On the Formation of Marxism

Front matter

On the Formation of Marxism

Historical Materialism Book Series

Editorial Board

PART 1 Kautsky’s Marxism

Organised Capitalism, the General Cartel and the Proletariat 29 The Dispute over Revisionism 35

The Theory of Immiseration, Socialist Consciousness and the Intellectuals 57

The Capitalist Law of Appropriation: Kautsky’s Interpretation of Karl Marx’s Economic Thought 78

The Centralisation of Capital and Monopoly Formation 94

Imperialism and the Relation between Industrial and Agrarian Countries 99

Imperialism and Its Alternatives 107 Imperialism as the Last Stage of Capitalism 126

Theoretical Sources of Kautsky’s and Lenin’s Studies on Imperialism 134

Imperialism as the Truth about Capitalism 151

VI CONTENTS 13 The Question of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lenin’s Critique of Kautsky the Renegade 192 PART 2 Marx’s Marxism

15 John Locke, Adam Smith and Karl Marx’s Critique of Private Property 225

17 The Theory of Increasing Misery and the Critique of Capitalism 276 Conclusion 288 Bibliography zu

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 International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1983 made it possible for me to become acquainted with the Karl Kautsky archive preserved at the Institute.

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 responsibility 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 Societas Scientiarum Fennica.

Tm grateful to the editor of the Historical Materialism series at Brill Publishers for offering me the possibility of republishing it. After much consideration, I have decided to publish the work in its original form, with only minor changes, mostly omissions of unnecessary repetitions and excessive quotes. Instead of making any extensive changes in the main text of the book, I have partly rewritten 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 of my thesis in 1986, none of which, in my opinion, seriously challenge the main line of interpretation of my book.

In the original version, most of the quotations were in their original German. This new version uses either original English translations or specific translations 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: ‘translation modified BL. Benjamin Lewis has helped me 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 knowledge and extensive reading in guiding me through the most important recent contributions in the field, as well as commented expertly on my interpretation

VII PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ofthem. Without his valuable help, the whole project ofrepublishing my 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 theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party, he was understood to represent genuine Marxism by both enemies and friends of socialism alike. Kautsky’s Marxism was the target of many polemics and disputes concerning the right interpretation of Marxist doctrine, the scientific validity of the Marxist 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 representative and protagonist. Not until the end of the First World War and the final organisational and political dissolution of the labour movement would Kautsky’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 he was 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 published many of Marx’s posthumous works, including the first published version of Theories of Surplus Value Kautsky could thus with good reason speak with the authority of the ‘Old Ones’, and he was a most influential interpreter and propagator of

Marx’s and Engels’s scientific thoughts. Together with Engels’s Anti-Dühring,? Kautsky’s Das Erfurter Programm | The Class Struggle (1892) |? and The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx [Karl Marx’s Ökonomische Lehren],* 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 of Karl Kautsky as the main theoretical figure in the present study could thus be justified by the influential position he enjoyed among the Marxists of the period of the Second International. The main 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 conceptions. 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 formulate a theory of capitalism of his own. As the formation of the Marxist 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 philosophical materialism or practical political questions of Social Democracy, only to name alternative approaches. Compared with Plekhanov, another main theoretical figure of Second International Marxism, questions of philosophical and historical materialism were of relatively little interest to Kautsky, at least at the time when he was a leading theoretician of the spp, 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,® mainly in the context of the discussion concerning the role of ethics in historical materialism.’ But the different versions of and disputes over materialism were otherwise of relatively little interest to Kautsky, as evidenced

Engels 1974-2004d.

Kautsky ıgıob.

Kautsky ıg06b.

See Donner 1978.

Kautsky 1899a.

Kautsky ıgogb.

N OO Bw DW by the standpoint he adopted in the discussion about Mach and Machism.® For the practical purpose of the analysis of society, and of capitalism in particular, it was in his opinion enough to acknowledge a materialist position in philosophy.

Consequently, Kautsky did not pay much attention to the development and interpretation of historical materialism or the materialist conception of history, even though he did publish a voluminous work on the subject. However, The Materialist Conception of History? had relatively little to do with his earlier studies and analysis of capitalism. In this later work, Kautsky presented an explicitly evolutionist conception of history more reminiscent of the interest in Darwinism of his ‘premarxist’ years.!° The corpus of ideas later to be codified as historical materialism in the Soviet Union had its origin mainly in Plekhanov’s studies; Kautsky was, after all, the formulator of the Marxist theory of capitalism.

In fact, the only Marxist to seriously challenge Kautsky’s position as the leading 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 1910,1? the most systematic single treatise on modern capitalism, which was hailed by Kautsky!? as the forth volume of Capital. On the other hand, it can be claimed that many of the conceptions and conclusions formulated by Hilferding were simultaneously or even earlier discussed and analysed by Kautsky and others as well. Thus there seems in fact to have existed 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 consensus of what really was thought to constitute the theoretical core of Marxism. A critical reconstruction and a systematic analysis of Kautsky’s conceptions about capitalism is of special importance, because he was one of those who,

Kautsky 1909c.

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 1910-1, p. 883.

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 conceptions 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 of Marxist 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 capitalism 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 development of Marxism have been the object of amazingly few studies. No doubt Kautsky has figured as an important personality in various political and intellectual histories of the German Social Democratic Party and of Bismarckian and Wilhelminian Germany,!* and in general histories of Marxism. Certain important aspects of Kautsky’s thinking have been analysed in different contexts; Kautsky has often had the questionable honour of representing a deterministic conception of the development of society in Marxism.!6 The paradoxical combination of revolutionary vigour and practical cautiousness in Kautsky’s thinking was first pointed out by Mathias.!” The same paradox was formulated in more positive terms by Lichtheim: in Lichtheim’s interpretation,'® 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 analysed and discussed in different contexts - one could easily add several other studies to the above list — one can agree with Massimo Salvadori on his comment on the reception and critical evaluation of Kautsky’s theoretical and political contribution:

14 See e.g. Groh 1973; Rosenberg 1962; Steinberg 1973.

15 _ Lichtheim 1964.

In sum, there is an enormous disproportion between the volume of references to Kautsky in the course of history itself and the paucity of critical 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, ideologies, 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.!?

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.”° 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 is merely a historical figure from the ‘pre-history’ of the party with 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 Steenson,”! Salvadori,?? Hithnlich?? and Braionovich.?* (Kraus’s dissertation on Kautsky’s theory of imperialism?® is more limited in scope, but it can be added to the above list). Even though not remarkably different in its conclusions from Alter’s?® evaluation of Kautsky as an opponent of Leninism and the proletarian revolution, Braionovie’s monograph does include a cautious attempt at rehabilitating Kautsky’s theoretical role from a Leninist standpoint; Braionovic’s verdict of Kautsky is not as complete as usual. Steenson’s Karl Kautsky 1854-1938

19 Salvadori 1979, p. 9.

22 Salvadori 1979.

23 Hühnlich 1981.

24 Braionovich 1978 and 1981.

26 Alter 1930; see also Furtchik 1929.

is a general intellectual biography of Kautsky.?” Hiihnlich’s study consists of an overall analysis of Kautsky’s political theory, but also includes many penetrating 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 theoretical position at different periods of his intellectual life are one of the main concerns of both these monographs, and consequently they explicitly problematise the Leninist thesis that Kautsky had given up his former revolutionary Marxist position. Hiihnlich’s and Salvadori’s studies have served as invaluable guidelines in orienting my own study of Kautsky’s voluminous litarary output.?9 Dick Geary’s short introduction to Kautsky’s political thinking came out in 1987,°° almost simultaneously with my own work. Marek Waldenberg’s thorough and extensive work Wzlot i upadek Karola Kautsky’ego, which came out in Poland as early as 1972, should be added to the list of critical Kautsky studies.?!

During the decades after the original publication of my study, the re-evalution of Kautsky’s role and importance has continued in at least as far as the clarification of three important questions is concerned. The first and most important one has concerned the relations between Kautsky and the Russian Social Democrats, and has shown without any doubt the enormous intellectual debt that the Russian Marxists, Lenin included, owed to Kautsky concerning both the understanding of the mobilisation of the working class and the conditions of the future socialist revolution. Lenin’s vehement condemnation of Kautsky as a renegade after the outbreak of the First World War has effectively concealed the fact that Lenin was, and in many ways remained ever after, Kautsky’s loyal pupil who tried to apply, as well as he could, the example of German Social Democracy, in theorising about Russian social developments and organising

27 Steenson 1978.

28 Salvadori 1979.

29 Hühnlich’s work includes a comprehensive bibliography of Kautsky’s publications; cf. also Blumenberg’s earlier bibliography (1960).

31 Waldenberg 1972. Cf. also the short version published in 1976. Since Waldenberg’s seminal work is, in addition to Polish, only available in an Italian translation (1980), it is mostly known only by its fame and has understandably - but unfortunately — remained largely beyond the reach of Kautsky scholars who do not read Polish or Italian, including the author of this book. Waldenberg’s article (in German) from 1992 discusses Kautsky’s reception of historical materialism.

the Russian proletariat in the expectation of the coming revolution. The second recent discussion has, at least to some extent, broadened the view we have of Kautsky’s own revolutionary strategy and tactics. Kautsky was a revolutionary socialist. In his mind, there were never any doubts about the inevitability of the coming socialist revolution in Russia and the whole world. However, Kautsky was firmly convinced that under the conditions which prevailed in Germany at the turn of the century, the revolution could in practice be non-violent or almost peaceful. Thus it differed radically both from the Great French Revolution and from the European revolutionary uprisings of the nineteenth century. The Social Democratic Party could now freely organise the working class and propagate openly its revolutionary message to the workers using the freedom of press and assembly. The best proof of the success of this strategy was the fact that the German Social Democratic Party was a mass party with millions of members with a firm and, as it seemed, steadily growing representation in the German Parliament. Kautsky has therefore often been claimed as — and at times accused of — representing a revolutionary wait-and-see strategy | Attentism] or tiring-out strategy | Ermattungsstrategie]: all the working class had to do was to wait until its organisations had grown in size and power, which would inevitably lead, sooner or later, to an absolute majority in the parliament. The Social Democratic Party could then simply declare that the time was ripe for social upheaval and accomplish its great historical mission by voting in parliament for the introduction of socialism (‘a ballot box revolution’). What it should avoid by all means was to make any risky moves that would endanger its organisation by any premature or untimely political adventures. Kautsky raised his warning finger in his polemics with Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek and other left-wing revolutionary radicals who actualised the question of the use of a general strike as a political weapon.

As the more recent studies have shown, Kautsky’s position was, in fact, more nuanced than is often presumed. In some of his lesser known works, like in his history of the French Republic as well as his January 1919 Guidelines for a Socialist Action Programme,** Kautsky formulated more detailed accounts of what was expected from the working class and its political organisations once they had taken state power into their hands, which proved that Kautsky was well aware that other radical measures were needed in addition to the parliamentary politics. For instance, he demanded the re-organisation of the army and

32 Kautsky 20a and ıgıgc. Ben Lewis argues that, when comparing Kautsky’s republican writings from 1905 and 1917, there is a demonstrable watering down of Kautsky’s democratic-republican proposals for dealing with the capitalist state form (Lewis 2011).

the state bureaucracy, and emphasised the need for new forms of working class self-organisation to control the production and distribution of goods. (In fact, his suggestion in the 1919 guidelines comes closer to corporatism than workers’ soviets). That said, one cannot completely deny that in many of his influential and well-known writings on this question, Kautsky’s views are rather vague and abstract. More often than not, he does not go into any details at all, and instead is satisfied in stating or repeating his principal position according to which the coming socialist take-over, at least in Germany and Western Europe, will take place by respecting the rules of parliamentary democracy. His conception of bourgeois democracy was, as Lenin would put it, formal. In Lenin’s mind, Kautsky did not pay enough attention to the real economic and social position of the social classes in capitalism and the huge differences in the distribution of the political resources following from it. One also gets the impression as if everything will be quite simple and straightforward after the declaration of a peaceful Socialist transformation, which Kautsky insisted on calling a revolution. Kautsky does not, for instance, reflect upon the fact that the reactionary political forces and the previous ruling classes would most likely not be willing, voluntarily and without any serious resistance, to give up their political power and go along with the new social order. As we know, this was something self-evident to Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries. In their minds, the Social Democrats should be fully prepared to meet this resistance and defend their achievements even with force against any attempts at restoring the old society. Despite the more nuanced picture based on these new findings, the standard interpretation of Kautsky’s thinking preserves a kernel of truth. As Bonner formulated it, admittedly a bit too pointedly, Kautsky ‘proved unable to visualize socialism in terms of a transition that would build the self-administrative powers of the working class to rule society. Socialism was equated with the organization and its success, while the notion of revolutionary administration and self-administration were thrown overboard by a party that was eliminating in practice the theory that justified it in Kautsky’s eyes’.3?

Finally, recent analyses of Kautsky’s writings on imperialism have raised some interesting new questions about his original contribution to the Marxist thinking of colonialism and imperialism. One of the problems in this respect has been that Kautsky wrote several treatises on imperialism before and during the First World War and his theoretical position changed from time to time. As pointed out by Matsuoka**, Kautsky adhered alternatively to two different theoretical schemes in explaining the emergence of colonial policy and imperialism in capitalism. The first was based on the theorem of the principal disproportion in the rates of growth of the industrial and agrarian sectors of the capitalist economy. The second was based on the theory of the over-accumulation of capital and the consequent under-consumption: because the demand for their goods was lagging behind, the capitalists constantly needed new markets to realise their almost chronic overproduction. But Kautsky is probably best known for his conception of ultra-imperialism, which he first coined after the outbreak of World War 1, borrowing from Hilferding’s Finance-Capital the thesis of the logical development of capitalism towards a single general cartel which, in Hilferding’s version, will rule over the whole national economy. Kautsky extrapolated this idea to the international economy in making the hypothetical claim of a kind of worldwide organised capitalism as the logical end-product of capitalist accumulation. The idea of ultra-imperialism is probably best known to many because Lenin ridiculed the idea in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism of 1917.3° What caused Lenin’s anger was the fact that Kautsky did not acknowledge the inevitability of the aggressiveness and ultimate violence of imperialism, neither did he understand that there could not possibly be any alternatives to it. Instead he was a proponent of a peaceful coalition of democratic nation states as an antidote to imperialist politics. Lenin was convinced that the only alternative to war and imperialism alike was the socialist revolution. At first glance, Lenin’s critique looks somewhat exaggerated and misplaced. Did not Kautsky also admit that ultra-imperialism was not a realistic alternative at all, but just a hypothetical thought construction? In his opinion, political tensions would interfere with the process long before the final stage of ultra-imperialism could be reached. Lenin added to this that such a development would be impossible to imagine not only because of the inescapable political tensions between the states but also, and more importantly, because imperialism could never outgrow its inherent economic contradictions and eliminate the competition between big monopolies. On the contrary, they could only be expected to grow in strength.

Neither Kautsky nor Lenin was a highly original thinker on the question of imperialism. True to his role as the main party ideologist, Kautsky’s numerous writings are often attempts to clarify the position of the party in the face of changing, actual challenges posed by international politics. To Lenin, the question of imperialism first became actual during and in the aftermath of the great imperialist world war facing the prospect of peace. He relied heavily on the works of Hilferding and Hobson — and more indirectly, Luxemburg - in constructing his own version that best suited his own political aspirations and convictions. Mike Macnair°® has argued that in one important respect, Kautsky laid the foundations for the later Marxist theory of imperialism in a series of articles published as early as 1898. In these articles, Kautsky developed a historical scheme about the different stages of the development of capitalist international relations beginning with feudal exploitative colonies and followed by the ‘work colonies’ (like North America and South Africa) which, as he claimed, enriched both Britain and the new colonies. This is followed by the policy of ‘free trade’ (Manchesterism) after the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which was followed in its turn by an exploitative stage of colonialism which arises first out of the new policy of protectionism adopted in Continental Europe during the very last decades of the nineteenth century as an antidote to British world domination.

Kautsky’s characterisation of these stages is mainly based on the type of principles that governed international trade policy. This is especially the case as far as the last two stages are concerned. Other theorists among Second International Marxists emphasised more the economic nature of imperialism and saw the inevitably increasing economic contradictions of capitalism as its major cause. According to Macnair, they learned from Kautsky one important lesson. This was the doctrine of the historical stages of capitalist development and the idea of (modern) imperialism as the last or latest stage of capitalism. Despite Kautsky’s great impact on his fellow Marxists, it is difficult to prove that they in fact learnt or adopted this idea from him. It would be safer to simply argue that Kautsky was one of the first, or perhaps even the first, to propose the thesis, and despite all the other theoretical and political disagreements concerning imperialism and capitalism in general, all the Marxists of the Second International shared this (rather abstract) idea of imperialism as a new stage of capitalism, radically differing — in one way or another - from the postulated ‘old’ or ‘classical’ capitalism of free competition and free trade. Consequently, the understanding of this new stage also demanded new theoretical tools of analysis, the development of which the Marxists took as a serious challenge. The groundbreaking studies of Moira Donalds?” and Lars T. Lih3® have convincingly shown that Karl Kautsky was the main mediator and mentor of Marx’s and Engels’s revolutionary thinking among the Russian Social Democrats before the First World War. He enjoyed undisputed authority as the main

36 = Macnair 2013. Day and Gaido (2011) present the development of Marxist discussions about imperialism up to the First World War.

37 Donalds 1993.

38 Lih 2008 and 2on.

Marxist theoretician among the Russian revolutionaries. Lenin in particular applied Kautsky’s teachings in order to mobilise the working class, preparing for the revolution under the prevailing conditions in the Russian autocracy. Even after his quite abrupt and final split with Kautsky — when the latter sided with the majority of German Social Democrats in voting for war credits at the outbreak of the First World War - Lenin continued to refer with great respect to Kautsky’s works written ‘when he was still a Marxist’. The pre-war Kautsky had not therefore lost his actuality, and his writings compiled before his ‘betrayal’ deserved respect. Lenin’s strong reaction and attempt to distance himself from Kautsky can best be explained by the great disappointment caused by his old teacher’s ‘betrayal’. It was Kautsky and not Lenin who had, by changing his position, deserved to be called a renegade.

According to Donald’s?? close reading of Lenin’s programmatic statements and writings, his attitude to Kautsky underwent a dramatic change first in 1914. This was partly due to Lenin's annoyance at Kautsky’s interference in Russian intra-party financial affairs, but the final break came with the outbreak of the war. Before that time, Lenin had been, for almost twenty years, a most loyal adherent to Kautsky’s ‘orthodox’ Marxism. Even after the final split, Lenin criticised Kautsky almost exclusively for his position on the war and not his pre-war writings.* In his famous treatise Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin quite vigorously attacked Kautsky’s ‘heretic’ conception of colonialism and imperialism, but his critique was directed only to Kautsky’s recent article in which he had coined the concept of ultra-imperialism. As Donald claimed, it is impossible to know what Lenin in fact thought about Kautsky’s previous writings on imperialism since he never commented on or made any references to them.*! We can deduce with good grounds that either he agreed with them or did not think that their possible shortcomings were of any decisive relevance to the central strategic questions of Social Democracy. As Donald summarised her contention, ‘far from rejecting the model of German Social Democracy at this time, Lenin remained a faithful discipline of the spp, searching constantly for parallels between the history of the party and his own, holding German Social Democracy as an example to the Russian movement, and continuing to hold its leaders and theoreticians in great respect’. It is even likely that Lenin’s almost unparalleled admiration of Kautsky prevented him as well as other Russian socialists from seeing the factual spread of revisionist tendencies within the Party, and the German trade unions in particular, before the war. Kautsky gave the impression that revisionism had not left any permanent traces in the party. In his mind, the best proof of this was that the programme of the Party was the same old revolutionary one. In other words, revisionism had been only a short interregnum in the party history. One can therefore agree with Donald’s conclusion that ‘[i]f anything, Lenin had too rosy a view ofspp’*?