Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal

Author(s): Norbert Leser

Source: Journal of Contemporary History , Jul., 1976, Vol. 11, No. 2/3, Special Issue:
Conflict and Compromise: Socialists and Socialism in the Twentieth Century (Jul.,
1976), pp. 133-148
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/260254

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Journal of Contemporary History

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Journal of Contemporary History, 11 (1976), 133-148

Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal

Norbert Leser

Although generally associated with the emerging Austrian Republic,

Austro-Marxism was actually rooted in and formed by the conditions
prevailing in the pre-1914 days of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Indeed, only under the aegis of the last Habsburgs were its most
forceful and eminent exponents still agreed on the principles and
application of Marxist thought. Later, when confronted with a world
war, and then under the Republic, when faced with the strains and
inevitable compromise of decision-making, the group lost its former
cohesion and members began to go their own separate ways.
Among those who put Austro-Marxism on the map and maintained
its reputation for decades, Otto Bauer, whose epoch-making Die
Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie appeared in 1907, is
perhaps the best-known figure. Other members of this brilliant circle
were Karl Renner, later Austrian Chancellor, and authority on
government, constitutional law, administration, and similar subjects;
Rudolf Hilferding, later Minister of Finance in the Weimar Republic,
whose Das Finanzkapital reappraised and extended Marxian economic
thought; Max Adler, a truly original interpreter of Marxian dialectics,
whose sadly neglected writings, deserve a revival; and Julius Deutsch,
later Defence Minister and organiser of the socialist defence league, the
Republikanischer Schutzbund. He contributed a fundamental study of
the Austrian trade union movement and a number of sociological and
military monographs to the socialist literature of the day.
The meeting of such exceptionally talented minds gave Austro-
Marxism its specific edge and flavour. It became an historically identi-
fiable entity with the founding in 1903 of the Fabian-type society
Zukunft. The impulses generated there exerted a lasting and widening
influence on the entire structure and performance of Austrian
socialism. One of the first acts of the group was the establishment of

133

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
134 Journal of Contemporary History

a workers' college, the first of its kind in Austria and the nucleus from
which, in time, the entire system of Austrian socialist education was to
spring. From 1904 the Marx-Studien were published, in which members
of this circle presented most of their major works for public discussion.
Three years later the journal Der Kampf was launched. It remained for
the duration of the party's existence its official theoretical organ, and
true to its masthead, carried on underground after the party was
banned in 1934.
The party itself emerged as a political organisation only after Victor
Adler at the Hainfeld congress of 1888-89 had managed to persuade
hitherto contending factions to accept a common platform. Before his
intervention internecine dissensions had rendered any united action
impossible. The programme finally accepted reaffirmed the funda-
mental concepts of orthodox Marxism and remained in force without
major alterations until 1926. The glaring failure of the course of
economic development to bear out the Marxian prognostications
inevitably led to demands for a reappraisal of the theoretical
approach. Such agitation, although it had little in common with Eduard
Bernstein's more formidable revisionism, was strenuously resisted by
Adler, not so much on ideological grounds, for he was anything but
a doctrinaire Marxist, but rather for fear of provoking dissensions
which might once more endanger party unity. Adler nevertheless
supported some modifications of the Hainfeld programme at the 1901
congress.
Marxism, if it was to live up to its reputation as a valid interpretation
of social phenomena, had to furnish answers to the urgent problems of
the society in which it operated. In the case of pre-1914 Austria this
meant, among other things, suggesting solutions to the problems
created by an autocratically ruled multi-national state. Austrian
socialists, like all others, were primarily concerned with the emanci-
pation of the working class, but their day-to-day political work
compelled them to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of the
nationality issue within the context of the Habsburg empire. To the
bulk of the population these questions were at least as real and of equal
immediate concern as the tactics of the class war. Moreover, being the
only supra-national party, the social-democrats were the one political
organization prepared to think out solutions to a problem threatening
to tear the whole state apart. Indeed, during the Party Congress of
1899 in Briinn and elsewhere, they proposed a number of reforms
which, had they been accepted by the establishment, might have saved
the multi-national concept.

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Leser: Austro-Marxism: A reappraisal 135

Karl Renner in particular believed in its validity and published under

pseudonyms pamphlets like Staat und Nation (1899), and Der Kampf
der osterreichischen Nationen um den Staat (1902), in which, like the
Czech historian Palacky, he argued that Austria-Hungary served regional
requirements so perfectly that it would have to be invented were it not
already in existence. While advocating radical administrative reforms
guaranteeing national as well as individual equality within the state,
Renner denounced the over-heated nationalism and the fashionable

insistence on national sovereignty as a historical anachronism. O

Bauer shared most of these views, although a marked difference o
emphasis allowed him to regard the Habsburg empire merely a
convenient point of departure rather than the final consummation
a sociological process.
In Austria, as elsewhere, 1914 saw the abandonment of the time-
honoured socialist doctrine of the international solidarity of the
working classes. However, as the war dragged on, the ferocious blood-
letting of the increasingly self-defeating and inconclusive struggle
caused party intellectuals to re-examine their position, and led during
the Zimmerwald and Kienthal congresses in neutral Switzerland to the
emergence of a militantly pacifist left. This new group opposed the
ruling party majorities, and in the case of Germany produced a split
in the social-democratic party, followed by the establishment of the
'independents' as a separate party. Renner particularly was accused
of the sin of 'social-patriotism', and his writings on war problems,
published in 1917 under the title Marxismus, Kreig und Internationale,
were cited as characteristic examples of the betrayal of socialist
principles. His efforts to maintain Austria's territorial integrity and
multi-national structure were also harshly criticised by the new group.
Countering his views in the Nationalitatenprogramm der Linke,
published by Kampf in 1918, they formally acknowledged each
nation's right to self-determination and independence. Although the
document did not propose the dissolution of the Austrian empire
expressis verbis, its demand for the convening of a nationality congress
practically implied it. Renner considered the measures advocated by the
party's left wing-and borne out by the actual course of events-as
intrinsically retograde. He stubbornly refused to draw the practical
conclusions from irrefutable portents, although by an irony of fate it
was he who, after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, was destined to
become the Republic's first Chancellor. But before this particular
juncture was reached, Renner had consistently backed the party
leadership's support for the war effort, holding that conquest and

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
136 Journal of Contemporary History

the exercise of force could also lead to such civilizing power

constellations as those represented by the Roman Empire and the
British Commonwealth. So long as actual international interdependence
was not given formal shape in agreed codes of international behaviour
and law, even a world war, he argued, by producing new and more
comprehensive power structures, could do the work of history and
should, therefore, not be condemned as wholly evil.1 Hence, for the
duration of the war, Renner was in favour of a Burgfrieden, an internal
armistice during which the class war was to be suspended and the
proletariat was actually to support the war effort on the understanding
that it was to share in the eventual rewards of victory. Exertions to
stop the war, such as on an international scale the left wing were
demanding of the workers, presupposed, according to Renner, a
simultaneity and compatibility of international economic developments
which failed to correspond to the facts of the situation. He in turn
accused the Zimmerwald congress of having disregarded actual realities;
for the duration of the conflict Austria's survival was the most
immediate concern; the self-sacrifice demanded by the left, far from
leading to a socialist victory, would allow contending imperialism,
and probably the imperialism of the Tsars, to stay the course and win.
Renner believed as fervently in internationalism as the men of the
left; all his life he had supported endeavours to create the
organizational framework within which an international code with
power to prevent war could function. But at this particular juncture
he regarded the initiatives of the left as repeating the historic error
into which the anarchists had fallen when they argued that individual
action could relieve them of the responsibility to take over and
administer the state. It remains arguable whether, from a Marxist
point of view, Renner's assessment did not make better sense than
that of the left, which so conveniently failed to face realities.
Be that as it may, the dissensions with the Zimmerwald international
already foreshadowed those schisms in the socialist movement which
were to dominate the decades to come.2 While the entire Zimmerwald
congress was united in its repudiation of 'social-patriotism' and the
various party leaderships supporting the war, its right wing, to which
Friedrich Adler and other left-wing Astro-Marxists belonged,
dissociated itself from the bolsheviks who, under Lenin's leadership,
had begun to use the congress as a slipway for the launching of a
communist international. At Kienthal, the right wing-owing to Lenin's
tactics already in a minority-were branded as Kautskyist and conse-
quently rejected. From the International Socialist Commission set up

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Leser: Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal 137

at Kienthal emerged, after the October revolution, the Third

International under Moscow's leadership, while the socialist parties
agreed at the 1919 Berne congress to continue the Second International.
The Austrian party, now dominated by its left wing, disagreed with
both factions. It was unwilling to join the Third International and to
abide by the 21 points which had been made a condition of member-
ship at the Comintern's second congress, and it felt unable to
countenance the 'social-patriotism' of the socialists. At an international
socialist conference held in Vienna in 1921, the Austrians promoted the
formation of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft sozialistischer Parteien, for which
Karl Radek coined the irreverent appellation Two-and-a-half
International. Although its ranks were swollen by the Independent
Socialists who had broken away from the majority parties of Germany
and Switzerland, the International did not prove viable. At its Hamburg
congress in 1923 the dissenters decided to rejoin the Socialist
International. The early demise of the movement epitomizes the failure
of Austro-Marxism-which, according to Otto Bauer, 'had always
striven to adopt a middle course between reformism and Bolshevism'3-
to act as a pace-setter and to exert a permanently synthesizing influence
on the polarised elements of Marxist thought. Looking back, the fate
of this short-lived effort to defend an intermediary position seems
to presage Austro-Marxism's inability, even on its home ground, to hold
its own between the upper and nether doctrinal millstones.
Austro-Marxism's ambiguous position on the state and the exercise
of power was to prove its main stumbling block and the cause of its
final undoing. The dilemma confronting the party had already been
reflected in its attitude to the war effort. The 1917 Declaration of the
Left (Erkldrung der Linken) stated clearly:

Only by adhering to the concept of the class struggle can social-democracy

discharge its historical task. The party must now allow itself to sink to the
level of a charitable organisation solely preoccupied with the attainment of
slight improvements in the living conditions of certain groups of workers.4
Similarly Renner was told:
Reformism is bound to lead to ministerialism. We reject all permanent co-
operation with the bourgeoisie. We stick to the time-honoured socialist
practice of refusing to contribute either a man or a brass farthing for the
preservation of the capitalist state.5

Renner, on the other hand, pointed out that the conquest of state
power was socialism's ultimate objective. Long before the congress
was convened, he had explained in a number of papers how the

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
138 Journal of Contemporary History

trend towards state capitalism inherent in the war economy might

provide the labour movement with a useful jumping off base. Analysing
the social conditions of his own day, he concluded: 'Capitalist society
as Marx knew, experienced, and described it, no longer exists', and
peering into the future, he prophesied: 'The state will become the key
to socialism'.6 He regarded working-class support for the war effort as
a token of its realisation that the attainment of state power was within
its reach, and refused to accept the Marxist all-or-nothing approach to
power. He told the left wing at the 1917 congress:

The state controls our processes of work and now dominates our entire
existence. In these circumstances the working class cannot indulge in policies
concerned only with abstract principles, irrespective of their actual relevance
within the context of the state in which it lives. This is what my reformism
amounts to.

Renner was not without backing. Wilhelm Ellenbogen

amiable and gifted of Austria's social-democrats, too
on his behalf. He summarised the problem that
conference and which was to assume increasing im
went on.

For twenty years (he said) we have lacked the courage to define ou
to the state unequivocally. We denounce it as the root of all e
castigate it as neither viable nor fit to live in, and having incessantly
against it, we merrily proceed to work for its preservation. In th
Victor Adler, we 'denounce it as a dunghill; since, however, this is
have to stay, we try to install ourselves on it'. These are contradic
Renner's efforts to resolve them are laudable. Although his recomm
may not meet with our wholehearted approval, his endeavour to
problem should not give rise to totally irresponsible and extravagan

The emergence and subsequent consolidation of the Austrian

Republic-it was proclaimed a day after Victor Adler's death on 12
November 1918-rested right from the beginning on a working agree-
ment between the bourgeois christian-socials and the working-class
social-democrats. In the specific conditions facing a defeated, dis-
illusioned, and impoverished Austria, only such a broadly-based
coalition held out any hope of avoiding civil strife and of revitalizing
the material and spiritual resources needed to rebuild the country.
Moreover, a show of national unanimity was deemed a great asset in
dealing with the victors and in impressing on them the overwhelming
popular desire for fusion with the German Republic, demonstrated

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Leser: Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal 139

by the resolution of the Provisional National Convention. In these

circumstances the social democrats could not willingly dissociate
themselves from the newly created republic. They rightly regarded
it as the fruit and outcome of their political labours, as the symbol
of a new social order which, shorn of outdated privilege and class
prerogatives, readily acknowledged the dignity, standing, and achieve-
ments of the working class. Propelled by the dynamics of its newly
won importance and authority, the party could not but consider
the state as an ally in the battle for the realization of its social demands.
Thus it found itself once more trying to preserve its own identity
'posed between reformism and bolshevism'.
The confrontation with bolshevik theory was no longer an exercise
in Marxian interpretation, but a matter of immediate practical
consequence. A substantial number of workers and demobilized
soldiers were clamouring for the establishment of a proletarian
dictatorship along Russian lines, and for a workers' republic on the
Hungarian and Bavarian model. The socialist leaders not only resisted
the temptation to use the power that was momentarily theirs to further
these objectives, but on the contrary exerted their considerable
authority over the workers to steer them clear of violence. It was the
important but unenviable task of Ministers Deutsch (Defence) and
Eldersch (Interior) to quell a series of communist uprisings, the last
of which was put down on Easter day 1919. The socialist leaders,
in any event opposed to violence, realised moreover that attempts
to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat by a putsch, would
inevitably induce the entente and the argicultural hinterland to close its
stranglehold on the capital, thus paving the way for a punitive white
counter-terror.

The two years of socialist support for the coalition

working class substantial material and political b
considerably beyond the social and economic demands fo
the Hainfeld programme. Among the most notable
were the introduction of the eight hour day, paid holiday
the banning or drastic reduction of child labour and nig
women, new enlightened regulations concerning out
extension of the scope and authority of the factory ins
well as the passing of fundamental social legislation
comprehensive system of health and unemployment ins
enlightened and progressive enactments will always evoke
Ferdinand Hanusch, the minister of social welfare, who f
Moreover, by creating such institutions as works councils

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
140 Journal of Contemporary History

of commerce, he greatly advanced the social standing, self-esteem, and

morale of the working class.
These substantial benefits notwithstanding, social-democratic
participation in a bourgeois government-according to Marx merely
an instrument for the oppression of one class by another-constituted
an anomaly that needed justification. As a theoretician and also because
he had initiated these ~policies, Otto Bauer, once the party had left
the government and resumed its traditional role in opposition, felt
called upon to account for these historical irregularities and to square
them with Marxist theory. In his Die isterreichische Revolution, an
excellent and vivid account of these eventful years published in 1923,
he cites Engels in support of his unimpeachable orthodoxy. From the
latter's Origins of the State, the Family and Private Property, Bauer
quotes a passage on the eventuality of 'the embattled classes having
reached a state of equilibrium'. When power was thus evenly matched,
Engels argued, the state ceased to be an instrument of class rule and
assumed the role of mediator, until external influences upset the
balance and made it once more revert to its original role.10 Bauer
contended that such a balance had been obtained in Austria after the
short period of proletarian supremacy. The country, he argued, had been
a genuine people's republic from the autumn of 1919 to the autumn
of 1922, from the time, that is, of the re-emergence of the bourgeoisie
to the ratification of the Geneva Protocols. Bauer regarded Seipel's
efforts to ward off the currency crisis with large injections of
foreign loans as the bourgeoisie's attempt to regain the controlling
positions it had lost immediately after the war. He called the day
of the signing of the Geneva protocols, 4 October 1922, 'Seipel's
revenge for 12 November 1918'.11
Although the social-democrats failed to persuade the nation that
the economic crisis could best be overcome by the imposition of
capital levies and the expropriation of indigenous capitalists, they did
manage to prevent the planned boycott of Parliament over the issue
of how foreign aid was to be administered. The battle over the ways
and means of resolving the crisis glaringly revealed the fundamental
differences between the two camps. The Austrian bourgeoisie never
ceased to disparage the 'ill begotten' republic which had replaced the
ancient and once glittering monarchy. The middle classes especially
found it difficult to accept on equal or any other terms what they
described as 'social rubble', the men and women who had come to
the top during the period of socialist participation in the government
and the social legislation they had carried through. To this day the

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Leser: Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal 141

twelfth of November 1918, the republic's birthday, far from being

commemorated as a unifying national symbol, remains one of those
ambivalent, emotionally charged turning points still capable of reviving
smouldering resentments.
The misgivings generated by the Austrian revolution are the more
surprising since, for all the substantial administrative and consititutional
changes it wrought, it certainly did not transform the established order.
Notwithstanding its social reforms, it did not interfere with property
relationships or control over the means of production. Repeated social-
democratic attempts to bring certain key sections of the economy
under public ownership were successfully resisted by the christian-
socials. Once the party of the lower middle class, these had long since
become the party of vested interests, of property and high finance.
The failure in 1919 to nationalise the Osterreichische Alpine-
Montangesellschaft, Austria's most important industrial corporation,
was destined to seal the fate of the republic. For it was from within
this vast industrial empire, which the state had been unable to subdue,
that the christian-socials launched their para-military Heimnwehrin their
final assault on the republic. When it became clear that attempts to
restore the monarchy were doomed, the Austrian middle classes,
adamant in their hostility towards the republic, began to flirt with
fascism in their efforts to move beyond the exercise of purely economic
power.
The nationalisation laws of 30 May 1919 had, in view of the
christian-social and Grossdeutsche opposition, remained mere
declarations of intent without practical consequence. The same fate
befell the entire body of legislation designed to bring the public
utilities, vast tracts of forest land, and the largest feudal estates into
public ownership. Its actual impact was negligible. In pursuance of the
act of 27 July 1919 a number of state-owned corporations like the
Osterreichische Heilmittelstelle (Austrian Pharmaceutical Supplies)
and Osterreichische Werke, incorporating the former army arsenals,
were set up. This, however, hardly affected the social structure; and
since nothing was done to modify the actual control over the means of
production, Otto Bauer's claim to have created a people's republic
did not go unchallenged. Both the party's right and left wings were
critical; the right emphasised that Bauer had already abandoned
orthodox theory, especially the doctrine of power equilibrium, to
which he himself subscribed.
In his Sozialismus und Staat (1920), Professor Hans Kelsen, the
still living architect of Austria's constitution, analysed Marxian

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
142
Journal of Contemporary History

thought on the exercise of state power. He found it wanting and

contended it was bound to fail as a guide to practical action when
confronted with the exigencies of actual situations. This view, he
argued, was borne out by Bauer's inability to vindicate his policies
in terms of Marxist doctrine: Bauer had based his argument on a
misinterpretation of Engels' words; these implied that the state's
detached neutrality in the period of equilibrium was illusory. Had
not Bauer, in his eagerness to accord post-war Austria the standing
of a people's republic, overstressed the significance of purely formal
aspects while playing down the importance of the underlying economic
realities?12 Kelsen tried to convince the vigorously dissenting Bauer
that he had already invalidated Marx's dogma of the exploiting state
if he conceded that even in a single instance and under exceptional
circumstances the state could use its power for purposes other than
legalized exploitation. Kelsen believed, as he explained in his Reine
Rechtslehre, his theory of 'Uncommitted Legality', that the state at
a certain stage of its development had become an inherently neutral
piece of social machinery, ready to serve whatever purpose it was put
to.13 He did not deny the role the capitalist state had played as an
instrument of legally sanctioned oppression, but he repudiated the
notion that this was its only function or reflected its essential
properties. The state could easily accommodate a socialist society;
indeed its coercive powers might well prove useful when it came to
implementing and enforcing the party's policies.
While on the right Kelsen had dwelt on Bauer's inconsistencies in
an effort to convince him that he had already advanced beyond Marx,
Otto Leichter criticised him from the left. He denounced Bauer's theory
of equilibrium as an artificial contrivance specially designed to meet a
particular set of political circumstances. Summing up his doubts on the
general validity of Bauer's interpretation, he observed:

Equilibrium in the class struggle can perhaps be best defined as a state of

affairs in which for the time being, neither class dares to engage the other in
combat. ... It is a passing and accidental situation and does not warrant a new
system of elaborate theories regarding the class struggle or the function of the
state at a given moment in time.14

Bauer's attitude to the state and to his continued participation in a

coalition government was, of course, not exclusively motivated by
Marxian theory. Nevertheless its impact should not be under-estimated,
and statements describing 'opposition as the proletariat's natural
attitude to the bourgeois state even in its republican guise'15 must

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Leser: Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal 143

obviously have influenced his decisions. On the other hand, he was not
the man to ignore practical considerations or the susceptibilities of the
rank and file, and nothing describes his respect for the masses he was
called to lead better than his dictum: 'Infinitely better to err with the
masses than to be proved right in opposition to them'. Fears that a
further extension of the coalition might induce the masses to transfer
their allegiance to the communists were justified. In these circum-
stances it is not surprising that a minor disagreement in 1920 over the
appointment and status of political advisers in the army was seized
upon as a heaven-sent opportunity by both sides to terminate a
coalition which they had come to regard as unnatural. In taking this
decision Otto Bauer was backed not only by Marxian theory but also
by the majority of a working class now increasingly disenchanted with
operating the machinery of a bourgeois government. In the light of
subsequent events and with the benefit of hindsight, as one looks
today on a situation almost exactly reversed, one wonders whether
working-class clamour in the twenties to dissolve the coalition,
compared with its contemporary insistence on sustaining it, does not
reflect rather the leadership's skill in manipulating opinion than any
assertion of the collective will. Among the prominent social-democratic
politicians, Karl Renner never ceased to deplore the grave and fateful
error of having surrendered the machinery of government to the
bourgeoisie.16
The price the social-democrats paid for maintaining doctrinal purity
and party unity was indeed high. While all key positions in the army,
the police, and the ministries were reoccupied by the stalwarts and
trusted agents of the resurgent bourgeoisie, the workers just managed to
hold on to their stronghold in Vienna, the traditional bastion of social-
democratic power, and the control over the country's railwaymen.
These were the only positions of real strength they still commanded,
apart from such influence as they could exert through parliamentary
pressure or the threat of extra-parliamentary action. How little all this
amounted to when confronted with the smoothly organised and ruth-
lessly deployed power of the state, was dramatically highlighted by the
abortive uprising of 15 July 1927, an unmistakable turning point in the
history of the first Austrian republic. Incensed by the acquittal of
members of a right-wing soldiers' league responsible for the killing
of several workers, angry crowds sacked the Ministry of Justice and
rioted in the streets. Eighty-five people were killed and more than
a thousand injured, the government never lost effective control, and
was able to proceed ruthlessly against the rioters, over whom their own

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
144 Journal of Contemporary History

Scbutzbund officers and political leaders had temporarily lost control.

After 15 July 1927 there was no turning back from the road leading
inexorably to civil war and the tragedy of February 1934. Renner's
frantic and repeated efforts to resuscitate the coalition failed as
lamentably as Julius Deutsch's attempts to prevent the outbreak of
civil strife by demanding the disbandment of the rival para-military
party formations. The Heimwebr, now riding the crest of the wave,
was sufficiently powerful to spurn offers of a compromise peace.
There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie, by trying to exclude the
social-democrats from all participation in the government, must bear
the overwhelming responsibility for the developments culminating in
civil war. Nevertheless Austro-Marxism also contributed to its own
undoing, at least to the extent of providing the Heimwehr gratuitously
with the sort of wild and violent statements which right-wing extremists
would successfully employ to frighten the undecided and the gullible
into active partisanship. Seipel and the christian-social leadership
cannot, of course, claim to have been deceived by this propaganda
or to have taken socialist threats at their face value. They must have
known from their own experience, at the very latest by 15 July 1927,
that the social-democratic leadership - actuated by a genuine sense of
responsibility and an equally genuine lack of revolutionary zeal - was
not only unwilling to resort to violence, but on the contrary could
always and under any circumstances be relied upon to curb its followers
and to avoid any show of force. Even when on 15 March 1933 the
legally elected representatives of the people were forcibly prevented
from entering their parliament, and Dollfuss' violation of the con-
stitution became starkly evident, the socialist leaders still shrank back
from calling for armed resistance or organising a general strike.
It was Austro-Marxism's tragedy neither to nave neecde Kenner s
plea for unequivocal acceptance of parliamentary democracy, nor to
have forgone the pleasures of barnstorming revolutionary rhetoric and
of supplementing it with dedicated action. The heated controversy
between Bauer and Max Adler in the twenties touched on precisely
such questions as the correct Marxist approach to the constitutional
and the revolutionary alternatives, or the advisability of retaining
revolution in the party programmes as the final objective and with it
the use of inflammatory terminology irrelevant both to prevailing
conditions or to any situation in the foreseeable future. The
'messianic outlook', as Renner called it, far from being dead, still
preoccupied the leaders as well as the rank and file, to such an extent
as to cloud their assessment of political realities. In this way social-

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Leser: Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal 145

democratic propaganda, by continually emphasizing th

and disparaging the institutions of the republic-which i
utmost to uphold-allowed the middle classes to
misinterpret much of which it had to say on the subjec
and dictatorship. One of Austro-Marxism's classic state
programme of 1926, proclaimed:

The social-democratic workers' party will govern in strict ac

rules of the democratic state, scrupulously observing all th
trenched in its constitution. However, should the bourgeois
revolutionary forces, attempt to obstruct the social change
movement in assuming power is pledged to carry out, then
will be forced to employ dictatorial means to break such resi

The purely defensive planning for a clearly hypotheti

nevertheless provided the bourgeoisie with welcome ev
opponents' dictatorial ambitions. Such deliberate mi
was time and again given the appearance of verisim
thumping party hacks who used exalted revolutiona
to compensate for their loss of real power.
Even Max Adler-ever since he published in 1922 his Die
Staatsauffassung des Marxismus the acknowledged guardian of
orthodoxy and the movement's defender against revisionist
corruption-insisted on having a paragraph dealing with the 'dictator-
ship of the proletariat' inserted in the Linz programme. To Bauer's
objection that,since the Russian Revolution18 the term dictatorship
had assumed an ominous meaning, Adler replied by enlarging on the
fallacies of 'democratism', a new creed which exposed the masses
to the perils of bourgeois thinking. He went on to an adamant defence
of the orthodox point of view, long since relinquished even by such
purists as Kautsky, that only a 'social-democratic' classless society
deserves the name of democracy. As an instrument of class rule, the
bourgeois version of this institution could not really lay claim to this
appellation. Only the final establishment of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, Adler insisted, could by substituting majority for
minority rule, effect the hoped for transistion to an ultimately
classless communist society. Bauer, although opposed to Adler's rigid
formalism, was ideologically not all that far removed from his
position. What the latter described as the 'illusions of democratism'
the former castigated as a substitute creed for 'vulgar petty-bourgeois
democrats, who preferred democracy to socialism'.19
Moreover the entire theory of Bauer's brand of socialism as well

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
146 Journal of Contemporary History

as its tactics was shot through with, and to a certain extent handi-
capped by, his belief in the inevitability of the historical processes
and their almost automatic unfolding. Events, he held, could be
influenced by individual action only in certain periods and in special
circumstances; by and large their evolution would prove impermeable
to outside intervention. This is not to dispute that the decline and
ultimate collapse of the Austrian republic and the Austro-Marxist
experiment did not have a certain air of tragic inevitability about it.
Nevertheless repeated references to the unalterable laws of history
tended to promote an all too submissive surrender to the inescapable
logic of events, rather than to encourage the single-minded
determination needed to retrieve a desperate situation. This over-
powering sense of impotence seems to have moved Bauer to remark
in 1930, when the process of isolating the Austrian working class
was already well advanced, that 'the proletarian revolution which had
demolished the monarchy was but a phase in an historical process
culminating in the establishment of a bourgeois republic'.20
Historical determinism, like its religious counterpart, the belief in
predestination, fosters gravely pessimistic attitudes as well as confident
and positive ones. In stressing the futility of trying to tamper with the
mechanics of history, they paralyse the will to act; and many of Bauer's
comments of these later years reveal his bitter though clear-sighted
acceptance of the inevitable. In 1927, for instance, he informed his
right and left wing critics that 'the re-emergence of the repressive
machinery of bourgeois government had been implicit in all European
developments since 1919'.21
Whether resolution rather than resignation could either have halted
or reversed the general trend towards restoration, is difficult to say.
History's alternatives remain forever speculative. However, faced with
a comparable situation, those who have inherited that dilemma today
must be allowed to penetrate beyond the fatuities of apportioning
blame or providing self-righteous justifications, and to ascertain the
typical and the recurrent features in a bygone situation. The lessons
of history can be learned, if at all, only if by renouncing value
judgements and the comfort of being wise after the event, the funda-
mental and exemplary as well as the misguided responses to a particular
political situation are fully analysed and their relevance to the present
correctly assessed.
Even where Austro-Marxism erred, whether in its theoretical
assessment or its practical approach, it was still always preoccupied
with worthwhile issues, issues which, divested of their evanescent

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Leser: Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal 147

features, remain enduringly relevant. Attempts to resolve the

conflict, to heal the breach between democratic socialism and
communism, and to discover an alternative to the dichotomy between
reformism and bolshevism, remain commendable even if in strictly
Marxian terms these aims can never be attained. Any accommodation
between social-democracy and bolshevism could not, it seems, be the
result of an inherent convergence, but would depend rather on
evolutionary changes within the Soviet sphere. These, by involving
the transmutation of quantity into quality, would modify the entire
character of the movement, an obviously slow and gradual process and
one that might never take place; on the other hand-the spirit bloweth
where it listeth-it could not be entirely ruled out. Hence communist
developments ought to be studied dispassionately, and the investigator
should be swayed neither by exaggerated expectations nor by the
desire to arrive hastily at final judgements.
Though the Austro-Marxist analysis of bolshevism has not proved
superior to other interpretations, it did nevertheless give greater sharp-
ness and depth to our insight into the socio-political forces at work in
Russia. The Austro-Marxists believed that a political movement based
on socialist tradition should offer the masses something more inspiring
than gradual material improvements; it ought to excite the imagination
and kindle a fire that would illuminate and transfigure the drabness
of their condition. Austro-Marxism deserves our gratitude for having
opposed its own moral concepts and considerations to the pursuit of
exclusively utilitarian policies, and for having striven to educate people
towards the image of what Max Adler called 'New Men'.22 This aspect
of socialism was not to be abandoned, even though all its other basic
assumptions might have become untenable. For although Austro-
Marxism, like its Marxist progenitor, failed to interpret and modify
reality in a single, all-embracing system, it nevertheless injected
impulses and made contributions which, surviving their transitory
historical context, constitute, in Hegelian terms, the elements of a
new situation. In its specific Marxist and Austrian manifestation
Austro-Marxism is dead, but its underlying objectives are timeless
and will continue to exert a formative influence.

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
148 Journal of Contemporary History

NOTES

1. Karl Renner, Marxismus, Krieg und Internationale (Stuttgart

167 ff.

2. Cf. Jules Humbert-Droz, Der Krieg und die Internationale-Die

Konferenzen von Zimmerwald und Kienthal (Vienna 1964).
3. Otto Bauer, 'Nach dem Parteitag', Der Kampf (December 1927), 549.
4. Protokoll der Verhandlungen des Parteitages 1917, 115.
5. Ibid., 116.
6. Renner, op. cit., 9, 28.
7. Op. cit. note 4, 122.
8. Op. cit. note 4, 148.
9. Cf. Maria Szecsi, 'Ferdinand Hanusch', in Norbert Leser (ed), Werk und
Widerball-Grosse Gestalten des osterreicbiscben Sozialismus (Vienna 1964),
178 ff.
10. Otto Bauer, Die osterreichiscbe Revolution (re-issue, Vienna 1965),
257 ff.
11. Ibid, 285.
12. Hans Kelsen, Marx oder Lassalle-Wandlungen in der politischen Theorie
des Marxismus (Leipzig 1924), 285.
13. Hans Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, 2nd ed. (Vienna 1960), 283 ff.
14. Otto Leichter, 'Zum Problem der sozialen Gleichgewichtszustande',
Der Kampf (May 1924) 194.
15. Protokoll der Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen
Arbeiterpartei Deutsch-Osterreichs (Vienna 1920), 143.
16. Osterreich von der Ersten zur Zweiten Republik, II. Band des Nachlasses
(Vienna 1953), 42.
17. Die osterreicbiscbe Sozialdemokratie im Spiegel ibre Programme (Vienna
1964), 43.
18. Protokoll des sozialdemokratischen Parteitages 1926, 269 ff., 286 ff.
19. Otto Bauer, 'Die Zukunft der russischen Sozialdemokratie', Der Kampf
(December 1931), 518.
20. 'Die Bourgeois-Republik in Osterreich', Der Kampf (May 1930), 194.
21. 'Kritiker links und rechts', ibid. (October 1927), 444.
22. Max Adler, Neue Menscben (Berlin 1924).

This content downloaded from

79.95.1.62 on Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:38:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms