Abstract
Today, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) is mainly remembered for his polemics against the young Bolshevik regime or as the ‘renegade’ in Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), which pillories him for his wavering stance in opposing World War I and his (later) outright hostility to the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Kautsky’s authority as a Marxist theoretician was seriously called into question ever since Lenin’s polemic. During the Cold War in particular, a consensus emerged which suggested that Kautsky’s views of democracy, organisation and revolutionary change had little or nothing to do with the political practice of Russian Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Recently, however, several studies have challenged this consensus. They highlight the profound impact which Kautsky had on the development of Russian Bolshevism and make the case that – prior to his renegacy in 1914 – thinkers such as Lenin and Trotsky viewed Kautsky as the legitimate intellectual heir of Marx and Engels. This article introduces an autobiographical essay written by Kautsky in 1924 and calls for closer engagement with his œuvre as a whole.
19 October 2014 marked the 160th birthday of one of the most influential Marxist thinkers since Marx and Engels – Karl Kautsky (1854–1938). Yet there were no articles, academic conferences or publications to commemorate the occasion. Indeed, the date will probably have gone unnoticed by most Marxist academics and activists.
The near absence of scholarly engagement with Kautsky’s thought today can only be understood by looking at his political legacy, which is as conflicted as it is vast. In terms of output and significance, it is difficult to find a rival amongst Marxists who were not also prominent political leaders. Yet it is equally difficult to find somebody whose standing as a Marxist thinker is more disputed.
Indeed, more or less all far-left political activists, regardless of their particular tradition or background, seem to have a clear-cut and pronounced opinion on the man. Yet how many of us have actually engaged with Kautsky’s work and its development beyond a perfunctory reading of this or that English translation of a handful of his diverse writings? To this day, much of what is written about Kautsky unfortunately tends to rely on recycled phrases and received opinions at the expense of critical engagement.
Nonetheless, over the past couple of decades a reconsideration of Kautsky and his life has been ongoing, both in terms of his stature and – more importantly, perhaps – in terms of his profound influence on the strategic conceptions of Bolshevism and the very Russian Revolution he later came to oppose so vehemently. This reconsideration has fundamentally challenged the Cold War consensus surrounding Kautsky and his relationship to revolutionary Marxism,1 a consensus which, in the last analysis, was informed by the need to uphold the respective ideological imperatives and foundation myths of the East and West.
Basing itself on an ahistorical and an almost religious cult of Lenin, Stalinist ideological output contended that the views of Kautsky and those of Bolshevism were radically different in nature. As Stalin himself put it in his notorious Short Course of 1939: ‘The Party strengthens itself by purging its ranks of opportunist elements – that is one of the maxims of the Bolshevik Party, which is a party of a new type fundamentally different from the Social Democratic parties of the Second International’.2
On the other hand, Western historical output was also at pains to make the case that Bolshevism was worlds apart from Western Social Democracy. Bolshevism had always been the elitist creation of a handful of authoritarian leaders (such as Lenin and Stalin, almost invariably painted with the same brush) who were distrustful of the mass of the population and who knew nothing of the (implicitly Western) traditions of democracy, mass political life and so forth.3 This school further stressed that Marxism is a determinist ideology which possesses no developed theory of politics and the nuances of the struggle for political power. For this school, Marxist socialism, of which Kautsky was the most Orthodox representative, is either a utopian schema for the future, or as a vulgar, determinist world view that overlooks the role of individuals, social groups, parties, constitutions and power structures in society.
This Cold War ideological framework still dominates. Nonetheless, by highlighting the manifold connections between the Russian and Western European sections of the Second International, and by disputing the image of Kautsky as a passive determinist, the ongoing Kautsky reconsideration has removed two of the major obstacles to a more rounded appraisal of his thought. As Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido put it in their recent publication Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, Kautsky’s early writings on Russia in particular help ‘to overcome the stereotypical and mistaken view of Kautsky as an apostle of quietism and a reformist cloaked in revolutionary phraseology’.4
Yet any scholarly or critical interaction with Kautsky’s work in the anglophone world immediately faces another obvious obstacle: translation. Given that Kautsky’s output was to all intents and purposes drowned out by the competing historiographical schools of the East and West, it should come as no surprise that so little of his work has been translated into English. Moreover, the existing translations of some his most important writings are either incomplete, rendered in anachronistic language, inaccurate or a combination of all three.5 And even researchers who read German still face a daunting prospect when approaching Kautsky’s œuvre: its sheer immensity.6
Kautsky wrote more or less without interruption (and almost always by hand) his whole adult life. He covered topics as wide-ranging as alcoholism and the Anabaptists, and often revisited the same issue, from a new angle, at various times during his career – buttressing his conclusions with fresh insights and new ideas gained from his painstaking life-long study of world history. All of these factors combine to ensure that the path of the isolated Kautsky researcher is an extremely difficult one, making collective collaboration all the more necessary.
It is interesting to note that in the past such efforts to coordinate research were indeed pursued. In his fascinating 1960 study, Karl Kautskys literarisches Werk, Werner Blumenberg notes how in 1923 the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow planned to publish the most important works of the ‘early Kautsky’ (that his to say, his pre-1914 writings) in a series. 14 volumes were planned, but by 1930 only four were actually published: Volumes i and ii (Economic Writings); Volume x (The Origins of Christianity) and Volume xii (Reproduction and Development in Nature and Society). Yet with the removal of David Ryazanov from the Institute, the project collapsed altogether (Blumenberg even suggests that the plan for the publication of these works may have contributed to Ryazanov’s removal).7 In his short obituary of Kautsky written in 1938, Leon Trotsky appears to underline this basic point regarding Stalinist historiography’s marginalisation of Kautsky: ‘The attempts of the present historiography of the Comintern to present things as if Lenin, almost in his youth, had seen in Kautsky an opportunist and had declared war against him, are radically false. Almost up to the time of the world war, Lenin considered Kautsky as the genuine continuator of the cause of Marx and Engels’.8
It is thus with the aim of helping to correct the historiographical account and of stimulating further engagement with Kautsky’s thought that I have translated the following autobiographical life-sketch, Das Werden eines Marxisten, first published in 1924.9 The article provides a contemporary audience with an overview of the majority of the man’s life from his own perspective, conveying the seriousness with which he went about his work and the array of socio-political upheavals, transformations and struggles in which he participated. Of course, the sketch fails to deal with the last 14 years of his life and is not as detailed or extensive as his later (untranslated) biographical sketch published in 1960 by his son Benedikt,10 but nonetheless provides a short and accessible outline of Karl’s quite remarkable life.11 Readers will find much that is interesting, provocative and frustrating in Kautsky’s account – not merely in what is said but also what is omitted.
I have attempted to reference each and every one his works that he cites: there is certainly much work to be done.
Yet such research can potentially bear fruit. Following the collapse of ‘official’ communism and the marginalisation of revolutionary Marxist thought in particular, critical thought faces a huge challenge. Nobody is suggesting that Karl Kautsky holds the key to changing the world in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, it is my contention that attaining a greater sense of the history of the workers’ movement, freed from the fetters of Social-Democratic and Stalinist myth-making, is pivotal to theorising and implementing revolutionary perspectives in today’s world. If the as-of-yet small-scale reconsideration of Kautsky emerging in scholarship has made one thing clear then it is this: that it is impossible to understand the history of Marxism without grasping the life and times of Karl Kautsky. Examining his life-long commitment to merging socialism and the workers’ movement and his successes, shortcomings and failures in pursuing this project can potentially open up fresh perspectives for our appreciation of European Social Democracy and its influence on subsequent developments within the Communist International and beyond.12
References
Blumenberg, Werner 1960, Karl Kautskys literarisches Werk: eine bibliographische Übersicht, The Hague: Mouton & Co.
Day, Richard and Daniel Gaido (eds.) 2009, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Donald, Moira 1993, Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists 1900–24, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press.
Gronow, Jukka 2016 [1986], On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky’s Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Kautsky, Karl 1960, Erinnerungen und Erörterungen, edited by Benedikt Kautsky, The Hague: Mouton & Co.
Kautsky, Karl 1971, The Class Struggle, with an introduction by Robert C. Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton.
Lewis, Ben 2011, ‘Kautsky: From Erfurt to Charlottenburg’, Weekly Worker, 10 November.
Lih, Lars T. 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is To Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Lih, Lars T. 2014, ‘True to Revolutionary Social Democracy’, Weekly Worker, 17 April.
Salvadori, Massimo 1990, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880–1938, London: Verso.
Stalin, Joseph 1939, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Moscow: International Publishers.
Steenson, Gary P. 1978, Karl Kautsky, 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Trotsky, Leon 1938, ‘Karl Kautsky’, New International, 5, 2: 50–51.
See, inter alia, Gronow 2016, Donald 1993, Lih 2006, Day and Gaido (eds.) 2009. For my own brief thoughts on the evolution of Kautsky’s ideas, see Lewis 2011. In 2015, I translated and edited a 350-page volume entitled Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism. It will soon be published as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series.
Stalin 1939, p. 142. The Lenin cult is expressed in these comments: ‘However, these brilliant ideas of Marx [on the necessity of an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry –
This view is blown out of the water by Lars Lih’s remarkable study (Lih 2006).
Day and Gaido (eds.) 2009, p. 569.
Some examples: my (abridged) translation of Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt Programme talks of the ‘capitalist method of production’ (emphasis added), the ‘slum proletariat’ and the ‘children’s disease’ of the young utopian-socialist movement (cf. Kautsky 1971, pp. 13, 170, 198). The latter term in German, Kinderkrankheit, is also the root of what we know as Lenin’s argument that ultra-leftism represents an ‘infantile disorder’. In fact, both Kautsky and Lenin use this term in a way that is closer to ‘teething troubles’ or even ‘growing pains’ in the workers’ movement.
The independent scholar, Noa Reni, is currently doing excellent work in the Kautsky archives at the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where he has discovered unpublished book manuscripts, written in the 1920s and 1930s, on a variety of topics such as money, war and much more besides. The final twenty years of Kautsky’s life remain an important and completely unexplored field of scholarship.
Blumenberg 1960, p. 9.
Trotsky 1938, p. 50. This is not to ignore the fact that in this article and elsewhere Trotsky also contributes to a different kind of marginalisation along the lines of ‘Lenin was fooled by Kautsky, his influence was a mistake of his youth’ (something which also underplays Trotsky’s own devoted remarks about Kautsky). Following a speech by Lenin in Zurich in October 1914, for example, Trotsky found it absurd that Lenin repeatedly called Kautsky a traitor in light of his behaviour over German Social Democracy’s approval of war credits (cited in Lih 2014, pp. 6–7).
I would like to thank Mike Macnair, Lars T. Lih, Daniel Gaido, Maciej Żurowski and Professor Henk de Berg for their comments on my translation, as well as Sebastian Budgen for encouraging me to pursue it in the first place.
Kautsky 1960.
Steenson 1978 and Salvadori 1990 are two eminently readable overviews of Kautsky’s life in English. There is also an important Polish-language biography written by Marek Waldenberg, but this has yet to be translated into English.
I thus conclude this brief introduction with an appeal to the world of Marxist research. It is high time that Kautsky researchers and translators begin to collectivise our efforts, pool resources, exchange ideas and publish more of our research. In the medium term, something along the lines of an ‘International Network of Karl Kautsky Studies’ would be a huge step forward. Such a network would merely formalise the connections which exist between individual scholars across the world. Yet in time there would be no reason why we could not set our sights higher: bringing Kautsky’s ideas to a bigger audience, establishing a research website, conferences and maybe even an irregular journal for new translations, insights and outlooks. And who knows? Given time, effort and funds it may even be possible to complete the kind of project that comrade Ryazanov had in mind, albeit in English. In the coming period I will endeavour to contact the living writers and historians who have published on Karl Kautsky within the past forty or fifty years to discuss this proposal and to concretise plans.