Karl Kautsky
1) His Biography:
Karl Kautsky was born in Prague into a creative, middle-class family; his parents were Johann Kautsky, a Czech scenic designer, and Minna née Jaich, an Austrian writer and actress. When Kautsky was seven years old, the family relocated to Vienna. In 1874, he began studying history, philosophy, and economics at the University of Vienna. In 1875, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). He joined a group of German socialists in Zürich in 1880 that Karl Höchberg financially supported, and which smuggled socialist literature into Germany during the Anti-Socialist Laws period (1878–1890).
The Stuttgart-based monthly Die Neue Zeit (“The New Times”) was established by Kautsky in 1883; it changed its format to a weekly in 1890. Up until September 1917, he was the magazine’s editor; this provided him with a solid source of money and allowed him to spread Marxism. He lived in London between 1885 and 1890, where he grew close to Friedrich Engels. When Engels tasked him with editing Marx’s three-volume opus Theories of Surplus Value in 1888, his reputation as a leading Marxist theorist was secured. Along with August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein, he co-wrote the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s (SPD) Erfurt Program in 1891. Engels was notable for being present to denounce the opportunist and non-Marxist nature of the Erfurt programme.
After Engels passed away in 1895, Kautsky rose to prominence as one of Marxism’s most significant and influential theorists, representing the party’s mainstream alongside August Bebel and developing a Marxist theory of imperialism. In the late 1890s, when Bernstein questioned the classic Marxist view that revolution was necessary, Kautsky condemned him, claiming that Bernstein’s emphasis on the moral underpinnings of Socialism had led to a demand for an alliance with the “progressive” bourgeoisie and a non-class approach.
Kautsky, who was not a member of the German Social-Democrat delegation but attended their meetings, advised abstaining from the vote on war credits in the Reichstag in 1914. According to Kautsky, Germany was fighting a defensive conflict to counter the threat posed by Czarist Russia. However, approximately ten months into the conflict, when it was clear that it would be a protracted, horrifyingly bloody, and expensive struggle, he and Eduard Bernstein and Hugo Haase published a statement denouncing the pro-war SPD leaders and the German government’s annexationist objectives.
He withdrew from the SPD in 1917 to join the German Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which was made up of socialists who opposed the war. In the short-lived SPD-USPD revolutionary administration that followed Germany’s November Revolution, Kautsky attempted to collect papers that demonstrated Imperial Germany’s war crimes while serving as the undersecretary of state in the Foreign Office.
When the USPD split in 1920, he rejoined the SPD together with a small portion of USPD. He travelled to Georgia in 1920 and penned a book about the Democratic Republic of Georgia, which was still a separate country from Bolshevik Russia at the time. By the time it was published in 1921, the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic had been imposed by the Bolsheviks, the Red Army had invaded Georgia, and the Georgian Civil War had had a significant impact on Georgia. Due to the devastating nature of the Georgian invasion and the limited political influence that the proletariat actually had in Soviet Russia at that time, Kautsky believed that the Soviet Union had already transformed into an imperialist state.
The German Social Democratic Party’s party platform, which was adopted in Heidelberg (1925), was aided by Kautsky. He relocated back to Vienna with his family in 1924, when he was 70 years old, and stayed there until 1938. Hitler fled to Czechoslovakia during the Anschluss and then travelled by plane to Amsterdam, where he passed away the following year. Longtime resident of Berlin-Friedenau, Karl Kautsky’s wife, Luise, had a close friendship with Rosa Luxemburg, who also resided in Friedenau. Kautsky’s residence at Saarstraße is commemorated by a plaque.
Bolshevist control in Russia was discussed in Kautsky’s collection of writings, Social Democracy vs. Communism. He viewed the Bolsheviks (or Communists) as a nefarious group that had seized control in a coup and started revolutionary changes in Russia that had no practical economic justification. He contended that instead, a bureaucracy-dominated society emerged, whose sufferings eclipsed the issues with Western capitalism. On October 17, 1938, Kautsky passed away in Amsterdam. Benedikt Kautsky, his son, suffered seven years in a concentration camp, and Luise Kautsky, his wife, was killed in Auschwitz.
2) Main Works:
The Class Struggle:
Karl Kautsky published a book-length work titled The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) in 1892. The short 1891 Erfurt Program was the subject of this official SPD commentary, written by Kautsky, party founder August Bebel, and Eduard Bernstein, and it was originally published in Stuttgart. It was the foundational document for orthodox marxism, and it still is today.
Forerunners of Modern Socialism:
The four-volume work, Forerunners of Modern Socialism, edited by Karl Kautsky, traces the development of early communist and socialist theories. It features contributions by notable Second International thinkers such Eduard Bernstein, Paul Lafargue, C. Hugo, Franz Mehring, and Georgii Plekhanov.
Road to Power:
Chapter 1 of Kautsky’s book makes the case that, contrary to what some on the Left, most notably Eduard Bernstein, claimed, the time for revolution has not yet passed. According to Kautsky, Bismarck directed the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary fervour toward his plans to depose “a few German princes from their thrones”, topple the French Empire, and encourage Italian unification. The partnership of the state and bourgeoisie stopped the proletariat’s growth and prevented revolution. In 1904, Kautsky foresaw a workers’ uprising in Russia that would unite with the capitalists to establish a representative government. In 1905, a revolution prompted the Tsar to form the Duma, or Parliament. He continued by noting and foreseeing the continuation of political awakenings in Turkey, China, India, Egypt, Morocco, and China. He asserted that, with the exception of Russia, a violent revolution was unlikely to occur in Europe due to the power of contemporary armies. The will itself is not free, according to Kautsky’s argument in chapters IV and V, hence Marxism is a historical determinism.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat:
Karl Kautsky, a well-known Marxist, published a paper titled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in 1918. In establishing the Russian SFSR, the Bolsheviks, it is claimed in the essay, forwent democracy in favour of armed power. The conflict between the two socialist movements—Bolshevism and non-Bolshevism, according to Kautsky—”is not based on small personal jealousies; it is the clashing of two fundamentally distinct methods, that of democracy and that of dictatorship”. The Bolshevik concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat”, according to Kautsky, “does not promise good results for the proletariat, either from the standpoint of theory or from that of the special Russian conditions”.
Foundations of Christianity:
Kautsky hoped that the book would be “a powerful weapon in the struggles of the present, in order to hasten the attainment of a better future” in his prologue. Using both pagan and Christian sources, he started his investigation by looking for proof that “the person of Jesus” actually existed. The materialist depiction of the ancient Roman civilization that gave rise to early Christianity fills the next twelve chapters. The history of the Jewish people up until the advent of Christianity was then described by Kautsky.
3) Main Themes:
A Passive Revolution:
A history of representative democracy titled Parliamentarism and Democracy, written by Kautsky in 1894, defended parliamentary democracy against direct democratic forms like referendums and municipal assemblies. He also made the crucial claim that parliamentary democracy could be used to “serve the most diverse class interests” rather than being a purely capitalist system of government. A real parliamentary system might serve as an instrument for the proletariat’s dictatorship just as well as it could serve as an instrument for the bourgeoisie’s, according to Kautsky. He continued by criticising anarchists for seeking to topple the government.
With Kautsky’s support for parliamentarism, the SPD was destined to see the birth of even stronger right-wing currents. Eduard Bernstein started an open war against the Kautsky associated Marxist “orthodoxy” of the SPD in 1899 after publishing his book Evolutionary Socialism. Together with Kautsky, Bernstein had drafted the SPD’s “minimum programme” of urgent demands, the Erfurt Programme. Evolutionary Socialism promoted in theory what the party increasingly practised: limited parliamentary and trade union action to enact limited reforms.
The ideologies of Bernstein and his adherents were a philosophical reflection of the bureaucratic interests of the labour unions and the overtly class-collaborationist politics of individuals like Georg von Vollmar of the Bavarian SPD. In order to make the party more appealing to the liberal middle class and the peasantry, and to pave the path for coalition administrations with their political representatives, Vollmar had opposed the Erfurt Programme.
After hesitating for a moment, Kautsky retaliated against this new political trend inside the SPD. Both seasoned party leader August Bebel and new radicals like Rosa Luxemburg and Alexander Parvus supported him. Bernstein was charged with “revisionism,” which is the rejection of Marxism’s core principles. Kautsky attacked Bernstein’s open reformism, contested populist overtures to the middle class and peasantry, and upheld the working class’s right to pursue its own political agenda. He criticised gradualist “evolutionary socialism” as being utopian in The Social Revolution, which was published in 1902.
However, Kautsky’s alternative was a wholly passive political approach, despite these criticisms of Berstein’s evolutionary socialism. His own theory of social change was supported by the conviction that socialism will inevitably emerge as a byproduct of capitalism’s economic growth. The working class would expand and become more organised as capitalist industry expanded; as it did so, class consciousness would also develop; and as it did so, the number of votes for the SPD would increase.
An overwhelming socialist majority in the legislature and the start of the socialist reconstruction of society would result from this unstoppable growth. As the last term in a mechanical social process rooted in the rise of capitalism, the party consequently assumed a passive function. When he stated that the SPD “is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party,” Kautsky encapsulated this philosophy. We are aware that only a revolution will allow us to achieve our objective. Additionally, we are aware that our ability to spark this revolution is as limited as that of our adversary to do so.
Revisionism seems to have lost ground within the party by 1904. But the left’s apparent win was only fleeting. Even as party officials gave Marxist orthodoxy lip service, reformist and electoralist techniques grew in popularity. Indeed, despite what the heated discussion about revisionism at the party may have led one to believe, Bernstein and Kautsky had much more in agreement than that. I absolutely agree with you that in England the road to the creation of a socialist society is open without a revolution, Kautsky had written to Bernstein in 1898, before he had made the decision to take up the fight against revisionism. So, despite criticising Bernstein’s overt rejection of revolution, he did not do so in a way that posed a threat to reformist methods.
After a few years, Kautsky seemed to shift to the left as a result of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the intensifying class division in Germany. Workers in Germany displayed a new combativeness as a result of the massive upheaval that swept the Russian Empire. Kautsky had anticipated the Russian Empire’s revolution and the working class’s dominant position within it, in contrast to the leaders of the right-wing Menshevik branch of the Russian socialist movement, such as Georgi Plekhanov. He anticipated that it would exacerbate class tensions in the rest of Europe. Interestingly, he also asserted that developments in Russia demonstrated that states with slower economic growth rates than the major capitalist nations could bypass the stages of development that those more established economies had undergone.
He also had an understanding of the peasantry’s function, stating that “the Russian and the French Revolutions will be alike in that the breaking up of the great private landed estates will constitute a tie that will bind the peasants indissolubly to the revolution”. However, he ultimately contended that the 1905 Revolution’s goals should be restricted to achieving bourgeois democracy due to Russia’s underdeveloped capitalism. Furthermore, Kautsky acted far more cautiously closer to home, notwithstanding how extreme his views on the Russian revolution were.
The Road to Power?
The SPD lost 38 seats in the Reichstag in the general election of 1907, marking the party’s first significant electoral defeat since the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws. The election’s most important subject was colonial policy, which gained attention after troops brutally put down a rebellion in Germany’s territory in South West Africa (now Namibia). The SPD had fought colonialism and denounced the atrocities. While the working class maintained the foundation of this, the middle class abandoned it.
The right wing of the party, led by Gustav Noske and supported by the union bosses, accused the left of being to blame for the defeats and demanded a more nationalistic stance. Kautsky disagreed, contending that the election had strengthened the party’s working-class base politically. He openly criticised Bernstein’s support for colonialism at the Socialist International convention that was held that year in Stuttgart. Bebel and the party leadership began to work more closely with the revisionists and the union bureaucracy after this, though. The Road to Power was written by Kautsky in the aftermath of these incidents and the failure of Russia’s 1905 Revolution. Some people still consider this book to be his most extreme creation. Some Bolshevik officials still viewed it as a revolutionary manifesto even after his fall from favour among the revolutionary left. Yet, was it?
Two sociological trends, according to Kautsky’s argument in The Road to Power, are ushering in “a new period of social revolutions.” First, the most powerful national capitalist classes were experiencing imperialist tensions as a result of the concentration and centralization of capital. Second, the labour movement was becoming more powerful, which would trigger significant class conflicts. The interests of the working class could no longer be advanced solely through union activity. Employers organised themselves better. Prices were rising more quickly than unions could secure wage increases due to the rise of monopoly capitalism, tariffs, and greater taxation to finance the weapons race. Despite this extreme prediction, Kautsky remained ambiguous about the nature of the coming revolution. Although Kautsky’s descriptions of the objective development pointed more strongly toward revolution than his earlier writings, the historian Carl Schorske says that “his view of the function of the proletariat had developed towards passivity.”
The Road to Power author Kautsky’s perspective on mass strikes served as one indicator of this. Mass strikes were to be used as a last resort when the ruling class attempted to undermine parliamentary democracy, as “[d]irect action] by the trade unions can only serve as a supplement and reinforcement, not as a substitute for the parliamentary activity of the labour parties,” according to the author. A general strike would need to be closely supervised from above even if it were used. Even though he acknowledged the crucial role that mass strikes had played during the 1905 Revolution, he never regarded them as a viable alternative to electoralism.
In debate with Luxemburg, who emphasised the significance of the mass strike as a means of boosting the working class’s confidence and understanding of its own collective strength, Kautsky’s views on the mass strike were refined. The division between politics and economics, which Luxemburg saw as the core of reformism, would need to be overcome, she claimed in her booklet The Mass Strike.
There was a fundamental consistency in Kautsky’s politics even when he appeared to be at his most extreme. The growth of capitalism ultimately led to social upheaval, which could only be brought about by parliament. As opposed to Blanc’s assertion that Kautsky’s path to power was “a path to an anti-capitalist rupture,” Kautsky’s ascent to power was gradual and slow. The Road to Power’s extreme stance, however, enraged the SPD executive, who attempted to stop the book from being published by the party, as well as the more aggressive and conservative union leaders.
Even though Kautsky prevailed in that specific conflict, he gradually made concessions to the openly reformist forces that were now in charge of the party. Kautsky did reject the revisionists’ resurrected calls for a partnership with the liberal capitalist parties on issues of taxation and electoral reform. This defence of the SPD’s political independence from capitalist political parties, meanwhile, did not result in a concentration on working-class autonomization.
Prussia saw protests in 1910. In support of them, mass strikes were organised by Luxemburg and the local SPD convention. The protests opposed the state’s three-class system of suffrage and called for the democratisation of Prussian government. Due to the rigged electoral system, the SPD received much fewer seats in the Prussian Landtag than the working class votes it received. Nevertheless, Kautsky opposed mass strikes, emphasising the power of the German state, despite the movement’s electoral aim. The mass strike, he claimed, had been appropriate in Russia in 1905 because there was no democracy at all, but it could only be used in Germany as part of the final struggle for power.
The “Marxist Centre” of the SPD was now made up of Kautsky and his adherents. After he declined to publish an article by Luxemburg in Die Neue Zeit, the SPD’s theoretical journal, since it advocated the use of the mass strike in the fight for democracy, he and Luxemburg had parted ways. He came under increasing attack from members of the radical left of the party, including Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Karl Radek, and Anton Pannekoek, who praised the mass strike’s spontaneous militancy and argued that it should be used to raise workers’ revolutionary consciousness in addition to democratising the state. In an article in Die Neue Zeit, Kautsky attacked the radicals’ stress on the power of direct action by workers and denounced the “the cretinism of mass actions”
Kautsky on Imperialism and War:
Rehearsing Kautsky’s arguments with Lenin regarding imperialism and war is not the appropriate venue. However, it is crucial to discuss this aspect of his thinking since it serves as a crucial illustration of the direction his reformist politics took. By 1914, Kautsky had come to view imperialism as a huge capitalist deliberate decision rather than a systemically driven economic necessity. He did not believe that capitalism and imperialism were linked, unlike Lenin and Luxemburg. He thought that only a small segment of capital, such as the arms industry, saw the logic in conflict.
He came up with his “ultra-imperialism” theory early on in the First World War. According to this, big business would pressure governments to achieve an international agreement on economic rivalry, trade, and raw material access in order to prevent war. Furthermore, Kautsky no longer believed that socialism was inevitable after the start of World War I; instead, he saw it as a possibility.
As we’ve seen, the SPD leadership had given up on its prior resistance to militarism and colonialism as German imperialism rose and World War I drew near. This change was primarily prompted by the labour union bureaucracy’s growing influence over the party. In response to this political reality, Kautsky modified his beliefs and grounded his opposition to imperialist war on a qualified, juridical foundation. He believed that socialists ought to respond differently to an offensive war than to a defensive one.
In addition, he changed his mind from his previous opinion that socialists had a responsibility to fight militarism in their own nation, regardless of the internal political systems of the belligerent states. The Second International was only effective during times of peace, he claimed, thus it was impossible to expect it to put an end to the killing. He also dismissed the idea of a mass strike against war. He was now prepared to protect his own country, if was necessary.
Kautsky took part in the infamous Reichstag conference of the SPD on the evening of August 3, 1914. The SPD lawmakers adopted a resolution the next day granting the government access to war funds with his backing. For socialists during the war, maintaining party cohesion was top concern, according to Kautsky. Kautsky anticipated that after the war, things would go back to normal, with the peaceful growth of capitalism and gradual democratisation. Since only gradual democratisation and peaceful economic development might lead to socialism in the meantime, socialists should struggle for peace rather than revolution.
On the SPD left, the revolutionaries had the exact opposite view. They maintained that workers should attempt to transform the capitalist civil war between the ruling class and the working class into an imperialist war between various nations. According to Liebknecht, “the main enemy is at home”. These radicals rightfully condemned the Second International and their defenders, including Kautsky, for failing to oppose the war. A new revolutionary anti-imperialist international was advocated for by Luxemburg.
4) Marxism after Engels:
Karl Kautsky, editor of Die Neue Zeit, the official publication of the German Social Democratic Party, succeeded Engels in the role of theoretical leader. He authored Karl Marx’ ökonomische Lehren (1887), also known as The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, in which the author’s work is fundamentally viewed as an economic theory. Marxist historical dialectic and Kautsky’s views were reduced to a form of evolutionism. He emphasised the growing level of capitalist concentration as well as the working class’ increasing pauperization.
He supported the argument that the socialist movement should support legislation benefiting the workers so long as they did not increase the power of the state, whilst opposing any compromise with the bourgeois state. He rejected the notion that the working class and the peasantry should band together and thought that the capitalist state could be overthrown and the working class could gain political power without disrupting the status quo. He was an internationalist who favoured peace and opposed violence and war. For him, capitalism produced conflict. At the time Eduard Bernstein’s “revisionist” beliefs first arose, these were the primary characteristics of “orthodox” German Marxism.
With his essays for Die Neue Zeit in 1896, Bernstein stirred up a lot of debate by arguing that Marxism needed to be updated. With the publication of Evolutionary Socialism in 1899, his disagreement grew. To this, Kautsky responded in Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Programm: Eine Antikritik (1899), and the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg (1899), who was born in Poland, responded in Reform oder Revolution. Bernstein put the labour theory of value front and centre. He regarded it as being out of date, just like the other economists of his era did, both in the form advocated by British classical economists and as presented in Das Kapital.
Additionally, he contended that the intensity of the class struggle was decreasing rather than increasing since, contrary to Marx’s predictions, concentration was not accelerating in industry or agriculture. Bernstein illustrated this using statistical data from the German, Dutch, and English languages. Additionally, he contended that cartels and commercial syndicates were accelerating capitalism’s development, which called into question the veracity of Marx’s thesis of capitalistic crises. Bernstein argued that many of Marx’s theories lacked a scientific foundation and that his failure to adequately account for observed reality was due to the Hegelian and Ricardian framework of his work.
Kautsky responded that as capitalism advanced, the agricultural sector became more and more reliant on industry and that there was also a trend toward industrialising agriculture. According to Luxemburg, the contradictions of capitalism continued to worsen as finance capitalism and the colonial exploitation advanced, and these contradictions were causing a war that would provide the proletariat with a chance to seize power through revolutionary means.
5) His Legacy:
Marxist thinker, journalist, and philosopher Karl Johann Kautsky was of Czech and Austrian descent. After Friedrich Engels’ death in 1895 and up to the start of World War I in 1914, Kautsky was one of the most eminent proponents of traditional Marxism. During the Second International’s years, he was the foremost socialist theorist. He established the communist publication Neue Zeit. After the war, Kautsky was a vocal opponent of the Bolshevik Revolution, engaged in debates on the nature of the Soviet state with Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin. Along with his anti-Bolshevik rhetoric, Kautsky is well-known for editing and publishing Marx’s Capital, Volume IV (also referred to as Theories of Surplus Value).
Over the past ten years, the left-wing reformist political strategy he promoted has gained support. Although the majority of those who raced to Sanders’ side or poured into the Labour Party to back Corbyn are unlikely to have heard of Kautsky, his ideas are significant—but not for the reasons outlined in the aforementioned Jacobin articles. According to Blanc’s article, “Kautsky’s radical democratic vision is not the final word in Marxist politics, it’s an excellent starting point.”
Before mass strikes and workers’ councils were recognised for their revolutionary potential, Engels was writing. The Kapp Putsch of 1920, the overthrow of the fascist coup in Spain in 1936, and the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 are all examples of how revolutionary workers may topple modern armies. More recently, the Sudanese Revolution, despite not yet being successful, demonstrates that popular resistance may successfully face off against the army in a contemporary state. Political leadership that is transparent is at least as vital as using force.
Democracy, in Kautsky’s view, was an abstract historical entity that coexisted with capitalism and feudalism and would do so again under socialism. Thus, while democracy is somewhat separate from a society’s class structure, it is nevertheless influenced by it. Bourgeois democracy and workers’ democracy are conceptually distinct to revolutionary Marxists. The capitalist class prefers it because it allows it to assert public legitimacy, despite the fact that working-class struggle was required to achieve universal suffrage and many other democratic rights. When it felt it was necessary, the bourgeoisie has frequently abolished the legislature.
In his earlier days, Kautsky believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat might be conducted through parliament, despite the fact that democracy is distinct from socialism even if it is vital to it. The dictatorship of the proletariat, according to revolutionary Marxists, is when the working class uses its own power to repress the ruling class and overthrow its government. This would enable the working class to rule democratically using a network of workers’ councils and a workers’ militia.
Contrary to what Kautsky claimed, these forms of proletariat democracy must be established during the fight to supplant the specialised armed groups and the state bureaucracy, both of which serve to maintain the rule of the capitalist class. According to Lenin, “dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over the other classes; even so, it does mean the abolition of democracy (or very real material restriction, which is a form of abolition) for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised.”
The odd claim made by Blanc is that Leninists have frequently been reluctant to aggressively advocate for major democratic reforms. Leninists have really been at the vanguard of all key battles for democratic changes over the past century, from the fight to topple Tsarism in the Russian Empire to the anti-apartheid movement and the current battle in Egypt against a military dictatorship. Marxism’s central tenet is that socialists must protect bourgeois democracy because it provides the most conducive environment for the socialist revolution. However, it does not follow from this that, according to Kautsky’s lifelong convictions, capitalism can be overturned through the use of bourgeois democratic institutions.
Left reformists will point out that there has never been a successful socialist revolution, with the exception of the Russian Revolution’s fleeting success. Socialist revolutionaries will reply that no real, lasting socialist society has ever been built using parliamentary means either. Thanks to Corbynism in Britain and Sanderism in recent years, there has been a very welcome resurgence of interest in socialist theories.
But neither the White House nor 10 Downing Street have elected a socialist, let alone started the desperately needed socialist reform of society. When appropriate, socialists should support and take part in election campaigns, but these efforts must also serve to strengthen the mass movement in the workplaces and neighbourhoods. These are the areas where working people have the most influence, and it is in these areas that the capitalist system will be overthrown. In the writings of Kautsky, we shall look in vain for instructions on how to do it.
6) Some Quotes:
“The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government.” – Karl Kautsky
“Socialism without democracy is unthinkable.” – Karl Kautsky
“The war brought things to a head, exposing the utter falsity and rottenness of Kautskyism from its very first day.” – Karl Kautsky
