Karl Kautsky (1854 - 1938)

Mon Oct 16, 1854

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Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician born on this day in 1854. Kautsky was one of the most authoritative proponents of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, including during the Second International.

Kautsky founded the important socialist journal “Neue Zeit”. Following the war, Kautsky was an outspoken critic of the Bolshevik Revolution, engaging in polemics with Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin on the nature of the Soviet state. Towards the end of his life, he became close friends with Rosa Luxemburg.

Of the USSR, he famously wrote “Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand before the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought occur to them what enslavement, what lowering of human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments.”

For his part, Lenin excoriated Kautsky’s interpretations of Marxist thought stating “Kautsky has beaten the world record in the liberal distortion of Marx.” (see Lenin’s essay “How Kautsky Turned Marx Into A Common Liberal”).

Kautsky is notable for, in addition to his anti-Bolshevik polemics, his editing and publication of Marx’s Capital, Volume IV (usually published as “Theories of Surplus Value”).