Paul Blackledge
Introduction
After an inauspicious early encounter with Marx, when the older man described his young epigone as a pedant,[2] Karl Kautsky’s reputation as a Marxist theoretician rose to a peak in the first decade of the last century, only to endure a dramatic reversal in the years after the outbreak of the First World War. Typically, most of Kautsky’s modern interlocutors totally dismiss his understanding of historical materialism as a crude, indeed Darwinian, form of economic reductionism, which informed his equally mechanical interpretation of socialist politics.[3] In contrast to this reading of Kautsky’s interpretation of historical materialism, I argue that his theory of history evolved from a more to a less sophisticated type; and, in the early years of the twentieth century, he contributed to the complex and sophisticated flowering of Marxist thought that is usually associated with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky.
Despite Marx’s misgivings about this young ‘mediocrity’, Kautsky’s early theoretical renown was placed on a sure footing when, in 1883, he launched and edited Neue Zeit, the Second International’s most important journal of socialist theory. When, subsequently, first, Engels set him to work editing Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value in 1888, and then, after Engels’ death, he was named as the editor of Marx’s literary estate, his pre-eminence amongst Marxist intellectuals was assured (Steenson 1991, 101). Moreover, it was from this position that he firmly stamped his imprint on the international socialist movement in 1891, when he co-authored the German Social Democratic Party’s Erfurt Programme. In fact, so influential were Kautsky’s ideas in the two decades between Engels’ death and the outbreak of the First World War that he became, according to Steenson, ‘the most important theorist of Marxism in the world’, who ‘did more to popularise Marxism in western Europe than any other intellectual’ (Steenson 1991, 3). Indeed, such was Kautsky’s status during this period that when one wiseacre described him the ‘Pope of Marxism’ the label stuck.
Nevertheless, Lenin’s polemical assaults upon Kautsky in the wake of, first, his support for the German Social Democratic Party’s vote for war credits in 1914, second, his opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and third, his opposition to the post-war revolutionary movement in Germany, ensured that, within revolutionary circles at least, he was forever associated with the epitaph ‘renegade’ (Lenin 1918). Unfortunately for Kautsky, his break with the revolutionary left did little to endear him to the reformist right. For, in this period of heightened political polarisation, his ‘centrist’ politics were almost as abhorrent to the leadership of the SPD as they were to Lenin. So while Lenin denounced Kautsky’s support for the vote for war credits, his reformist critics could not countenance his support for the wartime slogan of ‘peace without annexations’ (Salvadori 1979, 183). Thus, in 1917, it was the right-wing of the SPD who removed him from his position as editor of Neue Zeit; a move which heralded his journey into the political wilderness. Indeed, after a moment of notoriety in the post-war period, when he polemically engaged with Lenin and Trotsky, Kautsky slowly drifted out of politics, such that, by 1924, he had left both Germany and active politics forever.
Kautsky’s movement away from the centre stage of Marxist politics coincided with his attempt to justify in theory his rejection of the Bolshevik Revolution. To this end, in his magnum opus The Materialist Conception of History (1927), he repeated and defended Marx’s claim, made in the preface to Capital, that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Kautsky 1927, 418). According to this schema, Russia was not ripe for revolution in 1917, because she had not yet passed through the necessary historical stage of unfettered capitalist development. So, from a position of apparent orthodoxy, Kautsky mounted a ‘Marxist’ critique of the October Revolution. Interestingly, while Kautsky’s name is usually linked to crude economic determinist formulations such as this, his most sophisticated historical analyses were made as an explicit criticism of a similarly mechanical model of historical evolution. Thus, at the very least, Kautsky was not always a Kautskyite as this term is normally understood. And to downplay, as does Steenson, the break in Kautsky’s interpretation of historical materialism which grew out of his clash with Rosa Luxemburg from around 1910 and was deepened by his experience of war and revolution thereafter, is as potentially misleading as is the suggestion that there was little continuity between his earlier and later interpretations of Marxism (Steenson 1991, 6; cf Blackledge 2004, 227-8).
Unfortunately, the change in Kautsky’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of history is often elided over by his interlocutors, who have been much keener to analyse his political arguments than they have been to examine the contribution he made to historical materialism in the early years of the twentieth century.[4] Nevertheless, despite the widespread dismissal of Kautsky’s historiography, in recent years a number of Marxists have produced works informed by his historical studies (Harman 1999, 687; Lowy 1996, 10-11; Siegal 1986, 55-69). More generally, Alan Shandro has suggested that a close reading of Kautsky’s works of historical scholarship would subvert some of the traditional assumptions about his thought.[5] In this essay I develop Shandro’s argument, whilst simultaneously demarcating its parameters of applicability. I argue, first, contra the dominant interpretation of Kautskyism, that Kautsky’s early historiography was much more powerful than the typically applied labels ‘fatalism’ or ‘vulgar evolutionism’ would imply; while, second, contra Shandro, I note that that some elements of historical fatalism did coexist alongside an activist conception of socialist political practice within Kautsky’s Marxism. Finally, I suggest that this tension was typical of all Second International Marxists in the years running up to the First World War, but where Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg responded to war and revolution by expunging the last vestiges of political fatalism from their understandings of historical materialism, Kautsky responded to these events by retreating into a form of mechanical materialism.
Kautsky’s Conception of Social History
While Kautsky’s Marxism thus took a more mechanical turn after 1910, it is not true that he ever embraced a Darwinian model of social evolution. Indeed, while many of Kautsky’s critics have interpreted his claim that he came to Marxism via Darwinism (Kautsky 1927, 6; Salvadori 1979, 23) as evidence of his crude evolutionism (Stack 2003, 80), this suggestion cannot withstand even a cursory reading of his work. For as early as 1885, he concluded that Darwin’s system could not be equated with Marx’s, and in The Materialist Conception of History he explicitly described his evolutionary social theory as ‘materialist neo-Lamarckianism’ (Steenson 1991, 5; Kelly 1981, 125; Kautsky 1927, xxxiii). In fact, Kautsky maintained that natural and social evolutionary processes were incommensurable: ‘with man … there begins a new kind of evolution’. Indeed, he premised his interpretation of historical materialism upon the fact that social evolution, in a way that was foreclosed to natural evolution, involves the operation of conscious human will (Kautsky 1927, 522-23). And on the basis of an earlier articulation of this truism, he replied to those who criticised Marxism as a theory of ‘“blindly governing” “automatic” economic development’, by insisting that they had failed to understand the importance of ‘human will’ in historical materialism (Kautsky 1909, 21).
Nevertheless, in both The Materialist Conception of History (1927) and The Road to Power (1909) Kautsky incoherently combined a defence of the role of human agency in history with a more fatalistic argument regarding the inevitability of social progress. Thus, in 1927 he argued that ‘the advance and progress of the proletariat in capitalist society is irresistible … It is inevitable that the process of economic development in the direction of socialism … will end with the abolition of all classes’ (Kautsky 1927, 410-411; lxix).[6] Similarly, in 1909 he insisted that socialist revolutions are ‘irresistible because it is inevitable that the growing proletariat will defend itself against capitalist exploitation’ (Kautsky 1909, 2). Given these arguments it is difficult to agree fully with Shandro’s rejection of the claim that Kautskyism involved an element of fatalism. However, a reading of Kautsky’s defence of free will in history militates against us entirely accepting Rees’ dismissal of Kautsky’s interpretation of Marxism as a form of ‘fatalism’ (Rees 1998, 138). In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, Kautsky embraced a fatalistic model of class and party formation, and combined this with a more active, if mechanical, interpretation of the introduction of socialist consciousness from the party into the working class (Blackledge 2004, 223).
Similarly, Shandro and Weikart have argued that those of Kautsky’s critics who have stressed the supposed determinism and fatalism of his interpretation of Marxism, in effect obscure more fundamental flaws in his political theory. So, while Weikart suggests that Kautsky’s ‘determinist’ interpretation of historical materialism may have ‘dampened his revolutionary élan’, he also insists that this process ‘should not be overstated’ (Weikart 1998, 182). More systematically, Shandro suggests that not only did Kautsky reject the claim that socialism would evolve, mechanically, out of the exhaustion of capitalism, but also that Kautsky defended a form of parliamentary socialist political practice. This political project was premised, first, as Shandro argues, upon an ‘abstractly universalistic theorisation of working-class unity’, and second, as other commentators have noted, upon a rejection of Marx’s theory of the state (Shandro 1997-8, 491; 474; Timpanaro 1975, 120). Socialist intellectuals were, on the basis of this model, enjoined, in Kautsky’s words, to maintain ‘the unity of the proletarian movement’ (Shandro 1997-8, 488). However, this position did not imply, according to Shandro, that Kautsky embraced a simple ahistorical narrative of socialist intellectuals introducing a disembodied ideology into the workers’ consciousness from without. Rather, Kautsky understood socialist ideology to be itself a product of the historical struggles of the proletariat and other oppressed groups for freedom. Shandro therefore suggests that ‘while Kautsky situates socialist consciousness in relation to the theory of scientific socialism, he does not thereby cast it in terms of an ahistorical polarisation of intellectuals and workers, but instead invokes the historical development of the theory in the very concept of socialist consciousness’ (Shandro 1997-8, 485). Shandro’s argument is informed by his reading of Kautsky’s histories of early Christianity and Reformation communism: Thomas More and His Utopia, Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation, and Foundations of Christianity. In effect, Shandro, through reference to Kautsky’s own attempts to historicise his political and sociological arguments, insists that Kautsky’s Marxism is much more sophisticated, and much more democratic, than his critics would have us believe.
Although this re-evaluation of Kautsky’s contribution to historical materialism is to be welcomed, Shandro’s use of these texts it is largely illustrative. In fact, a closer reading of Kautsky’s historical studies shows them to be more sophisticated than even Shandro allows. Thus, where Kautsky’s histories of Christianity and Reformation communism explode the myth that he embraced a simple model of historical progress, his attempts to historically situate the American and Russian social formations at the beginning of the twentieth century show that he rejected a unilinear model of human history. However, despite the power of these historical studies, Kautsky built his model of proletarian unity upon a model of historical process that suffered from a form of fatalism. So, while Shandro is right to reject crude dismissals of Kautsky’s fatalism, he has perhaps ‘bent the stick’ too far in Kautsky’s favour to grasp a complete picture of his failings. For, as I argue below, Kautsky’s fatalistic model of class construction robbed his otherwise powerful comparative models of American and Russian class formation of their full explanatory potential: a potential that was only realised in the works of Lenin and Trotsky.
Kautsky’s Histories of Christianity in the First and Sixteenth Centuries
In sharp contrast to those analysts who would paint him as one of Marx’s more orthodox and uninteresting epigones, Kautsky argued that Marxists could not be content with mere mimicry of their master’s voice: as Donald points out, he ‘warned against the practice of invoking Marx’s authority’, and insisted that ‘it would be quite un-Marxist to close one’s eyes to facts and persevere with the old Marxist viewpoint’ (Donald 1993, 83-4). Indeed, so flexible was Kautsky’s interpretation of historical materialism, that in 1905 he was at the forefront of the movement to rethink Marx’s theory of history in response to the Russian Revolution of that year; a project that grew out of his previous historical writings.
In the decade up to the Russian Revolution of 1905, Kautsky’s main historical aim, executed through the publication of a series of studies of radical movements in history, was to dispel the myth that communism was alien to human nature. Alongside his own analysis of radical ideas at the time of the Reformation, the first fruit of this project was Eduard Bernstein’s Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution: bizarrely translated into English in 1930 as Cromwell and Communism. In what Gay has called this ‘brilliant study’, Bernstein provided, in Christopher Hill’s opinion, the first ‘full treatment’ of Gerrard Winstanley after two centuries of neglect: a treatment that, according to Petegorsky, succeeded in ‘resurrecting’ his ideas (Gay 1962, 161; Hill 1973, 70; Petegorsky 1995, 121). Despite the fact that this book was first published in 1895,[7] it is not of mere antiquarian importance. Brailsford argued that Bernstein’s book was of the ‘first importance’, and Brian Manning defended Bernstein’s discussion of the class structure of the levellers in a book that was first published as late as 1999 (Brailsford 1983, 52; Manning 1999, 78). Manning was willing to make this claim because, while Bernstein utilised the Marxist concept of class in his analysis – the first edition was written before he became Europe’s leading revisionist – he refused to act as a mythical Second International Marxist was supposed to, by crudely deducing political affiliations from class locations (Bernstein 1895, 170). In fact, Bernstein’s goal was to show how, in the 1640s, splits between different sections of the ‘ruling class’ created the conditions through which ordinary people were thrust to the forefront of the ‘political stage’; and once they entered the spotlight these figures from below developed political programmes that prefigured both modern democracy and modern communism (Bernstein 1895, 281). So powerful were Bernstein’s arguments that not only did he receive praise for his scholarship from academic doyens such as S.R. Gardiner and C.H. Firth, but he also influenced Max Weber, and helped him with his researches towards the completion of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Gay 1962, 66; Weber 1976, 219).
Co-temporally with the publication of Bernstein’s book, Kautsky published The Forerunners of Socialism (1895). It was in this book that he first signalled his independent frame of mind. He opened this book, through which he aimed to trace the history of the idea of Communism over the last two millennia, and which has only been partially translated into English as Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation (1897), with a discussion of the history of early Christianity. Where Engels had argued, in his essay ‘On the History of Early Christianity’, that ‘Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome’; Kautsky countered that Christianity had in fact been constituted, in its earliest days, as a movement of ancient proletarians: slaves had only made up a small minority of these communities. Commenting on Kautsky’s book, Engels wrote that it ‘gets better the further one reads’; suggesting that the analysis of Christianity was its weakest aspect (Engels 1894; Kyrtatas 1987, 6-9). Nevertheless, despite this rebuke, Kautsky developed his original critical engagement with Engels’ ideas in a substantial study of the early Christian Church, Foundations of Christianity, published in 1908. While his analysis of early Christianity has been superseded by later research, his remarks on the Marxist method in this book show that he held a far from crude evolutionary theory of history.
Kautsky opened Foundations of Christianity with the argument that academic analyses of past movements of the oppressed were severely compromised by the contemplative and ‘objective’ approach favoured by most historians. In contrast to this method, Kautsky, exploding the myth that he embraced a form of political fatalism, followed Rousseau in affirming that the type of social activity that we practice will inform our interpretations of the past: ‘We see others’ actions’, wrote Rousseau in Julie, ‘only to the extent that we act ourselves’ (Kautsky 1908, xii). Developing this point, Kautsky suggested that as early Christianity was a movement of ancient proletarians, a historian with an intimate relationship with ‘the modern movement of the proletariat … has a right to expect to penetrate into the beginnings of Christianity more easily, in many respects, than men of learning that see the proletariat only from afar’ (Kautsky 1908, xiii). As opposed to the traditional elitist conception of popular participation in history, which substituted derogatory terms such as mass or mob for concrete analyses of the agency of the oppressed (Williams 1982, 252 ff & 298), Kautsky’s claim that radical activists are more likely to attune themselves to the complexity of popular agency seems intuitively powerful. The power of Kautsky’s approach was magnified as he showed an awareness of the dangers inherent in so empathising with past movements: radicals, making such readings, were want to make anachronistic claims as to the motives and actions of earlier agents. In opposition to this error, Kautsky warned against falsely imposing contemporary categories onto the past. He insisted that, as human history exhibits a continual process of development, historians should be careful to express the ‘peculiar characteristics’ of past actions: ‘the Marxist conception of history guards us against the danger of measuring the past with the yardstick of the present’ (Kautsky 1908, xv).
Kautsky applied this interpretation of historical materialism to the analysis of the evolving behaviour of early Christians as he understood it through a combination of his reading of the gospels and a series of the secondary literature on the period. His key political aim in this book, as in his earlier work on the radical movements of the Reformation, was to show that communism, of one form or another, was not a utopia dreamt up by nineteenth century demagogues that clashed with human nature, but that it had been a constant rallying cry of the oppressed throughout history. To this end he sought to analyse not only the ‘communism’ of the early Christians, but also the contradictions of that type of social organisation which led, eventually, to its negation.
He suggested that St. Luke’s claim that ‘it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’, reflected ‘a fierce class hatred’ on the part of the early Christians towards the rich (Kautsky 1908, 276). Furthermore, St. John’s comments in The Acts of the Apostles to the effect that ‘what a man needed was then taken from the treasure of the community’ symbolised the tendency ‘towards a communistic form of organisation’ on the part of the early Church (Kautsky 1908, 280). Kautsky was clear that while this Christian communism shared many of its features in common with modern communism, it was also very different from this later form. In particular, he stressed that the communism of the early Christian communities was a form of consumer, rather than producer, communism, within which goods were produced individually but consumed collectively (Kautsky 1908, 352). It was precisely this form of communism which, while appealing strongly to ancient proletarians whose ‘daily bread’ could not usually be guaranteed, failed to appeal to slaves; who were normally guaranteed some sustenance from their master’s supplies (Kautsky 1908, 353). Moreover, not only was Engels mistaken when he located slaves as the earliest social basis of Christianity, but also early Christians themselves did not reject slavery. Indeed, after the prospects for revolutionary advance in the Holy Lands declined in the wake of the sacking of Jerusalem in the seventieth year of the Christian era, not only did Christians continue to accept slavery, but they came to increasingly moderate the communist nature of their community.
While the earliest Christian communities exhibited ‘communist’ characteristics; so long as these communities were forced to reproduce themselves within the Roman Empire, then they were compelled to reproduce the class divisions of that Empire. Thus, as Christians worked, or employed others to work for them, with the aim of fulfilling their duties towards the community, then some would flourish where others would fail: ‘it was precisely out of the performance of these mutual aids that a motive would arise that weakened and broke up the original communistic drive’ (Kautsky 1908, 359). So, to maintain the community once it ceased to be a ‘fighting organisation’, it became increasingly important, or so Kautsky claimed, for Christians to ‘attract prosperous comrades’ into their fold. However, to attract such people, the original denunciations of the rich had increasingly to be mediated (Kautsky 1908, 361). Therefore, the Church evolved an ever more moderate approach to the rich, which led to ‘imperceptible’ changes in the community itself. For instance, the common meal, which had played a central role in the early Church, was of markedly less importance to the richer comrades than it was to the poorer members of the community. As the rich exercised their increasing hegemony within the community, this meal took on a less and less important place within the life of the community: ‘in the second century the actual common meals for the poorer members were separated from the merely symbolic meals for the whole community, and in the fourth century, after the church had become a dominant power in the state, the first kind of meals were crowded out of the … churches, … and in the next century were abolished completely’ (Kautsky 1908, 363-4). Moreover, as the numbers of the rich increased within the Church, then so too did their influence within the community; to the extent that this hegemony took an institutional form through the transformation of the Church hierarchy into a new ‘ruling class’ of bishops (Kautsky 1908, 364).
Interestingly, given his own evolving relationship at the time of writing to the increasingly moderate bureaucracy of the SPD, Kautsky analysed the growth of conservatism within the Church using concepts borrowed from early twentieth-century Social Democracy. At the time of the first Russian Revolution of 1905, he recognised that, in the SPD, the trade union bureaucrats had evolved as a conservative social layer (Kautsky 1906a, 51; Gaido 2003, 109-110). Paralleling this argument, he suggested that in the early Church ‘an official doctrine, recognised and propagated by the bureaucracy of the community’ evolved; and in the struggle between this ‘opportunism’ and the earlier ‘rigorism’, it was the opportunists who triumphed by deploying ‘all the means at their disposal’ (Kautsky 1908, 381). In this way, Kautsky explained the ‘cause of the failures on the one hand, of the successes on the other’ of communists and anti-communists within the Church, not in religious but in material terms (Kautsky 1908, 391).
Whatever the merits of Kautsky’s work on early Christianity; and Steenson’s claim that it is now ‘little more than an intriguing period piece’ is too dismissive (Steenson 1991, 165), it does illuminate his political trajectory in the decade before 1914. For while many have suggested that it was his attachment to a crude evolutionary schema that informed his retreat before the increasingly conservative trajectory of the German trade union bureaucracy in this period, the explicit critique of this social group that can be found in his essay ‘The American Worker’, and the implied critique of the conservatism of such bureaucracies that can be read between the lines of Foundations of Christianity, suggests that it was something more than a simple model of progressive evolutionary advance that informed his politics in this period. In fact, as Kautsky had located a process of regression in the social structure of the early Christian communities, at a moral if not economic level, then it would seem ill advised to suggest, as Bronner does, that at this time Kautsky held to a simple theory of historical progress (Bronner 1990, 35).
In fact, Kautsky had outlined a similar process of decline in his earlier history of Reformation ‘communism’. Prefiguring the aim of his history of the early Christian Church, in Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation he was at pains to show that ‘nothing can be more erroneous than the widespread idea that communism is antagonistic to the existence of man – antagonistic to human nature itself’ (Kautsky 1897). The link between the two books was more profound than this shared aim; for Kautsky sought to show that while the ‘communistic doctrines of the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles did not create the analogous tendencies in the middle ages’, they did favour ‘the growth and dissemination of the latter quite as much as the Roman law aided the development of absolutism and the bourgeoisie’ (Kautsky 1897). Thus, Kautsky traced a historical thread from the Gospels to the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century through which he sought, partially, to explain the actions of Munzer and his fellow revolutionaries: a methodological stress on the important role of ideas in history that conflicts somewhat with our standard model of Kautsky’s Marxism as being crudely economically reductionist.
It is not, of course, that Kautsky ignored the role of material forces in his history of sixteenth century communism: far from it. Rather, he deployed an analysis of the level of the development of the forces of production, and the clash between these and the existing relations of production, to explain both the broad timing of the German peasant wars and the emergence of sixteenth century communism more specifically. While he located the roots of the German reformation in its Bohemian predecessor, he argued that this movement was itself underpinned by the growth of industry and a decline in the position of the peasants in this region. To this extent, ‘the period of the Hussite Wars may be fairly considered as approximately the line of demarcation at which the decline of the peasantry began, not only at different periods and in isolated localities, but universally’: a process that was caused, ‘principally’, by the ‘growth of capital’ (Kautsky 1897). While these economic conditions set the scene upon which the peasant wars were played out, Kautsky insisted that it was ideas as manifest in real human agents that spread the seeds of revolt. Thus, while the communistic spirit of the Tabor Hussites eventually declined, Kautsky insisted that so brilliant was the beacon of hope lit by this movement that ‘the principles on which it was based necessarily survived’. And, in its wake, the German ‘ruling class were stimulated … to a greater mistrust of, and severity towards, all suspicious agitations amongst the lower orders, while … Bohemia became an asylum from which the German emigrants could exert their influence on their own country’ (Kautsky 1897). Nevertheless, despite the inspiring potential of the idea of communism in sixteenth century Europe, his comparison of the similar fate of communism in, ‘successful’, Tabor, and, defeated, Munster, convinced him that the level of the development of the forces of production was such that communism was unfeasible as a mode of production in this period: ‘it now became evident … how little military victories avail, if the aims of the conquerors are in contradiction to those of economic development’. The fate of Tabor ‘shows what would have been the outcome of the … Anabaptist movement in Munster, if they had remained unconquered by military force’ (Kautsky 1897).
In contrast to their positive reception of Bernstein’s study of radical ideas in the context of the English Revolution, Kautsky’s discussion of Reformation communism was dismissed as crude and schematic by Petegorsky and Weber (Petegorsky 1995, 149; Weber 1976, 258). Similarly, Kautsky’s method incensed Chris Harman, who argued that, for Kautsky, human action ‘could not alter the inevitable development of history’, and therefore ‘the task of revolutionary socialists under modern capitalism was not to try to cut short the historical process, but simply to reflect its development’ (Harman 1998, 9-10). But this is surely not Kautsky’s suggestion. Rather, it was to the general pattern of history, not its detail, to which he referred in this argument; and, in this sense, as Duncan Hallas has argued, he was undoubtedly consistent with Marx’s materialist method (Hallas 1987, 127). Furthermore, this method did not imply, as Laclau and Mouffe suggest, that Kautsky believed in the existence of simple universal, ‘ineluctable laws’ through which history progressed (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 20). For instance, in his study of Thomas More’s Utopia, published almost a decade before his study of the Anabaptists, Kautsky argued that, in similar economic conditions, but in a different political context, More’s communism could be understood as a sympathetic response to the deteriorating condition of English peasants in this period, but one that ‘frightened nobody’ because ‘no communist party [that is no Anabaptist like movement] existed’ (Kautsky 1888, 162 & 139). Similarly, in his complex interpretations of Russian and American history, Kautsky refused to draw political conclusions mechanically from his analyses of the level of economic development.
Kautsky’s Histories of America and Russia
In the first of these essays, ‘The American Worker’, published in 1906, Kautsky took issue with Werner Sombart’s Why is There no Socialism in the USA? Kautsky opened his reply to Sombart with a brief excursus on method. Noting Sombart’s nod towards Marx’s claim, as made in the preface to the first edition of Capital, that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx 1976, 91), Kautsky replied that ‘this assertion can be accepted only with great reservations’ (Kautsky 1906a, 15). So where Kautsky had opened his histories of Christianity and the German peasant wars with a critique of Engels’ analyses of these movements, this supposed mimic of his masters’ voices opened his analysis of American history with a critical swipe at Marx. Still, Kautsky did not simply dismiss Marx’s suggestion that England had ploughed a furrow down which less developed states would follow, rather he argued that while Marx’s general thesis had been true in 1867, there no longer existed a ‘classical Model’ of development, such as was England forty years earlier.[8] In fact, there were now two national states that represented extreme elements of the contemporary mode of production: America, where the capitalist class was disproportionately strong, and Russia, where the workers were excessively powerful. Meanwhile, Germany, or so he argued, had an economy that ‘is closest to the American model’, but was politically ‘closest to’ Russia (Kautsky 1906a, 16). So, in contrast to the unilinear model of historical development that he was to defend in 1927 (Kautsky 1927, 418), in 1906 Kautsky argued that this complex structure ‘only contradicts that kind of historical materialism of which our opponents and critics accuse us, by which they understand a ready-to-hand model, and not a method of inquiry’ (Kautsky 1906a, 16).
In ‘The American Worker’, Kautsky located the historical basis for Russian exceptionalism in her relatively recent move towards capitalism. Prefiguring Trotsky’s account of Russia’s ‘combined and uneven’ development, Kautsky argued that this top down process had been executed by an archaic state structure that was not only incapable of delivering complete modernisation but also proceeded without ‘a strong native capitalist class’ (cf Trotsky 1932-3, 468; 575; 642). Thus, while a ‘political revolution’ was necessary if Russia was to realise her ambition of matching the growth rates of the Western powers, the traditional Western agency of that transformation was missing. In contrast, while the Russian capitalist class was unusually small, the growth of capitalism had, as its corollary, the production of both a modern proletariat and a modern intelligentsia. Precisely because of the relative social weakness of the capitalist class, the intelligentsia had developed a level of ‘independence from’, and ‘opposition to’, capital that was unique in Europe. Thus, where, in the West, intellectuals tended to act as media for the transmission of capitalist values to the lower orders, in Russia the intelligentsia saw its role as the reverse of this; to reflect the interests of the peasants and workers against capital and the state (Kautsky 1906a, 24). Consequentially, while the differential social structures of America and Russia went some way towards accounting for their differential political scenes – America had the most homogeneous capitalist class, and, because of ‘mass immigration’, the most heterogeneous proletariat – the political consciousness of workers could not be reduced to these structural constraints: rather these could best be understood as a consequence of the ‘different ideological development of both nations’. Russian workers received more than their share of ‘revolutionary romanticism’ from their intelligentsia, while the poor American’s had to make do with what Kautsky ironically described as the ‘‘healthy Realpolitik’, which deals only with the nearest and most tangible things’ (Kautsky 1906a, 32 & 38).
The strength of Kautsky’s method as realised in ‘The American Worker’ lies, first, in his break with a crude unilinear model of history; and, second, in his stress on the causal importance of ideas in history. The general thrust of his essay, therefore, lies in opposition to the crude application of historical materialism which is so often labelled Kautskyism: he drew a complex map of the interplay between history, ideology, intellectual agency, and economics to explain the differential historical trajectories taken by America, Russia, Germany, and to a lesser extent England.[9]
However, Kautsky failed to address a fundamental issue which was, ironically, implied by his own analysis: could the various forces, which militated against the growth of American socialism, indefinitely prevent the radicalisation of American workers? Rather than contend with this difficulty, he fatalistically insisted that the growth of economic inequality in America, coupled with the amplified pressure on American workers to increase productivity, meant that ‘the American workers must … be rendered more and more accessible to socialist ideas’ (Kautsky 1906a, 71-3). In fact, he claimed much more than this: the new circumstances would mean not only that the American working class would become more amenable to socialist influence, but that they would embrace such ideas: they ‘must finally come to the conclusion that only the realisation of the social-democratic programme … can free them from their yoke’ (Kautsky 1906a, 74). Thus, Kautsky insisted that economic developments would, inevitably, overcome the ideological and material roots of the fragmentation of the American proletariat: ‘we must expect a flourishing of socialism in America’ (Kautsky 1906a, 74). While this conclusion lends some support to Shandro’s thesis that Kautsky embraced an ‘abstractly universalistic theorisation of working-class unity’, Kautsky’s defence of this argument does not stand in opposition to a fatalistic account of history, but rather grows out of such an account. For while, as Shandro suggests, Kautsky’s argument is innocent of any sense that the unification of the American proletariat might involve political struggles, Kautsky does, contra Shandro’s implication, conceptualise the process of unification itself. Regrettably, his interpretation of the process of class unification is presented in a fatalistic manner. It seems to emerge as a simple consequence of economic development. In effect, Kautsky reduces the political process by which the unification of the American working class was to be realised to his analysis of the growing economic polarisation of American society.
The obvious political defects of this conclusion should not, however, blind us to the many strengths of Kautsky’s comparative history; historiographic strengths that are all too often obscured by these political weaknesses. For, the general thrust of Kautsky’s history lends itself to the development of a sophisticated model of national peculiarities within a global context. If this was true of his essay on America, it was also manifest in his historical analysis of the Russian social formation.
Given his posthumous reputation as a dogmatic evolutionist, it is somewhat ironic to recount the context within which Kautsky intervened in the debate on the nature of the Russian revolution. During the Revolution of 1905, Plekhanov, the ‘Father of Russian Marxism’, advocated an alliance between the Russian socialists and the liberal Constitutional Democrat Party (Cadets). This position placed him at the extreme right wing of Russian Social Democracy, from where he was roundly criticised by both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Seeking support for his position from the ‘Pope of Marxism’, Plekhanov wrote a loaded letter to Kautsky, in which he asked for Kautsky’s answers to the following questions: ‘… are we facing a bourgeois or a socialist revolution … what should be [our] attitude … towards the bourgeois democratic parties, which are struggling in their own way for political liberty … what tactics should [we] … pursue in the Duma elections in order to utilise the strength of the bourgeois opposition parties?’ (Plekhanov quoted in Kautsky 1906b, 370). The very structure of these questions, as Lenin pointed out in his introduction to the Russian edition of Kautsky’s essay, were framed in such a way as to preclude the interpretations of Plekhanov’s Russian critics (Lenin 1906, 355). Thus, in posing the question of the character of the coming revolution as a simple dichotomy between bourgeois or socialist, Plekhanov attempted to disqualify any suggestion that Russia might either be moving towards a new type of revolution, or towards some combination of the two types he mentioned. Beyond this, his question concerning the attitude that socialists should take to the liberals, was phrased so as to attempt the exclusion of any disagreement with his approach to this issue.
Nevertheless, if Plekhanov hoped that Kautsky’s reply would aid his polemic against his opponents, he was sadly mistaken: for Kautsky wrote an analysis of the revolution that was embraced both by Lenin and Trotsky as a vindication of their own analyses of the Russian social formation. Indeed, Lenin was so impressed by Kautsky’s thesis that he added a glowing preface to its Russian edition (Lenin 1906; Trotsky 1906, 33-4; Trotsky 1907, 10).
In his essay ‘The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and its Prospects’ Kautsky built upon the analysis of Russia that he had outlined in ‘The American Worker’. He opened his discussion of the Russian situation with an analysis of what he, reasonably, believed was the key issue at stake: the agrarian question. Moira Donald has rightly suggested that, in the wake of the publication of his 1899 book, The Agrarian Question, Kautsky was recognised as ‘the unrivalled Marxist expert in the field’ (Donald 1993, 157). In opening his essay on Russia with a discussion of this issue, Kautsky thus demanded a close hearing from his foreign comrades. In his essay, he insisted that if agriculture was to be ‘put on a sound economic basis’, then ‘the peasants must be satisfied’ (Kautsky 1906b, 357). To satisfy the peasants, not only was a redistribution of land necessary, but also the peasantry must be offered both the necessary education and the necessary capital to effectively realise the potential of the land (Kautsky 1906b, 363). Absolutism, because of its ties to the landed gentry, was incapable of making the first step in this direction. The liberals were similarly impotent in the face of this dilemma, for they too fought against ‘the confiscation of the large estates’, and could no more than absolutism countenance the dissolution of the oppressive and expensive standing army (Kautsky 1906b, 363-366). To thus compare, as Plekhanov had suggested in his letter to Kautsky, the coming Russian Revolution with its French predecessor of 1789 was ‘quite erroneous’, as the petty bourgeoisie could no longer act as the ‘leading class in the revolutionary movement’ (Kautsky 1906b, 366). Indeed, Kautsky, prefiguring Trotsky, went so far as to suggest that ‘Russia lacks the firm backbone of a bourgeois democracy’, and, as the class struggle intensifies, ‘it only accelerates the bankruptcy of liberalism’ (Kautsky 1906b, 367-9).
The one class that could countenance the drastic measures necessary to solve the agrarian question was the proletariat; but this class was too weak socially to make a socialist revolution. Moreover, in expropriating the large landowners, a peasant rebellion would necessarily increase the social weight of small capitalist property. In line with Lenin’s analysis of the class structure of the revolution, Kautsky argued that workers and peasants might therefore be able to unite politically against absolutism on the basis of their ‘common economic interest’, in a manner that was impossible for the workers and the liberal capitalists. Interestingly, this supposed dogmatist with a procrustean tendency to force the evidence into a preconceived framework argued that while such a revolutionary movement might prevail against the old order, and while socialists should fight for hegemony within it, the outcome of the movement would break any preconceived Marxist models: ‘we are approaching completely new situations and problems for which no earlier model is appropriate’ (Kautsky 1906b, 371).
While this obviously perceptive diagnosis of the prospects for the coming Russian Revolution did not reach the heights of conceptual innovation associated with Trotsky’s discussion of the Russian social formation, it did show that Kautsky refused, in 1906 at least, to confine his analysis of contemporary events to a conceptual straightjacket uncritically inherited from Marx. It also is evidence that Kautsky, in contrast to Plekhanov in this period, was an inventive and subtle Marxist thinker (Baron 1963, 274-277).[10] Unfortunately, Kautsky was to gravitate towards a much more mechanical model of social development in the wake of his break with the German left after 1910 (Le Blanc 2003, 132-135). Nevertheless, in the early years of the last century, his interpretation of historical materialism was far more sophisticated than the common caricature of it allows.
Conclusion
Kautsky, in the period around the first Russian revolution of 1905, made three significant contributions to historical materialism that undermine the simplistic claim that his work, at this juncture, can adequately be labelled as either ‘fatalistic’ or a form of ‘vulgar evolutionism’. First, in his essays on the early Church and on Reformation communism he broke with a crude model of historical progress. Second, in his brilliant comparative analyses of the American, English, German, and Russian social formations he rejected unilinear models of historical development. Third, in the essays on Thomas More, America, and Reformation communism he clearly stressed the causal significance of ideas in history. Both Lenin and Trotsky interpreted Kautsky, in this period, as supporting their analyses of the Russian social formation, and whatever the relative merits of these claims, we can agree with Le Blanc that Kautsky’s Marxism, at this time, was far more sophisticated than it later became (Le Blanc 2003, 134).[11]
However, in his essay on America
in particular, Kautsky showed evidence of a fatalistic model of class formation,
which provided the foundation upon which he built his political perspective.
Moreover, in his discussion of the Russian social formation, despite his
willingness to reject Plekhanov’s mechanical perspectives, his insights into
the class dynamics of the revolution were weakened by his fetishisation of the
concept of social maturity (Lowy 1981, 222). Nevertheless, in the early years
of the twentieth century Kautsky shared these failings with all of the leading
figures within the Second International. Kautsky’s tragedy in the following
years was rooted in his inability to take a lead from Luxemburg, Lenin and
Trotsky when they moved to reject these weaknesses with Second International
Marxism. In contrast to their trajectory, Kautsky came to reify the failings of
Second International Marxism, to the extent that his critique of the Bolshevik
Revolution was theoretically underpinned by his deployment of a version of the
crude unilinear model of historical evolution which he had so powerfully
criticised a decade earlier. Despite this failing, it would be wrong to dismiss
Kautsky’s contribution to historical materialism in toto, for in the first decade of the last century he helped to
inspire a series of important contributions to the renewal of Marx’s theory of
history, most importantly that developed by Trotsky, which continue to
influence Marxist historians to this day.
References
Alavi, Hamza & Shanin, Teodor 1988 ‘Introduction to the English Edition’ Kautsky, Karl 1899 (1988) The Agrarian Question Vol. I London: Zwan
Anderson, Perry 1980 Arguments Within English Marxism London: Verso
Baron, Samuel 1963 Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism Stanford University Press
Baron, Samuel 1995 Plekhanov in Russian History and Soviet Historiography University of Pittsburgh Press
Bernstein, Eduard 1895 (1980) Cromwell and Communism London: Spokesman
Blackledge, Paul 2004 ‘Socialist Darwinism in Germany 1875-1914’ Historical Materialism 12.1
Brailsford, H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution London: Spokesman
Bronner, Stephen Eric 1990 Socialism Unbound London: Routledge
Burns, Tony 2001 ‘Karl Kautsky: Ethics and Marxism’ in Wilde, Lawrence ed. 2001 Marxism’s Ethical Thinkers London: Palgrave
Callinicos, Alex 1999 Social Theory Cambridge: Polity Press
Cliff, Tony 2003 ‘Marxism and the Collectivisation of Agriculture’ in Cliff, Tony Marxist Theory After Trotsky London: Bookmarks
Colletti, Lucio 1972 From Rousseau to Lenin New York: Monthly Review Press
Donald, Moira 1993 Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists 1900-1924 Yale University Press
Gaido, Daniel 2003 ‘‘The American Revolution’ and the Theory of Permanent Revolution’ Historical Materialism 11.4
Gay, Peter 1962 The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism New York: Collier Books
Geary, Dick 1987 Karl Kautsky Manchester: Manchester University Press
Bookmarks
Hallas, Duncan 1987 ‘A Note on Chris Harman’s “Base and Superstructure”’ International Socialism 2: 34
Harman, Chris 1998 Marxism and History London: Bookmarks
Harman, Chris 1999 A People’s History of the World London: Bookmarks
Hill, Christopher 1973 ‘Introduction’ Hill, Christopher ed. Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings London: Penguin
Kautsky, Karl 1888 (1979) Thomas More and His Utopia London: Lawrence and Wishart
Kautsky, Karl 1897 Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation at
Kautsky, Karl 1899 (1988) The Agrarian Question Vols. I & II London: Zwan
Kautsky, Karl 1906a (2003) ‘The American Worker’ Historical Materialism 11.4
Kautsky Karl 1906b (1983) ‘The Driving Force of the Russian Revolution and its Prospects’ in Harding, Neil ed. Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879-1906 Cambridge University Press
Kautsky, Karl 1908 (1953) The Foundations of Christianity New York: S.A. Russell
Kautsky, Karl 1909 (1996) The Road to Power New Jersey: Humanities Press
Kautsky, Karl 1927 (1988) The Materialist Conception of History Yale University Press
Kyrtatas, Dimitris 1987 The Social Structure of the Early Christian Church London: Verso
Laclau, Ernesto & Mouffe, Chantal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy London: Verso
Le Blanc, Paul 2003 ‘The Absence of Socialism in the United States: Contextualising Kautsky’s “American Worker”’ Historical Materialism 11.4
Lenin, Vladimir 1906 (1983) ‘Preface to Kautsky’s ‘The Driving Foces of the Russian Revolution and its Prospects’’ in Harding, Neil ed. Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879-1906 Cambridge University Press
Lenin, Vladimir 1918 The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky at
Lowy, Michael 1996 The War of Gods London: Verso
Manning, Brian 1999 The Far Left in the English Revolution London: Bookmarks
Marx, Karl 1976 Capital Volume 1 Harmondsworth, Penguin
Perry, Matt 2002 Marxism and History London: Palgrave
Petegorsky, David 1995 Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War Stroud: Allen Sutton
Rees, John 1998 The Algebra of Revolution London: Routledge
Rigby, Steven 1998 Marxism and History Manchester University Press
Salvadori, Massimo 1979 Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution London: Verso
Samuel, Raphael 1980a ‘British Marxist Historians I’ New Left Review 1: 120
Schorske, Carl 1983 German Social Democracy 1905-1917 London: Harvard University Press
Shandro, Alan 1997-8 ‘Karl Kautsky: On the Relation of Theory and Practice’ Science and Society Vol. 61, No. 4, Winter 1997-1998.
Siegel, Paul 1986 The Meek and the Militant London: Zed
Stack, David 2003 The First Darwinian Left Cheltenham: New Clarion Press
Steenson, Gary 1991 Karl Kautsky, 1854-1938 University of Pittsburgh Press
Timpanaro, Sebastiano 1975 On Materialism London, Verso
Trotsky, Leon 1906 ‘Results and Prospects’ in Trotsky, Leon 1969 The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects New York: Pathfinder
Trotsky, Leon 1907 (1973) 1905 London: Penguin
Trotsky, Leon 1932-3 (1977) The History of the Russian Revolution London: Pluto
Weber, Max 1976 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism London: George Allen & Unwin
Weikart, Richard 1998 Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein San Francisco: International Scholars Publications
Williams, Raymond 1982 Culture
and Society London: Hogarth Press
[1] Thanks to Neil Davidson, Kristyn Gorton, Joe Hartney and three anonymous referees from Science and Society for comments on this paper in draft.
[2] In the wake of their first meeting in 1881, Marx, in a letter to his daughter Jenny – 11th April 1881, famously described Kautsky as ‘a mediocrity with a small-minded outlook, super wise (only 26), very conceited, industrious in a certain sort of way, he busies himself a lot with statistics but does not read anything very clever out of them, belongs by nature to the tribe of the philistines but is otherwise a decent fellow in his own way’.
[3] Both revisionist and revolutionary socialists have related Kautsky’s political failings to his historiographic weaknesses (Callinicos 1999, 112; Laclau & Mouffe 1985, 3; Mandel 1986, 93; Rees 1998, 135-43; Sassoon 1996, 5). Typically, his Marxism has been dismissed within the academy as a crude ‘form of productive force determinism’ (Rigby 1998, 13). Moreover, despite the fact that he repeatedly rejected the view that ‘natural laws could be applied to human society’ (Steenson 1991, 5), his critics have tended to label his thought as a ‘biologically or technologically deterministic version of historical materialism’ (Perry 2002, 22). Perhaps the classic articulation of this critique was made by Lucio Colletti. He argued that the political weaknesses of Kautsky’s Marxism specifically, and Second International Marxism more generally, could best be understood as a corollary of its ‘fatalistic’ and ‘providential’ faith in the automatic progress of economic evolution, which underpinned the certainty that its eventual rise to power would come about ‘in a spontaneous, constant, and irresistible way, quite tranquilly like a natural process’’ (Colletti 1972, 105).
[4] Thus, in their various studies of his thought, Geary does not discuss any of Kautsky’s historical essays (Geary 1987), while Steenson and Donald consider them very briefly and only in passing (Steenson 1991, 162-5; Donald 1993, 80-2). In fact, of the book length studies of Kautsky’s Marxism published in English, only Salvadori hints at the contribution Kautsky made to Marx’s theory of history. However, he does not develop this insight, preferring instead to concentrate on the political conclusions Kautsky drew from his interpretation of history (Salvadori 1979, 100). Indeed, with the exception of Steenson’s brief dismissal of Kautsky’s histories of early Christianity and Reformation communism, none of these commentators move beyond discussions of his essays on Russian and American history, which are typically analysed with reference to their political, rather than their historiographic, merits. This tendency has been revived by Gaido and Le Blanc in their recent analyses of Kautsky’s 1906 essay ‘The American Worker’; and, despite the undoubted strengths of these papers, because they treat Kautsky’s studies of Russian and American history in isolation from his broader historical output, they provide an inadequate guide to the full power, and limitations, of his interpretation of historical materialism (Gaido 2003; Le Blanc 2003).
[5] Tony Burns also makes a similar claim in his study of Kautsky’s ethics (Burns 2001). While Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin have pointed out that in his analysis of the agrarian question, Kautsky, far from being a dogmatist, allowed his study of the evidence of German agricultural production to inform his break with orthodoxy: ‘in so far as the actual facts did not fit the preconceived trend, he accepted the facts’ (Alavi & Shanin 1988, xxxii; cf Cliff 2003, 238-240).
[6] Kautsky’s optimism was not shaken by the First World War. Thus, six years before the ascendancy of Hitler he wrote the following: ‘The excitement caused by the World War is beginning to subside. The economic abnormalities resulting from it are beginning to give way once again to normal economic conditions in which the force of economic laws is again manifesting itself … the strength of the Social-Democratic movement is beginning to grow again, and it is resuming its temporarily interrupted victorious advance (Kautsky 1988, lxix-lxx).
[7] The English translation is taken from the fourth German edition of 1922.
[8] As I pointed out in the introduction to this essay, Kautsky retreated from this argument to mechanically repeat Marx’s dictum in The Materialist Conception of History (Kautsky 1988, 418). This later position coheres with Shandro’s argument that Kautsky’s model of class formation was a generalisation of this statement by Marx. However, in 1906, Kautsky rejected such a mechanical model (Shandro 1997-8, 488).
[9] In England, Kautsky argued, the hegemony of capital could be understood as a consequence of the reinforcement of the heavy social weight of capital by a multiplicity of similarly strong and intertwined strata which were dependent on capital for their social reproduction. This ensured both that ‘capitalist ideas and sensibilities are highly developed in the English intelligentsia’, and that ‘English workers find it difficult to widen their struggle against the industrial entrepreneur into a struggle against the whole capitalist system of exploitation’ (Kautsky 2003, 24-8).
[10] Plekhanov had, of course, displayed a much more sophisticated understanding of historical materialism in the 1880s and 1890s (Baron 1995, 44).
[11] For what it is worth, I agree with Salvadori, Donald, Steenson and Lowy, against Gaido, that Kautsky’s views were closer to Lenin’s than they were to Trotsky’s in this period (Salvadori 1979, 102; Donald 1993, 96; Steenson 1991, 206; Lowy 1981, 37; Gaido 2003, 93).