ABSTRACT
Social democrats speculated about the emergence of large-scale and supposedly more or less autarkic capitalist economic spaces. In envisioning the Zukunfsstaatas an autarky, Karl Kautsky was building on the tradition of the ‘state socialists’. However, Kautsky failed to explain why the capitalist world market would necessarily undo an autarkic economy. Social democrats tended to find the solution for an isolated socialist state in withdrawal into self-sufficiency, a survival strategy more reflective of the communitarian instincts of communism. There emerged a new, imperialist variety of socialism in one country among the right wing of German socialism: Germany, the initiator-state hosting a socialist mode of production, would be kept afloat by a colonial empire. Protectionism and imperialism significantly impacted on how the social democrats conceptualised capitalism. The Great War fuelled speculations that the increasing state regulation of the wartime economies was further improving the prospects of socialist transition.
