> what's the name of Kautsky's summary of the first volume of CAPITAL? > > ------------------------ > Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Well I couldn't remember the title off the top of my head. It's "The economic doctrines of Karl Marx", written 1887 and revised in 1903 when Luxemburg wrote her piece to which I referred. This was a standard popularisation of Das Kapital which was widely read, focusing basically on Marx's Capital volume 1. See: http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/works/1880s/economic/index.htm When the first known New Zealand Marxist, Westcoaster Tom Feary, worked his way on a ship to San Fransisco to get some Marxist literature there, mainly in Charles Kerr editions, from the IWW bookshop, in order to smuggle it back into New Zealand in a trunk (the sedition laws made this literature illegal), Kautsky's "Economic Doctrines" would have been one of the books he bought. He would later be found sitting on the hillside by the coast in the weekends, overlooking the coalmines, reading "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" as well as "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy". A "Marxian Association" had been founded during the first world war, a war in which, from memory, 1 in 11 adult males in New Zealand lost their lives. The New Zealand sedition laws led to quite a number of arrests and fines, and Hetty Weitzel (If I remember correctly), a bright young woman from German background, university educated and aiming to teach, who had associated with the new Communist Party founded in 1921, five years after the Labour Party was founded, was left without job prospects and forced by circumstances to emigrate to Australia. She had had a Comintern journal or pamphlet in her possession and was caught with it. Lateron, Harry Holland MP, the honorary Marxist in the Labour Party (who had read Das Kapital and published a pamphlet on theories of value), would read the titles of banned literature into the Parliamentary Hansard (= the official record of parliamentary proceedings, accessible to the general public), so that at least the comrades would know what literature they had to get, or were missing out on. And they did get it, because the New Zealand Seamen's Union was very strong and militant, containing many Wobblies and socialists of one stripe or another, and a lot of socialist literature was imported by them. As regards Karl Kautsky, he was reviled among revolutionaries ever since Lenin's polemics, but as his articles in Die Neue Zeit show, he was actually a quite sophisticated Marxist thinker and not merely a populariser. Among other things, he wrote some thoughtful articles about the political economy of gold ("Gold und Teuerung"). One of the main sources of difference between Kautsky and Lenin was Kautsky's strong commitment to democracy, which of course did not exist in Russia beyond the consultative Duma permitted by the Czar after 1905 for some time. In Russia and Poland, the workers movement had to break the law, or at any rate undertake very radical actions, in order to win even bread-and-butter issues, whereas in post-Bismarck Germany, a popular democracy existed, such that the social democrats could operate legally "within the system" and indeed gain parliamentary representation in elections; trade unions could generally operate freely and expand. The more radical, revolutionary stance of Polish and Russian Marxism is in good part explained by this fact alone. If you read Salvatori's biography of Kautsky (which is in some respects a bit superficial and tedious) you will be amazed at Kautsky's vision, despite his relative incomprehension of the politics of imperialism (having ruled out the possibility of a new cycle of world wars in 1906, he wrote an article on "ultra-imperialism" on the very eve of world war 1). Jurriaan > two comments on Kautsky: > > 1) despite the antagonism of self-styled "Leninists" toward him, Lenin's WHAT IS TO BE DONE? is based largely on Kautsky's work. > > 2) His notions of ultra-imperialism aren't so far off today. It wouldn't be the first time that Marxist predictions came true long after they were made. > > Jim I believe you are correct - certainly, the concept of "democratic centralism" was already mooted by Kautsky. Lenin merely reinterpreted the concept in his own situation. I think from memory David Lane also mentioned this fact in his sociology of bolshevism. I have some reservations about the concept of ultra-imperialism since I feel it doesn't really do justice to the reality of inter-capitalist competition, and the fact that most corporations are still nationally based. J. > yes, but the concept applies _better_ now than any time since its invention. > Jim
