Amending Kautsky's Charge-Sheet
| Author | Jules Townshend |
| Published date | 01 October 1984 |
| Date | 01 October 1984 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9256.1984.tb00094.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Black
Youth and the
1980-81
Riots: Official Interpretations
and
Political
Responses
27
Scarman, Lord (1982)
,
The Scarman Report:
The
Brixton
Disorders 10-1
2
Apri 1 1981
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin).
Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration (1969), Problems of Coloured
School Leavers (London:
HMSOI.
Solomos, J. et.al. (19821, 'The Organic Crisis of British Capitalism and Race: the
experience
of
the seventies',
in
CCCS
Race and Politics Group,
The
Empire
Strikes
Back (London: Hutchinson).
Stevenson and Wallis,
P.
(1970), 'Second Generation West Indians:
A
Study in Aliena-
tion', Race Today,
August,
278-280.
Tumber,
H.
(1982), Television and
the
Riots
(London:
British
Film Institute).
-0-000-0-
AMENDING
KAIJTSKY'S
CHARGE-SHEET
Jules Townshend
Ever
since Lenin successfully demoted Kautsky from
the
'Pope' of Marxism to a
Just as the police would like to
pin
all unsolved murder cases
on
an
un-
'renegade'
,
all subsequent indictments of him have been accepted almost without
question.
witting suspect,
so
Kautsky has been blamed for
most
of the major shortcomings of
the Second International (1889-1914)
,
with
Engels
and even the later Marx making
brief appearances in
the
dock.
ure
to oppose the First
World
War in a revolutionary manner and for his criticism
of the October Revolution,
the
Neo-Hegelian accusations of Gramsci
,
Lukacs and Korsch
were added to
the
charge-sheet. Today,
their
charges are uncritically echoed by
ideologically diverse commentators.
1
I
shall argue that Kautsky ought to be acquitted
of
some
of
the central Neo-
Hegelian charges.
'reformism' or 'centrismI.2 The claim that
I
shall defend is that Kautsky's reform-
ism
and supposedly implicit political passivity derived less from
his
philosophy of
history and positivism,
but
rather from his theory of the state and his analysis of
specific social, economic and political conditions (hereafter referred
to
as
his
conjunctural analysis).
Gramsci's, Lukacs' and Korsch's accusations at a theoretical level
were
inspired
by an appreciation of Marx's indebtedness
to
German classical philosophy, especially
Hegel. From this they
drew
the
conclusion that for Marx revolution was not
just
an epiphenomenon of developing material productive forces. The growth of workers'
class consciousness was pivotal to the revolutionary process. This stemmed
from
a dialectical interplay between theory (Marxism) and working class practice. These
Neo-Hegelians saw the Theses on Feurbach as the key to understanding the Marxist
project:
the
self-emancipation of
the
working class.
Marxism as a science
of
human evolution, understood in
terms
of rigidly determinis-
tic laws and modelled on a positivist view of the natural sciences.
that
his
interpretation
of
Marxism had played an important part in causing passi-
vity amongst the
West
European working class in the period between 1917 and 1920,
at a time when
the
actions of their Russiav brethren should have been emulated.
Kautsky's perspective, they claimed, had fostered a fatalistic belief that history
was
on
the proletariat's side.
This
seemed
to provide workers with a scientific
certainty that revolution would occur when the forces of production had fully matured
and could develop no further. Revolution would come in
its
own good time, because
revolutionary class consciousness was a reflex of economic development. Workers
merely had
to
wait. To
use
an 'Althusserianism': Kautsky's Marxism contained a
determinism/passivity couple.3
After Lenin's condemnation of Kautsky for his fail-
This however
is
not
to absolve him from Lenin's indictments
of
They indicted Kautsky on two counts. First, they argued that he portrayed
Theycontended
To continue reading
Request your trial