Less than a year after this article Austria’s Social Democratic Party would be banned, its leaders exiled, arrested, or murdered as the fascist Fatherland Front assumed their dictatorship.

‘The End of Austro-Marxism’ by Austriacus from The Militant. Vol. Vol. 6 Nos. 32 & 33. June 24 & July 1, 1933.  

The Austrian social democracy was highly esteemed even before, the war among its brother parties: for its statesman-like spirit. “Our Bebel,” a member of the German party leadership once said to Austrian friends, “our Bebel is only a cavalry colonel, but your (Victor) Adler is a Field Marshal.”

After the war, socialist Austria became even more famous. And why not? If Stalin could undertake, the building up of socialism in a single country, then the Austrian social democrats could tackle an even more complicated task, the task of building socialism in one little province, and even in a single city. They gave the new Austria “the most democratic constitution in the world” and created thereby the prerequisites for a socialization which was to be just as irresistible as it was peaceful.

And this achievement they brought about–as the highest triumph of socialist statesmanship–in unison with the Christian Socialists. But…red Vienna built cooperative houses and children’s baths, overturned the whole educational system in a fashion hair-raising for the “blacks” (the clergy) brought about other such bold changes. In short, the Austrian social democracy rose by its deeds and became the “Exemplary Party of the Second International,” and it became looked upon in the whole socialist world as if it were some miracle.

Its prominents, after they had reconstituted the Second International, the bloc from Friedrich Adler to Noske, led on the floor at all the international congresses. The teaching which its thinkers had thought up, Austro-Marxism, victoriously surpassed the narrow bounds of the homeland.

And the Austrian Social Democracy

Under such circumstances it is self-evident that today, after the German social democracy has suffered a collapse unique in the history of the labor movement in its “struggle” against the swastika, all socialists turn their eyes to Austria, the exemplary little country of socialism, where Fascism, encouraged by Hitler’s victory has just taken up the struggle for power. All socialists hearts and minds are stirred by the question: How will the Austrian social democracy stand up in this struggle? Will it not stand the test much better than the German party? Are not, looking aside from its striking qualities, the circumstances themselves auspicious for it?

The German working class was defeated because it was split, but the unity of the Austrian working’ class has never been seriously threatened by the Third International. The Communist Party of Austria has always been of negligible size, small, weak, unserious. The Austrian social democracy is proportionately bigger than any other social democracy. In addition to that, Austrian Fascism is in itself split into two hostile camps. Heimwehr Fascism, with the aid of which Dollfuss wants to cut the throat of democracy and smash the workers, does not enjoy the support of the National Socialists, but is hard pressed by competition from them. Really, in such a situation, should not the Austrian social democracy come off with flying colors?

The question is already answered. It cannot be doubted that the collapse of the German social democracy will not stand alone for long. The Austrian social democracy will soon stand just as naked by its side. It will lose the “war” against “Dollfuss the little,” has already lost it in fact. For it hasn’t begun any and won’t ever, under any circumstances, undertake one.

Its True Face

In order to understand this as the only possible, as the self-evident thing, what this Austrian social democracy, praised in all tones and admired in all languages, really is not in its own imagination, not in the imagination of its brother parties, but in actuality.

Heinrich Unger once said: Liberalism has a great future behind it. That can be said equally as well for the Austrian socialism. Its beginnings were auspicious. Under the leadership of Victor Adler the Austrian working class waged battles against the decayed Hapsburg monarchy which aroused the admiration of the old Engels. But ultimately, the Austrian state remained the victor in this struggle.

Not in open battle. It crushed its opponents gradually, and incorporated the Austrian social democracy slowly within itself. Thus arose Austro-Marxism.

If we look upon its fists and not upon its mouth, Austro-Marxism proves to be nothing else but reformism. Like every other form of reformism, it is the adaptation of the labor movement to the bourgeois state, its subordination to the bourgeois state. What distinguishes it from the other forms of reformism, what allowed it to appear for a long time as something essentially different and unique was the circumstance that it assumed the task of adapting the labor movement to a state which was going to pieces. Therein lay its extraordinary strength, that is what gave it the possibility to achieve successes to which it appeared to have no right according to the relationship of forces. The Austria in which all the national parties leaped at each other like wild beasts and daily threatened the existence of the state, was in reality the classical country of the most guarded compremism. All these state conspirators who made the mien of being so intransigent and irreconcilable were in reality mercenary, had the souls of petty shopkeepers and were masters of the vulgar compromise. They held their fists under the nose of the government so as to be able later to stretch out their empty palms before it with all the greater success.

Collusion With Hapsburg

In this state, which could not live and could not die; whose existence was a lamentable drag; which had no friend if it did not pay him in cold cash-in this decadent world, the great Austro-Marxist idea was born: that renovation and entrenchment of the Hapsburg state in return for concessions to the working class. This program looked very new, very bold. It was like a creative thought in this world of fruitless pettiness. But in reality, this grandiloquent Austro-Marxist conception was only the translation of the common garden variety reformist program–cannon fodder for voting rights into the Austrian.

Since then Austro-Marxism continually made state policies, no longer class policies. Its ideas revolved only around parliament. It emulated all the petty arts of parliamentary cretinism from the bourgeois parties. The Marxist conception that the liberation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves was smiled upon as old fashioned.

Austro-Marxist lore knows of no acting, struggling proletariat. According to it the worker does not make his history, he only experiences, suffers. And so, little by little, almost imperceptibly, the suffering working class becomes automatically triumphant, quite in line with the immanent laws of capitalism and capitalism becomes filled more and more with a socialist content. That was the secret lore of Austro-Marxism. Public opinion it blessed with the most scholarly, with the keenest argumentations for its inner thoughts and for its actions.

The war came and as its most immediate consequence, the Habsburg empire collapsed. As to Austro-Marxism, it lost the ground underneath its feet. But it did not notice this. It believed that its period of bloom had only begun. That was only natural. The domination of capitalism was heavily shaken and the bourgeoisie could not even think of rehabilitating itself by its own power. And so it transmitted the task of reconstructing economy–this is how it came to be called instead of reestablishing the capitalist regime—not to the social democracy.

And the latter went about this work with the greatest of enthusiasm, for according to its view the “reconstruction of economy” was the prerequisite and beginning of “socialization”. And bad democracy anything else but the automatic generator of socialization? Things were quite simple: If capitalism developed, the working class grew, and side by side with the working class, the social democracy would grow. Ultimately it would have to get the majority in the house of parliament and then, no obstacle would any longer stand in the way of socialization. Society would thus grow into socialism, without revolution, without blood-shed, without a dictatorship and without a reign of terror.

The Dream is Punctured, But…

But one fine day the cup overflowed. The bourgeoisie parties discovered that they could now get along even without the social democrats and took leave of their coalition brethren. But that did not rouse the social democrats from their democratic intoxication. The unfriendly attitude of the bourgeois parties only went to prove to them the correctness of the theory that the social democratic camp there arouse a contest of calculation as to the chances of the party for the conquest of parliament.

While the latter wallowed in the delights of this socialization-mathematics, the bourgeois parties accomplished a less romantic but much more effective task. They cleaned up all those conquests of the revolution which the socialists praised as irrevocable. One after the other of these conquests came under the knife, so that a short time ago a madame social democrat voiced the complaint in the National Assembly: “From the commonwealth state, which we were supposed to be building up, nothing has remained any longer”.

The bourgeoisie parties were, however, of a different opinion. They believed that there was still a great deal of “revolutionary garbage” that had to be cleaned up and that this work could not be done at all by democratic means, or at least, not as fast as they would like. Fascism raised its head and is today about to establish its own domination.

The Rise of Fascism, Unnoticed…

The oldest Fascist associations, the Heimwehren, arose as early as the days of the overthrow. Originally they were only to be border guards (therefore their name, Heimwehren equals Home Guards). But the reactionaries recognized in them, with their unfailing intuition, the possibility of playing role as self-defense organizations against the “internal enemy”. The social democrats naturally did not recognize this. As good patriots they even handed out arms to the Heinwehren. And when the Communists brought attention to the “white guard danger”, the social democrats, at that time their honeymoon with the coalition, put them off with a jest: they were sowing white mice…White Guards? Something like that could exist in backward Russia, but not in a highly civilized democratic republic; this was all the more so, because the democratic wing of the Christian Socialists, which was at that time still strong, did not have the slightest inclination for the adventure of a civil war.

“Heinwehren? What for?”, said Prelate Hauser, “I can get everything done that is necessary by agreement with Renner” (leader of the social democracy). And that was god’s own truth. Everything necessary for them could be got done in collusion with Renner. That was the pride of the social democrats and this pride allowed them to ignore the Heimwehren.

Of course, this could not go on for over, because the Heimwehren soon began to show very distinct signs of life. Here and there, they went about assassinating one worker, then another.

The Incident of July 15, 1927

After every one of these murders the Arbeiterzeitung would write: if this should happen again, then!…What was to happen “then”, was shown on July 15, 1927. On this day, when the Viennese workers, embittered over the acquittal of several Fascist labor assassins, put the Palace of Justice on fire, the social democrats thought of nothing better to do than to propose the Formation of a new coalition to the Christian Socialists!

And along this style they have continued to carry on the struggle against Fascism to this very day. The frightful aggravation of the crisis brought ever new forces to the side of Fascism. Side by side with the Heimweheren there arose National Socialism (the Hitler Brown Shirts). The unification of the workers’ enemies kept on making rapid strides of progress in spite of squabbles within their own camp. Their plans became constantly more distinct. But the social democratic party persisted in complete inactivity.

It is not even doing anything now, after Dollfuss, half encouraged and half terrified by the events in Germany, has gone about creating those advantages for the bourgeoisie which a Fascist regime has to offer to it, while at the same time protecting it from the irksome consequences which such a regime brings with it for the ruling classes.

Even Dollfuss Can Put One Over…

When Dollfuss cast aside the parliament and announced a new constitution on the basis of the Empowering Act of Wartime Economy, intending thereby to clean up the rest of the “revolutionary garbage”, they had no other resistance to offer him than their democratic oratory. Austro-Marxism stands there just as helplessly today before the advent of Fascism as the theoreticians and practitioners of reformism did before the advent of the war. It starts out with the assumption that the normal condition for capitalism is prosperity and that through increasing prosperity the class antagonisms will straightened out by the collaboration of the classes, leading up to a perfected socialism.

As to phenomena which appear to contradict this assumption it does not know even how to begin to tackle them. To the question as to what can be done about the crisis and its offspring Fascism they have as little an answer as they have to the question: how socialism will be realized in case the earth should collide with some other heavenly, body….Austro-Marxism one will hear, is not astronomy, but economics and politics. It concerns itself, in spite of the arsenals of the Republican Schutzbund (the social democratic defense organization) which Dollfuss is SO feverishly searching for, not with shooting irons and other weapons of destruction, but with elections and parliamentary negotiations. Austro-Marxism is democratic and if the others do not stick to the democratic rules of the game, then it falls into that same condition as that whimsical Austrian general, who whenever he was asked why it was that Napoleon always defeated him, called out despondently: “How can one conduct war against a man who doesn’t stick to the rules of military science?”

What can be done against Dollfuss when, going against all human and divine justice, he simply thumbs his nose at the whole democracy, the most democratic of all constitutions included? In that case only one thing is left: submission. And in actuality, the Arbeiterzeitung has repeatedly declared that its party realizes that after the overturn in Germany, a good many things will have to change also in Austria and that it is prepared to negotiate with Dollfuss about the new constitution. That means only this; the social democracy does not object if the democracy is beaten to death and interred, so long as, in consideration of propriety, the democratic ceremonial is retained. Naturally, the Arbeiterzeitung brings not only such declarations but also others, contrary to these. It threatens, mocks wails, hatches the most ridiculous plans, vacillates between hope and despair, just as befits such a condition of headlessness, into which that terrible Dollfuss has cast Austro-Marxism.

What does the social democracy still hope for? Naturally, it has no hope in its own powers, but in the intervention of the foreign countries and in the quarrels within the Fascist camp. It does not see in the dispute between the Heimweheren and Nazis a war of unification, it dos not see that it resembles a lovers’ quarrel which ends in a warm embrace. It does not see at all any more, it does not understand the world, and more it is incapable of acting and that is why it will go along the road of debasement and devitalization to the bitter end, paralyzed in mind and body like the German social democracy. The Austrian workers can expect nothing from the Exemplary Party of the Second International except disgrace and defeat.

AUSTRIACUS. (From ‘Unser Wort)

The Militant was a weekly newspaper begun by supporters of the International Left Opposition recently expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 and published in New York City. Led by James P Cannon, Max Schacthman, Martin Abern, and others, the new organization called itself the Communist League of America (Opposition) and saw itself as an outside faction of both the Communist Party and the Comintern. After 1933, the group dropped ‘Opposition’ and advocated a new party and International. When the CLA fused with AJ Muste’s American Workers Party in late 1934, the paper became the New Militant as the organ of the newly formed Workers Party of the United States.

PDF of full issue 1: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1933/jun-24-1933.pdf

PDF of full issue 2: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1933/jul-01-1933.pdf