Karl Korsch

Karl Korsch ( born August 15, 1886 in Tostedt in the Lüneburg Heath, † 21 October 1961, in Belmont, Massachusetts, United States) applies in addition to Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs as the most important reviver of a Marxist philosophy and theory in the first half of the 20th century.

Youth and Education

As the son of Carl Korsch and Terese Raikowski Charles had five siblings, four sisters and one brother. His father came from an old farming family, who owned a medium-sized farm in Friedland ( East Prussia ). Since this did not suit the rural environment and he was looking for a more urban environment and contact with the Western culture, he moved shortly after marrying Terese to Tostedt in Hamburg, where Karl Korsch 1892-1898 attended elementary school. Father, Carl, who was in Tostedt clerk at the local district court, had developed a great interest in philosophical questions and worked on an extensive but unpublished work on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theory of monads.

When Karl Korsch was eleven years old, the family moved to Obermaßfeld what an education in advanced Duchy of Saxe -Meiningen ( Thuringia today ) allowed the children. From 1898 to 1906 Karl Korsch attended high school Bernhardinum in Meiningen. His father worked at a Meininger Bank, where he eventually rose to deputy director. In addition to the school curriculum Korsch studied philosophical works, what encouraged him and his father. In contrast to his father, a Leibnizian, Karl looked at the time as a Kantian.

Between 1906 and 1909 he studied law, economics and philosophy at the universities of Munich, Geneva, Berlin and Jena. There he joined the Free Students, and was editor of the Jena high school newspaper. He often went to meetings in the People's House Jena.

Korsch was, after the first legal state examination, 1909-1910 Trainee in Meiningen. He received his doctorate in 1910 with Heinrich Gerland at the University of Jena with a dissertation on the application of the burden of proof in civil proceedings. 1910/1911 made ​​Korsch in Meiningen his military service. In 1912 he joined the SPD and in the same year a research assistant at Ernest Schuster, London. He joined the Fabian Society and married there in 1913 Hedda Gagliardi, with whom he had two daughters. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Korsch returned to Germany and became a soldier. After three weeks at the front, he refused to continue to take a gun in his hand, and expressed in the pacifist sense, for which he was demoted.

Revolution and Communist Party membership

1918 belonged Korsch of the founders of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council in Meiningen, 1919, he was temporarily a member of the socialization Commission for the coal industry in Berlin, in June of that year he joined the USPD and belonged here soon to the left wing, in 1920 for themselves the merger with the KPD at the congress hall uttered. Besides, he habilitated in October 1919 on the law and legal protection in the English civil procedure and was first lecturer in Jena, then called there the end of August 1923, professor of civil, process and labor law.

In May of 1923 he took part in the Marxist Work Week, as their spiritual father he can be.

From October 16th to November 12th, 1923 Korsch was Attorney General of the short-lived coalition government of the SPD and KPD in Thuringia and temporarily had to go into hiding after their dismissal by President Ebert. Korsch had called for the formation of proletarian hundreds and they einexerziert. After this formative experience of a failed uprising against the SPD, the KPD moved to the left, also Korsch took up to his expulsion from the party an ultra-left, " Leninist " position in the KPD.

In February 1924, Korsch was elected to the Landtag of Thuringia, in July he moved to the Reichstag after, then gave his seat in Parliament and was re-elected in the elections in December 1924. He took over the function of the chief editor of the KPD theory organ, the International and took in the summer of 1924 at the 5th World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. The new state government ( DVP, DNVP, Thuringian Land League ) denied him the exercise of his teaching assignment, but officially Reserve left him rights and title of professor. By the law adopted in April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Korsch was officially released.

Theorists of the independent left

1925 Korsch began increasingly Stalinization of the Comintern and KPD criticize and withdrew from the editorial board of the International; from the autumn of 1925 began efforts to collect the ultra-left opposition in the Communist Party, which led Communist policy in February 1926 in the founding of the KPD internal fraction Decisive left in January 1926, the monthly magazine. On May 3 of this year there followed the expulsion from the party. Together with the two Communists also excluded Ernst Schwarz and Heinrich Suggest Werth formed Korsch in the Reichstag, the Group of International Communists and joined in November 1926, the group of the Left Communists in the Reichstag, where he worked with, among others, the deputies also excluded Werner Scholem. At international level, Korsch had contacts with other left-wing critics of Stalinism as Amadeo Bordiga in Italy and Timofey Sapronov in the Soviet Union. In 1927, he criticized the only speaker in the Reichstag the German - Soviet trade agreement.

Partly because Korsch support the declaration of the 700, one of the more moderate call KPD left, it came to the separation of Ernst Schwarz and the setting of the magazine. As a result, Korsch group acted to 1933 rather than loose confederation of circles; Contacts were thereby maintained, among other things to the SPD - Left, for Leninbund, for KAP and the resistance movement Red fighters. The aim was more intensive cooperation of the left.

A close co-operation, there were times also with a left independent trade union, the German Industry Association (DIV ), especially organized for the Korsch lectures and courses on employment law topics and for whose newspaper battle front, he wrote several articles. From 1931 he wrote and discussed regularly in the published by Franz Jung and Harro Schulze- Boysen magazine opponent.

Korsch devoted himself in these years of intense theoretical studies and discussions. He discussed with Alfred Doblin, Isaac Steinberg and also with Erich difficulty, Augustin Souchy and others, and was present as a guest in 1931 at the Congress of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT in Madrid.

Exile

In 1933 after the coming to power of the Nazi Party Korsch went under first, then emigrated to Denmark in the autumn of the year, then to Britain and finally in 1936 in the United States. In exile, he worked with Bertolt Brecht, members of the SAPD and council communist groups like the circle around Paul Mattick in the U.S. together, next he devoted himself to intense theoretical studies ( for example, about Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin and sociological themes ). 1935 Korsch was slandered by the KPD as a " Trotskyist Hitler Agent". In the U.S., Korsch received several teaching and research assignments and visiting professorships at universities, including the Washington State College in Pullman and at Tulane University in New Orleans, but many of its applications for professorships were rejected for political reasons. Starting in 1956, a severe disease (decomposition of brain cells) to get in Korsch noticeable, his last four years of life he had to spend in hospitals and sanatoriums. He died in 1961.

Theoretical Approaches and effect

As a law professor, who could hardly teach, he was a social philosopher, with a dedicated interlude politicians and parliamentarians. He was co-founder in 1923 of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. He took in contrast to critical theory more a mediating role between the scientific claim of positivism and of socialist theory and practice of materialist dialectics according to Karl Marx.

In 1923 appeared font Marxism and philosophy that counts next to Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness of the most important writings of critical Marxism, Korsch used for the first time to the materialist conception of history of Marxism itself and examines the question of why the German Social Democracy of 2 International "fails" in the revolution of 1918 did so. Initially intended as an update of Marxist theory in the sense of Lenin's writing State and Revolution, Marxism and philosophy already contains the elements for the fundamental critique of Leninism in the second edition, 1930.

Bertolt Brecht looked at Karl Korsch as his teacher in terms of Marxism. Other important student of Karl Korsch were Kurt Mandelbaum, Kurt Brandis, Heinz Langerhans and Erich Gerlach. An important role is played by the ideas of Karl Korsch the theoretical debate of the SDS in the early and mid 1960s.

Since 1978 is published the Korsch total output in officina -Verlag in Hannover on behalf of the International Institute for Social History ( IISH ) in Amsterdam and the Institute of Political Science, University of Hannover by Michael Buck Miller. There are a total of five volumes from 1980 to 2001 appeared.

Hedda Korsch

Karl Korsch's wife, the educational reformer Hedda Gagliardi (1890-1982), was a granddaughter of feminist Hedwig Dohm. She received her PhD in 1914 with the work of Chaucer as a critic, Berlin, 1916. From 1916 to 1921 she was a teacher at Gustav Wyneken in Wickersdorf. In 1924 she worked at the Soviet Trade Mission, 1926-1933 Fritz Karsens Karl Marx School (before Kaiser- Wilhelm-Gymnasium ), in Swedish exile until 1936 at the Viggbyholmskolan (Reform School Quakers) in Stockholm. Then she was up to 1956 Lecturer in German Studies at Wheaton College, Mass.. She took with her husband at the " Marxist Work Week " part.

466149
de