Karl Korsch and Marxism’s interwar moment, 1917–1933

Nicholas Devlin

OAI: oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/327474 • DOI: 10.17863/CAM.74926

This article offers a major reinterpretation of the nature of interwar Marxist theory. It does so by offering a new reading of the work of Karl Korsch in the context of a network of ex-communist intellectuals. In Marxism and Philosophy (1923), Korsch responded to the split in the labour movement with a radical new claim to Marxist orthodoxy. Rather than engaging in Marx-exegesis, he aimed to turn the Marxist ‘method’ on Marxism’s own history. In the narrative he constructed, Bolshevik-inspired Communism appeared as the next logical step in the dialectic. But this argument rested on an historicisation of Marx’s own writing that led to an unresolvable tension in Korsch’s work that threatened to undermine its claim to Marxist orthodoxy. Once it is understood that Marxism was a political currency as much as a purely theoretical space of argument, Korsch’s reluctance to resolve the tension one way or the other becomes understandable. This reinterpretation of Korsch’s work challenges the ‘Western Marxism’ paradigm in which he has been read, showing that Korsch’s work presupposed a reading of revolutionary success and potential rather than defeat and that he did not advocate a turn to superstructural or cultural questions in the manner supposed.