 | It has been suggested thatUltra-imperialism bemerged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since February 2025. |
| It has been suggested thatSuper-imperialism bemerged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since February 2025. |
Karl Kautsky | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Kautsky in 1915 | |
| Born | Karl Johann Kautsky 16 October 1854 |
| Died | 17 October 1938(1938-10-17) (aged 84) |
| Political party | SPD (until 1917; from 1920) |
| Other political affiliations | USPD (1917–1920) SPÖ (from 1875)[a] |
| Spouse | |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | |
| Region | |
| School | Orthodox Marxism |
| Main interests | Political philosophy,politics,economics,history |
| Notable ideas | Evolutionary epistemology,social instinct,active adaption,hyperimperialism |
Karl Johann Kautsky (/ˈkaʊtski/;German:[ˈkaʊtski]; 16 October 1854 – 17 October 1938) was a Czech-AustrianMarxist theorist. A leading theorist of theSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and theSecond International, Kautsky advocatedorthodox Marxism, which emphasized thescientific,materialist, anddeterminist character ofKarl Marx's work. Kautsky's interpretation dominated European Marxism for about two decades, from the death ofFriedrich Engels in 1895 to the outbreak ofWorld War I in 1914.
Born inPrague, Kautsky studied at theUniversity of Vienna. In 1875, he joined theSocial Democratic Party of Austria, and from 1883 founded and edited the influential journalDie Neue Zeit. From 1885 to 1890, he lived in London, where he worked with Engels. He moved back to Germany in 1890 and became active in the SPD, and wrote the theory section of itsErfurt Program of 1891, a major influence on other European socialist parties. On the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Kautsky opposed the SPD's collaboration with the German war effort. In 1917, he joined theIndependent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), and rejoined the SPD in 1920. His influence dwindled during the 1920s, and he died inAmsterdam in 1938.
Kautsky'sstagist interpretation of Marxism emphasized that history could not be hurried, and that workers had to wait for the suitable material conditions to develop before asocialist revolution. Under his influence, the SPD adopted a gradualist approach to achieving socialism, usingbourgeoisparliamentary democracy to secure improvements in the lives of workers until capitalism collapsed under its own contradictions. His stance sparked conflict with other leading Marxists, includingEduard Bernstein, who rejected revolution;Rosa Luxemburg, who championedrevolutionary spontaneity; andVladimir Lenin, whom Kautsky accused of launching a prematurerevolution in Russia in 1917 and leading the Soviet Union toward dictatorship.
Karl Kautsky was born inPrague of an artistic and middle class family – his parents wereJohann Kautsky, a Czech scenic designer, andWilhelmine “Minna” Kautsky (née Jaich), an Austrian actress and writer of Czech descent. The family moved toVienna when Kautsky was the age of seven. He studiedhistory,philosophy andeconomics at theUniversity of Vienna from 1874, and became a member of theSocial Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in 1875. Shortly afterwards he published his first contributions in the German socialist journalsDer Volksstaat andVorwärts and to the Austrian journalsGleichheit andDer Sozialist.[1]
In 1880 he joined a group of German socialists inZurich who were supported financially byKarl Höchberg, and who smuggled socialist material into Germany at the time of theAnti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890).
In 1883, Kautsky founded the monthlyDie Neue Zeit ("The New Times") inStuttgart. It became a weekly in 1890. He edited the magazine until September 1917: this gave him a steady income and allowed him to propagateMarxism.[2]From 1885 to 1890 he spent time inLondon, where he became a close friend of Friedrich Engels. His position as a prominent Marxist theorist was assured in 1888, when Engels put him to the task of editing Marx's three-volume workTheories of Surplus Value.[3] In 1891 he co-authored theErfurt Program of theSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) together withAugust Bebel andEduard Bernstein.
Following the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky became one of the most important and influential theoreticians of Marxism, representing the mainstream of the party together withAugust Bebel, and outlining a Marxist theory ofimperialism. When Bernstein attacked the traditional Marxist position of the necessity for revolution in the late 1890s, 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.
In 1914, when the German Social-Democrat deputies in theReichstag voted for war credits, Kautsky (who was not a deputy but attended their meetings) 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 with Eduard Bernstein andHugo Haase against the pro-war leaders of the SPD and denounced the German government's annexationist aims. In 1917 he left the SPD for theIndependent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) with united socialists who opposed the war.
After theNovember Revolution 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 disproved the alleged war guilt of Imperial Germany.
In 1920, when the USPD split, he went with a minority of that party back into the SPD. He visitedGeorgia in 1920 and wrote a book on theDemocratic Republic of Georgia that at that moment was still independent ofBolshevist Russia. By the time it was published in 1921, Georgia had been thoroughly influenced by theRussian Civil War, theRed Army had invaded Georgia, and the Bolsheviks hadimposed theGeorgian Soviet Socialist Republic. By that point, Kautsky considered the Soviet Union to have become an imperialist state, due to the destructiveness of the invasion of Georgia, and the minimal political role that the actual proletariat had in Soviet Russia.[4]
Kautsky assisted in the creation of the party program adopted in Heidelberg (1925) by the German Social Democratic Party. In 1924, at the age of 70, he moved back to Vienna with his family, and remained there until 1938. At the time of Hitler'sAnschluss, he fled toCzechoslovakia and thence by plane toAmsterdam, where he died in the same year.
Karl Kautsky lived inBerlin-Friedenau for many years; his wife,Luise Kautsky, became a close friend ofRosa Luxemburg, who also lived in Friedenau. A commemorative plaque marks where Kautsky lived at Saarstraße 14.
Vladimir Lenin described Kautsky as a "renegade" in his pamphletThe Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky; Kautsky in turn castigated Lenin in his 1934 workMarxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship:
The Bolsheviki 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 Czarist dictatorship.[5]
A collection of excerpts of Kautsky's writings,Social Democracy vs. Communism, discussed Bolshevist rule in Russia. He saw the Bolsheviks (or Communists) as a conspiratorial organization that had gained power by a coup and initiated revolutionary changes for which there was no economic rationale in Russia. Instead, a bureaucracy-dominated society developed, the miseries of which outweighed the problems of Westerncapitalism, he argued. He stated:
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 thePiatiletka, people rapidly perished. Soviet films, of course, did not show this.[6]
Kautsky died on 17 October 1938, in Amsterdam. His son,Benedikt Kautsky, spent seven years inconcentration camps; his wife,Luise Kautsky, was murdered inAuschwitz.[7]
In addition to his anti-Bolshevik polemics, Kautsky was also noted for editing and publishing Marx'sCapital, Volume IV (usually appearing under the titleTheories of Surplus Value).
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