Kautsky's Fable

From Ultra-Imperialism and Back Again

Karl Kautsky with the Georgian Social Democrats, 1920

Karl Kautsky’s “Ultra-Imperialism” may be the worst-timed article ever written. In the September 1914 issue of his party’s theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit, the German Social Democratic Party’s chief theorist—“the Pope of Marxism”—argued that a massive war was not the necessary outcome of competition between the great powers. Rather, the major developed economies, dominated by financial capital, might give up protection of their national monopolies and cooperate peacefully for the more thorough exploitation of the rest of the world. They might form a “federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.” Imperialism would be replaced with the titular “ultra-imperialism,” where that prefix should be understood as a move beyond, rather than an intensification, of the previous process. This would be accomplished through the “translation of cartellization into foreign policy,” in other words, the collusion of the principal industrialized economies through a set of international agreements and institutions.

The article was ready to go in the early summer of 1914, but the outbreak of World War I in July appeared to totally falsify its premise. Kautsky was forced to make revisions that accounted for the arrival of the long-prophesied intra-imperialist war. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin was brutal in his reply to Kautsky: his famed pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism made savage fun of Kautsky’s pacifist hopes. Lenin’s belief that war was the necessary outcome of the imperialist phase of capitalism seemed to be borne out by the facts. To Lenin, Kautsky’s was no longer even a real Marxist, but a bourgeois, “opportunist” social democrat who’d cooked up a “silly little fable” about world peace.

Still, I think Kautsky’s predictions are worth revisiting. Kautsky wrote, “All the consequences ripening in the womb of the present World War have not yet seen the light. Its outcome may still be that the imperialist tendencies and the arms race accelerate at first – in which case, the subsequent peace will be no more than a short armistice.” It’s certainly possible to read this as a prescient understanding of the interwar period and the return to conflict in less than 30 years, with the League of Nations as a failed gesture towards ultra-imperialism. Kautsky thought this return to imperialist conflict would be because the ideological effects of nationalism had not run their course, but that,

From the purely economic standpoint, however, there is nothing further to prevent this violent explosion finally replacing imperialism by a holy alliance of the imperialists. The longer the War lasts, the more it exhausts all the participants and makes them recoil from an early repetition of armed conflict, the nearer we come to this last solution, however unlikely it may seem at the moment.

Again, Kautsky might have been a little ahead of his time, instead of woefully behind it: One could see the post-war settlement, with the creation of institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as the practical realization of this exhaustion with total war. Of course, the Cold War was not peaceful or cooperative—there were still major conflicting blocs that almost came to blows and fought it out in bloody proxy battles. Another candidate for an “ultra-imperialist” situation was the post-Cold War hope for a unipolar world underpinned by globalization, economic agreements and organizations like the WTO and NAFTA, and the unrivaled military dominance of the United States and its allies. This proved to be short-lived: the end of history ended, refractory ethnic conflicts simmered and exploded, “globalism” was rejected at the ballot box in many Western countries, and major armed confrontation returned in the form of revanchist campaigns, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

According to Lenin, Kautsky was naive to think that imperialism—the ruthless inter-state competition that courted war—was merely a policy choice of the bourgeoisie and not an intrinsic part of capitalist development, which always tended towards conflict and crisis. Lenin thought that any apparent alliance between the imperialist powers was nothing but a temporary truce: “[T]he deeper causes of conflict are not removed by these alliances, they are merely postponed.” As old and “permanent” alliances are shredded, perhaps Vladimir Ilyich was onto something in the long run. On the other hand, Kautsky seems to be right that there’s nothing in the economic substructure that necessitates imperialist conflict: it looks like an ideological program adopted over the fervent objections of many capitalists who liked the old way of doing things just fine. Perhaps a deeper analysis would reveal something structural in the economic relationship between China and the United States that has pushed the world back to an imperialist phase.

Leninists believed that war would beget revolution: the imperialist Götterdamerung would be the birthpangs of international socialism. “Leninism is Marxism for the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution,” as Stalin would put it. Kautskyites—and their descendants who may not even know his name—hoped that a burgeoning socialism would gradually and peacefully shed the ultra-imperialist integument. The reactionary right’s seemingly paranoid and delusional suspicion that there’s something communistic or socialistic lurking in financial capitalist “globalism” comes from a strange intuition about one strategy of Kautskyite social democracy: a picture of increasing international cooperation and peace that eventually drops even market competition for rational coordination and social planning. Lenin’s notion of inevitable, violent contradiction is much closer in spirit to the nationalist right’s belief in irrepressible, zero-sum conflict between races and peoples, although he believed it was not a natural feature of humanity but something that would be overcome through revolution. Anything’s possible, I suppose, but after the 20th century, very few believe in that possibility anymore. I, for one, still prefer Kautsky’s fable to a world of treasons, stratagems, and spoils. Alas.