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This chapter reconstructs a theory of socialist republicanism from the writings of Karl Kautsky. Comparing it with the theories of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the SPD leadership, I argue that during the revolution Kautsky proposed an innovative socialist programme that called for the radical transformation of the state and society. The dominance of the ‘National Assembly versus Council Republic’ ideological framework of the revolution has obscured Kautsky’s ‘centrist’ third option. Kautsky argued for the presence of workers’ councils alongside a parliamentary system and understood democracy and socialism as the twin goals of a socialist revolution. He sought to combine the benefits of political democracy and civil rights for minorities with the gradual socialization of the economy. Drawing from overlooked and untranslated (or newly translated) texts written during the early days of the German Revolution, this interpretation challenges the dominant view of Kautsky as a bourgeois reformist who advocated political quietism during the revolution. It theorizes an important socialist action programme that has been neglected within the scholarly literature.

This chapter analyzes the socialist thought of Karl Kautsky. Kautsky was an intellectual activist who brought Marx's thought to the attention of millions and whose political influence profoundly stamped the nascent social democratic movement. His “orthodox” interpretation of Marx mirrored a unique historical situation in which the working class was indeed leading “the people” in a struggle for republican democracy and economic justice. However, orthodox Marxism eventually lost its coherence. Democracy, socialism reform and revolution, economics and politics, nationalism and internationalism increasingly appeared mutually exclusive. The connection Kautsky sought to create between them collapsed, as if Eduard Bernstein appropriated one part of Kautsky's worldview for his theory of social reform while Lenin embraced the other for his doctrine of political revolution. By the time Kautsky died in 1938 at the age of eighty-four, the optimistic assumptions of his theory had been invalidated by the Nazi triumph.

The political and social significance of the rise of ‘trusts’ and ‘cartels’ is evaluated, with the suggestion that capitalist ‘nouveau riche’ tended to meld with traditional landed and political elites into an ‘oligarchy’. The development of ‘militarism’ is principally attributed to the technical requirements of modern armaments where land-borders are relatively insecure. Traditional liberalism, suspicious of augmented state-power, was increasingly untenable in this environment – but liberalism evolved rather than simply collapsing. Nonetheless, radical democratic liberalism was clearly weakened, and into the space it vacated stepped a socialist workers’ movement in many countries. Socialists in the ‘Second International’, such as Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Rosa Luxemburg, argued whether the labour movement had taken up the democratic cause abandoned by the bourgeoisie: but it was not clear, in fact, whether socialists had any better idea about how to force responsible constitutionalism onto semi-absolutist executive states.

This chapter argues that council theorists considered it important to shift the balance of power between social classes in order to achieve political transformation. It theorizes differences between those who advocated ‘organization’ (Kautsky) versus those who advocated ‘mobilization’ (Luxemburg, Pannekoek) as the most effective method of developing the independent power of the working class. It claims Karl Kautsky advocated a strategy of developing power through building worker-led organizations such as the party, unions, and the press. His strategy involved the gradual growth of power through organization-building, parliamentary activity, and developing workers’ consciousness within existing organizations. Underlying this strategy of organization lay a conception of power as something that could be incrementally developed and stored through sound organizing, discipline, and patience. In contrast, Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek considered that power could only be developed through political struggle and direct clashes with the ruling class. They argued that previously unorganized workers could be mobilized through the escalating dynamics of political struggle and that consciousness-raising was best conducted in militant action rather than administrative party activities. These two fundamentally different analyses of how workers should develop their power shed light on different aspects of the council movements’ political struggle.

This chapter treats the Bolshevik revolution and first years of the Soviet regime as the final chapter of the émigré saga. It follows the alumni of the colonies as they returned to the colonies after the February 1917 revolution and examines how their experiences abroad influenced their later actions. The chapter shows how the Bolsheviks used the exile tradition of living the revolution and the close relationships they had formed abroad to consolidate their power. At the same time, it argues that longstanding antipathies imported from Europe intensified revolutionary violence, and that rival interpretations of what it meant to live the revolution advanced by other parties posed persistent challenges to Bolshevik hegemony.

It has been an article of faith in Mandelstam studies that he conceived an early antagonism for Soviet life and became an outcast. This chapter surveys the political language of journalism and poetry from 1918 until the collision with Stalin in 1934. Combining literary analysis, biography, and a forensic survey of his publishing record, it analyses his ideological positions. The profile of the writer in this revisionist account is of commitment to cultural revolution and professional involvement. In the late 1920s as the Proletarian movement and class warfare became entrenched, he sought to establish his credentials as a writer ‘made’ by the revolution, courting controversy at the end of New Economic Policy with views on state-sponsored translation as a tool of progress. His defence of expertise as the right means to enlighten cut across political trends, leading to a clash with fellow writers and Stalin.

Dick Geary, in a wide-ranging essay, contrasts the lives of the British and German working classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He poses the notion that there were marked differences between the two lifestyles. Britain emerges as a more liberal society in which in religion, societies and leisure brought the working classes and the middle classes came close together. The standard of living of the British working class was higher than the German, their housing provision better – encouraging domesticity – and their absorption of the growing leisure industry more marked. In contrast the German state was far more interventionist and presided over the workers living in seriously overcrowded tenement in a low wage economy in which consumption taxes, in the absence of an effective income tax, which bore deeply upon them. In this climate the German Social Democratic Party throve and produced its own range of independent, rather than commercially-run, leisure activities. Although seriously challenged by the Catholic Church and employers, the SDP became much more class conscious than their class status and political concerns, as driven from a home life their aired their grievances in the pubs, which Karl Kautsky referred to as ‘the solitary bulwark of proletarian freedom’. In the end Dick Geary contrasts that he difference a class-conscious tension in Germany against the more liberal, and less class-conscious culture of Britain.