"The Crisis of Marxism" was written by Karl Korsch in 1931 for purposes of "self-clarification." It remained unpublished until 1971, ten years after the author's death, when it appeared in a collection of essays entitled Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (The Materialist Conception of History) published in West Germany. The fact that this essay remains a penetrating critique of the atrophy of Marxist theory today, both under state socialism as well as within certain tendencies of the Left in advanced