Reassessing Kautsky's Marxism
| Date | 01 December 1989 |
| Published date | 01 December 1989 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1989.tb00295.x |
| Author | Jules Townshend |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political Studies
(1989),
XXXVII,
659-664
Reassessing
Kautsky’s
Marxism
JULES
TOWNSHEND
Manchester Polytechnic
Kautsky has been thwarted by the very thing he worshipped: history. His pacific,
evolutionary Marxism, for
so
long ascendent within the Marxist camp, lost its
persuasive potency in the turbulent years
of
the first world war and its aftermath.
In Germany, the
SPD
‘centre’, the living embodiment
of
his theory, did not hold.
And the Bolshevik success in October
191
7
decisively moved the magnetic field of
Marxism from Germany to Russia. Lenin’s Marxism replaced Kautsky’s as the
new orthodoxy. Kautsky spent the two remaining decades of his life in the
political wilderness, having to endure the soubriquet ‘renegade’. He has been one
of history’s losers, unable to turn tables by winning posterity’s sympathy through
posthumous martyrdom. And the final snub: just when his ideas appeared on the
brink of rehabilitation in Eurocommunist practice, legitimation and inspiration
has been sought not in his abundant texts. Rather, Eurocommunists have looked
to Gramsci, who rejected almost everything for which Kautsky stood. He has
remained consigned, along with his friend Bernstein, to the rogues’ gallery of
Marxism, his works more reviled than read.’
To
Lenin’s sketch of him as a pacific
parliamentarist and panderer to national chauvinism was added the gloss of the
Neo-Hegelian Marxists
-
Lukacs, Korsch and indirectly Gramsci.
The Neo-Hegelian Interpretation
Recent interpretations and extracts
of
Kautsky’s writings however, are beginning
to challenge, explicitly or implicitly, and
in
varying degrees, the Neo-Hegelian
interpretation, which has become a widely held orthodoxy amongst Marxists and
non-Marxists alike.2 In the eyes
of
the Neo-Hegelian Marxists the roots of
Kautsky’s apostasy lay in his philosophical error. In essence, they rejected what
’
Although some Scandinavian scholars are beginning to adopt an overtly favourable attitude to
Kautsky. See G. Esping-Andersen,
Politics against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power
(Priyton, Princeton University Press, 1985).
R.
Geary,
Karl Kautsky
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987);
P.
Goode,
Karl
Kautsky: Selected Political Writings
(London, Macmillan, 1983); M. Salvadori,
Karl Kautsky and the
Socialist Revolution 1880-1938
(London, New Left Books, 1979);
G.
P. Steenson,
Karl Kautsky,
1854-1938: Marxism in the Classical Years
(Pittsburg, University
of
Pittsburg Press, 1978). For Neo-
Hegelian Marxist perspectives directly
or
indirectly
on
Kautsky
see
A.
Gramsci,
The
Prison
Notebooks
(London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 336 and 342; K. Korsch,
Marxism and
Philosophy
(London, New Left Books, 1970), pp. 54-5, 102 and
104;
G.
Lukacs,
Political Wrifings,
1919-29
(London, New Left Books, 1972), pp. 21-2.
For
contemporary exponents of these
perspectives, see for example, A. Arato, ‘The Second International: a re-examination’,
Telos,
18
(19734), p. 8;
A.
Callinicos,
Althusser’s Marxism
(London, Pluto Press, 1976), p. 14;
D.
McLellan,
Marxism After Marx
(London, Macmillan, 1979), p.
210.
0032-32 17/89/04/0659-06/$03.00
0
1989
Political Studies
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