Background
Korsch, Karl was born in 1886 in Tolstedt, Germany.
Korsch, Karl was born in 1886 in Tolstedt, Germany.
Korsch studied Law. Economics and Philosophy at several universities, gaining his doctorate from Jena, tnfts: Marx.
Lecturer, University ol Jena. Elected to the Thuringian Parliament, 1923. later Minister of Justice.
After a distinguished non-combatant war servicereturned to Jena. Active in socialist politics, as a member first of the USPD then of the KPD. he was elected to the Thuringian Parliament in 1923. and became a Minister of Justice. His opposition to Lenin led to his expulsion from the KPD >n 1926. He fled from the Nazis in 1933, emigrating to the USA in 1938. He taught sociology briefly at Tulane, and continued his Marxist writingsTowards the end of his life, he became increasingly distanced from his earlier Marxist commitmentsKorsch’s most original work. Marxism an Philosophy (1923), applied Marxist principles10 the development of Marxism itself. He distmguished three stages in Marxism: a philosophical stage (1843-1848), a stage in which Marxist thought became differentiated into economics, politics and ideology (1848-1900), and finally an unfin- •shed phase in which socialism is regarded as a science divorced from immediate political prescriptions. Although writing before Marx's early Hegelian-inspired works had been published, Korsch invoked a Hegelian conception of the dialectical ■nterplay of base and superstructure, thus implicitly rejecting the prevailing Second International view of Marxism as a value-free science. However, in Karl Marx, written some sixteen years later, his thought had shifted. While still insisting that Marxism is essentially a critical theory yielding practical prescriptions, he then stressed in more orthodox manner the priority of the economic base over the superstructure. In addition to academic works on Marxism, Korsch was also an active polemicist in the debates within Marxism. He defended workers’ councils; he criticized Bernstein on the r‘ght, Kautsky in the centre and Lenin on the left; and he condemned the Stalinist thesis of ‘social- ■srn in one country’ as a betrayal of the international working-class struggle.