Variously known as the “pope of Marxism” — or, in Lenin’s famous words, a “renegade” — Karl Kautsky remains one of the most controversial figures in post-Marx Marxism. A famous popularizer of Marxist ideas in the late-nineteenth-century Second International and German Social Democrats (SPD), after World War I, Kautsky became a sharp critic of the Bolshevik Revolution — and was himself damned by the main currents derived from Leninism. While Kautsky’s works have drawn renewed attention from historians in recent decades, these reappraisals are themselves highly diverse, spanning everything from the attempt to retrieve an early, revolutionary period, to positive portrayals of Kautskyan anti-Bolshevism.

Ben Lewis is a scholar of German social democracy whose Marxism Translated project aims to make classic German-language Marxist works available in English. He is also translator and editor of Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, issued as part of Brill’s Historical Materialism Book Series in 2019 and this week published in an affordable paperback edition by Haymarket. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about Kautsky’s understanding of socialist revolution, the specific emphasis he placed on democratic-republican demands, and the importance of combating commonplace misrepresentations of his ideas today.