Austromarxism

Austromarxism (also stylised as Austro-Marxism; German: Austromarxismus) was a Marxist theoretical current led by Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, Max Adler and Rudolf Hilferding, members of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria in Austria-Hungary and the First Austrian Republic, and later supported by Austrian-born revolutionary and assassin of the Imperial Minister-President Count von Stürgkh, Friedrich Adler. It is known for its theory of nationality and nationalism, and its attempt to conciliate it with socialism in the imperial context. More generally, the Austromarxists strove to achieve a synthesis between social democracy and revolutionary socialism. Uniquely, Austromarxists posited that class consciousness in the working class could be achieved more organically through the maintenance of national autonomy, in contrast to the internationalist perspective and the notion of the party vanguard popular in orthodox Marxist circles elsewhere in Europe.

Beginning in 1904, the Austromarxist group organized around magazines such as the Blätter zur Theorie und Politik des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus and the Marx-Studien. Far from being a homogeneous movement, it was a home for such different thinkers and politicians as the Neokantian Max Adler and Rudolf Hilferding. The term "Austromarxism" was first used by the American writer and Marxist theoretician Louis B. Boudin just before the first world war.

In 1921 the Austromarxists formed the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (also known as 21⁄2 International or the Vienna International), hoping to unite the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, with Friedrich Adler as the first secretary of the IWUSP. After it failed to maintain momentum as a force, the IWUSP was integrated with what remained of the Second International and formed the Labour and Socialist International (LSI).

Austromarxism, as the main political current within the SDAP, was responsible for guiding much of the municipal programs instituted by the SDAP-controlled Gemeinderat (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 subsidized healthcare, a substantial number of municipal housing projects, and expansion of the educational system in Vienna, which during this time was known colloquially as Red Vienna, and which mirrored similar projects undertaken by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Scandinavians, and the British Labour Party, all of which were fellow member parties in the Labour and Socialist International.

In 1920, the SDAP-CSP coalition in the Austrian Nationalrat broke down, resulting in the SDAP losing its parliamentary majority in the 1920 Austrian legislative election, a loss from which the SDAP would not recover. From that point forward, the CSP maintained nearly unbroken control over the Nationalrat until it was suspended by CSP politician and Bundeskanzler Engelbert Dollfuß, who then radically transformed the political landscape and government of Austria between 1933 and 1934 from a conservative parliamentary democracy into a clericofascist single-party dictatorship under the rule of the Vaterländische 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. After the takeover by the Vaterländische Front, a brief Civil War ensued that ended with a defeat for the socialists.

The Austro-Marxist principle of national personal autonomy was later adopted by various parties, among them the Bund (General Jewish Labour Union), left-wing Zionists (Hashomer Hatzair) in favour of a binational solution in Palestine, the Jewish Folkspartei between the two world wars and the Democratic 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.

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 the Bolshevik current predominant in the Third International and the concept of national identity abstracted from the territory. It was also influenced by contemporaneous intellectual trends, including the prominence of neo-Kantianism and positivism in philosophy and the emergence of marginalism in economics, and sought to confront questions around the rise of the interventionist state and the changing class-structure of early 20th century capitalist societies.