INVESTIGADORES
GAIDO Daniel Fernando
artículos
Título:
'The American Worker' and the Theory of Permanent Revolution: Karl Kautsky on Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
Autor/es:
GAIDO, DANIEL
Revista:
Historical Materialism
Editorial:
Brill
Referencias:
Lugar: London; Año: 2003 p. 79 - 123
ISSN:
1465-4466
Resumen:
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One of the main
peculiarities of American historical development has been the relative
political weakness of the American labour movement. The classical bourgeois
attempt to analyse the reasons for this phenomenon is Werner Sombart's famous
book Why Is There No Socialism
in the United States?, first published in
1906. Though Sombart's theses have long been a subject of debate among
academics in both the US and Europe, it is not generally known that Karl
Kautsky, the foremost Marxist theoretician of that period, answered them with a
comparative analysis of the peculiarities of capitalist development in Russia,
the UK and the US, and their influence on the respective labour movements.
Kautsky's study, published in 1906
in the theoretical journal of the German social
democracy Die Neue Zeit under the title 'The American Worker', was part of a
series of articles developing the idea that the Russian Revolution of 1905
would go beyond the framework of the classical bourgeois revolutions, in fact
approaching Trotskys permanent revolution scenario. This study provides the
first English edition of Kautskys article series and contextualizes them in
the framework of the contemporary debates within German Social Democracy and
the Second International as a whole.
