Review: Zombie Kautskyism

Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky – The Renegade’s Revenge, Routledge 2024.

When Georges Haupt, an outstanding historian of socialism in the period of the Second International, on a visit to a Canadian university, wondered why students always referred to “renegade Kautsky,” he learned that they believed “renegade” was Kautsky’s first name.

Douglas Greene’s book opens with this anecdote (p.1), which encapsulates Karl Kautsky’s spectacular fall from grace. Once the intellectual leader of the largest socialist party in Europe, Kautsky died in relative obscurity in 1937. The decline of his influence mirrored the degeneration of German Social Democracy, the party to which he dedicated his life, which went from the great hope of socialism to a name synonymous with betrayal of Marxist principles. On 4 August 4 1914, this avowedly Marxist party voted to support the German war effort and rapidly transformed into a party of law and order. As a defender of the SPD and opponent of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Kautsky spent the rest of the twentieth century remembered best as one of the reformist foils of revolutionary socialists like Luxemburg and Lenin, the latter of whom gave him the moniker “Renegade” in one of his famous polemics.

Now, much like the controversial Britpop band Oasis, Karl Kautsky is going back on tour. Historians and socialist writers, including Mike Macnair and Eric Blanc, have exhumed Kautsky’s writings, championing his pre-war Marxism as a model for socialist strategy. Common to these contributions is an attempt to rehabilitate Kautsky and historiographically reverse the rift which defined his era – the painful schism between revolutionaries and reformists that took place during the First World War. This rift left the socialist movement divided between two rival “Internationals” fighting for the allegiance of workers, and conditions of veritable civil war between revolutionary workers and a Social Democratic government in Germany.

At stake in the contest over Kautsky’s legacy today are a series of age-old questions which have split the socialist movement since the time Karl Kautsky reigned supreme. What lines of demarcation should socialists draw in the organisations they build? What approach should socialists take toward imperialist war? Can the capitalist state be used as a vehicle for socialist transformation?

The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky by Douglas Greene is an important contribution to the debates sparked by Kautsky’s revival. Greene’s book chronicles Kautsky’s life and contributions, details his debates with rivals on the revolutionary left, and critiques the arguments of neo-Kautskyists who have attempted to restore his image.

Karl Kautsky: revolutionary?

The first section of Greene’s book is a highly condensed political biography of Kautsky, charting his trajectory from the left of the socialist movement to the right. Greene’s examination of Kautsky’s record can help dispel myth-making about his supposedly “radical” early period as the internationally recognised guardian of Marxist orthodoxy.

Kautsky came to prominence as Germany’s foremost Marxist theoretician at a turning point in the history of the socialist movement. In 1890, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was emerging from a long period of illegality under the regime of Otto Von Bismarck. The party had not only survived state repression but had successfully utilised loopholes in the law allowing participation in elections, winning 20 percent of the vote that year. Kautsky, who had built his name as editor of the illegal newspaper Sozialdemocrat, was commissioned to write a new Marxist program for the party.

The Erfurt Program was rife with ambiguity – it condemned capitalism, but shied away from an explicit challenge to the German state, instead emphasising a strategy of contesting parliamentary elections and a “minimum program” of day-to-day reforms that could guide the party’s practice. Greene argues that the effect of this ambiguity on Kautsky’s part was “to reconcile the conflicting camps of reform and revolution” (p.14).

Greene points to left radical Franz Mehring as an early critic of this parliamentary orientation, an outlook he described as “like a knife that lacks both handle and blade” (p.14). Mehring warned that the state would simply abolish universal suffrage if socialists came close to a parliamentary majority, rendering preparation for revolution necessary. However, these criticisms were largely drowned in the euphoria of the party’s stellar advance and the general feeling among members, reinforced by Kautsky’s positivist theoretical framework, that the future was assured for socialism.

In time, the SPD boasted a million members and more than 90 daily newspapers. It permeated every aspect of working-class life with youth organisations, socialist schools, sports clubs and cooperatives, and trade unions, which organised millions.

However, the peaceful growth of the SPD during a period of stability also led to the construction of a huge party apparatus: parliamentarians and their staffers, journalists, managers of the cooperatives and more. Alongside this apparatus, the unions spawned thousands of trade union officials. For many of these relatively comfortable apparatchiks, maintaining the party became an end in itself – they wanted class peace and party unity above all. These layers found their first coherent intellectual expression in the “revisionist” theorist Eduard Bernstein, who argued that capitalism’s tendencies toward polarisation and crisis were diminishing, and socialism would be the outcome of a process of gradual reform.

While Kautsky defended Marxist orthodoxy against this theoretical offensive, his response conceded many points to Bernstein – most significantly agreeing to defer the question of how to achieve state power: “We can leave the decision on the problem of the proletarian dictatorship to the future. Again, we do not need to tie our hands” (p.28).

In substance, Kautsky reaffirmed the Erfurt consensus while allowing the reformist practice of party and union leaders to continue unchecked. As Greene writes:

Many inside the SPD apparatus and labor unions shared Bernstein’s views, but they were not willing to say the quiet part so loud. As SPD secretary Ignaz Auer wrote to Bernstein in 1899: “My dear Ede, one does not formally make a decision to do the things you suggest, one doesn’t say such things, one simply does them” (p.28).

Union leaders engaged in daily compromise and collaboration with employers could continue their practice without the need for theoretical justification.

Kautsky’s theoretical formulas aimed to maintain the unity of the SPD as a “broad church” socialist party just as it was increasingly divided between left and right. A series of debates in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution about the relevance of mass strikes in socialist strategy culminated in a conscious split between Kautsky and the radical wing of the party.

This conflict came to a head in 1910, when the refusal of the Prussian state government to abolish its undemocratic “three-class” voting system produced working-class outrage and boiled over into a series of mass demonstrations that met with brutal police repression. Rank-and-file workers who demanded an unlimited general strike to win electoral reform were met with hostility from the party bureaucracy, who declared the proposal “mass insanity”.

Kautsky stood in these debates as a spokesperson of the “centre”. While supporting the idea of mass strikes in principle, he argued that such struggle was “premature”, and vetoed articles by radicals urging action. Kautsky justified his approach as a strategy of “attrition” – urging the SPD to patiently build socialist forces and demoralise the enemy without provoking a fight. In essence, he advocated a gradualist approach, which meant subordinating class struggle to the exigencies of electoral cycles: “Today our agitation must escalate not towards the mass strike, but towards the coming Reichstag elections” (quoted on p.52).

Radicals were routed in the suffrage debate, evidence that the balance of power in the party was shifting decisively in the favour of reformists. Rather than fight this backsliding, Kautsky offered increasingly implausible theoretical salves to justify the party’s passive parliamentary practice and internal paralysis.

As storm clouds of war gathered in Europe, Kautsky continued his struggle to reconcile the warring camps. While radicals urged anti-militarist agitation against the threat of impending conflict, and the party’s right openly embraced German nationalism and colonial policy, Kautsky sat stubbornly in the centre. He developed a new, highly implausible theory of “ultra-imperialism” which claimed that, in the long term, peace was in the self-interest of the capitalist class. When the SPD decisively betrayed its socialist principles at the outbreak of World War I and voted for war credits, it revealed a deep rot, the product of years of conservatisation and integration into German capitalism. Kautsky initially refused to criticise this orientation, arguing that the war was nothing but a blip that would soon come to an end, allowing the party to continue its peaceful pursuit of a parliamentary majority.

Confronted with the reality of revolution at the height of the war Kautsky shrank away from the struggle for socialism. Leon Trotsky described his trajectory scathingly:

So long as the class struggle flowed between the peaceful shores of parliamentarism, Kautsky, like thousands of others, indulged himself in the luxury of revolutionary criticism and bold perspectives: in practice these did not bind him to anything. But when the war and the after-war period brought the problems of revolution onto the field, Kautsky took up his position definitively on the other side of the barricade (quoted on p.117).

Kautsky opposed the October Revolution in Russia, the first attempt by workers to take state power – decrying the struggle as “premature” and complaining about the disenfranchisement of Russian capitalists. Revolution then spread to Germany in 1918, when a sailors’ revolt sparked a working-class uprising which overthrew the Kaiser. As the reformist SPD entered a coalition government with capitalist parties and violently hunted down revolutionaries, Kautsky stood again in the centre, blaming both sides as “extremists” who mirrored one another. He urged a reunification of the socialist movement and the limiting of the revolution to securing a capitalist democracy. He spent the rest of his life a bitter critic of the new Communist movement which emerged from this period.

Greene draws this balance sheet of Kautsky’s legacy:

Despite his radical rhetoric, Kautsky quickly adapted himself to the parliamentary and reformist direction of Social Democracy. The limitations of Kautsky’s Marxism appeared whenever it was necessary to offer concrete answers to pressing questions such as the nature of the state and the appropriate tactics for socialist revolution (p.5).

Kautsky’s back

So why does this history matter? There are some today who claim Kautsky’s theory can provide a guide to building socialist organisations and for revolutionary strategy. They want to salvage the “positive” elements of Kautsky’s project and extract it from the logic of his later betrayal. The third section of Greene’s book engages with the arguments of these “neo-Kautskyists”, the most important of whom are Mike Macnair and Eric Blanc.

Mike Macnair is a leading figure in the Communist Party of Great Britain, who argues that the revolutionary left needs to draw its strategy from the high point of Second International Marxism. He identifies Kautskyism as the “golden mean” between reformism and the radical left: “I argue that the ‘strategy of patience’ of the Kautskyan centre was and is preferable to either the strategy of cross-class ‘left’ coalition government favoured by the right, or the ‘mass strike strategy’ favoured by the left” (quoted on p.193).

The American socialist Eric Blanc is the author of Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (reviewed in MLR 23), an extensive defence of Second International Marxism. Blanc has revived Kautsky in an attempt to unearth a credible and unblemished parliamentary socialism. He argues that Kautsky’s greatest insight was that: “the path to anticapitalist rupture in conditions of political democracy passed through the election of a workers’ party to government”. Blanc sees Kautsky as an alternative to the strategy of Leninists, who “for decades have hinged their strategy on the need for an insurrection to overthrow the entire parliamentary state”.^[1]

Both are critical of Kautsky’s eventual lurch to the right but argue that pre-war “Kautskyism” provides a model. But was Kautsky at his best good enough?

Macnair upholds Kautsky’s strategy of patience as a guide for those who want to build revolutionary organisations today, writing: “I do not want to revive Kautsky, but a part of Kautsky, namely the serious, long-term attention he paid to the idea that before you get to the point of being able to pose the question of power, you have to build up a movement in non-revolutionary times” (quoted on p.193).

Kautsky’s “patience” really meant subordinating workers’ struggle to the project of gradually building a solid party apparatus and playing the parliamentary numbers game. This was expressed clearly in the mass strike debate of 1910, when a chance to qualitatively advance struggle was squandered as Kautsky advised socialists to “keep their powder dry” and wait for the next election.

Most revolutionary socialists would agree with Macnair’s invocation to build movements in non-revolutionary times. Kautsky’s gradualist strategy of “attrition”, however, is a conservative strategy which ignores the reality of how radical working-class consciousness and organisation is built.

As US socialist Charlie Post explains in his contribution to the Kautsky debate:

[W]orking-class struggle under capitalism takes the form of massive and discontinuous upsurges. It is during these periodic upheavals that working people can win gains and build democratic organizations that cement solidarity and overcome the divisions and fragmentation of the class. To succeed, such movements always involve rising levels of confrontation with the established political and economic order and tend to radicalize many of their participants.^[2]

The capitalist class and their state can’t be gradually worn down through “attrition”, but can only be defeated through great revolutionary upsurges, processes Trotsky described as the “forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny”.

Any socialist serious about uprooting capitalist society knows that it’s necessary to win a majority. But attempting to appeal to a majority in non-revolutionary periods, when capitalist ideas predominate, can only produce compromise and political accommodation. Revolutionaries can only win a majority through intervention into the episodic struggles that radicalise their participants and turn the world upside down, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1918:

As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German social democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the homemade wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to the revolution: first let’s become a “majority”. The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that is the way the road runs. Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times.^[3]

But both Macnair and Blanc dismiss revolutionary tactics in favour of a “parliamentary socialism” purportedly more suited to liberal democracies of the West. Eric Blanc defends “Kautskyan” strategy in these terms:

Even at his most radical, Kautsky rejected the relevance of an insurrectionary strategy within capitalist democracies. His case was simple: the majority of workers in parliamentary countries would generally seek to use legal mass movements and the existing democratic channels to advance their interests. Technological advances, in any case, had made modern armies too strong to be overthrown through uprisings on the old nineteenth-century model of barricade street fighting. For these reasons, democratically elected governments had too much legitimacy among working people and too much armed strength for an insurrectionary approach to be realistic.^[4]

Blanc claims that he has no illusions that the capitalists would respect a socialist majority at the ballot box, and that a “decisive battle” of political and institutional rupture should be expected and prepared for. But what would this “institutional rupture” look like? While it’s undoubtedly true that a left-wing government can presage sharp class battles as the 1936 election of the Popular Front government in Spain or Chile’s Allende government shows, this only poses the question of how the working class can resolve this conflict – a question Blanc leaves unanswered.

Any party in parliament first faces the prospect of passive and active resistance to the implementation of any socialist measures not just from the private capitalist class, but also from the permanent, unelected state bureaucracy. The fate of the Allende government in Chile, overthrown by a bosses’ offensive capped off by a coup organised by the military hierarchy, is a reminder of the danger of capitalist repression of elected government.

While Allende’s Socialist Party remained “imprisoned in the bourgeois order” as one revolutionary critic described, the real alternative was posed by organs of popular control established by workers in the factories and neighbourhoods, which confronted capitalist sabotage, distributed goods, began organising production and undertook to arm workers.

To effectively block resistance from the capitalists, the bureaucracy and the military, these organisations of working-class power would have had to become a substitute state. This would mean breaking fundamentally with the democratic socialist strategy, by taking power against both the repressive wings of the state and the parliamentary socialists in government.

It’s only in the context of workers’ revolution, when capitalism is severely destabilised, that overthrowing capitalist states becomes a real possibility. As the Belgian revolutionary Ernest Mandel put it:

These defences permit no lasting assemblies or sieges of long duration. They can be dismantled, but only at precise moments, when a juxtaposition of circumstances momentarily weakens or even paralyses the enemy’s ability to make use of them. But this moment never lasts very long. It is called a “revolutionary crisis”.^[5]

Fundamentally, the contest between two rival political powers on the same territory can only be resolved by force, by the destruction of one or the other. The better organised and more clear-sighted the revolutionary forces, the less physical violence will be necessary to achieve that victory. This is the lesson of situations of “dual power” from Russia in 1917, to Spain in 1936, to Chile in 1973. It has been learned through innumerable revolutionary struggles that have shown the necessity of clearly breaking with the capitalist state.

Blanc’s schema for socialist change, which urges an orientation to winning a parliamentary majority armed only with the vague notion of the need for a “rupture” with capitalism, is not based on any real reflection on the history of workers’ struggle.

Mike Macnair justifies a parliamentary approach with an even more wildly unrealistic perspective, championing a “democratic republic” as the political form necessary to carry out a socialist transformation. In his book Revolutionary Strategy, he summarises the program thus:

Until we have won a majority (identifiable by our votes in election results) the workers’ party will remain in opposition and not in government… When we have a majority, we will form a government and implement the whole minimum programme [ie of democratic reforms, LT]; if necessary, the possession of a majority will give us legitimacy to coerce the capitalist/pro-capitalist and petty bourgeois minority. Implementing the whole minimum programme will prevent the state in the future serving as an instrument of the capitalist class and allow the struggle to progress on terrain more favourable to the working class.^[6]

While Macnair appeals to the authority of Marx and Engels to justify this position, they argued something quite different. Reflecting in 1891 on the lessons of the Paris Commune, Engels made it clear he considered even the “‘purest’ democratic republic” an organ of capitalist rule: “In reality…, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy”.^[7]

Since the social content of every state has been to uphold the class rule of a minority, Marx saw that a working-class revolution would of necessity involve smashing and superseding the bounds of the bourgeois state. This was the significance of the Paris Commune, as Marx outlined:

This was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of State power. It was a revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life.^[8]

Socialists who reject an insurrectionary strategy for socialism can point to the difficulty of overthrowing modern capitalist states. But they can find no historical precedent that vindicates their strategy of a parliamentary road to socialism, and they most definitely cannot claim the authority of Marx and Engels to support their argument.

Kautsky’s theory at its most radical can’t provide a guide for smashing the power of the bureaucratic capitalist state and creating the forms of democratic self-government that can allow workers to run society. None of his epigones, either, have posed convincing answers to these questions within the framework of his theory.

If Kautsky at his best isn’t good enough, there is a broader problem with Blanc and Macnair’s method. They want to extract Kautsky’s strategic arguments at a certain point in his political development (generally somewhere just before 1910), separated completely from his political practice. This is a thoroughly idealist and non-Marxist approach. Kautsky’s theoretical formulas, as Greene’s book shows, were shaped by a desire to reconcile opposing tendencies in a broad socialist organisation shifting rightward. His political backsliding followed the degeneration of the organisation he dedicated his life to defending. This degeneration had deep material roots, most extensively chronicled in Carl Schorske’s book The Development of the Great Schism, which explains the SPD’s bureaucratisation and integration into German capitalism. Although Kautsky shied away from the worst excesses of the SPD, his life’s work was a defence of this process. His rejection of the mass strike tactic was a conscious concession to the army of conservative trade union bureaucrats that politically dominated the party. His distortion of the Marxist theory of the state muddied the task for socialists in a period of war and revolution. His urging of socialist “unity” allowed reformists to gain ground unimpeded, and then became a call to mend the necessary division taking place between opponents and supporters of capitalism.

Kautsky’s contemporary critics, revolutionary Marxists like Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, understood this. They criticised Kautsky not only for his increasingly explicit conservatism but for the role that he played in papering over clear divisions in the socialist movement, a practice that only benefited the movement’s most open defenders of capitalism. From the perspective gained by witnessing the catastrophic collapse of Social Democracy during the war, Kautsky’s long-term political deficiencies became clearer. The middle section of Greene’s book illuminates how Kautsky’s radical rivals understood his politics.

Revolutionary anti-Kautskyism

Rosa Luxemburg, the most formidable figure of the German revolutionary left, broke clearly with Kautsky during the mass strike debate of 1910, as Greene writes:

Luxemburg concluded that Kautsky’s “strategy of attrition” amounted to a “Nothing-But-Parliamentarianism”. For the SPD, mass action was viewed as a “hindrance” to their “parliamentary and union daily routine”. To prevent a disruption of this orderly strategy, she believed the SPD would use its organizational power to “put the brakes on the mass action” (p.90).

While Lenin’s hostility to Kautsky only developed after the great betrayal of 1914, he took seriously the task of locating the roots of this disaster. In The State and Revolution, published in 1917, Lenin identified the source of Kautsky’s political degeneration in his evasion of the question of state power. He accuses Kautsky of being deliberately vague about the nature of workers’ power as far back as his 1902 pamphlet The Social Revolution:

Throughout the pamphlet the author speaks of the winning of state power – and no more; that is, he has chosen a formula which makes a concession to the opportunists, inasmuch as it admits the possibility of seizing power without destroying the state machine (quoted on p.108).

In his polemic The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Lenin attacked Kautsky’s tendency to approach democracy abstracted from its class character: “It is natural for a liberal to speak of ‘democracy’ in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: ‘for what class?’” (quoted on p.109). This is a criticism that could equally be levelled at Kautsky’s modern epigones.

In Socialism and War, Lenin attacked Kautsky mercilessly for his role as representative of the “centre”, attempting to elide principled differences between reformists and revolutionaries and prevent necessary political clarification on the questions of war and revolution:

“[T]he Kautskyan ‘Centre’ is doing more harm to Marxism than avowed social-chauvinism. Whoever now obscures disagreements, whoever now, in the guise of Marxism, preaches to the workers what Kautskyism is preaching, is lulling the workers.”^[9]Lenin argued that “centrists” like Kautsky were the greatest danger to the politics of the workers’ movement, because unlike the avowed reformists, they refused to put their positions clearly.

This small sampling of the critiques outlined in Greene’s book gives a sense of the questions at stake in the schism in European socialism. Kautsky’s Marxist critics took him to task by exposing the links between his theoretical evasions and his conservative political practice. A similar critique should be made of the socialists who are today reviving his legacy.

Mike Macnair upholds Kautsky to further his argument for a broad party encompassing different tendencies that are committed to “Marxist unity”. Macnair shares Kautsky’s belief that the working class should have only one party:

The proletariat as a class has an extremely powerful interest in common action among people who have political disagreements – which is necessary to trade unions and all other sorts of workers’ organisations. Hence, setting yourselves up in organisational competition with existing workers’ organisations to recruit individuals is a sure-fire route to marginality unless you have a very clear political explanation of why you have to be separate.^[10]

Macnair counterposes the success of Social Democracy in its ascendant period to the trials and tribulations of small groups today. While the challenges facing scattered groupings of revolutionaries today are immense, attempting to elide the principled differences and distinctions on the left that have emerged through a century of bitter experience can’t create a shortcut to mass influence. It is impossible for socialists today to recreate the experience of Social Democracy at the dawn of the workers’ movement – and nor should we try. Under the banner of “unity” these parties became dominated by reformist elements which converted them into bulwarks of capitalist stability. It is precisely on the basis of these experiences that revolutionaries have a “clear political explanation” of why they have to strive for organisational independence from reformists.

Macnair argues today that the radical left should focus almost exclusively on regroupment, deriding organisations that focus on individual recruitment and a “practice in which party activity means mainly ‘activism’: ie, running round from one agitational initiative to the next”.^[11]

This dismissal of the serious work of rebuilding interventionist organisations that can learn to play a role in struggles and arm their members in revolutionary politics is a road to nowhere. In Macnair’s case, it has done little but reproduce the sectarianism he claims to be aiming to overcome – Macnair is building an inward-looking and passive sect that loudly proclaims that only their (dubious) program of a “democratic republic” can provide the basis for successful advance.

Macnair argues that the purpose of a Marxist organisation is not to engage in small group activity, but in “high politics”. But Marxists will only be able to achieve the influence necessary to impact society at this level if they pass through the hard work of individual recruitment and “activist” campaign work that Macnair derides.

Eric Blanc, an ex-revolutionary turned member of the left-liberal Democratic Socialists of America, has a clear motivation for championing Kautsky, as articulated in the pages of the reformist Jacobin Magazine: “moving away from dogmatic assumptions about the generalizability of the 1917 model should help socialists abandon other political dogmas, including on pressing issues such as how to build a Marxist current and whether it’s okay to ever use the Democratic Party ballot line”.^[12]

Essentially, he argues that embracing Kautsky and erasing the divide between reformist and revolutionary strategies will free socialists up to abandon more political principles and operate “flexibly”. For Blanc, this means committing wholeheartedly to the project of building a “left wing” in the thoroughly conservative and bourgeois Democratic Party. The fruits of this project, described by Blanc as an “electoral upsurge” is the election of a small layer of political hacks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose wholehearted embrace of Biden and Harris’ imperialist and anti-worker agenda would make even the most cynical Young Labor hack in Australia blush.

Greene outlines Blanc’s rapid rush to the right since his embrace of “Kautskyist” politics, from entertaining the “tactical” use of the Democratic ballot line in 2017, in order to build a mass base for socialist politics, to embracing the new generation of liberal Democrats elected in the 2018 midterms, to calling for socialists to “get out the vote” for Biden in 2020. Blanc’s orientation to the Democratic Party, which was initially justified as a short-term tactical expedient, is now a permanent political orientation – one which, if unchallenged, will permanently subordinate the American left to the most aggressive and successful capitalist party on the planet.

This political practice is a million miles to the right of the version of Kautsky that Blanc claims to uphold. Before the First World War, Kautsky at least claimed that workers’ political independence, rejection of support for capitalist parties and refusal to participate in coalition governments were cornerstones of Marxist principle. At the same time, Blanc is methodologically a pure Kautskyist, attempting to ply formulas that are acceptable to both rightward-moving socialists and the Biden administration.

This trajectory is proof that the political demarcations drawn in Kautsky’s era are still important reference points today. World War I was a decisive moment because it created the possibility of workers’ revolution and clarified a division that was fundamental – socialists had to declare for or against cooperation with the capitalist state, for or against imperialist war, and for or against the reality of social revolution. Douglas Greene’s book shows that these formative debates still echo more than a century later, as we enter a new period of polarisation and capitalist crisis.

References

Blanc, Eric 2019, “Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)” Jacobin, 2 April. https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture

Engels, Frederick 1891, “On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune [Postscript]”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

LeBlanc, Paul 2020, “Rosa Luxemburg and the Final Conflict”, Spectre Journal, April. https://spectrejournal.com/rosa-luxemburg-and-the-final-conflict/

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1915, “Socialism and War”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/index.htm

Macnair, Mike 2010, Revolutionary Strategy, November Publications. https://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Macnair-Revolutionary-Strategy.pdf

Macnair, Mike 2020, “End the cycle of splits” Weekly Worker, 23 May. https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/915/end-the-cycle-of-splits/

Macnair, Mike 2020, “Programmeless liquidationism”, Weekly Worker, 8 October. https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1318/programmeless-liquidationism/#fnref2

Mandel, Ernest 1978, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of “Socialism in One Country”, Verso.

Marx, Karl 1871, “The Character of the Commune”, in The Civil War in France (First Draft). https://marxengels.public-archive.net/en/ME1511en_d1.html

Post, Charlie 2019, “The ‘Best’ of Karl Kautsky Isn’t Good Enough”, Jacobin, 3 September. https://jacobin.com/2019/03/karl-kautsky-socialist-strategy-german-revolution