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Kautsky, Karl
Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) was the leading theoretician of Marxism from Friedrich Engels’s death in 1895 to the outbreak of World War I. His close association with Engels and passing acquaintance with Karl Marx gave his work the stamp of legitimacy. More importantly, his early work about Marx’s theories and interpretation of history—The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (1887)—spread the word throughout the world, was translated into scores of languages, and was credited by both Lenin and Mao, among many others, with introducing them to Marxism. But above all else, his prominence derived from his intimate association with the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, SPD), for decades the world’s largest avowedly Marxian worker party. He was a major architect of the SPD’s Erfurt program ...
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