This is the first of a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.
PART ONE: THE STRANGE RESURRECTION OF KARL KAUTSKY
The last fifteen years have witnessed one of the strangest political rehabilitations: Karl Kautsky, chief theorist within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during its heyday between 1890 and 1914 (when its membership numbered in the millions and its influence immense), the so-called “Pope of Marxism,” has been resurrected. This rehabilitation is one of those peculiar ironies of history, in which the impossible somehow becomes real the kind of dialectical inversion more sensible to a Hegelian Marxism than that of Plekhanov or Kautsky himself, almost playful and absurdist, the invention of an Ionesco or Beckett.
Kautsky’s fall from favour is easy enough to understand. Once committed to the principles of internationalism and revolution (if vaguely conceived), the outbreak of World War One saw Kautsky shift to the Right, when he tailed the SPD’s abandonment of their traditional anti-war position. The political capitulation of this once-immense socialist party (numbering millions of members), the sudden revelation that it had transmuted into a bourgeois party of reform, shocked the internationalist Left and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in particular. From that moment, Kautsky hovered in a grey half-life, a liminal world where he was marginalised by the SPD and yet spent his time denouncing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Not one to suffer fools gladly, at the head of the Soviet State battling counterrevolutionary white armies and foreign interventionist forces, Vladimir Lenin had little time for Kautsky’s abstract democratic and liberal sophistry. Which side was he on? Lenin struck back in his 1918 polemic The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, whose tone was laced with the kind of vehemence only a former fan can muster.1 This document marked the end for Kautsky as a respected figure, for times of revolution and war have little space for prevarication or lack of commitment.2 From then on, Kautsky was out of place in the tumult of post-war Europe, eking on with no significant audience, speaking to now imaginary members of the SPD, who existed in the illusory golden age of progress before the war, when genteel sociological reflection and undifferentiated abstractions (democracy, progress, universality, revolution) could sustain themselves without substantive challenge. Like many of the Second International figures the Italians were exactly like this Kautsky was unmistakably bourgeois (in the sociological rather than Marxist sense) in his habits, his attitudes, his life experience, particularly when compared to the footloose, romantic, and often bohemian intellectuals and worker-intellectuals of the Third International. The latter were constantly on the move under threat of state repression or Right-wing violence, and whose natural habitat was not receiving visitors in the parlour but in the tumult of the masses, in the worker’s councils (think of Antonio Gramsci or Rosa Luxemburg), in their parties’ central committees, in the cut and thrust of debate (Lenin and Gramsci), sometimes at the head of governments or city administrations, however short-lived (Georg Lukacs or Gregory Zinoviev), almost always often with their own base of support in the class and the broad masses. They were engaged militants, not just intellectual commentators.3
Lenin’s victory over Kautsky came as much politically as theoretically. The capitulation of the SPD, the discrediting of its “strategy of patience” (of “attrition”) left Kautsky’s project stamped in ignominy and defeat. In contrast, Lenin’s work appeared infinitely more relevant in times of crisis and given the stamp of approval by events themselves, by the march of history, by the victory of the October Revolution. As Lenin’s star was ascendent, Kautsky was banished to the shadows, seemingly forever.
Kautsky’s resurrection is more puzzling. From forgotten “renegade,” he has recently taken his place as a Marxist thinker worthy of serious consideration. A small but not insignificant group of acolytes make his case. The principal home of the New Kautskyism has been Jacobin magazine, based in New York, advocate for “democratic socialism,” whose intellectual wellsprings include Ralph Miliband, the “Eurocommunist” version of Antonio Gramsci and his successor in the Italian Communist Party Palmiro Togliatti. Jacobin’s Founder, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote admiringly of the German SPD in his erudite 2019 book, The Socialist Manifesto (over dinner I attended in Melbourne some years ago, he said, “My analysis is Trotskyist but my strategy is social-democratic”). The book argues for “class-struggle social democracy” that will need to move to “democratic socialism” as close to a summary of Kautskyism as one gets:
Democratic socialists must secure decisive majorities in legislatures while winning hegemony in the unions. Then our organizations must be willing to flex their social power in the form of mass mobilizations and political strikes to counter the structural power of capital and ensure that our leaders choose confrontation over accommodation with elites. This is the sole way we’ll not only make our reforms durable but break with capitalism entirely and bring about a world that values people over profit.4
Both Jacobin and the new Kautskyists have had an audience in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group whose vitality made it a point of reference over the last decade, but whose strategy included support for the “Squad,” (such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez), once viewed as a challenge to the Democratic Party establishment but in the eyes of many, now simply the left flank of it.
A second nexus for the “New Kautskyists” lies across the Atlantic, in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), an iconoclastic organisation whose work seems also principally intellectual, and can be found on their website, The Weekly Worker and their online presence, principally YouTube. There a more Left-wing Kautskyism seems to hold sway, but existing in dialogue with their American counterparts. In the tracks of these two currents, the Marxist magazine Cosmonaut, dedicated to the development of “scientific socialism”, has joined in the debates and is producing an audiobook of Ben Lewis’s Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism.
All in all, we have a disparate collection of intellectuals and activists (of a type) who might be categorised as the New Kautskyists. Mike McNair (Revolutionary strategy: Marxism and the challenge of left unity (2008), James Muldoon, Ben Lewis (Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, 2021), Eric Blanc (Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882 1917), 2022), the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Daniel Gaido and Richard B. Day’s Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, Jacobin contributor Jason Shulman each has contributed to the Kautsky revival.5
None of this could have occurred without the role of scholar Lars T. Lih, a kind of inspirer for the group despite being a vaguely left-leaning scholar rather than organiser or activist. Lih’s voluminous and erudite Lenin Rediscovered: What is to Be Done in Context (2005) made the Kautsky revival possible. An instant classic, the book provided much-needed historical context to the debates and personalities who populate Lenin’s text, and in doing so significantly challenged what he framed as the myth, what he calls the “textbook interpretation,” of Lenin’s What is to Be Done? For believers of this textbook myth, What is to Be Done? represents the birth of Lenin’s theory of a “party of a new type”, composed of professional and hardened revolutionaries, operating conspiratorially as a small elitist organisation of intellectuals, more Russian in character than European, with little faith in the working-class, whose dismissal of democracy presaged the later anti-democratic measures taken by the Bolsheviks after 1917. In Lih’s view, this uninformed fantasy was held by conservatives and socialist activists alike.
Instead, Lih argues that What is To Be Done? was simply the application of Kautskyism to the conditions of Russia, which took its inspiration from the 1891 Erfurt Program, adopted by the German SPD, co-authored by Kautsky and expanded in his book The Class Struggle (1892). The heart of this is a heroic “merger narrative” the role of Marxists is to facilitate the merger of socialist theory with the working-class movement, a process that is inevitable, but which can be slowed or hastened. The socialist party is the bearer of the “good news” to the working class, already bursting with revolutionary activity and potential, of its destiny as the leader of the entire people, in a strategy of hegemony, to their common liberation. Lenin was not, Lih argues, an original theorist, but simply a talented practitioner. The new Kautskyists seized, sometimes gleefully, on this revelatory claim. This makes the 1917 Bolshevik revolution a victory for Kautskyism.6 A new field was opened to research. A new current born.
DOUGLAS GREENE’S REVENGE ON THE RENEGADE
Following the release of Lih’s Lenin Reconsidered, there was some hesitancy and confusion on the part of the Leninist Left. Not everyone was confident to take on the encyclopaedic research necessary to confront Lih. Eventually, the rejoinders began to appear. Debates were hosted by Jacobin, Cosmonaut and Third International scholar John Riddell’s website. Leninists challenged the New Kautskyist’s claims while recognising their useful historical contributions.7 Now we have Douglas Greene’s recently released book, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). Greene describes himself as an “independent Marxist” and has published widely on the left, though clearly he falls within the Trotskyist tradition. Indeed, his book represents Trotskyism’s strengths and weaknesses its literary, philological and intellectual rigour, its sense of closure and rigidity, its tinge of idealism, its tendency to collapse into, or fail to grapple with, both Trotsky and Luxemburg’s spontaneism, its powerful negative critique combined with a reaffirmation of past verities rather than other positive alternative constructions.
Though he divides Kautsky’s ideas into three phases on the Left, on the Centre, on the Right Greene’s book is, in the end, a “negative critique.” Greene argues that Kautsky is:
not unique. The parties of the Second International followed a trajectory from revolution to reform. Thus, Kautsky’s political journey mirrors those of other socialists of his era, such as Jean Jaur s, Jules Guesde, and Filippo Turati, who were active participants within the Second International. What sets Kautsky apart from them and thousands of other social democrats is that he was the most articulate, cogent, and influential thinker explaining the reasoning behind the shift from revolution to reformism. Subsequent reformist socialists have often repeated Kautsky’s arguments to defend their politics.8
For Greene, “Kautsky’s views on revolution and socialism were dictated by his worldview, which was heavily influenced by positivism and an anti-dialectical evolutionism he is not a dialectical thinker, despite the apparent trappings and references.” The defining trait of Kautskyism was that “revolutions were strictly objective phenomena that socialists should patiently wait for, rather than actively organize.” This passivity resulted in a failure to “seriously confront the problems of imperialism and the bourgeois state.” Reaffirming the old verities once part of the socialist Left’s common sense, challenging effectively none of them, Greene continues:
He argued that imperialism and war were merely bad policies and not intrinsic to the latest stage of capitalism. Kautsky believed that with persuasion the bourgeoisie could be enlightened to choose otherwise. Furthermore, he claimed the institutions of parliamentarism and democracy could presage the transition to socialism. The essential question for Kautsky was simply who commanded an electoral majority through the ballot box.9
A central part of Greene’s book is dedicated to surveys of the anti-Kautsky polemics of the three most well-known revolutionaries of that time of Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky (a “Holy Trinity” for some). While Trotsky and Luxemburg’s arguments are both interesting and illuminating, it’s not immediately clear why Greene includes them as their own independent perspectives, since the real debate is about Kautsky and Lenin, and their relationship, to which we will return shortly. Lenin’s work after all, in Greene’s view, “represents the most comprehensive Marxist critique of Kautskyism.”10
By Greene’s account, Lenin constructed a radical theory of imperialism, the stage of monopoly capitalism, in which imperialist blocs struggle for the control and exploitation of colonies, and the flow of wealth from these exploited nations of the Global South (as we call them now) allowed the development of a privileged layer among the working class of the imperialist nations a labour aristocracy. Strategic consequences flowed from Lenin’s division of imperialism into exploiter and exploited nations. In the former, the socialists had to confront the labour aristocrats and bureaucrats, making the policy of the united front of particular importance. In the Global South, Greene perceptively argues, Lenin argued that national liberation movements might lead to a break from capitalism altogether. Lenin thus “freed Marxism from its Kautskyian straitjacket that was centered on Europe, making it directly relevant for the first time to those in the colonial world.”11 For Lenin, though Greene doesn’t give the topic much space, the labour aristocracy was the basis for institutionalised reformism and the development of new bourgeois parties, the bourgeois workers parties of “Social Democracy.” All this reaffirmed for Lenin the need for independent Marxist, revolutionary organisation, the party of a new type, and this logic can be found first in What Is to Be Done? Then in 1917, as the Russian Revolution at its height, Lenin composed The State and Revolution, which asserted that the capitalist state could not be reformed but needed to be “smashed.” Equivocation about the nature of the State is, in Lenin’s argument, at the heart of Kautsky’s theoretical errors one ever-present, even in Kautsky’s best works. In his polemic against the “renegade,” in 1918, Lenin dismantled Kautsky’s opposition of “democracy” and “dictatorship” and defended the Bolshevik’s fidelity to their revolutionary tradition. With the Second International moribund, the well-known “Twenty-One Conditions” of membership were adopted by the Third International as the price of membership, documenting some of the key elements of the “party of a new type,” composed of revolutionaries organisationally separate from reformism. This compressed summary should be enough for most to dispel the notion that Lenin was simply a Kautskyist. Surely there’s too much divergence from Kautsky in evidence? Greene writes: “While Lenin began within the horizon of social democracy, the logic of WITBD [What is to be Done?] pointed beyond it. Lenin’s intransigence against opportunism ensured a split with Menshevism. Rather, WITBD was not a defense of Kautskyism, but an anticipation for ‘the party of a new type’ that would lead the October Revolution.”12
The final section of Greene’s book turns its fire directly onto the New Kautskyists, whose strategy of patience, he argues, is a revivified reformism. He briefly notes the similarities between Kautskyism and Eurocommunism during the 1970s and concludes:
their defense of Kautsky is based on shaky philosophical assumptions and distorting the historical record. While their rhetoric differs, Blanc and McNair both embrace the same underlying reformism with its faith in elections and the institutions of capitalist democracy. As a result, the neo-Kautskyians are destined to find themselves in the same cul-de-sac as Kautsky himself.13
So far, so Trotskyist. We are back where we started, perhaps with more knowledge about the details and the history (the section challenging Blanc’s interpretation of the Finnish revolution adds further historical material to Blanc’s already substantial contribution). The justice of this account, as it comes to Kautsky himself, I will return to in a longer piece “The Curious Case of Comrade Kautsky” (forthcoming). Greene however, faces his own methodological problems: as with much of the intellectual work of Trotskyism the argument contains considerable force by setting some of the historical record back on firm footing, and of effectively establishing Leninism as its own entity. But as with some Trotskyism, quite what that entity is, however, never quite becomes clear a problem that will work its way through the logic of Greene’s book.
LENINISM AS A STRATEGY AND ORGANISATION: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? + ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK
Greene claims that the work of Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, “forms a three-legged stool that offers the most all-embracing and astute critique of Kautsky’s methods and politics.”14 Roughly a third of the book is given over to these three Marxists and their criticisms of Kautsky. As a historical chart, this works well enough, once again placing the debate on a firm historical footing.
Nevertheless, it is an argument that a Leninist would hesitate in accepting, without significant qualification. After all, Luxemburg’s strategic outlook was, for Lenin, an inadequate critique of opportunism and Kautskyism. While she has much of value to say, her positions are also more akin to his Economist opponents criticised in What Is To Be Done? Trotsky too, began as one of Lenin’s most vocal opponents, and while his book Terrorism and Communism, a polemic against Kautsky, is fascinating, the traces of mechanical thought and sponteneism are found both there and elsewhere in his work. The problem is not that Luxemburg and Trotsky don’t make serious or compelling critiques of Kautsky, particularly as his moves into his notoriously “centrist” position (revolutionary in word, reformist in deed), or that these critiques are already implicit or explicit in Lenin (which they are), but that Greene makes this claim for this implicitly complimentary “holy trinity” by side-stepping the chief originality of What is To Be Done? That is, he never quite defends Leninism which stands front and centre of this debate.
What Is To Be Done? is not principally about the need for a “new type” of organisation, though its immediate practical aim was the formation of a national party. Rather, it outlines the strategy necessary to bring the working class and the broad masses to socialist consciousness which Lenin describes as an “irreconcilable antagonism” to the system as a whole. This would not happen naturally or spontaneously, Lenin points out, which results in the working class and the broad masses being subjected to bourgeois leadership and ideology. Moreover, in the Tsarist empire, this task of developing socialist consciousness was to occur in conditions of significant social stratification and territorial division, in which the working class is a minority, in which there was still a bourgeois revolution to complete. All these factors meant they needed to forge alliances between multiple social and political groups.15 Facing these challenges, Lenin developed his strategy of hegemony (winning the leadership of the revolutionary movement) as an “all-round” struggle against every form of injustice and oppression, no matter which class is affected (religious groups, national and ethnic groups, women, peasants/farmers, elements of the petit-bourgeoisie, repressed sections of the State and bureaucracy, even members of the bourgeoisie). By campaigning against all abuses and injustices, among all people in the society, the socialist movement would unite the disparate protesting groups into one, unified revolutionary anti-systemic movement, and win their confidence, that is, become the leadership of these broad masses (a strategy of hegemony). This finds its source in Kautsky, as Lih notes correctly.16 However Lenin’s argument is developed in an entirely new way that escapes Lih’s notice, for it emerges by contrast with the opportunist strategy of the Economists and here Lih misunderstands the nature of Economism, like many others seeing it as simply a focus on the “economic” demands of the workers and a dismissal of general “political” demands which misunderstands Lenin’s focus in the pamphlet, which is against the opportunist method.17
For Lenin there is no set hierarchy of issues, because socialist consciousness is not the consciousness of the “working class and its immediate interests” it is consciousness of the system in all its interrelations, from all perspectives and angles. Anyone who privileges narrow workerist demands of the sectional workerist movement, like the Economists, fails to raise the movement’s consciousness to socialist consciousness. Instead, they adapt to the level of consciousness of the movement. Consequently, they abandon Marxism and surrender the movement to bourgeois ideas and political forces, to ideological and political dead ends. And this is why Lenin accuses the Economists of underestimating the capacity of the workers to reach socialist consciousness systemic consciousness who are in fact ready and capable, if the Marxists take the systemic understanding to them through the “all-round” struggle. What Is To Be Done? contrasts this “all-round struggle” for hegemony to the Economist tendency to “tail-end” the movement, slavishly worship the spontaneous forms of working-class activity, while ignoring the struggles of other social groups and of democratic opposition to the Tsarist state.
Leninism is thus a fundamental break from workerism, which Lenin savagely disparages. Some of the most valuable sections of Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered are when he contrasts Lenin’s method and approach to that of the Mensheviks, including Trotsky, and Luxemburg (who he notes are, in many ways, the originators of the “textbook interpretation”). Lih also does invaluable work in establishing what Lenin’s strategy looked like in practice, compared to the workerist activity of his opponents. The revelation that Lih has discovered a “lost book” of Lenin’s, composed at the same time as What is To Be Done?, and which makes just such a systemic, conjunctural, analysis of Tsarist Russia at that moment, registering all the struggles, all the injustices, all the groups affected, is a too-overlooked fact (one day perhaps Lih might edit and publish this as a collection). Yet for all its strengths, Lih never quite comprehends that this is more than a campaign for democratic rights, just as he never quite realises that emerges in contrast to a critique of the method of opportunism and hence Lih needs to divorce the opening chapters of What is To Be Done? from the later ones, and particularly certain “formulations” from the main line of the argument.18
Lenin outlines at the beginning of What is To Be Done? that the struggle of his tendency (which became the Bolsheviks) against the Economists was only a form of the general struggle of revolutionaries against opportunists, which take different forms depending on the country, but who share this same underlying methodology. Consequently, the argument against the Economists, he affirms later, was the first stage in the Bolshevik’s long general struggle against opportunism, which changed forms as it became Menshevism, Liquidationism, Imperialist Economism, and so on. By contrast, Lenin’s strategy of hegemony itself develops into his political positions taken during the great upheavals of 1905 and 1917, his theory of two-stage revolution (first the bourgeois-democratic tasks, including the campaigns for democracy, then the socialist ones), his analysis of imperialism as a global system of exploited and exploiter nations, his support for national self-determination, his theorisation of the soviets and remains constant throughout his entire political career.19
Lenin’s organisational conclusions emerge from this strategy; they are not separate from the argument against opportunism but a part of it. His argument for a unified organisation of revolutionaries isn’t a matter simply of working under a repressive Tsarist bureaucracy (as suggested by Lih and the New Kautskyists) but operates on a different level that of the political, as part of a theory of socialist consciousness. In What Is To Be Done? Lenin writes, “The character of any organisation is naturally and inevitably determined by the content of its activity.”20 Against the Economists, he affirms, that “The worst sin we commit is that we degrade our political and organisational tasks to the level of the immediate, “palpable”, “concrete” interests of the everyday economic struggle.”21 For this “all-round struggle” to be carried out, a united organisation of revolutionary Marxists is required (this is fleshed out more thoroughly in his 1904 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back). This is because the task of raising the movement’s political level to “systemic consciousness” cannot be carried out, either across the Tsarist empire, or within any local struggle, or in any national context, “East” or “West,” without revolutionary Marxists working collectively in the same direction. They must be free to act and to make the same anti-systemic arguments, developing and implementing the same tactical steps, in unison, without internal opposition paralysing them, without the disorganisation of opportunism in their ranks. Only a national party can do this. Having the Marxists isolated from each other, arguing for separate understandings within the movement, refusing to support this or that struggle, refusing to analyse this or that aspect of the system, taking opposing tactical initiatives all these introduce confusion and disorganisation into the movement and lay the ground for bourgeois forces to derail or crush the movement of workers and broad masses and the Marxists themselves a situation facing revolutionaries (such as Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci) in the Second International in Germany from 1919-1923 and in Italy in 1919-1920.22 In this sense, Leninism can be considered as What Is To Be Done? [for the strategy of Hegemony against political opportunism] + One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [for the organisational unity of Marxists against “organisational opportunism”].
Many putative Leninists have never grappled with this central line of argument, the foundational one, which links the strategy of hegemony to its organisational conclusions, from which Lenin’s other positions develop.23 Some, like Marcel Liebman or Tony Cliff separate What Is To Be Done? from Lenin’s later work. This theoretical amputation allows these “Leninists” to collapse into the “textbook interpretation,” echoing the conservative commentators that this early Lenin is elitist and sectarian. This in turn allows them to reject Lenin’s strategy of hegemony, based in his critique of opportunism and “spontaneity,” and to pretend Leninism is simply a theory of a centralised party of revolutionaries. From there it becomes easy to adopt non-Leninist strategies: to promote workerism, to ignore or minimise movements against non-proletarian group oppression (women’s liberation, religious, environmental, or specifically “middle-class” concerns), to minimize national liberation struggles and other movements in the Global South (i.e., the democratic tasks of the revolution), to adapt to trade unionism, and the trade union bureaucracy, or perhaps to a “bourgeois labour party” (as the Militant tradition in the UK did for a period), to focus on the “bread and butter” issues of the day rather than all those abstract political or systemic questions, to idealise spontaneity, expressed in ideas like “revolution from below” that come from Luxemburg, to advocacy for Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and consequent misunderstanding of events in the Russian revolution. Some of these slippages we find in Doug Greene’s book. Perhaps the most significant is his advocacy of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.24 The second part of this series, to be published in a week, turns to these issues emerging from Trotskyism.
Footnotes
- Lenin’s work is nowhere near as vituperative as many of his critics maintain. A close reading reveals the bulk of his writing to be mostly fair-handed and considerate, especially when confronted with his opponents. To Kautsky, however, one senses the simmering anger of the betrayed. ↑
- As analogy: the genocide in Gaza today leaves little space for those who want to pontificate on abstract points about the democracy on one side and the other, as if there were some equivalent between the two sides, one in an open-air concentration camp, the other a powerfully militarised ruler of apartheid. ↑
- In a more contemporary example, Barry Shephard, former leader of the US SWP (and author of two memoirs about the party), once said that James P. Cannon, footloose organiser for the IWW, early CP USA leader, then leading Trotskyist, was a worker leader with a real base that groups of workers would ask, “What does Cannon say on this?” ↑
- The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara, 2019, found in the section “We must move quickly from social democracy to democratic socialism.” ↑
- Jukka Gronow’s On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky’s Theory of Capitalism is of a different order, assessment and critique as much as rehabilitation. ↑
- See, Lars T. Lih, “Kautsky as Architect of the October Revolution,” https://jacobin.com/2019/06/karl-kautsky-vladimir-lenin-russian-revolution. See Lih’s significant series of articles at https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/authors/lars-t-lih/ ↑
- See https://johnriddell.com/?s=Kautsky and https://jacobin.com/search?query=Kautsky and https://cosmonautmag.com/?s=Kautsky. See also, Darren Rosso’s “Kautsky: The Abyss Beyond Parliament.” https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/kautsky-the-abyss-beyond-parliament/ ↑
- Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024, p.1. ↑
- Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024, P.2. ↑
- Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024, P.1, p.112. ↑
- Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024, P.1, p.106. ↑
- Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024, P.1, p.138. ↑
- Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024, p.208. ↑
- Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024, p.85. ↑
- This argument can only be briefly summarised here, though it is a core subject of two complimentary pieces which will engage with Lih on a more textual level (“Luxembugism or Leninism?” and “The Curious Case of Comrade Kautsky”). ↑
- https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1298/the-centrality-of-hegemony/
↑ - The 2015 publication of The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, 1899?1904: Documents of the ‘Economist’ Opposition to Iskra and Early Menshevism edited by Richard Mullin has done a great service to socialists, who can now read Lenin’s opponents (necessary for an actually materialist analysis of the debate, just as Lih’s book helps with the context. ↑
- All this will be further developed in my forthcoming “The Curious Case of Comrade Kautsky.” It should be noted that Lih nevertheless does recognises that there were two definite trends in the socialist movement and that: “within Russian Social Democracy, it was known as ‘Bolshevik hegemony’ versus ‘Menshevik fear of proletarian isolation’. After the outbreak of war in 1914, it became known as ‘internationalism’ versus ‘defencism’. After February, the demarcation line was expressed as ‘anti-agreement’ versus ‘pro-agreement’.” https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1450/supplement-back-to-nevsky/ ↑
- Lih argues that Lenin’s two-stage theory, just like his strategy of hegemony, is first outlined by Kautsky here: https://johnriddell.com/2017/04/26/karl-kautsky-the-proletariat-and-its-ally/ ↑
- Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, fifth printing, 1977, p.440. ↑
- Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, fifth printing, 1977, p.446. ↑
- Lenin notes in What is To Be Done? that the specific conditions of Tsarist autocracy rule out a more open, democratic party, in Russia, at that moment, and so the general argument and the specific one requires distinction from a discerning reader. ↑
- Perhaps the most perceptive recent analyst is Alan Shandro, whose Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony captures the unity of Lenin’s theory with sensitivity and perceptiveness. Despite its scholastic style it stands head and shoulders above most contemporary works. ↑
- Others adopt the strategy of hegemony yet reject the organisational conclusions of Lenin’s argument, effectively taking Martov’s position at the 1903 Second Congress of the RSDLP, where he strategically differed from the Economists yet advocated a “broad based” party open to every striker, every professor, etc. We see this attitude in such organisations in Australia as Socialist Alliance and Red Ant. ↑