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Youve just published a book about Karl Kautsky. Im a historian of the socialist movement in Germany, and I can say that until recently, Kautsky was almost completely forgotten. He was remembered, if at all, as a target of polemics by Lenin and Trotsky. Yet there has been a minor Kautsky revival in the United States. The Kautsky debate began about five years ago with an article in Jacobin magazine. What do you think drew people to Kautsky around 201819, more or less a century after he betrayed socialism in the First World War?

The resurrection of Kautsky is a very interesting phenomenon. When Kautsky died in 1938, he had been largely disavowed by the revolutionary Left. Yet moderate leftists had no use for him either. After World War II, as social democracy abandoned socialism as even a long-term goal, they dispensed with Kautskys theoretical formulas. In fact, Kautskys reputation fell so far in the decades after his death that many people, as the joke went, thought his first name was Renegade, since they only knew him from Lenins pamphlet.

In a deeper sense, though, Kautsky never quite went away. Those who advocated a reformist or democratic socialism often returned to his ideas, even if credit to Kautsky went unacknowledged. For example, in the 1970s, a number of western European Communist Parties dropped their allegiance to Marxism-Leninism and the USSR, developing the ideas of Eurocommunism. Eurocommunists advocated a democratic road to socialism that bore a great deal of similarity to Kautskys ideas on parliament and the state. The Eurocommunists claimed not Kautsky but Antonio Gramsci as a source of inspiration for their reformism. This was mistaken, since Gramsci was a stalwart revolutionary who never advocated gradualism. The reason that Kautsky was not given credit is simple: for parties that were still nominally communist, Gramsci was a more acceptable figure than Kautsky. Basically, whenever anyone seeks a theoretical rationale for democratic socialism, Kautsky eventually comes up.

The United States represents an interesting example. In 2016, the Bernie Sanders campaign popularized all sorts of vague ideas about democratic socialism. At the same time, many debates surrounding Sanders were reflected in Jacobin magazine, which acted as an unofficial campaign organ. You also saw the growth of the moribund Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which went from roughly 5,000 members in 2016 to more than 25,000 by 2018, standing at roughly 78,000 today. Many of those joining DSA were politically new and trying to figure out what they meant by socialism.

For the more intellectual types in DSA and Jacobin, Kautsky appeared very attractive. While you can find people with similar politics to Kautsky in the ranks of Communist Parties, such as Earl Browder or Palmiro Togliatti, they are all tainted with the brush of Stalinism to one degree or another, and no one could accuse Kautsky of that. Thats the first point. Second, Kautsky has an impressive rsum as an orthodox Marxist, at least on paperfar more than DSAs founder, Michael Harrington, for example. Kautskys theoretical authority could be used in DSA to justify democratic socialist politics. Interestingly, the debates surrounding Kautsky are not only about him but also about using a Marxist veneer to justify supporting the Democratic Party and American imperialism.

I knew the basics of Kautskys life when I wrote that article. When I researched this book, I didnt discover anything earth shattering that changed my view of the man. But one thing that did surprise me was Kautskys awareness of the SPDs bureaucratization. He had seen from early on that the party apparatus was growing more bureaucratic and conservative. If you read some of his letters to Victor Adler, he could even be very perceptive about the SPDs accommodation with the German state.

But he really had no concrete strategy to deal with it. Kautsky never believed that the party would give up its revolutionary program. When he pondered if social democracy would end up going from an underground movement to new oppressors (like Christianity), he discounted the possibility out of hand. He thought that the growth of the party and expansion of the productive forces would prevent that. He embraced a sort of linear idiocya mechanical and evolutionary notion that history would just take care of things. Even after 1914, when it was clear that the SPD could no longer be characterized as revolutionary, Kautsky kept up the illusion until the end.

Kautsky viewed social revolution as objective and inevitable. In other words, socialists just needed to patiently wait for it rather than actively organize. He had no program for fighting the party bureaucracy that involved creating a faction or a party with its own revolutionary program. Opposing bureaucracy in theory without a material force to smash it just leads to capitulation. Rosa Luxemburg herself only realized that very late in her struggles with the SPD, whereas Kautsky never understood this necessity at all.

Its true that in 19056, during debates on the mass strike, Kautsky was at his most radical. He supported the mass strike and said that Germany was approaching Russian conditions. This debate found Kautsky allied with Luxemburg and opposed to more conservative figures in the party and the unions who recoiled from the mass strike.

For the revisionists, it may have looked like Kautsky was a revolutionary, but this was deceptive. Kautsky was always very talented at saying the right slogans even if his practice was found wanting. During these debates, the SPD passed several left-sounding resolutions favoring the mass strikebut with so many stipulations that they were made a dead letter. Kautsky briefly bemoaned this as a symptom of bureaucratization, but mostly took these resolutions as a genuine sign that the SPD was committed to mass strikes and revolution. So he did not become a full-blown revolutionary in 1905, and let himself be reassured by paper resolutions from the party apparatus.

This idea that we just need to vote harder for democratic socialists (or Democrats, in Blancs case), and that we can have socialism once we achieve 50 percent plus one, is not borne out by history. I think both Kautsky and Blanc make a fetish of elections and bourgeois democracy. For one, they overestimate the democratic character of bourgeois democracy and its toleration of socialist organizations. For example, the United States has a violent labor history of ruthlessly crushing strikes and unions. Leftist organizations have been the targets of repression in the Haymarket affair, multiple red scares, and Cointelpro. This is not even talking about the dozens of examples of the United States invading or using the CIA to stop even moderate social democracy abroad. Only someone who gets their view of the American government from a high school civics textbook could possibly think that this is a democratic country.

It is true that in normal times, there is generally not majority support in the working class for revolutionary alternatives. But there have been revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations in Germany 1919, Spain 1936, France 1968, Portugal 1974, and others. None of those instances led to a successful revolution for a variety of reasons, but we would be hard pressed to say revolutionary politics was marginal in those instances.

Lenins continuing relevance covers the whole gamut of revolutionary politics and strategy. Among his great insights are his understanding of the state and how to defeat it. One of Lenins great insights in State and Revolution is that the state is an instrument of class oppression that cannot be captured by the working class and instead must be smashed. This has been borne out by every revolution in history, whether the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution. It is not the ballot box but armed force that is required to break the back of the ruling class.

As a negative example, we can look at Salvador Allende and Chile in the 1970s to see what happens to those who attempt to reach socialism by voting for it. Allende was elected, but he was constrained by the rules of the existing state structure and did everything possible to appease the bourgeoisie. In 1973, the Chilean army showed how much respect it had for democratic niceties by overthrowing Allende in a bloody military coup. Ultimately, the advocates of the peaceful road to socialism kept the working class disarmed and thus ensured their defeat.

To begin, Lih has done some valuable work on Lenin. For one, he does challenge a great deal of anticommunist stereotypes that Lenin was some sort of elitist totalitarian. The Lenin that emerges from Lih is a Marxist who believes in the self-emancipation of the working class. Moreover, Lih correctly highlights Lenins debt to Kautsky. And if this was all Lih did, then there really wouldnt be any reason to object to his ideas.

However, Lih goes much further and states that there were few, if any, breaks in Lenins political ideas. This means that he sees Lenin as largely Kautskyian. As a result, the distinctiveness of Leninism is erased. So instead of reading Lenin, we could just return to Kautsky. Yet Lih cannot see how Lenin broke with Kautsky on a host of issues. For example, Lenins conception of the vanguard party may have used Kautskys formulations, but it developed a unique revolutionary practice, foreign to the SPDs parliamentarism. In the end, Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed in practice that they were revolutionaries, while Kautskyian social democracy was not.

In 1917, there were figures in the Bolshevik Party such as Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin who were associated with Kautskys stagism (in which democratic revolution is a prelude to socialist revolution). Lenins April Theses broke radically with Kautskyism by calling for soviet power and socialist revolution. In many respects, Lenin had come around to the essentials of the theory of permanent revolution championed by Trotsky. This was recognized as a break with Kautskyism by many social democrats such as Plekhanov and Bogdanovand they knew their Kautsky very well! So, far from Kautsky being the architect of the October Revolution, it was the reverse. If Lenin and the Bolsheviks had followed Kautsky, they would have gone down to certain defeat.

I honestly dont think it is possible, even if there is a will (and Im not convinced on that score), for deeply engrained reformism and class collaborationism to be suddenly transformed into class struggle and revolution. The simple fact of the matter is, if you spend years training someone to play basketball, you cant abruptly throw them in a baseball uniform and expect them to play well. I think all this neo-Kautskyian talk about a break is empty because there is no will to do so. If someone has no problem supporting Bernie Sanders, AOC, and other Democrats for the time being, then they are not revolutionary Marxists but servants of the class enemy. The break with the bourgeois parties by Marxists either happens now or it does not happen at all.

In todays debates, I think Kautsky serves as a role model for those advocating reformist socialism and support for the Democratic Party. In other words, Kautsky stands for a perspective diametrically opposed to anti-imperialism, internationalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism. Those championing Kautsky advocate a long game of working in bourgeois parties and parliaments before, somehow, voting their way to socialism. It will end in either co-option or defeat, but never in socialism. The Kautskyian perspective is one that should be forcefully rejected by every Marxist as fundamentally reformist, nationalist, and anticommunist.

If we are serious about the history of the Second International and Marxism, then it is important for radicals to read and understand Kautsky. It was not without reason that Kautsky was considered a major authority on socialism a century ago. I think reading his popularization of social democracy in the Erfurt Program is a worthwhile exercise. As a historian, I find many of Kautskys historical works, such as Democracy and Republicanism and The Foundations of Christianity, to be very valuable.

That said, Kautsky mostly serves as a negative example for communists today. Despite his rhetorical radicalism, Kautsky shrank from socialist revolution at the critical hour. His ideas of a democratic and parliamentary road did not show a peaceful and easier path to socialism. Rather, Kautskys ideas have been proven tragically wrong every time theyve been tried. They dont lead to socialism, but to catastrophe and defeat always and everywhere. Thats reason enough to reject Kautsky root and branch.

Instead, we should return to the revolutionary tradition of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky. Their work not only offers the most comprehensive criticism of Kautsky on all fronts but also possesses the necessary road map for victory. If we are serious about fighting capitalism, then it is necessary to return to revolutionary communism. Let us leave Kautsky dead and buried where he belongs.

Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegades Revenge (New York: Routledge, 2024), 224 pages, hardcover, $170, appearing June 6.

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