KAUTSKY, KARL

born Oct. 16, 1854, Prague died Oct. 17, 1938, Amsterdam Marxist theorist and a leader of the German Social Democratic Party. Having joined the Austrian Social Democrats while a student at the University of Vienna, Kautsky became a Marxist when he went to Zrich (1880) and was influenced by the political theorist Eduard Bernstein (18501932). In London he made the acquaintance of Friedrich Engels, with whom he maintained a close friendship until the latter's death in 1895. In 1883 he founded and edited the Marxist review Neue Zeit, publishing it in Zrich, London, Berlin, and Vienna until 1917. He was the author of the Erfurt Program adopted by the Social Democrats in 1891, which committed the party to an evolutionary form of Marxism that rejected both the radicalism of Rosa Luxemburg and the evolutionary socialist doctrines of Eduard Bernstein. The German Social Democrats accepted Kautsky as their authority on Marxism until World War I, when he joined the minority Independent Social Democrats in their opposition to the war. After the October Revolution in Russia (1917), Kautsky became increasingly isolated from the Independents by his opposition to violent revolution and to minority socialist dictatorships. After many Independents had joined the Communist Party, however, the remaining Independents and the majority branch of the German Social Democratic Party reunited, a result for which Kautsky had laboured. After 1918 he edited the German Foreign Office's archives, publishing secret documents regarding the origins of the war. He engaged in literary activities in Vienna from 1924 until 1938, when the German occupation of Austria forced him to flee. His other works include Marx' konomische Lehren (1887; The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx), Thomas More und seine Utopie (1888; Thomas More and His Utopia), and many articles in Neue Zeit.