Karl Kautsky

Karl Kautsky (born October 16, 1854, Prague, Bohemia [now Czech Republic]—died October 17, 1938, Amsterdam, Netherlands) was a Marxist theorist and a leader of the German Social Democratic Party. After the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895, Kautsky inherited the role of the intellectual and political conscience of German Marxism.

Having joined the Austrian Social Democrats while a student at the University of Vienna, Kautsky became a Marxist when he went to Zürich, Switzerland (1880), and came under the influence of the political theorist Eduard Bernstein. In London he met Engels, with whom he maintained a close friendship until the latter’s death. In 1883 Kautsky founded and edited the Marxist review Neue Zeit, publishing it in Zürich, London, Berlin, and Vienna until 1917. In 1891 the Social Democrats adopted his Erfurt Program, which committed the party to an evolutionary form of Marxism that rejected both the radicalism of Rosa Luxemburg and the evolutionary socialist doctrines of Bernstein. Kautsky served as the German Social Democrats’ authority on Marxism until World War I, when he joined the minority Independent Social Democrats in their opposition to the war. Although he had earlier defended the revolutionary ambitions of Marxism against the reformism of Bernstein, after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Kautsky increasingly became isolated from the Independents by his opposition both to violent revolution and to minority socialist dictatorships. The Russian revolution led by Vladimir Lenin was not the revolution he sought, and Kautsky was the target of one of Lenin’s most venomous polemics. After many Independents joined the Communist Party, the remaining Independents and the majority branch of the German Social Democratic Party reunited, a result for which Kautsky had laboured.

After 1918 he edited the German Foreign Office’s archives, publishing secret documents regarding the origins of the war. He engaged in literary activities in Vienna from 1924 until 1938, when the German occupation of Austria forced him to flee. His major works include The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887), Thomas More and His Utopia (1888), and many articles in Neue Zeit.