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
