Karl Kautsky

Karl Kautsky was an Austrian-born Marxist theorist, for decades the leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International, often called the Pope of Marxism. Born in Prague, he founded the journal Die Neue Zeit in 1883 and edited it for 35 years, and wrote the theoretical section of the SPD's 1891 Erfurt Program. He defended orthodox Marxism against Eduard Bernstein's revisionism and opposed the revolutionary spontaneity of Rosa Luxemburg. Opposing the war, he co-founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1917, and he denounced the October Revolution as a premature coup. He fled to Amsterdam after the 1938 Anschluss and died there.