Karl Kautsky

Karl Johann Kautsky (16 October 1854 in Prague - 17 October 1938 in Amsterdam) was a leading Czech Marxist theorist, member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and an important theoretician of the Second International.

Biography

He was born in Prague on October 16, 1854, in the still powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the son of Johan Kautsky, a famous painter, and his wife Minna, an actress and author of novels admired by Engels. During his childhood the family moved to Vienna. He studied History and Philosophy at the University of Vienna. In 1875, he became a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ). Between 1885 and 1890, he was in London, where he met and became friends with Friedrich Engels. In 1891, he co-authored the Erfurt Program of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), along with August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein.

After Engels' death in 1895, Kautsky became one of the most important and influential theoreticians of socialism and the Second International, forming the Marxist core of the party along with August Bebel.

At that time he was considered contemptuously by Trotsky, among others, as the “theoretical legislator of international Marxism”.

He broke with Rosa Luxemburg and the left wing of the SPD in 1914 and, after joining the Independent Social Democratic Party from 1917 to 1919, rejoined the SPD in 1922. Towards the end of World War I, Lenin attacked Kautsky calling him an "opportunist" and a "renegade", comparing his positions to those of the revisionist Eduard Bernstein. By 1934, Kautsky wrote a work entitled Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship.

Karl Kautsky died in exile in Amsterdam on October 17, 1938 at the age of 84, one day after his birthday.

Works

• 1892: The Erfurt Programme (Julián Besteiro, Madrid, 1933)
• 1899: The agrarian question
• 1905: The lessons of the miners' strike
• 1905: Policy on the issue of general strike
• 1907: The Three Sources of Marxism: Marx's Historical Work
• 1908: Origins and foundations of Christianity
• 1919: Terrorism and Communism