A popularly priced paperback on Karl Kautsky is to be welcomed. It is approaching a decade since Gary P Steenson’s Karl Kautsky: Marxism in the Classical Years appeared in an expensive North American university hardback and seven years since Massimo Salvadori’s Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution. The ‘Lives of the Left’ series is widely available.
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Salvardori’s detailed description of his thought was valuable. But it was marred by his fundamentally ‘Eurocommunist’ standpoint which seeks to minimize the contradictions of Kautsky’s evolution and to stress his lifelong commitment to a peaceful parliamentary road to socialism.
Both Salvador and Steenson aim much of their fire against Lenin and Trotsky’s contention that Kautsky was a ‘renegade’. In their view so total is the continuity between the pre-1914 and post 1914 Kautsky that the leaders of the Comintern were simply mistaken about Kautsky. Both were under illusions that were rudely shattered and this explains their bitterness.
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Dick Geary’s book belongs, at bottom to the school of those who see no fundamental contradictions in Kautsky’s development. He accepts in essence the Karl Korsch, Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci critiques of Kautsky whilst defending him against the more unbalanced and unfair attacks. In fact, starting from an admiration of the voluntarist, praxis based humanist approach to socialism Geary found much of these values in Kautsky, especially in his critique of Bolshevism. The Kautsky that Geary most dislikes is the Kautsky who defended, and Die Neue Zeit propagated, historical and dialectical materialism.