The Arcades Project - Operi

so-called historical materialism they have made a universal . .. sociological the­
ory. From this ... leveling . .. of materialist theory of society, it was only a step to
the idea that once again today-or especially today-it was necessary to shore up
the historical and economic science of Marx, not only with a general social philoso­
phy but even with a . .. universal materialist worldview embracing the totality of
nature and society. Thus, the . . . scientific forms into which the real kernel of
eighteenth-century philosophical materialism had evolved . . . were ultimately
carried back to what Marx himself had once unmistakably repudiated as 'the
philosophical phrases of the Materialists about matter. ' Materialist social science
... does not need . .. any such philosophic support. This most important advance
... carried out by Marx was later overlooked even by . .. 'orthodox' interpreters
of Marx . . . . They have thus reintroduced their own backward attitudes into a
theory which Marx had consciously transformed from a philosophy into a science.
It is the almost grotesque historical fate of the Marx-orthodoxy that, in repulsing
the attacks of' revisionists, it ultimately arrives, on all important issues, at the very
same standpoint as that taken by its adversaries. For example, the leading representative
of' this school, ... Plekhanov, in his eager pursuit of that 'philosophy'
which might be the true foundation of Marxism, finally hit upon the idea of pre­
senting Marxism as 'a form of Spinoza's philosophy freed by Feuerbach of its
theological addendum. '" Korsch, Karl Marx (manuscript), vol. 3, pp. 29-31Y
[N!7a]
Korsch cites Bacon, from the Novum Organum: ·"Recte enim veritas temporis
{ilia dicitur non auctoritas.' On that authority of' all authorities, time, he had
based the superiority of the new bourgeois empirical science over the dogmatic
science of the Middle Ages." Korsch, Karl Marx (manuscript), vol. 1, p. 72.511
[N!8,!]
"For the positive use, Marx replaces the overweening postulate of Hegel that the
truth must be concrete with the rational principle of specification . ... The real
interest lies . . . in the specific traits through which each particular historical
society is distinguished from the common features of society in general and in
which, therefore, its development is comprised . ... In the same manner, an exact
social science cannot form its general concepts by simply abstracting from some
and retaining other more or less arbitrarily chosen characteristics of the given
historical form of bourgeois society. It can secure the knowledge of the general
contained in that particular form of society only by the minute investigation of all
the historical conditions underlying its emergence from another state of society
and from the actual modification of its present form under exactly established
conditions . ... Thus, the only genuine laws in social science are laws of development."
Korsch, Karl Marx (manuscript), vol. 1, pp. 49-52.59 [N18,2]
The authentic concept of universal history is a messianic concept. Universal
history, as it is understood today, is an affair of obscurantists. [N!8,3]