To What Extent is the Communist Manifesto Obsolete?”: Article Review Karl Kautsky’s article “To What Extent is the Communist Manifesto Obsolete?” is an analysis of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto in respect to its validity and relevance in the present day. Karl Kautsky was a philosopher and Marxist from Czech-Austria; he was a proponent of Orthodox Marxism and a critic of the Bolshevik Revolution. He wrote this article in 1904 and published it later that year in the journal Leipziger Volkszeitung and later in English in The Social Democrat. This article was not peer-reviewed due to the age and context of it. That being said, this article is credible because of its author, a well-known Marxist scholar. This article is about the validity and relevance of The Communist Manifesto sixty years after the book was published in 1848; it is an in-depth analysis of what The Manifesto predicted with the reality of the condition in Europe. He explains that in regards to some aspects The Manifest is only historical, strictly corresponding to the time it was written and “no longer determinate for the present” (pg. 1). Kautsky goes on to explain that this is not true for the whole of the work and that the development…show more content… I found that it directly overlapped my research question of what conditions are necessary for a communist/proletariat revolution by addressing how in Western Europe those conditions have been precluded. In all states but Russia, “the era of revolution, for the near future at least, had come to an end” and “a bourgeois revolution which could form the prelude of a proletarian revolution is no longer possible” (pg. 7). Additionally, I found that Kautsky’s analysis of the relevance of The Manifesto in the 1900s supported and, in fact, influenced my working
