KAUTSKY, KARL

KAUTSKY, KARL (1854–1938), Marxist theoretician.

Karl Kautsky was the most important Marxist theoretician from the death of Engels in 1895 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Born to an artistic, German-speaking, middle-class family in Prague, Kautsky grew up and was educated in Vienna. As a young man he participated in the nascent worker-socialist movement in Austria, but then moved on to richer grounds. After a period of exile in London, where he briefly met Karl Marx (1818–1883) and established a much closer relationship with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Kautsky became one of the leading intellectuals of the German and international socialist movements. In addition to being the principal author of the German Social Democratic Party's (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, SPD) Erfurt program (1891), which announced the party's putative basis in Marxian theory, Kautsky was for nearly thirty years editor of the leading Marxist journal, Die Neue Zeit. In this latter capacity, he dealt with all the most important Marxist theoreticians of his time, not only Europeans, but also those in Asia, Australia, North and South America, and elsewhere, who saw themselves as part of the worldwide upswelling of Marxist theory, history, and contemporary political analysis. Kautsky's significance as a theoretician and popularizer of Marxism corresponded to the rise and impressive growth of socialist, working-class parties in Europe and much of the rest of the world.

Kautsky was primarily important in two capacities—as a popularizer of Marxism and as the theoretician of the Marxist mainstream of the SPD. In the first capacity, his works like The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1883) and The Erfurt Program (1892) (both of which went through innumerable editions and translations), played a significant role in establishing Marx's critique of modern capitalism as legitimate and useful to the emerging workers' movements. Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) frequently identified Kautsky as one of the major influences that led him to Marxism, and Economic Doctrines was the first full-length Marxian work translated into Chinese. In the second capacity, as theoretician of the SPD, Kautsky served to reinforce the positions of the long-time party leader, August Bebel (1840–1913), and to counterattacks from the right, especially Eduard Bernstein's (1850–1932) revisionism, and the left, especially Rosa Luxemburg's (1870–1919) radical calls for violent action in the streets to bring about the socialist revolution. Time and again, Bebel called on Kautsky to criticize on the theoretical level those elements of the party who would move it to the right, in the direction of pure reformism, or to the left, in the direction of pressing for revolution at every opportunity, which might well have cost the movement dearly in terms of loss of life and legitimacy. The clearest statement of this centrist position came in Der Weg zur Macht (1909; The Road to Power), in which he urged the party to stay the course between outright reformism and reckless activism in the streets.

While not an innovator in Marxian theory, Kautsky did popularize the worldview and language of Marxism. He was heavily influenced both by Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) evolutionary theory and by Engels's inclination to expand Marx's philosophical analysis of modern capitalism into a comprehensive natural-scientific based view that encompassed the whole of natural history and human society. Kautsky would not have been nearly as important as he was if he had not been backed, largely in the person of August Bebel, by the enormous prestige of the German Social Democratic Party. Although no longer held in high esteem, Kautsky should be recognized for what he was, namely, a popularizer of a seductive and alluring theory of modern society.

See alsoBebel, August; Bernstein, Eduard; Engels, Friedrich; Jaurès, Jean; Lenin, Vladimir; Marx, Karl; Second International; Socialism.

bibliography

Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid. Das Mandat des Intellecktuellen: Karl Kautsky und die Sozialdemokratie. Berlin, 1986.

Salvadori, Massimo L. Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880–1938. Translated by Jon Rothschild. London, 1979.

Steenson, Gary P. Karl Kautsky, 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years. Pittsburgh, 1978.

Gary P. Steenson