Karl Kautsky

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the socialist thought of Karl Kautsky. Kautsky was an intellectual activist who brought Marx's thought to the attention of millions and whose political influence profoundly stamped the nascent social democratic movement. His “orthodox” interpretation of Marx mirrored a unique historical situation in which the working class was indeed leading “the people” in a struggle for republican democracy and economic justice. However, orthodox Marxism eventually lost its coherence. Democracy, socialism reform and revolution, economics and politics, nationalism and internationalism increasingly appeared mutually exclusive. The connection Kautsky sought to create between them collapsed, as if Eduard Bernstein appropriated one part of Kautsky's worldview for his theory of social reform while Lenin embraced the other for his doctrine of political revolution. By the time Kautsky died in 1938 at the age of eighty-four, the optimistic assumptions of his theory had been invalidated by the Nazi triumph.