Abstract
Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) was before the First World War a leading, if not the leading theoretician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1890 Kautsky was commissioned to draft the party program, later known as the Erfurt Program, which the German Social Democratic Party adopted in the following year. The program acted as a model for many social democratic parties. Kautsky’s extensive commentary on the program, known in English as The Class Struggle, became the catechism of socialism together with his work The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887). A whole generation of Marxists learned their Marxism through these works. In 1899, Kautsky defended the Marxist doctrine of the coming proletarian revolution against Eduard Bernstein’s critique. The dispute laid the theoretical foundations for the split between the revolutionary and the revisionist Social Democrats. To the Marxists-Leninists, Kautsky became, after the Russian Revolution, a renegade thanks to Lenin’s verdict.
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