Leo Kofler: On topicality Leo Kofler: An undogmatic optimist

Karl Dietz Verlag has just published a new anthology with texts by the Marxist social philosopher and social theorist Leo Kofler. What is new about this volume, what is the concept and intention behind it?

The volume brings together a total of 47 short texts by Kofler, 40 of which appear here in book form for the first time, if I counted correctly. In my opinion, what is special about them is that they offer contributions to Marxist theory and practice in short newspaper and magazine format that can still be read with intellectual benefit. This applies to those who already know Kofler’s books as well as to those who are looking for an introduction to Kofler. The texts have an enormous thematic breadth and deal with the relationship between state and society, work and economy or liberalism and democracy. They deal with questions of literature and aesthetics and offer an analysis and criticism of both modern neo-capitalism and the Stalinist understanding of Marxism.

Kofler deals with fundamental questions such as the relationship between materialism and idealism, Marxism and ethics or Marxism and religion. He also explains what Marxists mean by alienation, reification, fetishism and ideology, what exploitation, freedom and progress are and why the concept of totality is so important and central to critical Marxism. Above all, the texts make it clear – and I see this as a particular originality of this volume – that and how Kofler saw himself as a political intellectual and tried to get involved in left-wing debates, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, but also in the 1970s and 1980s to intervene. Both explicitly and implicitly, he is always concerned with the complicated relationship between theory and practice, which is an ongoing question.

But how would you characterize his theoretical thinking and his political-intellectual point of view? What sets him apart, also in comparison with other German post-war Marxists?

Kofler’s originality lies in his biography, about which I have written a lot elsewhere. As a child of East Galician Jewry and the “Red Vienna” of the interwar period, he became a student first of the left-wing social democratic-left-socialist Austro-Marxist Max Adler and then, in exile in Switzerland, of Georg Lukács. Under the historical conditions of the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s and 1940s, Kofler turned this into a theoretically original hybrid form of “Western Marxism” and “socialist humanism” that rarely exists. This socialist humanism and, above all, Kofler’s derived understanding of a humanistic view of humanity and a Marxist anthropology can also be found in the texts in this volume. Unlike most German post-war Marxists such as Theodor W. Adorno and other representatives of the “Frankfurt School”, but also differently and more profoundly than Ernst Bloch, Wolfgang Abendroth or Wolfgang Harich, Kofler developed the foundations of a philosophical anthropology understood in Marxist terms. This avoids the one-sidedness of a “Western Marxism” that is only understood in terms of cultural science or cultural criticism, or the one-sidedness of Eastern Marxism-Leninism.

This theoretical originality is closely related to Kofler’s political-intellectual originality. Even if the later “68ers” themselves mostly didn’t want to admit it, he was an intellectual father of the “68er” revolt. This means that he had already made a comprehensive criticism of the socio-political integration process of the Social Democrats and trade unionists in the 1950s and combined this criticism with a no less sharp criticism of communist Stalinism in theory and practice. So in the second half of the 1950s he came to develop his theory of a progressive, humanist elite as a third left force between and beyond the two main left movements. In doing so, he not only anticipated the later New Left. What’s more, he was a leading activist from the first generation, which had already existed in the fifties, together with Viktor Agartz, Fritz Lamm, Gerhard Gleissberg and many others.

You wrote about these historical connections in more detail in the introduction to the new volume.

Yes. And I think that this explains a large part of the topicality of the texts and Kofler’s work. The criticism he made in the 1950s of the “ethical socialism” of the SPD thinkers at the time has lost little of its relevance – it’s just that today we find this ethical socialism in other currents. And what he wonderfully dismantles in an article in the volume as “orthodox priesthood” is nothing other than the philo-Stalinism that can still be found among quite a few leftists today. Unfortunately there hasn’t been much improvement on the German left. Incidentally, this also applies to the New Left itself. Kofler did not miss the opportunity to critically portray this political-intellectual movement in all its inherent contradictions. We also find this in this volume.

And not much has changed in these basic constellations since then. There are also extremely diverse and sometimes even antagonistic currents in today’s progressive left. There is also a sometimes subtle, sometimes open battle between, as Kofler would say, humanistic currents and nihilistic currents. By nihilism, it must be said, he understood what today would be called the anti-political cynicism of many leftists.

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Now that doesn’t sound very encouraging.

Might be. But Kofler himself was an incorrigible optimist and relied on people’s ability and willingness to learn.

Would that also be the point that one can or should learn from him in the current crisis on the left?

I don’t know if you can really learn to be optimistic – he would certainly say yes. But we can learn from him his undogmatic and productive understanding of Marxism. We can also learn that Marxist theory and socialist practice were always diverse and plural and in many ways did not represent the distorted image that so many paint today.

Can you illustrate this with an example?

I have already mentioned the understanding of Marxism-Leninism, which still seems so devastating, and have also discussed it in other places. In my opinion, the discussion about the ecological challenge and the alleged failures of the historical left is even more topical. Of course, there were and are, to put it bluntly, many ignorant people on the political and social left. But we always find those individuals and small groups who took different paths early on, very early on, including on the ecological issue. The fact that a “Western Marxism”, which primarily looks at society and its culture, had and still has its problems with questions of nature and ecology has often been discussed and criticized. And Kofler also didn’t have a good feel for ecology as such. But he had a very keen sense of human nature as part of world nature, and here, in my opinion, he has a lot to give us. The wisdom, which is often quoted again today, that we humans were only able to develop culture because of our nature, is also the basis of every emancipatory ecology. Leo Kofler already developed this topic in the 1950s. Here too he was a pioneer who is really worth remembering.