KAUTSKY, 1854-1938 Marxism in the Classical Years Gary P. Steenson 82 - KARL KAUTSKY those who supported the court, those who opposed it, and those who went over to the side of the Third Estate. He discussed the many layers of the Third Estate and emphasized the importance of peasant and street-rabble uprisings in sustaining and advancing the revolution. Though his sympathies were obviously with the sans-culottes, he viewed the sequence of events in the Revolution as the inevitable results of the immature development of the French bourgeoisie and as a necessary step in the progression toward modern capitalist society. Class Struggles was a convincing example of the utility of the materialist conception of history and its potential as a weapon in the orthodox struggle against both those who would merge the workers’ movement with the bourgeoisie and those who argued that the workers should have noth- ing to do with any other group. It was a fitting last work for this decade in which Kautsky prepared for the role of international arbiter of Marxism that would be his after he returned to Stuttgart in 1890.68 CHAPTER FOUR Challenge from the Right 1890- l 904 KAUTSKY AND HIS NEW WIFE settled in Stuttgart in late 1890, shortly before the expiration of the antisocialist law. In the next quarter century the SPD grew into a massive party, and Kautsky’s reputation grew with it. During these years he became an important figure in the international movement as well as the leading theorist of the SPD. His international prestige was largely a product of his re- lationship with the German party, and his place in the SPD derived from his alliance with Bebel, his skill as a polemicist, his control of the New Zeit, and his role as editor of the Marx Nachlass (“literary estate”), especially volume four of Capital. Kautsky drafted much of the official program the SPD adopted in 1891, aided the Austrian and Hungarian parties with their programs, and corresponded with the leading fig- ures of virtually every socialist party in the world. At congresses of the Second International and in his private correspondence and public writing, he was frequently called upon to arbitrate theoretical disputes, to hand down authoritative judgments as the successor to Marx and Engels. According to one prominent historian of Marxism, during these years Kautsky “helped turn Marxism from an esoteric system into the doctrine of a gigantic political movement.“ Under the antisocialist law, the electoral fortunes of the SPD had increased steadily. This trend reached a climax on 20 February 1890, when the SPD became the largest party in the Reich, receiving over 1.4 million votes. With the lapse of the law the party continued to grow, surpassing 2 million votes in 1898, 3 million in 1903, and 4 million in 1912. At the same time, party and trade-union membership increased enormously, as did the bureaucracies of both organizations. But the euphoria induced by this growth did not completely mask the malaise and discontent within the party before 1914. Electoral success and 83 84 - KARL KAUTSKY bureaucratic growth increasingly threatened the supposed revolu- tionary posture of the party as integration into the prevailing system replaced intransigent opposition. Greater size endangered the unitary nature of the party as the south German socialists increasingly pursued independent policies. Despite its status as a social and political pariah and its negligible political power, the SPD was a focal point in the politics of the Wilhelmian Reich. The antisocialist law, the “new course” of Wilhelm II, the election of 1907, and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s concern with the party all attest to the SPD’s importance in the formulation of official and unofficial policy. But this negative role did not satisfy those within the party who hoped to make it an effective political force. The increase in votes did not yield a comparable increase in mandates; not until 1912 did the party have the largest Reichstag delegation, 110, barely a quarter of the total. Even an absolute majority would have meant little in the pseudorepresentative Reich. Moreover, by 1912-1913, the SPD’s steady growth was slowing up; the party had apparently reached a saturation point, beyond which lay stagnation? Party developments after 1890 intensified the moderate-radical dif- ferences that had characterized German socialism since its beginnings. Electoral success, a rising standard of living, and the conservatizing influence of bureaucratization strengthened the moderate forces, while the persistent ostracism of the SPD, the periodic violence of labor disputes, frustration with lack of power, and, after the turn of the century, the debate over imperialism, all fed the so-called radical fraction. During the years before the First World War, the moderates constituted the right wing of the party; the radicals were the left wing. Until the emergence of revisionism in the late nineties, right and left most often indicated attitudes toward party tactics and views of the nature and goals of the party. The right wing tended to concentrate exclusively on parliamentary activity, gradual reform, and the expansion of the party’s appeal, especially to the peasantry. The left wing, while not rejecting parliamentary activity, tended to call for extraparliamentary action as well, drastic political reforms to alter the nature of the Reich, and preservation of the exclusively working-class character of the party. From 1890 to 1904, Kautsky devoted most of his time to fighting what he considered the pernicious tendencies of the right. These tendencies included support for state socialism, appeals to the peasantry, and overemphasis on the efficacy of parliamentary reform. After the mid-nineties, Kautsky also struggled against Bernstein’s revisionism, the first and only theoretical attempt to justify the right wing of the SPD. Not until after the 1905 Russian revolution CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT, 1890-1904 ° 85 did an SPD left wing begin to emerge as distinct from Kautsky’s position, and not until then did he feel compelled to distinguish his own position as centrist, between the traditional deviations to the right and the new deviations to the left. Editing the Neue Zeit From his return to Germany in 1890 until he lost the journal in 1917, a great deal of Kautsky’s time was devoted to editing the N we Zeit. This job entailed a staggering amount of work. In 1892, he reviewed nearly five hundred unsolicited article manuscripts, over three hundred of which were returned. These unsolicited articles often required sharply worded responses in order to clarify positions of the SPD. Even articles Kautsky solicited did not always work out as expected. In late 1893, he rejected as unacceptable an article about Lessing from Paul Ernst, a dramatist-critic associated with the left wing of the Berlin party. Kautsky had expected an article based on the materialist conception of history, but found that Ernst was not of that school of thought. Such incidents made him suspicious of those intellectuals who were not full-time adherents to the cause. Kautsky’s editorial responsibilities also included an enormous amount of correspondence; in 1895 he estimated that he wrote approximately one thousand letters per year, and in September 1896 he was writing about twelve letters every day. Kautsky also received a large number of inquiries from people he identified as “bourgeois and students,” who asked about such things as value theory, “our relation to ethics,” and other matters. These inquiries often required article-length answers and sometimes consumed more time than either editorial or private correspondence. Their great number also led Kautsky to admit reluctantly that the majority of readers of the Neue Zeit were bourgeois, not workers as he had hoped.3 During most of his years at the head of the Neue Zeit, Kautsky complained periodically of being overburdened with work. Though he always had co-workers to assist him, not until 1899 did he have coeditors whom he felt he could entrust with editorial responsibilities. Again and again he complained that he was prevented by the burdens of the New Zeit from pursuing his own theoretical development. Espe- cially during the first three or four years after the return to Germany, he felt that he wasted time with routine work, with reading “bad manuscripts, bad brochures, and bad newspapers,” and that such work was causing him to decay theoretically. However, his capacity for work usually was more than a match for the demands made on him. At one 86 - KARL KAUTSKY point in 1896, he was working on seven different projects— two books, two articles, two revisions of previous works, and a translation of a series of articles from the Marx Nac/zlass——as well as keeping up his editorial work. This capacity for hard work once led Adler to exclaim: “You are simply a human demon! If I had your strength, or even a tenth of it!”4 Not just the work of editing a weekly bothered Kautsky; he was even more upset with having to live in Stuttgart. He had agreed to move back to Germany with the expiration of the antisocialist law in part because he recognized that, as far as socialism was concerned, Germany was where the action was. He soon discovered, however, as he had during his earlier residence, that Stuttgart did not share in much of the action of German socialism. In the 1890s, it was an isolated, backward city on the edge of the rural splendor of the Black Forest region in southern Germany. It had neither a vigorous socialist circle nor sufficient research facilities, the only things that would have made living there palatable to Kautsky. London had Engels and the British Museum; Vienna had family and friends; Berlin was the center of German socialist activity. Kautsky would have preferred any of these three great cities to Stuttgart, but several factors worked to keep him and his family there until 1897.5 Kautsky was dependent on the Neue Zeit for a regular income. Dietz had made the departure from London more attractive by guaranteeing Kautsky 3,000 marks per year, and on 1 October 1891, this figure was raised to 5,000 marks. The increase was most welcome as the Kautsky family was growing rather swiftly. In February 1891, the first of three children, all boys, was born, and on 13 January 1892, the second, Karl Kautsky, _[r., made his appearance while his father was in London for a brief visit. The proximity of the two births led Karl, Sr., to exclaim in a letter to Engels: “Holy Malthus, pray for me!” The responsibilities of a family made him more cautious about abandoning Stuttgart and the Neue Zeit than he might otherwise have been.“ Both Dietz and Kautsky agreed that editing the Neue Zeit as a weekly required the editor’s presence in Stuttgart, and this further limited Kautsky’s ability to get away from provincial Swabia. He could leave Stuttgart for extended visits to London and Berlin only if he could find a coeditor whom he trusted. For a time in 1892, Kautsky and Engels thought they had found such a man in Conrad Schmidt. But Schmidt (1863-1932), once identified with the left wing of the Berlin party organization, could not be pursuaded to give up plans to move to Zurich and be aPrivatdozent. After Schmidt, several men were consid- ered, including Bruno Schoenlank, Heinrich Braun, Franz Mehring, CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT, 1890-1904 ° 87 and Max Schippel, but all were found wanting for one reason or another. Though Kautsky would have gladly accepted Bernstein as a coeditor at any time before 1897, he was under indictment for lése- majesté and not free to return to Germany until 1901.7 Three other options existed for Kautsky which would have allowed him to leave Stuttgart and have more time for his own theoretical work. One was to change the New Zeit back into a monthly; another was to move the journal’s headquarters to Berlin; and the third was simply to give up publication. The first of these options received a great deal of attention from Kautsky not only because it would have freed him of burdens, but also because he and Dietz differed on how to solve another problem, namely overcoming the Neue Ze2't’s chronic deficit. Both men recognized, as did virtually everyone associated with the journal, that it was neither read by workers nor subscribed to sufficiently to be self-supporting. One critic suggested that the Neue Zeit could just as well be published in Kamchatka for all the foreigners who wrote for it, and Bebel complained that the journal was not topical enough. But Kautsky contended that when he called on these critics to contribute articles that would overcome these weaknesses, none was forthcomingf‘ Since the Neue Zeit was not an official party organ, its losses were underwritten not by the party, but by Dietz privately. Dietz’s solution to the deficit was to change the content of the journal, to appeal to a greater number of subscribers by running short articles concerned with subjects of more immediate interest. Kautsky agreed that this would probably increase circulation, but he had two objections. First of all, he argued, in order to become more topical the New Zeit would have to be published in Berlin where its editor could keep on top of current developments. Second, while Kautsky wanted to move to Ber- lin, both he and Engels felt that popularizing the journal could only be done by sacrificing the best part of the Neue Zeit, and its raison d’2tre, the theoretical articles. Kautsky suggested that the monthly format be restored, and each issue enlarged, so that more space could be devoted to serious theoretical topics. He argued that this would streamline costs while preserving the journal’s true value. If Dietz and Bebel felt a new weekly was needed, then a new one should be started without destroying the Neue Zeit.9 Abandoning his journal completely was the most extreme solution to Kautsky’s discomfort with Stuttgart. But by late 1893, he had become so frustrated with the isolation of the town that he announced that he was moving to Vienna in April 1894, whether or not a suitable replacement had been found, and whether or not it would mean the 88 0 KARL KAUTSKY end of the New Zeit. In fact, of course, he did not go to Vienna and did not give up his journal. Although his frustration and sense of isolation were real, his commitment to the cause of advancing and strength- ening Marxism was even stronger. He was acutely aware that Marxism did not dominate the German party and that among the party and trade- union rank and file, and particularly among the unorganized workers, no theory carried much weight. His conviction that the Neue Zeit was the only Marxian journal in Germany convinced him that to give it up would be a death blow to Marxism there. However much he wanted to leave Stuttgart, and he sincerely detested living there, his sense of duty to the workers and to Marxism prevented him from taking the final step of departure. In a letter to Adler announcing his decision not to come to Austria, Kautsky explained that he had come to the realization that the only way he could leave Stuttgart was to give up the New Zeit. That he could not do, he wrote, because “I am too much [a] church father.”1° Not only was the New Zeit the sole organ of Marxism in Germany, it also provided many of the party’s leading intellectuals with the lion’s share of their income. In addition to Kautsky, Bernstein, Schippel, Mehring, and Bebel were also largely dependent upon it. This was one of the major reasons Dietz continued to carry the journal’s substantial yearly deficit, and it was apparently the decisive reason for the changes made in the journal in August 1895. After almost five years of steady hounding from Kautsky to change things, after nearly as many years of dissatisfaction with the sales and appeal, though not the quality, of the New Zeit, on 2 August, Dietz, Bebel, and Kautsky met to discuss three proposals: (1) shifting the journal to Berlin; (2) converting it into a monthly; and (3) reorganizing payment for articles and raising the price per issue. Point one was rejected quickly because all three men agreed that the move would mean an increase in costs that neither Dietz nor the party was willing to shoulder at that time. Kautsky argued vigorously in favor of point two, but Dietz and Bebel would not hear of it. Rather Kautsky got a long lecture from Bebel about not letting personal wishes overrule the fact that as a weekly the New Zeit supported important party intellectuals, especially Bernstein, Mehring, and Schippel.“ Agreement was reached on point three—the price was raised from 20 to 25 pfennig, which would give Dietz an increase of 1.5 marks profit per yearly subscription. Figuring the present circulation at forty-five hundred, subtracting from five hundred to one thousand subscribers who would balk at the price increase, but adding five hundred new readers who would come over to the New Zeit with the end of Bernstein’s Sozialdemokmt, Kautsky calculated that Dietz would Cover of Die neue Zeit, 14 July 1900 90 ° KARL KAUTSKY net an increase of about 6,000 marks per year. In addition Bernstein and Mehring would each take a cut in pay of 100 marks per month for their work on the Neue Zeit, bringing their yearly stipends to 3,600 marks each. Bernstein would make up the loss by receiving an additional 100 marks a month from the official party journal, Vorwiirts, and Mehring would receive a similar amount from the Wahre jacob, another party journal published by Dietz. Finally, Schippel’s hon- orarium from the N we Zeit would be increased by 75 marks per month. These changes would save Dietz 1,500 marks per year, which, when added to the 6,000 marks increase in income, amounted to a potential net increase of 7,500 marks per year. Kautsky expressed the hope that this amount “may cover the deficit” of the Neue Zeit. Although he was greatly disappointed that he and his family would have to spend at least another year in “Stukkert,” he was grateful that his own salary was not reduced. The intricacies of this settlement reveal the extent to which the New Zeit, though a private undertaking, was tied to party affairs. Furthermore, the journal was obviously important as a means of support for party intellectuals. The 1894 SPD congress had debated the issue of the level of pay for party intellectuals, with the party leadership successfully defeating the minority proposal to limit salaries to 3,000 or 4,000 marks per year. Kautsky’s 5,000 marks was a comfortable income, though not high. Editors who oversaw dailies earned at least 5,500 marks, and Liebknecht got 7,200 for his work on the V orwdrts. 12 Less than a week after this complicated agreement was reached, Tussy Marx threw a wrench into the works by asking Kautsky to assume primary responsibility for editing the Marx Nachlass, of which she had recently assumed control following Engels’ death. Though Kautsky had agreed to accept the August settlement for at least a year, Tussy’s offer changed matters considerably, and from late August through the spring of 1896, he vacillated between going to London and staying in Germany with theNeue Zeit. By February, Tussy was growing annoyed with his indecision, which resulted from his perennial money difficulties and his need to measure the relative importance of the Nachlass work against that of the Neue Zeit. The money issue centered on three things: how much the eventual publisher of the fourth volume of Capital would be willing to pay Kautsky for editing it; whether additional guaranteed sources of income could be found; and whether Dietz would continue the New Zeit after Kautsky’s departure and pay him 150 to 200 marks per month as a permanent contributor. The matter of a publisher was not settled until long after Kautsky had decided not to go to London. Adler offered him 100 marks per month CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT, 1890-1904 ° 91 to be London correspondent for the Arbeiterzeitung, but other potential sources of income remained too indefinite to allow him to commit himself fully. The decisive factor was Dietz’s attitude toward the New Zeit, and he threatened to end the journal if Kautsky went to London. Karl felt that theNachlass work was very important and prestigious, but his own journal was even more critical to the cause of Marxism in Germany.” Though Kautsky announced at least twice during the spring of 1896 that he definitely was moving to London, regardless of the fate of the Neue Zeit, he never made the move. For a time Dietz strongly hinted that he would be willing to convert the journal back into a monthly, keeping Kautsky as editor in absentia. Then he gave in to Kautsky’s earlier demand and announced in early May that the New Zeit headquarters would be transferred to Berlin beginning 1 October 1896. Kautsky and his family did not move until 1897, but the chance to get out of Stuttgart permanently, coupled with the uncertainty of income in England, turned him against going to London. The 1895 party congress debate on the agrarian question had further reinforced his belief that the New Zeit had to be preserved, and when Dietz threw in Berlin as additional bait, Karl began to make plans to try to edit the Nachlass during brief visits to London while keeping up with full-time obligations to the New Zeit.” Kautsky’s conception of the nature and function of the New Zeit and of party intellectuals was constantly reinforced by party developments during the period 1890 to 1904. Debates on the party program and the agrarian question, the increasingly complex problems of tactics for the rapidly growing socialist movement, and above all, the revisionism crisis of the late nineties, served to strengthen his conviction that the only function of socialist intellectuals was to provide clarification for the workers in matters of theory. This view was predicated on two assumptions. First, “the class condition of the proletariat produces socialist inclinations, but not socialist knowledge.” Second, without theory the German movement would “come to an English conception of things which only concerns itself with the tangible, the obvious, the practical, to the conception of the old unionism.” Kautsky felt that one of the major problems in the German movement was that “this conception lies very near many of our people, namely the determined trade unionists; we must do everything to root it out because it is the grave of revolutionary thinking.” He was willing to tolerate a good deal of theoretical inconsistency among the workers, but not among party intellectuals. The workers, because of their class instincts, were at least predisposed to the correct course, but “the confused intellectual has no I llustmtions Cover of Die neue Zeit, 14 July 1900 Karl Kautsky, 1881 Louise and Karl Kautsky, 1902 Felix, Benedikt, and Kar1,]r., 1905 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, ]r., 1907 Eduard Bernstein, Pavel Axelrod, Karl Kautsky, 1922 Karl Kautsky’s last public speaking appearance, Vienna, 1932 89 156 157 157 234 234 235 92 ° KARL KAUTSKY such compass, he gropes helplessly in the dark.” He felt that good- hearted but wrong-headed intellectuals did damage to the socialist cause. Thus when his close friend, Heinrich Braun, founded a journal that boasted of its eclectic theoretical basis, Kautsky sharply condemned the undertaking for extolling “characterlessness as a special virtue.” For ten years the New Zeit had labored “to cram the people with Marxism and to bring an end to coquetting with Messieurs Rodbertus, Diihring, Schaffle, etc.” Braun had founded a journal that would “ruin the laboriously gained, not altogether fixed clarity and . . . make our work futile.” Kautsky trusted to objective conditions to generate energy and motion among the workers, but he clearly thought that the workers were to be channeled into proper courses by the theoretical dikes erected by socialist intellectuals. His View obviously demanded that intellectuals associated with the movement should espouse consistent, and preferably Marxian, positions.” With the exception of the years of the revisionist debates (1898- 1899, 1901-1903), Kautsky rarely spoke at party congresses. just prior to the 1895 congress, where the agrarian question was argued at length, Karl reported to Luise that he was apprehensive because party comrades “think I have come with a big speech in my belly, [and] that is not agreeable.” He was quite pleased that this speech came off as well as it did and surprised when a 1902 congress speech was well received. He was never part of the official party or congress leadership, though he did serve on various committees. Nor did he ever run for a Reichstag seat. When in 1890 Dietz proposed that he might become a German citizen and get elected as a representative from Stuttgart, Kautsky was cool to the idea. Three years later this suggestion was made again, and in rejecting it again he offered a very perceptive self-evaluation: “You do not need me in parliament. I am no speaker and even less a debater. The good thoughts always come to me after a debate. I am also no politician, neither a jurist nor an organizer. . . . I could only be a follower in parliament, and would play a mournful role, because one would expect something of me. It would go even more poorly with me than with [Paul] Lafargue, and I would, like him, forfeit my scientific efficiency under parliamentarism without exchanging it for something better.” Though he toyed with the idea several times, Kautsky did not become a German citizen until after the fall of the Wilhelmine state. Until then his status as a foreigner ensured that he could not be politically active.“ The combination of Kautsky’s conception of the function of the New Zeit and his aversion to personal, active participation in grass-roots politics reveals something about his attitude toward one of the CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT, 1890-1904 0 93 fundamental issues of Marxism, the relationship between theory and practice. While his view of the role of the New Zeit presupposed intimate cooperation between theory and practice, his attitude toward his own involvement in practice meant that he did not perceive the two as inseparably interdependent. Though he was aware that his theory suffered when he was isolated from the centers of action, he was never convinced that the perspective of distance and detachment was less important than the familiarity of immediate experience. He repeatedly emphasized that politicians and trade-union leaders got bogged down in day-to-day details at the expense of the larger overview. But as with many other conservatizing factors in the SPD after 1890, Kautsky only made perceptive observations about the increasing influence of Reichstag representatives and trade unionists; he did not suggest ways to counter this influence. As most of his more politically astute associates pointed out on many occasions, he was an inveterate optimist who thought all would go right in time. He demanded constant and careful attention to theory and did not argue that revolution would occur come what may. But he also failed to perceive that criticism without action would not stem the antirevolutionary tendencies within the party. In large part he did not see the latter because he was not an activist himself .17 The Party Program At the last exile congress of the German socialist party before the expiration of the antisocialist law, held in St. Gall, Switzerland, in 1887, Ignaz Auer, Bebel, and Liebknecht were charged with drafting a new party program. The majority of delegates at this congress concluded that conditions in Germany and the party had changed sufficiently since the 1875 party program was adopted to require a new program. This commission was supposed to fulfill its charge by the following congress. But at that gathering in Halle in 1890, Liebknecht explained the failure to fulfill the charge in terms of preoccupation with survival and also the need to rethink things entirely with the end of the antisocialist law. Liebknecht’s resolution calling for a new program vaguely mentioned that the Gotha program was out of date and prom- ised that the party leadership would propose a new program at the 1891 congress. The discussion that came between the Halle congress and the adoption of a new program at Erfurt opened the door for Kautsky’s emergence as the leading theorist of the party.” Debate preceeding Erfurt included a thorough airing of old pro- grams, criticizing them in light of contemporary conditions, and then 94 - KARL KAUTSKY proposing new program drafts which in turn would be criticized in the party press. All of the party journals and most of its intellectuals took part in this process, but none was more active than Kautsky in the Neue Zeit. His original plan, suggested by Dietz, was to run a series of articles by several different people, including Auer, Bebel, Bernstein, and Engels, which would discuss various aspects of the program. But when asked by Kautsky for a contribution, Engels replied that he was too busy with Marx’s Nachlass to write a new article. Instead he sent the manuscript of a letter and comments Marx had written after the 1875 German party program was proposed. This work, now known as the Critique of the Gotha Program, had been circulated privately in 1875 among leaders of German socialism and was first published in the Neue Zeit in January 1891. Knowing full well that it was a potential bombshell, because the Critique harshly criticized the Gotha program and included disparaging remarks about Lassalle and some of the party leadership, Engels suggested in his cover letter that if Kautsky felt he could not print it, it should be sent to Adler to be published in Austria. But he concluded, “it is far better if it appears in Germany itself, and in the party organ especially founded for such things, the Neue Zeit.” Though Kautsky was somewhat apprehensive about the possible impact of this document, he was also eager to make known Marx’s attitude toward the old program.” Isolated in Stuttgart, Kautsky was confronted on 8 January 1891 with a very important decision. Should the harsh criticism of the Gotha program be published in the Neue Zeit or not? On that day Kautsky wrote to Bernstein: “Hardly ever have I so painfully felt my isolation, and especially the separation from you, as today.” He was certain that the Critique would help to win the majority of the party to his own position, but added that “one does not happily undertake such impor- tant action without having discussed it with a trusted friend or comrade.” In a postscript to his letter, Kautsky alluded to Bernstein’s continuing exile in London, and to the similar position he found himself in, by writing: “You yourself know best what it means to be isolated in a responsible position.” Clearly he would have preferred to have his own decision to publish, which was apparently made immediately, reinforced by Bernstein, Bebel, and others. He explained to Bernstein that the Neue Zeit would carry the Critique for three reasons. First, Engels was willing to accept ultimate responsibility for publication. Second, Kautsky felt that “it would be deplorable if Engels were forced to publish a piece of the Marx Nachlass” in Austria through Adler. Third, Kautsky assumed that since the original letter had been intended for Auer, Bebel, and Liebknecht, as well as others, Engels CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT, 1890-1904 ° 95 must have already notified Bebel of the imminent publication. Kautsky knew that some old Lassalleans would be offended, but the C7itique’s value outweighed such considerations.“ Kautsky also wrote to Engels on 8 January, explaining that he was delighted with the Critique and would publish it. He asked if Engels had notified Bebel and Liebknecht and added that only some sharply sarcastic remarks about the program’s authors would be edited out, for the sake of party peace. A few days later he sent Engels a further defense of the deletions. He also commented that Dietz had seen the proofs and had not been enraged by the article, much to Kautsky’s relief. In his response to these two letters, Engels gave general approval to the sorts of deletions Kautsky proposed and added that he had just written to Bebel about publishing the letter. Because Liebknecht had made distorted reference to the contents of Marx’s letter during the program commission report of the Halle congress, Engels felt that notifying Bebel beforehand of the publication of the Critique would have put him in an awkward position. Bebel, Engels contended, would have had to decide whether or not to consult Liebknecht, and the latter “would have moved heaven and hell to prevent the printing.” With this letter, dated l5January, Kautsky first discovered for certain what he had suspected for the past week: Bebel too was going to be surprised by the publication of the Gotha program criticism.“ What followed was a bizarre series of events that made the publication of Marx’s criticisms far more disruptive for Kautsky than it should have been. Sometime between 15 and 25 January, Kautsky informed Bebel by letter that Marx’s work would be printed, and Bebel responded that he was not familiar with the material. Then on 25 January, Kautsky sent the article proofs to Bebel in Berlin, and Dietz went to Berlin also. Only after meeting with Bebel did Dietz realize the full implications of publishing the Critique. However, though the two men apparently discussed the article on the twenty-fifth or twenty- sixth, not until the afternoon of 28 January did Dietz wire Kautsky to stop distribution of the issue carrying the article. By that time it was too late, and Kautsky knew that Dietz and Liebknecht, and maybe Bebel also, would be furious about not being consulted beforehand. To Bernstein, Kautsky commented that as a result of this affair, “perhaps I will come to London sooner than I thought?“ A brief, but intense storm broke in SPD circles over the publication of the Critique of the Got/ta Program. Although Engels steadfastly claimed responsibility, the majority of the SPD Reichstag Fraktion, including above all Dietz and Liebknecht, harshly chastized Kautsky as the villain. In the V orwérts, the Fmktion denounced Kautsky for deception and 96 - KARL KAUTSKY further assaulted him both by letter and verbally. Most of the rest of the party remained strangely silent, but the Fmktz'on’s attack was severe. Kautsky asserted that he did not “care a straw for the Fmktzbn,” but consented to write a conciliatory article anyway, for the sake of party unity. Privately he excused the Fmktion for what he called “one sound reason: their grandiose ignorance.” Bebel’s reaction upset Kautsky a good deal, especially since he had notified the party leader before the publication date that the article would appear.“ Kautsky responded most vehemently to Liebknecht’s attack. In a letter to Engels, he directly accused Liebknecht of having deliberately kept the original 1875 letter from Bebel. Though Liebknecht claimed that Bebel had been in prison when the letter from Marx arrived, Kautsky pointed out that Bebel had been released from prison in late April, and the letter was dated 5 May. Kautsky and Liebknecht had long been at odds, largely because Kautsky resented Liebknecht’s unearned reputation as a theorist and Liebknecht resented Kautsky as a non-German upstart. But when Liebknecht upbraided Karl for indiscretion in not notifying Bebel in advance, Kautsky rejoined: “If Bebel did not know what was in the letter, for that I was not responsible, but the one who suppressed the letter from him. It will be seen if and what the old sinner [Liebknecht] will answer to that. This time he has trapped himself in his own failures.” The Kautsky- Liebknecht relationship went downhill from this point on.“ After this storm of protest quieted down, the party’s preparation for the adoption of a new program proceeded quite calmly. Liebknecht drafted a proposal that appeared in the Vorwiirts, but Kautsky thought it a very poor effort, designed only to avoid the disgrace of once again coming up with nothing. Since Liebknecht no longer had Marx’s letters to plagiarize, Kautsky argued, his “vulgar socialism . . . [was] dull and absurd.” By late September 1891, less than three weeks before the Erfurt congress, Karl was beginning to feel sorry for Liebknecht and his efforts to draft a new program. He reported to Engels that he had asked Bebel to speak to Liebknecht about these efforts, since someone “must save the old one from himself.” And in the New Zeit, Kautsky subjected Liebknecht’s proposal and others to a reasoned critique, discussing the origins and fallacies of state socialism and terroristic anarchism, the conservative potential of direct legislation, the economic and scientific basis of modern socialism (Marxism), the class nature of the state, the fallacy of the “one reactionary mass” slogan, and the major weakness of program proposals other than his own—they were overly long. He closed by insisting that in fact theoretical unity CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT, 1890-1904 0 97 prevailed within the party since most of the differences in the proposed programs concerned emphasis, not principles. Publicly Kautsky tried to play a conciliatory role in the weeks before the Erfurt congress, confident that his proposal, backed by Engels and the prestige of Marx, would win.” One particularly interesting aspect of Kautsky’s discussion of the program proposals was his refutation of fatalism as one of the dangers of Marxism. This was one of the few times he directly confronted the determinist-voluntarist ambiguities of Marx’s work. His major point was that while Marx taught that the direction of social development was not established arbitrarily, but out of necessity, he also taught that the motive force of development was “the struggle of opposites, the class struggle.” Kautsky argued that these two positions constituted the dialectical core of Marx’s theory and that the implicit voluntarism of the latter was as essential as the determinism of the former. Immediately after rejecting fatalism in Marx, he baldly asserted that “the final victory of the proletariat is inevitable,” because the economics of modern capitalism made it so. However, he tied determinism in economics to voluntarism in politics by arguing that economically determined class struggles also have a political aspect: Every class struggle is a political struggle. The proletariat cannot fight its economic struggles without political rights; it constantly encounters state power when it fights the exploiter. Gaining and using political rights [and] making state power subject to its inter- ests are absolute necessities for the proletariat. It must therefore organize itself as an independent party to which falls the task of maintaining its interests in political life, which must devote itself to the end of conquering the state, this most powerful and only adequate lever to bring about the transfer of the means of pro- duction to the possession of all.“ This argument rejected all fatalistic dependence on inevitable historical development. Kautsky also used this reasoning to refute the notion held by some “revolutionary enthusiasts” that better is worse, that is, that if their living conditions improve, workers will become less revolutionary. He argued that the success of positive work, or reform in the present society, would only teach the workers the value of organization. He contended this was so because class conflict, not poverty, was the root of the struggle for the workers’ emancipation. By blending voluntarism and determinism in this manner, by asserting in 98 - KARL KAUTSKY effect that the workers must work for their own inevitable conquest of the state and political power, Kautsky preserved the ambiguous and elusive quality of Marx’s own work. The Erfurt Congress The 1891 party congress was held in Erfurt from 14 through 20 October. When the 230 delegates assembled in the Kaiser Hall, they found it draped with two banners, one saying Workers of the World Unite! and the other, The Workers Are the Rocks on Which the Church of the Future Will Be Built! The religious allusions were probably conscious: SPD congresses had an aura of spiritual renewal about them, and the host party organization often got carried away with enthusiasm. This gathering in the ancient Saxon city so closely associated with Luther was to be the congress at which the party ratified the scriptures of the movement. Kautsky captured the camaraderie of these annual gatherings when he wrote to Luise on the second day of the congress: “I am sorry not to be able to show you our comrades, a body of splendid fellows, as [they] are assembled here.” Karl was amused by the fact that in a way he was attending the congress as the representative of the recently retired Bismarck. His mandate was from Lauenberg where the former chancellor’s retirement estate was located. Karl Frohme, a long-time SPD Reichstag representative, had yielded his mandate to Kautsky so that the party’s theoretician could be a voting participant in the congress.” Though much of the congress was spent in debate over the so-called jungen, revolt which centered in Berlin, the major task was the accept- ance of a new party program. Paul Singer, the congress cochairman, opened the first session by declaring that just as the Halle congress had provided the party with new organization, so this one was to provide a new program “which scientifically and indisputably expresses our demands in clear and generally understandable form, and like the previous program will be a polestar for us in the struggles, a guide to victory.” To accomplish this grandiose goal, a twenty-one-member commission, including Kautsky, Bebel, Liebknecht, and Vollmar, was elected on 18 October. Its job was to choose from the many proposals that had been offered and discussed in the party press before the congress. Of the four complete proposals seriously considered, the choice quickly narrowed down to Kautsky’s draft presented in the New Zeit or the central committee’s draft which had been written and defended by Liebknecht, but to which Bebel, Auer, and others had also contributed. The two drafts did not differ markedly in content, but CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT, 1890-1904 ° 99 Kautsky’s was much the shorter. At the commission’s first meeting, a vote to accept one of these two drafts as a working basis resulted in a seventeen to four victory for Kautsky. Liebknecht was again offended by this vote and had to suffer the additional blow to his ego of reporting the commission’s results to the entire congress. On the whole Liebknecht’s presentation was judicious, though he only reluctantly credited the N we Zeit draft for its brevity and clarity. The program was accepted by a very large majority on the last day of the congress after an extremely brief discussion. The general theme of unity and harmony, so laboriously maintained at most SPD party congresses, prevailed again.“ In its final form the Erfurt program combined a theoretical section written mostly by Kautsky and a tactical section written mostly by Bernstein and Bebel. The theoretical portion was short, only two pages, and defined economic and political developments in what by then were orthodox Marxian terms. Engels had read Kautsky’s final proposal, but of the four or five changes in wording he suggested, only one was incorporated into the program. Where Kautsky had referred to “the growth of the yield of human labor,” Engels recommended substituting the more precise products for yield, and the program commission agreed. Kautsky reported to Engels after the congress that though acceptance of the New Zeit draft as a basis was a foregone conclusion once Bebel had thrown his influence behind it, hammering out the end product was not so easy, ironically because of Bebel’s obstinacy on some points. Engels, Bernstein, and Kautsky had all protested when Bebel added the phrase “one reactionary mass” to the New Zeit proposal published in the Vonuiinis prior to the congress, and Kautsky led an almost unanimous opposition to Bebel’s effort to get the program commission to include this phrase in the final draft. Though Kautsky won on this point, he lost when he opposed Bebel over inclusion of a demand for the “free administration of justice.” Thus though Bebel’s support carried the day for Kautsky’s program, the two men were not in complete agreement on specifics. The only major changes in the theoretical portion were the addition of two paragraphs, one emphasizing recurrent crisis in capitalist society, and the other accentuating references to the class struggle. The commission entrusted Kautsky with the duty of adding these sections. The theoretical portion in its final form pleased both Engels and Kautsky, though Engels found the practical demands “philistine.”29 After Erfurt, Kautsky was called upon by the party central committee to write a pamphlet that explained and amplified the pro- gram. This pamphlet turned into a book, Das Erfurter Programm (1892), which became Kautsl