Karl Kautsky ideologies?

[Comrade Mitja]

I want to get more links or works about kautsky ideologies,books,links,everything,i read lenins book and lenin describet kautsky as some marxsist poser,...but i heard from other people that he was an smart man with way more better ideologies that the boisheviks,so if anyone has some links or books about kautsky it would be awesome!.

I alreday read an article about kautsky on marxs.

But i dont understand what this means:

Karly kautsky:from marxs to hitler pleas explain

marxsis. org/archive/mattick-paul/1939/kautsky . htm

[Questionable]

Lenin based a lot of his views on Kautsky's writings. I wouldn't say his ideologies were way better than the Bolsheviks, since they were the basis for a lot of what Lenin said. Sometime near WWI, Kautsky got this crazy idea that imperialism meant capitalist nations were so dependent on each other that there could be no more war, therefore you could reform the system through elections. When WWI finally broke out, he took a nationalist stance that German socialists should root for their nation or else the reactionary forces of the enemy would sweep through and crush them.

But yeah, Lenin had a lot of respect for Kautsky until he entered his nationalist phase. Their Marxist ideologies weren't opposed to each other.

[Peoples' War]

From my understanding, Luxembourg had an ongoing "feud" with him, and discovered his opportunism and revisionism even before Lenin.

In October 27, 1914, Lenin wrote to A. Shlyapnikov: “I hate and despise Kautsky now more than anyone, with his vile, dirty, self-satisfied hypocrisy ... Rosa Luxemburg was right when she wrote, long ago, that Kautsky has the ‘subservience of a theoretician’ – servility, in plainer language, servility to the majority of the party, to opportunism”

I would look to her writings, for anything on Kautsky.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ That's a poor sound bite to take out of the broader context that Questionable referred to. I mean, there are left-com skeptics like Gilles Dauve who write of The Renegade Kautsky and His Disciple Lenin, there are sympathetic historians like Lars Lih who write of Lenin Rediscovered and the teacher-student relationship more positively, and there are comradely revivalists like Mike Macnair who write of Revolutionary Strategy with respect to the Marxist Center.

[Manic Impressive]

OP here you go http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/index.htm

Out of them I'd say the Erfut program is probably the most important. Communism in central Europe at the time of the reformation is also one of my favourites, just for the history. For me Kautsky makes some interesting points and his writing style is fairly easy to follow most of the time. Although I disagree with a lot of what he says.

[Q]

i read lenins book and lenin describet kautsky as some marxsist poser,...

Not poser, but renegade. There is a crucial difference: Kautsky was pivotal in founding Marxism as a method and political project. But between 1909 and 1914 he started to take a different course, in other words, he reneged on the Marxism that he defended since 1881 and when starting his theoretical publication Die Neue Zeit that he edited from the start in 1883 until 1917 when he was removed by the SPD leadership for his (later) opposition to the war.

When Lenin attacked Kautsky, he attacked the person, which he couldn't stand before 1914, much less after it. So when he spoke of "vile Kautskyism", it was a reference to the person. Lars Lih's scholarly work (among others) have helped to uncover the truth that Lenin was really an Orthodox Marxist for, arguably, his whole life, defending and continuing the strategy Kautsky abandoned and betrayed.

So, yes, there is everything we can gain from reading and understanding Kautsky's work up until 1909.