Marxism Translated

Clara Zetkin, 'Our Day': The First International Women's Day, March 19 1911

'It is certainly firmly established in history that the decisive victories for the rights of women in bourgeois class society can only be achieved by the armies of the one undivided revolutionary working class. But the other fact that is no less firmly established is that working women themselves must remain the driving force of the fight for this right. For women’s initiative, for the great force of collective action! We owe it to this knowledge that the First International Socialist Women’s Day for female suffrage has become a day of glory for social democracy, a day of glory for proletarian women and socialist women, a political event. It rises up as a landmark that shows us the path on which we advance from stage to stage into the land where socialism, the liberator of humanity, will break the last shackles that society has imposed on women.'

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Kautsky: 'How this wealth was acquired is not our concern here, but it should be noted in passing that it is nothing but a philistine fable to claim that the wealth through which individuals have risen and continue to rise above the masses comes from thrift. Anyone who reads history will find that the first great fortunes were made through robbery, plunder, theft, fraud, and extortion, not through the savings that their owners set aside from the proceeds of their own labour.'

Coming this week! Kautsky on technology (1892):

Once the division of labour in an industry had developed to such an extent that the manufacture of an object was broken down into a series of perfectly simple operations, science took hold of this area of production and transferred the simplified operations of the worker to an inanimate one – the machine. This marked the beginning of a significant expansion in the productivity of human labour. Thanks to the machine, the worker who supervises it now does the work of several labourers, whose movements are performed by the machine; this multiplies number of his working limbs and the pace of their activity. And economic development is moving towards making machines ever more powerful, to assigning more and more tasks to each of them, to an ever greater increase in their speed: so it is that the machine not only doubles and triples labour productivity, but increases it ten times over - and not infrequently a hundred times over.

This means that many more goods can now be produced with the same amount of labour, or the same amount of goods can be acquired with much less work than before.

You might think that such an outcome would be met with universal acclaim, that it would result in dazzling prosperity and boost leisure time for all. But a look at today’s society shows how far we are from such a state of affairs; indeed, developments show no inclination whatsoever of moving closer to it. Things are actually going in the opposite direction. What is behind this peculiar phenomenon?

It is a consequence of the fact that in our society commodity production prevails.

Hello all,

By popular demand, we now turn our attention to Karl Kautsky's famous extended commentary on the theoretical section of Erfurt Programme of 1891. First published as 'Das Erfurter Programm' in 1892, various abridged translations and versions of this text have made their way into English under the title of 'The Class Struggle'. Despite Kautsky's marginalisation in bourgeois and far-left historiography, which I explore in detail in my book 'Karl Kautsky on Republicanism', the text is an excellent introduction to the world of Second International Marxism and an indispensable point of reference those joining the workers' movement who want to become acquainted with the fundamentals of Marxism more generally. It is no coincidence that other classic primers of revolutionary politics, such as Preobrazhensky and Bukharin's 'The ABC of Communism' (1920), draw inspiration from - and refer extensively to - Kautsky's foundational text.

Reconstructing and translating this work in its entirety in English for the first time will be no easy task, as it will involve tracking down the various iterations of it in German, as well as closely comparing them to the existing translations. It will also require getting hold of the various Prefaces to the editions, as they are reflections of how the author continued to view the text, especially in light of its various critics within the socialist movement and without. What is more, this undertaking cannot be separated from other similar texts by Kautsky on the fundamentals of socialist strategy, such as his 'Anti-Bernstein', which we translated on this page in 2025, and which will appear in book form soon.

In this and my other endeavours, dear readers, I am also dependent upon you: not just in terms of your continued financial support in a period of academic unemployment hell, but also for any information you might have on the fate of this text in various editions and translations in different languages. If there is anything you have come across in your reading on the subject then please make sure to drop me a line. And share with anybody who might be interested!

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Recent Translations on Marxism Translated:

Clara Zetkin, 'Marriage and Sexual Morality'
Karl Kautsky, 'Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Programme. An Anti-Critique'
Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht on the Franco-Prussian War
Karski, 'What is Bolshevism?'

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Marxism Translated | Patreon first-time translations and analysis of German-language Marxism

'There is no such thing as impartial research on the part of a historian who considers it his duty to brand tyrants with moral indignation and to surround the martyrs of freedom in a halo of glory.

Even a thinker as brilliant as [Henry Thomas] Buckle ultimately failed because of this peculiar tendency of his party. Although he recognised full well that the task of the science of history was to determine the causes of human development and explain the laws according to which it takes place, the party line was too powerful in him for him to be able to maintain an unclouded historical view. He was therefore just as incapable of understanding Antiquity and the Middle Ages as his party comrades were. Although he grasped the modern era from the English Revolution onwards quite correctly, he was unable to understand its development fully, as its roots, the preceding centuries and millennia, remained foreign territory to him. In essence, Buckle’s work is thus little more than a collection of witty and stimulating aphorisms, which in their overall effect amount to a condemnation of the ‘spirit of paternalism’ and a homage to laissez-faire, laissez-aller. This is too much of an unstable basis on which to build a new historical science.'

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Kautsky continues his thoughts on Bernstein and the 'ultimate goal' of the SPD's programme. You can access this weekly material from just 2 GBP/month on Patreon!

"And the intelligentsia? Certainly, for the most part, it has no interest in exploiting wage labour; it partly counts itself among the ranks of the exploited. But weak in numbers, it is even weaker in strength. It is the social class least suited to energetic class struggle, and however much it may hate the capitalist regime in its heart, it remains subservient to it. Certainly, Social Democracy needs intellectuals, many intellectuals, but it can only welcome into its ranks those who are determined to burn all bridges with, and ruthlessly take up the fight against, bourgeois society. Those who cannot or will not do so should stay away from the proletarian movement. Ultimately, either it will disappoint them, or they will betray it."

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Rosa Luxemburg in an article written for the anti-war youth newspaper 'Freie Jugend' (1916):

"Human history abounds with heroic sagas, with the great deeds of individuals; it echoes with the glory of wise kings, bold generals, daring explorers, ingenious inventors, and heroic liberators. But all these colourful and beautiful activities of individuals are, as it were, only the outward facing, flowery dress of human history.

At first glance, all good and evil, the entirety of happiness and misery among peoples, is the work of individual rulers or great men. In reality, it is the peoples themselves, the nameless masses, who create their own destiny, their happiness and their woe. According to Greek legend, Prometheus, a demigod, once stole fire from heaven in ancient times and brought it to mankind for their use. No, in reality, the use of fire is one of the fruits of the labour of countless people who, over long millennia of prehistory, groped their way forward from animal existence towards the light of civilisation.

The proud pyramids in the African desert bear the names of their creators: the famous pharaohs. No, in reality, the pyramids are the work of thousands upon thousands of patient slaves who, under heavy forced labour and loud groans, erected the stone testimonies to their own enslavement. For the rule of a pharaoh requires the patience of millions who bow their necks under the yoke and allow themselves to be controlled.

Napoleon’s military glory fills a century of history. But his military campaigns were only the inevitable consequence of the Great French Revolution. However, this was not the work of individual heroes, not Danton, Robespierre, or Marat, but the work of the masses of French peasants, Parisian artisans, and workers who rose up to liberate themselves from the yoke of medieval feudalism. And even the wars themselves, whether under Napoleon or one of today's famous generals, are in reality not made by emperors, generals, or diplomats, but by the peoples, by the masses themselves. No war is possible without the responsibility of the masses themselves, whether through their warlike enthusiasm or at least through submissive acquiescence. Where else would the generals get their millions of soldiers to send into the trenches, and where would the governments get the billions they take from the taxes of the masses to pay for the costs of war?

And just like its hardship, the welfare of the people is only possible as the work of millions themselves. The abolition of exploitation and oppression in society, the creation of different conditions in which there are no masters and no servants, but free and equal people working for the common good, in which there are no more wars, but the fraternity of all peoples — none of this can fall from the sky as a gift of grace from individual heroes. The liberation of the working class can only be the work of the working class itself, says the 'Communist Manifesto' of Marx and Engels. As long as the millions of workers in all countries have not understood that they must liberate themselves, exploitation, hardship, misery, and peoples mutually slaughtering each other will persist."

Image: Kush*te prisoners of war watched over by Egyptians, waiting to be deported into Egypt. Relief from the tomb of Horemheb in Saqqara. By Mike Knell - Flickr: Mono version, CC BY-SA 2.0,

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Kautsky versus Bernstein on Chartism:

'This is the argument of the social reformers. They forget that Social Democracy exercises comprehensive positive activity, even if it has no ministerial posts to dish out. Fear may not be everything, and I believe that the direct, physical fear of Social Democracy has not yet had much effect. And yet we see how the entirety of domestic politics in Germany has revolved around Social Democracy for years. This does not stem from the fear that our party, if not kept in good spirits, might one fine day smash everything to smithereens, but from the fear that Social Democracy might one fine day rally the whole of the working masses around it.

It is the growth in the number and strength of the proletariat and the growth of Social Democracy's influence on this proletariat — the necessity for the other parties to compete with ours in order not to let this increasingly important factor of power slip completely out of their hands: these are the factors that compel the bourgeois-democratic parties to social reformism, which have brought about that change in the liberal press that Bernstein considers so characteristic of the good will of the German bourgeoisie.'