Recent sympathetic re-readings of Lenin run the risk of divorcing or unnecessarily distancing his project from that of Marx and Engels. One of the many claims in Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done in Context is that "Marx as incarnated by European Social Democracy and the German SPD in particular" especially its theoretical leader Karl Kautsky, was the "inspiration" for the Bolshevik leader's politics. A close reading of Marx and Engels on the Russian question as well as (...) Lenin up to and including What Is to Be Done disputes this argument, a variant on a long-held assumption, and the more general claim about the supposed distance between their projects. Marx and Engels accurately anticipated the Russian Revolution and provided the young Lenin with the necessary tools for applying their program to its reality. Rather than Kautsky and the German party, it was their perspective and program that he drew upon to understand and respond to developments, not only in Russia but in Germany as well. This enabled Lenin to appreciate not only the strengths of German Social Democracy—Lih's focus—but also its weaknesses. (shrink)

The traditional dismissive characterization of Karl Kautsky's Marxism as a form of mechanical or even Darwinian evolutionism is a caricature that obscures the very real and important contribution he made to historical materialism in the early years of the last century. Kautsky's historical studies of both the early Church and Reformation "communism," as well as his attempts to analyze the contemporary Russian and American social formations, show that, while Kautsky's Marxism suffered from consistent political weaknesses, his theory of history, especially (...) as it was articulated in the years before 1910, was sophisticated and powerful. While the power of Kautsky's Marxism became muted after this period, the weaknesses of his later works should not be allowed to obscure the insights contained within his earlier work; insights that informed some of the best work of the next generation of Marxists. (shrink)