[Karl Kautsky was once the worlds leading Marxist theoretician,
but his reputation dimmed after World War I. On the occasion of the
publication of a newly translated volume of his writings, reviewer
Vaquas offers a reassessment.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

KARL KAUTSKY ON DEMOCRACY AND REPUBLICANISM  
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Rida Vaquas
July 25, 2020
Prometheus
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_ Karl Kautsky was once the world's leading Marxist theoretician, but
his reputation dimmed after World War I. On the occasion of the
publication of a newly translated volume of his writings, reviewer
Vaquas offers a reassessment. _

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_Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism_
Karl Kautsky Edited and translated by Ben Lewis
Haymarket Books
ISBN: 9781642593372

‘_So I will die as I have lived, an incorrigible Marxist’_

This is what Kautsky concludes in his overview of his life’s work,
in 1924. In these new translations by Ben Lewis, a reader begins to
see just what exactly was incorrigibly Marxist about Kautsky, free
from the scorn cast on him as a renegade and traitor. At a moment when
there is an increasing interest in Kautsky across some parts of the
Left, this volume is a welcome addition to our understanding of his
democratic and republican thought, as well as his divergence from
Bolshevism in his own words.

Lewis has chosen to present three texts: _Parliamentarism and
Democracy, The Republic and Social Democracy in France _and _The
Development of a Marxist. _This selection has the benefit of
presenting a clear analysis of party, state and class, his criticisms
of ministerial socialism as represented by Jean Jaurès, and his own
perspective on his political development after the declaration of
World War One. It also reminds us of the sheer thrill that socialists
must have had in reading him – the moments of ‘yes, that’s
exactly it!’ After all, it was none other than Anton Pannekoek,
later council communist, who claimed that nobody had demonstrated the
significance of Marxist theory as well as Kautsky in his historical
writings. And it was Leon Trotsky who described him, in 1938, as
‘the teacher who instructed the international proletarian
vanguard’. Kautsky’s pupils, in the variety of directions they
went, forged the histories of twentieth-century communism and social
democracy. It is now time to return to the master himself. These texts
demonstrate he still has much to teach us.

_Parliamentarism and Democracy _was a text first published in 1893 and
reissued in 1911. Mike Macnair has covered its historical context and
in Second International debates and the veracity of its historical
claims extensively here
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hence I will restrict myself to some more general comments.

For a socialist involved in the Labour Party, what jumps out is
Kautsky’s conception of Social Democratic party and how incongruous
it is with the Labour Party. For Kautsky, in a party ‘class
antagonisms must not be allowed to assert themselves.’ Furthermore,
while the party may have the ‘most varied differences of opinion’
on immediate tasks, the final goal and the methods of achieving them
must be points of unity, otherwise it would be ‘an absurdity’ to
unite the various elements into a party.

One may easily dismiss the absence of class antagonisms as
over-optimism on Kautsky’s part, even the SPD had effectively
pro-capitalist functionaries in its ranks. But his belief in unity in
a final goal bears closer examination – if simply because I would be
hard-pressed to assert what the final goal of the Labour Party is, let
alone build any unity around such a goal. The Labour Party is an
absurdity. What are socialists doing in it?

As Corbynism is marginalised and normal service resumes, it becomes
more pressing to provide a clear answer to this question that
doesn’t depend upon the power that various figures of the left may
hold in it. We are in it to create a cadre who are the mortal enemies
of bourgeois society. To echo R. H. Tawney, we will not make the
Labour Party a socialist party until we realise it is not one. What
this means is that socialists in the Labour Party must act as a
militant animating principle of party life: developing a unified
programme and pushing for it at all levels in the party. But to do
this, we need a precise analysis of the levers of power, the
(un)democratic structures.

What Kautsky grasps in _Parliamentarism and Democracy _is something
that may seem simple: an organism as complex as a capitalist state to
the extent that it is democratic necessarily delegates its
decision-making to a smaller group of people, parliamentarians. State
power is the only way to accomplish control over the ever-increasing
officialdom that manages various affairs of the state. Democracy must
be representative, and not direct. Referenda on single-issue topics
only affect society in a piecemeal way. They divide the party and
create cross-class alliances.

How strangely current this seems in light of the disastrous legacy of
the 2016 EU referendum! Referenda emerge not as a gift of democracy
– but as a way of weakening the process of politics via parties. For
a party that represents class interests, they are unhelpful at best
and damaging at worst.

His theory of representative democracy is extended to the party
itself. As he points out, none of his contemporary advocates of direct
legislation have done away with party congresses. Kautsky elaborates:
‘The representative system is the only form in which the party as a
whole can convene, come to an understanding and make its decisions.’
When parts of the left are experimenting with horizontalism, online
democracy via e-referenda, and other democratic forms, it is worth
dwelling on why Kautsky holds representative democracy as crucial.

On a surface level, representative democracy is disempowering – why
can only a committee, or a few thousand delegates vote, instead of the
entire membership? But Kautsky understood that posing questions to an
entire membership did not necessarily mean that the membership would
determine the outcome. If a single piece of legislation cannot be
evaluated except in relation to how it affects the management of the
capitalist state as a whole, how can a single policy point be
evaluated except in how it relates to the party programme as a whole?
Simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions are simply used by ruling
committees as affirmation for their own policies – the true people
who decide are those who set the question.

A segment of advocates of more representative democracy on the Left
these days often raise the criticism that having more democratic
processes, direct or otherwise, is exclusionary, as many people do not
have the time to go to meetings and hence most power must be devolved
to a small group of representatives. This is a bad argument for
representative democracy. Representative democracy only functions
democratically if it has a high level of member participation behind
it – i.e. branch meetings, district meetings, regional meetings, the
lot. After all, it was at a party meeting that Karl Liebknecht
realized his initial error of conforming to party discipline and
voting for war credits on 4 August 1914 in the Reichstag – despite
his opposition to the war.

At the time, Kautsky could afford not to elaborate on the exact shape
of representative democracy within a party precisely because a set of
democratic norms were taken for granted, even as the party apparatus
expanded. Socialists today have no such luxury, beleaguered by large
committees, chosen in backroom deals, with very few real
accountability mechanisms. Moreover, the internal party life of the
Labour Party is moribund. The self-evident sovereignty of the party
congress to Kautsky is something we still need to fight for. It’s
for this reason re-examining the democratic thought of the Second
International is a worthwhile endeavour.

For socialists who have witnessed the disappointments of
ministerialism firsthand, _The Republic and Social Democracy in France
_sheds light on the question of entering bourgeois governments. The
central question it concerns is the Millerand affair, in which
Alexandre Millerand, a socialist, entered the government of Pierre
Waldeck-Rousseau, the butcher of the Paris Commune. Kautsky takes the
opportunity to elaborate bourgeois and proletarian concepts of the
republic. The sharp excellence of this polemic only emphasises the
tragedy of his U-turn after the German Revolution: how could a man who
penned such a decisive take-down of ministerialism later collaborate
in it?

In _Republic and Social Democracy, _he decisively demolishes
socialists in government but not in power, observing that the
deployment of troops against striking workers increased since they
took power! Republican France remained behind the Kaiser’s Germany
in its restrictions on child labour. The underlying worldview of
ministerialism seems impossible to maintain. Yet the questions it
raises about when to enter a government, about when one can
collaborate with bourgeois politicians, are questions that are
unresolved in a Left – particularly in a British context where many
have been swept up in a ministerialism of their own.

Kautsky demands that we ‘ensure it is impossible to identify us with
the ‘cartel’ of bourgeois business republicans that governs and
exploits the republic.’ The only class that can secure a republic in
the true sense is the proletariat and the fight for the republic
involves elevating the political independence of the class. The French
socialists had no justification for entering a bourgeois government
because the ‘republic’ was under threat. In all manner of parallel
‘emergency’ situations from the EU referendum to the climate
crisis, it is precisely this clarity that is missing in the modern-day
Left.

After seeing Kautsky at his sharpest, one is inevitably left with a
question: at what point did Kautsky renege his Marxist commitments?
The final text, his own account of his life, fails to provide an
answer to this question – in Kautsky’s view, he never left.
Historical writing nonetheless tends to assess his break with
revolutionary politics as occurring in around 1910, as his splits with
the radical left over mass action and mass strikes became more
evident.

In this period immediately before the First World War, as his former
allies on the radical Left debated him in the pages of _Die Neue Zeit,
_Kautsky charted out his own standpoint of revolutionary centrism
‘between Baden and Luxemburg’ – Baden being the stronghold of
German revisionism.

Kautsky does not present a new theory in his articles – bemoaning
misrepresentations by both Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek – he
simply acknowledges the limitations of theory. In ‘Between Baden and
Luxemburg’, he argues ‘When the right moment for a mass strike
arrives… cannot be determined by theory beforehand.’ In his
response to Pannekoek, he insists that spontaneous mass actions would
bring ‘a completely unpredictable element into our political life’
and that the class character of the masses could not be determined
according to the Marxist method. On this note, his contemporaries were
kinder to him than later historians, who identify Kautsky after 1910
with the gradualist and revisionist tendencies – Pannekoek clearly
states that Kautsky’s position needs to be assessed because
‘Kautsky is not a revisionist.’

For his interlocutors on the radical left, Kautsky’s problem was not
so much an abandonment of Marxism so much as a refusal to apply it to
the political problems that really mattered. After all, Karl Kautsky
wrote that precisely because a mass strike had to be unpredictable to
be effective, it was all the more necessary to be constantly prepared
for one. In his own words from 1905 ‘Nothing is more ridiculous than
a war administration which wants to start testing its weapons and
drilling its troops […] only when the war has first been
declared.’

So why then did Kautsky lack confidence in the theory to which he
devoted his life at a crucial moment? Quite simply, while he may have
earnestly committed to revolutionary centrism – this was not, as he
wanted to believe, the strategy of Social Democracy as a whole. In his
own words, at the declaration of war, he was ‘almost entirely
alone’ in his middle position of neither unconditionally accepting
nor unconditionally rejecting war credits, if it was not possible to
abstain. During the war, he was even ejected from his position as the
editor of _Die Neue Zeit _by the party leadership.

The so-called Pope of Marxism found no base that was willing to apply
his theories. As Kautsky applauded Social Democracy for raising the
working class for the revolution, it had in fact raised a working
class for the trenches. This brings out the fundamental problem of
Kautsky’s politics prior to 1914 – a problem of practice, not of
theory. He correctly assessed that unity of the working class party
was a necessity for it to accomplish the tasks of social revolution.
The party needed debate, but prolonged internal strife was to be
avoided.

But he misjudged what that unity was founded upon – and its
ultimately brittle nature. The revisionist wing of Social Democracy
were tireless propagandists for their perspective – in Lenin’s
assessment in April 1914, ‘the most prominent and responsible
people, members of parliament and trade union leaders who write for
_Sozialistische Monatshefte_, constantly and undeviatingly propagate
their views among the masses.’ The orthodox centre that Kautsky
represented clung to the official resolutions of the party, whilst
ignoring that to the officialdom these resolutions might as well have
meant nothing. As the Second International painfully learned, the
victories of orthodox Marxism at every congress were hollow because
there was no base capable of enforcing them as programme and strategy.
Kautsky’s failure at the eve of the First World War was not the same
as his rightward turn at the point of the German Revolution – the
former was a failure of practice, not theory.

Is there anything to be salvaged from Kautskyism after 1914? There is
one point in his favour – a bar that much of the contemporary Left
fails to clear – his conviction in building up the capacity of the
working class to take power. While _The Development of a Marxist _was
penned in 1924, Kautsky had another fourteen years of political
activity in front of him, up until his death in 1938.

A speech he gave shortly before his death, as Nazism and Stalinist
terror were at their height, reveals an underlying continuity in his
priorities.

He said: ‘One of the most important tasks of socialists today is
therefore to lift the proletariat as high as possible, morally,
physically, economically, intellectually so that it is able to lift
the new modes of production over the former immediately, from the
beginning. This is carried out by class struggle in democracy.’

Dictatorship, even if socialist, stultified the proletariat’s
capacity to exercise rule as a class and hence could not be accepted.
In a fortunate irony, this brings him somewhat closer to his former
friends on the radical left, even if strategy diverged considerably.

Pannekoek, who abandoned the party form itself as an instrument of
domination over the proletariat wrote in 1948: ‘The goal of the
working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not
reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class
substituting the bourgeoisie. It can only be realised by the workers
themselves being master over production.’

Both men, whose political trajectories permanently diverged after
1912, nonetheless understood their tasks as increasing the capacity of
the working class to act as the liberators of history. This might seem
like Marxism 101. But as the Left around the world enters alliances
with bourgeois reformists or retreats into the comfort zones of sects,
Kautsky’s life is a vital reminder that there is no substitute for
the patient and difficult work of building a socialist, working class
party that is capable of action. As we enter into the post-Covid era,
in which millions of our class are facing unprecedented attacks, it
will be all the more tempting to look for shortcuts and quick fixes.
Unrest does not lead to victories – purposeful class struggle does.

A review would not be complete without noting the profound debt the
communist movement owes to its translators, who, quietly and
unassumingly, have made a corpus of knowledge and insight available to
us across the centuries, often under very difficult conditions. With
this new edition of Kautsky’s writings, Ben Lewis has continued this
tradition admirably.

* Marxism
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* social democracy
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* German Social Democracy
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* electoral struggle
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* Reform
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* revolution
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* Critical Theory
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