Concept

Karl Kautsky

Overview

Karl Johann Kautsky (; German: [ˈkaʊtski]; 16 October 1854 – 17 October 1938) was an Austrian-born Marxist theorist. One of the most authoritative promulgators of orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895, he was for decades the leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International. His influence was so pervasive that he was often called the "Pope of Marxism", with his views remaining dominant until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. His influence extended beyond Germany, shaping the development of Marxism in the Russian Empire, where he was seen by figures like Vladimir Lenin as the leading authority on Marxist theory.

Born in Prague and educated in Vienna, Kautsky became a Marxist in the early 1880s while in exile in Zurich. He founded the journal Die Neue Zeit in 1883 and was its editor for 35 years. From 1885 to 1890, he lived in London, where he became a close friend of Engels. Following the repeal of Germany's Anti-Socialist Laws, he authored the theoretical section of the SPD's 1891 Erfurt Program. His commentary on the program, The Class Struggle, became a popular and widely circulated summary of Marxism. Kautsky's theoretical framework reinterpreted Karl Marx's critique of political economy into a doctrine of historical-empirical laws predicting the inevitable concentration of capital, polarisation of society, and immiseration of the working class.

Kautsky's orthodox Marxism advocated a gradualist, evolutionary approach to socialism. He argued that a socialist revolution was inevitable but could not be forced prematurely. The role of a socialist party was to organise the working class, win political reforms, and improve workers' lives through the institutions of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, until material conditions were ripe for the transition to socialism. This "centrist" stance, positioned between reformism and revolutionary radicalism, drew him into major conflicts. He defended Marxist orthodoxy against the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein, and opposed the revolutionary spontaneity advocated by Rosa Luxemburg.

Kautsky's pre-war influence collapsed after 1914. He opposed the SPD's decision to support the German war effort, which led him to break with the party and co-found the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917. After the war, he became a prominent critic of the October Revolution, denouncing it as a premature coup that had established a new form of dictatorship. He argued that the Bolsheviks' methods had betrayed the democratic principles he saw as essential to socialism. He rejoined the SPD in 1922 but his influence steadily declined. He fled to Amsterdam after the 1938 Anschluss of Austria, and died there the same year. Vilified by Leninists as a "renegade", Kautsky is seen by others as a consistent proponent of democratic socialism whose work continues to influence modern currents.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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I must call attention to the fact, by the way, that the views here set out were, for by far the most part, developed and established by Marx, and only to a very slight degree by myself, so that it is understood that I have not represented them without his knowledge. I read the entire manuscript to him before sending it to press and the tenth chapter of the section on Political Economy was written by Marx and…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
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Kautsky began to cause serious mistrust in his own school during the period of his revolutionary culmination, at the time of the first Russian Revolution, when he recognized as necessary the seizure of power by the Russian Social-Democracy, and attempted to inoculate the German working class with his theoretical conclusions from the experience of the general strike in Russia. The collapse of the first Russian…
Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy
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Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of…
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
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Part of Communism.

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