I’ve been beavering away on the introduction to the Kautsky book. This is where I’m up to. Intelligent comments are welcome.

Karl Kautsky’s wrote The Foundations of Christianity (Der Ursprung des Christentums) in the early years of the twentieth century. The book, drawing heavily on contemporary biblical scholarship was an attempt to examine the birth of Christianity using the Marxist method. Even allowing for the enormous advances in our knowledge of this period Kautsky’s work still stands as a good example of how an ideological phenomenon, in this case a religion, can be subjected to a materialist analysis. Neither the author nor his original readers would have thought possible the resurgence of religious belief that we are witnessing in the early years of the subsequent century. For hundreds of millions of people in every part of the globe religion provides them with an interpretive framework, a feeling of community and solidarity and a consolation that they otherwise would not have. This is most acutely seen in Africa, the United States and the Middle East where the void caused by the collapse of nationalist, progressive or socialist ideologies has been filled with a range of Christian and Muslim beliefs. Even in England, probably Europe’s least religious country, in 2007 the largest demonstration of migrant workers demanding their rights was organised not by trade unions or socialist organisations but by a coalition of Christian churches. This alone is some part of the justification for choosing to republish the work after an interval of three decades during which it has been unavailable in English. But there is also a determinedly political purpose in the choice. This is to re-assert the classical Marxist understanding of religion and to remind readers that it is both possible and necessary to scrutinise the re-emergence of religion using the analytical tools employed by Kautsky and later Marxists.

Who was Kautsky?

Karl Kautsky was born into a middle class family on October 16, 1854, in Prague. While studying at the University of Vienna he joined the Social Democrats of Austria, the name then used by Marxist parties. His name is most often encountered by modern readers when studying the history of German and Russian Marxism. Lenin wrote a pamphlet entitled “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky”. He came to personify the reformist, gradualist method of the majority of the German Social Democratic Party, a path that led him and them to support German imperialism in World War One, thus provoking Lenin’s rebuke.

But for a long time Kautsky was judged by his peers to be the keeper of the flame of orthodox Marxism. Trotsky wrote of him: “there was a time when Kautsky was in the true sense of the word the teacher who instructed the international proletarian vanguard”[i]. His correspondence with Engels between 1881 and 1895 fills a book of four hundred pages[ii]. The two men collaborated closely from 1885 until 1888. For thirty five years he edited Die Neue Zeit which he founded in 1883 and under his control it was long considered to be the most important Marxist publication in the world. Some foreign socialists learned German to enable them to read it. Kautsky helped popularise and disseminate Marx’s ideas. His 1887 book The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx was published in twenty languages and in twenty five editions in German.

Kautsky was judged such a pre-eminent and orthodox Marxist that Marx’s family and Engels give him the responsibility of preparing for publication Marx’s manuscript for a fourth volume of Capital. He also produced the most reliable German edition of Das Kapital the “Volksaugabe”. The bitterness that the title of Lenin’s pamphlet expressed was all the sharper because the younger generation of Marxist leaders had regarded Kautsky as their mentor and teacher. They argued that Kautsky had made his peace with the capitalist system. John Kautsky writing in the introduction to his father’s book The Materialist Conception of History indirectly agrees with them: “In Kautsky’s view, then, the working class can and does advance toward the realization of its political and economic goals already under capitalism, and the class struggle assumes less and less violent forms with the development of capitalism”[iii]. When war broke out in 1914 Kautsky was one of those German Social Democrats who voted for war credits on the grounds that German imperialism was preferable to Russian Tsarism. The war was more horrific than he or anyone else had anticipated. Repulsed by his party’s continuing support for it he split and joined the right wing of the Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (USPD)

Kautsky’s view of the world was no longer that of the Marxist who wanted to change it. By removing the concept of struggle from socialist organisation he now provided a theoretical gloss for the parliamentarians, trade union officials and careerists who were, and are the backbone of the German SDP and the British Labour Party. For them nothing was, or is, more important than holding onto their well paid jobs, existing comfortably inside the established order and disciplining the working class on behalf of capital. Breaking with these people politically and establishing new, Communist parties was the essential step required for preserving the revolutionary content of Marxism.

Kautsky found himself on the right wing of the German revolution. He served as under-secretary of State in the Foreign Office in the short lived SPD-USPD revolutionary government and was a harsh critic of the Bolshevik revolution. In 1924 he returned to Vienna, remaining there until 1938 when the Nazis annexed Austria, the ultimate refutation of his theory of the gradual transformation of capitalism. He completely misunderstood the threat that fascism represented to the working class, writing in 1934 that “we should guard against overestimating the superiority of Hitler’s power” He died in Amsterdam in the same year. His second wife Luise Ronsperger later died in Auschwitz

Marxism has much more to say about the subject than “religion is the opium of the people”. Kautsky describes Christianity’s progression from radical nationalist sect to the state religion of the Roman Empire. At various times in various places interpretations of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism have been either the dominant class’ justification for its rule or a revolutionary ideology rallying the most dynamic forces in society. The uses to which King Charles, Oliver Cromwell and the Levellers put the Bible during the English Revolution are good proof of how flexibly any religion can be interpreted according to the needs of contending classes. It is for this very reason that Marxists have always been willing to engage in common political struggles with religious believers. While making no secret of the fact that they see religion as an intellectual error, and something which should be challenged as such, religious believers, who in most of the world form the majority of the working class, the rural poor and the oppressed, are socialists’ natural allies in the struggle to change society.