06.03.2020

Dispelling the Kautsky myths

Ben Lewis introduces his recently published Karl Kautsky on democracy and republicanism. This article is based on a talk he gave to the March 1 London Communist Forum.

First of all, I would like to thank the London Communist Forum for inviting me to speak on my book. Its 350-odd pages represent a fair chunk of my time and effort and I am delighted to see it in print as part of the Historical Materialism book series.

While I submitted the book to the publisher in 2016, I actually first started working on the core of its material as far back as 2011. This, you might recall, was the year of the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. Slightly annoyed, to put it mildly, by the flood of royal propaganda, I started to do some reading around Marxism and republicanism to see what I could find - not only for my own sanity, but perhaps for the benefit of the Weekly Worker’s readership.

One of the sillier leftwing takes on republicanism, which perhaps due to its absurdity has never left my mind, was something I came across when reading through older debates within the Socialist Alliance. There, the concept of republicanism was rejected by one comrade - I think from the Socialist Workers Party - who argued that republican agitation in the SA should be rejected because “we don’t want to be like France or the USA”. Indeed we don’t, comrade, and Karl Kautsky - once the leading theoretician of the Second International - had something to say on this very issue, as we will soon establish.

It was around the spring of 2011 then that in my explorations I came across a 2009 Historical Materialism paper by the historian, Lars T Lih, entitled ‘The book that didn’t bark: Karl Kautsky’s “Republic and social democracy in France”’. This discussed a relatively unknown but truly fascinating series of seven articles, published by Kautsky in 1905 in Die Neue Zeit. This was German social democracy’s weekly theoretical journal that Kautsky edited until the party had him removed from the post in 1917 due to his opposition to the SPD’s role in World War I (Lenin had a complete collection of this journal, which is still on display in his study today). ‘Republic and social democracy in France’ discussed the attitude that Marxists should take towards the question of republics and republicanism. To my knowledge, this series is a rare extended discussion of republicanism in the Marxist canon, so I was keen to crack on with translating it for the Weekly Worker: my own little wedding gift for the newly-eloped royals.

Interestingly, Lars used the ‘Republic’ series as a foil to question some of Lenin’s assertions about Kautsky in State and revolution in 1917, as we will see below. I proceeded to translate some of the articles for the Weekly Worker, and Lars contributed an introduction to the abridged series. It did not produce much of a reaction, unfortunately, but I was really pleased with the overall product.

In 2014 I began to study, and translate, Kautsky’s Parliamentarism, direct legislation by the people and social democracy, first published in 1893 and reissued in 1911. This text exerted a huge impact on Lenin in the late 1890s, so I wanted to take a closer look. My book contains the first English translation of this text, which Lenin and others quickly arranged to be translated into Russian. Readers of the Weekly Worker may actually be familiar with some of its content: I have spoken on it at Communist University over the years and its arguments have been critically drawn on by me and various other writers in the Weekly Worker to highlight Kautsky’s arguments on the weaknesses of direct democracy and referenda from the perspective of the class struggle. For an excellent and critical overview of this text, I would point readers to Mike Macnair’s recent discussion of it in the Weekly Worker, as I do not wish to dwell on Parliamentarism here.

In addition to this translation work, my book offers an extended introduction - my MA thesis completed in 2015 at Sheffield University - that discusses Kautsky’s life and work, his disputed legacy and the potential enduring significance of his democratic republicanism, as expressed in both ‘Republic’ and Parliamentarism. Moreover, the book contains a translation of Kautsky’s autobiographical article, ‘The development of a Marxist’, written in 1924, and a synoptic overview of the various drafts of the SPD’s Erfurt programme of 1891. This programme was emulated by revolutionaries in Russia and formed the basis of the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. These drafts are perhaps a more ‘specialist’ resource, but I think that comrades will find them useful, because they underline the seriousness with which this organisation went about its strategic ideas and allows us to trace, with some exactitude, the precise contributions to the programme made by figures such as Engels, Bebel and Kautsky, as well as the differences between them.

At this stage, the book is extortionately priced, but it has recently come to my attention that the paperback edition, which will appear on October 13 this year, can already be pre-ordered on Amazon for the much more reasonable price of £20. I hope that it can take its place alongside other studies of the strategic thought of the Second International, although I am fearful that the book itself will become one that ‘doesn’t bark’ - I have arranged for review copies to be sent to various leftwing organisations and publications, but, with the notable exception of the Weekly Worker, I have not yet heard as much as a whimper. Maybe the paperback version will give the book’s ideas more traction.

Now that I have provided an overview of the publication and how it came about, in this article I would like to focus on what I believe are the its two most important contributions. First, its rediscovery of the significance of Kautsky “when he was a Marxist” - freed from the overwhelmingly negative consensus that has surrounded the ideas of this erstwhile “honorary Bolshevik”. Second, the revolutionary significance of Kautsky’s republicanism as a key, if now unfortunately almost entirely forgotten, pillar of Marxist political strategy. Finally, I wish to make some tentative suggestions about the potential importance of future work both for historians and, most importantly, for the development of Marxist politics and perspectives today. These are obviously huge topics, but let us now do our best to outline them succinctly.

Three schools

When it comes to Kautsky’s legacy, there is one term, more than any other, that has stuck to his name: renegade. Historians, specialists in German thought and history, and, sadly, many leftwing activists know him, if at all, as the ‘renegade’ in Lenin’s The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky. This pamphlet pillories Kautsky for his wavering stance in opposing World War I and his outright hostility to the Russian October 1917 revolution (Kautsky welcomed the February revolution and wrote a brilliant article on its significance).

Moreover, the relatively few specialists who are familiar with his work tend to have a rather negative view of it. Even scholars who consider themselves Marxists or sympathetic to Marxism, such as Stephen Eric Bronner, often reject much of Kautsky’s thought. Thus Bronner asserts that “Kautsky’s Marxism was never dialectical, [but] always mechanistic” and that this thought prevented him “from calling the bourgeois state and the existing modes of socio-political organisation into question”. Kautsky’s authority as a Marxist theoretician has been seriously in doubt ever since Lenin’s angered accusations. Indeed, anecdote has it that not only Lenin’s critique of Kautsky, but also the very title of his anti-Kautsky pamphlet, has moulded historical consciousness. The Kautsky scholar, Hans-Josef Steinberg, for instance, recalls - or claims to recall - hearing from his colleague, Georges Haupt, that at various history conferences across the globe in the 1970s and 1980s Haupt had met students and academics who actually thought that Kautsky’s forename was ‘Renegade’. Kautsky’s grandson, John, mentions similar reactions at being introduced to others at conferences and receptions.

Be that as it may, Lenin’s choice of the term ‘renegade’ is worth bearing in mind, when considering the representation of Kautsky’s legacy. For to call somebody a renegade is to assert that this somebody, for whatever reason, has reneged on, or turned away from, what he once held dear, not that everything he once held dear was useless from the outset. Seen in this light, Lenin’s charge against Kautsky is not that he had always been a traitor to the cause of socialism, but that at a certain point he had flinched back from the perspectives he had formulated earlier. Indeed, following the outbreak of World War I, Lenin recommended to a comrade that he should “Obtain without fail and reread (or ask to have it translated for you) Road to power by Kautsky [and see] what he writes there about the revolution of our time! And now, how he acts the toady and disavows all that”. Lenin tried to explain Kautsky’s renegacy in the realm of politics. Clara Zetkin, a close friend of the Kautsky family in Stuttgart, took the same position. In 1920, she wrote:

Nobody disputes Kautsky’s great and enduring service of teaching the most advanced workers the ABC of scientific socialism, of historical materialism. Nor does anybody dispute that he fought to shed further light on Marx’s world of thought, to develop this thought and to make a cadre of advanced proletarian fighters feel at home within it. But it is precisely this which makes his ‘fall from grace’ all the more inexcusable.

For Lenin and Zetkin, then, it was Kautsky who fell from grace, who failed to achieve the heights to which he had once pointed. It was Kautsky who broke with Kautsky, who broke with the revolutionary Marxism that inspired the fundamental views of Lenin and Zetkin on the revolution of their time. However, three schools of 20th century thought, for various reasons and in various ways, sought either to downplay the connection between Bolshevism and the leading thinker of the Second International, or to increase the gulf between Kautsky “when he was a Marxist” and the theory and practice of Bolshevism. These three schools are neo-Hegelianism, Stalinism and western cold war historiography. As we will see, there are commonalities and overlaps between them, but they are three distinct trends in their own right.

For the neo-Hegelian approach, Kautsky’s thought was essentially useless from the standpoint of revolutionary strategy from the outset, either because he failed to understand the dialectic or because he was a determinist - or even a mechanistic Darwinist who thought that societies followed unchanging laws of development from lower forms to higher, more advanced ones. He thus - or so it is claimed - looked forward to the orderly transition to socialism from the comfort of his armchair. Note that this school predominantly locates the break between Lenin and Kautsky as lying in the realm of philosophy, not politics or programme. This has led to claims by various thinkers that it was actually Lenin who had to renege on the Kautskyan outlook he himself once held dear by locking himself away in Swiss libraries, rereading Hegel and overhauling the non-dialectical diet of Second International Marxism he had lived off until that point.

This is not to say that philosophy or the dialectic is of secondary importance to the understanding of revolutionary politics, but far too much has been made of Lenin’s library time in Switzerland as holding the key to an understanding of his political development. It does a disservice to the stature of Lenin as a thinker by claiming that there is a fundamental rupture in his thought and thus that most of what he wrote before that should be disregarded. More to the point, this claim warps what Lenin was actually saying about Kautsky: Lenin was simply seeking to uphold the revolutionary perspectives on Russia that Kautsky once upheld, not to break with so-called Second International evolutionism.

The neo-Hegelian approach has enjoyed wide purchase in academia, the ‘new left’ and also on the Trotskyist left, as expressed in the ideas of thinkers like John Rees. But we shall see below just how misplaced it is to think that Kautsky envisaged the transition to socialism as some kind of objective evolutionary necessity. On the contrary, what ultimately mattered for him was the subjective factor: state politics, party and programme.

The rise of Stalinism represents the most significant distortion of the intellectual relationship between the SPD ‘centre’ around Kautsky, on the one hand, and Bolshevism, on the other. This is particularly prominent in the notion of Bolshevism as a ‘party of a new type’. As Stalin himself put it in his notorious Short course of 1939, “The party strengthens itself by purging its ranks of opportunist elements - that is one of the maxims of the Bolshevik Party, which is a party of a new type fundamentally different from the social democratic parties of the Second International.”

This statement entails a complete fabrication of history. For one, in early Soviet Russia, Kautsky’s pre-1914 writings were extensively used as educational tools for new party cadres. In this sense, Zetkin’s emphasis on Kautsky’s role in propagating the “ABCs” of Marxism was applied rather literally: Bukharin and Preobrazhensky’s The ABC of communism: a popular exposition of the programme of the Communist Party of Russia (1919) abounds with Kautsky texts in the ‘recommended reading’ at the end of each chapter. For another, the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow initially planned an edition of Kautsky’s Collected works. By 1923 a few volumes had been published, but plans were shelved in - note the date - 1930. Trotsky’s obituary of Kautsky points to the Stalinist skulduggery this entailed:

The attempts of the present historiography of the Comintern to present things as if Lenin, almost in his youth, had seen in Kautsky an opportunist and had declared war against him, are radically false. Almost up to the time of the world war, Lenin considered Kautsky as the genuine continuator of the cause of Marx and Engels.

Nonetheless, here Trotsky also implies that the young Lenin was led astray by Kautsky’s rhetoric. Not only does this also involve a misrepresentation of the real relationship: it is slightly hypocritical, for the young Trotsky was just as much of a Kautsky fanboy as Lenin, as expressed in Trotsky’s fawning correspondence, written in German, to the ‘pope of Marxism’.

The third major school in the distortion and marginalisation of Kautsky’s legacy was cold war historiography in the west. This school echoed the Stalinist consensus on the fundamental difference between Kautsky and Lenin, but put plus-signs where the Stalinists put minus-signs and vice versa. There is no time to go into this now, but in this consensus a key role was played by Menshevik exiles in Germany, as well as by some of Kautsky’s family, such as his son, Benedikt, who was an Austrian Social Democrat MP, and his grandson, John, who wrote a book on his grandfather, claiming that it was Lenin who broke with the more moderate Kautsky. Kautsky may have been a determinist, John reasoned, but at least he was not a bloodthirsty voluntarist like Lenin.

During the cold war, then, a peculiar consensus emerged. From different angles, and for different reasons, the three main schools we have identified tend to suggest that Kautsky’s views of democracy, organisation and revolutionary change had little or nothing to do with the political practice of Russian Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

These schools of thought continue to dominate the reception of Kautsky and his work today, but thankfully some scholars are reassessing his work and challenging this communis opinio - often by looking at the original source materials in German or Russian instead of merely relying on second-hand accounts. The thawing of the 20th century consensus on Kautsky has also, albeit in a most limited and disappointing way, become evident in the recent upturn in discussions of Kautsky and the recent ‘Kautsky wars’ among the US left. I will not comment on those here, but will merely note that most of these writers seem to have ‘discovered’ a rather Bersteinised Kautsky: either as a projection of their own reformism onto the past, or as a projection attempting to uphold the misleading views on him outlined above.

A rather different image of Kautsky emerges when we consider in more detail his work “when he was a Marxist” as one of the most central influences on the politics of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. Unfortunately, these texts receive scant attention from today’s left. Here we arrive at ‘Republic and social democracy in France’ and the fundamental strategic principle it defends - one upheld by Kautsky and Lenin alike, before Kautsky reneged on it - that socialist parties should not participate in bourgeois coalition governments and should instead gain majority support for what Marx and Engels called the commune state, the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is working class rule, with - paraphrasing Marx - ‘the working class not simply laying hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wielding it for its own purposes’.

It is often claimed - most famously by Lenin in State and revolution - that Kautsky’s political thought was unaffected by the revolutionary spirit of Marx and Engels in their assessment the Paris Commune of 1871. But this, as we will now see, is misleading. Let us now take a closer look at the ‘Republic’ series to see why this is the case.

Republicanism

The backdrop to Kautsky’s Neue Zeit series in 1905 is the debate in the Second International over the experience of Millerandism - a trend named after Alexandre Millerand, who was eventually kicked out of the international for accepting a post as minister of commerce in a French government, with Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, butcher of the Paris commune, at is head. Kautsky himself drafted the resolution condemning socialist participation in bourgeois governments, which was adopted at the Paris Congress of the international in 1900.

Interestingly, however, the resolution contained a key weakness. For, although it unequivocally condemned socialist coalitionism in ‘normal’ circumstances’, it left the door open to such participation in extreme or catastrophic situations - such as perhaps during an invasion or occupation. This caveat came to the delight of the ‘revisionist’ right wing of social democracy, who generally had as their aim the participation of socialists assuming office in the bourgeois state. Equally, it earned the condemnation of the Iskra editorial board, which referred to it not as the ‘Kautsky resolution’, but the ‘rubber resolution’ - a malleable and thus opportunist statement.

By the time of the SPD Congress in Dresden in 1903, however, Kautsky drafted a resolution on government participation that was free of all ambiguity and removed all references to extreme situations. Did he ever account for his change of heart and his move away from open opportunism here? Thanks to comrade Mike Taber, I have been able to locate Kautsky’s speech to the Dresden Congress in 1903. He says:

It is notable that all the revisionists have spoken out in favour of Millerand. Now [Ignaz] Auer has attempted to point out a contradiction in my thought on this and claimed that I too stood up for Millerand. He, Auer, had defended my resolution back then and says I had expressed my full support for his speech.

I think Auer’s memory is playing tricks on him. My recognition of his speech can only have applied to the skill with which he delivered it, because it was excellent. But my remarks did not apply to the content, because his speech avoided the crux of the matter. Nonetheless, back then I did look to formulate the resolution in a way that turned against Millerand in principle, but which presented his behaviour as a mistake, not as a crime. I wanted to preserve the principled standpoint and yet pave the way for unity amongst the French (heckle: “That’s opportunist!” [Because this time the Dresden resolution to which he is speaking is not formulated in this way - BL]). My latter efforts were in vain. And this has also happened to others too.

Kautsky’s efforts at preserving the unity of the socialist French movement on this question were thus in vain, and he shifted his position accordingly. When the question of government participation was placed on the agenda of the international’s Amsterdam Congress in 1904, a fierce clash ensued. In the one corner were some of the French socialists, headed by Jean Jaurès, who rejected the vehemence of the Dresden resolution. In the other was the SPD majority headed by August Bebel, who defended it.

Besides the typical revisionist dismissal of the SPD as consisting of impotent, dogmatic oppositionists (a criticism unconsciously echoed by many on the left today), Jaurès accused the Germans - who lived under an imperial monarch, of course - of being indifferent to the significance of the republic and republicanism. After all, for some French reformist socialists, if the French republic was under threat, as it was from the right at this time, then it might be necessary, and thus politically permissible, not only to bloc with bourgeois forces to defend it, but to join them in government. This would be a necessary price to pay to retain such an historic achievement of the French people.

After the Amsterdam congress, Kautsky feels compelled to pick up his pen to defend Bebel and what Kautsky sees as Marxist republicanism more broadly. He too believes that the Third Republic must be defended, but that the best way of doing so is by exposing what he calls its “monarchical means of rule” in the church, state bureaucracy, elections, army and so on.

Kautsky rejects the logic of Jaurès and co. Just as Engels once argued that the French Third Republic amounts to an “empire without the emperor” and contrasts it with a genuinely democratic republic, Kautsky identifies two types of republicanism: a bourgeois variety embodied in the French Third Republic, and the kind of radical, proletarian republic along the lines of the Paris Commune. Depending on their particular content, republics can thus form the basis of what Kautsky terms “the class rule” of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat:

Thus, the same republic which forms the basis for the emancipation of the proletariat can at the same time become the basis for the class domination of the bourgeoisie. This is a contradiction, but one which is no stranger than the contradictory role played by the machine in capitalist society: the machine is both the indispensable precondition of the liberation of the proletariat and at the same time the means of its degradation and enslavement.

Following on from this, Kautsky underlines how Marxist-republican agitation should not cease with the formal removal or abdication of a monarch. In other words, the French socialists still need to conduct republican agitation. A different kind to that in Germany, admittedly, but republican agitation all the same. He refers to those socialists in America and France who fail to see the need for this as suffering from “republican superstitions” that must be destroyed forthwith, if the working class movement is to progress in those countries. He argues that this agitation must continue until the conditions have been created for the working class to take power.

Such conditions are a far throw from those in the Troisième République in France and amount to a state form, in which the minimum demands of the Erfurt programme have been realised, as we will discuss below. Perhaps “republican superstitions” might be less debilitating than much of the British left’s past and present ‘monarchical superstitions’, but that is, of course, another matter.

Democracy

But what did Kautsky understand by what he calls the “ideal of the democratic republic”, which “the Parisian proletariat of 1871 would seek to form into an instrument of its emancipation”?

After describing the course of events which led to the formation of the Paris Commune, Kautsky extensively quotes from Marx’s The civil war in France (1871) in order to highlight what he - following Marx - views as the political features of the Commune that distinguish it as a revolutionary government (and which, it should be stressed, find reflection in the minimum demands of the Erfurt programme): the replacement of the standing army by a people’s militia; universal suffrage; the disestablishment of the church and a secular state; the election of judges on short terms of service, self-government in the localities and public servants working for an average worker’s wage (the latter was the only one that did not feature in the Erfurt demands: a significant omission).

In other words, in Kautsky’s work there is a clear reference to Marx’s criteria for working class government and the conclusion Marx drew from the experience of 1871 - that the existing state machinery must be completely overhauled, not given a socialist gloss (the very points that Lenin raised in 1917 … against Kautsky). In ‘Republic’, Kautsky is quite explicit on this matter and, paraphrasing Marx, pinpoints the central pillars of the state machinery that must be overhauled by a working class government:

The conquest of state power by the proletariat therefore does not simply mean the conquest of the government ministries, which then, without further ado, administers the previous means of rule - an established state church, the bureaucracy and the officer corps - in a ‘socialist’ manner. Rather, it means the dissolution of these institutions. As long as the proletariat is not strong enough to abolish these institutions of power, then taking over individual government departments and entire governments will be to no avail. A socialist ministry can at best exist temporarily. It will be worn down in the futile struggle against these institutions of power, without being able to create anything permanent.

This bold, anti-revisionist statement on one of the core features of Marxist political strategy is one that much of today’s left - with its calls for ‘Labour/Syriza/Sinn Féin, etc to power’ - should take note of. It is an example of some of Kautsky’s clearest Marxist writing and it is understandable why Lenin held it in such high esteem.

The defeat and suppression of the Commune, continues Kautsky, entailed the overthrow of its (genuinely) republican form of rule, so that the republic became “a tool of bourgeois class rule”. It forced the bourgeoisie to reign over the proletariat itself - an unpleasant task, which the bourgeoisie had previously left to the monarchy. For Kautsky there are, therefore, republics and republics - republicanism and republicanism. The significant feature of Marxist republicanism is precisely that it seeks to create a republican state form that, following Engels, is “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”, or - as Marx put it - “the political form at last discovered, under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.

By uncovering these texts and by presenting them - with all their faults and historical limitations, of course - to a modern audience, this book is further able to shed light on how the republican Kautsky of 1905 has clearly morphed into something else by the time of the German Revolution of 1918. By then he has, if you excuse the phrase, become a ‘renegade republican’ and embraced some of the very ideas he fought against in the Socialist International in the early 1900s. He embraces the SPD’s participation in the so-called Weimar coalition as ‘socialism’ and soft-pedals Weimar’s ‘Reich-republicanism’ - the content of which was much closer to the Third Republic than the proletarian republican Paris Commune.

But this is not the end of the story, for there is a lot more work to be done on Kautsky. Many of the existing English-language translations are abridged, often employ archaic language and are generally a little clunky to read. I do think that an accessible reissue of his core strategic writings - most crucially the (still incomplete!) translation of his commentary on the Erfurt programme - should be made available, precisely because they are such useful introductions to what Zetkin calls the ABCs of Marxism for newer and or younger comrades.

His writings as a ‘renegade’, I believe, should also be taken more seriously - not only for the ‘negative’ (ie, the lengths to which Kautsky would go to defend participation in a bourgeois government in a text such as his 1922 The proletarian revolution and its programme), but also in some of the doubtless important insights he provides in his later works.

In concluding, I will just state that to argue, as comrade Jim Creegan recently did in the Weekly Worker, that “the overall curve of [Kautsky’s] political career can only serve as a negative example”, overlooks both the positive political content in many of his earlier works and, more importantly, the enormous impact that his ideas exerted on the strategy of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. In short, to dismiss Kautsky’s career as “overwhelmingly negative” is to dismiss the experience of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution as negative - even if, as with comrade Creegan and others, it is done in a well-meaning attempt to uphold staunch loyalty to the term ‘Bolshevism’.

As I have hopefully shown here, and do in more detail in the book itself, such a view remains lost within the mystification and distortion of Kautsky’s legacy in the 20th century.

Notes

1. B Lewis Karl Kautsky on democracy and republicanism Leiden 2019, pp366, £121.

2. M Macnair, ‘Democracy and republic’ Weekly Worker February 13 2020..

3. This is the dedicated Amazon page: www.amazon.co.uk/Karl-Kautsky-Democracy-Republicanism/dp/1642593370.

4. K Kautsky, ‘Prospects of the Russian Revolution’ Weekly Worker January 14 2010.

5. SE Bronner, ‘Karl Kautsky and the twilight of orthodoxy’ Political Theory November 1982, p596.

6. J Rojahn, T Schelz-Brandenburg and H-J Steinberg (eds) Marxismus und Demokratie. Karl Kautskys Bedeutung in der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung Frankfurt am Main 1992, p19. As the Russian language does not use the definite article (‘the’), the original title of Lenin’s pamphlet was Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskiĭ.

7. LT Lih, ‘True to revolutionary social democracy’ Weekly Worker November 13 2014.

8. C Zetkin Der Weg nach Moskau Hamburg 1920, pp9-10.

9. A term first coined by Jules Townshend in ‘Reassessing Kautsky’s Marxism’ (Political Studies, Vol 37, pp 659-64.

10. J Rees The algebra of revolution: the dialectic and the classical Marxist tradition London 1998.

11. J Stalin History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Moscow 1939.

12. L Trotsky, ‘Karl Kautsky’ New International Vol 5, no2, 1938, pp50-51.

13. SPD Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands abgehalten zu Dresden vom 13 bis 20 Berlin 1903, p384.

14. F Engels, ‘A critique of the draft Social-Democratic program of 1891’ (https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm).

15. B Lewis (ed) Karl Kautsky on democracy and republicanism Leiden 2019, p159.

16. Ibid p177.

17. Ibid p184.

18. F Engels op cit.

19. K Marx The civil war in France (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil‑war‑france/ 1871), chapter 5.

20. J Creegan, ‘Commitment to orderly progress’ Weekly Worker May 9 2019.