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ABSTRACT:
The traditional dismissive characterization of Karl Kantsky's Marxism as a form of mechanical or even Darwinian evolutionism is a caricature that obscures the very real and important contribution he made to historical materialism in the early years of the last century. Kautsky's historical studies of both the early Church and Reformation "communism," as well as his attempts to analyze the contemporary Russian and American social formations, show that, while Kautsky's Marxism suffered from consistent political weaknesses, his theory of history, especially as it was articulated in the years before 1910, was sophisticated and powerful. While the power of Kautsky's Marxism became muted after this period, the weaknesses of his later works should not be allowed to obscure the insights contained within his earlier work; insights that informed some of the best work of the next generation of Marxists.
AFTER AN INAUSPICIOUS EARLY ENCOUNTER with Marx, when the older man described his young epigone as a pedant,1 Karl Kautsky's reputation as a Marxist theoretician rose to a peak in the first decade of the last century, only to endure a dramatic reversal in the years alter the outbreak of the First World War. Typically, most of Kantsky's modern interlocutors totally dismiss his understanding of historical materialism as a crude, indeed Darwinian, form of economic reductionism, which informed his equally mechanical interpretation of socialist politics.2 In contrast to this reading of Kautsky's interpretation of historical materialism, I argue that his theory of history evolved from a more to a less sophisticated type; moreover, in the early years of the 20th century, he contributed to the complex and sophisticated flowering of Marxist thought that is usually associated with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky.
Despite Marx's misgivings about this young "mediocrity," Kautsky's early theoretical renown was placed on a sure footing when, in 1883, he launched and edited Neue Zeil, the second International's most important journal of socialist theory. When, subsequently, first, Engels set him to work editing Marx's Theories of Surplus Value in 1888, and then, after Engels' death, he was named as the editor of Marx's literary estate, his pre-eminence among Marxist intellectuals was assured (Steenson, 1991, 101). Moreover, it was from this position that he firmly stamped his imprint on the international...