Grundsätze und Forderungen der Sozialdemokratie, Erläuterungen Zum Erfurter Programm

by Karl Kautsky

Grundsätze und Forderungen der Sozialdemokratie, Erläuterungen Zum Erfurter Programm by Karl Kautsky. This book is a reproduction of the original book published in 1907 and may have some imperfections such as marks or hand-written notes.

66 pages, Paperback

Published June 19, 2016

About the author

Czech-German philosopher and politician. He was a leading theoretician of Marxism. He became the leading promulgator of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels.

Reviews

[Omar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently came across this remarkable fact: that one of the most widely read socialist writings in the pre-World War I era was a pamphlet co-authored by Karl Kautsky and Bruno Schoenlank entitled "The Principles and Demands of Social Democracy." At the time, it sold over a million copies (!) and was translated into several languages.

Of course, I put it on my stack as a must-read but to my great annoyance, an English translation was extremely difficult to track down.

The way the pamphlet is divided is very much like the Erfurt Program written 3 years before where Kautsky provides a theoretical Marxist background that describes Social Democracy's end goal and a co-author, this time Schoenlank instead of Eduard Bernstein, who details the list of practical demands that Social Democrats want now. It is impressive at how clearly this was written, which helps explain why it was popular with the working-class at the time. The demands are dated in certain parts (like replacing standing armies with a militia) and context specific, yet they sound very modern in others - abolition of the death penalty, democratization of the state (make elected institutions more representative), abolition of gender inequality, free access to legal counsel.

This needs to be reissued and reprinted, with a new translation and perhaps even updated for the 21st century.