Karl Kautsky

Karl Kautsky (16 October 1854 - 17 October 1938) was a leading theoretician of Marxist Socialism and Social Democracy. He became a significant figure in Marxist history as the editor of the fourth published volume of Karl Marx's economic critique, Das Kapital. He became the leading promulgator of orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895, and was called the "Pope of Marxism". Some of his works were translated into all major European languages.

Karl Kautsky was born in Prague of artistic middle class parents. The family moved to Vienna when he was seven years old. He studied history and philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1874, and became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in 1875. In 1880 he joined a group of German socialists in Zurich who were supported financially by Karl Höchberg, and who smuggled socialist material into the Reich at the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Influenced by Eduard Bernstein, who was then Höchberg's secretary, he became a Marxist and in 1881 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 what was known then as Marxism. From 1885 to 1890 he spent time in London, where he became a close friend of Friedrich Engels. In 1891, he co-authored the Erfurt Program of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) together with August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein.

Following the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky became one of the most important and influential theoreticians of Marxism, representing the centre current of the party led by August Bebel. When Bernstein attacked the traditional Marxist position on the necessity for revolution in the later 1890s, Kautsky criticised 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 was very interested in the progress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party, and in the Russian Revolution of 1905. In his article " The Driving Force and Prospects of the Russian Revolution", published in Die Neue Zeit in 1906, he took the view that the Russian revolution, given that it took place in an economically backward country, nonetheless had the potential to go beyond the traditional bourgeois capitalist stage of development found in Western Europe. This article was published by Lenin in Russian as backing his view rather than those of the Mensheviks who tended to the view that the Russian revolution could only be a bourgeois one and so the Russian Social Democrats and working classes should co-operate with the liberal and progressive elements of the bourgeoisie.

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. Kautsky claimed that Germany was waging a defensive war against the threat of Czarist Russia. However, in June 1915, about ten months after the war had begun and when it had become obvious that this was going to be a sustained, appallingly brutal and costly struggle, he issued an appeal jointly with Eduard Bernstein and Hugo Haase against the pro-war leaders of the SPD and denounced the government's annexationist aims. In 1917 he left the SPD for the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which united Socialists who opposed the war.

After the November Revolution in 1918 in Germany, Kautsky served as under-secretary of State in the Foreign Office in the short lived SPD-USPD revolutionary government and worked at finding documents which proved the war guilt of Imperial Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm in particular. He also wrote the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", which criticised the Bolsheviks for their undemocratic sweeping away of the elected Constituent Assembly, and plans to build socialism in backward peasant Russia.

After 1919, Kautsky's prominence steadily diminished. He visited Georgia in 1920 and wrote a book in 1921 on this Social Democratic government, then still independent of Bolshevist Russia. In 1920, when the USPD split, he went with the 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 several works of the 1920s and 1930s. In his 1934 work Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship, he wrote that

   "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.

Having seized control, Lenin at once conceived himself powerful enough to undertake from above and by utopian methods the carrying out of a task which until then he himself as a disciplined Marxist had regarded as unrealizable, namely, the immediate establishment of the Socialist order of production with the aid of an immature proletariat."

Major works ( Dates given are of the original publication in German, Titles are those of the English translations where they exist)

   * Frederick Engels: His Life, His Work and His Writings (1887) 
   * The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887/1903) 
   * Thomas More and his Utopia (1888) 
   * The Erfurt Programme (1892)
   * Parliamentarianism, Direct Legislation, and Social Democracy (1893/1910/1924) 
   * On The Agrarian Question (1899)
   * The Social Revolution and On the Day after the Social Revolution (1902) 
   * Foundations of Christianity (1908) 
   * The Road to Power (1909) 
   * Are the Jews a Race? (1914) 
   * The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) 
   * Terrorism and Communism (1919) 
   * The Guilt of William Hohenzolleren (1920)
   * The Labour Revolution (1924) 
   * The Materialist Conception of History (1927)
   * Bolshevism at a Deadlock (1929)