Karl Kautsky - Haven't read any of his works and probably never will, Lenin speaks of him in such vitriol and venom it's like he's everything wrong with the socialist movement. But Lenin was also a hothead, One-sided and his character really shows in his writings.
Was he really as bad as Lenin makes him out to be? Very curious to hear the other side.
Well he basically formed SPD ideology and it really depends on how much you hate them.
You can think him as being the proto-mamdani type, or "centrist", he was basically a reformist, he opposed both Lenin and the war.
Kautsky was a "moderate" back then, but nowadays he would be considered "far-left" by most of leftypol so take that as you will
Leninists single out party leaders like Kautsky to deflect blame from the broader working class, even though the majority of workers supported the center-left and weren't communist.
For example Kautsky disagreed with WWI and abstained from voting for it, while the majority of the SPD voted in favor of war credits. He merely followed DemCent and refused to criticize or split the party. But to hear it from your average Trotskyist he's the sole reason the SPD went socdem
>>2558485Lenin was a kautskyite that didn't sell out.
>>2558590That's a good point. Parties reflect their social base to a considerable extent. There are left-wing groups that adapted to the student movement in the late 1960s. The CPUSA adapts to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. It's through a social interaction with a broader milieu that parties formulate strategy and tactics. When the party's social base is progressive like the Bolsheviks in 1917, the results are impressive. For the Second International that was the trade union bureaucracy which was not so much in 1914.