KAUTSKY,KARL - ON THE RELATION OF THEORY AND PRACTICE

It has become customary to trace the deficiencies of Kautsky's ''ortho dox Marxism'' to a reified social ontology that leaves no room for pol itical will and secretes a separation of theory from practice. But thi s sort of interpretation does not stand up to careful examination of K autskyan texts and their insertion in the political context of the Ger man Social-Democratic Party (SPD); it obscures, and hence risks reprod ucing, the real theoretical and political limitations of Kautskyan ort hodoxy. Bernstein's revisionist challenge counterposed social diversit y and the diversification. of the working class to the orthodox thesis of class polarization. Kautsky's failure to generate an innovative re sponse is best explained as the product, not of a separation, but of t he conjunction of an abstractly universalistic theorization of working -class unity with the parliamentary political project of the SPD. This union of theory and practice effectively depreciated any evidence of the necessary unevenness and complexity of the process of working-clas s unity and so, paradoxically, could reproduce divisions in the class. The appreciation of unevenness and complexity that is required in ord er to avoid the failures of Kautskyan orthodoxy suggests, in turn, a n otion of the working-class movement as a unity-in-diversity, a communi ty, and the need for a correspondingly rectified understanding of the unity of theory and practice.