14 Facts About Karl Kautsky

Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theorist.

Karl Kautsky was the most important socialist theorist during the years of the Second International.

The family moved to Vienna when Karl Kautsky was the age of seven.

Karl Kautsky studied history, philosophy and economics at the University of Vienna from 1874, and became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria in 1875.

In 1883, Karl Kautsky founded the monthly Die Neue Zeit in Stuttgart, which became a weekly in 1890.

Karl Kautsky edited the magazine until September 1917: this gave him a steady income and allowed him to propagate Marxism.

When Bernstein attacked the traditional Marxist position of the necessity for revolution in the late 1890s, Karl Kautsky denounced him, arguing that Bernstein's emphasis on the ethical foundations of Socialism opened the road to a call for an alliance with the "progressive" bourgeoisie and a non-class approach.

Karl Kautsky claimed that Germany was waging a defensive war against the threat of Czarist Russia.

Karl Kautsky visited Georgia in 1920 and wrote a book on the Democratic Republic of Georgia that at that moment was still independent of Bolshevist Russia.

Karl Kautsky assisted in the creation of the party program adopted in Heidelberg by the German Social Democratic Party.

Karl Kautsky lived in Berlin-Friedenau for many years; his wife, Luise Kautsky, became a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg, who lived in Friedenau.

Karl Kautsky saw the Bolsheviks as a conspiratorial organization that had gained power by a coup and initiated revolutionary changes for which there was no economic rationale in Russia.

Karl Kautsky's son, Benedikt Kautsky, spent seven years in concentration camps; his wife, Luise Kautsky, was murdered in Auschwitz.

Karl Kautsky is notable for, in addition to his anti-Bolshevik polemics, his editing and publication of Marx's Capital, Volume IV.