The Reseach On Kautsky’s Materialist Conception Of History

The present paper aims to divide the thinking process of Kautsky into three stages that is pre-Marxism period,orthodoxy Marxism period and non-orthodoxy Marxism period. During the pre-Marxism, in the aspect of political thought, Kautsky has undergone radical nationalism in Czech to vague socialism and in the scientific thought, Kautsky was deeply influenced by Darwinism, while Marxism was dismissed by Kautsky. In 1980, through the contacts with Bernstein and Engels, Kautsky gradually converted from the romantic, natural scientific socialism into Marxism. By the eve of the first World War, Kautsky was challenged by both the Right and the Left. From the outbreak of the first World War to the death of Kautsky in 1938, due to Kaustky take a neutral attitude on war and support Democratic Socialism, he was isolated in the SPD. Among the second international theorists,no one but Kautsky, whose status and influence had experienced tremendous changes. It is therefore demanded that kautsky’s theory should be studied relating to the different stages which he had undergone.Although Kaustky’s theory had experienced tremendous change, in his later year, Kautsky still summed up his life’s work with materialist history,and regard it as the guide of theory and practice. In Kautsky’s respect, materialist history was in essence a scientific view of history, in other word,it was a historic science. As a result, kautsky’s routes of expositon of Marxism contained human nature and human society as the object of study, of which the former was considered as the precondition of the study of materialist history, while the study approach of the latter included many factors,such as the mode of production, geography, ethnic characteristics and other specific factors. In the study of human society, Kautsky discussed it from the three aspects of class, state, social revolution and the proletarian movement. On the origin of class and country, Kautsky objected against Engels’s "naive theory of violence" internal hypothesis, and insisted that the class and country originated from the wars between tribes. the demise of classes and class antagonisms leads not to the disappearance of the state,rather the change of the function of the state. Kautsky called the new community after the demise of the class the worker’s state. As for the socialist movement, kautsky didn’t denied violent revolution, but he laid more stress on parliamentary democracy,and hope that the power could be seized through the parliamentary democracy.Kautsky’s Marxism received many criticism from other theoreticians of the second international,the early western Marxism and Lenin. The debates within the second international revolved round four questions such as the nature of capitalist democratic system, the mass strike, imperialist wars and whether socialist is ethical or scientifical. The critique of the early western Marxism on kautsky concerned on the level of philosophy. They censured kautsky for neglecting the relationship between Marxism and Hegelian, which in turn leaded to philosophy was awfully dismissed and Marxism was reduced to be scientific and economic determimism. In lenin’s respect, the betray of the former "tutor" was forgetting violent revolution and distorting the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And lenin assert that kautsky’s theory carried some eclecticism and sophistry.At last, this present paper discusses the theoretical contributions and limitations of kautsky’s Marxism as a whole. Considering theoretical contributions, there are three respects:the first, we can read the critique on the dimension of social anthropology from kautsky’s materialism. The second, kautsky had made contributions on the defence and elaboration of Marxist ethics. The third, the elaboration of the Marxist classical description by kautsky means an attempt to a new exploration of the development of Marxism. Considering the limitations, there are two respects. For one thing, kautsky’s Marxism carried positivism and eclecticism; for another thing, because kautsky didn’t understand the philosopy revolution of Marx, his materialism was still vulgar materialism,and his dialect was on the level of historism and embryology. The conclusion enhances the theme of the present paper, which discusses the key problems of kautsky among scholars, such as whether kautsky is a Darwinism and economic determinism or not, aiming to more accurately understand the features of kautsky’s theory,and to point the way for further study.