British historian Dick Geary, who passed away last year, apologised several times in the course of this short book for not being able to go into any detail. That’s because the book was a part of the “Lives on the Left” series published by Manchester University Press which aimed to produce “short, lively and accessible” texts.

Geary’s approach to Kautsky was critical, but not entirely without sympathy. The final line of the book (it’s not a murder mystery so I’m allowed to give this away) was this: “His failure was the failure of democratic Marxism everywhere.” (Emphasis in the original.)

It seems a bit unfair to criticise the author of a short book for leaving stuff out, but Geary went on at great length about some things (fair enough – those things interested him) but ignored others that I, for one, consider important.

For example, while criticising Kautsky for being too much the armchair theoretician, writing all the time about socialist revolution but never actually participating in one, it is remarkable that there’s no mention of Kautsky’s 1920-21 visit to democratic socialist Georgia. Kautsky not only spent several months there, but wrote a book about it and continued to defend the Georgian Social Democrats and their achievements long after the Red Army had put an end to their independent republic. Kautsky could not have been clearer about the importance of Georgia to his thinking. “In comparison with the hell which Soviet Russia represents,” he wrote, “Georgia appeared as a paradise.”

Even Geary’s list of Kautsky’s works in English contains no mention of his book on Georgia. The list of books by Kautsky’s contemporaries includes several by Trotsky, but does not include the one the Russian revolutionary wrote in answer to Kautsky’s book on Georgia.

Geary chose to quote Stalin — of all people — to contrast his views about socialism with Kautsky’s which I found weird, to say the least. I get the use of dissident Communists like Lukacs or Gramsci or Korsch, but Stalin? Really?

Geary’s book may be of some interest as a critique of Kautsky from the left, but there are better (and longer) books around on the subject.