Karl Johann Kautsky

Karl Johann Kautsky , 1854-1938, German-Austrian socialist, b. Prague. A leading figure in the effort to spread Marxist doctrine in Germany, he was the principal deviser of the Erfurt Program, which set the German Social Democratic party on an orthodox Marxist path and established him as a dominant figure in the Second International . He was a consistent opponent of Eduard Bernstein and other socialists who advocated revision of Marxist doctrines. After initial hesitation he opposed the Social Democratic party's support of the German effort in World War I and helped form, with Hugo Haase , the Independent Social Democratic party. Soon after the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) in Russia, he condemned it as undemocratic and non-Marxist. Kautsky wrote a great amount of socialist and other literature and edited the German documents on the origin of World War I (4 vol., 1919). Among his translated works are The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (tr. 1925), Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (tr. 1907), and Bolshevism at a Deadlock (tr. 1931).

Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938) A German socialist politician and social theorist. His ‘On the Agrarian Question’ (1899)
argued that small-scale peasant production was doomed to disappear in the face of capitalist development, and that social democrats should not seek to defend peasant interests, their future lying in proletarianization. For Kautsky, the peasantry embodied the ‘backward’ social characteristics of isolation, tradition, and individualism. He was opposed to revisionism; that is, the electoral politics of Edward Bernstein in the 1900s, and adopted a pacifist position in the First World War. He criticized the Bolshevik revolution and its policy of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, attracting the hostility of Lenin, who attacked Kautsky as the epitome of the social democratic betrayal of the working class (see The Road to Power, 1909, and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918
). See also MARXISM.