Karl Kautsky: Early Assumptions, Preconceptions, and Prejudices GARY P. STEENSON Washington, D. C., U.S.A. ABSTRACT Analysis of one of Karl Kautsky's earliest articles, "Der Kampf um's Dasein in der Menschenwelt" (1877a), reveals a relatively subtle and sophisticated understanding of biology and Darwinian theory, but also shows many of the problematical assumptions which colored Kautsky's early work. Even more importantly, this article makes it clear that far from disregar- ding the subjective element of human behavior, Kautsky made such behavior central to his efforts to link Darwinian thought to the workers' socialist movement. FROM 1875, WHEN AT THE AGE of twenty-one he published his first contributions to the socialist presses of Germany and Austria, until shortly before his death in 1938, Karl Kautsky was one of the most prolific and eclectic writers of the international socialist movement. He wrote about medieval England and Germany, ancient Greece, modern industry, philosophy, educa- tion, economics, history, modern society, imperialism, the natural and social sciences, contemporary affairs, party politics, Russia, France, the United States, anything, in fact, which struck his fancy and seemed important to him. For over half a century he devoted himself to advancing the cause of the workers' socialist movement and, more specifically, to the advancement of Marxism. Because of his close affiliation with the German Social Democratic Party and his responsibility for Die Neue Zeit, the leading intellectual journal of socialism and Marxism from its founding in 1883 until the outbreak of the First World War, Kautsky was, after Engels, the most important Marxian theorist in the world for the thirty years from the death of Marx to the war. Critics have long pointed out that Kautsky was attracted to and influenced by Darwinian thought, and in fact, as recently as 1986, one writer contended of Kautsky that "his one original contribution to orthodoxy consists of grafting Darwin's theory of evolution onto Marxism." (Dorman 1986, p. 158). The origins of this view are quite obvious since Kautsky himself frequently asserted the influence of Darwin upon his own thought. He once recalled in a memoir that while still in the university, he accepted Darwin with enthusiasm and wanted his own "historical theory to be nothing other than the application of Darwinism to societal development." (Kautsky 1954). Furthermore, in 1927, late in his career as a socialist thinker, Kautsky published a work entitled Die 34 materialistische Geschichtsauffassung to which he appended work done much earlier in his life-some pieces were among the earliest work he ever did-and which he called "the quintessence of my life's work." (Kautsky 1927, p. vii). This study not only directly tied his earliest theoretical writings to his mature views, but also reasserted the close connection with Darwin's thought. Among the most prominent of the many critics to claim that the influence of Darwin on Kautsky had a direct impact on his political writings was Karl Korsch, who in 1929 called Kautsky a cryptorevisionist who substituted evolution for the dialectic and thus eliminated the subjective, active element of Marx's theory to focus on "objective, historical evolution in nature and history." (Korsch 1929). However, more perceptive analysts, especially Hans-Josef Steinberg (1967) and others following his lead (Hunlich 1981, p. 28; Gasman 1971, pp. 123-24 n. 12),1 have long recognized that such a characterization is too glib and imprecise. Certainly Kautsky was influenced by Darwin, but his political writings, especially his discussion of tactics to be pursued by socialist-workers' parties, never particularly reflected any special evolutionary or fatalistic qual- ity. Furthermore, on several occasions during his long career as a Marxian theorist, Kautsky took pains to deny specifically that the Darwinian paradigm of natural development applied to human societies without major adjustments.2 The discussion which follows looks carefully at what was perhaps the first such case, a very early article by Kautsky in which he rejected the idea that humans are controlled by the same non-conscious forces that other organic forms are and in which he also revealed many of the assumptions and pre- judices that shaped his later writings. By October of 1876, just two weeks short of his twenty-second birthday, Karl Kautsky was already serving as the Austrian correspondent for the official organ of the German socialist party, the horzvarts, published in Leipzig. Kaut- sky had recently abandoned his university studies, and though by then he had pretty much committed himself to the cause of workers' socialism, he still had not secured a career that would provide an income and give him the time to develop his interest in socialist theory. As his reports to the Vorwdrts make clear, he had little hope that the Austrian movement would soon afford him the opportunity of being a professional socialist. His first contribution opened with the observation that "there is nothing more inconceivable than to be the correspondent from Austria for a social-democratic paper," because Austria 3 had virtually no movement to speak of.3 Kautsky was somewhat different from many of his fellow members of the Austrian movement in the extent to which he was concerned with the abstract theoretical underpinnings of socialism rather than with organization or political activity. He was especially fascinated by the natural scientific rage of the time-Darwin, above all, but many other writers who are now less well- known, such as Ernst Haeckel and Ludwig Buchner, made early impressions on him-and sought to add to socialism some of the cachet conferred at the time by being scientific. These were concerns which could not be well sup- .