Right. Another historical figure to dissect. Don't look so hopeful; understanding the past rarely makes the present less of a disappointment. Still, if you must know about the man they called the "Pope of Marxism," let's get on with it. Try to keep up.
Karl Kautsky
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Karl Johann Kautsky (/ˈkaʊtski/; German: [ˈkaʊtski]; 16 October 1854 – 17 October 1938) was an Austrian-born German Marxist theorist whose life work was to forge a coherent doctrine from the sprawling, difficult legacy of Marx. For decades, he was the most authoritative promulgator of orthodox Marxism, particularly after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895. As the leading theorist for both the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International, his influence was so immense that he earned the faintly ridiculous and entirely burdensome title of the "Pope of Marxism." His particular brand of theoretical certainty remained dominant until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 shattered the illusion of international socialist solidarity. His reach was global, profoundly shaping the development of Marxism in places like the Russian Empire, where figures such as Vladimir Lenin once regarded him as the supreme authority on Marxist theory, before deciding he was a renegade.
Born in Prague and educated, if one can call it that, in Vienna, Kautsky's conversion to Marxism occurred in the early 1880s while in exile in Zurich. In 1883, he founded the journal Die Neue Zeit, a theoretical organ he would edit for 35 years, shaping the minds of a generation of socialists. His exile extended to London from 1885 to 1890, where he became a close friend of Engels, the keeper of the flame. After Germany's Anti-Socialist Laws were finally repealed, Kautsky authored the theoretical section of the SPD's hugely influential 1891 Erfurt Program. His book-length commentary on it, The Class Struggle, became the definitive, accessible summary of Marxism, read by socialists from Berlin to Siberia. Kautsky's theoretical project involved a reinterpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, transforming it into a doctrine of historical-empirical laws that predicted the inevitable concentration of capital, the polarization of society into two warring classes, and the unavoidable immiseration of the working class.
His orthodox Marxism championed a gradualist, evolutionary path to socialism. Kautsky argued that a socialist revolution was a historical inevitability, but like a watched pot, it would not boil faster for being stared at and certainly could not be forced prematurely. The duty of a socialist party was therefore to organize the working class, patiently win political reforms, and improve the lives of workers through the existing institutions of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. This would continue until material conditions were sufficiently ripe for the transition to socialism. This "centrist" position, an uncomfortable balancing act between reformism and revolutionary radicalism, dragged him into nearly every major ideological conflict of his time. He defended Marxist orthodoxy against the revisionism of his one-time friend Eduard Bernstein and stood in opposition to the revolutionary spontaneity advocated by the likes of Rosa Luxemburg.
Kautsky's pre-war authority imploded after 1914. He opposed the SPD's catastrophic decision to support the German war effort, a stance that led him to break with the party he had helped build and co-found the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917. After the war, he became one of the most prominent and persistent critics of the October Revolution, denouncing it as a premature coup d'état that had simply established a new, more efficient form of dictatorship. He argued that the methods of the Bolsheviks were a betrayal of the democratic principles he saw as indivisible from genuine socialism. He rejoined the SPD in 1922, but his influence was a shadow of its former self, steadily declining in a world that had little patience for his brand of patient orthodoxy. He fled to Amsterdam after the 1938 Anschluss of Austria, where he died the same year. Vilified by Leninists as a "renegade," Kautsky is seen by others as a consistent, if sometimes tragically ineffective, proponent of democratic socialism whose work continues to echo in modern political currents.
Early life
Family and background
Karl Kautsky was born in Prague on 16 October 1854, at a time when it was still part of the sprawling Austrian Empire.¹ His parents were Johann Kautsky, a Czech theatrical scene designer, and Minna Jaich, an Austrian actress and writer of Czech heritage.² The family relocated to the imperial capital of Vienna in 1863, when Kautsky was seven.³ Despite Kautsky's later, somewhat strained, attempts in his memoirs to suggest a vague connection to the proletariat, his family was decidedly not working class. While his parents had navigated some financial instability in their early married life, they were cushioned by family connections. By the time Karl was six, his father's career provided a comfortable income, enough to afford at least two servants.⁴ He was the eldest of four children, followed by Minna (born 1856), Fritz (born 1857), and Johann (born 1864).⁴
Kautsky fostered a particularly close intellectual bond with his mother, Minna. Hailing from a family of actors and theatrical artists, she was freed from most household duties by the family's improved financial situation after 1860 and turned her energies to intellectual pursuits. She and Karl developed a shared fascination with contemporary philosophy and natural science. When Karl received a copy of Ernst Haeckel's The History of Creation in 1874, they studied its dense pages together. Later, as Kautsky began to draft his first socialist articles, he would present them to his mother for her advice. Minna Kautsky eventually became a socialist writer in her own right, earning a minor reputation for her romantic socialist fiction even before her son's work gained prominence, and was admired by no less a figure than Friedrich Engels.⁵
A persistent misconception, as noted by the historian Gary Steenson, is that Kautsky was Jewish. He was not. This confusion may have arisen because his second wife, Luise Ronsperger, was Jewish, and their sons subsequently faced persecution under the Nazis.⁶
Education and early influences
From a young age, Kautsky was a voracious reader. Tutored at home until he was nine, he began his formal education in 1864 at the Melk seminary, an institution run by Benedictine monks which he found stifling and oppressive.⁷ From 1866 to 1874, he attended the far more progressive Academic Gymnasium in Vienna, where his studies encompassed religion, Latin, Greek, German, geography, history, mathematics, natural history, and philosophy.⁷ He was, by all accounts, a mediocre student, a fact he attributed to chronic illness, poor eyesight, and a deep-seated distrust of his teachers. His academic performance was also undoubtedly hampered by his growing fixation on extracurricular matters, most notably the explosive events of the Paris Commune in 1871.⁸ He excelled only in history and philosophy, subjects that allowed for broader interpretation and less rote memorization.⁸
In the autumn of 1874, Kautsky enrolled at the University of Vienna, with the vague intention of studying "historical philosophy" to become a university lecturer or a middle-school teacher.⁷ He took courses in psychology, history, physical geography, and literature. A brief, ill-fated attempt to study law was abandoned due to illness and what he self-deprecatingly described as a complete lack of oratorical skill.⁹ He ultimately attended for nine semesters but never completed a degree, as his escalating socialist activities pulled him away from the staid world of academia.⁹ Kautsky himself felt he learned little of value at the university, citing conflicts with professors and concluding that socialists were, by necessity, largely self-taught.⁹ Friedrich Engels would later criticize Kautsky's university training for instilling a "frightful mass of nonsense" and a tendency towards hasty judgment, though he did concede that Kautsky was making an effort to unlearn these academic habits.¹⁰ Steenson, however, argues that Kautsky's broad and somewhat undisciplined university studies were precisely what fostered his eclectic intellectual tastes, suiting him perfectly for his future role as a popularizer of Marxism.¹¹
During his university years, Kautsky briefly toyed with the idea of careers in art, like his father, or playwriting, having written creatively since his seminary days.¹² Inspired by his father's successful stage adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Karl penned a scientific fantasy play, The Atlantic-Pacific Company, which centered on the construction of a Panama-Nicaragua canal. It enjoyed only limited success in Vienna, Graz, and Berlin during 1877–1878. Its failure, combined with his deepening immersion in the socialist movement, convinced him to abandon playwriting for good.¹³
Entry into socialism
Kautsky's immediate family was largely apolitical, save for a sporadic current of Czech nationalism that Karl initially shared.¹⁴ His political consciousness began to stir in the summer of 1868, following a visit to rural Bohemia, where he was struck by the intensity of Czech nationalist feeling and peasant agitation. For the next two years, he considered himself an "outspoken Czech nationalist," drawing inspiration from figures like František Palacký, who blended romantic nationalism with political liberalism.¹⁵ This phase, however, was short-lived in the predominantly German cultural milieu of Vienna.¹⁶
Two events in early 1871 were instrumental in Kautsky's radicalization: the Paris Commune and his reading of George Sand's romantic socialist novel, The Sin of M. Antoine. The Commune captured his imagination, ignited his sympathies for the working class, and nudged his political radicalism decisively towards socialism.¹⁷ Sand's novel, which he would reread countless times, offered crucial emotional solace during a period of isolation when his family disapproved of his socialist inclinations. It reinforced his ethical commitment to the oppressed and instilled in him the idea that the arrival of socialism would be a long, arduous process requiring immense study and development.¹⁸ Other early influences included the historical works of Louis Blanc.¹⁹ By late 1871, his Czech nationalism had morphed into a vaguely defined socialist, democratic radicalism. In 1873–1874, he wrote a series of unpublished articles and stories that sought to reconcile capital and labor through education, equality, and worker cooperatives, advocating for a federal republic with expansive freedoms.²⁰
Around this time, Kautsky fell heavily under the influence of positivism, materialism, and the scientific currents of the age, particularly the works of Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Büchner, and Henry Thomas Buckle.²¹ Darwin's work was especially pivotal, as its elimination of a deity from explanations of natural origins was instrumental in shaping Kautsky's anti-Christian, natural-scientific worldview.²² Darwin's Descent of Man proved particularly significant. Its explanation for the non-supernatural origin of human ethics was, in Kautsky's own words, a "revelation" that swept away one of the last obstacles to his full embrace of materialism.²³ He was deeply impressed by Haeckel's attempts to apply natural science to human society, though he recoiled from Haeckel's overt racism and the cruder expressions of Social Darwinism.²⁴ Büchner's monistic worldview and near-socialist political positions also held a strong appeal.²⁵ Buckle's History of Civilization in England initially suggested a materialist perspective but ultimately privileged the role of intellectual factors, a contradiction Kautsky would later address with more rigor.²⁶ Steenson notes that by 1885, Kautsky had decisively broken with the notion that natural laws could be directly mapped onto human society, emphasizing instead the historical specificity of social laws.²⁷
Austrian socialist movement and early writings
At about twenty years of age, Kautsky became an active participant in the Austrian socialist movement and began contributing to its journals.¹² He joined the small and fractious Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party (SPÖ) in January 1875.²⁸ Founded only a year earlier, the party was hobbled by Austria's limited industrialization, a severe economic depression, and deep internal divisions along both national and tactical lines.²⁹ Kautsky quickly aligned himself with the radical faction led by Andreas Scheu and took on the role of a propagandist and lecturer, focusing primarily on historical subjects.³⁰ His profound frustration with the party's impotence and the constant state repression led to a brief but intense flirtation with anarchist ideas.³¹
His earliest published writings appeared mostly in German socialist journals like Der Volksstaat (which later became Vorwärts) and in various Austrian socialist papers.³² These articles centered on natural science and its relationship to socialism, as well as on contemporary Austrian political developments.³³ A key early piece was "Socialism and the Struggle for Existence" (1876), in which he critiqued anti-socialist interpretations of Darwinism, arguing that solidarity, not just individual struggle, was a driving factor in evolution and human society.³⁴ His first book, Der Einfluss der Volksvermehrung auf den Fortschritt der Gesellschaft (The Influence of Population Increase on the Progress of Society, 1880), was a sustained critique of the Malthusian theory of overpopulation.¹⁹ During this pre-Marxist phase, Kautsky's theory of history was, by his own later admission, "nothing other than the application of Darwinism to social development," focused on the struggle for existence between different tribes, peoples, and races.³⁵ Steenson observes that these early writings were still heavily steeped in romantic and idealist influences, with Kautsky's commitment to socialism remaining primarily a moral one.³⁶
Kautsky first read Karl Marx's Capital in 1875, but its complex economic arguments did not immediately manifest in his work.³⁶ A more decisive turning point came with his encounter with Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring, which was serialized in Vorwärts from 1877 to 1878.³⁷ Though Kautsky would not study it in depth until 1880 with Eduard Bernstein, its ideas began to seep into his writing by the spring of 1878, signaling a shift towards a greater awareness of economic factors and Marxian analysis.³⁸ In 1879, through the wealthy German socialist Karl Höchberg, Kautsky was offered a subsidized position among exiled German socialists in Zurich, Switzerland. The offer, which was contingent on him abandoning his quasi-anarchist sympathies, provided a ready market for his socialist writing and, crucially, removed him from the increasingly anarchist-dominated Austrian socialist scene. He arrived in Zurich in January 1880.³⁹
Theoretician of German social democracy
Zurich and London exile (1880s)
The decade of the 1880s was transformative for Kautsky, both personally and intellectually. With Germany under the thumb of the Anti-Socialist Laws, he became a political nomad, moving between Zurich (1880–1882, 1884), Vienna (1882–1883, 1888–1889), Stuttgart (1883), and London (1885–1888, 1889–1890), before finally settling in Stuttgart in late 1890.⁴⁰ In this period, he cultivated a radical outlook, denouncing the bureaucratic-military state, viewing parliament primarily as a stage for agitation, and promoting a "mystique" of the party as a new ecclesia militans (church militant).⁴¹
In Zurich, living independently for the first time with Höchberg's financial backing, Kautsky became part of the German socialist émigré community, where he earned the nickname "Baron Juchzer" for his somewhat fastidious dress and irrepressible optimism.⁴² Höchberg served as his first serious editor and introduced him to the work of Herbert Spencer and the more practical dimensions of economics.⁴³ Most importantly, Kautsky forged a close friendship and intellectual alliance with Eduard Bernstein.⁴⁴ Together, they embarked on an intensive study of Engels's Anti-Dühring, an experience that cemented their conversion to Marxism.⁴⁵ Bernstein, with his practical party experience, also tutored Kautsky in the often-mundane realities of the German movement.⁴⁶
In February 1881, writing in Der Sozialdemokrat, the official newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) published in exile, he affirmed the necessity of a violent revolution, in which violence would act as the "midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one." He argued that while a party could not simply conjure a revolution out of thin air, it had a duty to organize itself for the inevitable event and "take advantage of it."⁴⁷ He saw the SPD's role as guiding the masses and giving the revolution a coherent direction.⁴⁸ In a December 1881 article, he argued that the revolution's first act must be to "demolish the bourgeois state" and erect a new one. The victorious proletariat, he wrote, would require a government to "curb the ruled with all the means at its command. All this may sound very undemocratic, but necessity will compel us to act in this way."⁴⁹
Kautsky first visited Marx and Engels in London from March to June 1881.⁵⁰ Marx was famously unimpressed, dismissing Kautsky as a "mediocrity," but Engels, ever the pragmatist, recognized his intellectual hunger and potential.⁵¹ He would spend a further five years in London between 1885 and 1890, maintaining close contact with Engels, with whom he had a much warmer relationship than with Marx.⁵² Kautsky was briefly considered for the editorship of Der Sozialdemokrat, but August Bebel and Engels ultimately decided Bernstein was better suited for the political demands of the role, deeming Kautsky more valuable as a pure theorist.⁵³
Die Neue Zeit
In 1883, Kautsky founded and became the primary editor of Die Neue Zeit (The New Age), a Marxist theoretical journal published by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz in Stuttgart.⁵⁴ This position provided Kautsky with a regular income and, more importantly, a powerful platform from which to develop and disseminate his particular interpretation of Marxism.⁵⁵ The journal was conceived as an organ of scientific socialism, with Marx and Darwin as its "twin pillars."⁵⁶ In a letter to Engels requesting a contribution for the first issue, Kautsky wrote: "I cannot think of a better introductory article ... than one about Darwin. The name alone is already a program."⁵⁷ According to its inaugural editorial, the journal's objectives were the "democratization of science as an instrument for the socialist elevation of the proletariat," unwavering party commitment, and a devotion to truth.⁵⁸ Wilhelm Liebknecht was a designated permanent contributor, and the initial editorial board consisted of Dietz, Liebknecht, and Kautsky.⁵⁹ Kautsky would remain its editor until 1917. Under his guidance, it became the most prestigious of all international Marxist journals, cementing his national and international reputation as the foremost expounder of Marx. The journal's influence was particularly strong in the Russian Empire, where it was the most popular Marxist publication and was seen as an indispensable source of theory for Russian Social Democrats.⁶⁰
The early years of Die Neue Zeit were fraught with Kautsky's financial anxieties and battles over editorial control, particularly with Wilhelm Blos and Bruno Geiser, who were installed by Dietz during Kautsky's brief return to Zurich in 1884. With crucial backing from Bebel, Kautsky successfully fought off attempts by the moderate wing of the SPD to water down the journal's staunchly Marxist orientation.⁶¹ From 1885 to 1888, Kautsky edited Die Neue Zeit from London, benefiting from close collaboration with Engels and the unparalleled resources of the British Museum. This proved to be a highly productive period for him.⁶² A key early theoretical debate published in the journal was Kautsky's (Engels-guided) critique of the state socialist ideas of Karl Rodbertus in 1884–1885, a polemic aimed at neutralizing its appeal within the German socialist movement.⁶³ In 1894–1895, the journal's status became the subject of a major internal party controversy. To ensure it could continue providing a living for key party intellectuals like Bernstein and Franz Mehring, Bebel overruled Kautsky's desire to convert it from a weekly back to a monthly, a decision that underscored the journal's practical role in subsidizing the movement's theorists.⁶⁴
Erfurt Program
Kautsky was the central architect of the SPD's new party program following the lapse of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890. The old Gotha Program of 1875 was widely considered theoretically obsolete.⁶⁵ In January 1891, Engels sent Kautsky Marx's previously unpublished Critique of the Gotha Program, which Kautsky promptly published in Die Neue Zeit. This act created a considerable firestorm within the SPD leadership, particularly infuriating Wilhelm Liebknecht and Dietz, due to its scathing criticism of the 1875 program and of Ferdinand Lassalle.⁶⁶ Despite the controversy, Kautsky's draft for the new program, which was built on orthodox Marxist principles, was largely accepted by the party commission at the Erfurt Congress in October 1891, triumphing over a rival draft prepared mainly by Liebknecht.⁶⁷ Kautsky was tasked with writing the theoretical section, which outlined the long-term goals of social polarization and the socialization of the means of production, while Bernstein drafted the "minimum programme" of short-term practical demands.⁶⁸ Although Bebel's support was crucial for the acceptance of Kautsky's draft, he also insisted on changes, such as a clause for the free administration of justice. Kautsky, in turn, successfully led the opposition to Bebel's desire to include the Lassallean phrase "one reactionary mass" to describe all non-socialist parties.⁶⁷ The resulting Erfurt Program was the first major party platform based strictly on Marxist principles.¹⁹ It served as a masterful compromise, reconciling the revolutionary fervor born from years of persecution with the practical necessity of a reformist tactic in a fundamentally non-revolutionary era.⁶⁹
Following the congress, Kautsky was commissioned by the party's central committee to write a popular pamphlet explaining and elaborating on the program. The result was Das Erfurter Programm (1892, translated as The Class Struggle), which became his most famous and widely translated work, firmly establishing him as a premier interpreter of Marxism.⁵⁹ In it, Kautsky laid out the origins of modern capitalism, the role of human action in history, the nature of the future socialist state (though he was characteristically reluctant to offer detailed blueprints), and the tactics of the working-class movement. He emphasized party purity, political participation, and the historical inevitability of revolution.⁷⁰ He argued that modern parliamentarism was indispensable for governing a large modern state and that a genuine parliamentary republic could serve as an instrument for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" just as effectively as for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.⁷¹ He attacked concepts like direct legislation as unworkable fantasies and expressions of a political sterility rooted in petty-bourgeois individualism.⁷² For an entire generation of Marxists, including Vladimir Lenin, his commentary was the authoritative definition of social democracy.⁷³ Lenin, who translated it into Russian in 1894, saw Kautsky's program as the "New Testament" of Marxism, a scientific confirmation of the prophecies made in the "Old Testament" of the Communist Manifesto.⁷⁴
The peasant question
A significant tactical and theoretical headache for the SPD in the 1890s was its approach to the peasantry. While some party members, particularly in South Germany under the leadership of Georg von Vollmar, advocated for an agrarian program to attract peasant votes, Kautsky remained consistently and profoundly skeptical.⁷⁵ He had argued since the 1870s that the peasants' deep attachment to private property and their inherent individualism made them unreliable, if not outright hostile, allies for a socialist party.⁷⁶ He saw an unavoidable conflict of interest between the urban worker and the peasant; for instance, protecting peasant smallholdings would inevitably mean higher food prices for urban consumers. For Kautsky, the best the party could hope for was to "neutralise" the peasantry, as they could never be a dependable socialist constituency.⁷⁷
At the SPD's Frankfurt Congress in 1894, a resolution was passed calling for the creation of an agrarian program.⁷⁵ Kautsky opposed this move, arguing that making specific appeals to peasants would dilute the party's proletarian character and contradict its class-struggle foundations. He was particularly irritated by the "antitheoretical posture" of many of the program's proponents.⁷⁵ He maintained that the majority of the rural population was already, or was rapidly becoming, a rural proletariat. He believed that land, as a primary means of production, must ultimately be socialized.⁷⁸ At the Breslau Congress in 1895, Kautsky's resolution rejecting the proposed agrarian program was passed by 158 votes to 63, despite Bebel's opposition on this specific issue. In a stirring speech, Kautsky's ally Clara Zetkin implored the party to "hold firmly to the revolutionary character of our party."⁷⁹ He further developed these ideas in his major work Die Agrarfrage (The Agrarian Question, 1899).⁸⁰ This work, which Lenin praised as the most significant contribution to economic literature since Capital, systematically argued for the superiority of large-scale agriculture and posited that the party's task was to win over the agricultural proletariat and neutralize the small peasants, not to prop up their doomed form of production.⁸¹
Revisionism debate
The most significant challenge to Kautsky's orthodox Marxism during this period came from an unexpected source: his former close friend, Eduard Bernstein. Beginning in 1896, Bernstein published a series of articles in Die Neue Zeit under the title "Problems of Socialism," which systematically questioned the foundational tenets of Marxism, including the theory of value, the inevitability of capitalist collapse, the intensification of class struggle, and the need for a purely proletarian revolutionary party. Bernstein argued for an evolutionary, ethical socialism, famously declaring, "the goal is nothing, the movement everything."⁸²
Kautsky was initially hesitant to publicly attack Bernstein, owing to their long friendship and Bernstein's continued exile.⁸³ He first defended Bernstein against cruder attacks from figures like Ernest Belfort Bax.⁸⁴ However, as Bernstein's views became more explicit, especially with the publication of Evolutionary Socialism (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie) in 1899, Kautsky, prodded by Bebel, felt he had no choice but to respond.⁶⁷ He was pushed into the role of "defender of the faith" partly by Russian orthodox Marxists like Georgi Plekhanov, for whom Bernstein's theories were a particularly galling heresy.⁸⁵ The debate centered on the empirical validity of Marx's prognosis of increasing capital centralization and proletarianization. Both men agreed that if Marx's predictions were invalid, the revolutionary perspective would lose its scientific foundation.⁸⁶
In his classic defense of Marxist theory, Bernstein and the Social Democratic Programme (1899), Kautsky argued that Bernstein's analysis, based on observations of England, was irrelevant to Germany, where no significant democratic forces existed outside the working class.⁸⁷ For Kautsky, theory—orthodox Marxism—served a practical function: it provided German workers with self-confidence and the unshakeable certainty of victory.⁸⁸ He contended that while capitalism was not mechanically collapsing (refuting the "collapse theory" that Bernstein had attributed to him), its contradictions were indeed sharpening, particularly with the rise of finance capital and cartels, which increased social misery even if absolute poverty did not.⁸⁹ He also refined his concept of Verelendung (immiserization), arguing that even if workers' material conditions improved, their relative share of the national wealth declined, and social and political assaults by the ruling class would intensify the class struggle.⁹⁰ His objective was to keep the party "armed for every eventuality," maintaining a flexible tactic that could reckon "with crisis as with prosperity, with reaction as with revolution, with catastrophes as with slow peaceful development."⁹¹ The SPD officially condemned revisionism at its congresses in Hanover (1899) and Dresden (1903).⁹² The debate permanently shattered Kautsky's friendship with Bernstein.⁹³ Kautsky later came to see revisionism as a "renaissance of bourgeois radicalism" linked to the decline of the petty bourgeoisie, and privately urged Bernstein to break with the SPD and form a new left-bourgeois party.⁸⁹
Kautsky also waded into tactical debates concerning cooperation with bourgeois parties. He opposed participation in the Prussian Landtag elections under the restrictive three-class franchise in 1893, but reversed his position by 1897, arguing it was a necessary tactic to weaken the Junkers and fight for democratic reforms.⁹⁴ He supported Jean Jaurès's engagement in the Dreyfus Affair but condemned Alexandre Millerand's entry into a bourgeois French government, viewing it as an unnecessary and corrupting compromise. At the Second International's Paris Congress in 1900, Kautsky's resolution—which opposed electoral alliances but allowed for socialist entry into bourgeois governments under extraordinary circumstances (such as a Russian invasion of Germany) with full party approval—was adopted as the official line.⁹⁵
"Classical years" and challenges (1905–1914)
Russian Revolution of 1905 and mass strike debate
The Russian Revolution of 1905 sent shockwaves through the European socialist movement, particularly in Germany, by dramatically demonstrating the potential of the mass strike. Kautsky had paid some attention to Russia before, viewing it as a backward society ripe for a bourgeois revolution. He had close connections with Russian Marxists like Pavel Axelrod, Georgi Plekhanov, and Rosa Luxemburg, and was often called upon to act as an arbiter in their endless factional disputes.⁹⁶ When the revolution erupted, Kautsky was one of the first Western Marxists to grasp its significance, arguing that Russia had become the "torch-bearer of revolution" for the world, and that the East was now opening the revolutionary road for the West at the "beginning of the era of proletarian revolutions."⁹⁷ He saw the revolution as a democratic, not a socialist, process, but one driven by the proletariat. Kautsky supported the revolutionaries and argued that the Russian peasantry, unlike Germany's, possessed genuine revolutionary potential. He believed a worker-peasant coalition could establish a liberal, capitalist Russia, which would in turn create the conditions for an eventual transition to socialism.⁹⁸
The 1905 revolution, combined with a surge in strike activity within Germany itself, ignited a major debate inside the SPD on the tactic of the mass strike.⁹⁹ Trade union leaders, ever mindful of their budgets and the threat of employer retaliation, were deeply cautious. The increasingly conservative SPD leadership also resisted any formal adoption of the mass strike. However, the party's radical intellectual wing, including Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, saw it as a powerful tool to revitalize the party and force democratic reforms.¹⁰⁰ Kautsky's position was, as usual, nuanced. He had long considered the general strike a potentially useful, if extremely dangerous, weapon.¹⁰¹ He argued that the growing interest in the mass strike was a direct response to the "growing disdain for parliamentarism" that followed the SPD's massive 1903 electoral victory, which had failed to translate into any significant political gains.¹⁰² He drew radical conclusions from the 1905 Ruhr coal strike, arguing that the employers' power was now so immense that "it can no longer be assailed by pure trade-union means" and that a political orientation was now essential.¹⁰³ He urged a discussion of the mass strike not because he was eager to deploy it, but to ensure it was properly understood and not misused. He believed that in Germany, a successful mass strike was "only conceivable in a revolutionary situation."¹⁰⁴
The SPD's Jena Congress in 1905 passed a Bebel-sponsored resolution that ambiguously accepted the mass strike as a purely defensive tactic and affirmed the party's superiority over the trade unions.¹⁰⁵ This was a hollow victory. A secret agreement in February 1906 between party and trade union leaders effectively neutered any organized mass action by the SPD, as the party accepted fiscal responsibility for political strikes it could not possibly afford.¹⁰⁶ At the Mannheim Congress in 1906, this backroom deal was essentially ratified, despite the strenuous opposition of Kautsky and Luxemburg. In a failed attempt to subordinate the unions to the party, Kautsky proposed an amendment declaring it the "duty of every party comrade ... to feel bound by the decisions of the party congresses in his trade-union activity." The defeat of his amendment marked a major victory for the trade-union leadership and a decisive reversal of the radicals' gains from the previous year.¹⁰⁷
After the defeat of the 1905 revolution, Kautsky's relationship with the Russian Marxists became increasingly frayed by their incessant factionalism. In 1910, he reluctantly agreed to act as a trustee, alongside Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, for the finances of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in a desperate attempt to enforce unity between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. The effort was a predictable failure, entangling Kautsky in years of bitter disputes over party funds and drawing accusations from all sides. The experience deepened his disillusionment with the Russian émigré leadership, whom he chided for their "organisational particularism" and their infuriating inability to place the interests of the movement above their own factional and personal squabbles.¹⁰⁸
In 1909, Kautsky published The Road to Power (Der Weg zur Macht), which he saw as a "complement" to his 1902 work The Social Revolution. In this book, Kautsky argued that a new "era of revolutions" was dawning, fueled by the sharpening of class and international conflicts. He predicted "significant shifts in the relationship of forces in favour of the proletariat" and reiterated that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the "only form" of political power for the working class. The book's radical tone caused a major stir within the SPD; the party leadership refused to publish it under the party's imprint, and revisionists threatened a split over its publication, viewing it as dangerously inflammatory.¹⁰⁹ In the book, Kautsky argued that theory was needed to reveal the reality concealed by the reformists' "positive work" and to transform the revolutionary potential of the masses from a "possibility" into a "reality." He presented the revolution as an inevitable product of capitalist development that could not be artificially stimulated, assigning a passive role to the party: it must maintain its oppositional integrity while waiting for the ruling class to destroy itself through its own contradictions. The work represented a return to the "Erfurt synthesis" and a theoretical proposal for a truce between the party's warring factions.¹¹⁰ After the initial edition of 5,000 sold out quickly, the executive refused a second printing. With the help of his friend Clara Zetkin on the party's control commission, Kautsky forced the executive to relent.¹¹¹
Development of "centrism"
The mass strike debate and its deflating outcome led Kautsky to articulate what became known as his "centrist" position, a perpetual attempt to steer a "true" course between the Scylla of reformism on the right and the Charybdis of radicalism on the left.¹⁰¹ He rejected both the reformist notion that socialism could be achieved through a simple accumulation of gradual reforms and the revolutionary theory that the party's primary task was to prepare for a single, violent upheaval.¹¹² He believed that theory (Marxism) generated the necessary motivation for socialist action and that the party's main task was to prepare the workers for an inevitable, though not necessarily imminent, revolution by raising their consciousness and strengthening their organizations.¹¹³ He argued for a "strategy of attrition" (Ermattungsstrategie), in which the party would win not through shock tactics but by outlasting its opposition through persistent, aggressive political positioning.¹¹⁴ In this strategy, the party would use parliamentary struggles, street demonstrations, and strikes to gradually weaken its opponents and strengthen the proletariat, only engaging in a decisive battle when the enemy had been sufficiently worn down.¹¹⁵
This period witnessed a definitive and bitter break with Rosa Luxemburg. A debate in 1910 over franchise reform in Prussia, where Luxemburg advocated for mass action and Kautsky urged caution, escalated into a personal and theoretical split after Kautsky refused to publish an article by Luxemburg that called for a republic.¹¹⁶ Kautsky articulated his centrist stance in a 1910 article titled "Between Baden and Luxemburg," arguing that the party must navigate between the reformist compromises of the South German SPD (who had disgracefully voted for the Baden state budget) and the putschist tendencies of Luxemburg. He famously characterized the SPD as a "revolutionary, not a revolution-making" party.¹¹⁷ He criticized Luxemburg for failing to grasp the specific conditions in Germany, where the state was far stronger than in Russia, making a "strategy of annihilation" (Niederwerfungsstrategie) suicidal.¹¹⁸
Imperialism and the path to war
As imperialism and militarism intensified across Europe, Kautsky dedicated considerable thought to these phenomena. He initially associated colonial expansion with commercial-capitalist and agrarian-aristocratic interests.¹¹⁹ Under the influence of J. A. Hobson and, more significantly, Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital (1910), his views evolved. He came to see imperialism and nationalism primarily as bourgeois capitalist tools used by the German government to strengthen itself against the workers.¹²⁰
Kautsky was an unwavering opponent of any form of socialist colonial policy, viewing it as a contradiction in terms—inherently exploitative, brutalizing, and racist. This was a consistent theme from his 1907 pamphlet Socialism and Colonial Policy.¹²¹ At the Second International's Stuttgart Congress in 1907, he endorsed a minority report opposing imperialism, while the majority of the German delegation took a more conservative, accommodating stance.⁹⁵ While he initially believed that mature capitalism did not necessarily require imperialism and militarism, by 1912 he accepted the connection. However, as the threat of war loomed, his deep humanitarian aversion to violence led him to search for ways it might be avoided, arguing that the "armaments race is based on economic causes, but not on economic necessity."¹²² He developed a theory that imperialism was a specific policy of finance capital, not an inevitable economic stage of capitalism itself. In his view, imperialism was just one of several possible political responses to chronic overproduction, which Kautsky attributed to the faster rate of accumulation in industrial versus agrarian sectors.¹²³ He even conjectured that a future phase of "ultra-imperialism" was possible, in which international capitalist cartels would cooperate to exploit the world peacefully, superseding the violent competition of the imperialist phase.¹²⁴ He believed that if war did come, socialists had a duty to take an unpopular oppositional stance, which would ultimately position them to lead the revolution that would surely follow the war's inevitable collapse of capitalist society.¹²⁵
World War I and party split
Opposition to the war
When World War I erupted in August 1914, Kautsky, though not a member of the SPD Fraktion (parliamentary group), was invited to its decisive meeting on war credits. He and Hugo Haase initially drafted a statement arguing for a refusal of war credits. When it became clear that a vast majority would vote in favor of the credits, Kautsky urged abstention. Finally, when the Fraktion voted 78 to 14 for credit approval, he joined Gustav Hoch in a last-ditch, unsuccessful attempt to include a clause in the party's declaration demanding no annexations or violations of neutrality. Kautsky had lost, and the SPD embraced the Burgfrieden (civic truce), effectively suspending the class struggle for the duration of the war.¹²⁶
Throughout the war, Kautsky's primary concern was to salvage as much theoretical integrity as possible and to prevent the SPD from completely succumbing to nationalist war hysteria. He meticulously distinguished between the legitimate defense of a "national state" and the aggressive "nationalistic state," arguing that while workers had a right to national self-defense, they must reject all forms of chauvinism and imperialism.¹²⁷ He was a staunch opponent of the Burgfrieden and the increasingly imperialistic war aims adopted by the SPD majority.¹²⁸
Kautsky believed the Second International had not been destroyed by the war, but that its true nature and limitations had been brutally exposed. It was, he argued, an instrument for peacetime, not for war, and its immediate task was now to "reconquer peace."¹²⁹ He engaged in extensive polemics, primarily against the right-wing socialists (the Umlerner or "re-learners") who argued that the party must discard its old theories to fit the new realities of war.¹³⁰ Wartime censorship, ironically, made it easier to criticize the right than the left.¹³¹ During the war, Kautsky re-established a close working relationship with Eduard Bernstein, who had also moved to an anti-war position. Conversely, his relationship with former collaborators like Heinrich Cunow, who became a leading proponent of a pro-war Marxism, completely deteriorated.¹³²
Founding of the USPD
As the war dragged on and the SPD majority grew ever more intolerant of dissent, Kautsky laid the theoretical groundwork for a party split. He argued that the majority's suppression of minority voices and violation of party custom justified a formal separation.¹³³ In a series of articles in late 1915, he defended the right to dissent and warned that repression only breeds extremism.¹³⁴
In April 1917, Kautsky, along with Bernstein, Haase, and other oppositionists, founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) at a congress in Gotha.¹³⁵ He had initially been part of a small group, which also included Bernstein and Emanuel Wurm, that vigorously opposed the creation of a separate party, fearing it would only strengthen the hand of the Spartacists.¹³⁶ Kautsky wrote the new party's manifesto, which called for an international, democratic peace with self-determination for all nations and squarely blamed the SPD majority for the split.¹³⁷ The new party was born divided, its only common denominator being opposition to the war.¹³⁸ The split also led to Kautsky's ouster from the editorship of Die Neue Zeit.⁹² He continued to develop his views on nationalism and democracy, arguing in The Liberation of Nations (1917) that self-determination was essential for both international democracy and the proletarian struggle. He also refined his crucial distinction between political and social revolution.¹³⁹
Revolutions and post-war period
German Revolution
The German Revolution of 1918–1919 briefly brought Kautsky into government service. He served as chairman of the Socialization Commission and as an advisor in the Foreign Office, where he was tasked with publishing documents on German war guilt.¹⁴⁰ His work on the latter resulted in the book The Guilt of William Hohenzollern (1919).¹⁴¹ Kautsky advocated for a democratic republic and vehemently opposed the attempts by the extreme left (Spartacists) to establish a council-based (Räte) system, which he viewed as fundamentally undemocratic and a certain path to civil war.¹⁴² He believed the workers' councils had an important economic role to play in a process of gradual socialization but were entirely unsuitable as permanent political bodies.¹⁴³ For Kautsky, only a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage could provide the legitimate foundation for a democratic state; councils, as class-based institutions, could not represent the whole nation and would inevitably lead to a minority dictatorship.¹⁴⁴ His moderate stance and unwavering insistence on democratic processes put him at odds with the increasingly radicalized USPD, and he effectively broke with the party by mid-1919 when it endorsed the concept of a council dictatorship.¹⁴⁵
Kautsky's plan for socialization was gradualist to its core, emphasizing an orderly transition, compensation for expropriated property to maintain production, and careful adaptation to the technical development of different industries. He saw the state's role as facilitative rather than directly administrative in a socialized economy.¹⁴⁶ His proposals included the dissolution of the standing army, the submission of the bureaucracy to a national assembly, and the devolution of police powers to municipalities.¹⁴⁷
Critique of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism
Kautsky was one of the earliest and most persistent critics of the Bolshevik Revolution. While he had long seen Russia as ripe for a political (bourgeois-democratic) revolution, he argued forcefully that the conditions for a socialist revolution were entirely absent. His critique was rooted in a lifelong commitment to democratic principles, which he considered an absolute precondition for any genuine form of socialism.¹⁴⁸ His most comprehensive critique appeared in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918). In it, he argued that the goal of socialism was the abolition of all forms of exploitation and oppression, a goal that required more democracy, not a dictatorship of one faction of the proletariat over all others and the peasantry.¹⁴⁹ He contended that the Bolshevik reliance on sheer will over objective conditions, their suppression of democratic forms like the Constituent Assembly in favor of soviets, and their embrace of violent methods would inevitably lead to an oppressive regime and, ultimately, to failure.¹⁵⁰ He argued that the Bolsheviks had perverted the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Marx and Engels, he insisted, this was a "state of fact" based on the democratic rule of a proletarian majority—as exemplified by the Paris Commune—not a "form of government" based on the suppression of democracy.¹⁵¹ Kautsky predicted that this "original sin of Bolshevism"—the abolition of elections and the denial of freedom of speech and assembly—would give rise to a "new class of bureaucratic exploiters, no better than the Tsarist chinovniks."¹⁵²
This critique sparked a famous and vicious polemic with Lenin, whose The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) fiercely attacked Kautsky as a traitor to Marxism.¹⁵³ The theoretical disagreement extended to their fundamental views on democracy. Lenin accused Kautsky of a "formal" conception of democracy, arguing that bourgeois democracy was merely a decorative façade for the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Kautsky, in turn, saw democracy as a principle that was alien to capitalism and could only be genuinely realized by the proletariat.¹⁵⁴ Kautsky continued to criticize the Soviet regime for the rest of his life, developing a theory that Bolshevism was a new form of class society, a "state capitalism" ruled by a bureaucratic "new class," and that Stalinism was a form of "counter-revolution" even worse than Bonapartism.¹⁵⁵
Later years and exile (1920–1938)
After the USPD split in 1920, with the majority defecting to the Communist Party (KPD), Kautsky advocated for the reunification of the remaining USPD members with the SPD, a merger that finally occurred in 1922.¹⁵⁶ He drafted the SPD's Heidelberg Program in 1925 but never felt truly at home in the increasingly pragmatic and reformist party of the Weimar Republic.¹⁵⁷ In 1924, Kautsky moved to Vienna at the invitation of the Austrian Socialists, effectively retiring from active party politics.¹⁵⁸ His concerns shifted to more abstract theorizing and a continued, relentless critique of Bolshevism.¹⁵⁹ He urged Russian émigré opponents of Bolshevism, particularly the Mensheviks, to unite and prepare for what he saw as the communists' inevitable collapse.¹⁶⁰ While he had little direct involvement in the Labour and Socialist International (LSI), he remained an honored, if increasingly marginal, figure within it. He was highly respected by the exiled Mensheviks and maintained a close correspondence with figures like Pavel Axelrod and Fyodor Dan, who saw him as their "only loyal and stout support in the international arena during the first two decades of Communist rule in Russia." Kautsky, for his part, felt a deep affection for the Russian socialists, telling Axelrod in 1924: "I have nowhere found such wonderful people as amongst the Russians, with so much warmth, so much theoretical interest, so much simple affection."¹⁶¹
His magnum opus from this period was the two-volume Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (The Materialist Conception of History, 1927). In this monumental work, Kautsky aimed to provide a systematic presentation of historical materialism, grounding it in the natural sciences but emphasizing the unique dialectical development of human society, which he saw as driven by the interaction of human intellect (especially technology) and the environment. He reiterated his long-held view that the laws of nature and society were not directly interchangeable.¹⁶²
Kautsky struggled to comprehend the rise of fascism and Nazism, generally viewing them as counter-revolutionary phenomena born of post-revolutionary despair and economic crisis, appealing to the insecurities of the petit bourgeois and peasant masses. He maintained an often-criticized "optimistic fatalism," an unshakeable belief in the ultimate triumph of reason and socialism.¹⁶³ He argued that fascism was a mere "interlude" that could not last in developed industrial countries and that its violent methods were ultimately incompatible with the rational needs of modern capitalism.¹⁶⁴ From his home in Vienna, he witnessed the crushing defeat of German socialism at the hands of Adolf Hitler and the annihilation of Austrian Social Democracy in the civil war of 1934.¹⁶⁵
Following the Anschluss in March 1938, Kautsky and his wife Luise, aided by the Czech embassy, fled Vienna by airplane for Amsterdam.¹⁶⁶ Karl Kautsky died in Amsterdam on 17 October 1938, from complications of pancreatic cancer, one day after his 84th birthday.¹⁶⁷ Several members of his family, including his wife Luise (who died in Auschwitz) and his son Benedikt (who survived Buchenwald), would suffer terribly under Nazi persecution.¹⁶⁸
Thought and legacy
Kautsky was a central, if now often overlooked, figure in the history of Marxism. He was, above all, its leading popularizer and systematizer during the era of the Second International.¹⁶⁹ Described by Leszek Kołakowski as the "chief architect and, so to speak, the embodiment of Marxist orthodoxy," his life's work was to translate Marx's dense and often contradictory theories into a coherent, digestible doctrine for a mass party. This he achieved most notably through his editorship of Die Neue Zeit and his work on the Erfurt Program.¹⁷⁰ He was known in his time, for better or worse, as the "Pope of Marxism."¹⁷¹ According to the scholar Jukka Gronow, Kautsky was the pivotal figure in the "formation of Marxism" as a distinct doctrine after Marx's death, creating a theoretical system that became the "common core" for the various theorists of the Second International, including those who would later become his fiercest critics.¹⁷² Kołakowski notes that Kautsky played the main part in creating a "stereotype" of Marxism as an "evolutionist, determinist, and scientific form" that dominated socialist thought for decades.¹⁹
Gronow argues that Kautsky's theoretical framework rested on two main pillars, both stemming from a crucial misreading of Marx's Capital. Kautsky, he contends, read Marx's work not as a critique of the fundamental categories of political economy, but as a historical and empirical treatise that laid out the iron laws of capitalist development.¹⁷³ The first pillar of his theory was the formulation of these historical laws, which predicted the continuous concentration of capital and the inevitable polarization of society. The second pillar, heavily influenced by Engels, was his critique of capitalism based on the idea that it violated the original "natural right" of a producer to the product of their own labor, a right supposedly realized in an earlier historical stage of "simple commodity production."¹⁷⁴ In Kautsky's framework, capitalism's defining sin became the appropriation of products created collectively by workers, a stark violation of the individual appropriation of the pre-capitalist era.¹⁷⁵
Kautsky's interpretation of Marxism emphasized historical evolution and the inevitability of socialism, but it also stressed the need for conscious political action by an organized working class. He perpetually sought a balance between determinism and voluntarism, arguing that while objective conditions shaped history, human will, particularly in the political realm, was crucial.¹⁷⁶ His central political idea was what the historian Lars T. Lih calls the "merger formula": the conviction that "Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement."¹⁷⁷ According to this narrative, the socialist party's mission was to bring socialist consciousness—the "good news" of the proletariat's world-historical mission to create socialism—to the hitherto separate and spontaneously resistant working-class movement.¹⁷⁸ His concept that socialist consciousness must be "carried into the class struggle of the proletariat from outside" was famously adopted by Vladimir Lenin.¹⁷⁹ Kautsky consistently distinguished between political revolution (the seizure of state power) and social revolution (the much longer-term transformation of economic structures), a distinction that became central to his later critique of Bolshevism.¹⁸⁰
Kautsky's Marxism was characterized by a strong rationalist and humanist bent. He abhorred violence and believed socialism could only be achieved through democratic means by a conscious majority.¹⁸¹ This put him on a collision course with the Leninist model of a vanguard party and revolutionary dictatorship, leading to his denunciation by communists as a "renegade."¹⁸² According to his biographer Massimo Salvadori, the "renegade" charge was a polemical caricature; Kautsky's post-1917 opposition to Bolshevism was a consistent application of the democratic and parliamentary conception of the state that he had developed as early as the 1890s.¹⁸³ Non-communist critics often faulted him for a revolutionary rhetoric that was not matched by practical action, or for an overly deterministic, "fatalistic" view of history that underestimated the need for pragmatic reform.¹⁸⁴ According to Dick Geary, Kautsky's theoretical ambiguity and "optimistic fatalism" made a certain practical sense in the repressive but non-revolutionary political stalemate of Imperial Germany, but it left his theory woefully ill-prepared for the revolutionary upheavals after 1914.¹⁸⁵ The philosopher Walter Benjamin later observed that Kautsky's Darwinian view of history was a "double-edged sword" that served to "maintain the party's faith and determination in its struggle" during periods of persecution, but later "burdened the concept of 'development' more and more as the party became less willing to risk what it had gained."¹⁸⁶
Kautsky's legacy is contested. While hugely influential, he was "certainly not an outstanding philosopher"; Kołakowski notes his "complete lack of understanding of philosophical problems," stating that the "key problems of metaphysics and epistemology ... are unknown to him." He was, however, "pedantically orthodox" in regarding Marxism as a self-sufficient system that should not be supplemented by other philosophies, with the notable exception of Darwinism.¹⁸⁷ Steenson concludes that Kautsky's greatest weakness was his "failure to see his theoretical positions translated into effective action" and to perceive that "practice tended to be self-perpetuating quite independently of theory."¹⁸⁸ Some scholars, such as Moira Donald, argue that Kautsky's influence, particularly on Lenin, has been underestimated. Donald contends that much of what became Bolshevik ideology before 1917 was formulated by Kautsky, and that Lenin was more of a "tactician rather than a thinker," adapting Kautsky's orthodox Marxism to Russian conditions.¹⁸⁹ With the retreat of communism in the late 20th century, Steenson, in his 1991 preface, suggests that Kautsky's moderate, humanist interpretation of Marx might find renewed relevance as a counterpoint to the thoroughly discredited Leninist tradition.¹⁹⁰
Marxism and evolutionary theory
Kautsky's lifelong engagement with evolutionary theory was central to his entire intellectual project. He saw Darwinism as a crucial factor in his conversion to materialism and a key scientific pillar for a modern, secular worldview.¹⁹¹ In his pre-Marxist years, his conception of history was a form of social Darwinism that viewed social development as a struggle for existence between races and tribes.¹⁹¹ After embracing Marxism, he sought to integrate the two theories. A core element of this synthesis was his theory of "social instincts." Adopting Darwin's idea that morality evolved from the instincts of social animals, Kautsky argued that humanity had inherited "communist instincts" of solidarity, self-sacrifice, and loyalty from its animal ancestors.¹⁹² He contended that these instincts conferred a selective advantage in early human history but had been suppressed by capitalism's corrosive individualism. Socialism, for Kautsky, was thus not some utopian ideal but was "grounded as much in the essence of the human as in the course of historical development," representing the revival of these innate social instincts.¹⁹³
The greatest tension between Darwinism and Marxism was the Malthusian concept of a struggle for existence driven by population pressure. Kautsky initially accepted a modified version but later rejected its applicability to human society.¹⁹⁴ Around 1900, he resolved this contradiction by abandoning Darwinian natural selection in favor of neo-Lamarckism. This theory, which emphasized the inheritance of acquired characteristics and direct environmental influence, was far more compatible with his Marxism. It allowed him to explain evolution without recourse to an intraspecific struggle for existence, which he came to see as playing a minimal role in nature and no role at all in a future socialist society.¹⁹⁵ Kautsky's evolutionary thought also led him to support a form of socialist eugenics. He shared the contemporary concern that modern society promoted degeneration by eliminating natural selection and allowing the "weak and sick to reproduce." His solution was rational social planning under socialism, which would eliminate the conditions causing degeneration and replace natural selection with artificial selection. Kautsky believed that public opinion, not state compulsion, would guide the "weak, sick, and inferior" to voluntarily refrain from having children.¹⁹⁶
Kautsky's synthesis of Marxism and evolutionary theory was criticized by leftists like Karl Korsch as "Darwino-Marxism," a fatalistic theory of gradual evolution that replaced the revolutionary dialectic.¹⁹⁷ Kautsky, however, insisted he adhered to Engels's formulation of the dialectic and argued that evolution did not exclude revolution, but rather that revolution was merely a "special phase" of evolution that occurred under specific conditions.¹⁹⁸
Personal life
Kautsky married Louise Strasser in March 1883.¹⁹⁸ They lived together in Stuttgart and London. The marriage was often strained by financial difficulties and Kautsky's all-consuming focus on his work. They divorced in 1889 after a lengthy separation that began in 1888; the split caused considerable distress among their socialist friends, particularly Friedrich Engels.¹⁹⁹ Louise Strasser later remarried.²⁰⁰
In April 1890, Kautsky married Luise Ronsperger, a friend of his mother's.²⁰¹ This second marriage lasted until Karl's death and was, by all accounts, a close intellectual and personal partnership. Luise Kautsky was herself a socialist author and translator, and served as Karl's closest critic and collaborator.²⁰² They had three sons: Felix (born 1891), Karl Jr. (born 1892), and Benedikt (born 1894).²⁰³ Kautsky's family life was orderly and disciplined; he devoted his mornings to writing, took long afternoon walks (often with his sons), and reserved his evenings for visiting friends or light reading. The Kautsky household hosted regular Sunday afternoon gatherings for socialist comrades and international visitors.²⁰⁴
Selected works
- Der Einfluss der Volksvermehrung auf den Fortschritt der Gesellschaft (The Influence of Population Increase on the Progress of Society). 1880.
- Karl Marx’ ökonomische Lehren (The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx). 1887.
- Thomas More und seine Utopie (Thomas More and his Utopia). 1888.
- Die Klassengegensätze von 1789. Zum hundertjährigen Gedenktag der großen Revolution (The Class Antagonisms of 1789: On the Centenary of the Great Revolution). 1889.
- Das Erfurter Programm in seinem grundsätzlichen Teil erläutert (The Erfurt Program Explained in its Fundamental Part). 1892. Also known as The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program).
- Der Parlamentarismus, die Volksgesetzgebung und die Sozialdemokratie (Parliamentarism, Direct Legislation, and Social Democracy). 1893. Later republished as Parlamentarismus und Demokratie (Parliamentarism and Democracy).
- "Unser neuestes Programm" ("Our Newest Program"). Die Neue Zeit. 1894–1895.
- Die Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus. Erster Band, erster Theil. Von Plato bis zu den Wiedertäufern (Forerunners of Modern Socialism, Volume One, Part One: From Plato to the Anabaptists). 1895.
- Der Kommunismus im Mittelalter und im Zeitalter der Reformation (Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation). 1895.
- Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Programm. Eine Antikritik (Bernstein and the Social Democratic Programme: An Anti-Critique). 1899.
- Die Agrarfrage: Eine Uebersicht über die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirthschaft und die Agrarpolitik der Sozialdemokratie (The Agrarian Question: A Survey of the Tendencies of Modern Agriculture and the Agrarian Policy of Social Democracy). 1899.
- Die soziale Revolution (The Social Revolution). 1902.
- Ethik und materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History). 1906.
- Der Ursprung des Christentums (Foundations of Christianity). 1908.
- Der Weg zur Macht. Politische Betrachtungen über das Hineinwachsen in die Revolution (The Road to Power: Political Reflections on Growing into the Revolution). 1909.
- "Eine neue Strategie" ("A New Strategy"). Die Neue Zeit. 1910.
- Handelspolitik und Sozialdemokratie (The Trade Policy and Social Democracy). 1911.
- "Massenaktion" ("The Struggle of the Masses"). Die Neue Zeit. 1912.
- Der politische Massenstreik. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Massenstreikdiskussionen innerhalb der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (The Political Mass Strike: A Contribution to the History of Mass Strike Discussions within German Social Democracy). 1914.
- "Der Imperialismus" ("On Imperialism"). Die Neue Zeit. 1914.
- Die Internationalität und der Krieg (Internationalism and the War). 1915.
- Nationalstaat, imperialistischer Staat und Staatenbund (The National State, the Imperialist State, and the League of States). 1915.
- Die Befreiung der Nationen (The Liberation of Nations). 1917.
- Die Diktatur des Proletariats (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat). 1918.
- Demokratie oder Diktatur (Democracy or Dictatorship). 1918.
- Das Weitertreiben der Revolution (Driving the Revolution Forward). 1919.
- Wie der Weltkrieg entstand. Dargestellt nach dem Aktenmaterial des Deutschen Auswärtigen Amts (How the World War Arose: Presented from the Archival Material of the German Foreign Office). 1919. Also known as The Guilt of William Hohenzollern.
- Terrorismus und Kommunismus. Ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution (Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of the Revolution). 1919.
- Von der Demokratie zur Staatssklaverei. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Trotzki (From Democracy to State Slavery: A Polemic with Trotsky). 1921.
- Georgien: Eine sozialdemokratische Bauernrepublik. Eindrücke und Beobachtungen (Georgia: A Social-Democratic Peasant Republic. Impressions and Observations). 1921.
- Die proletarische Revolution und ihr Programm (The Labour Revolution). 1922.
- Die Internationale und Sowjetrussland (The International and Soviet Russia). 1925.
- Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (The Materialist Conception of History). 1927. Two volumes.
- Der Bolschewismus in der Sackgasse (Bolshevism at a Deadlock). 1930.
- Krieg und Demokratie. Eine historische Untersuchung und Darstellung ihrer Wechselwirkungen in der Neuzeit (War and Democracy: A Historical Study and Presentation of Their Interactions in the Modern Era). 1932.
- "Sozialdemokratie und Kommunismus" ("Social Democracy versus Communism"). Der Kampf. 1932.
- "Hitlerismus und Sozialdemokratie" ("Hitlerism and Social Democracy"). Der Kampf. 1934.
- Grenzen der Gewalt: Aussichten und Wirkungen bewaffneter Erhebungen des Proletariats (Limits of Violence: Prospects and Effects of Armed Uprisings of the Proletariat). 1934.
- Sozialisten und Krieg: Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte des Sozialismus von den Hussiten bis zum Völkerbund (Socialists and War: A Contribution to the Intellectual History of Socialism from the Hussites to the League of Nations). 1937. Published posthumously.
See also
- Terrorism and Communism – 1920 pamphlet by Leon Trotsky responding to Kautsky's 1918 pamphlet of the same name
The rest of this is just bibliography and links. You can read it yourself. Or don't. It makes no difference to the inevitable heat death of the universe.