On the Actuality of the "Anti-racket Forms"
Now for the 300 lines of the Spain-review. The restrictions on length will make for even greater difficulties here, since longer excerpts from the report, still unavailable in English, were intended for inclusion in the review. 100 more lines wouldn’t have made this easy, but might have made their inclusion more possible. Nevertheless, I believe I will find a satisfactory solution and should in any event send the manuscript over in time for the deadline on the 20th. I hope I will have more luck this time in my renewed attempt to collaborate on the Zeitschrift than I did last time. After all of our discussions, I am basically convinced that the preconditions for this are definitely present. […]
[…] There is nothing else to report; since, as you know, the world is in enough turmoil already. All the same, I am anxious [to see] whether the Anarchists in Valencia will not attempt a last-ditch effort of resistance after the final capitulation of the Azaña-Negrin Government. They would lose a lot of blood through defeat, which, if they capitulated without a fight, would remain unshed. – But I see now that the working class must empty the cup completely; none of its organizations and ideologies until now can be spared.1
The short but intense success of the anarcho-syndicalist and the Spanish Communist Party uprisings against Franco’s fascist coup in July 1936 in Spain and the subsequent collectivisation processes that followed led Max Horkheimer to believe that these events could instantiate an anti-racket spirit. For the events of resistance and barricading successfully materialised as a series of spontaneous exercises of self-instituting, collectivising praxis that took immediate, collective control over the functions of private industrial firms and all kinds of businesses, but also the state’s public services, during a series of months. These collectivising processes were led by the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (F.A.I.), lasting three years, from July 1936 to March 1939, forming an exceptional historical event not seen in Europe since the revolutionary actions of the Paris Commune.
Max Horkheimer expressed this to be the case both in a short remark in his essay “On the Sociology of Class Relations” and also in a brief mention in a draft for a book on “racket theory.”2 However, what is particular about Horkheimer’s position on the collectivisation processes during the Spanish Civil War is that this was placed in the context of a lucid negative account of the time of its writing. Horkheimer’s essay, it must be clarified, related mostly to an assessment of the concrete social context of the USA, which was compared to or contrasted with that of Nazi Germany. Horkheimer conceptualised the dynamics implied in the evolving shapes that the systems of domination had taken and observed the full integration of the worker’s ‘work’ as a sort of upgraded, reified commodity to serve a new monopolistic form of organising around a new conceptual device, Labour with a capital “L”: “The term Labour, however, comprises both the leaders who appropriate the profits and the members who create them.”3 This is the specific phase in the context of the shift of working class forms of organising where Horkheimer sees the racket-form being smuggled inside the workers’ unions as they had turned into monopolistic patterns, giving their totalising dimension to that (late) stage of capitalism.
The moment where the Spanish case is brought up in Horkheimer’s text is precisely that moment where he situates a historical shift, a turn for the worse, hence introducing his thesis of the mutation of the trade unions into monopolistic forms: “The rise of workers from a passive role in the capitalistic process has been paid for with their complete integration. Labour in a monopolistic society is itself a kind of monopoly: to be more exact, it is the monopoly of its leaders.”4 Of this leadership’s complicity with a monopolistic totality which has been accomplished, Horkheimer writes: “[…] the leaders control labor supplies as the presidents of the big corporations control raw materials, machines, or other elements of production.”5 To grasp how this came to be the case, Horkheimer analyses the minds of the workers and of their leaders, their behavioural patterns, recurring to a dialectical, complicated pulse between a critical anthropological, phylogenetic Freudian reading and a materialist, Marxist one.6 These implicit methodological tensions in Horkheimer’s ‘aporetic’ recourse to anthropology and Freudian psychology for grappling with the pervasiveness of the racket-form will be discussed and analyzed further at a later point in this essay.
Karl Korsch initially wrote a critical account about Spain’s “soft revolution” and the instauration of its Segunda República in 1931.7 He described the factors involved in the ensuing capitalist, bourgeois alliances with the old regime’s inter-racket crisis that this so-called “Beautiful Revolution” supposed. This soft and beautiful ousting of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain and its democratic opening to the parties of the left led to the intensifying of a conspiracy of its ‘comprador classes’ and led their imperialist, international alliances (mostly with the UK, but also followed closely with the USA) to rely on a small military group of fascist rebels to stage a coup against the República.8 And yet, the event of the fascist coup, in its disruptive breaking of the dynamics of civil society, galvanised a series of practical developments taken by its opposing forces, such as the anarchist F.A.I., the syndicalist CNT, and the Communist POUM. This was the event where all the factors of what entailed a practical expression of that which had been learnt previously in theory—rehearsed by an ideation of their specific pedagogy as potential revolutionaries—became real experience: a spontaneous experiment in a concrete materialisation of the project of labour collectivisation. This realisation recalled Marx’s “ real community [in which] the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association,” as with the case of ‘La Commune.’9
The collectivising period during the Spanish Civil War exemplified, for Horkheimer, as well as for Korsch, a positive sociohistorical moment of social organising; a realisation that an anti-racket spirit was applicable and possible; a moment where the people had shown a capacity for spontaneously negating the reproduction of the same racket-form as repeated by a sort of self-perpetuating and unchallengeable socio-biological fate.10 In a draft outline for the book on rackets, “Notes for the Programme of the Book (8/30/1942),” we read: “The racket-like elements in the Spanish Civil War as a model for anti-rackets: there were genuinely anti-racket-like forms, not only political but also in art etc.”11 These social emancipatory qualities of the collectivising period also signified that elements of mimesis were at play in the course of the Spanish Civil War.12 Concepts such as spontaneity, testing, and improvisation, which always bring into the present time that which was rehearsed and learnt, are important for grasping what factors are involved in the social revolutionary quality of the case. This social revolutionary quality is also important for understanding the reason why Korsch thought this experience, even once it had become part of the archive of failures, would hold the same positive properties as any other legacies of former attempts and rehearsals of previous practices in the pedagogy of revolution.
Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s negative-dialectical methodologies for elaborating on the concept of mimesis and the racket-form will also be considered here while looking at Korsch’s essays about the collectivisation processes during the civil war in Spain. Korsch’s articles supply us with great detail and comparative material of the specific cases and all the aspects of his documentation of what he states as his commitment to an objective non-idealist approach to historical facts. Thus, we will see how Korsch’s articles simultaneously inform Horkheimer’s ideas about concrete examples and possibilities for revolution and how those play in Horkheimer’s account of the relation between spirit and the racket in “Rackets and Spirit” as well as Horkheimer’s account of how racket-form materialises everywhere in “On the Sociology of Class Relations.”13
Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s variations on the concept of mimesis, as introduced in Dialectic of Enlightenment and other works such as Negative Dialectics, are sources to retrace the critical-dialectical relations that the concepts of the racket, utopia, praxis, mimesis, and anti-racket that were at play in Horkheimer’s writings at the time of his epistolary exchange with Korsch on the matter of collectivisation during the Spanish Civil War. Horkheimer’s short, parenthesised recollection of the past case of Spanish collectivisation becomes a present mnemonic of the potentia involved in spontaneity when activated by critical situations. Spain at the start of the civil war shared some structural aspects with Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and this comparative cross-referencing will help Korsch to situate the specificity of the differences between the cases. The highlight for Horkheimer was that these barely rationalised and socialised Spanish workers’ organisations had managed to accomplish such an impressive level of collectivisation in a situation that required a great amount of spontaneity.
The exceptionality of its example is the success of its specific praxis, not just for defeating the fascist coup in Catalonia and Valencia, but for establishing its collectivising system for a great length of time. However, what concerns us here are the aspects of the case of Spanish collectivisation documented by Korsch versus the concepts sustaining the unforgiving critique by Horkheimer of the racket-form as reproduced in those same kind workers’ organisations elsewhere that he simultaneously recognised positively in the case of Spain, since the latter belonged to a previous, out-of-synch temporality. What we want to highlight here is that Horkheimer’s negative account of class relations and of the racket-form as it had become ingrained in labour organisations nevertheless includes the Spanish Civil War case of collectivisation as an exception and desynchrony, one which also contains a micrological seed for a future historical date. Per contra, we want to try to discern the concepts sustaining Korsch’s enthusiastic description of these emancipatory struggles against the racket form of capital and fascism in the collectivising takeover by the proletarian class of the industries, business, and public services in Catalonia. This will allow us to explore the perplexities that the concept of mimesis carries within.
In the essays “Rackets and Spirit (1942/44)” and “On The Sociology of Class Relations (1943),” Horkheimer lays out the characteristics of each, the historical and relational developments of the bourgeois and the working classes, in order for us to understand the paradigm shift undertaken in both earlier forms of the party and the workers’ unions. Exposing the further ‘turn of the screw’ in the transformation of the subjects-workers, Horkheimer writes: “[a]lthough deprived as they were of their human qualities by being transformed into mere elements of production, […] had not yet become statistical figures of organizations.”14 However in the essays, we note that what informs Horkheimer’s assessment of labour unions involved two correlational factors: a focus on Nazi Germany, but also on trade unions in the US, the correspondence between which had intensified under the forces of the Fordist system (which was both opposed and mirrored by industry in Nazi Germany). It is relevant, too, to see the USA as the location of Horkheimer’s social and living experience when tackling the concepts of the spirit of the anti-racket and the process of collectivisation in Spain. This is especially because they have to be compared to the situation that Horkheimer describes as: “The hope of the proletariat today does not consist of sticking to traditional party and civil war patterns. Rather, it must recognise and fight the monopolistic set-up of society infiltrating into the proletariat’s own organizations and infesting the minds of its individuals.”15 It is in this context that Horkheimer will write and mention the Spanish (Civil) War and its “spontaneity before critical situations,” but also for having taken place in a context of social and economic backwardness. This is important, because he was analysing the problems that the concept of Labour as a refined, newly objectified commodity dirempted from a socialist-communist project, posed at the time:
The new situation is expressed in the concept of Labor (with a capital L) as it is recognized as a guiding intellectual principle not only in the minds of workers but also with the general public. Like Agriculture or Industry, or even sections of Industry, such as Steel, Rubber, and Oil, Labor is a collective term which is not an ordinary abstractum or generale. With regard to the individual elements included in their logical structure, such entities resemble a unit like State, Nation, Church, rather than a generality like Color, or Animal.16
Hence, for Horkheimer, the events in Spain, led by a spontaneous coalition of various workers (syndicalist, anarchist, and marxist) unions, had already been superseded: first due to their failure under the fascist forces and second by the ‘perverse’ agencies of Stalin’s imploding of their successful collectivisation. While the case of Spain and the Spanish Civil War is most generally subsumed under a global push and speedy pace of an American-led process of modernisation, the modernity this process produced was precisely what Horkheimer would describe as related to regression, to mimesis. Modernisation is mimetic regression. Yet, we want to keep in mind that Horkheimer still left us a comment on the events in Spain and of their existence, of their having been possible and exemplary.
Indeed, the particular exception of Spanish collectivisation did signify a positive example. However, its condition of possibility, as Horkheimer indicated, implied its being in a temporal-historical context of social backwardness. In the mid-1930’s, Spanish society was still closer in a structural sense to the composition of the workers and their ways of class fighting that were characteristic of 19th-century Marxist and communist movements and organisations. The case of Spain therefore involves an element of desynchronicity. Below is Horkheimer’s brief mention of the case of the Spanish Civil War in his essay “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” We can observe how he links the case practically to the 19th century, as Spain is mentioned between parentheses, a sign itself placing a sort of temporal decalage:
Around the middle of the 19th century, the non-integrated nature of the individual worker as a part of an amorphous proletariat of the disinherited peasant or artisan, and his retrogressiveness in terms of the ever increasing rational “socialization” (Vergesellschaftung) of society was inseparably bound up with his “progressiveness” in the sense of revolution. [It is significant that, even today, worker’s organizations which are with some justification labeled as “backward” both theoretically and economically have proven to be the most spontaneous elements in critical situations, such as the Spanish Civil War.]17
The next line in the opening paragraph following the quote above states: “However, the clock cannot be put back nor can the organizational development be revoked or even theoretically rejected.”18 It is from this point on that what happened in Spain, even if exemplary, is relegated to the past by Horkheimer.
With this in mind, we will reflect on the seed that such a short citation of the phase of Spanish collectivisation supposed, and on what the event itself, as described by Korsch, can bring to our present conjuncture. Horkheimer’s essay gives us a phenomenology of precedent forms of collectivising downwards, as he focuses on showing us the absolute monopolisation of everything. He offers a Marxian genealogy of forms that the dominating elites of society had taken in their way towards the present. His is a framework that is, however, supported by conceptual elements of both anthropology and psychology used in a critical and transdisciplinary form. This has to be the case for his approach because the mental transformations and the mental resistances to or pervasiveness of certain aspects in the human mind under capitalism will need explaining. Horkheimer exposes the role and tactics for shifting the subject’s mind that mass media and publicity played when he states that, “[t]he conscious precautions taken by radio, press, and motion pictures are only a visible supplement to the unconscious trends necessitated by economic and social development.”19 And relating to the previous era’s social collectivities, as in the case of religion and the church, he says: “In contrast to the tendencies of today’s mass culture, it did not sell the people their own way of living […].”20 Thus he exposes the subterfuge of the mind by the entertainment industry:
All the ingenious devices of the amusement industry serve but to reproduce over and over again, without betraying the slightest revolt, scenes of life which are already dull and automatized when they happen in reality. Motion pictures, radio, popular biographies and novels shout incessantly the same rhythm: this is our groove, this is the rut of the great and the little ones, this is reality as it is and should be and will be.21
The psychological aspect is brought up as, “Labor, becoming a trade among others, completes the process of the reification of the human mind.”22 Hence, the abducted ‘mind’ that forgets its previous socialist and communist aims is at stake here as the neuroplastic displacement and disappearance of proletarian theory: “It is a double-barrelled transformation into things. [..] The idea of intrinsic antagonism between the international proletariat and any system of domination is completely superseded by the concepts connected with the disputes of power between the various monopolies.”23
However, Horkheimer’s psychological and anthropological devices are mediated by an ‘aporetic’* dialectical methodology when he tackles the pervasiveness of hierarchy and the authority principle within the family in their reappearance in expanded forms of organising at the time.24 Horkheimer situates the patriarchal aspect, which is further developed into the context of bourgeois domination, as part intrinsic to both the capitalist and racket-form way of organising in their recourse to the structure of the patriarchal family.25 Mostly, he indicates this by recalling the position of the subject as equated with a child in a context of hierarchy: “Just as the child repeats the words of his mother and the youngster, the brutality of his elders at whose hands he has suffered much, industrialized culture, the giant loudspeaker voice of monopolism, copies reality endlessly and boringly.”26 And as Horkheimer puts it to close his essay “On The Sociology of Class Relations”: “[a]dults, with regard to the children, behaved as a totality. The racket was also the pattern of the organization of males with regard to females. The modern concept serves to describe past social relations. ‘The anatomy of the man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey.’”27 In a letter to Felix Weil, Horkheimer explains this allusion as follows:
Once a certain psychological quality has become clearly visible, we always can trace its roots back to the past, but we easily forget that it would not have struck us as something unusual if it were not for the new form which it has taken in the meantime. You will remember the observation that human anatomy is the key to that of the monkey? The meaning of that truth is that once we know man, we can discover his beginnings in earlier forms of life. Once Fascism had developed in European society, we now are able to find its hallmarks in earlier stages of human history, but it would be an error to say that, because of those traces, the development was a necessary one.28
Here a key element to think through is that of what “the modern concept” fully means here, because it is intertwined with a past temporality that prevails in those “past social relations,” but which can only be defined and explained by a conceptual explanation of modernity. Thus an assertion of the question of asynchronic, looped temporalities in their cultural and social forms is implied. For Horkheimer, in the actuality of those Nazi and fascist times, this relating-back to a primal latency in the form of a racket-like social organising that began within the family and its hierarchies, had equally transcended into the syndicalist formations, such as the workers’ trade unions: “[…] Docilely and without a hint of any opposing interests, the workers surrender part of their money to the mammoth trusts which trade in their labor.”29 This Freudian aspect of the methodology in Horkheimer’s critique of the labour unions and the workers’ ‘docile surrender’ (child-like) to what he defines above as the “mammoth trusts,” is key. What is “child-like” in the workers’ disposition is also transferred to a sort of civilisational childhood that keeps re-appearing, in the same sense that “[t]he modern concept serves to describe past social relations.”30 This is especially the case if the modern is informed by a regressive mimetism: “Modern culture is a resurrection of oppressed mimetic practices.”31 Mind, the unconscious, and the conscious, first and second nature, mental repression, and psychological manipulation are intrinsic to those social turns and returns.
Here, we ask if the case of the workers’ unions becoming a racket was caused by a patriarchal legacy that resisted evolutive displacement or even erasure, managing to endure in our social realm, by instinctive reaction. This could have occurred as the outcome of adaptive learning; as the recurrent, tactical, and cunning aspect of mimesis; of the learning and replicating of forms of oppression as self-defence, or even as a camouflage, in the social context in which all structures of society worked in similar mirroring forms, albeit with opposite aims vis-a-vis one another. That is, a mimesis which reproduces the order of domination to neutralise the oppressors’ same tactics. Looking at Dialectic of Enlightenment’s insights about the mimetic dynamics at work both in “The Odyssey” and in “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” we see the case of mimesis as being part of the conceptual tensions that we are exploring here, i.e. the correlation of learning, theory, praxis, error (failure) and spontaneity in the context of revolution.
Theodor W. Adorno was already conceptualising of ‘mimesis as reflection’ during his time in Oxford in the mid/early 30’s.32 In a footnote to his study of Husserl, he provides a condensed genealogy that helps us navigate the paradoxes of Horkheimer’s critique of the racket-form as present and reproduced in the labour organisations. Adorno’s grasping of mimesis as a process of learning is crucial here: if rationality as fully implicit in the “demythologization of mimetic modes of procedure” fulfils its purpose, “then it can be no surprise that the mimetic motif survives in reflection on cognition.”33 Here Adorno, by dialectically negating that “[t]his is perhaps not simply an archaic holdover,” opens up the space for thinking and acknowledging the “fact that cognition itself cannot be conceived without the supplement of mimesis, however that may be sublimated.”34 That ultimately, “[w]ithout mimesis, the break between subject and object would be absolute and cognition impossible.”35 This shows us that mimesis does not just have a negative significance.
Therefore, we ask: does the racket-form thus survive (in a looped, reciprocal sense of a socio-biological import) from ancient configurations, like a persistent subconscious figure that resurfaces in every time there is a shift or paradigm turn in social formations? Because, albeit decapitated at some point in history, hierarchy does not lose its head: the captain, the leader, and the followers are placed in a determinate order of preference and responsibility and thus it always returns to dual social figurations of those who are protected and those who are left out, of the insiders and their others, the outsiders. Here, Horkheimer’s psycho-anthropological stance resonates (negatively) with the famous young Marx’s 1844 “species being” dictum, as Horkheimer wants to remind us of the involution and regression that modern culture represented:36
…From the day of his birth, the individual is made to feel that there is only one way to get along in this world: by resigning his unlimited hope. This he can only achieve by imitation (mimesis). […] By echoing, repeating, imitating the surroundings, by adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which he belongs, by transforming himself from a human being into a member of specific organized bodies, by reducing his potentialities to readiness and ability to conform to, and gain influence in, such bodies, he can finally manage to survive. It is survival by practicing the oldest biological means of survival: mimicry.37
In the above, Horkheimer lays out what a mimetic gesture and its realisation meant when reproduced in childhood processes (once more mobilising Freud —yet mediated by a critical Frommian anthropological interpretation— as we had already seen at play in his essay “Egoism and Freedom Movements”) and of the individual when it is faced with the pressure for survival in the context of modernity’s behavioural crises. These crises take the form of a brute, regressive fascism, of Nazism, overpowering the progress represented by the ideas and projects of anarchism, communism, and socialism.
For us, the racket-form taking over the workers’ unions could have still more complex psycho-social elements in its coming to be. This is especially true if we give the aspect of the social reproduction of the dominant and dominating in the existence of the dominated more emphasis. Our proposition here will be that, albeit communist or socialist in aims, this organising as union-form and its (perhaps unavoidable) fate in becoming a racket was mediated by a ‘species being,’ one which was apparently only able to reproduce what it already saw as a model by replicating it ‘mimetically’—even cannibalistically—in order to achieve what it considered necessary to avoid subjection from that same model, and from the system in the hands of the dominant class.38 While this was not an optimal tactic, as pointed out in the above-quoted, a triggered response to a necessity for survival in a hostile situation and temporality where the objective conditions for revolution were yet not met. However, the case made precisely by Horkheimer and Adorno, in their chapter on Odysseus, develops the concept of ‘cunning,’ mimesis in response to a wound, which could explain that the union form was mimetic in relation to the racket, as it had inverted tactically (out of cunning, understood as an outcome of learning) the purposes of the racket: to be efficient and powerful. This tactical inversion was to counteract the grip of the capitalist rackets, to convey authority and to quash authority, to have power of dissuasion and negotiation with the correlative forces opposite to it.
Hence, we can look at the case of struggle and failure as modes of learning and mimesis as it is described in the chapter “Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where “[t]he adventures bestow names on each of these places, and the names give rise to a rational overview of space. The shipwrecked, tremulous navigator anticipates the work of the compass. His powerlessness, leaving no part of the sea unknown, aims to undermine the ruling powers.”39 Indeed, if communism is understood as the result of the ultimate progression to fulfil the fate of human ‘species being’ (again, the anthropological trope of linear progress and evolution as mobilised by the young Marx), then the very content of ‘a’progress will entail a mimesis, a learning, in the fight “to undermine the ruling powers.” This forms a core spirit of the movement (in Hegelian terms) that this unity of opposites, this movement between the racket vs the spirit of the anti-racket, this history in the making, can signify. The aspects brought forward in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in its account of the dynamics of power that will produce the bourgeois capitalist order and its ethos at play in the Odyssey, also tell us that “[i]mitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings.”40 Man against man, master and slave, correlation of political forces, binaries, and polarities all come to mind when tackling the issue of the spirit of the racket, of power relations; potential emancipations with universalist, communist, and socialised forms that can overcome such mirrorist inversions of everything that they have had to learn, thus involve a core displacement of cunning as the central tactic of such.
At the same time, both Horkheimer, Adorno, as much as the young Marx before them, could not help but rely on notions borrowed from anthropology to mediate their concepts of either fated progress or fated regression. They leave us with the ambivalences of having to choose between the linear and the spiralling or circular, cyclical, eternal return. A moment of Blochean and Benjaminian hope, of a “not yet” or of the “time of the now,” appears to us today in the legacy Horkheimer leaves us in his reference to Spain, to the spontaneous historical lapsus signified by the phenomena of Spanish collectivisation, recorded as revolutionary pedagogy. For if these spontaneous, revolutionary events happened and lasted for a certain amount of time, they could indeed happen again and last longer. They could re-appear, return. With this, we may turn to look at the specific case of what happened to these workers’ unions at the time of the Spanish fascist coup—as indeed in a moment, and indeed in an open time—that provided a condition of possibility for them to supersede the racket form, for them to then enter into a new spatio-temporality. There, they would rehearse a self-liberating spirit of the anti-racket and its praxis.
What the case of collectivisation in Spain shows us is that precisely the workers’ unions which had evolved to become another racket-form had instead, in the desynchronised and liberated space-time generated in the event of fighting the fascist rebels, opened up the chance for a collective formation. This ‘real community’ displaced the racket-like defensive strategies of mirroring and adapting to the surrounding totality, to instead jump into the experimental rehearsing of the possibility that such open temporalities brought about.41 Can we identify, however, which aspects of the collective takeover of business and public services during Franco’s coup, and its follow-up war of conquest, that could be illustrative or exemplary of the spirit of an anti-racket formation these processes of socialisation and collectivisation involved?
In Korsch’s “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain” he states that, “[t]here is thus a deep shadow thrown on the constructive work resulting from the heroic efforts and sacrifices of the revolutionary workers in all parts of Spain where the syndicalist and anarchist slogan of ‘collectivization’ prevailed over the Social Democratic and Communist slogans of ‘nationalization’ and ‘state interference.’”42 The critique of the nation-state-based project of Communism as it was captured by Stalin appears quite clearly in various points throughout his articles. We argue that the so-called spontaneity of the Catalan Marxists, anarchists, and syndicalists in the context of a crisis in a sociohistorical opening of time, and its conditions of possibility for a revolutionary action, was, in itself, at the core of what signifies improvisation versus imitation. (Imitation, mimesis in the Greek sense, is a way of learning, repeating, and perfecting.) In connection to Korsch, it is important to reflect upon the temporal coincidence between the Spanish Civil War and Stalin’s Purges, which started on the 19th of August 1936, while the fascist coup by Franco started on the 17th of July 1936. In addition, during the Spanish (Civil) War, the Republican front, the so-called ‘Los Rojos’ according to the fascist front, was flooded by purging Stalinist agents who, by killing anyone not of their sect, disturbed the multi-party formation. Korsch was well aware of the intensity of Stalin’s murderous policies as they happened in these parallel temporalities, and, moreover, that because of these policies, the Spanish resistance paid a high price.43
In the context of this powerful state of affairs in which Communism qua Stalinism appeared to be nothing more than another inverted world, its upside-down aspects equivalent to corresponding problems of authoritarianism and autocracy that affected the political leaders in the West, the example of praxis in the improvisational, spontaneous events beginning on July 1936 in Spain was a crucial one. Because the processes of Spanish collectivisations had managed to win and survive for a certain amount of time, Korsch considered them a great lesson (in the educational content of the process of revolution) that included a futuristic prospect of an ‘other’ Communism. This was a Communism that Korsch and many others, including Horkheimer, hoped for when they were confronted by disappointment, by the truth that Stalin’s abduction of the Communist Party of Russia implied.44 In this retrospective light, what the Catalan uprising and takeover for a form of self-organising rule and structure meant and means as an example for revolutionary education is that indeed it could be possible then and now, that it was and is doable, and that it worked.
Looking back at what Horkheimer had to say about the relation between ‘rackets’ and ‘spirit’ in connection to the masses of the poor, we see how, “[the] brutality of the underclasses, from which the secret of the ruling must be kept, is nothing original, but socially generated. The terrible, bloodthirsty ‘Collective’ that traverses the history of humanity is but the other face of the exclusionary rackets, consciously or unconsciously generated by them.”45 The fear of the “collective” and the masses, which the elites produce and reproduce in all its brutishness and subjection, appears to be a psychic projection for these bourgeois subjects in their dress-rehearsal as aristocrats, as they replace with their own heads those of the bodies and structures of privilege they previously decapitated, and do so with the help of these collectives and masses, with the help of the people.
The “fearsomeness” that the former collective generated should be considered in grasping the amount of “fearlessness” required by the new (marxist, anarchist and syndicalist) collective formations during the fascist attacks on the Spanish Republican democracy at the time.46 This praxis of emancipation from a state on the brink of sequestration by fascism and already subservient to a capitalist bourgeoisie can only be defined in light of the juncture in which it found itself:
[…] Fascism has only revealed what was already inherent in liberalism: the delusive nature of the labor contract as a deal between partners equally free. It would be a grave theoretical mistake to denounce the contract in modern totalitarianism as a mere formality, and stress its genuine authenticity under liberalism. In both phases of the economic system, the aim of the contract may well be considered as the maintenance of that same basic inequality which is shrouded in its democratic language.47
The exemplarity of the impromptu ‘putting-into-practice’ by the Marxists (POUM), the Anarchists, and the Syndicalists—all of whom had become fully invested in collectivisation, in a historically localised rehearsal of that which they had previously theorised—brings to the fore the particular, contractual nature of their collective organizing to abolish the contract of the ruling powers. Thus, the contract between the collective form of organisation becomes the antithesis of the capitalist-bourgeois contract, which is based on competitiveness and the production of inequality. Korsch presents the educational aspects and the legacy of these historical experiences in the archive alongside all the previous failed and defeated revolutions.48 In the last thoughts that he gives to the defeated collectivisation-events in Catalonia and Spain, this is the very point Korsch leaves us with:
“To serve the history of the revolution” is the program which is invisibly written on the front page of the above cited faithful and comprehensive report on the positive results achieved in the economic field by the revolutionary workers of Barcelona and by the industrial and agricultural laborers in many a small Catalonian town or remote and forgotten village. “To serve history” means for the writer as well as for us, revolutionary workers of a dismal world laboring in the crisis and decay of all forms of the “old” socialist, communist, and anarchist labor movements, to learn from the deeds and from the mistakes of past history the lesson for the future, the ways and means for the realization of the goals of the revolutionary working class.49
With this understanding of Korsch’s approach to the events that make history as lesson, archive, and pedagogy, we turn to how Korsch will tackle those same aspects as they historically developed in his second article on “Collectivisation in Spain,” just a mere year later.
Korsch’s article “Collectivisation in Spain” was published in 1939, when there was still a very slight possibility for the revolutionary efforts to resist, even if they had already failed all over Spain and almost fully in Catalonia. Korsch starts with a very specific declaration: “In a previous issue we have endeavoured to refute one of the main fallacies that conceal from the international-working class the particular importance of that new phase of the Spanish revolution which was inaugurated by the events of July 19, 1936.”50 It is in those short fragments where we may appreciate Korsch’s positive assessment and appraisal of the events of July 19 1936, and their great relevance versus a “fallacious” negative narrative and the truth of these events that were hidden from the reports informing the international working class. Korsch recognised the events in their role of exemplarity; the future, educational aspect of such experience, that even if they had failed, would ultimately be crucial for the objectives of the ever-possible (future) revolution:
In spite of the rapidly increasing amount of literature on Spain today there is not available up to now any full report of what from our point of view we would call the real contents of the present struggles in revolutionary Spain. Of course, one would not expect such information on the really interesting facts from those progressively-minded people who even today go on to interpret the intensified class struggles, wars, and civil wars of contemporary history as so many expressions of an ideological struggle between a fascist and a democratic “’principle.”51
It is worth noticing already how Korsch makes a distinction between the subjects of the liberal progressive middle classes versus those on the left, mostly the workers, but also independent Marxists or anarcho-syndicalists involved in the ongoing practical efforts and fights. These are the affinities between the racket-form and fascism, the apparent entanglement of their forms, both products of the bourgeois era of capitalist correlations of force, bring out the tension implicit in the fact that the workers, too, developed a form of reproduction of the behaviour found in fascism. Indeed, looking at the reports of international members of the POUM like the American couple Lois and Charles Orr shows that there is indeed a great capability for many organisations and movements apparently aligned with the left and as anti-fascist to recur into a racket-form, even to the extreme of aiding a racket of counterrevolution, repression, brutality, and murder, in order to maintain the grip of their faction’s control over the masses of workers as subject.52 We can thus situate the case of collectivisation as a spontaneous element as an outcome of a critical and exceptional situation. This is the situation of an open temporality which gives space and context to a new form that is productive, possible, and positive. The spontaneity of the Marxist and anarchist groups and syndicalist trade unions was possible due to a full investment into, first of all, a defensive and assertive action, something that was made possible due to their interaction with one another. For, as we see in the reports about Catalonia about how the main independent Catalan government absorbs the initiative and includes leaders of both syndicalists and anarchists in the new situation, forming the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militia, CCAFM, only to end in the betrayals that these formations of collectivisation suffered:53
There is no use arguing (as many people have done) that during the many phases of the revolutionary development of the last seven years there has evolved more than once—in October, 1934, and, again, in July, 1936, and in May, 1937—an “objective situation” in which the united revolutionary workers of Spain might have seized the power of the state but did not do so either on account of theoretical scruples or by reason of an internal weakness of their revolutionary attitude. This may be true in regard to the July-Days of 1936 when the syndicalist and anarchist workers and militias of Barcelona had stormed the arms depots of the government and further equipped themselves with the weapons seized from the defeated fascist revolt […]54
Korsch’s interpretation of analyses and reports about Spain identifies aspects of the experimental and practical forms taken by a spirit of the ‘counterracket’ in the organic, spontaneous processes of collectivisation and socialisation that occurred on a mass scale immediately after the Spanish fascist coup. Korsch will go on, in his description of the cases of the Catalan uprisings and takeover of industries and businesses, to outline very thoroughly how those formations had shown the possibility of a praxis, implied in their very form, of a sort of anti-racket fate. Korsch’s 1931 report gives us an account of the great obstacles implied for any sort of revolutionary-emancipatory workers-peasants coalition which is based on the fight for rights and the obtention of these rights. Korsch notes the case of the singularity of the Spanish context, with its particular backwardness and delays, in his introduction to the situation:
There is no doubt that the actual outcome of “collectivization,” even in those industries of Barcelona and the smaller towns and villages of Catalonia where it can be studied at its best, lags far behind the ideal constructions of the orthodox socialist and communist theories, and even more so behind the lofty dreams of generations of revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist workers in Spain since the days of Bakunin.55
Initially, Korsch’s report portrays a Spain certainly lacking in revolutionary strength. This diminished and already weak historical situation for collectivisation makes the efforts of these subjects even more poignant. Korsch describes the case as follows: “During the whole process of revolutionary movement beginning with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1931, there has not been one single moment when the workers, or any party or organization speaking in the name of the revolutionary vanguard of the workers, have been in possession of the political power.” 56 The complicated context formed by the Spanish national and regional, political and social problematics applies “even to the conditions prevailing in the syndicalist stronghold of Catalonia during the first months after July, 1936, when the power of the government had become temporarily invisible, and yet the new and still undefined authority exercised by the syndicates did not assume a distinct political character.”57 However, the case is that these workers were indeed “armed” at that point, and thus enjoyed the upper hand in the correlation of forces, obstructing the fascists in a very specific tactical form. This was not a situation of “dual power,” but instead “[…] represented rather a temporary eclipse of all state power resulting from the split between its (economic) substance which had shifted to the workers and its (political) shell, [and] from the decisive fact that the main function of the bureaucratic and military machinery of any capitalistic state, the suppression of the workers, could not operate in any event against workers in arms.”58 Korsch’s articles establish an instructive, comparative account of the Catalan uprisings versus that of the Bolsheviks. His insights about the singular aspects of the Spanish-Catalan case and the problematics inherent to those territories are geared towards leaving behind a testimony of a thorough research programme of an educational, exemplary legacy—an archive for the revolution. We cannot, moreover, eliminate from the equation the fact that the workers’ seizure of weapons and use of violence was part of the objective condition of possibility for their experiments in collectivisation.
While, in his introductory remarks, Korsch points to the limitations of the Spanish cases, he soon after emphatically defends them: “it cannot be said in fairness that the Spanish workers and their revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist leadership neglected to seize the political power on a national or even on a regional Catalonian scale under conditions when this would have been done by a revolutionary party such as the Russian Bolsheviks.”59 Korsch points in particular to the double-standards at work in those who praise “the tactics of the Russian Bolsheviks in July, 1917 as a “cautious and realistic revolutionary policy” but “denounce the same policy as a “lack of revolutionary foresight and decision” when repeated, under such strongly analogous conditions, by the syndicalists in Spain.
Korsch describes this process as follows,
[…] a last hour victory of the revolutionary proletarian forces rallied in Barcelona - either with or without a rehearsal of the insurrection of the communardes in besieged Paris 1871-would immensely enhance the immediate historical and practical importance of the great experiment in a genuine proletarian collectivization of industry, which was initiated and carried through by the workers and their unions during the last two years.60
The Spanish Marxists of the POUM were, however, in collaboration with the Anarchists and Syndicalists. Here we can see a possible diversion between, on the one hand, the objective of an emancipation that acquires its form through collectivisation from the bottom up and, in parallel, in the form of the anti-state and, on the other hand, a Communism that aims for the takeover of the state, that believes, in a Leninist sense, in the possibility of the state and the nation becoming fully transformed into a Communist form. Thus, once more, the possibility that such collectivisation signified a possible anti-racket form must have meant that there was a strong belief shared by Horkheimer and Korsch at the time that the State was the signifier and container of the racket of rackets.61 There must have also been a belief that only a collectivisation, an establishing of a collective take-over of business and industries, could result in a true democratic and freer form at a distance from the fate of the mimetic racketeering of the state.
In his article on “Collectivisation in Spain,” in which Korsch cites a small book published by the CNT/FAI about the Catalonian experiment of ‘collectivisation,’ Korsch proposes in his analysis and critique of the Spanish experience that such documents “cannot claim any greater merit than what we know from Marx, Engels, Lissagarays, and other writers about the economic experiments of the revolutionary Commune of the Paris workers in 1871.”62 Recalling the last paragraph of Korsch article “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain,” we can see how Korsch develops a critical stance towards a decaying, older form of Communism and Socialism, but also of the degeneration of Anarchist and Labour movements at the time. For this, the notion of degeneration (as a kind of anthropology of social forms) is crucial, and is a matter of direct experience. This is the experience of something that once manifested, that ultimately ended in failure, but that leaves the possibility of being recorded, told, and written about, of forming part of the material that revolutionary pedagogy piles up for future use: memory, archive, data, studying, and theory to inform potential future practices.
The questions we have posed to Korsch and Horkheimer’s psychological and anthropological mediations in tackling the cases of the racket-form, its pervasiveness in the capitalist totality, as well as the conditions of possibility for social revolution, as signified by the collectivisation in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, have centered on a critical challenge to the concept of ‘mimesis.’ Our questions have also led us to revisit the tensions at work in Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, which, by necessity, because of its commitment to historical materialism, had to include the various aspects and fields involved in his transdisciplinary, dialectical praxis. We have seen how the fields of anthropology and psychology had their limitations, and further that Horkheimer was unable to fully discard them when attempting to mediate his definition of the racket-form. Thus, our argument has been that mimesis as quality, impulse, characteristic of our animal but also our social realm, possesses both positive and negative possibilities and options for its trajectory. One can be a regressive mimetic, and thus be an anti-Semite, Nazi, fascist, but can also be a learning mimetic, rehearsing, writing, memorising, and bringing forward manifestations of the positive emancipation of ‘species being.’ This was the case in the time and space when and where collectivisation in Spain managed to work, to be effective in creating another order, distribution, and new values.
With Rosa Luxemburg, we can understand that the spirit of the anti-racket is deeply involved in resisting with collective forms of relation and production, and that every defeat is also a pedagogy: “Because of the contradiction in the early stages of the revolutionary process between the task being sharply posed and the absence of any preconditions to resolve it, individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of “war”—and this is another peculiar law of history—in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats.”63 The aspects and the characteristics that are registered in Korsch’s articles about Spanish collectivisation do not answer all of our questions, questions which we pose as a retracting and reflecting on the ongoing issues brought about under the circumstances in which we live today. Remembering, studying, testing, rehearsing, and taking notes on all of the past and present examples that constitute our modes of resistance and the spontaneous forms of fight, are thus a form of praxis we are doing once more, as did Korsch when reporting about the failed and defeated collectivisation of Spain.
“Horkheimer’s Letters With Korsch (1938-1939),” Substudies (blog), May 21, 2025, https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimers-letters-with-korsch-1938. ↩
Max Horkheimer, “Notes for the Programme of the Book (8/30/1942),” CTWG, 2025. https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketTexts/#notes-for-the-programme-of-the-book-8-30-1942. ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
For a more in-depth overview on the issue in Horkheimer, see, Dennis Johannssen, “Toward a Negative Anthropology”, Anthropology & Materialism [Online], 1 | 2013, Online since 15 October 2013, connection on 30 April 2019. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/am/194 ; DOI : 10.4000/am.194. ↩
Karl Korsch, “The Spanish Revolution,” Translated by Heinz Otto, Andrew Giles-Peters, and Heinz Schutte, in Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory, ed.Douglas Kellner (University of Texas Press, 1977), 212-223. ↩
For the now known secret complicity of the UK’s MI6’s agent involved to fly General Franco from Africa to the Canary Islands, see Peter Day, Franco’s Friends: How British Intelligence Helped Bring Franco to Power in Spain (Biteback Publishing, 2011). Also see Adam Hochschild, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Houghton Mifflin, 2016). Additionally for an in-depth study of the significance of ‘comprador classes’ in context of neocolonialism or post-colonialism see Nicos Poulantzas, The Crisis of the Dictatorships: Portugal, Spain, Greece (Verso Books, 2017). ↩
See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, (Lawrence & Wishart, 1976) [original 1845-46]. ↩
See Horkheimer’s critique of anthropology commented on and edited by James Crane. James Crane, “Revised Collection: Revolution and Rhetoric (1936/37),” Substudies (blog), March 6, 2025, https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158485476/b-critiqunon-idealistice-of-anthropology. ↩
“Notes for the Programme of the Book (8/30/1942),” CTWG, 2025. ↩
The aspects of mimesis that Adorno points at in Negative Dialectics are also useful here: “…the mimetic element of knowledge, for the element of elective affinity between the knower and the known.” In Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (Routledge, 1990 [1973]), 45-55. For a more recent translation, see: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (2021 [2001]), https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/Negative_Dialectics_Redmondtrans2021.pdf. For more on Adorno’s concept of the mimetic impulse, which posits a simultaneous character of mimesis and spontaneity, see: Pierre-François Noppen, “Adorno on Mimetic Rationality: Three Puzzles,” Adorno Studies 1, no. 1 (January 3, 2017), 79-100, http://adornostudies.org/ojs/index.php/as/article/download/7/22. ↩
Max Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” and Max Horkheimer, “Rackets and Spirit (1942/44),” CTWG, 2025, https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketTexts/#rackets-and-spirit-1942-44. ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
*My approach to the concept of a possible aporetic dialectical methodology in Horkheimer is based on Gillian Rose’s notion of the difference between the deterministic approach versus the aporetic one to Marxism in her introduction Mourning Became the Law (1996). My argument here is that indeed Horkheimer and Adorno, if not fully representing to the letter Rose’s concept of ‘her aporetic approach to Marx,’ do share in a negative sense a definitive non-“deterministic approach” to their own Marxist methodologies, thus their way to navigate/mediate the fields of Anthropology and Psychology will be closer to the description given by Rose of what it entails the ‘aporetic approach.’ Rose writes: “Philosophy as I practise it has a different orientation based on a different logic and a different story. From Plato to Marx, I would argue, it is always possible to take the claims and conceptuality of philosophical works (I say ‘works’ not ‘texts’: the former implying the labour of the concept inseparable from its formal characteristics as opposed to the latter with its connotations of signifiers, the symbolic and semiotics) deterministically or aporetically—as fixed, closed conceptual structures, colonising being with the garrison of thought; or according to the difficulty which the conceptuality represents by leaving gaps and silences in the mode of representation. These alternatives are well-known in the case of the labour of the concept inseparable from its formal characteristics as opposed to the latter with its connotations of signifiers, the symbolic and semiotics) deterministically or aporetically—as fixed, closed conceptual structures, colonising being with the garrison of thought; or according to the difficulty which the conceptuality represents by leaving gaps and silences in the mode of representation. These alternatives are well-known in the case of Marx and Marxism. Marx’s works can be interpreted deterministically: as formulating the iron laws of history from which the inevitable outcome of class struggle in the victory of the proletariat can be predicted. The same works can be interpreted aporetically: as stressing the gap between theory and practice, which strain towards each other; as insisting on the uncertain course of class struggle, which depends on the unpredictable configurations of objective conditions and the formation of class consciousness; as imagining the multiplicity of eventualities which might emerge between the extremes, ‘Barbarism or Socialism.’” In Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes The Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7-8. ↩
A work that proposes a methodology of an ‘aporetic anthropology’ mediated by Sigmund Freud via Eric Fromm’s critique, is Max Horkheimer’s 1936 essay published as “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, Max Horkheimer, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (MIT Press, 1993), 49-110. ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer to Felix Weil, 1/13/1943, in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 17, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Alfred Schmidt (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 397. English in original. Cf. Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations”: “The modern concept serves to describe past social relations. “The anatomy of the man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey.”” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
For us this is key for explaining the creative element at “play” in certain tactical learning or mimetic performance, as could be the case with the workers union at the time, albeit with not so great results. In the Appendix to his Lectures on Negative Dialectics, Adorno states: “To represent the thing it has repressed, namely mimesis, the concept has no alternative but to incorporate some of it into its own behaviour. In accordance with the criteria of the concept, this procedure introduces an element of playfulness.” Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966 (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 187. ↩
Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Polity, 2013), 143. ↩
Adorno, Against Epistemology. ↩
Adorno, Against Epistemology. ↩
We have found that our proposal partly coincides with a fragment of Dennis Johannssen essay on Negative Anthropology, where he states that “[…] History also contains traces of liberation in the revolutionary movements of the past. In the words of the early Marx, the human being has not yet come into being, because to the present day its species characteristics – the characteristics that result from the historical form of his conscious relation to nature by means of labour – have been restricted by repressive forms of social organisation (Marx 1988: 75-77; Bien 1984: 65-77, 201-217). Horkheimer is not willing to give up the anthropological assumptions implied by this model of man’s progressive historical realisation, for it allows him to justify a universal, trans-historical demand of the human being to be liberated from repressive social conditions.”Johannssen, “Toward a Negative Anthropology”, 194 ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
The concept of cannibalising the enemy, culturally at least, was brought up by Oswald de Andrade with his Manifesto Antropofago. Oswald de Andrade,”The Cannibalist Manifesto (Manifesto Antropófago),” in The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. James N. Green, Victoria Langland and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, 300-308 (Duke University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822371793-080 ↩
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford University Press, 2002) 37-8. ↩
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 45. ↩
See Korsch on the issue of rehearse and conditions of possibility: “ […] a “reconstruction” of the government in a “leftist” direction became inevitable, a last hour victory of the revolutionary proletarian forces rallied in Barcelona - either with or without a rehearsal of the insurrection of the communardes in besieged Paris 1871-would immensely enhance the immediate historical and practical importance of the great experiment in a genuine proletarian collectivization of industry, which was initiated and carried through by the workers and their unions during the last two years.” Karl Korsch, “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain,” in Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory, ed. Douglas Kellner (University of Texas Press, 1977), 224-231. ↩
Karl Korsch, “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain.” ↩
“Soviet Agents in Republican Spain,” Spanish Civil War. A Virtual Museum (date accessed: 12/17/2025), https://www.vscw.ca/en/node/92. ↩
See Note 2 of Korsch’s article, where he defines the situation of Stalinism correlation of forces at the time: “We quote here for the benefit of those hitherto Stalin-worshipping Communists who have recently begun to learn the lesson of great “purges” in Russia, a sentence from Pravda testifying to what the Stalinist “friends” did and intended to do in a thoroughly “Bolshevized” Spain. Says Pravda from December 17, 1936: “The purging of Catalonia from all Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist elements has already begun; this task is pushed on with the same energy with which it has already been performed in USSR.” Karl Korsch, “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain.” ↩
Horkheimer, “Rackets and Spirit.” ↩
Again, one has to be reminded that, as Korsch indicates, a realist view versus an idealised version of the case implies acknowledging that these workers were armed, that they gathered fearlessly to break up the locks where weapons were kept, and that they were fully armed in their uprising, for which their further experiment in collectivisation was possible. ↩
Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” ↩
Here quoting Rosa Luxemburg to understand why the case of Collectivisation in Spain cannot be dismissed: “Because of the contradiction in the early stages of the revolutionary process between the task being sharply posed and the absence of any preconditions to resolve it, individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of “war” – and this is another peculiar law of history – in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of “defeats.” What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today, as we advance into the final battle of the proletarian class war, we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.” Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Berlin (January, 1919),” Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Ed.Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott (Pluto Press, 2010), 265-266. ↩
Karl Korsch, “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain.” ↩
Karl Korsch, “Collectivization in Spain,” 1939, in Living Marxism, Vol. IV, No. 6, April 1939, 178-182. ↩
Karl Korsch, “Collectivization in Spain.” ↩
For an in depth review, see the witnessing report by Lois and Charles Orr, in a blog about anarchist and socialist resistance in the USA, Revolution’s Newsstand, “‘May 3-7, 1937: Barricades in Barcelona’ by Lois and Charles Orr From Spanish Revolution (New York-P.O.U.M.). Vol. 2 Vol. 8. May 19, 1936.” and also see the original in print here: “The Spanish Revolution — English Language Paper of the POUM,” , https://www.marxists.org/history/spain/poum/spanishrevolution/. ↩
In is worth seeing in closer inspection, the more varied aspects of the initial block or resistance and immediate collectivativisation efforts uniquely happening in Catalonia: “In addition to the collectivisation of businesses and agricultural fields, during the first week and thereafter, the first bodies were created in Barcelona to collaborate with the UGT, the Marxist left-wing parties and the parties of the republican petty bourgeoisie, in order to defeat the uprising of the military, Catholics and Falangists. The successive governments of the Generalitat, following the agreement between President Lluís Companys and the CNT-FAI delegation on 20 July 1936, limited themselves to legalising these organisations until their transformation into the Consell de la Generalitat de Catalunya, which incorporated the CNT and the FAI in early October 1936, along with all the collaborative organisations created with the UGT and the anti-fascist political parties between July and September 1936.” https://cgtcatalunya.cat/memoriahistorica/fonts/?page_id=17 accessed 09/08/2025. ↩
Karl Korsch,“Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain.” ↩
Karl Korsch, “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain.” ↩
Karl Korsch, “The Spanish Revolution.” ↩
Karl Korsch, “The Spanish Revolution.” ↩
Karl Korsch, “The Spanish Revolution.” ↩
Karl Korsch, “The Spanish Revolution.” ↩
Karl Korsch, “Collectivization in Spain.” ↩
In a quote from Max Horkheimer “Authoritarian State” [1940/42] on the problem of how the state betrays the councils, we read “Instead of dissolving in the end into the democracy of the councils, the group can maintain itself as a leadership. … The revolutionary movement negatively reflects the situation which it is attacking.” Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State” [1942], Trans.Peoples’ Translation Service in Berkeley and Elliott Eisenberg, Telos, No. 15 (1973), 6. ↩
Karl Korsch, “Collectivization in Spain.” ↩
Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Berlin (January, 1919).” ↩