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Karl Kautsky

Social Democracy versus Communism

(Various Dates)

Translated: David Shub and Joseph Shaplen.

Published: Rand School Press, 1946.

Transcribed: Ted Crawford for marxists.org, September, 2002.

Transcriber’s Note

We are told by Professor John Kautsky that Social Democracy versus Communism is a strange book, for it combines, in odd ways, paragraphs or pages from a number of articles Kautsky had written in the early 1930s without ever indicating the sources which are mostly Die Gesellschaft of Berlin and Der Kampf of Vienna. These two Social Democratic Party journals were closed down by Hitler in 1933 and Dollfuss in 1934 respectively. Professor Kautsky has the full details of these confusing sources. The introduction by Hook in the 1946 publication is incorrect when he says they were “penned in exile, shortly before his death”, for Kautsky was living in Vienna then, his home since 1924, and did not die till 1938. Social Democracy versus Communism was reprinted by the Hyperion Press in Westport, Connecticut, in 1979 with precisely the same text and same introduction by Sidney Hook, the latter piece not being included here.



1. The Origin of Socialism



2. Marxism and the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”



3. The Beginning of Bolshevism



4. Lenin and the Russian Revolution of 1917



5. The Communist International



6. Is Soviet Russia a Socialist State?



7. Communism, Social Democracy

and the Rise of Nazism in Germany



8. Socialism and Democracy



9. The Road to Power



10. The “United Front”

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Last updated on 27.1.2004