The Adolescence of a Concept: “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in Karl Kautsky’s Revolutionary Writings
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The Adolescence of a Concept: “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in Karl Kautsky’s Revolutionary Writings
Articles

The Adolescence of a Concept: “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in Karl Kautsky’s Revolutionary Writings

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Karl Kautsky’s writings on the dictatorship of the proletariat serve as a waypoint between Marx and Lenin, Ian Szabo argues in an analysis of Kautsky’s democratic-republican, revolutionary Marxist political ideas.

Delegates to the 1904 International Conference of Socialists in Amsterdam. Kautsky third from right in back row.

At the turn of the 20th century, Karl Johann Kautsky (1854-1938), nicknamed the “Pope of Marxism,”1 was widely considered the most important theorist of the international socialist movement. His chief texts on Marxist politics, the Erfurt Program and The Social Revolution, defined what it meant to be a Marxist for many in the movement. Kautsky is today a relatively forgotten figure, whose voluminous writings go more or less unread even among scholars of Marxist theory and historians of socialism.2 So forgotten is Kautsky that some later students and academics believed that his first name was “Renegade,” based on Vladimir Lenin’s hostile pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.3

Kautsky, a Czech-Austrian historian and journalist, was viewed by many during his lifetime as the heir apparent to Karl Marx himself. In his youth, he studied under Friedrich Engels alongside his close friend and long-time collaborator Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932). Kautsky published the bulk of his theoretical work in Die Neue Zeit, a journal connected to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and served as its executive editor from 1880 until his removal from its masthead in 1917.4 In Die Neue Zeit, we find the bulk of Kautsky’s articles and the debates he engaged in. Such articles established the discursive ground of Marxist orthodoxy. Many of these articles were also the basis for what would later become Kautsky’s long-form texts such as Die Agrarfrage (The Agrarian Question) and die soziale Revolution (The Social Revolution). Kautsky’s articles in Die Neue Zeit help to contextualize his popular texts by making the dictatorship of the proletariat more explicit. The Imperial Press Law of 1874 and the banning of the Social Democratic Party (1875-1890) meant that coded language to avoid censorship was more necessary for books than in periodicals.5

This essay seeks to consolidate Kautsky’s contribution to a vital, frequently misunderstood concept within Marxism—the dictatorship of the proletariat—and demonstrate the influence of Kautsky’s treatment of the concept within revolutionary Marxist politics. Kautsky’s writings from the 1880s to the early 1910s are the particular focus because of the role the dictatorship of the proletariat played in the debates regarding the agrarian question, parliamentary politics, and Russian context. All of these writings reveal the persistence of democratic-republican ideas that became increasingly legible only through working-class politics.6 Kautsky’s writings on the dictatorship of the proletariat served as the waypoint between Marx and Lenin.

My argument extends a slowly emerging literature on Kautsky and his substantial impact on the Bolsheviks. Moira Donald’s Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists demonstrated that the debates within the two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, were often littered with quotes and citations from Kautsky.7 In 2008, Lars Lih published his groundbreaking Lenin Rediscovered: What is To be Done? In Context, which situated Lenin’s writings as the Russian articulation of “Erfurtianism.” Lih uses this term to describe the general outlook of German Social Democratic politics articulated in Kautsky’s Erfurt Program that found its way into the Russian context by way of Lenin’s What is to be Done?8 Accompanying these texts have been new translations into English of Kautsky’s political writings, contained in Richard Day and Daniel Gaido’s Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: the Documentary Record and Ben Lewis’s Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism. The former contains Kautsky’s writings endorsing the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP during the Russian Revolution of 1905; the latter contains debates cited by the Bolsheviks in their ideological and strategic battles with their rivals.9

This essay also seeks to show that what has been accepted as gospel about Kautsky in Western and Soviet literature has been profoundly misleading. Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy sanctioned the reading of Kautsky as an exclusively positivistic, Darwinian vulgar-Marxist whose writings contained “not a whiff of the genuine materialist and revolutionary principles in Marxism.”10 It is in these writings that we see the origin of Kautsky as a strawman figure for “vulgar Marxism,” later invoked by Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Louis Althusser.11 Joseph Stalin’s Short Course in Marxism-Leninism is equally responsible for diminishing Kautsky. It argues that “the Bolshevik Party [the founding party of the Third International]… is a party of a new type fundamentally different from the Social Democratic parties of the Second International.”12 The whole history of the Bolsheviks as Social Democrats influenced by Kautsky was, as Stalin was wont to do, wholly erased. The flipside is scholarship regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Scant in its own right, the literature on the dictatorship of the proletariat has little to say regarding Kautsky’s writing on the subject. One major work, Hal Draper’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin, is almost entirely dismissive of Kautsky, presenting his use of the concept as little more than revolutionary window dressing for a reformist practice.13 John Ehrenberg’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: Marxism’s Theory of Socialist Democracy all but ignores Kautsky altogether.14  

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a legible concept without proper attention to Kautsky’s interventions. Effacing Kautsky’s contribution to this topic results in the absurd notion that Karl Marx had developed his entire political outlook in perfect form and that Lenin was the only person able to divine it. By contextualizing the space between Marx and Lenin, we can instead see how the dictatorship of the proletariat developed over time and functioned in different contexts. Given the conceptual character of the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, it can be clarified also through other political categories intimately bound up with it.

Adjacent Concepts: The Program, Intransigence, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Throughout his pre-First World War writings, Kautsky presents the dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of political rule by the working class that mediates the transition from capitalism to socialism. Two adjacent concepts, the minimum/maximum program and the strategy of intransigence, help to clarify Kautsky’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

The first section of classical Social Democratic political programs—the minimum section—enumerated reforms the party would campaign for when not in power.15 In the Erfurt Program of 1891, written with Eduard Bernstein, Kautsky provides precisely such an enumeration through its political demands.16 The forms of political freedom the party campaigned for were divided between civil rights and the democratization of state institutions.17 Civil rights took the form of universal suffrage alongside freedom of speech, press, association, and religion. Democratization of state institutions meant they would become increasingly staffed by and subordinated to the working class. This would mean replacement of the standing army with a people’s militia, secularization of education, free medical care, progressive tax policy, and a fair legal system. By enumerating these political demands, the party could present a vision of precisely what it believed in and what society would look like under a proletarian dictatorship. Kautsky also argued that achieving partial demands would increase the confidence of the working class to direct society as a whole. The concept of the minimum program persisted in Lenin’s thought as well. Even after the revolution of 1917, Lenin continued to insist that it was necessary to maintain the minimum program due to the possibility that the Bolsheviks could lose power and may have to start all over again.18

The maximum section of these programs enumerated the economic reforms that would transition capitalism to socialism under the direction of the proletariat. Workers’ protections would be first on the agenda in the form of the eight-hour day, abolition of child labor, prohibition of most night work, thirty-six hours of free time per week, and a guarantee that wages would always be paid in monetary wages. Plenty of the reforms outlined in these programs have been achieved in the twentieth century, however, the difference between contemporary reforms and the social democratic political vision can be found in who inaugurated them. 

It is in posing the question of who is inaugurating such reforms that the importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat comes to the fore. Rather than progressive reforms resulting from concessions to the working class, they would be part of a project that increasingly democratized society. The result would be precisely what Andreas Kalyvas describes in his theory of radical democracy: “establish[ing] the political superiority of the part that counts less over the part that counts more… not to exterminate the rich but to constitute relations of power and construct structures of authority that will privilege and benefit the poor in their ongoing political struggles…”19 Kautsky himself says much the same thing in The Social Revolution.  The abolition of unemployment, he felt, would result in the capitalist class “ceas[ing] to be their [the workers’] masters and exploiters”; instead, it would be increasingly subject to oversight by the majority of society.20 

Achieving the social-democratic demands of the minimum program, Kautsky believed, required a strategy of intransigence. This meant the party would refuse to take part in a government without the minimum demands having been fulfilled. Social democrats would campaign for their program in the periphery of political power in the familiar forms of political activity such as marches, protests, and raising awareness of issues through newspapers. In addition, they would raise awareness through their thriving alternative culture composed of sports clubs, beer halls, educational institutions, and libraries. This would allow enormous numbers of workers to be exposed to the ideas of Social Democracy while also allowing the party to retain an independent spirit. It followed that the SPD vehemently opposed the state and directed itself toward a political strategy centering the expansion of political freedom rather than the acquisition of existing state power.21 To seek out the latter would have made the social democrats responsible for running the institutions that they sought to abolish and which, according to the theory of class struggle, were meant to police the very people they claimed to represent.

However, this did not mean that social democrats would not take up political office. Kautsky’s resolution at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress declared that the parties of the Second International would only hold offices in state administration under exceptional conditions and that the individual representatives who did so would remain subordinate to the rank and file of the party.22 Social democrats found it acceptable to take up positions in representative bodies but not executive ones. In so doing, representatives such as August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht would use such positions as pulpits to spread the message of socialism. These resolutions are precisely what Lenin alludes to in describing the character of the revolutionary Social Democrat as a tribune of the people.23 To be a tribune is to be a party nominee or elected official responsible for confronting the state at the level of oratory and spreading the message of socialism. Intransigence, the orientation of the tribune, is, in short, the concrete articulation of the old First International motto, ‘the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class themselves.’24

Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin all presumed that the dictatorship of the proletariat is an interstitial form of political rule. For all of these thinkers, between capitalism and communism “lies the stage of the so-called Dictatorship of the Proletariat, when the latter has conquered political power but the new form of production is not yet fully developed and implemented.”25 The notion of an interstitial form of political rule is not original. In fact, it is quite ancient, having been borrowed from the Roman Republic.

Dictatorship subtended the structure of political life under the Roman Republic as a mechanism for nominating generals to be periodic dictators who would then bring order to the republic.26 The concept implies the presence of a crisis which the dictator must save society from. Given the broader context for Kautsky’s usage of the concept, the securitizing logic of dictatorship is rearticulated through the strategy of intransigence.27 In carrying out this strategy, the party waits for a crisis to emerge while it grows in strength and confidence. When the crisis emerges, the working class will be ready to instill order over society. The crisis-prone character of capitalism made the dictatorship of the proletariat emerge as a historical necessity for steering society out of the various economic upheavals that were emerging with increasing frequency. Further, it was Kautsky’s view that the period of dictatorship “is by no means [necessarily]… accompanied with violence and bloodshed.”28 Revolution did not have to be violent but depended entirely on context. Violence would only emerge if revanchist forces attempted to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat as they had done during the Paris Commune. Kautsky, in all likelihood, would have preferred the type of political revolution that swept the SPD into power in 1918 after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.29 Namely, a peaceful transition to power in the midst of a collapsing government and enormous support from the majority of the population in the form of workers’ organizations and electoral support. The difference, however, would have been the fulfillment of the minimum program and thus the subordination of state apparatuses to the working class.30

Pre-History of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Historically, the dictatorship of the proletariat had emerged sporadically while also being, according to Marx and Engels themselves, the most important aspect of their thought. Hal Draper identifies three periods and twelve “loci” where Marx and Engels use the concept, mainly in their reflections on the European revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871, as well as in their tutelage of the German Social Democrats.31 The most important among these writings was Marx’s letter to fellow revolutionary Joseph Weydemeyer. In it, Marx sought to correct the idea that he could be credited with the discovery of the concept of class struggle, which Marx claimed prior historians had already identified. Rather, what he identified was: 

(1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads the dictatorship of the proletariat, [and] (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.32 

Engels’s preface to The Civil War in France further elucidates the importance of the dictatorship in the conceptual terrain of early Marxism. Criticizing the right wing of the German Social Democrats, Engels argued:

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.33

It is essential to note the profound impact the Paris Commune had on the political programs of social democratic parties. Major aspects of these programs, including abolition of the standing army in favor of the worker’s militia, subordination of the police to the citizens, democratic centralism through the unicameral legislative body of the commune, recallability of officials, and political freedom, were all present during the Commune’s brief existence.34 The Paris Commune served as validation of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a key concept in Marx and Engels’s theory of history. It was proof positive for their belief that the proletariat was uniquely capable of directing society because their lack of property and ever-increasing size caused them to create new social forms outside of hegemonic society. This included but was not limited to political parties, trade unions, and mutual aid networks.

A final component worth mentioning of Marx’s articulation of the dictatorship of the proletariat is how it functions as a criticism directed at fellow 1848 revolutionary, Louis Auguste Blanqui. As Draper points out, Marx argues for the entire class of the proletariat to seize power. This counterposed itself to the conspiratorial minoritarian revolution imagined by Blanqui.35 Given this, the dictatorship of the proletariat has its beginnings in a call for radical, majoritarian democracy. The majoritarian and democratic model of dictatorship automatically assumes the presence of a program, an idea Marx contributed to in the form of the Communist Manifesto and the 1880 Program of the French Workers’ Party.36  

The German Social Democratic Party, The Erfurt Program, and the Struggle for the Republic

German Social Democracy emerged from the union of two predominant strains of late 19th century German socialist politics: Marxism and Lassallism. While Marx was the great theorist for the working class, Ferdinand Lassalle was its demagogic activist, campaigner, and organizer. The Marxists formed the Sozialedemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Worker’s Party of Germany, SDAP), led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The Lassalleans inhabited the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein (General German Workers’ Organization, ADAV), controlled from the top down by Jean-Baptisa von Schweizer. The Marxists called for, according to Gary Steenson, an executive committee elected by the rank and file membership, with no control over the party press.37 The party press would instead become a forum for open debate and discussion rather than simply a propaganda mill. Meanwhile, the Lassalleans sought to create a workers’ organization that could act as a constituency to pass legislation to improve the existing Bismarckian state on behalf of the working class. On top of a disinterest in working-class political independence, the ADAV did not unify around a political program but instead the figure of von Schweizer. In 1875, the SDAP and the ADAV unified into the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Gotha, Germany. This resulted in the Gotha Program, which Marx famously criticized in his Gothakritik (Critique of the Gotha Program) written the same year.38

Despite Marx’s criticisms of the Gotha Program, the unification of the two Social Democratic organizations was an enormous victory for the Marxist faction. Bebel and Liebknecht achieved their desired central committee structure, guaranteeing the party press would remain autonomous. Moreover, such reforms in the party meant that it would not be led by a cult of personality but would, for the coming decades, be unified by its program. Further, despite the Gotha Program’s Lassallean tenor, it set the stage for the hegemony of Marxists not only in the party, but in the whole Second International. This new party structure would allow the free flow of arguments, permitting both majority and minority views to be voiced. However, it did mean that Kautsky was essentially barred from ever holding office in the party, given his editorship of Die Neue Zeit. He nonetheless participated in the writing of political programs, to which we now turn.

In 1891, Kautsky wrote The Class Struggle as a supplemental text to the Erfurt Program. It presented the ideological outlook of Social Democracy and was published with the program. “It was,” according to Lars Lih, “the book one read to find out what it meant to be a Social Democrat.” None other than a young Vladimir Lenin translated the text into Russian in 1894.39 Kautsky’s strategic text discussed below, “Parliamentarism and Social Democracy,” as well as Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, were intimately connected to The Class Struggle. The Critique, while much older, had been hidden away, first by Engels and then by Bebel and Liebknecht. Marx’s Critique finally saw the light of day in the pages of Die Neue Zeit to provide authoritative backing to The Class Struggle in 1891.40 While “Parliamentarism” and Marx’s Critique contain direct references to the dictatorship of the proletariat, The Class Struggle does not.

The absence of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a phrase in The Class Struggle did not mean its absence as a concept but instead an analogous term. Engels himself was aware of this, stating in his critique of the draft program that Kautsky and Bernstein could still call for “the concentration of all political power in the hands of the people’s representatives.”41 Instead of explicitly referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat, Kautsky uses the language of democratic republicanism. This reveals the degree to which socialist thought during the late 19th century saw itself as the continuation of older radical traditions.

The language of republicanism and its understanding of power relations is most explicit in the fifth section of “The Commonwealth of the Future,” the chapter of the Erfurt Program focused on State Socialism and Social Democracy. Here, Kautsky argues that the nationalization of industry is not automatically socialism, as any act of doing so still presupposes that “the nationalizing of industries [will not go] further than the interests of the ruling classes demanded…”42 This is counterposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is clearly alluded to when he uses the term “co-operative commonwealth.”  The clearest example is this passage:

The state will not cease to be a capitalist institution until the proletariat, the working class, has become the ruling class; not until then will it become possible to turn it into the co-operative commonwealth.43 [emphasis my own]

At the level of theory, the two quoted sentences repeat what Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit describe as the critique of domination central to civic republicanism.44 That is, the argument that one is not free so long as they play no part in defining the parameters of how the society they inhabit operates. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie means that a small majority retains the right to veto any alteration to society rather than the majority. In other words, the capitalist class decides the rules of a game everyone else is forced to play. Opposed to this would be the dictatorship of the proletariat, wherein the nationalization of industry by a political order determined by proletarian interests rather than that of the bourgeoisie would result in cooperative production by factory councils on a mass scale. Of course, Kautsky and his fellow social democratic thinkers were rarely so specific. The point was simply that the nature of the proletariat as a highly collaborative workforce meant that its rule would lead to universal freedom rather than more forms of arbitrary domination.  

A more explicitly republican document from the same period as the Erfurt Program, and which has only recently been excavated by Lars Lih and translated by Ben Lewis, is Kautsky’s article “Parliamentarism and Social Democracy.” Published in Die Neue Zeit soon after the Erfurt Program, “Parliamentarism and Social Democracy” was a general outline of the political strategy of Social Democracy—especially, as the title would suggest, in relation to representative democracy. According to Lih, “the book brings together better than anywhere the logic behind what the Russians labeled the strategy of proletarian hegemony in the democratic revolution.”45 In fact, this article is the true origin of Lenin’s What is to be Done?, as it argued a decade earlier for the idea of “Social-Democratic guidance of the class struggle of the proletariat…”46

“Parliamentarism” was intended as a critique of direct democracy and the call for the abolition of any form of representative politics developed by one of the founders of the SDAP, Moritz Rittinghausen.47 Kautsky’s argument against direct democracy, conceived by Rittinghausen as the distribution of voting on legislation to ten thousand assemblies rather than a single unicameral legislature, was that it would not simplify legislative activity but instead confuse it.48 The problem is that legislation involves just as much the writing and revision of laws as it does voting on them. Given that assemblies would only vote “yes” or “no” in Rittinghausen’s “direct” form of democracy, says Kautsky, it would result in the population not having any role in the deliberation or implementation of new laws.49 Rittinghausen, in Kautsky’s view, fetishizes a political form, while neglecting issues of political power. 

Rather than direct democracy, Kautsky argues for representative democracy subordinated to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky states explicitly that “a real parliamentary regime can be just as well an instrument for the dictatorship of the proletariat as it is an instrument for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”50 The social class that held veto power over the organization of political institutions determined the character of the state. Such political institutions were therefore not neutral but rather contested ground among various classes. Lenin repeated the logic of Kautsky’s argument in his own writings on the dictatorship of the proletariat, stating, “the state is only a weapon 52 Although Lenin’s later criticisms of Kautsky in The State and Revolution are scathing, it is worth noting, to echo Lih, that there is no reason why soviet democracy should be counterposed to what Kautsky described as representative democracy, given that they were councils of elected deputies from the various political parties composed of workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants.53 The last of those groups mentioned, the peasantry, was an extremely important subject in both Germany and Russia. We therefore turn to what is known as the agrarian debates in the history of social democracy. 

The Agrarian Debate

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of central Europe was predominantly rural but undergoing seismic shifts in class composition. Adam Tooze notes that the emerging global economy of the period and its impact on rural populations “was one of the fundamental questions facing European societies…”54 The agrarian question therefore had a major impact on the formation of Kautsky’s thinking on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky’s 1895 series of articles entitled “Unser Neuestes Programm” in Die Neue Zeit articulated precisely how social democratic politics addressed agrarian policy.55 This article criticized the SPD Agrarian Commission of the same year for putting forward Lassallean state-socialist demands such as “state assistance to landowners in the form of nationalized mortgages, nationalized insurance, and lowered interest rates.”56 

While it is more than likely Kautsky agreed with some of the programmatic demands developed by the commission, especially the extension of labor rights to rural workers, Kautsky mainly disagreed with the Lassallean character of the proposals. Nationalized mortgages and insurance, Kautsky argued, would result in support by the peasants for the large landowning class. By making peasants dependent on state-backed mortgages and insurance, they would not support the working class in its struggle to overthrow the Bismarckian state.57 Kautsky claimed that only through the dictatorship of the proletariat would such reforms be acceptable, drawing the peasantry to support the revolutionary movement. Any alliance between the proletariat and peasantry had to be predicated on the proletariat taking responsibility for reforms that would benefit the peasantry. If this was achieved, the peasantry would rise to the defense of the revolution if it came under attack by forces allied with the bourgeoisie. This series of articles also set the stage for a full-length book project, The Agrarian Question.

The Agrarian Question recapitulates Kautsky’s arguments from 1895 while also expanding and enriching his views on the dictatorship of the proletariat. In The Agrarian Question, Kautsky discussed the idea of the transformation of the “police state” to the “cultural state.”58 The “police state” referred specifically to a state whose entire institutional apparatus was directed toward the defense of private property. When social democrats called for the abolition of the standing army, the object was the abolition of the “police state.” The working class stood on the other side, taking over the state and taking responsibility for agrarian reforms. This would lead to the formation of a “cultural state.” The concept of the “cultural state” appears as a stand-in for the dictatorship of the proletariat while also clarifying Kaustky’s view of the future state. Kautsky’s usage points to the idea of the state under socialism as increasingly subordinated to society, or, the alternative institutions created by the workers and peasants. These institutions ranged from mutual aid networks to sports clubs, with the main commonality being that they were either separate or at least semi-autonomous from the state.59

Much of the Agrarian Question is a recapitulation of the Erfurt Program, but both it and the prior articles on the same subject clarify the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and non-proletarian classes. The arguments presented in these texts furnish what eventually became the Leninist theory of the “smychka”: unifying the struggle of the proletariat with that of the peasantry.60 Donald has also demonstrated that The Agrarian Question was the text in Russia the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party quoted at each other to back their arguments.61 However, the agrarian debates were primarily among Germans in the leadership of the SPD, a political terrain that saw a seismic shift when a leading member of the Marxist faction, Eduard Bernstein, defected to the Lassallean faction. This led to the momentous debate in German Social Democracy known as the “revisionist controversy.”

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Revisionist Controversy

In 1896, Eduard Bernstein inaugurated the revisionist controversy by abandoning Marxism and embracing Lassallism. Bernstein had studied alongside Kautsky under Engels, and the two were extremely close co-thinkers. However, as H. and J.M. Tudor describe, Bernstein’s political engagements became increasingly academic and politically disengaged, moving more towards the conservatism of the German neo-Kantian turn and the gradualist politics of English Fabianism.62 Bernstein’s abandonment of Marxism was tied primarily to the need to perpetuate the existence of the party rather than direct it toward social revolution. “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything” became the motto of Bernstein’s followers.63 Social Democrats should therefore collaborate with whichever forces in society that would allow them to gain political victories. It is in this context that the idea of intransigence and its relation to the dictatorship of the proletariat was further extended in Kautsky’s writings.

An important article within the revisionist controversy was Kautsky’s “The Republic and Social Democracy in France.” In it, Kautsky explicitly binds intransigence and the dictatorship of the proletariat together.64 He did so by responding to a member of the revisionist faction of the SPD, Kurt Eisner. Eisner urged the Second International to fight for a republic so as to alleviate the “evil” of class contradiction by appealing to an indeterminate faction of the bourgeoisie. According to this logic, sections of the bourgeoisie would be amenable to Social Democracy because it was the form politics takes in bourgeois society.65 

Kautsky did not take issue with the notion that the Second International should struggle for a republic. However, he took issue with the motivation behind Eisner’s argument. A republic, according to Kautsky, was not desirable because it resolved class contradiction but rather because it allowed it to be heightened and made explicit. Class contradiction would be made explicit through the struggle for political freedom, allowing the working class to organize itself openly. To this end, Kautsky here urges the need for political intransigence, stating “[t]he conquest of state power by the proletariat therefore does not simply mean the conquest of the government ministries, which then, without further ado, administers the previous means of rule…”66 The crisis-prone character of capitalism would create opportunities for the organized working class to acquire concessions from the state as a prelude to its conquest of power. This would then inaugurate a wholly new form of rule, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky debated Eisner rather than Bernstein in order to avoid attacking one of his closest friends.67 However, a direct confrontation was inevitable. 

Just as The Agrarian Question consolidated Kautsky’s views on social democracy’s relationship to the peasantry, The Social Revolution consolidated his views on revolutionary politics as a whole. It also shares a similarity with the Erfurt Program, as it too lacks the explicit usage of the term dictatorship of the proletariat. The text was Kautsky’s long-awaited response to Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism, which presented the idea of socialism as something that emerged gradually. Kautsky argued that Bernstein’s theorization was not evolutionary, as evolution is not gradual but rather occurs in stops and starts. In keeping with the naturalist zeitgeist of the time, Kautsky analogizes revolution to the gradual process of gestation and the eruption of birth.68 

The Social Revolution discussed what would occur under the dictatorship of the proletariat by examining the consolidation of production alongside universal employment. Here, Kautsky argued that a major historically specific dynamic of capitalist society is unemployment, due to workers being made increasingly superfluous thanks to the development of the productive forces.69 To take political power meant, therefore, to socialize production in such a way that there would be full employment. This would result in necessary labor being so reduced, due to the already existing productivity of capitalist infrastructure, that it amounted to the abolition of work. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the political means for socializing production and thus abolishing the conditions necessary for the reproduction of the working class. However, for that to occur, a revolution would have to happen. In Russia in 1905, Kautsky’s ideas would finally be applied in a revolutionary context, resulting in major changes to his thinking.

Kautsky on the Russian Revolution of 1905

Although socialist politics had existed in Russia since the end of the 19th century, articulated by figures such as Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, and practiced in the form of Narodnik and Anarchist politics, Social Democracy was in its infancy up until the revolution of 1905. The revolution itself was precipitated by the social forces that drove the popularity of the Narodniks and Anarchists. Increasingly organized agrarian movements were dissatisfied with medieval legal structures keeping them bound to land. Unionization among the nascent urban working class was made illegal. Worse still, unemployed and disillusioned soldiers had returned from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Finally, Russia had, since the beginning of the 19th century, seen the rise of a restless and highly educated intelligentsiya, which had never been reliable supporters of the Romanov dynasty.

In this context, figures such as Vera Zasulich, Georgi Plekhanov, Alexander Bogdanov, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin would emerge as the leading figures of Russian Social Democracy. Moreover, all of these thinkers imported the Marxist political strategy formulated by Kautsky into Russia, such as the struggle for political freedom.70 Moreover, the features familiar to anyone from the 1917 revolution will find nascent forms in 1905. Large agrarian political parties, revolutionary Social Democrats, and soviet workers’ councils are just some of those features. Kautsky’s response to 1905, however, differed heavily from his response to the 1917 revolution. 

Given Kautsky’s later condemnation of Bolshevik revolution, one would never have expected to find writings of his that outline the revolutionary strategy enacted a decade later.71 However, it is in his writings on Russia that Kautsky does precisely that. In terms of taking power, Kautsky here argued that “it is very possible that in the course of the revolution victory will fall to the [Russian] Social Democratic [Labor] Party [RSDLP].”72 The party apparatus which represents the working class may have to take power rather than the working class itself in Russia because the working class was simply too small compared to Russia’s enormous peasant population.73 This was a major addendum to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat being a dictatorship articulated through a commune state composed of a plurality of worker’s organizations such as Paris in 1870, this would be a dictatorship articulated through a single political party. This likely appeared as a legible idea to Kautsky and his Russian followers because the SPD had become itself hegemonic in Germany. Though single party rule was neither the goal nor what initially happened in 1917, it does explain why such an eventuality was acceptable in the Russian context. When such a possibility occurred, however, Kautsky condemned it. Bolsheviks responded by pointing out that they owed their entire political outlook to Kautsky.

In his 1924 Paths to the Russian Revolution, Karl Radek described Kautsky as “solidly with the Bolsheviks” from 1905 to 1907.74 Kautsky claimed that he sided with the Menshevik argument that Russia required a bourgeois revolution prior to a proletarian revolution.75 Radek quoted Kautsky’s own arguments at Kautsky to dispel such an argument. By identifying a continuity from the 1905 to the 1917 revolution, Radek presents the view that it was Kautsky that broke with his own thought rather than the Bolsheviks breaking from Kautsky.

Conclusion

After the revolution of 1917 and the rise of Weimar Germany, the revolutionary characteristics of Kautsky’s thought rapidly began to disappear. He tangled with Lenin and Leon Trotsky in his condemnations of the October Revolution, something he would continue to do until his death in 1938. The measures that the Bolsheviks took to cement their power, especially the violence they committed, were too much for Kautsky to stomach. Kautsky had long opposed violence because he viewed it as the strategy of bourgeois revolution as had been the case in the French Revolution.76 More importantly, Kautsky’s rejection of the Bolshevik revolution was due to his own inability to find relevance in a world fractured by the First World War.

In the 1920 preface to The Road to Power, he argues explicitly that it would be acceptable to enter into coalition with bourgeois democratic forces if the Social Democratic party were sufficiently organized.77 In essence, this meant that the strategy of intransigence was abandoned. Doing so would automatically mean that the Marxist minimum/maximum program and especially the dictatorship of the proletariat were abandoned as well. It is as if the structural integrity of Kautsky’s thought had begun to disintegrate. Few comments made Kautsky’s turn toward revisionism clearer than the transition found in his language on what constituted the “light and air” of the working class; “political freedom” was substituted with “unity.” It may have taken two decades, but Kautsky had come to adopt Bernstein’s language of the movement being everything, the goal being nothing.

 

 

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  1. Note: the first appearance of this nickname was likely given to him by a political rival, the German trade unionist Joseph Lebedour, in 1894. Mike Macnair ed., Karl Kautsky on Colonialism, trans. Ben Lewis and Maciej Zurowski (November Publications, 2013), 7.
  2. For a survey of the historiography on Kautsky, see: Ben Lewis, Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism (Brill, 2018), 5-16.
  3. Ibid, 5.
  4. Gary Steenson, Karl Kautsky, 1854-1938: Marxism in the Classical Years (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), 187.
  5. Vernon Lidtke, Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878-1890, (Princeton University Press, 1966), 17.
  6. Note: This relates to the recent re-emergence of literature regarding the relationship between Civic Republican and Marxist thought. Further reading: William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton University Press, 2016); Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Political and Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2024).
  7. Moira Donald, Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists, 1900-1924 (Yale University Press, 1993).
  8. Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? In Context (Brill, 2008).
  9. Daniel Gaido and Richard Day, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution (Brill, 2009).
  10. Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (Monthly Review Press, 1970), 64.
  11. Edward Baring, “Who Are You Calling Vulgar? Lukács, Kautsky, and the Beginnings of ‘Western Marxism’, Rethinking Marxism 35, no. 4 (Aug. 31, 2023), 467-483, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.224135.
  12. Joseph Stalin, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (International Publishers, 1939), 142.
  13. Hal Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat From Marx to Lenin (Monthly Review Press, 1987), 53-58.
  14. John Ehrenberg, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: Marxism’s Theory of Socialist Democracy (Routledge, 1992), 126.
  15. Note: with regards to terminology, the programs of early Social Democracy more often used the word “demand” rather than “reform.” It should therefore be understood that my own use of the word “reform” should be seen as presuming the possibility for a demand to become a reform in the possibility that the working class takes power. Furthermore, “reform” is not an allusion to the political practice of “reformism” but rather any alteration to political activity regardless of the ideology inaugurating the reform.
  16. H. Tudor and J.M. Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896-1898 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 7.
  17. Gary Steenson, Not One Man! Not One Penny!: German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 249-250.
  18. Vladimir Lenin, “Revisions to the Party Program”, Collected Works Volume 26 (Progress Publishers, 1972), 149-172.
  19. Andreas Kalyvas, “Democracy and the poor: Prolegomena to a radical theory of democracy,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 26, no. 4 (2019), https:doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12451.
  20. Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution, trans. A.M. and May Wood Simmons (Charles H. Kerr, 1903), 87-88.
  21. Lewis, Karl Kautsky, 22.
  22. Karl Kautsky, “Kautsky Resolution,” Flashlights of the Amsterdam International Congress, 1904, ed. Daniel de Leon (1904), 93-94.
  23. Lenin, Lih ed., “What is to be Done?” in Lenin Rediscovered, 746.
  24. International Working Man’s Association, “General Rules, October 1864,” Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men’s International Association (November 1864).
  25. Karl Kautsky, “Unser Neuestes Programm”, Die Neue Zeit, (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Revue des geistigen und öffentlichen Lebens, 13.1894-95), 612; Quoted in H. Kendall Rogers, Before the Revisionist Controversy: Kautsky, Bernstein, and the Meaning of Marxism, 1895-1898 (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1992), 88.
  26. Livy, History of Rome Book I-II (Harvard University Press, 1951), 275-325.
  27. In mind here regarding securitization is that provided by Andreas Kalyvas’s description of Lenin’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which I am attempting to demonstrate is also present in Kautsky, albeit without the context generating changes to it. Andreas Kalyvas, “Dictatorship,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 5, https://www.politicalconcepts.org/dictatorship-andreas-kalyvas/.
  28. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program), tran. by William E. Bohn (Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1910), 90-91.
  29. Gary Steenson, “Not One Man! Not One Penny!”: German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 53; Susanne Miller and Heinrich Potthoff, A History of German Social Democracy: From 1848 to the Present, trans. by J.A. Underwood (Berg Publishers, 1986), 64-65.
  30. Karl Kautsky, “Driving the Revolution Forward”, Freiheit no. 79, December 29 1918, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/12/forward.html.
  31. Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 28.
  32. Karl Marx, “Letter to J. Weydemeyer in New York,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Volume 39: Letters, 1852-1855 (Progress Publishers, 1983), 62-65.
  33. Frederick Engels, “Introduction to the Civil War in France,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Volume 27, Frederick Engels, 1890-1895 (Progress Publishers, 1991), 191.
  34. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Volume 22: Marx and Engels 1870-1871 (Progress Publishers, 1986), 331.
  35. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume 3: The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (Monthly Review Press, 1986), 38-39.
  36. Karl Marx, “Preamble to the Programme of the French Workers’ Party,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Volume 24: Marx and Engels 1874-1883, (Progress Publishers, 1986), 340-341.
  37. Steenson, 21.
  38. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” MECW Vol. 24: 1874-1883, 75-99.
  39. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 74.
  40. William Harvey Maehl, August Bebel: Shadow Emperor of the German Workers (American Philosophical Society), 110-111.
  41. Friedrich Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Volume 27: Engels 1890-1895 (Progress Publishers, 1990), 227.
  42. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 110.
  43. Ibid.
  44. Contemporary articulations of this line of thought are: Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Clarendon Press, 1997).
  45. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 75.
  46. Lenin, Lih, “What is to be Done”, Lenin Rediscovered, 802.
  47. Kautsky, Lewis, “Parliamentarism and Social Democracy”, Karl Kautsky, 92.
  48. Ibid, 98.
  49. Ibid, 98-99.
  50. Ibid, 139.
  52. of the proletariat in its class struggle” and further, when discussing the soviets, described them as “particular instruments of embryonic revolutionary authority.”51Vladimir Lenin, “A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship,” Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 31, 358; “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” The Lenin Anthology, ed. by Robert Tucker (W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), 490.
  53. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 75.
  54. Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Viking Press, 2006), 167.
  55. Kautsky, “Unser Neuestes Programm.”
  56. H. Kendall Rogers, Before the Revisionist Controversy, 85-86.
  57. Kautsky, “Unser Neuestes Programm,” 612.
  58. Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question: in Two Volumes (Zwan Publications, 1988), 410-412.
  59. Note: the alternative culture of the German working class has been particularly well documented in Vernon Lidtke’s The Alternative Culture and Andrew Bonnell’s The People’s Stage in Imperial Germany. Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford University Press, 1985); Andrew Bonnell The People’s Stage in Imperial Germany: Social Democracy and Culture 1890-1914 (Taurus Academic Studies, 2005).
  60. Donald, Marxism and Revolution, 98.
  61. Ibid, 150-157.
  62. Tudor and Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy, 11.
  63. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, trans. Edith C. Harvey (Schocken Books, 1963), 202; Tudor & Tudor, Marxism and Social Democracy, 8.
  64. Karl Kautsky, “The Republic and Social Democracy in France,” in Lewis, Karl Kautsky, 157-269.
  65. Kautsky, “Republic,” Lewis, Karl Kautsky, 160.
  66. Kautsky, “Republic,” Lewis, Karl Kautsky, 177.
  67. Christina Morina, The Invention of Marxism: How an Idea Changed the World (Oxford University Press, 2023), 323.
  68. Kautsky, The Social Revolution, 15-16.
  69. Ibid, 87-88.
  70. Note: a particularly important example of this is how Lenin and the Bolsheviks navigated the Duma Elections. August Nimtz, The Ballots, the Streets – or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution (Haymarket, 2019).
  71. Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (National Labor Press, 1919).
  72. Karl Kautsky, “The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and Its Prospects,” in Day & Gaido, Witnesses, 606.
  73. Ibid.
  74. Karl Radek, “Paths of the Russian Revolution,” in In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings, 1917–1923, edited by Al Richardson (Porcupine Press, 1995), 35–75.
  75. Karl Kautsky, Von der Demokratie zur Staatssklaverei: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Trotzki, transcribed by J.L.W., Marxist Internet Archive (Verlagsgenossenschaft Freiheit, 1921), 121.
  76. Jean-Numa Ducange, The French Revolution and Social Democracy: the Transmission of History and its Political Uses in Germany and Austria, 1889-1934 (Brill, 2018), 234.
  77. Karl Kautsky, The Road to Power (Humanities Press, 1996), lxii.