Karl Kautsky was born in Prague, on 16th October, 1850. He became active in socialist politics while at the University of Vienna.
In 1880 Kautsky moved to Zurich where he met and was influenced by the Marxist writer, Eduard Bernstein. Later, when living in London, he maintained a close relationship with Frederick Engels.
Kautsky founded the Marxist journal Neue Zeit in 1883. The journal was published in Zurich, London, Berlin and Vienna.
He joined the Social Democrat Party (SDP) and was responsible for drafting the Erfurt Program which committed the SDP to an evolutionary form of Marxism. He also wrote and published The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887) and Thomas Moore and His Utopia (1888).
Kautsky broke with Eduard Bernstein after he published Evolutionary Socialism (1899).
In the book Bernstein argued that the predictions made by Karl Marx about the development of capitalism had not come true. He pointed out that the real wages of workers had risen and the polarization of classes between an oppressed proletariat and capitalist, had not materialized. Nor had capital become concentrated in fewer hands.
Kautsky, like Eduard Bernstein, sided with the left-wing over Germany's participation in the First World War and in 1915 voted against war credits.
In April 1917 left-wing members of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) formed the Independent Socialist Party. Members included Kautsky, Kurt Eisner, Eduard Bernstein, Julius Leber, Rudolf Breitscheild and Rudolf Hilferding. However, he continued to oppose the idea of a violent revolution.
Kautsky returned to the Social Democrat Party after the war. He moved to Vienna and continued to write but was forced to flee the country after the German Army occupied Austria in 1938. Karl
Kautsky died in Amsterdam on 17th October, 1938.
http://spartacus-educational.com/GERkautsky.htm
By John Simkin (john@spartacus-educational.com) © September 1997 (updated August 2014).
Kautsky, Karl
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
COPYRIGHT 2008 Thomson Gale
Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), socialist theoretician and social scientist, was born October 16, 1854, in Prague, the son of a Czech painter and an Austrian actress and novelist. Kautsky was throughout his life, by temperament and interests, above all a social scientist. His social science was not the politician’s tool in his drive for power; rather, he became influential in politics only to the extent that his approach and findings met needs existing in the socialist movement.
While attending the University of Vienna and working as a journalist for the small Austrian Social Democratic party, Kautsky, influenced by the works of J. S. Mill, H. T. Buckle, and especially Darwin, groped for a theory of history along natural science lines. In 1880 he joined some German socialists, in exile in Zurich, as a writer and as a student of the writings of such anthropologists as Herbert Bancroft, J. J. Bachofen, and Lewis Henry Morgan. He became a Marxist under Eduard Bernstein’s guidance, and in 1881 he visited Marx and Engels.
In 1883, Kautsky founded the monthly (weekly from 1890)Die Neue Zeit in Stuttgart, an event that marks the beginning of Marxism as a school of thought. As its editor until 1917, he published contributions from socialist thinkers all over the world as well as hundreds of his own articles. From 1885 to 1890, he worked in London in close con-tact with Engels. HisEconomic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887), in numerous German and foreign editions, made Kautsky largely responsible for Marxism’s early spread. He also applied the Marxian method in some original historical studies— Thomas More and His Utopia (1888), Foundations of Christianity (1908), and a study of the precursors of modern socialism (1895). A book on class conflicts during the French Revolution (1889) stressed the complexity of social conflicts and modified the concept of the class struggle by emphasis on divisions within classes, a recurring theme in Kautsky’s thought, somewhat akin to the interest-group approach of modern political science.
In 1891, Kautsky drafted the “theoretical part” of the German Social Democratic party’s (SPD) Erfurt program. This first major Marxist party program and his widely translated commentary, Das Erfurter Programm (1892), established him, after Engels, as the leading Marxist theoretician in the Socialist International. He moved to Berlin in 1897.
Kautsky was one of the first Marxists to formu-late theories of imperialism (beginning in Die Neue Zeit in 1898) and agricultural development (Die Agrarfrage 1899a; see also 1919a). Unlike Rudolf Hilferding and Lenin, but more like Schumpeter, Kautsky saw imperialism as the product not of industrial capitalism but of preindustrial, especially aristocratic, elements that remained strong in modern society. He traced these elements back to pre-historic times when nomadic conquerors of peasant societies sought unlimited territorial expansion. In agriculture, Kautsky could, at the turn of the century, find no general tendency for large enterprise to replace small enterprise, but he considered large enterprise to be potentially more productive. He therefore favored a socialist program that advocated conversion of large estates into communal or cooperative enterprises, and he expected that individual peasant enterprises would eventually voluntarily join such cooperatives.
When Bernstein attacked the SPD’s “revolutionary” doctrine, Kautsky became the chief defender of “orthodox” Marxism (see his Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm 1899b;The Social Revolution 1902). He advocated reformist practice and revolutionary, but not insurrectionary, goals. Such a program served to integrate those German and other Continental socialist parties which, de-spite their sharp conflict with their militarist-bureaucratic regimes, appealed to the working classes by demanding reforms. With the Revisionists, Kautsky believed that socialism could be realized only through parliamentary democracy (see his earlier Parlamentarismus und Demokratie 1893), but unlike them he did not expect democracy to grow peacefully in the German empire (The Road to Power 1909). He insisted on a “revolutionary,” i.e., oppositional, strategy, because compromises with the so-called bourgeois parties sup-porting the imperial regime would endanger labor’s political unity. In the same period, Kautsky edited Marx’s manuscript notes for a fourth volume of Capital, entitling the volume Theorien tiber den Mehrwert (1905–1910)
In 1910, Kautsky, in the “Marxist center” of the SPD, attacked as impatient and reckless the radical advocates of revolutionary mass strikes, led by Rosa Luxemburg. Their polemics (reviewed in Kautsky 1914a) foreshadowed the clash between the social-democrats and the communists. The former saw the party as an instrument to prepare the workers for their inevitable rise to power, while the latter saw it as a revolution-making “shock troop.”
During World War i, Kautsky opposed both the SPD majority’s support of the German government and the Spartacists’ call for revolution against all “bourgeois” governments. Although resisting a party split as long as possible, he did join the new In-dependent Social Democratic party (USPD), to oppose the SPD’s war policy. Between 1915 and 1918, in studies of the problem of nationalities, he advocated national self-determination and rejected the inevitability of imperialist expansionism under capitalism. After the German revolution at the end of the war, he served as a secretary of state for foreign affairs in the SPD-USPD coalition of November-December 1918. He collected the German documents on the outbreak of the war (1919b; see also his book on the origins of World War I, 1919c) and was chairman of the government’s socialization commission. Kautsky’s views of the political and economic transition to socialism (The Labour Revolution 1922) became the basis of the reunited SPD’s Heidelberg program.
Soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, Kautsky denounced all attempts to introduce socialism in a backward society by violent minority action as a betrayal of Marxism and democracy that would lead to dictatorship and eventual collapse (The Dictatorship of the Proletariat 1918). Called a renegade by Lenin and Trotsky, he replied inTerrorism and Communism (1919d) and in a book on democracy, dictatorship, and forced labor (1921a; see also 1925; 1930). In late 1920, Kautsky visited Menshevik-governed Georgia to study an underdeveloped country with a strong intelligentsia and a substantial urban working class (1921 b).
At 70, Kautsky returned to Vienna to engage in research. He had always been interested in anthropology, ecology, and demography, fields straddling the social and natural sciences; and he aimed at developing a conceptual framework encompassing both these areas of science. He attempted this in his first, as yet non-Marxian book on the influence of population growth on the progress of society (1880), in his later work on reproduction and development in nature and society (1910), inAre the Jews a Race? (1914 b), and also in his natural science explanation of ethics as a response of man and certain animals to the requirements of life in society (1906). Later Kautsky systematized and elaborated his ideas about social and natural science in his monumental work on the materialist conception of history (1927). He regarded the Marxian theory of history as the application, in principle value-free, of the methods of science to the study of society. He rejected the Hegelian dialectic with its teleological overtones and substituted for it, as the basis for the law of development for which he had searched all his life, the process of adaptation to a changing environment. In organic nature, species change to adjust to a slowly changing natural environment; in human society, man adjusts by changing his environment himself, which in turn requires further adjustment by further changes, including both technical and social ones, in an unending process that is history.
With the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria, Kautsky critically analyzed various proposed socialist counterstrategies (1933; 1934). His last major publications were two of four projected historical works on war (Krieg und Demokratie 1932;Sozialisten und Krieg 1937) and an edition of his correspondence with Engels (1935). Of a large-scale autobiography (1960) only the part covering his life until 1883 was completed by March 1938, when Kautsky fled from the Nazis to Amsterdam. He died there on October 17, 1938.
John H. Kautsky
[For the historical context of Kautsky’s work, see the biographies ofBachofen; Bernstein; Darwin; Engels; Lenin; Luxemburg; Marx; Mill; Trotsky.]
http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/social-sciences-and-law/political-science-biographies/karl-johann-kautsky
26 de noviembre de 2017: 21:40:06
Marx and Engels on Karl Kautsky
That Vladimir Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries of 1917 considered the Social-Democratic leader Karl Kautsky a pedant and a philistine is well known. Lenin pinpointed the reason for Kautsky’s post-1914 renegacy in his dilution of Marxian dialectics. “How is this monstrous distortion of Marxism by the pedant Kautsky to be explained…??” the Bolshevik asked rhetorically in a section of his 1918 polemic, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, “How Kautsky Turned Marx into a Common Liberal.” “As far as the philosophical roots of this phenomenon are concerned,” he answered, “it amounts to the substitution of eclecticism and sophistry for dialectics.” In another chapter, Lenin accused Kautsky of “pursuing a characteristically petty-bourgeois, philistine policy [типично мещанскую, филистерскую политику]” by backing the Mensheviks. Needless to say, Lenin’s immense respect for the so-called “Pope of Marxism” before the war had all but evaporated.
What is less well known, however, is that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels shared this appraisal of Kautsky. But this would only be revealed in 1932, several years after Lenin’s death, in extracts published from their correspondence. Engels confided to Eduard Bernstein in August 1881 that “Kautsky is an exceptionally good chap, but a born pedant and hairsplitter in whose hands complex questions are not made simple, but simple ones complex.” Marx, for his part, suspected that Engels’ fondness of Kautsky was due to his capacity to consume alcohol, as he recorded in a note to his daughter Jenny Longuet from April that same year:
[Johann Most, grandfather of legendary Boston Celtics announcer Johnny Most,] has found a kindred spirit in Kautsky, on whom he had frowned so grimly; even Engels takes a much more tolerant view of this joker [Kautz, punning on Kautz-ky] since the latter gave proof of his considerable drinking ability. When the charmer — the little joker [Kautz], I mean — first came to see me, the first question that rose to my lips was: Are you like your mother? “Not in the least!” he exclaimed, and silently I congratulated his mother. He’s a mediocrity, narrow in his outlook, over-wise (only 26 years old), and a know-it-all, although hard-working after a fashion, much concerned with statistics out of which, however, he makes little sense. By nature he’s a member of the philistine tribe. For the rest, a decent fellow in his own way; I unload him onto amigo Engels as much as I can.
Leon Trotsky was caught off-guard by the casuistry Kautsky displayed after 1914, remembering the praise he had showered on the Russian workers’ movement a decade or so earlier. “Kautsky’s reactionary-pedantic criticism [педантски-реакционная критика Каутского] must have come the more unexpectedly to those comrades who’d gone through the period of the first Russian revolution with their eyes open and read Kautsky’s articles of 1905-1906,” declared Trotsky in his preface to the 1919 reissue of Results and Prospects (1906). “At that time Kautsky (true, not without the beneficial influence of Rosa Luxemburg) fully understood and acknowledged that the Russian revolution could not terminate in a bourgeois-democratic republic but must inevitably lead to proletarian dictatorship, because of the level attained by the class struggle in the country itself and because of the entire international situation of capitalism… For decades Kautsky developed and upheld the ideas of social revolution. Now that it has become reality, Kautsky retreats before it in terror. He is horrified at Russian Soviet power and thus takes up a hostile attitude towards the mighty movement of the German communist proletariat.”
Trotsky underscored this point again thirteen years later in defending Luxemburg against the calumnies heaped upon her by Stalin. “Lenin considered Kautsky his teacher [when he wrote What is to be Done?] and stressed this everywhere he could. In Lenin’s work of that period and for a number of years following, one doesn’t find even a hit of criticism directed against the Bebel-Kautsky tendency. One rather finds a series of declarations to the effect that Bolshevism is not an independent tendency, merely a translation of the Bebel-Kautsky tendency into the language of Russian conditions. Here is what Lenin wrote in his famous pamphlet, Two Tactics, in the middle of 1905: ‘When and where have there been brought to light differences between me on the one hand and Bebel and Kautsky on the other? Complete unanimity of international revolutionary Social Democracy on all major questions of program and tactics is an incontrovertible fact.’ …But between October 1916, when Lenin wrote about the Junius pamphlet, and 1903, when Bolshevism had its inception, there was a lapse of thirteen years, during which Luxemburg was to be found in opposition to the Kautsky and Bebel Central Committee, and her fight against the formal, pedantic, and rotten-at-the-core ‘radicalism’ of Kautsky took on an ever increasingly sharp character.”
Just a decade or so after Trotsky penned these lines, Adorno wrote contemptuously in Minima Moralia of “the so-called heritage of socialism and the philistinism [Banausie] of the Bebels.” Franz Borkenau, a left communist also associated with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in exile, remarked upon the undue respect accorded to Kautsky and his ilk. Borkenau mentioned in this connection the disparaging statements made by Marx and Engels in private about their disciple. In Borkenau’s 1939 overview of World Communism, he wrote:
Admiration for Western Marxists played more than one trick on Lenin, which is remarkable given that his reverence was spent on men who, without exception, were his inferiors in every respect. Two cases are particularly interesting. One concerns Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov, the man who introduced Marxism in its original form to Russia. Plekhanov had published a number of studies on philosophy which, though one-sided, are probably superior to Lenin’s work [Borkenau is likely referring here to Materialism and Empiriocriticism, since the notebooks on Hegel were not widely known in the West]; as a politician, though, Plekhanov was of no account. He ended as an extreme partisan of Menshevism, openly fighting Lenin. Nevertheless Lenin retained a particular admiration for this man the rest of his life; after all, he had brought Marxism to Russia! But the case of Karl Kautsky, the official theoretical mouthpiece of German Marxism, is far more noteworthy.
Anyone who takes the trouble to collect the quotations concerning Kautsky in Lenin’s prewar writings will soon be convinced that Lenin regarded this man as no less than an oracle. Kautsky, it is true, was the delight of that German Marxist left wing that so miserably collapsed in August 1914 and after. This was no reason for Lenin to admire him, yet he did. For Lenin believed as firmly in the German socialists as in Kautsky. The latter was a man timid and slow in politics, wooden and unoriginal in theory, true to the type of philistine who would appear a theoretician. A few mocking remarks about him survive in the correspondence of Marx and Engels. As to the German Socialist Party which Kautsky represented, Lenin trusted it so firmly that when, in 1914, he learned of their voting for the war credits he first believed it to be a forgery of the German Foreign Office.
Unfortunately, the letters Borkenau alludes to here (fully excerpted above) may have been the undoing of the great scholar David Riazanov. Riazanov was arrested on March 6, 1931, accused of conspiring with the Mensheviks against the dictatorship of the proletariat. His brilliant assistant at the Marx-Engels Institute, Isaak Rubin, a first-rate economic theorist, gave him up after enduring several weeks of torture. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Trotsky wrote incredulously about the charges leveled at Riazanov. On May Day, he published an article, “A New Slander against David Riazanov.” You can read it below.
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2017/03/16/marx-and-engels-on-karl-kautsky/
26 de noviembre de 2017: 21:44:07
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