Leo Kofler

Leo Kofler ( born April 26, 1907 in Chocimierz at Stanisławów, Eastern Galicia, Austria - Hungary, now: Ukraine, † July 29, 1995 in Cologne) - also known under the pseudonyms Stanislaw Warynski or Jules Dévérité - was an Austro- German non-dogmatic Marxist theorist and sociologist of Jewish descent.

Life

Kofler visited the Commercial Academy in Vienna. From 1930 to 1934 he was employed in the Viennese Social Democratic Educational Center. Besides, he still attended the lectures of Max Adler, who shaped his thinking long term. After the occupation of Austria by the German Reich of the left-wing socialist Jewish origin fled to Switzerland and survived in emigrants and labor camps. There he was active in the movement " Free Austria " and the movement " Free Germany ". In 1947 he went to Halle an der Saale, in the former Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. With work, the science of society. Outline of a methodology of dialectical sociology, which he had published in Switzerland in 1944, he was in 1947 a doctorate at the University of Halle. He holds a PhD degree with the writing the history of bourgeois society. Attempt to -understand interpretation of the modern era from the perspective of historical materialism, which was published in 1948, 1966 cut in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1992 and fully came out in two volumes.

After the Second World War Kofler lived in the Soviet zone, the later GDR. In Halle he was a professor of Medieval and Modern History. According to political disputes he stepped out in early 1950 from the SED and went end of the year to Cologne. From 1951 he worked in the trade union and youth education and taught at various community colleges. From 1953 he was a lecturer at the Social Academy of Dortmund, 1969 in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum and 1968-1972 Lecturer in Sociology at the Art Academy in Cologne ( Cologne factory schools).

1972 won the student movement for Kofler the acting chair for the chair sociology (as successor of Urs Jaeggi ) at the Ruhr- University Bochum, which he held until 1979. In 1975 he was awarded on the basis of his outstanding accomplishments in teaching an honorary professorship. This status enabled him to teach until his stroke in the summer of 1991 there. On July 29, 1995 Leo Kofler died after a long illness. He is buried in Cologne.

Work

Kofler put their own interpretation of Marxism before in the fields of sociology, history, aesthetics and anthropology. Furthermore, he examined the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and also published critical work on " leveled middle -class society " and literary theory.

Kofler's first work, The Science of Society, deals with the importance of the dialectic of social theory. This Kofler develops the Marxist theory of society and criticized undialectical theories of society. Marxism, realistic social theory and dialectical thinking are connected for Kofler inseparable. It shows the progress and Erkenntnischranken in social theory and makes the development of dialectical thinking since its inception in Heraclitus dar. to the development of materialist dialectics and historical materialism of Marx In this view, he explains the essential categories of dialectical thinking and provides their importance for the criticism of materialism and idealism undialektischem out.

His second work, the history of civil society, is a first concrete application of his dialectical method to the field of history. It is not a complete historical account of the civil society, but focuses primarily on the " position of the religious to the political- social " in the development of civil society. His claim is " to tell in, -understand ' manner, but Abstreichung all metaphysical burdens that traditionally adhere to this felicitous phrase, is history. " In this understanding of history Kofler begins with the Christian Vorscholastik in the Middle Ages and ended his presentation with the victory of the reactionary elements in the bourgeois thinking and the limits of bourgeois humanism in the 19th century.

History and dialectic constitutes an act building on the basis of Marxism, " an attempt to prop up the history of science epistemologically ". This experiment opens in a substantially " -understand " presentation of the development of philosophical thought to the historical materialism of Marx. From the subjective idealism of Fichte, the Kantian " thing in itself ", from which, among other things, the objective idealism of Hegel emerged, and the materialism of Feuerbach starting, shows Kofler, like the classical German philosophy eventually applied in the ideas of Marx.

Stalinism and bureaucracy is an early font Marxist Stalinism criticism of Trotsky that differs by greater focus on the ideological self-deception of the bureaucracy and the " bureaucratic consciousness." The book consists of two texts Kofler: The nature and role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and Marxism and language. The aim of the first paper is to " prove contradictions in the mode of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the way of exposing their reasons as necessary unity and thus to unveil the last Animistic importance of the contradictory elements " yourself. Also in this document, it is a particular concern Koflers to uncover the nature of social phenomena in order to make it understandable, as he criticizes the usual scientific method whereby only kompilativ and surface adhesion. The central contradiction of the Stalinist bureaucracy is the contradiction between their Marxist self-image and its bureaucratic, anti-democratic and terrorist practice for Kofler. While the liberal critique of Stalinism whose practice mostly derived from Marxist theory explains Kofler the non-Marxist theory and practice of Stalinism from the concrete social conditions following the October Revolution: " But in Russia, where, and under the assumption of lack of democratic tradition the lack of a developed industry, the bureaucratic high-handedness with the addiction to accumulate without regard to human needs, unions, the typical Stalinist bureaucracy could arise. "

On the other hand, Kofler provides a direct link between planned economy itself and bureaucratization, when he writes:

" Because first was even in Russia the degeneracy of bureaucratism in a terrible terrorist dictatorship preventable and secondly, it was quite possible this gradually reduce, rather than increase them."

Rather, an historic opportunity had enforced because of the weakness of the democratic forces:

"Without the direct participation of the democratic forces of the people in the government and no direct democratic control by the people every planned economy must bureaucratic degenerate; in the presence of these forces and of such control, the planned economy, not bureaucratic degenerate "

Kofler.

The article Marxism and language is a polemical response to Josef Stalin's investigation About Marxism in linguistics. In this text Kofler attempts to prove that Stalin's views on language are extremely formalistic and contrary to the Marxist view. Formalistic were Stalin's views because he etc. consider only the purely technical side, their grammar, but the substance of their conditioned by ideology and its roots in concrete social relations completely ignore. That is why Stalin's view was also un-Marxist. Instead, Stalin falls far short of the Marxism and linguistics and ended up with mechanical materialism on the one hand, and his flat idealism on the other.

Fort effect

1996 Leo Kofler Society was founded in Bochum.

Works

• The science of society. Outline of a methodology of dialectical sociology. Francke, Bern 1944 (EA as Stanislaw Warynski, EA Preface v. Konrad Farner ); again Makol, Frankfurt 1971 ², last ibid. 1991
• On the history of bourgeois society. Hall 1948; Luchterhand, Neuwied 1966 ²
• Marxist or Stalinist Marxism? A meditation on the corruption of the Marxist doctrine by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Publisher of Journalism, Cologne 1951
• The case Lukacs. Georg Lukacs and Stalinism. 1952 ( as Jules Dévérité )
• History and dialectics. 1955, 1970 ², ³ 1973; Re: New Impetus, Essen 2002
• State, society and the elite between humanism and nihilism. 1960
• The end of philosophy? 1961
• On the theory of modern literature. Luchterhand, Neuwied 1962
• The proletarian citizens. 1964
• The ascetic Eros. 1967
• Marxist theory of the state. 1970
• Stalinism and bureaucracy. Luchterhand, Neuwied 1970
• Abstract Art and absurd literature. 1970
• Technological rationality in late capitalism. 1971
• Aggression and belief. Foundation of an anthropological epistemology. 1973
• Sociology of ideology. 1975
• Mental deterioration and progressive elite. 1981
• Humanistic Anthropology and dialectical materialism. A workbook. Leo Kofler 's 70th birthday. In 1982. ISBN 3879587108
• The daily between Eros and alienation. 1982
• We are dominated by the technology? Technological rationality in late capitalism. 1983
• Eros, aesthetics, politics. Theses on the Concept of Man Marx. 1985
• The spiritualization of domination. 1986/87, 2 volumes
• Avant-gardism as alienation. Aesthetics and ideology critique. 1987
• The conservatism. Between decadence and reaction. VSA -Verlag, Hamburg 1987
• "Criticism is the head of passion. " From the Life of a Marxist frontier worker. A talk on the occasion of his 80th birthday with Wolf Schönleitner and Werner Seppmann, 1987
• For a critique of bourgeois freedom. Selected political- philosophical texts of Marxist loner. Edited by Christoph Jünke, 2000