Karl Kautsky

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Karl Kautsky spent thirty-five years as editor of Die Neue Zeit, the most prestigious Marxist journal in the world, and in that time he became known as the "Pope of Marxism". Born in Prague on the 16th of October 1854 and educated in Vienna, he rose to become the leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Second International. His influence extended from Berlin to St. Petersburg, where figures like Vladimir Lenin regarded him as the supreme authority on Marxist theory. Then, in 1914, everything collapsed. The same man Lenin had once treated as gospel became, in Lenin's words, a renegade. How did the most authoritative voice of orthodox Marxism end up denounced by both left and right? And what did Kautsky actually believe, in a life that stretched from the Paris Commune to the rise of Adolf Hitler?

• 2. A Prague Childhood

  ›

  Johann Kautsky, Karl's father, was a Czech theatrical scene designer, and Minna Jaich, his mother, was an Austrian actress and writer of Czech descent. The family moved to Vienna when Karl was seven years old, in 1863. Despite Kautsky's later efforts in his memoirs to suggest a vague proletarian background, the household was comfortable enough to employ at least two servants by the time he was six.

  Of all the family relationships that shaped Kautsky, the bond with his mother was the most lasting. Freed from household duties after 1860 by the family's improved finances, Minna turned to intellectual pursuits, and she and Karl developed a shared passion for contemporary philosophy and natural science. When Karl received Ernst Haeckel's The History of Creation in 1874, they studied it together. Minna herself became a socialist writer, gaining a minor reputation for her romantic socialist fiction even before her son's work was known; she was admired by Friedrich Engels.

  Kautsky attended the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna from 1866 to 1874, a more progressive institution than the Benedictine seminary he had briefly endured at Melk. He was a mediocre student, distracted by poor eyesight, chronic illness, and an early fixation on events like the Paris Commune of 1871. He performed best in history and philosophy, the two fields that would define his career. He entered the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1874, attended nine semesters, and never took a degree, his growing socialist activities having drawn him away from academia entirely.

• 3. Conversion and Exile

  ›

  Two events in early 1871 cracked open Kautsky's political imagination: the Paris Commune, which fired his sympathies for the working class, and his reading of George Sand's romantic socialist novel The Sin of M. Antoine, which provided emotional sustenance during a period of family disapproval. By late 1871 his Czech nationalism had dissolved into a vaguely socialist, democratic radicalism. Darwin's Descent of Man delivered what Kautsky himself called a "revelation", removing one of the last obstacles to his adoption of materialism by explaining the non-supernatural origins of human ethics without appealing to God.

  He joined the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party in January 1875, the same year he first read Karl Marx's Capital. The more decisive intellectual encounter came later, with Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring, serialized in Vorwärts from 1877 to 1878. In 1879, through the wealthy German socialist Karl Höchberg, Kautsky was offered a subsidized position among exiled German socialists in Zurich, contingent on abandoning his quasi-anarchist sympathies. He arrived in Zurich in January 1880.

  In Zurich, Kautsky formed a close friendship and intellectual partnership with Eduard Bernstein. Together they undertook an intense study of Anti-Dühring, which cemented both men's conversion to Marxism. Kautsky earned the nickname "Baron Juchzer" in these émigré circles for his somewhat fastidious dress and ebullient optimism. He first visited Marx and Engels in London from March to June 1881. Marx was unimpressed, viewing Kautsky as a "mediocrity"; Engels recognized his eagerness and potential. The relationship with Engels deepened, and from 1885 to 1890, Kautsky lived in London, where he worked at the British Museum and benefited from close daily collaboration with the man who was then the guardian of Marx's legacy.

• 4. The Journal and the Program

  ›

  In 1883, Kautsky founded Die Neue Zeit in Stuttgart, published by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. In a letter to Engels asking him to contribute to the first issue, Kautsky wrote: "I cannot think of a better introductory article... than one about Darwin. The name alone is already a program." He remained its editor for thirty-five years, until 1917, turning it into the most prestigious of all international Marxist journals.

  The journal's early years were turbulent. Kautsky faced attempts by the moderate wing of the SPD to dilute its Marxist orientation, with Wilhelm Blos and Bruno Geiser installed by Dietz during his absence. With crucial support from August Bebel, Kautsky successfully resisted. The journal's influence reached well beyond Germany; in the Russian Empire, it was the most popular Marxist publication and was seen as a crucial theoretical resource for Russian Social Democrats.

  Kautsky's most consequential single act of drafting came in 1891, when he authored the theoretical section of the SPD's Erfurt Program, the first party platform based strictly on Marxist principles. He had just published Marx's previously unpublished Critique of the Gotha Program in Die Neue Zeit, creating considerable controversy within the SPD leadership. His draft for the new program won out over a rival version prepared primarily by Wilhelm Liebknecht. Bernstein wrote the practical minimum program of short-term demands; Kautsky supplied the long-range theoretical framework.

  The commentary Kautsky was then commissioned to write, Das Erfurter Programm, published in 1892 and translated as The Class Struggle, became his most famous and widely translated work. Lenin translated it into Russian in 1894 and called it the "New Testament" of Marxism, a confirmation of the predictions made in the Communist Manifesto. A generation of Marxists took it as the authoritative definition of social democracy.

• 5. Orthodoxy Under Siege

  ›

  Starting in 1896, Kautsky's oldest intellectual ally turned against him. Eduard Bernstein published a series of articles in Die Neue Zeit titled "Problems of Socialism", questioning the theory of value, the inevitability of capitalist collapse, and the intensification of class struggle. Bernstein's position was summed up in his famous phrase: "the goal is nothing, the movement everything".

  Kautsky was initially reluctant to respond publicly, out of loyalty to their long friendship and to Bernstein's exile. When Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism appeared in 1899, Kautsky felt compelled, urged by Bebel and pressed by Russian orthodox Marxists like Georgi Plekhanov. His reply, Bernstein and the Social Democratic Programme, argued that Bernstein's observations of England were not applicable to Germany, where no significant democratic forces existed outside the working class. Kautsky contended that capitalism's contradictions were sharpening even if absolute poverty was not rising; the rise of finance capital and cartels was increasing social misery in relative terms. He introduced his concept of Verelendung, or immiserization, arguing that workers' share of the national wealth was declining even when their material conditions improved in absolute terms. The SPD officially condemned revisionism at its Hanover Congress in 1899 and again at Dresden in 1903. The debate permanently damaged Kautsky's friendship with Bernstein.

  A second challenge came from Rosa Luxemburg. Where Bernstein pushed from the right, Luxemburg pushed from the left, advocating revolutionary spontaneity and mass action. The two disputes converged in the mass strike debate that followed the Russian Revolution of 1905. Kautsky articulated his "centrist" position in an August 1910 article titled "Between Baden and Luxemburg", characterizing the SPD as a "revolutionary, not a revolution-making" party. He argued for a "strategy of attrition" in which the party would outlast its opponents through persistent political positioning rather than by seeking a single decisive confrontation. The SPD's secret February 1906 agreement with trade union leaders, which effectively prevented organized mass action the party could not afford to finance, represented a significant defeat for Kautsky and Luxemburg alike.

• 6. War, Split, and the Renegade

  ›

  When World War I broke out in August 1914, Kautsky was invited to the SPD parliamentary group's decisive meeting on war credits even though he was not a member of that body. He and Hugo Haase initially drafted a statement refusing credits. When the majority made clear it would vote for them, Kautsky urged abstention. The group voted 78 to 14 in favor; Kautsky joined Gustav Hoch in a failed last attempt to insert a clause demanding no annexations or violations of neutrality.

  Throughout the war, he tried to hold a line between what he called the legitimate defense of a "national state" and the aggressive "nationalistic state". Wartime censorship made it easier to criticize the war's right-wing socialist supporters than the left. He re-established a close working relationship with Bernstein, who had also moved to an anti-war position. Their former colleague Heinrich Cunow, by contrast, became a leading proponent of war Marxism.

  In April 1917, Kautsky co-founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, the USPD, at a congress in Gotha, alongside Bernstein, Hugo Haase, and other oppositionists. He wrote the party's founding manifesto, which called for an international, democratic peace with self-determination and blamed the SPD majority for the split. The new party's birth cost Kautsky the editorship of Die Neue Zeit after thirty-five years.

  The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 provoked his most famous piece of political writing. In The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, published in 1918, Kautsky argued that the Bolsheviks had perverted Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which for Marx and Engels was a "state of fact" based on the democratic rule of a proletarian majority, as exemplified by the Paris Commune, not a form of government that suppressed democracy. He predicted that the "original sin of Bolshevism" would give rise to a "new class of bureaucratic exploiters, no better than the Tsarist chinovniks". Lenin's reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, gave Kautsky the label he would carry for the rest of his life.

• 7. Darwin, Marx, and Social Instincts

  ›

  Kautsky's engagement with evolutionary theory was not a youthful flirtation he later abandoned; it ran through his entire intellectual life. In his pre-Marxist years, his conception of history was a form of social Darwinism that viewed development as a struggle for existence between races and peoples. After embracing Marxism, he sought to integrate the two frameworks rather than discard one.

  The core of this synthesis was his theory of "social instincts". Drawing on Darwin's idea that morality evolved from the instincts of social animals, Kautsky argued that humanity had inherited what he called "communist instincts" of solidarity, self-sacrifice, and loyalty from its animal ancestors. Capitalism's individualism had suppressed these instincts; socialism, in his view, represented their revival. Socialism was therefore grounded not in utopian idealism but in human biology and the course of historical development.

  Around 1900, Kautsky resolved the tension between Darwinian natural selection and his Marxism by abandoning strict Darwinian selection in favour of neo-Lamarckism, which emphasized the inheritance of acquired characteristics and direct environmental influence. This allowed him to explain evolution without relying on an intraspecific struggle for existence, which he came to believe played a minimal role in nature and no role at all in a future socialist society. His evolutionary thinking also led him to support socialist eugenics, believing that rational social planning would replace natural selection without compulsion; public opinion, he argued, would guide the "weak, sick, and inferior" to voluntarily refrain from having children. Leftists like Karl Korsch attacked this synthesis as "Darwino-Marxism", a fatalistic theory of gradual evolution that replaced revolutionary dialectic. Kautsky insisted he adhered to Engels's formulation of the dialectic and that revolution was a "special phase" of evolution, not its negation.

• 8. Exile and Final Years

  ›

  Kautsky moved to Vienna in 1924 on the invitation of the Austrian Socialists, effectively retiring from active party politics after rejoining the SPD in 1922. He drafted the SPD's Heidelberg Program in 1925 but never felt at home in the increasingly reformist party of the Weimar Republic. In Vienna he witnessed the defeat of Austrian Social Democracy in the civil war of 1934 and the defeat of German socialism at the hands of Adolf Hitler.

  His main theoretical project of this period was the two-volume Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, published in 1927, in which he aimed to provide a systematic presentation of historical materialism grounded in the natural sciences while insisting on the unique dialectical development of human society driven by the interaction of human intellect, especially technology, and the environment. He remained a revered figure among the exiled Mensheviks, and his correspondence with Pavel Axelrod and Fyodor Dan, who called him their "only loyal and stout support in the international arena during the first two decades of Communist rule in Russia", shows the warmth of those ties. To Axelrod he wrote in 1924: "I have nowhere found such wonderful people as amongst the Russians, with so much warmth, so much theoretical interest, so much simple affection."

  Following the Anschluss in March 1938, Kautsky and his wife Luise fled Vienna by aeroplane for Amsterdam, aided by the Czech embassy. Karl Kautsky died in Amsterdam on the 17th of October 1938, from complications of pancreatic cancer, one day after his 84th birthday. Luise Kautsky died in Auschwitz; their son Benedikt survived Buchenwald. The scholar Steenson, writing in 1991, observed that Kautsky's moderate, humanist interpretation of Marx might find renewed relevance as a counterpoint to the discredited Leninist tradition, a suggestion that the "renegade" label's long shadow may yet lift.