developments within the
‘superstructure’. This version of Marxism was deterministic. By contrast,
the Marxism of Lukacs and Korsch (as well as Gramsci) developed a ‘philosophy
of praxis’ which stressed the importance of subjectivity, culture and action,
in opposition to objectivistic Marxism, which put more emphasis on economic laws
and objective social conditions. The philosophy of praxis was more
action-oriented, insisting on the importance of workers’ self-management and
activity.
|
