Karl Johann Kautsky

Karl Johann Kautsky (1854-1938), German Marxist theorist and one of the early leaders of the German Social Democratic Party. Kautsky was born in Prague and educated at Vienna University. He was a friend and disciple of the communist leaders Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In 1883 he founded the newspaper Die Neue Zeit, which, under his editorship, become one of the leading socialist periodicals of Europe. After joining the German Social Democratic Party, he won recognition as one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of his time, esteemed for his defense of revolutionary doctrines against the more liberal theories of the Social Democratic leader Eduard Bernstein. Later, Kautsky himself adopted more liberal views.

During World War I, which he denounced as an imperialist venture, he was a pacifist. In 1917 he was one of the leaders of a left-wing faction that split from the Social Democrats and formed the Independent Social Democratic Party. He rejected the Russian Revolution of October (November, New Style) 1917, and declined to follow a large section of his party into the newly formed United German Communist Party, which supported the Soviet regime. After World War I he resided chiefly in Vienna, directing the activities of the Austrian socialists.

Kautsky's greatest contribution to Marxist theory is Theories of Surplus Value (4 volumes, 1905-1910), based on manuscripts and notes left by Marx and originally intended as the basis for a fourth volume of Marx's Das Kapital (3 volumes, 1867-1894).