German Marxism after Engels

The work of Kautsky and Bernstein

The theoretical leadership after Engels was taken by Karl Kautsky, editor of the official organ of the German Social Democratic Party, Die Neue Zeit. He wrote Karl Marx’ ökonomische Lehren (1887; The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx), in which the work of Marx is presented as essentially an economic theory. Kautsky reduced the ideas of Marx and Marxist historical dialectic to a kind of evolutionism. He laid stress on the increasing pauperization of the working class and on the increasing degree of capitalist concentration. While opposing all compromise with the bourgeois state, he accepted the contention that the socialist movement should support laws benefiting the workers provided that they did not reinforce the power of the state. Rejecting the idea of an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, he believed that the overthrow of the capitalist state and the acquisition of political power by the working class could be realized in a peaceful way, without upsetting the existing structures. As an internationalist he supported peace, rejecting war and violence. For him, war was a product of capitalism. Such were the main features of “orthodox” German Marxism at the time when the “revisionist” theories of Eduard Bernstein appeared.

Bernstein created a great controversy with articles that he wrote in 1896 for Die Neue Zeit, arguing that Marxism needed to be revised. His divergence widened with the publication in 1899 of Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Evolutionary Socialism), to which rejoinders were made by Kautsky in Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Programm: Eine Antikritik (1899; “Bernstein and the Social Democratic Program”) and the Polish-born Marxist Rosa Luxemburg in Sozialreform oder Revolution (Reform or Revolution), both in 1899. Bernstein focused first of all upon the labour theory of value. Along with the economists of his time he considered it outdated, both in the form expounded by British classical economists and as set forth in Das Kapital. He argued, moreover, that class struggle was becoming less rather than more intense, for concentration was not accelerating in industry as Marx had forecast, and in agriculture it was not increasing at all. Bernstein demonstrated this on the basis of German, Dutch, and English statistical data. He also argued that cartels and business syndicates were smoothing the evolution of capitalism, a fact that cast doubt on the validity of Marx’s theory of capitalistic crises. Arguing that quite a few of Marx’s theories were not scientifically based, Bernstein blamed the Hegelian and Ricardian structure of Marx’s work for his failure to take sufficient account of observable reality.

To this, Kautsky replied that, with the development of capitalism, agriculture was becoming a sector more and more dependent on industry, and that in addition an industrialization of agriculture was taking place. Luxemburg took the position that the contradictions of capitalism did not cease to grow with the progress of finance capitalism and the exploitation of the colonies, and that these contradictions were leading to a war that would give the proletariat its opportunity to assume power by revolutionary means.

The radicals

One of the most divisive questions was that of war and peace. This was brought to the fore at the outbreak of World War I, when Social Democratic deputies in the German Reichstag voted for the financing of the war. Among German Marxists who opposed the war were Karl Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Liebknecht was imprisoned in 1916 for agitating against the war. On his release in 1918 he took the leadership of the Spartacus League, which was later to become the Communist Party of Germany. Luxemburg had also been arrested for her antimilitary activities. In addition to her articles, signed Junius, in which she debated with Lenin on the subject of World War I and the attitude of the Marxists toward it (published in 1916 as Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie [The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy]), she is known for her book Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (1913; The Accumulation of Capital). In this work she returned to Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism, in particular the accumulation of capital as expounded in volume 2 of Das Kapital. There she found a contradiction that had until then been unnoticed: Marx’s scheme seems to imply that the development of capitalism can be indefinite, though elsewhere he sees the contradictions of the system as bringing about increasingly violent economic crises that will inevitably sweep capitalism away. Luxemburg concluded that Marx’s scheme is oversimplified and assumes a universe made up entirely of capitalists and workers. If increases in productivity are taken into account, she asserted, balance between the two sectors becomes impossible; in order to keep expanding, capitalists must find new markets in noncapitalist spheres, either among peasants and artisans or in colonies and underdeveloped countries. Capitalism will collapse only when exploitation of the world outside it (the peasantry, colonies, and so on) has reached a limit. This conclusion has been the subject of passionate controversies.

The Austrians

The Austrian school came into being when Austrian socialists started publishing their works independently of the Germans; it can be dated from either 1904 (beginning of the Marx-Studien collection) or 1907 (publication of the magazine Der Kampf). The most important members of the school were Max Adler, Karl Renner, Rudolf Hilferding, Gustav Eckstein, Friedrich Adler, and Otto Bauer. The most eminent was Bauer, a brilliant theoretician whose Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1906; “The Nationalities Question and the Social Democracy”) was critically reviewed by Lenin. In this work he dealt with the problem of nationalities in the light of the experience of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He favoured the self-determination of peoples and emphasized the cultural elements in the concept of nationhood. Hilferding was finance minister of the German Republic after World War I in the Cabinets of the Social Democrats Gustav Stresemann (1923) and Hermann Müller (1928). He is known especially for his work Das Finanzkapital (1910), in which he maintained that capitalism had come under the control of banks and industrial monopolies. The growth of national competition and tariff barriers, he believed, had led to economic warfare abroad. Hilferding’s ideas strongly influenced Lenin, who analyzed them in Imperializm, kak noveyshy etap kapitalizma (1917; Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism).

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