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The Road to Power: Political Reflections on Growing into the Revolution
The Road to Power Political Reflections on Growing into the Revolution Author:Karl Kautsky, John H. Kautsky, Raymond Meyer Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) was the leading theorist, interpreter, and popularizer of Marxism in the generation after Marx and Engels and the most authoritative champion of "orthodox" Marxism in the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International in the period of the Wilhelmine empire. As such, he fought in numerous publications both E... more »duard Bernstein's revisionism and Rosa Luxemburg's radicalism. As the principal representative of democratic Marxism, he bitterly opposed Lenin's communism in the last two decades of his life. Karl Kautsky's ROAD TO POWER was a highly controversial political pamphlet when it appeared in imperial Germany in 1909 and is therefore an important document for an understanding of the history of the Wilhelmine empire and especially of the German Social Democratic Party and Kautsky's role in it. It was Kautsky's last major attack on the Revisionists' hope for a gradual "growth into socialism" without any drastic changes in the political order. Instead, Kautsky hoped for and predicted a political revolution as the achievement of parliamentary democracy and of working-class power through a parliamentary majority. The present edition contains an excellent new translation of Kautsky's text; a scholarly introduction by the editor, political scientist John H. Kautsky; the author's prefaces to three German editions; and, in an appendix, two dozen letters concerning Kautsky's conflict with the Executive Committee of the Social Democratic Party regarding the publication of THE ROAD TO POWER.« less