Heinrich Cunow

Heinrich Cunow (* April 11, 1862 in Schwerin, † August 20, 1936 in Berlin) was a high school teacher ( anthropologist ), editor, politician ( SPD) and important Marxist theorist. Cunow in 1919 for the SPD deputy of the Weimar National Assembly, 1921-1924 Member of the Prussian Landtag.

Life

Heinrich Cunow born as the son of a stage worker in Schwerin. He can attend high school through financial support of a relative. Then he makes a commercial apprenticeship in Hanover. After completing his apprenticeship he worked as an accountant in a wallpaper factory in Hamburg. There he begins to engage in policy within the SPD. Self-taught, he studied Marxism and the philosophy of Kant and Hegel.

From 1898 Cunow editor of the magazine The New Times, edited by Karl Kautsky scientific organ of the Social Democracy. He also works from 1902 as editor of the SPD central organ forward, where he is next to Heinrich Stroebel as spokesman of the anti-revisionist left and turns against Kurt Eisner. As of 1907, followed by the activity as a professor at the Party School of the SPD in Berlin, next to Franz Mehring, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxembourg and Heinrich Schulz. In addition Cunow operates early scientific studies in the field of anthropology, to which he applies the Marxist method.

In August 1914 Cunow as his fellow editors in the forward or against the granting of war credits. From mid-October 1914, he changed this assessment and occurs in the opinion of the SPD majority to Friedrich Ebert; from 1915, the Lensch - Cunow - Haenisch group formed within the SPD, which tries to justify the attitude of the party majority on the subject of war credits Marxist, while they developed the theory of " war socialism ". Cunow published in the Hamburger Echo and other SPD party newspapers. From mid- 1915 the bell, a magazine founded by Parvus, the organ of the group. Later Sigmund Neumann Cunows keeps writing party breakdown? of 1915 for a concise expression for the presence sozialimperialistischer trends in social democracy, ie " a thoroughly sought for the working class imperialist policy."

October 1917 the USPD split off from the SPD without Cunow. He will succeed Karl Kautsky in the New Era, which he heads up to its setting in 1923. 1919 Cunow SPD Member of the National Assembly, and later from 1919 to 1925 Member of the Prussian Landtag, He is a member of the program committee of the Görlitz program of the SPD, but runs after more and more from the active party politics back.

1919 Cunow follows the call of the Berlin University and is appointed by Konrad Haenisch, now Prussian Minister of Culture, to Associate Professor of Ethnology. He has published numerous ethnological writings and a four-volume economic history. Significantly, he is as political theorist: 1920 and 1921 he published his major work: The Marxian historical, social, and political theory in two volumes. In it he represents, unlike Marx, the possibility of the development of the state in the course of a peaceful " social revolution " to the social administrative state. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he rejects as voluntarist takeover of the state from without regard to the state of development of Russian society.

1933 loses Cunow after the takeover of the NSDAP his pension, his texts were publicly burned. On August 20, 1936 he died impoverished and forgotten in Berlin.

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