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.
Kautsky was symbolic for the miserable collapse of the European Left into nationalism and class collaboration. Lenin didn't turn him into a devil, he didn't need to when you look at Kautsky's attitude after 1914. There's a reason the guy went from being considered the highest authority on Marxism to irrelevant old socdem figure who died in obscurity as fascism gripped Europe
>Kautsky wrote that the positive side of the conflict, namely that it was a ‘war against the Russian Tsar’, was contradicted by the negative side, that it was a war ‘also against the democracies of England and France’. Whatever these contradictions, however, in practice he spoke of the ‘necessity of defending one’s own homeland’, while nevertheless noting that this task created a ‘fatal dilemma’ between national loyalty and ‘international solidarity’ (…) Cancelling any force to what he had called the ‘dilemma’ between national defence and internationalist solidarity, he wrote in September 1914 that in reality there was no contradiction between the two terms. Indeed, the German Social Democrats and French Socialists, ‘without the slightest enmity towards their brothers across the border’, had each voted for war credits in order to provide the means for the defence of their respective nations. Shortly thereafter he wrote that once the war had actually begun only one question remained: ‘victory or defeat?’ The possibility of working for ‘the defeat of one’s own land’, he said, should be ruled out completely. The main problem was to ensure that defence was understood in terms of the democratic principles of the ‘independence and territorial integrity of the nation’. Since the war was an accomplished fact, the various socialist parties should prepare a ‘democratic peace’, making sure that their own respective governments would not practice an imperialist and annexationist policy. Kautsky therefore recommended not Germany’s ‘isolation’ but its ‘concord’ with the other world powers
>Kautsky strove above all to combat any talk of the ‘failure’ of the Second International. In a polemic against Mehring, who had declared that the ‘collapse’ of the International was a ‘devastating fact’ of reality, Kautsky maintained that on the contrary ‘unity around principles’ remained; there was merely ‘a diversity of conceptions’, which could and should end as soon as the ‘transitory situation that had generated it’ ended. Indeed, he continued, in an essay entitled Die Internationalität und der Krieg expressly devoted to defending the thesis that the International was not bankrupt, the facts demonstrated the correctness of its analyses. ‘The outbreak of the war’, he wrote, ‘signifies not the bankruptcy but on the contrary the confirmation of our theoretical conceptions.… We have no regrets, nothing to revise. We feel decisively strengthened in the conceptions we upheld prior to the war’. Kautsky argued that those who spoke of bankruptcy had expected something of the International it never could have produced. ‘There are people’ he said, referring to Luxemburg, Mehring, and Liebknecht, ‘who claim that the International is bankrupt, since it did not succeed in preventing the war’ – but in doing so, they ‘demand from the International something that has never been seen in world history: that a party which is still too weak to conquer political power and determine the policies of states should be strong enough to prevent the inevitable consequences of these policies under all conditions. (…) What had disappeared was the expectation of ‘a common position of the entire socialist proletariat’; what the war had provoked was the division of socialists into ‘different camps’. The International, Kautsky concluded, ‘is unable to prevent’ this division. Hence his assessment of the International as an instrument operative essentially during time of peace: ‘it is not an effective instrument in war, but is essentially an instrument of peace’; ‘it can bring its full force to bear only in peace-time’, and in war can act only ‘to reconquer peace’. Hence also the fact that ‘the victory of the nation in war never constitutes an end in itself but only a means by which to achieve a lasting peace’. Thus, the task of each party during the war was to ‘struggle for peace’
>Luxemburg issued a stinging and contemptuous reply to Kautsky, whom she called the ‘theoretician of the swamp’: ‘The world-historical call of the Communist Manifesto needs an essential amendment and now, after the Kautskyist correction, reads like this: workers of all countries, unite in time of peace and cut one another’s throats in time of war!’ According to Luxemburg, Kautsky’s theory that the International was essentially an instrument of peace and ‘not an effective instrument in war-time’ would inaugurate ‘a wholly new “revision” of historical materialism, compared to which all the past attempts of a Bernstein appear as innocent child’s play’, a revision that would culminate in petty-bourgeois utopianism. Instead, it was necessary to demand the reconstruction of the International on the basis of a militantly anti-imperialist programme, so that it would struggle against the present war from the revolutionary standpoint of the proletariat (Source: Karl Kautsky and The Socialist Revolution, Massimo Salvadori)
And many such cases. His dubious, timid positions turned him into a feeble, sad old fart who had given up the revolutionary struggle. But you should read him, he was always considered a good writer. Iirc his works were still being published in the USSR even by Stalin's time.
As Trotsky explained in his obituary for Kautsky:
>As for Marxism, Kautsky, from the beginning of the war, behaved incontestably like a renegade. But as for himself, he was only half a renegade from his past, so to speak: when the problems of the class struggle were posed in all their acuteness, Kautsky found himself constrained to draw the final conclusions of his organic opportunism. Kautsky undoubtedly leaves behind numerous works of value in the field of Marxian theory, which he applied successfully in the most variegated domains. His analytical thought was distinguished by an exceptional force. But it was not the universal creative intelligence of Marx, of Engels, or of Lenin: all his life Kautsky was, at bottom, a talented commentator. His character, like his thought, lacked audacity and sweep, without which revolutionary politics is impossible. From the very first cannon-shot, he occupied an ill-defined pacifist position; then he became one of the leaders of the Independent Social Democratic Party which tried to create a Two-and-one-Half International; then, with the debris of the Independent Party he returned under the wing of the Social Democracy. Kautsky understood nothing of the October Revolution, showed the petty-bourgeois savant’s fright before it, and devoted to it not a few works imbued with a spirit of fierce hostility. His works in the last quarter of a century are characterized by a complete theoretical and political decline. The foundering of the German and Austrian Social Democracy was also the foundering of all the reformist conceptions of Kautsky. To be sure, he still continued to affirm to the last that he had hopes of a “better future,” of a “regeneration” of democracy, etc.; this passive optimism was only the inertia of a laborious and in its way honest long life, but it contained no independent perspective. We remember Kautsky as our former teacher to whom we once owed a good deal, but who separated himself from the proletarian revolution and from whom, consequently, we had to separate ourselves.
>>2558632Only correct take here. Lenin was an enjoyer of the SPD Erfurt programme, wanted to emulate in Russia. He got pissed in 1917 because Kautsky et al. failed to uphold the ideas of the programme. That's why they are
renegades (a person who deserts and betrays an organization, country, or set of principles.)
>>2558485From this stems the present importance of the theory
which Kautsky develops in a particularly coherent form in
his pamphlet and which constituted the very fabric of his
thought throughout his life. Lenin took up this theory and
developed it as early as 1900 in "The Immediate
Objectives of our Organisation" and then in "What Is To
Be Done?" in 1902, in which moreover he quotes Kautsky
at length and with great praise. In 1913 Lenin again took
up these ideas in “The Three Sources and the Three
Component Parts of Marxism" in which he develops the
same themes and sometimes uses Kautsky's text word
for word.
These ideas rest on a scanty and superficial historical
analysis of the relationships of Marx and Engels, to the
intellectuals of their time as much as to the working class
movement. They can be summarised in a few words, and
a couple of quotations will be enough to reveal their
substance: "A working class movement that is
spontaneous and bereft of any theory rising in the
labouring classes against ascendant capitalism, is
incapable of accomplishing revolutionary work."
It is also necessary to bring about what Kautsky calls the
union of the working class movement and socialism.
Now: "Socialist consciousness today (?!) can only arise on
the basis of deep scientific knowledge (…) But the bearer
of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois
intellectuals; (…) so then socialist consciousness is
something brought into the class struggle of the
proletariat from outside and not something that arises
spontaneously within it." These words of Kautsky's are
according to Lenin "profoundly true."
https://files.libcom.org/files/Gilles%20Dauv%C3%A9-%20The%20Renegade%20Kautsky%20and%20his%20Disciple%20Lenin.pdf >>2558779>900 pageswhat the actual fuck
>>2562481The actual rediscovery is some 500 pgs, then there's a reprint of WITBD