Karl Korsch on Marx’s New Materialism

Abstract This article systematically reconstructs the key elements of the articulation of Marx’s new materialism by Karl Korsch, Weimar Germany’s anti-Stalinist and anti-Social Democratic Marxist heretic. After a brief biographical presentation, and a sketch of the topography of philosophical positions prior and contemporary to him, I develop a thematic presentation of Korsch’s reading of Marx’s materialist dialectics, this-sidedness, the coincidence of consciousness and reality, the problem of application, his salvaging of the category of content, the materialist conception of history and his efforts to produce a theory of the material reproduction of ideology.