During his lifetime, Karl Kautsky was such an influential theorist he was called the “Pope of Marxism” — but he was also famously branded “the renegade Kautsky” by Lenin for his betrayals of revolutionary socialism. In recent years there have been efforts to revive Kautskyism in order to justify reformism and electoralism. This approach is as wrong as it always was: Kautskyism remains a renegade socialism that is fundamentally opposed to revolution.
There are two ideological traps that prove a problem for many Marxists: eclecticism, the habit of grabbing ideas from all over the place, which either dilutes Marxism or renders it meaningless; and dogmatism, the stubborn rejection of any new ideas at all. Understanding how society and history work dialectically is crucial to navigating through these twin pitfalls and developing a sound approach to Marxism.
Contrary to arguments put forward by the editors of Spectre journal, revolutionaries need to organize now instead of waiting for the spontaneous emergence of a vanguard of the working class. Marxists need to integrate with the vanguard as it develops and influence it in a revolutionary direction from the beginning. As the history of revolution has shown again and again, if we wait until the vanguard has grown to a mass scale it will be too late.
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