This book by Jukka Gronow talks about how Karl Kautsky played a big role in shaping how people in the European social democratic labor movement understood and interpreted Marxism in the years before World War I. As the main authority on Marx and Engels’ ideas during this time, Kautsky’s specific analysis of Marx’s Capital and capitalism’s fundamental contradictions became the standard to which both supporters and critics of social democracy referred.
Recommended for: Scholars and students interested in the intellectual history of Marxism and the Second International. This book provides an in-depth analysis of Karl Kautsky’s influential interpretation of Marxism and its relation to the ideas of Karl Marx.
You will:
- Gain a detailed understanding of Kautsky’s role as the leading Marxist theorist in the decades before World War I, and how his views shaped the socialist movement.
- Explore Kautsky’s debates with figures like Eduard Bernstein and Vladimir Lenin over key issues like revisionism, imperialism, and the role of democracy.
- Discover how Kautsky’s reading of Marx’s political economy differed in important ways from Marx’s own critique of capitalism.
- Examine the theoretical sources and political implications of the divergences between Kautsky’s “Marxism of the Second International” and Marx’s original ideas.
Detailed Overview
The book looks at how Kautsky’s Marxist framework differed in key ways from Marx’s own critique of political economy, even though Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein and Vladimir Lenin all basically understood capitalism in the same way. Gronow traces how this Marxist tradition in the Second International developed, contrasting it with Marx’s original economic and philosophical ideas.
The book has two main parts. Part I, Kautskys Marxism, really digs into Kautsky’s influential interpretations across major areas. It covers his views on organized capitalism the debate over revisionism, the immiseration theory, socialism as science, and his understanding of Marx’s economic ideas. Special attention is paid to Kautsky’s analyses of imperialism and its relationship to industrialized and agrarian countries as well as his perspectives on parliamentary democracy, revolutionary tactics, and the question of democracy versus dictatorship in relation to Lenins criticisms.
The second part called Marx’s Marxism switches focus to digging into Marx’s own critical economic and philosophical ideas. This includes stuff like the immanent critique, his private property theory the labor principle, and his criticism of how capitalism tends to make people more miserable over time. This part kindles sort of a counterpoint to the Kautskyist interpretations from before by highlighting the splits between Kautsky’s Marxism and Marxs original thoughts. On the whole, the book opens up some good understanding into the intellectual history and self-image of the European labor movement in the early 1900s. It also makes some light on the complicated relationship between Kautsky’s influential Marxist tradition and Marx’s own radical criticism of capitalism.
Citation
Gronow, J. (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 (Vol. 113). Brill. https://brill.com/display/title/32480
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