Source: The Class Struggle, November-December, 1917. Vol. I, No. 4.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for the Marxists Internet Archive, October, 2022
On October 1st Karl Kautsky ceased to be editor of the Neue Zeit, having been ousted from his position by Messrs. Scheidemann & Co.
To many this may seem too small a matter for notice at a time when our entire civilization is being shaken to its foundations. To those, however, who are familiar with the history of the International Socialist Movement, and the part which Kautsky and the Neue Zeit have played in it for a generation, this incident will seem like the visible marking point of the close of an epoch of Socialist history. For the Neue Zeit, of which Kautsky was the founder and guiding spirit for thirty-five years, was not a mere magazine: It was an institution— an international Socialist University. Many a man who has since become prominent in the international Socialist movement has received his education at that University, and its graduates are the leaders of thought wherever there are thinking Socialists. The present writer is proud of the fact that he was both a student as well as a teacher at that remarkable institution of learning.
The Neue Zeit was founded in the fall of 1882, when the Bismarck anti-Socialist laws were in full operation and the German Socialist movement at its lowest ebb. But its young founder— Kautsky was then a young man of twenty-eight— succeeded in enlisting the co-operation of the best talent of the Marxian wing of the International Socialist Movement, and when the German Socialist movement revived again and the Marxian wing became the dominant element of the revived International, the Neue Zeit became the scientific organ of the International Socialist Movement. The leading Socialist thinkers of the world and the most active workers of the international movement co-operated to make its position unique not only in the field of Socialist journalism, but in the field of journalism generally. We know of no publication which has reached so high a level of scientific attainment, while being also the organ of expression of a world-wide practical movement.
Of the first generation of Marxian Socialists who contributed to its pages we may mention Frederick Engels, August Bebel, and Paul Lafargue. Of the next generation: Kautsky himself, who soon came to be recognized as the leading Marxian scholar the world over; then George Plechanoff, Franz Mehring, Edward Bernstein, Belfort Bax. Then came the third generation— a host of young scholars and active workers in the movement scattered throughout the civilized world, but all united by the bands of the great intellectual and practical movement of which they were a part and of the unity of which the Neue Zeit was the best expression.
Such was the Neue Zeit under Kautsky's editorship— and while the unity of the movement lasted.
But the unity of the movement is gone— and so is the Neue Zeit. For the Neue Zeit under the new management, under the management of Scheidemann & Co. and as the expression of the Scheidemannized part of the Socialist movement cannot be considered as a continuation of the Neue Zeit that we knew and loved so well. The Neue Zeit is dead, along with the Second International of which it was the best expression.
There is a time to weep.
But more even than for weeping this is a time for thinking. For in fruitful thought there lies the seeds of the rehabilitation of the movement, of the breakdown wherof the demise of the old Neue Zeit is a visible sign. And we cannot think of a more fitting way of paying tribute to Kautsky and his work in the Neue Zeit as well as doing something towards the rehabilitation of the movement of which the Neue Zeit under Kautsky has served so well than placing before our readers an important thought expressed by Kautsky in the last article which he wrote for the Neue Zeit.
Since the German militarists, junkers and imperialists have started out to “free” oppressed nationalities, many Socialists seem to have lost their bearings and began clamoring for the diverse German-made “freedoms.” Foremost among these are the demands for an “Independent Poland” and an “Independent Finland” for which a certain class of “Socialists” in Germany and in this country have been clamoring vociferously. Some of them add an “Independent Ukraine.”
Before the war such demands, when not instigated by agents of some rival government, were usually put forward by extreme nationalists or nationalistic Socialists. The revolutionary Socialists everywhere opposed them. So in Poland, for instance: The demand for an independent Poland was made, whenever it was made, by the extreme section of Polish nationalists and occasionally by some nationalistic Socialists of the most opportunistic type. The revolutionary Socialists, the Socialists who followed Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionary leaders of the proletariat always opposed this demand, being convinced that the interests of the Polish working-class lay not in separation from the Russian proletariat— but in forming with it a democratic federal Russian Republic.
When the War came to confound the tongues of men, our tongues and thoughts stand in very great danger of being confounded in this particular— and of our being carried off our feet by the vociferations of Messrs. Scheidemann & Co. and their following in Germany and elsewhere.
It is therefore refreshing to see Kautsky standing by the true Socialist principles, and braving the terrors of the German Government, as well as of Scheidemann & Co. in order to proclaim them to the German proletariat and to the proletariat of the world.
In the course of an article which appeared in the issue of the Neue Zeit dated September 14, 1917, Kautsky says that the question of the independence of nationalities must be viewed by Socialists from the point of view of the interests of democratic progress the world over, and then he proceeds:
“Such considerations may under certain circumstances demand imperatively that a great revolutionary state be held together against its reactionary enemies. . . . If the Finns and Ukrainians now want to get away from the Russian state, it is merely an after-effect of the policies of Zarism which drove them into opposition to Russia and of a lack of faith on their part in the staying qualities of the Russian Revolution. But they ought to know that their hopes of national independence are intimately bound up with the Russian Revolution— that the only way in which they can secure their independence is by their standing by Russia and not by their separating from it, thereby weakening it.”
It would be interesting to find out how much the expression of these un-Scheidemann views have contributed towards Kautsky's separation from the Neue Zeit, which not only weakened but destroyed that once justly famous international Socialist institution.
B.
Last updated on 13 October 2022