The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky <https://www.routledge.com/The-New-Reformism-and-the-Revival-of-Karl-Kautsky-The-Renegades-Revenge/Greene/p/book/9781032758787>The Renegade’s Revenge By Douglas Greene <https://www.routledge.com/search?author=Douglas%20Greene> This text offers an authoritative historiography of German socialist theorist Karl Kautsky and his impact on debates about the Russian Revolution and the contemporary left. Known as the “Pope of Marxism,” Douglas Greene examines the totality of Kautsky’s political career and dissects the fundamental opportunism and passive radicalism that defined his Marxism. He later examines the most substantive Marxist critics of Kautsky, namely Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, while offering a critical assessment of the work produced by scholars and activists, Lars Lih, Eric Blanc, and Mike Mcnair, seeking to revive Kautsky. *The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky *is an important addition to scholarship on the subject and a valuable resource for those interested in the Russian Revolution, German politics, socialism, Marxism, and contemporary left-wing debates.
Introduction Part I Karl Kautsky 1. On the Left 2. In the Center 3. On the Right Part II The Anti-Kautskyians 4. Rosa Luxemburg 5. Vladimir Ilyrich Lenin 6. Leon Trotsky Part III Neo-Kautskyism 7. Lars Lih 8. The Epigones: Right and Left Conclusion Chapter One can be read via the preview book link @ https://www.routledge.com/The-New-Reformism-and-the-Revival-of-Karl-Kautsky-The-Renegades-Revenge/Greene/p/book/9781032758787 . Why Kautsky Was Wrong (and Why You Should Care) <https://www.leftvoice.org/why-kautsky-was-wrong-and-why-you-should-care/> An interview with Doug Greene about his new book on The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky. "You’ve just published a book about Karl Kautsky. I’m a historian of the socialist movement in Germany, and I can say that until recently, Kautsky was almost completely forgotten. He was remembered, if at all, as a target of polemics by Lenin <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/> and Trotsky <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/>. Yet there has been a minor Kautsky revival in the United States. The Kautsky debate <https://www.leftvoice.org/an-introduction-to-the-kautsky-debate/> began about five years ago with an article in *Jacobin* magazine <https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture>. What do you think drew people to Kautsky around 2018–19, more or less a century after he betrayed socialism in the First World War?..." "Eric Blanc argued that Lenin is irrelevant to U.S. socialists today because there has never been a majority of the working class in a parliamentary democracy that has supported the perspective of a violent insurrection against the capitalist state. Blanc believes that socialists need to aim to win a majority in parliament, just as Kautsky propagated. How do you see Lenin’s relevance in established bourgeois democracies? (Blanc since seems to have given up on Kautsky and even the most watered-down versions of Marxist socialism in favor of American liberalism.) This idea that we just need to “vote harder” for democratic socialists (or Democrats, in Blanc’s case), and that we can have socialism once we achieve 50 percent plus one, is not borne out by history. I think both Kautsky and Blanc make a fetish of elections and bourgeois democracy. For one, they overestimate the “democratic” character of bourgeois democracy and its toleration of socialist organizations. For example, the United States has a violent labor history of ruthlessly crushing strikes and unions. Leftist organizations have been the targets of repression in the Haymarket affair, multiple red scares, and Cointelpro. This is not even talking about the dozens of examples of the United States invading or using the CIA to stop even moderate social democracy abroad. Only someone who gets their view of the American government from a high school civics textbook could possibly think that this is a democratic country. It is true that in normal times, there is generally not majority support in the working class for revolutionary alternatives. But there have been revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations in Germany 1919, Spain 1936, France 1968, Portugal 1974, and others. None of those instances led to a successful revolution for a variety of reasons, but we would be hard pressed to say revolutionary politics was marginal in those instances. Lenin’s continuing relevance covers the whole gamut of revolutionary politics and strategy. Among his great insights are his understanding of the state and how to defeat it. One of Lenin’s great insights in *State and Revolution* <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/> is that the state is an instrument of class oppression that cannot be captured by the working class and instead must be smashed. This has been borne out by every revolution in history, whether the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution. It is not the ballot box but armed force that is required to break the back of the ruling class. As a negative example, we can look at Salvador Allende and Chile in the 1970s <https://www.leftvoice.org/chile-73-was-victory-possible/> to see what happens to those who attempt to reach socialism by voting for it. Allende was elected, but he was constrained by the rules of the existing state structure and did everything possible to appease the bourgeoisie. In 1973, the Chilean army showed how much respect it had for democratic niceties by overthrowing Allende in a bloody military coup. Ultimately, the advocates of the peaceful road to socialism kept the working class disarmed and thus ensured their defeat. The original neo-Kautskyist was Lars Lih, who inspired the CPGB/*Weekly Worker*, which in turn inspired *Cosmonaut* and others. Lih’s main thesis was that Lenin was in perfect agreement with Kautsky until the Great Betrayal of August 4, 1914, when Kautsky and the majority of social democracy supported their own governments in the imperialist war. In Lih’s interpretation, Lenin simply continued Kautsky’s policies from before 1914. Would you agree with Lih’s thesis about Lenin’s “aggressive originality”? Was Kautsky the true “architect of the October Revolution” <https://jacobin.com/2019/06/karl-kautsky-vladimir-lenin-russian-revolution> ? To begin, Lih has done some valuable work on Lenin. For one, he does challenge a great deal of anticommunist stereotypes that Lenin was some sort of elitist totalitarian. The Lenin that emerges from Lih is a Marxist who believes in the self-emancipation of the working class. Moreover, Lih correctly highlights Lenin’s debt to Kautsky. And if this was all Lih did, then there really wouldn’t be any reason to object to his ideas. However, Lih goes much further and states that there were few, if any, breaks in Lenin’s political ideas. This means that he sees Lenin as largely Kautskyian. As a result, the distinctiveness of Leninism is erased. So instead of reading Lenin, we could just return to Kautsky. Yet Lih cannot see how Lenin broke with Kautsky on a host of issues. For example, Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party may have used Kautsky’s formulations, but it developed a unique revolutionary practice, foreign to the SPD’s parliamentarism. In the end, Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed in practice that they were revolutionaries, while Kautskyian social democracy was not. In 1917, there were figures in the Bolshevik Party such as Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin who were associated with Kautsky’s stagism (in which democratic revolution is a prelude to socialist revolution). Lenin’s April Theses <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm> broke radically with Kautskyism by calling for soviet power and socialist revolution. In many respects, Lenin had come around to the essentials of the theory of permanent revolution championed by Trotsky. This was recognized as a break with Kautskyism by many social democrats such as Plekhanov and Bogdanov — and they knew their Kautsky very well! So, far from Kautsky being the architect of the October Revolution, it was the reverse. If Lenin and the Bolsheviks had followed Kautsky, they would have gone down to certain defeat. While “right-wing” neo-Kautskyists like *Jacobin* support the Democratic Party without reservations, “left-wing” neo-Kautskyists like the *Weekly Worker* and *Cosmonaut* do call for class independence, but not as an immediate demand. As I’ve written elsewhere <https://www.leftvoice.org/kautsky-luxemburg-and-lenin-in-light-of-the-german-revolution/> (and again here <https://www.leftvoice.org/in-defense-of-the-transitional-program/>), their connection with Kautsky seems to lie in this strategic bifurcation: for now we will pursue class collaboration, but when the Big Day comes, we will suddenly call for a revolutionary rupture. What does Kautsky stand for in today’s strategic debates among socialists? I honestly don’t think it is possible, even if there is a will (and I’m not convinced on that score), for deeply engrained reformism and class collaborationism to be suddenly transformed into class struggle and revolution. The simple fact of the matter is, if you spend years training someone to play basketball, you can’t abruptly throw them in a baseball uniform and expect them to play well. I think all this neo-Kautskyian talk about a break is empty because there is no will to do so. If someone has no problem supporting Bernie Sanders, AOC, and other Democrats for “the time being,” then they are not revolutionary Marxists but servants of the class enemy. The break with the bourgeois parties by Marxists either happens now or it does not happen at all. In today’s debates, I think Kautsky serves as a role model for those advocating “reformist socialism” and support for the Democratic Party. In other words, Kautsky stands for a perspective diametrically opposed to anti-imperialism, internationalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism. Those championing Kautsky advocate a “long game” of working in bourgeois parties and parliaments before, somehow, voting their way to socialism. It will end in either co-option or defeat, but never in socialism. The Kautskyian perspective is one that should be forcefully rejected by every Marxist as fundamentally reformist, nationalist, and anticommunist..." Chapter 8|40 pages <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003481348/new-reformism-revival-karl-kautsky-douglas-greene?refId=33779f2a-01d0-4e4e-b485-bee6b69d5ab4&context=ubx>The Epigones <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781003481348-12/epigones-douglas-greene?context=ubx&refId=fa003420-3800-4545-88d4-7d42a5a25b80> Right and Left Abstract This chapter looks at the emergence of neo-Kautskyism oriented toward political action. While Kautsky was reviled after his death, the politics of Eurocommunism, Salvador Allende, and broad left parties show an elective affinity for his reformist strategy. In the United States, the scholar-activist Eric Blanc hopes to transform neo-Kautskyism into a political program for democratic socialism. Blanc’s defense of Kautskyism is built on anticommunist caricatures of Leninism as an insurrectionist strategy. Furthermore, Blanc claims that Kautsky’s ideas on a socialist transition were proven successful during the Finnish Revolution of 1917–18. However, Blanc’s argument is based on distorting the record of the Finnish Revolution and the reasons for its failure. In addition, Blanc criticizes Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary Marxism from the right by defending the opportunist politics of the Polish Socialist Party. Based on his neo-Kautskyism, Blanc advocates a strategy to create a labor party by working inside the Democrats for the long term before undertaking a “dirty break.” The British activist Mike Mcnair supports a more left-wing variant of neo-Kautskyism that counsels “revolutionary patience” and democratic republicanism while rejecting Lenin’s views on the state. Despite some rhetorical differences, the neo-Kautskyism of both Blanc and Mcnair shares the same underlying reformism. The Renegade Kautsky and his Acolyte Eric Blanc <https://libcom.org/article/renegade-kautsky-and-his-acolyte-eric-blanc> Michael Pugliese -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#30580): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/30580 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/106428496/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
