Chapter Karl Korsch

Overview & Synopsis

This essay is concerned with Karl Korsch’s account of labour, developed throughout his whole political and intellectual trajectory. Since his texts from 1912, Korsch tackled the topic of labour as crucial for the concrete elaboration of what the ‘socialisation of the means of production’ could mean. Answering this question requires facing the crossroad between direct and indirect forms of socialisation and workers’ political power. In Korsch, the notion of socialisation is thoroughly explored via that of labour, which is understood as the condition of possibility of any production. Moreover, his progressive understanding of this concept sheds lights onto the complexification of the joint problems of ownership and socialisation, even within the working class.