Karl Kautsky Research Articles

Kautsky’s Unexpected Comeback: Understanding the Re-emergence of the Second International in Contemporary Debates

Abstract In the history of the left, the conjuncture 1914–1917 is the “bifurcation point” per definition. Leaving an enduring mark on the labor movement, it also shaped subsequent historiographies. For the pro-Bolshevik left, 1914 epitomized the betrayal of a group of reformist leaders. Conversely, anti-communist social democrats regarded the Second International as an uncomfortable political heritage. Despite irreconcilable disputes, both traditions shared a lack of interest in defending the period 1889–1914, let alone delving into its history. The real take-off of Second International historiography came later and coincided with the outset of the Cold War, experiencing a “golden age” in the 1960s and 1970s. Studies of socialism lost momentum from the 1980s onwards, but the last 15 years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Second International and even a popular reappraisal of Karl Kautsky. Linking historiography to wider social and political phenomena, this article reflects on this new interest in the Second International in both activist and academic circles. The first section summarizes the historical significance of the International and examines how the crisis of 1914 became a crucial “bifurcation point” with significant political and historiographical impact. The second section explores recent trends in scholarly research on the subject. The third section provides an analysis of the vindication of Karl Kautsky among radicals and socialists in the United States over the past 10 years. The conclusion summarizes the main arguments and reflects on the contribution this analysis can make to a discussion about the “long cycle” of socialism.

A CIÊNCIA POLÍTICA DE LÊNIN: PARTIDO, ESTADO E DEMOCRACIA

Lenin's theoretical contributions to the social sciences were numerous. For political sociology, his concepts of social formation and the Prussian path are indispensable. For international relations, the interpretation of imperialism as the superior phase of capitalism remains current. And in the field of economics, the concept of financial capital is still explanatory. In this article, I argue that Lenin was also a relevant author for political science, in particular with his theories of the political party, the State and democracy. The text is structured into three sections. The first discusses his theory of the political party. With Lenin, the so-called “new type party” emerged, a form of political organization that had previously not existed. The second part analyzes how the Russian revolutionary updated the State theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Finally, the third and final section evaluates the debate between Lenin and Karl Kautsky on the topic of democracy. The article concludes that Lenin should be considered a fundamental author in political science literature.

Known in Europe, Unknown in Bulgaria (To the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Christian Rakovsky)

The article is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Christian Rakovsky (1873-1941) – a prominent figure in the international socialist movement, politician, statesman, diplomat, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Ukraine (1919-1923), Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the USSR in London (1923-1925) and Paris (1925-1927), one of the leaders of the Trotskyite bloc, and an opponent of Stalin. While Rakovsky’s life has been the subject of some research, many of its aspects remain unexplored. Drawing on a wealth of new documents discovered in the archives of Bulgaria, Great Britain, France, Ukraine, and Russia, the author sheds new light on little-known episodes of Rakovsky’s life – particularly the years of his youth, when he joined the international student socialist movement and spoke at international congresses. The article considers Rakovsky’s contacts with Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labor group in Geneva, where Rakovsky studied medicine and achieved some prominence among Russian social democrats. His connections with famous Western European revolutionaries are discussed – including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Jules Guesde, Karl Kautsky, and other figures of the Second International. It is noted that Rakovsky was the only member of the Bolshevik government who was also a member of the Bureau of the Second International. The article touches on a subject that has long been neglected by historians – Rakovsky’s efforts to solve the problem of Russian-Romanian relations in 1918, the resulting bilateral treaty, and his special position regarding the annexation of Bessarabia to Romania. Considerable attention is given to the question of Rakovsky’s so-called ‘Jewish’ origin and his alleged membership in the worldwide Masonic lodge, disproven on the basis of Rakovsky’s papers in the Bulgarian Historical Archive. The author also dwells on the problem of the so-called ‘Rakovsky protocols’, published by Iosif Landovsky in the book “Red Symphony: Confessions of the Trotskyist Rakovsky.” The author draws on Rakovsky’s NKVD case file and interrogation records, which he has published in full in his book “The Bloody Farce,” to demonstrate that no such protocols exist. Finally, the author addresses the rumor that Rakovsky was not executed, but spent the last years of his life in the Soviet Union. This rumor is proven false based on the analysis of extensive archival materials and memoirs of Rakovsky’s comrades; most notably, Rakovsky’s case file in the Central Archives of the KGB of the USSR contains a certificate of his execution on 11 September 1941 in the Oryol Central Prison.

Who Are You Calling Vulgar? Lukács, Kautsky, and the Beginnings of “Western Marxism”

This essay reads Georg Lukács’s early thought in light of his vexed relationship to the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Though Lukács criticized Kautsky as the archetypal “vulgar Marxist,” Lukács’s larger project of promoting “class consciousness” follows from Kautsky’s own political and pedagogical work. For Kautsky, Social Democratic intellectuals had to transmute proletarian “class instinct” into class consciousness by disseminating a simplified version of scientific socialism, transmitting the conclusions but not the method of Marxist thought. But because Lukács had defined “vulgar Marxism” as the forgetting of Marx’s method in favor of his conclusions, “vulgar Marxism” turned out to be both the precondition and an obstacle to proletarian class consciousness and thus to revolutionary action. The essay then reads Lukács’s changing understanding of the role of the party as a response to this impasse: a response that can help us understand the heterogeneous tradition of “Western Marxism.”

Marxists in a Declining Empire

Marxists in a Declining Empire Francis King Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics across the Russian Empire (1882–1917). 470 pp. Brill: Leiden, 2021. ISBN-13 978-9004449923. €190.00 (cloth). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1642597646. $36.00 (paper). Histories of the "Russian" Revolution have often either largely ignored developments in the periphery of the empire altogether or appended them to the main narrative as interesting case studies of secondary importance. The major all-Russia parties (the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party [RSDRP], the factions of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Constitutional Democrats, etc.) have been comprehensively studied in the literature, and the relations among them have been exhaustively analyzed. However, the smaller parties of the non-Russian national minorities, their relationships with one another and with the major all-Russia parties have received considerably less attention. Before the collapse of the USSR in 1991, in Soviet historiography the revolution in the non-Russian periphery was presented almost exclusively as the story of how the local Bolsheviks won power. In this narrative, the Bolsheviks' rivals, whether all-Russia or regional/national parties, were generally depicted as amorphously "petty-bourgeois" or "counterrevolutionary," and the details of their ideas were almost never explored. In English-language works of that time, only the revolutionary process in Ukraine could have been said to have a "historiography," produced mainly by diaspora scholars.1 Since 1991, the newly independent former union republics have had [End Page 437] to develop their own national historical narratives, and some of those with a distinctive revolutionary history, such as Georgia, have seen significant interest both at home and abroad in recovering that history. Ukraine, however has remained the most thoroughly studied area on the ex-Soviet periphery and the nation that has done the most to develop its own narrative of 1917 and after. In 2017, the Ukrainian state provided schools with lesson plans and materials to provide a national interpretation of the events of 1917.2 To emphasize the distinctiveness of their national experience, some Ukrainian and diaspora scholars have also been using decolonizing and postcolonial concepts in their presentations of this history of the revolution in Ukraine.3 The problem with these national(ist) historiographies has been their authors' need to separate these stories out from the all-Russia narrative—which, while understandable, downplays the interconnectedness of the revolutionary process across the Russian Empire. Eric Blanc's book, by eschewing both exclusively Russocentric and narrowly nationalist approaches, is therefore a welcome contribution to the historiography of the revolution. His focus is on the various social democratic (that is, avowedly Marxist) parties that operated in the periphery of the Russian Empire, and he seeks to integrate their histories into the wider history of the revolution. Few historians could undertake this sort of study, as it requires facility in several of the languages of the Russian Empire. The bibliography suggests that he has used an impressive range of primary and secondary sources. As one might expect from a book in the Historical Materialism series of monographs, it is not merely a work of historiography but also of politically engaged scholarship. Throughout the work, Blanc seeks to draw political lessons for today from the material he is presenting and to criticize or refute certain (mis)conceptions commonly found both in the scholarly community and among radical socialist activists, past and present. His researches have led him away from "traditional Leninist interpretations of revolutionary Russia" (17) and toward "retrieving the lost tradition of revolutionary social democracy" (407), which he associates particularly with the pre–World War I writings of Karl Kautsky. Blanc's ideological engagement [End Page 438] is both a strength of the work—it lends the book a vitality and intellectual coherence sometimes lacking in purely academic monographs—and, as will be discussed below, a source of some of its limitations. Besides an introduction and an epilogue, the book contains ten thematic chapters, mostly concerned with particular aspects of socialist politics, subdivided into sections dealing more with specific case studies. In his introduction, Blanc sets out his stall. His first key argument is that "the Russian revolution was far...

ЧТО СВЯЗЫВАЛО ВЛАДИМИРА УЛЬЯНОВА С ПИСАТЕЛЕМ ГЕОРГОМ БРАНДЕСОМ?

One of the documents shedding light on V.I. Ulyanov's (Lenin’s) interest in Marxist, populist and historical literature is his letter dated December 27, 1889, sent by him from Samara to Leipzig to the address of F.A. Brockhaus’ bookselling company to find out the possibility of ordering the literature of interest to him, banned in Russia by censorship, with its subsequent delivery to the addressee. In this letter, Vladimir Ulyanov asks to send him the works of the Danish writer and publicist Georg Brandes. The letter, discovered by German scientists and transferred back in Soviet times to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU, was published in the Communist magazine with a comment that soon after his arrival in Samara, young V.I. Ulyanov sought to obtain Marxist literature, including in the original language, which was a confirmation of the recollections of relatives and friends that V.I. Lenin already then stood on Marxist positions. But the list of books requested by V.I. Ulyanov also included the writings of Karl Kautsky, populist literature, and books that promoted the activities of populist circles. No comment was given to this circumstance both in Soviet times and by contemporary Russian researchers. This article is devoted to finding out the reasons for its absence.

Globalisation, internationalism and the Great War

ABSTRACT The declaration of war in August 1914 seemed to sanction the impotence of the organized labor movement and these international bodies. The First World War would prove ‘the gigantic force of imperialism’, accelerating and intensifying a new period of globalization. Thus, while at the beginning of the twentieth century John Atkinson Hobson described inter-imperialist entente as one of the consequences of what he called ‘patriotic parasitism’ and, like Karl Kautsky, excluded the risks of a global war, other commentators saw precisely in the imperialism of the great powers, and in particular in their unequal development, the reasons for future conflict. The First World War also promoted an ‘offensive war of self-defense’ by the state and the ruling classes against the organized labor movement. This paper proposes to discuss the conflicting and contradictory links between internationalism, globalization and war by taking a transnational approach, conceived as necessarily attentive to the ‘unequal and combined geographical development’ of the world. The combined nature of the transformations affecting the various societies at war thus becomes essential in attempting to grasp the apparently simple idea that the processes at work in certain advanced societies ‘irrevocably transform the conditions and character of similar processes about to take place elsewhere’.

The Christ Myth Debate in Marxist Literature

Due to the inauguration of the Next Quest of the Historical Jesus and renewed interest in historical materialist approaches to early Christianity (such as the forthcoming volume from Myles and Crossley), the present paper seeks to elucidate the history of one of the most contentious debates in early Christian studies among Marxists: that of the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The article goes through the early debates and discussions on the subject and seeks to correct a number of misunderstandings about the history of this debate and also evaluate some of the present contributions on the matter, to see where Marxist historians generally stand. It starts with the earliest discussions of Jesus’ historicity among figures such as Albert Kalthoff and Karl Kautsky, then discuss­ing where Marxist mythicists gained majority positions in the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China, until reaching the present day and briefly discussing the contemporary interlocutors in this debate.

СОЦІАЛІСТИЧНА ІДЕОЛОГІЯ У ПОГЛЯДАХ С. ПЕТЛЮРИ НА ПОЧАТКУ ХХ СТ.

The article considers the peculiarities of the social-democratic views of the prominent statesman Simon Vasilyevich Petliura in the period 1902-1917, that is, at the stage of forming his political worldview. The role of S. Petliura as one of the leading ideologues of the Ukrainian social democracy of the beginning of the XX century is determined. The attitude of S. Petliura to the Russian variants of marxism is analyzed, his views on European social democracy, the main issues of development of the Ukrainian people, and solving them through the prism of socialist ideas. His views on party building are studied, relations between the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers 'Party and the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. The key positions of the Russian Social Democrats have been identified, which became the subject of sharp criticism of S. Petliura. It turned out that Simon Petliura was a supporter of the European version of Social Democracy, in particular on the issue of the right of nations to selfdetermination. S. Petliura entered into a sharp controversy with representatives of the Russian Social-Democracy, argued the falsity of their views on non-recognition of the right of the Ukrainian people to autonomy, appealing to the works of Karl Kautsky. S. Petliura did not share the centralizing policy of the Russian Marxists regarding party building, defending the right of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party to an independent organizational structure. Socialist ideology in views S. Petliura was dominant, but had bright national features. The key stages of formation of the worldview of the figure are determined. The transformation of its ideological foundations is determined.

Democracy, Enlightenment, and Revolution: Cantonese Marxists and Chinese Social Democracy, 1920–1922

This article discusses two different attitudes toward elections and democracy among the early Chinese communists. It argues that apart from some communist leaders in Shanghai who saw nothing of value in participating in elections, there were members of the party who favored social democracy. Two Cantonese Marxists, Chen Gongbo and Tan Pingshan, heavily influenced by German social democrats, especially Karl Kautsky, attached great importance to elections and “the enlightenment of the masses” on the road to communism. This led them to oppose their comrades in Shanghai, and to support the federalist self-government movement advocated by Chen Jiongming. After 1922, this rift between communists in Guangzhou and Shanghai grew into a serious intra-party conflict. Eventually, the Cantonese social democratic approach was politically discredited and largely forgotten. Exploring this Cantonese approach will clarify the connection and tension between democracy, enlightenment, and socialism in May Fourth China.

The debate on democratization and parliament in Germany from 1871 to 1918

ABSTRACT The political setting of the German Kaiserreich founded in 1871 was based on a constitutional monarchy and endowed with a parliament (the Reichstag) elected by means of universal and democratic suffrage. Therefore, the question of democratization concerned specific issues: the extension of the vote to women and younger people, the reordering of the constituencies, and the reform of the graded suffrage in the federal states. However, the political system on the whole could not be considered as thoroughly democratic, since the Reichstag was flanked by a Federal Council (the Bundesrat) whose members were not appointed on a democratic basis, and the government did not derive from the parties that had won the elections. Hence, in the course of time the debate on democratization became intertwined with the claim of strengthening the political power of parliament. This article focuses on the positions of two outstanding democratic thinkers (Hugo Preuß, Max Weber) and of the leading social democratic intellectuals (Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein) and intends to reconstruct the meaning they ascribed to the process of democratization in connection with the essential role they attributed to parliament.

Friedrich Engels and the Strategy of “Siege Warfare”

ABSTRACT In a March 1887 letter to Hermann Schluter, a prominent member of the German-speaking socialist movement in the United States, Friedrich Engels argued that the appropriate strategy for the German social democracy of the time was “a form of siege warfare.” In doing so he anticipated Karl Kautsky’s “strategy of attrition” and Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position” in the application of the specific metaphor of siege warfare to revolutionary strategy. Given the prominent role played by Engels in the development of a Marxist analysis of war, this metaphor is more than a simple stylistic flourish. Among Engels’s extensive writings on war and military matters are his observations on sieges in wars of the nineteenth century, including the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. In this paper I examine how Engels’s military writings on siege warfare can help us to understand his discussion of revolutionary strategy. Engels’s sophisticated military perspective served as the foundation for a dialectical understanding of revolutionary strategy that provides an antidote to the contemporary tendency toward a stagist understanding of “strategy of attrition—strategy of overthrow” and “war of position—war of maneuver.”

Luise Kautsky: The ‘Forgotten Soul’ of the Socialist Movement

Abstract This article draws on archival research to recover the legacy of Luise Kautsky – journalist, editor, translator, politician and wife of Karl Kautsky – who has been overlooked as a leading member of the socialist movement. First, by adopting a feminist historical lens to reveal the unacknowledged intellectual labour of women, the article reassesses Luise Kautsky’s relationship to Karl Kautsky and his writings. The evidence suggests that Luise Kautsky was essential to the development, editing and dissemination of the work of Karl Kautsky. Second, the article claims Luise Kautsky played an invaluable practical role as the hub of an international network of socialist scholars and activists, acting as mediator, translator and middle point through her extensive correspondence and by hosting members of this network at her house. Finally, the article recovers her labour as a writer, editor and translator and calls for renewed attention to her as an independent figure of historical analysis.

Inside an enclave: the dynamics of capitalism and rural politics in a post-land reform context

ABSTRACT There is no doubt that Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Program resulted in repeasantization. As several studies point out, it also resulted in accumulation from below by a majority of the resettled peasantry. Our study focuses on an area where counter-agrarian reform is in motion and accumulation from below is constrained. In this location, we argue that repeasantization is severely being contested as indicated by the re-emergence of a dual-mode of production and the subsequent ‘virtual’ dispossession and proletarianization of the land reform beneficiaries. Our findings shed more light on the dynamics of capitalism and agrarian politics in a context where land reforms are implemented under neoliberalism. In this enclave, peasants after accessing land through the land reform collectivized their land and parceled it to the downsized and nearby capitalist farming system. The capitalist farming system engages in spatio-temporal fix by moving from one rural site to another as it follows the dictates of accumulation. While the possibility of full-scale land dispossession exists, the current state ownership of land and the peasantry's resistance provided some brakes to full-scale land dispossession. At the same time, the state's limited support to land reform beneficiaries fuels this localized land dispossession. The peasantry's exploitation in this enclave ranges from corvee labor to coercion into the mini-land enclosures; these are implemented by village heads, who are local state functionaries. This study also recasts the relevance of the Marxist framework in understanding rural dynamics more specifically; it revisits Karl Kautsky's arguments on the coexistence thesis of the peasantry and capitalist farming and illustrates the Zimbabwean state's ambivalence with regards to the conditions of peasant and capitalist farming.

Revising Democratic Socialism: C. A. R. Crosland and Pluralistic Economic Democracy

Revising Democratic Socialism: C. A. R. Crosland and Pluralistic Economic Democracy Gary Dorrien Democratic socialism, an idea boasting a rich European history and a slight American history, is making a remarkable resurgence in the United States. No democracy can perpetually survive gross disparities in economic and social condition, so the United States is witnessing a surge of democratic socialism, despite lacking much of a tradition of it. Social Democracy has created the world’s most humane societies, where health care and the rights of liberty are universal for all citizens, elections and higher education are publicly financed, and grotesque levels of inequality are not tolerated. The United States never achieved more than a modicum of social democratic decency, and now even the modicum is endangered. The surge for democratic socialism reflects a widespread recognition that neo‐liberal capitalism works only for a minority and that liberals do not fight for social justice. “Democratic socialism” summarizes what is lacking. But no movement for democratic socialism can afford to ignore the ambiguous history of the struggle for it. Social Democracy is battered and reeling almost everywhere that it exists. Social Democratic and worker parties are consumed by the battle to save the welfare states they created, no European socialist party has dismantled the culture of white supremacy in which it developed, and every Social Democratic party has been absorbed into the global capitalist system. Europe’s only national scale attempt to democratize major business enterprises, the Meidner Plan in Sweden, was abandoned in 1992, just as economic globalization threw Social Democratic parties on the defensive. Since then the historic Social Democratic commitment to economic democracy has been put aside. But economic democracy is precisely what the American surge for democratic socialism is demanding, in this case on elementary issues: universal health care, a $15 minimum wage, higher taxes on high incomes, expanding the cooperative sector, and turning the big banks into public utilities. Here, the European experience is instructive. Charles Fourier, in France, and Robert Owen, in England, propounded the original idea of socialism in the 1820s. It was to achieve the unrealized demands of the French Revolution, which never reached the working class. Instead of pitting workers against each other, a cooperative mode of production and exchange would allow them to work for each other. Socialism was about organizing society as a cooperative community. Soon there were many kinds of socialism conceived by Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Georgi Plekhanov, William Morris, Karl Kautsky, Sidney Webb, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and G. D. H. Cole. The founders blamed capitalism for all of society’s ills, but religious socialists did not, so there were Christian and Jewish versions of socialism. Every kind of socialism retains the original idea of organizing society as a cooperative community, yet there is no core that unites the many schools of socialism or democratic socialism, and democracy is as complex and variable as socialism. I believe that the best candidate for an essential “something” in democratic socialism is the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community. This ethical impulse retains the original socialist idea in multiple forms, inspiring struggles for freedom, equality, recognition, and democratic commonwealth. Democratic socialism, though linked historically to revisionism, is not another name for it. “Revisionism” names the periodic necessity of adjusting the socialist idea to real‐world circumstances. Eduard Bernstein, the quintessential revisionist, rocked the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1898–1899 by contending that Marx got many things wrong and the party’s Marxist ideology was less credible and democratic than its reformist practices. In Sweden, a similar watershed occurred in 1928 under Per Albin Hansson, who committed the Social Democratic Party to the Bernstein approach and built a political powerhouse. In Britain, the parallel benchmark came in 1955 when Hugh Gaitskell’s revisionist faction won control of the Labour Party, seeking to replace Fabian Collectivism with pluralistic economic democracy.1 Each of these revisionist episodes was a creative response to a stagnant orthodoxy and a blow to the conviction that “socialism” names something definite and credible. The British experience is especially relevant to the U.S. context because Britain has...

Проблема насилля у філософських розвідках другої половини хх століття

The article explores scientific explorations of the problem of violence in the subject field of social philosophy. It was determined that the basic theories for them were the theories of violence (Karl Kautsky, Ludwig Gumplowicz, Eugene During), theories of revolutionary violence (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky), criticism of violence (Georges Sorel, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin). The research actualizes the need to apply an interdisciplinary approach to the study of this social phenomenon using the results of scientific research in the fields of philosophy of law, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, political and psychological sciences. Analysis of the philosophical works of this period allowed us to show the following trends. Franz Fanon suggested that violence is seen as a value for the oppressed, as a path to freedom, and therefore a cause for pride. The colonized masses intuitively feel that their liberation is realized only by force, recognizing that violence alone is an effective mean of confronting a more powerful economic and military rival. Giorgio Agamben distinguishes sovereign violence, which is realized in a state of emergency and is no longer treated as natural, it is simultaneously sacralized and desacralized. Jacques Derrida has identified two types of violence that are in a state of mutual rivalry: violence as a historical solution that appears outlawed by law and the state but does not contain decisive knowledge; and violence as decisive knowledge and a certainty of reality that is incapable of decision. Hans Magnus Enzensberger has identified a trend toward violence that is characterized by a lack of ideological motivation and a blurring of the object of the target. Philosopher Lars Svendsen views violence in ethical and political context as a manifestation of evil, as a condition of a democratic society self-preservation. Karl Schlogel showed that outbreaks of violence occurred first and foremost in societies lacking political elites that lost control of the reorganization of the public and the state as a whole, and a readiness for violence replaces fear of civil war. Wolfgang Sofsky argues that violence in various forms has existed throughout human history, it has become a kind of anthropological constant of human existence, violence and culture are interdependent. Slavoj Zizek emphasizes that the individual's assessment of the act of violence is based on the expected standard of normal non-violent situation. In the phenomenology of violence by Michael Staudigl violence is understood as a relational phenomenon.

A forgotten economic work by Rosa Luxemburg

The recent and very useful edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s economic works compiled by Peter Hudis ( The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg) left out one essay: her review of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, edited by Karl Kautsky in 1905. While book reviews are nowadays a minor genre usually limited to a short length, that was not the case when Luxemburg wrote her essay: her review – published in Vorwärts, the daily of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), just before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905 – was extensive and dealt with a variety of theoretical and political issues. We offer the first critical edition in English of this work, setting it against the background of Rosa Luxemburg’s previous works and of the revisionist controversy within the SPD and the Second International, as well as contextualizing it within the framework of contemporary polemics with bourgeois economics, particularly with the German historical school and with marginalism. We also offer a comparison between the methodological issues raised by Luxemburg in her review and those raised by Rudolf Hilferding in his review of the third and last volume of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, published in 1911. We close with a brief assessment of the place of Luxemburg’s essay in the later development of her economic thought, concluding with The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913.

A socialist republican theory of freedom and government

In response to the republican revival of the ideal of freedom as non-domination, a number of ‘radical’, ‘labour’ and ‘workplace’ republicans have criticised the limitations of Philip Pettit’s account of freedom and government. This article proposes that the missing link in these debates is the relationship between republicanism and socialism. Seeking to bring this connection back into view in historical and theoretical terms, the article draws from contemporary radical republicans and the writings of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg to propose a socialist republican theory of freedom and government. This consists of a conception of freedom as collective autonomy and a participatory democratic vision of a decentralised state with parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, worker-controlled workplaces, community-directed investment and a political culture of solidarity and public-spiritedness. This theory of socialist republicanism seeks to overcome the weaknesses and limitations of each respective independent theory and should appeal to republicans and socialists alike.

Questions of War and Peace in the Theoretical Views of Karl Kautsky

The views on the problem of war and peace of one of the leading theorists of the Social Democratic movement Karl Kautsky is discussed in the article. The evolution of his views on the issues of the origin of wars, their types, methods of achieving peace, models of political power and the creation of global international systems is traced. A comparative analysis of the views of K. Kautsky with the views of representatives of other directions in Marxist ideology, its influence on the theoretical views of modern scholars is carried out. It covers the period from the beginning of the 20th century to the completion of the formation of the Versailles-Washington system of international relations, designed to consolidate the new world order, as well as the beginning of its collapse. The novelty of the study is that the social democratic concept of war and peace and K. Kautsky’s theoretical views on this problem have not been sufficiently studied in modern Russian historiography. The author concludes that the concept of K. Kautsky, as well as the socialist theory as a whole, based on an understanding of the essence of war, laid down in the writings of the founders of Marxism, and close to a realistic school, have evolved in matters of peace and the post-war world order to liberalism. At the same time, K. Kautsky made a significant contribution to the theory of international relations, and his concept became the basis not only for neo-Marxism, but also enriched with some conclusions the theory of political realism and liberalism, as well as modern science as a whole.

“Marxism” versus Hegelianism-Engelsism-Stalinism

Dialectical materialism, which became the standard designation of the “official theory” of state-based Marxism, has almost nothing to do with Karl Marx's materialist conception of history. It is contentious to suggest that there is an “authentic” or “good” Marx underneath all of the false readings and applications—that “the man” Marx wrote texts that were emancipatory, and that “bad readers,” beginning with Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky, transformed the theory into something totalitarian—but it should not be. There is a growing movement that sees the work of Engels as the true theoretical basis of “Marxism,”1 and key Marxists themselves all but…