It is a wide ranging book where Kautsky's central thesis is that the mass of people had long engaged in class struggle against religious authorities as well as their rulers: "The lower classes, the peasants, the town proletarians and the class immediately above them, together with the burgesses and the lower nobility, groaned under the domination of Rome. Even before the days of Wycliffe and Huss they had shown themselves... to enter upon a struggle against the Papal Church".
Kautsky argues that these class struggles took place using the religious language of the time, and the German Reformation "supplied the catch-words and arguments for the combatants till the middle of the seventeenth century... so that to the superficial observer it might be seen that in all these struggle religion was the only object in question".
This is, of course, the classical Marxist tradition and Kautsky demonstrates this repeatedly over the struggles he covers. He frames these histories in terms of class struggle and the development of class antagonism, particular the emerging capitalist class.
The problem is that Kautsky tends to project contemporary class relations back into history. There is much, anachronistic discussion of proletarians, far beyond the miners and workers' who would come to form the original working class. At time Kautsky hides this by talking of "proletarian elements" but its not particularly clear that he acknowledges the differences. That said Kautsky does help the reader understand how the struggle "from below" is also in the context of the struggles between groups within the ruling class. It is this element that I found particularly helpful.
Much of the book looks at the development of "Communist" ideas. Today the word is tainted by what Stalin did to the Russian Revolution, but in Kautsky's time it would have been much clearer what he meant. Kautsky was exploring how early religious groups in particular developed ideas of Communal living, Community of goods, common ownership and so on. A long section deals with Münzer and the radical wing of the German Peasant War, Münzer famously envisaged a society free of class oppression. It is why Luther attacked Münzer so forcibly:
If he says that God and His Spirit have sent him like the Apostles, then make him prove it with signs and wonders; but forbid his preaching, for when God would change the natural order of things, He signifies it by all manner of miracles.
But it is in the section on Munster and the anabaptists that Kautsky's framework begins to fail him. In 1534, long after the Peasant War had been destroyed, the anabaptist movement take control of Munster and reorganise society in the face of the Catholic Church and their rulers along "Communistic" lines. Kautsky defends the anabaptists from their critics, arguing that the salacious lies and gossip are accusations designed to justify the violent repression. Kautsky's decent account of the rise and fall of anabaptist Munster is not the problem, nor in fact is his demolition of the slander directed against the anabaptists (in particular the accusations of Common ownership of wives etc). He argues instead that this was a practice that arose out of the reality of Munster under siege and was an economic relationship - not a sexual one. Kautsky explores how the anabaptist thinkers, such as Rothmann, drew such ideas from their Biblical readings. But it doesn't really work - Kautsky doesn't explore enough the different roles of women and men within Reformation society and how this affected reality on the ground. A far more believable summary comes from James Stayer's book on The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods, where he argues:
The reality of community of goods in Münster was nothing like the egalitarian transformation of patterns of life and work achieved by the Hutterites. Although Münsterite polygamy reflected the broad interest among Reformation radicals in a regenerate sexuality, according to I Corinthians 7:29, it amounted in practice to nothing more than the regulating of the female majority according to the prescriptions of biblical misogyny. There was a lot of desperate play-acting in Münster from the actor-king downward. These people must have recognized with one side of their minds... that they were destined to violent death... In the meantime the hegemony of notables over commoners and of men over women continued.
Kautsky essential portrays Münster as a early version of the Paris Commune with similar ideals and experiences. Yet the reality is very different. With his vigorous defence of anabaptist Münster against its reactionary critics he fails to critically examine his heroes. The inevitable defeat of the anabaptists then becomes, for Kautsky a crisis on the scale of the defeat of modern day workers' movements:
Anabaptism, the proletarian cause, nay, the collective democracy in the German Empire, lay helpless in the dust; and outside of Germany also the fighting party of the Baptist order had lost all support.
In his attempt to attack contemporary critics of the anabaptists who used Münster as a way to attack modern socialists, Kautsky ends up making the same mistake as them.
A careful reader will pick up traces of Kautsky's later ambivalence over the role of the state in society, but there is no need to explore that here. Lenin, after all, did it far better.
Sadly Kautsky's book doesn't stand the test of time. It is rather dull, though it is certainly possible that is the fault of a bad translation, coming alive only when Kautsky is celebrating the achievements of these movements. But there are more useful, modern studies of similar periods and Kautsky's Marxism offers little insight beyond the superficial.
Related Reviews
Kautsky - The Agrarian Question - Volume 1
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
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