Karl Kautsky's Democratic Republicanism

introduction Karl Kautsky’s Democratic Republicanism

A Forgotten Legacy

Born in 1854 in Prague to a Czech father and a German mother, Kautsky became a member of Austrian social democracy as a student in Vienna in January 1875. He became a Marxist after reading Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring.1 As a keen disciple who was eager to learn, he went to visit Marx and Engels in London in 1881, discovering more about their work habits and theoretical study while striking up a close friendship with Engels, which would last until the latter’s death in 1895.2 In 1883, Kautsky set out on an ambitious path. Convinced that the workers’ movement needed to be rooted in the most advanced insights of Wissenschaft, of knowledge and theory, he founded his own newspaper, Die Neue Zeit. It was devoted to developing a Marxist analysis of an astounding range of topics and controversies, from alcohol to the Anabaptists, colonialism to Carthage, genetics to gender. Against the backdrop of the growing support for international socialism (apparent from the founding of the Socialist Second International – a federation of nationally based socialist and labour parties – in 18893 and the cessation of the German Empire’s Anti-Socialist Law in 1890), his magazine became a weekly, with a growing readership and influence. Through Kautsky’s connections to Marx’s literary testament via Engels, the magazine also published several Marxist classics for the first time, such as the ‘Rand- glossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei’ (known in English as The Critique of the Gotha Programme).4 Kautsky’s editorship of this magazine allowed him to gain a wider audience for his ideas and to shape the political strategy of the largest political party within Germany. Die Neue Zeit was studied and discussed far beyond the boundaries of the German Empire and exerted an international influence which belies the rather limited means of communication and transportation of the time. For Friedrich

1 Engels 1959. 2 Their correspondence can be found in Engels and Kautsky 1955. 3 The international organisation in which Kautsky was a leading actor is called the Second International because it was founded following the dissolution of the International Working- men’s Association (1864–76), which represented the first successful attempt to unite various working-class organisations on an international basis. 4 Marx 1891 [1875].

Adler, the Austrian socialist best known for his assassination of Count Karl von Stürgkh in 1916 in a protest against the Count’s enthusiastic support for World War I, Die Neue Zeit was ‘the thread which linked together the socialists of all countries’ and the ‘intellectual centre of German socialism and international Marxism’.5 Moira Donald notes how the publication also ‘played a multifaceted role during the formative period of Russian Marxism’, serving as a ‘platform for discussion of Russian affairs which the Russian Social Demo- cratic press could not itself provide during this period’.6 The French labour historian Georges Haupt has minutely detailed the reception of the publication, as well as of Kautsky’s work more generally, in the Balkans, while recent historical research has uncovered how Kautsky was a known name in countries such as Iran, with aspiring social democrats there asking him for his views on political and strategic matters.7 It was precisely through his ideas on these questions that Kautsky gained international significance. His breakthrough as a theoretician came in 1891, when he wrote the theoretical section of the party’s Erfurt Programme. The commentary he wrote on this programme8 is perhaps the most widely read and most influential Marxist text of the period.9 Kautsky never merely recycled and repeated the teachings of Marx and Engels. He was an original thinker in his own right, seeking to apply the meth- ods of his heroes to his own time. Occasionally,this involved updating their pro- gnoses on matters such as agricultural development, something which formed the basis of his 1899 The Agrarian Question.10 He also was the editor of what is generally seen as Volume IV of Marx’s Capital and the author of an impressive number of historical and theoretical works. Between 1883 and 1918, he wrote nearly forty books, about five hundred journal articles and well over three hun-

5 Cf. Benedikt Kautsky (ed.) 1954, p. 55. 6 Donald 1993, p. 5. 7 Haupt 1986, pp. 48–80. The Bremen-based historian Till-Schelz Brandenburg notes that Lenin’s study, which has been preserved through to today as a museum, boasts a complete collection of the journal (Schelz-Brandenburg n.d.); Cf., for example, Kautsky’s correspondence with a small group of social democrats from Tabriz in Chaqueri (ed.) 2010, pp. 123–8. The Kautsky archive in the Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam boasts a huge collection of such exchanges with thinkers from around the world. An overview of this repository is available online at: http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ ARCH00712/ArchiveContentList#1980. 8 Kautsky 1971 [1892]. 9 The astounding number of editions and translations of this work are listed in Werner Blumenberg’s book-length overview of Kautsky’s various writings. See Blumenberg 1960, pp. 47–8. 10 An English translation of this work is available: Kautsky 1988 [1899].