KAUTSKY, KARL. – German socialist, born in Prague on 16 October 1854, died in exile in Amsterdam on 17 October 1938. He was F. Engels’s secretary and, within German socialism, represented in a certain sense the continuity of the “classical tradition” of Marxism.
He was a determined opponent of the reformist and revisionist tendencies within German socialism, whose foremost exponent was Bernstein. The totalitarian methods employed by the Russian Bolsheviks nevertheless found in K. a very severe critic: Lenin even called him, in the final years of his life, a renegade, and dedicated to him a harsh polemical work. Among K.’s notable works are: Thomas More und seine Utopie (1887); Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm (1898); Die Diktatur des Proletariats (1918); Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (1927).
For a long time K. was called “the pontiff of socialism.” Yet he was a philosophically rather flat mind; his irony lacks subtlety and depth; in his Marxism one notices an accent that perhaps not unjustly has been called “professorial,” as well as a spiritual affinity with positivist positions. On the political plane, K., who in 1917 founded the “Independent Socialist Party,” is the exponent of a characteristic mixture of an essentially bourgeois temperament and schemas inspired by the class struggle as conceived by Marxism. In a certain sense he represents the typical position of a socialism oscillating between everyday practical compromise and outdated semi-revolutionary formulas, between humanitarian dreams bearing a democratic imprint and harsh dogmatic intransigence: a position dan-
gerous for any democracy that possesses a sense of reality and responsibility and, at the same time, one of clear inferiority when confronted with fanatical and consistent revolutionaries.