On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy

On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political EconomyGronow, Jukka
Book — Published Version On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy
Historical Materialism Book Series, No. 113
Provided in Cooperation with: Brill, Leiden
Suggested Citation: Gronow, Jukka (2016) : On the Formation of Marxism: Karl Kautsky's Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy, Historical Materialism Book Series, No. 113, ISBN 978-90-04-30665-3, Brill, Leiden, https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_613393
This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/181390
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Historical Materialism Book Series
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London)
volume 113
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
On the Formation of Marxism
Karl Kautsky’s Theory of Capitalism, the Marxism of the Second International and Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
By
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gronow, Jukka, author. On the formation of Marxism : Karl Kautsky's theory of capitalism, the Marxism of the Second
International and Karl Marx's Critique of political economy / by Jukka Gronow. pages cm. – (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; volume 113)
Originally published as the author's doctoral thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki in 1986.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-30664-6 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-30665-3 (e-book) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. 2. Kautsky, Karl, 1854-1938. 3. Capitalism. 4. Communism–History. I. Title.
HX39.5.G72 2015 335.4–dc23
2015032313
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issn 1570-1522 isbn 978-90-04-30664-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30665-3 (e-book)
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Contents
1 Organised Capitalism, the General Cartel and the Proletariat 29
2 The Dispute over Revisionism 35
3 The Theory of Immiseration, Socialist Consciousness and the Intellectuals 57
4 Socialism as Science 72
5 The Capitalist Law of Appropriation: Kautsky’s Interpretation of Karl Marx’s Economic Thought 78
6 The Centralisation of Capital andMonopoly Formation 94
7 Imperialism and the Relation between Industrial and Agrarian Countries 99
8 Imperialism and Its Alternatives 107
9 Imperialism as the Last Stage of Capitalism 126
10 Theoretical Sources of Kautsky’s and Lenin’s Studies on Imperialism 134
11 Imperialism as the Truth about Capitalism 151
12 Parliamentary Democracy and Revolutionary Tactics 157
vi contents
13 The Question of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lenin’s Critique of Kautsky the Renegade 192
part 2 Marx’sMarxism
14 The Immanent Critique and the Natural Rights Theory 211
15 John Locke, Adam Smith and Karl Marx’s Critique of Private Property 225
16 The Principle of Labour 252
17 The Theory of Increasing Misery and the Critique of Capitalism 276
Conclusion 288
Bibliography 311 Index of Names 325 Index of Subjects 327
Preface and Acknowledgements
This study was written originally as my doctor’s thesis at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki. In 1979–83 it was supported by the Academy of Finland, to which I wish to express my gratitude. A short visit to the Inter- national Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1983 made it possible for me to become acquainted with the Karl Kautsky archive preserved at the Insti- tute.
I would like to express my special gratitude to the following people, who commented on the original manuscript of my dissertation at different stages: Erik Allardt, Pauli Kettunen, Pekka Kosonen, Arto Noro and Matti Viikari. Erik Allardt and Matti Viikari also acted as the official examiners of my thesis. Johannes Berger was the official opponent nominated by the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. None of them, naturally, bears any re- sponsibility for the ideas represented in the final monograph. I am grateful to Susan Sinisalo for correcting the English of my thesis originally published in 1986 in the series Commentationes Scientiarum Socialum (nr.33) of the Soci- etas Scientiarum Fennica.
I’m grateful to the editor of the Historical Materialism series at Brill Publish- ers for offeringme the possibility of republishing it. Aftermuch consideration, I have decided to publish the work in its original form, with onlyminor changes, mostly omissions of unnecessary repetitions and excessive quotes. Instead of making any extensive changes in themain text of the book, I have partly rewrit- ten its introduction in order to take into account and relate my arguments, whenever necessary, to the scientific accomplishments in the study of Kautsky and Second International Marxism which have taken place during the almost thirty years that have elapsed since the original publication ofmy thesis in 1986, none of which, in my opinion, seriously challenge the main line of interpreta- tion of my book.
In the original version,most of the quotationswere in their original German. This new version uses either original English translations or specific transla- tions from German to English. Since the old translations are often of a rather poor quality, even they have had to be modified at times. Whenever this is the case, I have added the following note to the reference: ‘translationmodified BL’. Benjamin Lewis has helpedme locate the old translations, as well as translated with great skill all those texts which only existed in their original German. His role was by no means restricted to translating. He has also used his vast know- ledge and extensive reading in guiding me through the most important recent contributions in the field, as well as commented expertly onmy interpretation
viii preface and acknowledgements
of them.Without his valuable help, the whole project of republishingmy study would not have been possible at all.
The kone foundation has supported the project of the republication of this book for which I would like to express my special gratitude.
Helsinki, August 2013
Introduction
The quarter of a century of the rise and fall of the Second International (1889– 1914) could be called the formative years of Marxism, or ‘scientific socialism’ as it was solemnly named by its proponents. Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) was one of the leading figures who helped make Marxism the official doctrine of the rapidly growing social-democratic mass parties – directly in Germany and more indirectly throughout Europe and North America. As a leading theor- etician of the German Social Democratic Party, he was understood to repres- ent genuine Marxism by both enemies and friends of socialism alike. Kaut- sky’s Marxism was the target of many polemics and disputes concerning the right interpretation of Marxist doctrine, the scientific validity of the Marx- ist theory of society, and the political and strategic conclusions drawn from it.
For the first time Kautsky’s theoretical authority was seriously challenged in 1899 by the full-scale critique put forward by Eduard Bernstein – a former ally and collaborator of Kautsky – of all the main theorems of Marxism. But neither Bernstein nor later critics could shatter the faith in Marxism as the official party ideology and Kautsky’s position as its leading theoretical repres- entative and protagonist. Not until the end of the FirstWorldWar and the final organisational and political dissolution of the labour movement would Kaut- sky’s Marxism lose its position of authority. Kautsky became rather an obsolete figure, having no niche in the politically divided labour movement.
Kautsky enjoyed a wide reputation as a leading theoretician of Marxism even before hewas commissioned in 1890 to draft the official party programme, later to become known as the Erfurt Programme adopted by the German Social Democratic Party in 1891. The Erfurt Programme was generally recognised as the party’s first Marxist programme. For 34 years – from its very founding – Kautsky was the editor of the theoretical organ (Die Neue Zeit) of the most influential party of the Second International. He was also the acknowledged inheritor of the theoretical legacy of Marx and Engels, the ‘Old Ones’, and close collaborator with Engels during his last years. He edited and publishedmany of Marx’s posthumous works, including the first published version of Theories of Surplus Value.1 Kautsky could thus with good reason speak with the authority of the ‘Old Ones’, and he was a most influential interpreter and propagator of
1 Kautsky 1904, 1905, 1910a.
2 introduction
Marx’s and Engels’s scientific thoughts. Together with Engels’s Anti-Dühring,2 Kautsky’sDasErfurterProgramm [TheClass Struggle (1892)]3 andTheEconomic Doctrines of Karl Marx [Karl Marx’s Ökonomische Lehren],4 already published in 1887 before the Erfurt Programme, were the basic ‘textbooks’ of Marxism through which many a generation of Marxists studied and learned the basics of scientific socialism.5
The choice ofKarl Kautsky as themain theoretical figure in thepresent study could thus be justified by the influential position he enjoyed among the Marx- ists of the period of the Second International. Themain purpose of the present study is not, however, to analyse the history of Marxist ideas, and to identify the originators of certain important thought forms or the relations of influence among various Marxists and among different Marxist interpretations and con- ceptions. The major merit of Kautsky’s thinking from the perspective of the present study is that Kautsky was practically the only Marxist theoretician of the time to present a systematic interpretation of what he understood to be Marx’s and Engels’s theory of capitalism and, in so doing, to develop and for- mulate a theory of capitalismof his own. As the formation of theMarxist theory of capitalism constitutes the main object of this study, Kautsky’s contribution to the development of this theory is of immediate interest.
The focus of the present analysis is thus limited to the history of the social theory of capitalism. It does not intend to discuss in detail problems of philo- sophical materialism or practical political questions of Social Democracy, only to name alternative approaches. Comparedwith Plekhanov, anothermain the- oretical figure of Second InternationalMarxism, questions of philosophical and historical materialismwere of relatively little interest to Kautsky, at least at the time when he was a leading theoretician of the spd, and he left the defence of materialism to others, among them Plekhanov. The questions of historical materialism were actualised in Kautsky’s thinking before the First World War, in addition to his defence of the basic truths of Marxism against Bernstein’s critique,6 mainly in the context of the discussion concerning the role of eth- ics in historical materialism.7 But the different versions of and disputes over materialismwere otherwise of relatively little interest to Kautsky, as evidenced
2 Engels 1974–2004d. 3 Kautsky 1910b. 4 Kautsky 1906b. 5 See Donner 1978. 6 Kautsky 1899a. 7 Kautsky 1909b.
introduction 3
by the standpoint he adopted in the discussion aboutMach andMachism.8 For the practical purpose of the analysis of society, and of capitalism in particular, it was in his opinion enough to acknowledge amaterialist position in philosophy.
Consequently, Kautsky did not pay much attention to the development and interpretation of historical materialism or the materialist conception of his- tory, even though he did publish a voluminous work on the subject. However, TheMaterialist Conception of History9 had relatively little to do with his earlier studies and analysis of capitalism. In this later work, Kautsky presented an explicitly evolutionist conception of historymore reminiscent of the interest in Darwinism of his ‘premarxist’ years.10 The corpus of ideas later to be codified as historical materialism in the Soviet Union had its origin mainly in Plekhanov’s studies;11 Kautsky was, after all, the formulator of theMarxist theory of capital- ism.
In fact, the onlyMarxist to seriously challengeKautsky’s position as the lead- ing interpreter of Marx’s theory of capitalism, as well as being an expert on questions of modern capitalism, was Rudolf Hilferding, the author of Finance- Capital in 1910,12 the most systematic single treatise on modern capitalism, which was hailed by Kautsky13 as the forth volume of Capital. On the other hand, it can be claimed that many of the conceptions and conclusions for- mulated by Hilferding were simultaneously or even earlier discussed and ana- lysed by Kautsky and others as well. Thus there seems in fact to have exis- ted a common corpus of ideas shared by many of the leading Marxists of the time, which received its most consequential formulation both in Hilferding’s Finance-Capital and in Kautsky’s numerous articles and works on the subject of the development of capitalism.
The emphasis placed on Kautsky as the central and leading representative of the social theory of Marxism does not exclude the fact that many of his ideas and conclusions were also vehemently criticised and polemised against by other Marxists. Some of these disputes are discussed in more detail in this study, but even in such cases it is often possible to recognise a common con- sensus ofwhat reallywas thought to constitute the theoretical core ofMarxism. A critical reconstruction and a systematic analysis of Kautsky’s conceptions about capitalism is of special importance, because he was one of those who,
8 Kautsky 1909c. 9 Kautsky 1927. 10 Kautsky 1927, p. 17; see also Korsch 1971, B. Kautsky 1955, pp. 2–3; see also Kautsky 1960. 11 Negt 1974. 12 Hilferding 1968. 13 Kautsky 1910–11, p. 883.
4 introduction
perhaps more explicitly than others, contributed to the understanding of the fundamental social issues of capitalism. By analysing Kautsky’s thinking it is thus possible not only to reconstruct his theory of capitalism, imperialism and the conditions of the socialist revolution, but also to re-examine some of the basic presuppositions of other Marxist theories of imperialism and concep- tions of socialist revolution as evidenced by the discussion of Hilferding’s and Lenin’s theories of modern capitalism in this study.
The purpose of this study is thus not to present a complete history ofMarxist ideas at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, nor to reconstruct all the theoretical positions of the different factions or emerging schools of thought. The object of the first part of this study is, rather, exclusively the formation of the Marxist theory of society and of capit- alism in particular as represented by Karl Kautsky’s theoretical contribution – a contribution that was not the result of the efforts of an isolated intellectual, but instead had at least some degree of representativeness too.
Karl Kautsky’s theoretical conceptions and his contribution to the devel- opment of Marxism have been the object of amazingly few studies. No doubt Kautsky has figured as an important personality in various political and intel- lectual histories of the German Social Democratic Party and of Bismarckian and Wilhelminian Germany,14 and in general histories of Marxism.15 Certain important aspects of Kautsky’s thinking have been analysed in different con- texts; Kautsky has often had the questionable honour of representing a determ- inistic conception of the development of society inMarxism.16 The paradoxical combination of revolutionary vigour and practical cautiousness in Kautsky’s thinking was first pointed out by Mathias.17 The same paradox was formulated in more positive terms by Lichtheim: in Lichtheim’s interpretation,18 Kautsky completed the fusion of an essentially pacific and gradualist, democratic and reformist movement with a revolutionary doctrine.
Despite the fact that different aspects of Kautsky’s Marxism have been ana- lysed and discussed in different contexts – one could easily add several other studies to the above list – one can agree with Massimo Salvadori on his com- ment on the reception and critical evaluationofKautsky’s theoretical andpolit- ical contribution:
14 See e.g. Groh 1973; Rosenberg 1962; Steinberg 1973. 15 Lichtheim 1964. 16 See Lichtheim 1964, pp. 268–9; Arato 1973–4, pp. 7–8, 33–7; Colletti 1971, pp. 16–18. 17 Mathias 1957. 18 Lichtheim 1964, pp. 259–61.
introduction 5
In sum, there is an enormous disproportion between the volume of ref- erences to Kautsky in the course of history itself and the paucity of crit- ical studies devoted to him. I have come to the conclusion that the main reason for this disproportion is that scholars have so far fundamentally confined themselves to the judgemenets ‘for’ or ‘against’ Kautsky that were pronounced in the thick of political struggles between parties, ideo- logies, and movements of the own time. One might say that the image of Kautsky has remained fixed even since in the forms it acquired in that period.19
To this one could perhaps add yet another reason: Kautsky’s peculiar political position – later to become known as centrism – did not outlive the split in the Social Democratic movement after the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The effort to establish the Independent Social Democratic Party (uspd) after the war remained shortlived.20 In the post-war socialist labour movement, Kautsky fell between the lines dividing Communism and Social Democracy. To the Leninists, Kautsky has remained a renegade of Marxism ever since the verdict was proclaimed by Lenin, and to the Social Democrats, Kautsky ismerely a historical figure from the ‘pre-history’ of the partywith only little contemporary interest.
However, at the time of the writing of this work in the early 1980s there was what one might even venture to call a revival in the critical re-evaluation of Kautsky’s political and theoretical role as evidenced by the studies of Steen- son,21 Salvadori,22Hühnlich23 andBraionovich.24 (Kraus’s dissertationonKaut- sky’s theory of imperialism25 is more limited in scope, but it can be added to the above list). Even though not remarkably different in its conclusions from Alter’s26 evaluation of Kautsky as an opponent of Leninism and the proletarian revolution, Braionovi’s monograph does include a cautious attempt at rehab- ilitating Kautsky’s theoretical role from a Leninist standpoint; Braionovi’s ver- dict of Kautsky is not as complete as usual. Steenson’s Karl Kautsky 1854–1938
19 Salvadori 1979, p. 9. 20 Salvadori 1979, pp. 203–15, 145–50. 21 Steenson 1978. 22 Salvadori 1979. 23 Hühnlich 1981. 24 Braionovich 1978 and 1981. 25 Kraus 1975. 26 Alter 1930; see also Furtchik 1929.
6 introduction
is a general intellectual biography of Kautsky.27 Hühnlich’s study consists of an overall analysis of Kautsky’s political theory, but also includes many pen- etrating comments on Kautsky’s theory of capitalism and his interpretation of Marx’s Capital. In his Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880–1938,28 Salvadori is mainly interested in the questions of democracy, revolution, and socialism in Kautsky’s thinking, and Kautsky’s intellectual role in the political history of German Social Democracy. The possible shifts in Kautsky’s theor- etical position at different periods of his…