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Karl Kautsky (1854–1938)

Autor(a) de Foundations of Christianity

90+ Works 475 Membros 14 Críticas 1 Favorited

About the Author

Inclui os nomes: Karl Kautsky, Karl Kautsky

Image credit: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress)

Séries

Obras por Karl Kautsky

Foundations of Christianity (1921) 79 exemplares
The Class Struggle (1910) 46 exemplares
Thomas More and His Utopia (1947) 22 exemplares
The labour revolution (2011) 13 exemplares
The social revolution (1908) 11 exemplares
Are the Jews a Race? (1972) 11 exemplares
La cuestiòn agraria (1974) 5 exemplares
Bolshevism at a deadlock (1931) 5 exemplares
Vejen til magten (1978) 4 exemplares
La doctrina socialista (1970) 3 exemplares
LE CHEMIN DU POUVOIR 2 exemplares
La dictadura del proletariado (1976) 2 exemplares
Karl Marx' oekonomische Lehren (1980) 2 exemplares
Der Ursprung des Christentums (2011) 2 exemplares
Hoe de oorlog ontstond (2001) 2 exemplares
Luokkaharrastuksia 1 exemplar
Az út a hatalomhoz (1985) 1 exemplar
Le programme socialiste (2002) 1 exemplar
Sbornik stateĭ 1 exemplar
Dijalektika 1 exemplar
Teorie delle crisi 1 exemplar
Vägen till makt (1979) 1 exemplar

Associated Works

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome canónico
Kautsky, Karl
Nome legal
Kautsky, Karl Johann
Data de nascimento
1854-10-16
Data de falecimento
1938-10-17
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
Czechoslovakia
Local de nascimento
Prague, Czechoslovakia
Local de falecimento
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Nederland
Ocupações
philosopher
journalist
Marxist
Relações
Kautsky, Luise (spouse)
Luxemburg, Rosa (friend)

Membros

Críticas

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the first days of November 1917, socialists everywhere greeted the news with delight. But not Karl Kautsky, the German Social Democrat then widely known as the “Pope of Marxism”. Within a week of the Bolshevik “revolution” Kautsky was already writing up his criticisms of the new regime. By the following summer, he published these as a book, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which was a blistering attack on the new Soviet state. Lenin, for whom Kautsky was a mentor, was furious. He took a break from running that Soviet state to writing a book-length rebuttal to Kautsky in which he famously described his former teacher as a “renegade”. This book is Kautsky’s followup to the earlier one — but it is not in any way a direct answer to Lenin. This book got Trotsky to hastily write a reply, also called Terrorism and Communism, which the Red Army commander drafted while leading troops into battle from his armoured train.

I was frankly disappointed with this book. It is not Kautsky at his best. In some senses, it is Kautsky at his worst — pedantic, repetitive, and wandering. The first half of the book doesn’t even mention Russia and the Bolsheviks. Instead it is a ponderous history of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Kautsky is trying to draw out some general rules of revolution, but without much success. The remaining bits of the book reiterate arguments he made about the Bolsheviks in his earlier book. I imagine that Trotsky felt the need to reply not because of the power of Kautsky’s arguments, but because of who Kautsky was — the pre-eminent Marxist theoretician of his time.

One of the biggest surprises of this book is how amorphous Kautsky’s views really were at this time (1919). After criticising the Bolsheviks for a long list of sins, he concludes: “Whatever one may think of the Bolshevik methods, the fact that a proletarian government in a great state has not only come into power, but been able to maintain itself for nearly two years under the most difficult conditions conceivable, naturally increases the feeling of power among the proletariat of all countries. For the world-revolution therefore, in this respect, the Bolsheviks have rendered an enormous service …”

Strange words coming from a man who a year or two later would be comparing the Bolsheviks to Mussolini’s Fascists. Kautsky eventually convinced the Social Democratic and Labour parties in Euroope into supporting armed insurrections against the Soviet government — which he was still calling “proletarian” at this stage.

This edition fo the book is ill-served by its original translation. W.H. Kerridge, the translator, was a church organist and pianist for an opera company. He was also, apparently, a linguist, though it’s not clear if he had any background on the Left. It would be a good thing if someone would come along and do a new, better translation from the original German.
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Assinalado
ericlee | Jul 19, 2023 |
As the Second World War was coming to an end, anti-Stalinists on the Left found themselves facing a difficult problem. The Soviet Union had won a resounding victory against Nazi Germany. Stalin was widely perceived, especially in left and liberal circles, as an ally. Many expected the Soviet Union to open up a bit, to introduce some elements of democracy.

Communist Parties in many countries — including the USA — had grown enormously, and in some Western countries, including Italy and France, seemed to be on the cusp of power. The Rand School Press in New York City, linked to the American Socialist Party (which was then in deep decline), rushed to get this book into print to help thwart the Communists.

The eminent philosopher Sidney Hook wrote a long introduction. David Shub (author of a later excellent biography of Lenin) and Joseph Shaplen translated and edited the book. But it’s a very strange book — a collection of writings of Kautsky’s from his last years (1932-37), though none of the chapters cite sources. We don’t know when each chapter was written, what has been left out, or where the articles originally appeared. An attempt has been made to make this read like a coherent book, starting with essays on the origins of socialism and running right up to the rise of Nazism.

Kautsky was the original anti-Stalinist, having written critical letters and articles about the Bolshevik regime just days after Lenin’s seizure of power in 1917. He died in 1938. By 1945, his ideas about Communism had begun to take hold in Social Democratic and Labour parties; by 1952, with the re-foundation of the Socialist International in Frankfurt, its founding declaration was lifted almost word for word from Kautsky’s writings on the Soviet Union.

It is clear that much was not understood about what was happening in the Soviet Union at the time Kautsky wrote some of these essays. He noted the purges and show trials, but seemed to believe that they reflected growing unrest in the USSR, which was not the case. Similarly, he acknowledges the terror famines of the early 1930s which at least in the case of Ukraine were a form of genocide. He seems unaware of their full scale.

Kautsky’s didactic style, very much in the mode of German academia, was already dated by the 1930s. While books like Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia remain vivid indictments of Stalinism and are well-read today, Kautsky is largely forgotten. This collection, for example, has not been reprinted and can only be found in some libraries and used bookstores.

Nevertheless, it remains a useful book. The most surprising part was Kautsky’s use of what would now be called “alternate history” — a few pages of “what if” scenarios had the Bolsheviks decided in early 1918 to accept the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly and form a coalition government with the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Knowing what actually happened makes this painful reading.
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Assinalado
ericlee | 1 outra crítica | Jun 20, 2023 |
I am of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it hasn’t stood the test of time. Kautsky’s predictions from 1918 about what was going to happen next in Soviet Russia turned out to be wildly off the mark. To be fair, he could not have known about the new totalitarian society that was then being born. And yet it is strange that in a book so critical of Lenin and his party, there is no mention of the Red Terror, the creation of the feared Cheka or the labour camps that grew into the GULAG. Some of Kautsky’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks come, strangely, from the left — for example, he chastises them for encouraging peasants to seize the land and divvy it up among themselves, rather than turn it over to the state.

But on the other hand, when Kautsky wrote the book in the summer of 1918, just nine months after the Bolsheviks seized power, hardly any socialists outside of Russia had a bad thing to say about them. Even Rosa Luxemburg’s short book, though critical of the Bolsheviks, is extremely enthusiastic about their revolution. But in this book, Kautsky slowly, methodically explains the connection between socialism and democracy, completely rejecting dictatorship. He even does an effective job of explaining precisely what Karl Marx meant when he used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” on one or two occasions. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t mean banning socialist parties, shooting hostages, invading neighbouring countries and creating an entire economy based on slave labour.)

This edition of the book includes a long introduction by Kautsky’s grandson John, which is terrific — and not least because he quotes Max Shachtman, a personal favourite. John Kautsky calls his grandfather’s book “an important document in the history of Marxism and of the socialist movement and a milestone at the point of its path where communism and democratic socialism parted ways.” I would argue that it took another six years for that to happen, and that the suppression of the 1924 uprising in Georgia played a surprising role in that. But it was in this book that Kautsky first laid out the distinction between democracy and dictatorship that played such a critical role in the creation of the modern socialist movement.
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Assinalado
ericlee | Jul 14, 2022 |
Kautsky suggests that imperialism is primarily a relationship between industrial and agricultural countries, the former supplementing their normal trade profits by subjugating the latter. This work had a considerable influence on Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding. Lenin criticized this work because it did not regard imperialism as a necessary development of monopolistic capitalism. [1961]
 
Assinalado
GLArnold | Jul 15, 2020 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
90
Also by
3
Membros
475
Popularidade
#51,908
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
14
ISBN
103
Línguas
10
Marcado como favorito
1

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