Karl Kautsky was born in
Prague of artistic middle class parents. The family moved to
Vienna when he was seven years old. He was studying
history and
philosophy at the
University of Vienna in
1874, and became a member of the
Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in
1875. In
1880 he joined a group of German socialists in
Zurich who were supported financially by Karl Höchberg, and who smuggled socialist material into the Reich at the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Influenced by
Eduard Bernstein, Höchberg's secretary, he became a Marxist and in
1881 visited
Marx and
Engels in England.
In
1883, Kautsky founded the monthly
Die Neue Zeit ("The New Time") in
Stuttgart, which became a weekly in
1890, and was its editor until September
1917 which gave him a steady income and allowed him to propagate Marxism. From
1885 to
1890, he spent time in
London, where he became a close friend of Friedrich Engels. In
1891, he co-authored the
Erfurt Program of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) together with
August Bebel and
Eduard Bernstein.
Following the death of Engels in
1895, Kautsky became one of the most important and influential theoreticians of
Marxism, representing the centre current of the party together with
August Bebel. When Bernstein attacked the traditional Marxist position on the necessity for revolution in the later 1890s, Kautsky denounced him, arguing that Bernstein's emphasis on the ethical foundations of Socialism opened the road to a call for an alliance with the "progressive" bourgeoisie and a non-class approach.
In
1914 with the other German Social-Democrats Kautsky voted for the war credits. Kautsky claimed that Germany was waging a defensive war against the threat of Czarist Russia. However, in June
1915, about ten months after the war had begun and when it had become obvious that this was going to be a sustained, appallingly brutal and costly struggle, he issued an appeal with
Eduard Bernstein and
Hugo Haase against the pro-war leaders of the SPD and denounced the government's annexationist aims. In
1917 he left the SPD for the
Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which united Socialists who opposed the war.
After the
November Revolution in Germany, Kautsky served as under-secretary of State in the Foreign Office in the short lived SPD-USPD revolutionary government and worked at finding documents which proved the war guilt of Imperial Germany.
After 1919, Kautsky's prominence steadily diminished. He visited
Georgia in
1920 and wrote a book in
1921 on this Social Democratic country still independent of
Bolshevist Russia. In 1920, when the USPD split, he went with a minority of that party back into the SPD. At the age of 70 he moved back to Vienna with his family in
1924 where he remained until
1938. At the time of Hitler's
Anschluss, he fled to
Czechoslovakia and thence by plane to
Amsterdam where he died in the same year.
Karl Kautsky lived in
Berlin-Friedenau for many years; his wife, Luise Kautsky, was a close friend of
Rosa Luxemburg, who also lived in Friedenau, and today there is a commemorative plaque where Kautsky lived at Saarstraße 14.
Kautsky was described as a "renegade" by
Vladimir Lenin, and he in turn castigated Lenin in his 1934 work
Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship:
:"The Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership, however, succeeded in capturing control of the armed forces in
Petrograd and later in Moscow and thus laid the foundation for a new
dictatorship in place of the old
Tsarist dictatorship."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1934/bolshevism/index.htm
His work
Social Democracy vs. Communism treated the Bolshevist rule in Russia. In Kautsky's view, Bolsheviks (or, Communists) had been a conspirational organisation, which gained power by a coup and initiated revolutionary changes for which there were no economic presumptions in Russia. Instead, a bureaucratic society developed, misery of which eclipsed the problems of the Western capitalism. The attempts (be it undertaken by Lenin or Stalin) of building a working and affluent socialist society failed.
:“Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand before the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought occur to them what enslavement, what lowering of human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments.”
:“They extracted the means for the creation of material productive forces by destroying the most essential productive force of all-the laboring man. In the terrible conditions created by the Piatiletka, people rapidly perished. Soviet films, of course, did not show this.” (ch. 6
Is Soviet Russia A Socialist State?)
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