Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism

Historical Materialism #196

by Karl Kautsky, Ben Lewis (Translator)

Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) was the leading theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his time. However, during the twentieth century a constellation of historical factors ensured that his ideas were either gradually consigned to near oblivion or downright reviled. Not only has his political thought been dismissed in non-Marxist historical and political discourse, but his ideas are equally discredited in Marxist circles.

This book aims to rekindle interest in Kautsky's ideas by exploring his democratic-republican understanding of state and society. These essential works from different points in his career demonstrates how Kautsky's republican thought was positively influenced by Marx and Engels—especially in relation to the lessons they drew from the experience of the Paris Commune.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy

352 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2020

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

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kautsky has a bad reputation on the left. He has been equated with the Second International and its failures. It is common to suggest Kautsky's political thought was somehow tragically flawed and that it had to be transcended in Leninist revolution. Part of this argument hinges on Kautsky's view of the state, which is sometimes framed as passive acceptance of bourgeois institutions. Lenin is then positioned as an advocate of a radical new type of democracy built through the dismantling of the existing state. Ben Lewis' introductory essay and his selections from Kautsky point to an alternative: Kautsky's democratic-republican view of the state was drawn from examples like the Paris Commune. Many of the criticisms that Kautsky makes of contemporary political systems are similar in theme to Lenin's view of the state. This adds to the argument that Lenin was outraged by Kautsky's inability to see the merits of the Soviet revolution. It also opens the possibility that Kautsky did not in fact change his views but was simply skeptical that the democratic-republican revolution was being realized in the new Soviet state. Beyond that, it all implies a case for reconsidering Kautsky at a time when consistency with Lenin's judgment is less of a burning concern.

I found these arguments useful but it does proceed somewhat indirectly. Kautsky argues against referenda and promotes representative institutions instead. He also outlines the socialist movement's conquest of representative institutions against monarchical forms. But Kautsky's focus is on a path of ascent of the proletariat to ruling status. This is somewhat different than what interests people about Lenin's criticisms. The argument that people sympathetic to Lenin tend to make is that the Soviet revolution has answered the question of what form democratic-republicanism could take that elevates the workers to ruling status. In Kautsky's model that is incoherent because the Soviets, at best, are just representative institutions that were quickly emptied of that representative function - in a society where the proletariat were far from the conscious broad majority. But what appeals about Lenin is that (looked at a certain way) the Soviet revolution happened and the German revolution failed. So I think it's understandable that sometimes people consider the idea of fighting for the expansion of democracy through demands, agitation and legislation as a failed strategy to bring socialists to power as compared to creating new representative forms from below. For many Leninists, the idea that socialist societies or approximations actually came to be as a result of a new revolutionary state is at least as important as those societies' flaws. I think this is why some people feel that the attempts at retrieval of Kautsky are really a premise to valorize electoral reformism at the expense of the Leninist legacy.

All that said, I personally do like the project of trying to build a more accurate picture of the differences between socialists that extricates them from the cliches and attempts to sound cool that often dominate these debates. If this were about putting two master-theorists into battle then that wouldn't be much of a worthwhile discussion. What I think is useful is that going to the sources does sometimes show that the polemics we have inherited often have less of a relation to the people involved than we might have assumed. It reminds me of something that John Riddell said about the early Communist congresses - that the congress itself was an actor. The debates are useful because they can change us and the outcomes.

[Jehiel L · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the first part of this book, Kautsky's 'Parliamentarism', 1893:
Lars Lih has noted that this book was very influential on Lenin's early political thought. It is an argument against direct democracy in favour of parliament, that is, against the people as a whole being polled to determine if something should become law, and instead allowing a single national parliament to play this role. An interesting feature of Kautsky's argument is that parliamentarism, i.e. representative democracy, allows leadership to play it's function; rather than directly polling the whole people's average attitude and implementing the result, representative democracy allows leaders to not merely express the sentiments and prejudices of the mass, but instead allows for a winning of leadership and trust, and then the leaders are concentrated into a chamber and given authority. So political power is wielded by leaders whose views of course have to relate to the masses to win support, but are not identical to the mass. Social Democracy using the parliament as a platform can then make leading arguments and use the terrain to influence mass opinion rather than just doing what mass opinion thinks in absence of Social Democracy's leadership. Though Kautsky warns against equating the state with the party, it is important that the party operate in a parliamentarist way: an executive leadership is elected which then has genuine agency and decision-making power, it's not that everything is left to all members to decide all the time, rather the leadership is responsible to the members as leaders, with frequent party congresses. The political non-identity of leadership and the masses is a vital part of the Marxist materialist conception of politics.

The last (13th) chapter is a dense prose expressing a series of principles. Some of them express Kautsky's problematic conception of Marxism as being in harmony with the proletariat, and the proletariat alone, which comes to lead other classes simply by those classes becoming increasingly like the proletariat. This combined with his pedagogical conception of the Marxist movement led to a fetishisation of the parliamentary form as the single means of securing the conditions for taking power for socialism. Thus parliament becomes the strategy rather than a (very important and always conducted) tactic.

Kautsky accounts for how universal suffrage can be used for reactionary as well as socialist ends, but when it's reactionary it is for him because reactionary classes are winning support for themselves by stifling political freedom of the proletariat. He can't sufficiently comprehend how universal suffrage as a genuine demand of the proletarian movement, something genuinely forced on the bourgeoisie from without, might still be a means of reconfiguring bourgeois hegemony, with Social Democracy at its head. In Germany in November 1918, Kautsky got what he wanted: a parliament made sovereign by revolutionary activity with an SPD government. It did not actualise but instead smashed potential proletarian rule.

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On the second part of the book, 'The Republic and Social Democracy in France', 1905:
This text seeks to clarify the Marxist approach to republican state forms in an intervention against the Right of French socialism whom held illusions in the supposed merits of the French Republic, and sought alliances with the republican bourgeoisie. It affirms Kautsky's argument that the bourgeoisie is reactionary and will give support to backwards absolutism before giving any support to the consistently democratic force, the proletariat. The aim for the proletariat is 'democracy', which between Kautsky and Lenin would become a contested concept, informed by their different conceptions of hegemony.

Kautsky's account of the 1793 and 1848 French revolutions is strikingly orthodox. Particularly when he says the following:
"The conquest of state power by the proletariat... does not simply mean the conquest of government ministries, which then, without further ado, administers the previous means of rule - an established state church, the bureaucracy and the officer corps - in a socialist manner. Rather, it means the dissolution of these institutions." He then proceeds to make arguments against French opportunists who argue for increased French state police powers to curb the aristocracy, and in favour of a weakening of the central state in favour of institutions of self-government in the provinces and the enacting of a civil militia. He also argues that a Blanquist Parisian dictatorship in 1848 would have been a political benefit for its legacy, even if it was doomed to defeat.

Kautsky describes each of the pre-Marxist French socialisms as being partial truths, sublated in Marxism, in a rendition of his merger formula. He then, however, characteristically, describes the tendencies of contemporary socialism (conquest of power, appealing to the bourgeoisie and bourgeois state, ignoring politics in favour of economic organisation) as being expressions of real divisions in the workers' movement and as necessary moments in the struggle of the working class. He argues that emphasising one at a particular period is not wrong so long as the others are not forgotten. This is certainly inadequate as far as organisational questions go.

When discussing the Paris Commune, Kautsky says that it made clear how the elemental struggle may facilitate the development of proletarian social and political organisation, but not the art of war and military politics. Political education was lacking as well: "such education requires knowledge not only of one's own needs and strengths, but also those of the enemy. But this can only be attained by detailed study or extensive political practice. The proletarians of 1871 lacked both. Extensive participation in parliamentary work provides the best school for the political struggle against the bourgeoisie, but neither the Proudhonists nor Blanquists had participated in the parliamentary struggle". Kautsky then argues that the left being stooped in the traditions of 1793 prevented them from seeing how the situation in 1871 was very different, in terms of political trajectories and class alignments. He argues that decisive action was necessary to set the proletariat up for a fight, but such effort was impossible due to the fact that the proletariat had not prepared for the war but instead had it sprung upon them. The enemy was much better positioned and organised than they were.

A crucial first measure of the Commune was "the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it or the armed people." Kautsky describes how the Commune's structure was that of instantly revokeable delegates of the workers or their representatives on workers' wages, that it was a working and not parliamentary body, how it stripped the police and other branches of administration of their political attributes, that the judiciary was democratised, and how ultimately this was self-government of the working people. Out of its task of destroying the existing national state, the idea of the democratic republic emerged.

Kautsky explicitly critiques bourgeois reformism and the idea that all that needs to be done is electing better representatives to the existing state: "For them, any involvement of the people beyond electing a sufficient number of Radicals to the chamber was superfluous. These gentlemen no longer understand the democratisation of the administration to mean replacing bureaucratic paternalism with self-government, but replacing those from the right of the chamber protecting such paternalism with those from its left side."

The thing to notice though is that the goal is full universal suffrage, a demand which though radical for a time would, against Kautsky's analysis, be the basis upon which to deny workers' power. The lack of concreteness about the conditions and character of proletarian dictatorship would see Kautsky counterpose democracy and dictatorship, for which Lenin would criticise his former mentor. Beneath this disagreement was a difference in conceptions of hegemony, the dialectic of coercion and consent, for which Kautsky had on overly passive-ideological conception, for which, despite dismantling of the state being the aim, winning a parliamentarist majority (rather than a more concrete majority in something like the soviets) was the necessary condition. Kautsky would come to think parliament better than soviet for the fact that all people of all classes get equal suffrage, abstracting from the fact that the parliament he was preferring was that of a bourgeois state apparatus, compared to the command of revolutionary political activity of the soviets, of which the unevenness of suffrage in the soviets was a real reflection. Parliamentarism as principle, not just thinking parliament was important, was Kautsky's limitation. Engels was right to note in a letter to Bebel that the idea of 'pure democracy' is a rallying-point for reaction against the revolutionary people.

The last part of the book is a summary arguing that the French socialist tendency which seeks alliances with bourgeois republicanism has nothing to do with Marxism, and cannot justify itself with reference to the SPD. It is also an argument that such opportunism feeds another extreme error, that of anti-parliamentarist socialism like that which fetishises the general strike or anarchism which is indifferent to the state (Proudhonism) or is obsessed with hopeless putsches and acts of propaganda of the deed (Bakuninism). Kautsky argues for a disciplined proletarian party with a politically sharp focus on parliament. He argues that "it is certain that the parliamentary system is a bourgeois means of rule which has the tendency to transform all deputies, even the anti-bourgeois ones, from servants of the people into servants of the bourgeoisie. However, the less the proletariat concerns itself with the parliamentarians, the greater this danger becomes and the more the proletariat gives the parliamentarians free reign by turning its back on them in anger and contempt." There's in itself nothing wrong with what's said, but it has to be understood in the context noted above.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his introduction, Ben Lewis makes the case that Kautsky’s views on socialism, democracy and republicanism are different than what has often been the caricature, ever since Lenin’s polemics against him. The two main texts translated by Lewis in this book bear this out and show Kautsky to have had great insight into the intrasocialist political disputes of his era.
Although Kautsky may have betrayed the socialist cause upon the arrival of the World War, this volume proves that many of his writings are worthy of a reconsideration.

[Abel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent translation of previously quite unknown works by Kautsky. An excellent contribution to the current left.