The Materialist Conception of History

Kautsky argues that human history is a continuation of natural evolution, driven by adaptation to a changing environment. Man adapts not by changing his body but by creating artificial organs—tools and social institutions—that then become part of the environment, posing new problems and forcing further innovation in an endless dialectical process. Unlike earlier societies, capitalism transforms the conditions of the exploited so that social revolution becomes possible; once democracy is achieved, the growing exploited majority will eventually come to power and gradually introduce socialism.

Kautsky explicitly grounds his theory in Darwin rather than Hegel or Marx, and admits he came to historical change through evolutionary biology. He rejects Engels' concept of a 'dialectics of nature,' holding that dialectic applies only to human social development. Critics note that Kautsky substitutes technological determinism for Marx's emphasis on class struggle, and that his evolutionary, trouble-free conception of gradual human progress lacks the Hegelian discontinuities and revolutionary leaps central to Marx's method.

Kautsky identifies and describes the Asiatic Mode as a distinct historical formation, including Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, and especially Chinese society. He accepts the hydraulic hypothesis—that these societies were shaped by the need for large-scale water works—and delineates the causes of their stagnation and limitation. This was a significant theoretical move, as the Asiatic Mode was later largely suppressed in Stalinist historiography, and Kautsky's treatment anticipates later Marxist debates about non-European historical development.

Kautsky describes the Soviet Union as a reversion to a 'new despotism, a bureaucratic military despotism under the leadership of a dictatorship of intellectuals'. He accuses Bolshevism of holding that every antagonism among peoples and classes can only be fought out by bloody war. For Kautsky, in a democratic state 'there is no longer room for armed struggle as a way of carrying on class conflicts,' and even the mass strike 'hardly seems applicable'.

The book appeared during the relatively stable Stresemann era of the Weimar Republic, when Kautsky's evolutionary, gradualist conception of human progress seemed reasonable to many readers. It was translated into English in 1988 by Raymond Meyer and John H. Kautsky, the author's grandson, who abridged and annotated the two-volume German original. Reviewers have called it 'a synthesis, if not an encyclopaedia' of the worldview of the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International as a whole.

For three decades before World War I, Kautsky was the main authority on the intellectual heritage of Marx and Engels, and his interpretation of Marxism was the standard reference point for both allies and critics of Social Democracy. This book represents his final systematic synthesis of that worldview. It also forms the background against which Lenin and Trotsky developed their own ideas—Kautsky's critique of Bolshevism and his rejection of dialectical leaps directly provoked Lenin's polemics.