Karl Korsch"s critique to the Second International Marxism

• Grant number: 10/17771-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2011
• End date: December 31, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Musse
• Grantee: Ugo Urbano Casares Rivetti
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The collapse of the Second International (1889-1914) marks the beginning of a period of true undetermination in the history of marxism, with the split of the socialist movement in two radically divergent chains, the socialdemocratic and the Communist. But it was more than an undetermination about the practical routes, that is, political routes, for which the working-class movement would have to follow; consisted, over all, a "debate based on the situation of the marxism" between two chains that shared the same procedure to incorporate the marxism as disentailed ideology of the practical developments of the working-class movement. Thus, it was imposed task to recoup the original statute of the marxism as revolutionary theory tied with the revolutionary práxis of its historical depositary, the working-class. This is the diagnosis that Karl Korsch (1886-1961) displays in its "Anticritics", text published in 1930 in reply to the critiques directed by socialdemocratics and Communists to its book "Marxism and philosophy" (1923). We intend to examine the critiques of Korsch to the thesis of the main theoretical representatives of these two chains, Kautsky and Lenin, having as objective to verify the hypothesis that, when promoting this critique and influenced by it, Korsch attributes to marxism the statute of a theory defined by its indissolvable bond with the practique of the working-class.