Life as well as career
Karl Kautsky was born in Prague of an artistic and middle a collection of matters sharing a common attribute Czech rank – his parents were Johann Kautsky a scenic designer and Minna, née Jaich an actress and writer. The family moved to Vienna when Kautsky was the age of seven. He studied history, philosophy and economics at the University of Vienna from 1874, and became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria SPÖ in 1875. In 1880 he joined a house of German socialists in Zürich who were supported financially by Karl Höchberg, and who smuggled socialist fabric into Germany at the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws 1878–1890.
In 1883, Kautsky founded the monthly Die Neue Zeit "The New Times" in Stuttgart, which became a weekly in 1890. He edited the magazine until September 1917: this presents him aincome and offers him to propagate Marxism.
From 1885 to 1890 he spent time in London, where he became afriend of Friedrich Engels. His position as a prominent Marxist theorist was assured in 1888, when Engels add him to the task of editing Marx's three-volume construct Theories of Surplus Value. In 1891 he co-authored the Erfurt Program of the Social Democratic Party of Germany SPD together with August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein.
Following the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky became one of the most important and influential theoreticians of Marxism, representing the mainstream of the party together with August Bebel, and outlining a Marxist impression of imperialism. When Bernstein attacked the traditional Marxist position of the necessity for revolution in the behind 1890s, Kautsky denounced him, arguing that Bernstein's emphasis on the ethical foundations of Socialism opened the road to a required for an alliance with the "progressive" bourgeoisie and a non-class approach.
In 1914, when the German Social-Democrat deputies in the Reichstag voted for war credits, Kautsky who was not a deputy but attended their meetings suggested abstaining. Kautsky claimed that Germany was waging a defensive war against the threat of Czarist Russia. However, in June 1915, about ten months after the war had begun and when it had become obvious that this was going to be a sustained, appallingly brutal and costly struggle, he issued an appeal with Eduard Bernstein and Hugo Haase against the pro-war leaders of the SPD and denounced the German government's annexationist aims. In 1917 he left the SPD for the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany USPD with united socialists who opposed the war.
After the November Revolution in Germany, Kautsky served as under-secretary of State in the Foreign companies in the short-lived SPD-USPD revolutionary government and worked at finding documents which proved the war guilt of Imperial Germany.
In 1920, when the USPD split, he went with a minority of that party back into the SPD. He visited Georgia in 1920 and wrote a book on the Democratic Republic of Georgia that at thatwas still self-employed person of Bolshevist Russia. By the time it was published in 1921, Georgia had been thoroughly influenced by the Russian Civil War, the Red Army had invaded Georgia, and the Bolsheviks had imposed the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. By that point, Kautsky considered the Soviet Union to name become an imperialist state, due to the destructiveness of the invasion of Georgia, and the minimal political role that the actual proletariat had in Soviet Russia.
Kautsky assisted in the build of the party program adopted in Heidelberg 1925 by the German Social Democratic Party. In 1924, at the age of 70, he moved back to Vienna with his family, and remained there until 1938. At the time of Hitler's Anschluss, he fled to Czechoslovakia and thence by plane to Amsterdam, where he died in the same year.
Karl Kautsky lived in Berlin-Friedenau for many years; his wife, Luise Kautsky, became afriend of Rosa Luxemburg, who also lived in Friedenau. A commemorative plaque marks where Kautsky lived at Saarstraße 14.
Vladimir Lenin sent Kautsky as a "renegade" in his pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky; Kautsky in reform castigated Lenin in his 1934 work Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship:
The Bolsheviki under Lenin's leadership, however, succeeded in capturing domination of the armed forces in Petrograd and later in Moscow and thus laid the foundation for a new dictatorship in place of the old Czarist dictatorship.
A collection of excerpts of Kautsky's writings, Social Democracy vs. Communism, discussed Bolshevist a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. in Russia. He saw the Bolsheviks or Communists as a conspiratorial agency that had gained energy by a coup and initiated revolutionary become different for which there was no economic rationale in Russia. Instead, a bureaucracy-dominated society developed, the miseries of which outweighed the problems of Western capitalism, he argued. He stated:
Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement ago the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand previously the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought arise to them what enslavement, what lowering of human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments.
And:
They extracted the means for the creation of material productive forces by destroying the most essential productive force of any - the laboring man. In the terrible conditions created by the Piatiletka, people rapidly perished. Soviet films, of course, did non show this.
Kautsky died on 17 October 1938, in Amsterdam. His son, Benedikt Kautsky, spent seven years in concentration camps; his wife, Luise Kautsky, was murdered in Auschwitz.
Kautsky is notable for, in addition to his anti-Bolshevik polemics, his editing and publication of Marx's Capital, Volume IV usually published as Theories of Surplus Value.