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Austromarxism (also stylised asAustro-Marxism;German:Austromarxismus) was aMarxist theoretical current led byVictor Adler,Otto Bauer,Karl Renner,Max Adler andRudolf Hilferding,[1][2] members of theSocial Democratic Workers' Party of Austria inAustria-Hungary and theFirst Austrian Republic, and later supported by Austrian-born revolutionary and assassin of the Imperial Minister-PresidentCount von Stürgkh,Friedrich Adler. It is known for its theory ofnationality andnationalism, and its attempt to conciliate it withsocialism in the imperial context.[2] More generally, the Austromarxists strove to achieve a synthesis betweensocial democracy andrevolutionary socialism. Uniquely, Austromarxists posited that class consciousness in theworking class could be achieved more organically through the maintenance of national autonomy, in contrast to the internationalist perspective and the notion of theparty vanguard popular inorthodox Marxist circles elsewhere in Europe.
Beginning in 1904, the Austromarxist group organized around magazines such as theBlätter zur Theorie und Politik des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus and theMarx-Studien. Far from being a homogeneous movement, it was a home for such different thinkers and politicians as theNeokantian Max Adler andRudolf Hilferding.[2] The term "Austromarxism" was first used by the American writer andMarxist theoreticianLouis B. Boudin just before the first world war.[3][4]
In 1921 the Austromarxists formed theInternational Working Union of Socialist Parties (also known as 21⁄2 International or the Vienna International), hoping to unite the2nd and3rd Internationals, with Friedrich Adler as the first secretary of the IWUSP.[2][5][6] After it failed to maintain momentum as a force, the IWUSP was integrated with what remained of the Second International and formed theLabour and Socialist International (LSI).[5]
Austromarxism, as the main political current within the SDAP, was responsible for guiding much of the municipal programs instituted by the SDAP-controlledGemeinderat (English: Municipal Council) of Vienna in the years after the establishment of the First Austrian Republic. Under SDAP leadership, the capital city of Vienna instituted widespread economic and social reforms such as the introduction of widely available, publicly subsidizedhealthcare,[6] a substantial number ofmunicipal housing projects,[6] and expansion of theeducational system inVienna,[6] which during this time was known colloquially asRed Vienna, and which mirrored similar projects undertaken by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Scandinavians, and the BritishLabour Party, all of which were fellow member parties in the Labour and Socialist International.[5]
In 1920, the SDAP-CSP coalition in the AustrianNationalrat broke down, resulting in the SDAP losing its parliamentary majority in the1920 Austrian legislative election, a loss from which the SDAP would not recover.[6] From that point forward, the CSP maintained nearly unbroken control over theNationalrat until it was suspended by CSP politician andBundeskanzlerEngelbert Dollfuß, who then radically transformed the political landscape and government of Austria between 1933 and 1934 from a conservative parliamentary democracy into aclericofascist single-party dictatorship under the rule of theVaterländische Front, an authoritarian conservative political party. In the process, the SDAP was banned along with the Austrian branch of the NSDAP, which crippled the social democrat movement and Austromarxism as a whole.[6] After the takeover by theVaterländische Front, a briefCivil War ensued that ended with a defeat for the socialists.[6]
The Austro-Marxist principle ofnational personal autonomy was later adopted by various parties, among them theBund (General Jewish Labour Union), left-wingZionists (Hashomer Hatzair) in favour of abinational solution inPalestine, the JewishFolkspartei between the two world wars and theDemocratic Union of Hungarians in Romania after 1989.
Some scholars hold the opinion that everything that Austrian socialists thought and published from 1900 to 1945 should be subsumed under the generic term "Austromarxism", that the term is more a description of origin in the sense of an Austrian school of scientific socialism rather than a clear basis of a common substantive school of thought.[7]
Prior to the First World War and the subsequent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, much of the Austromarxist body of thought was based upon the works of Karl Renner and Max Adler. In the later war years and especially after the foundation of the First Austrian Republic, the Austromarxist current rapidly began to shift into the orbit of Otto Bauer's political positions, particularly in regard to its negative relationship to theBolshevik current predominant in theThird International and the concept of national identity abstracted from the territory.[6] It was also influenced by contemporaneous intellectual trends, including the prominence ofneo-Kantianism andpositivism in philosophy and the emergence ofmarginalism in economics,[8] and sought to confront questions around the rise of the interventionist state and the changing class-structure of early 20th century capitalist societies.[9]
Writing in the political treatise,Social Democracy and the Nationalities Question (1907), Bauer defined the nation as "the totality of men bound together through a common destiny into a community of character."[2] Bauer's synthesis of the notion of nationhood with socialism was unusual in relation to the then-orthodox Marxist internationalist interpretation. The delineation between the two resides within Bauer's assertion that the national identity is not necessarily obstructive toward class consciousness, existing as a useful praxis for theself-determination of the worker.[2] For Bauer, the problem lurking within national identity in the capitalist context was not the national identity itself so much as it was the tendency of peasants to cling to traditions that tethered them to the institutions of the old monarchical and capitalistic systems, as well as for nationality to be conceived of exclusively in racial and territorial means.[2]
Bauer, desiring to explain how the notion of territorial principle could be substituted in cases where minority populations risked being subjugated by majorities,[10]: 295–298 [11] resurrected Karl Renner's notion of the "personal principle" as a way of gathering the geographically divided members of the same nation.[10]: 295–298 InSocial Democracy and the Nationalities Question (1907), Bauer wrote that "The personal principle wants to organize nations not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons", thus radically disjoining the nation from theterritory and making of the nation a non-territorialassociation.[12] Bauer's position echoed earlier writings from Karl Renner, who expressed the importance of doing away with sub-national territorial identities as undemocratic and allowing for the oppression of non-majority populations within each nation.[10]
Like other theorists operating within the Marxist umbrella, many of the prominent members of the Austromarxist current utilised a determinist perspective of history in the formation of their political critiques.[13] Bauer in particular, regarded the phenomena of imperialism to be an inevitable and inescapable consequence of the evolution of capitalism, stating that "[imperialism] results from the insatiable and uncontrolled drive of capital to realize itself".[2] However, Bauer asserted inSocial Democracy and the Nationalities Question that a socialist society could rid itself of the possibility to be ruled by a foreign nation by democratizing the control of the military, which would necessarily entail wresting it from the hands of the controlling class.[2]
The Bolshevik model of revolution, while initially bearing some weight within the SDAP, quickly fell out of favor as several major Austromarxist thinkers, most prominently Bauer, became concerned with the feasibility of such a revolution in Austria. Between 1918 and 1920, Bolshevik-style revolutions and governments were staged in Germany (both theGerman revolution and theBavarian Soviet Republic) andBéla Kun'sHungarian Soviet Republic, all of which were either crushed or otherwise fell apart within the first several months of existence.[6][2] Alerted by the collapse of these radical movements, Bauer and the others in the SDAP distanced themselves as much as possible from radical communist agitators, treating them with suspicion and, when possible, bringing the force of the judicial system down upon would-be revolutionaries.[2]
Bauer specifically noted complications with the feasibility of the revolution in Austria that were not encountered by the Bolsheviks in 1917.[2] The aggravation and consciousness of the peasants and theproletariats were distinct in a manner that caused the two interest groups to be diametrically opposed to one another.[2] Among the peasants, the mass outrage that had stirred up over the course of the war was not due to the perceived manipulation of their livelihoods by a corrupt and evil structure of capitalism insofar as it was the dearth in cattle ownership that resulted from requisition efforts by the military over the course of the war.[2] Moreover, influence of the Catholic Church was far more substantial in the provincial Alpine hinterlands than it was in the industrial center of Vienna, and the predominant bulk of the peasant class did not share the highly anticlericalist attitude nor the predilection toward the dispossession of private property held by the urban working class.[2]
Additionally, unlike in the case of the October Revolution in Russia, the newFirst Austrian Republic was under close watch by the victoriousEntente Powers that had dismantled theAustro-Hungarian Empire, and would likewise pose a credible threat of militarily intervening in the event that they suspected a violent revolution in Austria to be likely.[2] Thus, Bauer dismissed any interest in pursuing the Bolshevik model of revolution in Austria on the basis that any such movement would both fail to defend itself militarily against intervention by external parties and to capture the mass support of both the urban working class and the agrarian rural peasant class, whose reactionary nature would be exceedingly difficult to overcome with rash action.[2] As an alternative, Bauer saw the path of social democracy to be the most feasible method for the success of socialism in Austria. The ability to grant major and permanent concessions to the proletariat while avoiding an open civil conflict, which may have involved the military power of the Entente, granted the Austromarxists safer and more numerous opportunities for generating lasting transformations in the social and economic structure of Austrian society.[2]
Bauer rejected elitism as a method for the dissemination of class consciousness, straying away from normative Bolshevik notion of the party vanguard.[6] The embodiment of the revolution in the Bauerian thought was an organic movement that developed from a groundswell of working-class awakening and gradual transition toward socialism.[2] Bauer's assertions were grounded in earlier writings by other Austromarxists who had written before him, such as Max Adler, who posited that "the cultural interests of the intellectuals, and the mere interests of the working class, as a self-enclosed class, have little in common except the very general claim for a humanly decent existence."[2]
This departure frominternational socialist norms had been the consequence of the Austromarxists' desire to avoid creating what Gruber describes as a "the dictatorship of a caste over the masses."[6] Paradoxically, the more normative Marxist structure of the core inner circle of educated urban intellectuals within the party had also developed in the SDAP well before the end of the war and remained at the center of party politics, reflecting a gap between the ideological persuasions of SDAP leadership and the party's behavior in practice that often manifested in other circumstances, such as with the relative lack of concern toward insufficient housing until the housing crisis in postwar Vienna necessitated the introduction of substantial construction projects.[6][5]
During the First World War, the relationship between various social democratic member parties of theSecond International grew strained, as member parties of opposing nations involved in the conflict that espoused support for their respective countries could no longer cooperate.[5] Following the war, two divergent currents within the Broad Left attempted to restore the unification of the international worker movements. In 1919, the more hardlineThird International was established with support from the Bolsheviks in Russia. As a response to the Third International,Friedrich Adler took part in founding the '21⁄2 International', formally named theInternational Working Union of Socialist Parties, as the IWUSP's first secretary in 1921.[2][5][6]
The IWUSP represented a general alignment of social democratic parties that leaned away from the Bolshevik current, having grown initially out of a wartime pacifist bloc of the Second International.[5] Other members of the Austromarxist movement, including Bauer and Hilferding, backed the IWUSP over the Third International, considering the Bolshevik model to be undesirable or unworkable in Austria.[2] Despite general support from social democratic parties in Switzerland, France, Germany, and Italy (in addition to the Austromarxists' own SDAP), the IWUSP failed its objective of bridging the divide between the competing Internationals.[6] After confidence and momentum in the IWUSP was lost following the German delegation's withdrawal under pressure from Third International chairmanGrigory Zinoviev, the IWUSP merged in 1923 with what was left of the Second International to form theLabour and Socialist International, with Friedrich Adler again leading as secretary.[2][5][6]
The rise of the agrarianFatherland Front was in part the consequence of the SDAP's failure to generate substantial momentum for the party outside of Vienna.[5] The dichotomy of rural Catholic Austria and the urbanised, educated elite of Vienna generated distrust among the rural working class due to perceptions of the Austromarxist cause having deteriorated and, additionally, due to the rise of similar nationalistic political forces in Germany at the time, which had similarly pivoted the rural working-class vote against the left movements of urban centres like Berlin.[5] Owing in part to the collapse of Austromarxism in Vienna was the inaction of SDAP leadership to counteract the growing forces of the Austrian right, paralleling failures by theSDP in Germany to likewise undermine the growth of theNSDAP.[2]
The growing political gap between rural Austria and the capital was exacerbated by the radicalising influence of the Catholic Church against socialism.[5] Minimal economic opportunities for rural Austrian provinces such asSteiermark andVorarlberg to pursue industrialisation, which further perpetuated the rural-urban divide in Austrian society, can be considered a primary reason for the failure of the SDAP to penetrate the Austrian hinterland.[5] Consequently,Engelbert Dollfuss was awarded theChancellorship in 1932, and by 1934 the Austromarxist project in Vienna had been fully unravelled, the SDAP banned nationwide in Austria, and most of the party's leadership and active membership had been placed either in exile or in prison.[2]
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