Karl Kautsky
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Karl Kautsky (October 16 1854 – October 17 1938) was a leading theoretician of German Social Democracy before World War I and a principal figure in the history of the Internationalist Socialist movement[2]. He became a significant figure in Marxist history as the editor of the fourth volume of Karl Marx's economic critique, Das Kapital, and was the leading promulgator of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels.
Life
Karl Kautsky was born in Prague of artistic middle class parents. The family moved to Vienna when he was seven years old. While studying history and philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1874, Kautsky became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in 1875. In 1880 Kautsky moved to Zurich, where he joined a group of German socialists who smuggled socialist material into the Reich at the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws. This group was supported financially by millionaire Karl Höchberg [3]. Influenced by Höchberg's secretary, Eduard Bernstein, Kautsky became a Marxist and Hochberg subsidized Kautsky's study of socialist scholarship. In 1881 Kautsky visited Marx and Engels in England.
In 1883, Kautsky founded the monthly Die Neue Zeit ("The New Time") in Stuttgart, which became a weekly in 1890, and was its editor until September 1917 – which gave him a steady income and allowed him to propagate Marxism.[1] From 1885-1888 Kautsky lived in London, where he established a close personal relationship with Engels and furthered his theoretical studies by visiting the British Museum library.
The German Social Democratic Party[4] was an illegal party for many years until 1890, when Kaiser William II [5], dropped the anti¬socialist laws. In 1891 the Social Democrats set forth their program at a congress at Erfurt, Germany [6]. Kautsky co-authored the Erfurt Program of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) together with August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein. The Erfurt program was strongly Marxist and revolutionary in tone, but encouraged its members to work through existing political institutions. The Erfurt program remained the official program of the party throughout the imperial period
Following the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky became one of the most important and influential theoreticians of Marxism, representing the center of the party together with August Bebel. In the later 1890s when Bernstein attacked the traditional Marxist position on the necessity for revolution, Kautsky denounced him, arguing that Bernstein's emphasis on the ethical foundations of Socialism opened the road to a call for an alliance with the "progressive" bourgeoisie and a non-class approach.
Kautsky broke with the majority of the Social Democrats during World War I. Bebel's death in 1913 severely undermined Kautsky's influence in the party, while his opposition to the war eventually brought an end to his affiliation with the SPD. In 1914, when the German Social-Democrat deputies in the Reichstag voted for the war credits, Kautsky, who was not a deputy but attended their meetings, had suggested abstaining. In June 1915, about ten months after the war had begun, Kautsky issued an appeal with Eduard Bernstein and Hugo Haase against the pro-war leaders of the SPD and denounced the government's annexationist aims. In 1917, convinced of the war guilt of Germany and Austria, he left the SPD for the pacifist Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which united Socialists who opposed the war. This move cost Kautsky the editorship of Die neue Zeit. [2]
After 1919, Kautsky's prominence steadily diminished. He visited Georgia in 1920 and wrote a book in 1921 on this Social Democratic country still independent of Bolshevist Russia. In 1920, when the USPD split, he went with a minority of that party back into the SPD. At the age of 70 he moved back to Vienna with his family in 1924 where he remained until 1938. At the time of Hitler's Anschluss, he fled to Czechoslovakia and thence by plane to Amsterdam where he died in the same year.
Karl Kautsky lived in Berlin-Friedenau for many years; his wife, Luise Kautsky, was a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg, who also lived in Friedenau, and today there is a commemorative plaque where Kautsky lived at Saarstraße 14.
Kautsky was described as a "renegade" by Vladimir Lenin, and he in turn castigated Lenin in his 1934 work Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship:
- "The Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership, however, succeeded in capturing control of the armed forces in Petrograd and later in Moscow and thus laid the foundation for a new dictatorship in place of the old Tsarist dictatorship."[7]
His work Social Democracy vs. Communism[3] treated the Bolshevist rule in Russia. In Kautsky's view, Bolsheviks (or, Communists) had been a conspirational organisation, which gained power by a coup and initiated revolutionary changes for which there were no economic presumptions in Russia. Instead, a bureaucratic society developed, misery of which eclipsed the problems of the Western capitalism. The attempts (be it undertaken by Lenin or Stalin) of building a working and affluent socialist society failed.
- “Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand before the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought occur to them what enslavement, what lowering of human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments.”
- “They extracted the means for the creation of material productive forces by destroying the most essential productive force of all-the laboring man. In the terrible conditions created by the Piatiletka, people rapidly perished. Soviet films, of course, did not show this.” (ch. 6 Is Soviet Russia A Socialist State?)
Major works
- Frederick Engels: His Life, His Work and His Writings (1887) [8]
- The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887/1903) [9]
- Thomas More and his Utopia (1888) [10]
- The Class Struggle (1892) [11]
- On The Agrarian Question (1899)
- The Social Revolution and on the day After the Social Revolution (1902) [12]
- Foundations of Christianity (1908) [13]
- The Road to Power (1909) [14]
- Are the Jews a Race? (1914) [15]
- The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) [16]
- Terrorism and Communism (1919) [17]
- The Labour Revolution (1924) [18]
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