Karl Marx' oekonomische lehren, gemeinverständlich dargestellt und erläutert von Karl Kautsky

by Karl Kautsky

Karl Marx' oekonomische lehren, gemeinverständlich dargestellt und erläutert von Karl Kautsky
(302 pages)

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction

234 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1887

About the author

Czech-German philosopher and politician. He was a leading theoretician of Marxism. He became the leading promulgator of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels.

Reviews

[Nathan Fisher]

Mentioned in my review of Anti-Duhring that I think this is the superior 'textbook' of Marxism that came out of the orthodox Second International era. Since Kautsky was Engels' disciple, I think he imposes the same misreading on Capital —namely that of erroneously imputing to the text a historical sequence moving from 'simple commodity production' to the capitalist mode of production and the ambiguous historicization of the 'law of value' that is downstream of this — but that was the dominant interpretation of the time, so it's entirely expected. Setting aside those limitations, what is striking about the text is how faithfully it covers the entire scope of Volume One — it is openly nothing but a precis, but as those go, it's a rather thorough and occasionally even subtle one. It went through twenty-five or so volumes in German, some of which included substantial revisions, and given the version in English includes references to both V3 and the World War, Kautsky obviously made an effort to keep it up to date. I'd love to read the original German version in translation, since it would be Kautsky's exegesis of Marxism prior to the publication of V3 — tracing the various editions as they are modified in response to the availability of later volumes of Capital would be a worthwhile project, but alas, only the later version is in English.

Anyway – the limitations are less significant than the rather pleasant surprising fact that this is a real yeoman's effort to make, essentially, an abridged Capital — and, in fairness, maybe the best of its genre until the outbreak (for better and for worse) of contemporary Marxology.