Karl Kautsky (1854–1938)

Social activist of the international workers’ movement; one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the opportunism of the Second International.

Kautsky was born in 1854, in Prague, in the Austrian Empire, into an intellectual’s family, and his family moved to Vienna when he was nine years old. In the multi-national Austrian Empire, Kautsky harbored radical pro-Czech nationalist sentiments from an early age. Under the influence of the Paris Commune Revolution, he became interested in socialism and began to study socialist theory, influenced by the ideas of Louis Blanc, Lassalle, and Dühring. In 1874, he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study history, economics, and philosophy. He had already written for socialist newspapers as a student. In January 1875, he joined the Social-Democratic Party of Austria. When he travelled to Leipzig in 1876, he had personal contacts with Liebknecht and Bebel, and joined the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAP) in 1877. In 1880, he accepted Karl Höchberg’s offer to write for the Yearbook for Socialist Science and Politics. In March 1881, Kautsky met Marx and Engels in London, and in 1883, he founded the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany theoretical publication Die Neue Zeit, and long served as editor-in-chief-of the journal (1883–1917), in which he published colloquial papers introducing Marxism. In 1889, he was entrusted by Engels to organize Marx’s manuscripts The History of the Theory of Surplus-Value. Following the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky accommodated, supported and condoned Bernstein’s revisionism. In 1900, when the Paris Congress of the Second International discussed the issue of Millerand’s participation in the bourgeois government, he adopted a wavering and compromising attitude and drew up a resolution that actually surrendered to opportunism. At the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International in 1904, he advocated a “cordial” consultation with the revisionists. After the outbreak of World War I, Kautsky continued to stand in the position of centrism, stood with social chauvinism, and embraced the aggressive war of the own bourgeoisie. In 1914, he published articles such as Wirkungen des Krieges (The Effects of the War) and publicly defended the social chauvinists. He also published articles and pamphlets such as Imperialism (1914), National State, Imperialist State and Confederation (1915), which distorted the nature of imperialist aggressive wars, preached the fallacy of “ultra-imperialism”, paralyzed the revolutionary will of the working class and supported imperialist wars. After the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, Kautsky published articles such as The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) and The Materialist Conception of History (1927), which distorted Marxism, viciously attacked the Bolshevik Party, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet power, and shattered the international proletarian revolutionary movement. After the 1920s, in the international workers’ movement, he actively supported the establishment of the “Two-and-a-Half International” and its reactionary activities. In 1934, he moved to Prague and then exiled to Amsterdam until his death in 1938. Lenin severely and profoundly criticized Kautsky’s revisionist theories and chauvinist standpoints in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, The State and Revolution, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, and other works.