This is an ongoing project to narrate Ben Lewis’s translation of Karl Kautksy´s texts on Republicanism and Democracy. The full audiobook is currently in production by the team at Cosmonaut Magazine. Narration and editing is done by Myk Laabas. You can find this, and other audio books, on our Youtube channel, and you can purchase a physical copy of the book itself at Haymarket Books.
Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) was the leading theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his time. However, during the twentieth century a constellation of historical factors ensured that his ideas were either gradually consigned to near oblivion or downright reviled. Not only has his political thought been dismissed in non-Marxist historical and political discourse, but his ideas are equally discredited in Marxist circles.
This book aims to rekindle interest in Kautsky’s ideas by exploring his democratic-republican understanding of state and society. These essential works from different points in his career demonstrates how Kautsky’s republican thought was positively influenced by Marx and Engels—especially in relation to the lessons they drew from the experience of the Paris Commune.
Editor and Translator’s Preface by Ben Lewis
I am delighted that this book, which I first began working on over a decade ago to mark that glorious occasion of the royal wedding between Kate and William here in Britain, is now available in audio form.
Back then, as now, my motivation in producing the book was to highlight the significance and indeed the centrality of democratic republicanism within Marxist thought. This is a distinct republicanism that is not simply opposed to the existence of the reactionary institution of the monarchy, but in the sense of an alternative proletarian state form to the capitalist order; an order defined by features such as such as a single legislative and executive assembly, the regular election and recallability of officials (including judges), workers’ wages for officials, the armed people and so on.
While Marx and Engels, at various points in their careers, claimed that “our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic” and that this republic was synonymous with “the form for the dictatorship of the proletariat” or the “political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour”, the “last state form of bourgeois society” in which “the class struggle will be fought out to the end”, this strategic pillar of their thought has been largely overlooked, forgotten or even buried in subsequent Marxist scholarship and writing.
The story behind such marginalization is a long and complicated one, but one of the key players in this story is Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) – the so-called Pope of Marxism following the death of Engels in 1895. Kautsky later became, in the words of V I Lenin, the “renegade Kautsky” by turning his back – in the name of ‘Marxism’ – on the revolutionary perspectives that he had earlier developed and propagated and by falling in, whatever his criticisms, with the warmongering project of German Social Democracy in 1914 and its pro-capitalist constitutionalism in the Weimar Republic. What is worth remembering, though, is for all of Lenin’s angered denunciations of Kautsky, he always counterposed the renegade Kautsky to his earlier record as a revolutionary who shaped the politics of millions: ‘How well Kautsky wrote when he was a Marxist!’, as Lenin put it – and on various occasions at that.1
This study views itself as part of the small upturn in recent interest in Kautsky scholarship by viewing Kautsky’s revolutionary output as not only foundational to the theory and practice of revolutionary social democracy (Bolshevism in particular), but both worthy of critical study – I stress critical – and of burning relevance to today: his writings on the democratic republic are a case in point. Indeed, without giving away too much by way of spoilers for the audiobook, one of the other aims of this study is to show just how – and why – most of leftwing takes and academic scholarship on Kautsky both get him so wrong in their portrayal of him as an alleged economistic, fatalist, determinist or even Darwinist thinker whose erstwhile revolutionary Marxism owed little or nothing to Marx and Engels. In particular, I locate three main sources of this problem today: the Soviet Union and former Eastern Bloc’s bastardization of Marxism (and a smaller-scale Trotskyist copy); Western pro-capitalist Cold War historiography; and the neo-Hegelian interpretation of Marxism.
But enough from me for now. I only wish to express my thanks for the comrades at Cosmonaut Magazine taking the time to record my book for you to listen to at your leisure. Please get in touch if you have any questions or comments via the usual channels and socials. If you want more of this kind of thing, then be sure to check out my website and Patreon project: marxismtranslated.com.
Happy listening!
Ben Lewis, 6 April 2022
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- See Lars Lih’s ‘Katusky as a Marxist Database’: https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal/online-articles/kautsky-as-marxist-data-base/Kautsky%20Post-1914%20Data%20Base.pdf