Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938

by Massimo L. Salvadori

This first modern study provides an original and balanced perspective of a theorist whom Lenin referred to as both ‘master of Marxism’ and ‘renegade’. Examining Kautsky’s political thought over a period stretching from the Paris Commune to the Second World War, the author argues for the consistency with which Kautsky developed his positions on socialism, democracy, political parties and the role of the proletariat. While Salvadori’s analysis is grounded in the debates within the Communist International and the German labour movement, Kautsky emerges as a distinctly modern thinker who produced a Marxist theory of the state, and originated critique of the USSR as a ‘state capitalist’ system. At this level, it provides a serious and measured exposition of the terms on which arguments for socialist strategy currently move.

Genres: History, Politics, Biography, Germany

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Massimo Luigi Salvadori, spesso citato come Massimo L. Salvadori (Ivrea, 1936), è uno storico e politico italiano.
Professore emerito, ordinario di Storia delle Dottrine Politiche nell'Università di Torino.
Membro del Comitato scientifico della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi di Torino, nel quale ha coperto per alcuni anni la carica di Presidente. Socio corrispondente dell'Accademia delle Scienze di Torino dal 1980, è dal 1997 socio nazionale residente nella classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche. Collabora con il quotidiano la Repubblica.

Reviews

[AHW · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid, highly detailed intellectual biography of Karl Kautsky, the pope of Second International Marxism and theorist of a completely statist, parliamentary, and fundamentally lawful path to socialism through liberal democracy. He was teacher to a generation of Marxists, including Lenin - who transformed his views into a more Jacobin statism more willing to confront the baseline of force that undergirds politics but still quite divorced from the self-development of the revolutionary proletariat on the ground. Kautsky condemned all serious revolutionaries as violent adventurists, and died unable to comprehend fascism because he identified capitalist development with liberal democracy so completely.

An excellent book for those looking to understand the links between Leninist state-capitalism and welfare state liberalism, and the development of the rot that gripped so much of 20th century Marxism.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Marxists in the Leninist tradition, the figure of Karl Kautsky is an awkward one. According to Lenin, Kautsky was the ‘the leader of the German revolutionary movement’ [1906], yet also wrote work that was ‘a hundred times more disgraceful, outrageous and renegade than Bernstein’s’[1918]. Of course, twelve years and a river of blood seperate those two statements but clearly something important had changed. The standard story is the one that Lenin himself put forward, that despite Kautsky’s centrality to German Social Democracy in the pre-WWI period from which Lenin and the Bolsheviks had learnt so much, at the time when they actually seized power in Russia, Kautsky turned over to the side of reaction and became the “renegade” Kautsky who unfairly criticised the Bolsheviks at a time when the success of the revolution was hanging by a thread. Kautsky, in this story, is not wrong in any theoretical way (and the Bolsheviks reveled in litigating this, massing mountains of quotes of the “old Kautsky” to argue against the new), but suffers from an inability to correctly apply his own Marxist principles to the situation of the Russian Revolutions. Thus, the Bolsheviks, despite their argumentation with the old man, still find themselves comfortable to quote favourably the works of the young man to support their politics. The unsatisfactoriness of this situation should go without saying. The first criticism of Lenin’s “renegade” view of the relationship between Kautsky and himself within the communist movement was from the left (by Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick, and perhaps most famously for contemporary ultra-leftists, Gilles Dauve). Their argument was that Lenin and Kautsky had much more in common than either would like to admit and that Lenin was as much a Renegade as his teacher Kautsky was. Somewhat recently (over the past 20 years), a new interpretation of the Kautsky/Lenin relationship has emerged (the “neo-kaut” view) that, like the left-wing critique, affirms the continuity of thought between the two, but which views this as a positive thing! These neo-kauts, inspired by the works of Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered) and Mike McNair (Revolutionary Strategy), want to bring Kautsky back into the pantheon of the great men of Marxism. The widely read American socialist magazine Jacobin has also helped in propagating a revisionist view of Kautsky among American marxists (a different one than the neo-kauts however, Jacobin’s editorial position should really be called Bernsteinian). The fruits of this can be seen in the Marxist Unity Group, the neo-kaut group associated with the online publication Cosmonaut, which has become an influential caucus within the DSA. This tendency has begun to grow in the UK, initially around the Weekly Worker paper of the CPGB-PCC and now around Prometheus Magazine and a group operating within the post-cliffite organisation RS21. There is even now a small German neo-kaut group! (called Licht und Luft after a passage from Kautsky’s book length commentary on the Erfurt Programme of 1892, which is worth quoting in full as it neatly summarises what is unique to contemporary “Kautskyism”, yet was common and unremarkable for second international Marxism: ‘wherever the working-class has endeavored to improve its economic position it has made political demands, especially demands for a free press and the right of assemblage. These privileges are to the proletariat the prerequisites of life; they are the light and air of the labor movement. Whoever attempts to deny them, no matter what his pretensions, is to be reckoned among the worst enemies of the working-class.’)

This book, first published in 1979, is not a product of the recent Kautsky resurgence, although it seems to pre-empt some of its main points. The author shows clearly for example, how over a protracted period Lenin borrowed heavily from Kautsky. It is also not, that being said, a book about the Lenin/Kautsky relationship, rather it is a book about what is the essential theoretical relationship of Kautsky’s socialism, that of socialism and democracy. In the author’s point of view, which is more similar to Kautsky’s actual view and those of the social democratic centre of the time rather than the modern neo-kaut view, it is Lenin alone who is the renegade, who with asiatic atavism resurrects the ghost of European social democratic history, Louis Auguste Blanqui, and his theory of the anti-democratic putsch as a precursor to socialism.

Throughout their years of exile following the failures of the revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels criticised Blanqui and his followers because they did not see the working class as the agent of their own liberation. Rather than proletarian democracy, Blanqui advocated for a small group of conspiracists to seize power and then enact a period of dictatorship through which they would be able to enact the needed reforms to bring about socialist society. Having said this, in 1850 Marx actually supported Blanqui, considering him a better representative of the proletariat than the petty-bourgeois socialist Louis Blanc and was happy to use terms like “dictatorship of the proletariat” at that time and then repeat them in the 1870s, as did Engels as well (this term was a bete noire of Kautsky who saw in it only “dictatorship of the party”).

Some 20 years before Kautsky accused the Bolsheviks of being Blanquists, Bernstein was accusing Marx and Engels of being Blanquists. And who defended them against the charge but Kautsky! After the first world war Kautsky and Bernstein joined together again and Kautsky would write in his biography regarding the time ‘I then found myself closely linked to Bernstein. We came together again during the war. Each of us preserved his own political physiognomy, but in practical action we found ourselves almost always in agreement. So it has continued to the present day.’ To this example could be added Kautsky’s position in 1918 toward the SPD convened “workers’ and soldiers’ council” (whose history is scandalously misrepresented in this book) and his position on entering coalitions in capitalist governments which from the time of the Millerand Affair to 1920 remained weak and wavering. The point is, as a person, there is nothing redeemable or even interesting about Kautsky. His oblivion is not surprising. Yet he still was the most important theoretical figure of orthodox second international marxism and wrote its clearest exposition. The desire of many on the left to recover the power and influence of the social democratic movement of the turn of the century by invoking its patron saint is understandable at a time when socialists seem to have lost all links with the wider working class yet the feeling in the face of numerous disasters of the need for some sort of socialism is stronger than ever. The attempt to surgically detach the good Kautsky from the bad Kautsky must surely fail however, and it is in valuable works such as this one we can clearly see in the detailed scholarship offered where the problems are. And so to turn to the work, let us examine closely these two pillars of the Kautskyian orthodoxy: socialism and democracy.

In the revisionist debate with Bernstein of the 1890s, Kautsky argued for the orthodox Marxist position that the development of capitalism was increasing the level of struggle between the two classes. As the proletariat became more “mature” and the state power increased due to the increasing concentration and specialisation of the productive capacities, resistance from the capitalist class (and especially the finance capitalists) to “concessions” wrested from the state grew. Eventually there would be a clash (potentially violent due to reaction but not essentially) and the proletariat would come out on top due to sheer numerical strength. Therefore in Kautsky’s view there was a complementary and even essential objective relationship between economic growth and the growth of working class political power. This is important because it is diametrically opposed to the view of the Marxist left after the war (though not for all immediately) which saw economic catastrophe as the handmaiden of the revolution. Kautsky’s policy ended up going both ways, not only was economic growth necessary for the increase in power of the working class, but only the working class’s party (the SPD) could govern the nation in a way that promoted economic growth. The capitalist factions, poisoned by the finance capitalists among them, only offered financial crashes, warfare and imperialism. Hence you can understand why Kautsky’s vision of socialism (“production in these nations will be left neither to free choice nor to the spontaneous formation of groups, nor even to sheer force of social attraction; instead, production will be placed under the direction of a well-organized administration”) resembled so closely the capitalist system it was replacing, and why he was so aghast at Lenin’s suggestion in State and Revolution to “smash the state”. “Why would we smash the state that we ourselves built!?” one can imagine Kautsky crying. At the time of the war, when the debate around imperialism and finance capital was occuring, Kautsky’s view is instructive and worth quoting: ‘The old class of capitalists no longer exists. War, inflation, and constant insecurity have steadily reduced the possessing classes' interest in industry compared with speculation. The dominant elements within the capitalist class are no longer the industrialists, but the speculators, for the most part uneducated parvenus lacking any sense of responsibility, any comprehension of the workers, and any respect for labour. The state, as it was constituted after the revolution, is no longer their state, and their fundamental objective is to weaken it.'

The bizarre implication is that Kautsky’s problem with the capitalists of the day is that they are not sufficiently capitalist! The comparison with the view of Bukharin and Lenin, that the growth of finance capital makes a generalised epoch of imperialism inevitable, shows the weakness of such a view. Kautsky hoped that the speculative behaviour of the finance capitalists would be an aberration and that after the war the social democrats could return to power and establish a period of economic reconstruction (with the support of the good old fashioned industrial capitalists) in order to build the foundations for the proletarian seizure of power to occur later. In a way the first part of that did happen, although Kautsky never understood its causes, and it was called fascism. Bukharin and Lenin’s analysis, although slightly preemptive in calling imperialism the “highest stage”, have been borne out by history. Financialisation, globalisation and the hollowing out of the reproductive state have continued apace, and they set the stage on which modern politics takes place (rather than “the conquest of democracy”), although this is primarily through the distorted lense of immigration and sexual politics.

On the question of democracy, it is only really necessary to say that for Kautsky, democracy was always liberal parliamentary democracy. The workers councils could be adjuncts to this in times of national crisis, but ultimately liberty, equality and fraternity were properly exercised through the ballot box and trade union membership. Kautsky therefore never recognised what had happened to the social democratic party and its unions. He didn’t complain about the capitalist state capturing these institutions because perhaps he imagined (following his schema) that the opposite was taking place and that the working class (through its party and unions) was taking over the state. Kautsky did recognise the Russian soviets of 1905 as democratic bodies but never followed up on that insight and when the German Revolution came along was unable to see the proletarian democracy in his midst, remaining fixated on the chimera of parliamentary democracy which betrayed his confidence again and again until 1924 when he simply accepted all was lost and moved to Austria.

To summarise, Kautsky is a figure of Orthodox Marxism (perhaps the figure), that had he died in 1905 would be counted amongst the grey heads of Marxism (filling the long gap between Engels and Lenin). Unfortunately for him he didn't and he lived long enough to make a fool of himself. But by doing so he revealed more about himself and a lot of the assumptions of orthodox Marxism that otherwise would perhaps be even more submerged. So for that we thank him. Attempts to recover the good parts of him, although sincerely motivated by commendable attempts to build a non sectarian left, are ultimately doomed to failure and the imposition of yet more sectarian shibboleths, because however much we might like to inhabit the prestige of pre war social democracy, that world no longer exists. We are instead in the same violent world that the Bolsheviks were born into and therefore the politics of a man who could not see the reality of financialisation and imperialism are not helpful.

[Cedric · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent account of Kautsky's political thought, in particular focusing on the theme of the transition to socialism and how his view of it changed in response to circumstances and events over his life. Kautsky comes across as a thinker who could be quite prescient about future developments but was hampered by two limitations. On the personal side, he was an optimist not in the long term Gramscian sense, but in his belief that the bourgeoisie and capitalist society was rational and committed to democracy. In the philosophical sense by his Darwinism which led him to a view of progressive social evolution, of which socialism was the outcome. Salvadori shows that the figure of the 'renegade Kautsky" peddled by Lenin and Trotsky, is in fact inaccurate. Kautsky did not suddenly change positions from the orthodox Marxist they had previously praised; his critical positions on Bolshevism were always inherent in his thinking and writing and were entirely consistent. A nice corrective. The book has led me to rethink Kautsky more and to give some greater credit to his positions and arguments about political strategy in times of class weakness, there is I think still much we can learn from him.

[Sam Rizer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the political development and praxis of a political figure who is forgotten in contemporary discourse but had a profound impact on the writings of revolutionaries still discussed to this day (whether in agreement or disagreement). Despite serious lapses in political analysis during crucial moments of crisis (the advent of the first World War and the rise of Nazism), Kautsky remained committed to a coherent and sufficiently Marxist perspective of socialism that centers democracy and liberal humanism, despite accusations of revisionism and being a “renegade” by his opponents on the left. Now that we are decades removed from the collapse of the Soviet Union and are seeing a rise in “democratic socialism”, revisiting Kautsky’s life can provide insight for contemporary problems and paths to victory for socialists today.

[Abel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geen sappige details over het leven van Kautsky, maar een heldere uiteenzetting van de ontwikkeling van zijn politieke ideeën en de polemieken tussen hem en andere marxistische theoretici. Een goede introductie om te lezen voor de teksten van Kautsky zelf.
Vooral op het einde veel verbindingen tussen de latere en de vroegste teksten van Kautsky, hoewel wel met een specifieke gekleurde interpretatie.

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was expecting this to be very tedious for two reasons, i) the SPD are very tedious and ii) I gave up on that book on Lenin and Kautsky that Haymarket put out because I found it repetitive and dull. this was great though. really comprehensive and convincing