Karl Kautsky

Born in Prague in 1854, Kautsky became a Marxist in exile in Zurich during the early 1880s and founded the journal Die Neue Zeit in 1883, editing it for 35 years. Living in London from 1885 to 1890, he grew close to Engels and emerged as the chief theorist of Germany's Social Democratic Party, authoring the theoretical section of the 1891 Erfurt Program. His commentary, The Class Struggle, became the most widely circulated primer on Marxist thought. He preached an evolutionary socialism: organise the workers, win reforms through parliamentary democracy, wait for material conditions to ripen - a centrist line that put him at odds with both Bernstein's revisionism and Luxemburg's spontaneity. When the SPD backed Germany's war effort in 1914, his authority collapsed. He opposed the war, co-founded the breakaway Independent Social Democratic Party in 1917, and after 1917 became one of the Bolsheviks' sharpest critics, calling the October Revolution a premature coup that had installed a new dictatorship. He rejoined the SPD in 1922 but spent his final years in the margins, fleeing to Amsterdam after the 1938 Anschluss and dying there the same year - denounced by Leni