Podcast on Kautsky
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Came across this interesting discussion of Kautsky’s “The Commonwealth of the Future”, a chapter from the book The Class Struggle. The commentators view it positively. If we view the SPGB as Kautsky minus the minimum programme, which I think is a fair shorthand description, then any resurgence in interest in these things has to be good news.
When I clicked that link I got this message :
“Content not available
We’ve restricted some content for people who aren’t over 18.”What was Kautsky advocating?
Try this link instead and scroll down to episode 44. You don’t need to pay them a subscription to listen.
https://www.patreon.com/leftofphilosophy/posts
“What was Kautsky advocating”
Actually the *how* of Kautsky seems like the SPGB, through a conscious majority using democratic means.
But the *what* I’m a bit unclear, I have not read enough of him to know. I know he writes about “socialisation”, but is this some kind of nationalisation as a transitional step, or something else?
I thought Kautsky might have been advocating free love or something like that that the internet censors thought unsuitable for under 18s.
“The Class Struggke” is more generally known as “The Erfurt Programme”, the theoretical underpinning of the programme adopted by the German Social Democrats at their congress held there in 1891.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/index.htm
The first three SPGB pamphlets were translations, approved by Kautsky, of the first three sections of his work. According to the introduction to the first section, the intention seems to have been to publish the whole work but the last two including the one of “The Commonwealth of the Future” were not published.
I will find sone time listen to the podcast to see what it makes of what Kautsky wrote.
In some ways, you could argue that Kautsky helped to boost the concept of “market socialism”. He seems to have sided with the advocates of a money-based system of accounting as against the advocates of labour-time accounting (and also those like Otto Neurath who repudiated the need for a single universal unit of accounting altogether and argued like us for a system purely based on calculation in kind).
In the context of the so-called “Socialist calculation debate” “market socialists” like like Oscar Lange and Fred Taylor have sometimes been presented as having won this debate against the likes of Von Mises – not by rejecting the need for a market but by incorporating it into their idea of a socialist society in which consumer goods still take the form of commodities but producer goods are directly allocated by the state. It may be a crassly incoherent idea but it a certainly one that has exerted some influence
Kautsky seems to have helped to promote this idea. I am thinking in particular of certain passages of his book, “The Labour Revolution”, written in 1924 in which he states that while “another form of Socialism without money is conceivable” but went on to argue:
“We have not yet progressed so far as this. At present, we are unable to divine whether we shall ever reach this state. But that Socialism with which we are alone concerned to-day, whose features we can discern with some precision from the indications that already exist, will unfortunately not have this enviable freedom and abundance at its disposal, and will therefore not be able to do without money” (ch 3)
Very disappointing. He unquestionably contributed to the confusion into which the term “socialism” subsequently fell
Karl Kaustky created many wrong conceptions, one of them was indicating that money will exist in a socialist society, he called it socialist money
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1924/labour/ch03_j.htm
As Robbo203 indicated Kautsky was also one of the promoter of the concept of market socialism
The early SPGB was not uncritical of Kautsky on economics as well as politics. In 1902 Kautsky gave two lectures in Amsterdam which he later published as a pamphlet that was translated into English the following year as “The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution” (and later as “The Social Revolution and on the day after the Social Revolution”).
In a written debate with a Tory party election agent in the columns of the Socialist Standard in May 1914 Jack Fitzgerald described Kautsky’s pamphlet as
“one of the worst works he ever penned”.
In it Kautsky discussed to what extent a “proletarian regime” would be able to immediately increase wages, and went on, prefiguring what he was in write in 1924:
“I speak here of the wages of labor. What, it will be said, will there be wages in the new society? Shall we not have abolished wage labor and money? How then can one speak of the wages of labor? These objections would be sound if the social revolution proposed to immediately abolish money. I maintain that this would be impossible. Money is the simplest means known up to the present time which makes it possible in as complicated a mechanism as that of the modern productive process, with its tremendous far-reaching division of labor, to secure the circulation of products and their distribution to the individual members of society. It is the means which makes it possible for each one to satisfy his necessities according to his individual inclination (to be sure within the bounds of his economic power). As a means to such circulation money will be found indispensable until something better is discovered.”
Fitzgerald was criticising another point that Kautsky had made, which had been quoted by his opponent, that there wouldn’t be enough to immediately increase what workers consumed by much. He said:
“Let us say at once, however, that we repudiate Kautsky on this as we have done on several other points.”
Kautsky’s pamphlet can be found here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1903/xx/socrev2.pdf
And the debate with the Tory here:
“He unquestionably contributed to the confusion into which the term “socialism” subsequently fell”
But there never has been a universally accepted understanding of “socialism” as a marketless, stateless society etc. Look in the Communist Manifesto. It’s not a fall, more a contestation, which is still ongoing.
It’s true there are many things that Kautsky got wrong, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing of use in his writings. He was most certainly a strong influence on the people that set up the SPGB, and if you read the various debates he took part in over the issues of spontaneity versus organisation, councils versus parliament (his conclusion was “why not both”), or against the bolsheviks, there are certainly insightful things to learn.
Kautsky is good on simplifying Marx’s account of capitalism. His views on money in socialism are useful because of his critique of labour time vouchers (essentially, he argues that commodity money does the job assigned to labour time vouchers better, i.e. they basically are continuity money. His books on the Russian revolution: “Dictatorship of the proletariat” and “Terrorism and socialism” are good, and that’s why most people know him from Lenin and Trotsky’s replies: they had to respond to him because his shots landed. He is worth reading, critically.
Of significance or not, Kautsky did not use a German term corresponding to ‘commonwealth’ in ‘The Class Struggle’ (i.e. the Erfurt Program). That is a liberty some translator took.
In English the title of chapter IV is has been rendered as ‘Commonwealth of the Future’. But as you can see here in the German, what he has is ‘Der Zukunftsstaat’, that is, ‘The Future State’). https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1892/erfurter/index.htm .
In English the title of chapter IV is has been rendered as ‘Commonwealth of the Future’. But as you can see here in the German, what he has is ‘Der Zukunftsstaat’, that is, ‘The Future State’).
Are you sure that in this context Zukunftsstaat means the future “government machine, or the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour”, as Marx referred to the state in his Critique of the Gotha Programme?
In Germany at the time Kautsky was writing, the word seems to have had more the meaning of “future society”. In fact at the turn of the century quite a few books with that in the title were published. Kautsky actually wrote the preface to one of them by Atlanticus (Carl Ballod), which was a sort of German equivalent of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward:
https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1898/xx/atlanticus.htm
In his preface the word clearly means “future society” rather than future state in the narrow sense (even if a state in that sense was a feature of that society).
It would have been natural for Kautsky to use the word in the same sense in his booklet.
Incidentally, the German original of von Mises’s notorious 1920 article “Economic planning in the Socialist Commonwealth” was “Wirtschaftliche Berechnung im sozialistischen Commonwealth”. Make of that what you will.
The SLP of America supported the creation of the Puerto Rican republic. it would be like supporting the creation of the Palestinian and the Israel states. Daniel De Leon said that Volume one of Capital is more than enough.
Several works of Karl Kautsky can be read as contribution to socialism but In some other works he messed it up and are part of the so many confusions that existed in the so called socialist movement.
There are several Facebook websites on Karl Kautsky but they only have chosen his writings which are similar to the Leninists, but the writings where he is critical of the Bolsheviks, and his explanation of the dictatorship of the proletariat versus Lenin dictatorship of the vanguard party are not widely mentioned.
Whatever translation they have done on his works, he supported the idea of a socialist state, or a socialist republic.
With, or without Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Martov, or others the socialist party of Great Britain would have created its own conception of socialism/communism, at the beginning the Socialist Party was not very critical about Kaustky but then we started to dig more on his works and we were able to read it critically, probably we have a much balanced conception about Kautsky than any other organization.
The concept of Market socialism which also Kautsky contributed to be spread among some groups is the justification used by the Vietnamese Maoists to exploit the workers, and the Vietnamese government is exporting workers to others countries in order to reduce unemployment.
[Trigger warning: possible linguistic trivia]
ALB asked:
‘Are you sure that in this context Zukunftsstaat means the future “government machine, or the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour”, as Marx referred to the state in his Critique of the Gotha Programme?’
No, I am not in the least sure (which is why I said ‘significant or not’). At one point I wondered if ‘-staat’ here meant ‘state’ in the English sense of the ‘condition’ of something, ‘water has three states’ etc. But it seems German ‘Staat / -staat’ is not so used. (For that meaning, ‘Zustand’ or something else is used.)
Using the marxists.org ‘Cross-Language Section — Selected Marxist Writers’ (https://www.marxists.org/xlang/selected-marxists.htm ) and clicking to Kautsky in French, it is seen that chapter IV in that language is titled ‘La Société future’. Unfortunately none of the other selectable languages there have this book (even if they contain any of Kautsky’s writings at all).
But elsewhere, here is the image-file of a Russian translation: http://e-heritage.ru/Book/10089962 (electronic page 3) and there the chapter-heading translates to English as ‘State of the Future’, using the same word for ‘state’ as Lenin did in the book-title ‘The State and Revolution’.
Have we not someone on this site with the linguistic (native language) and presumed political competence to speak to the matter of ‘Zukunftsstaat’? Lizzie, who I’d have thought is a zealous reader of all posts?
It may be misleading (divorced from the marxist late 19th century usage-context), but here is what the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache says about ‘Zukunftsstaat’: https://www.dwds.de/wb/Zukunftsstaat . (‘State’, not ‘society’, which would be ‘Gesellschaft’.)
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