Austro-Marxism: Texts Translated and Edited by Tom Bottomore & Patrick Goode

316 Pages·1978·5.348 MB·English

by  T.B. Bottomore

AUSTRO-MARXISM

A U S T R O - M A R X I S M
Texts translated and edited by
T om Bottomore and Patrick G oode
with an Introduction by
T om Bottomore
1978
CLAR EN D O N PRESS • OXFORD
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp
OXFORD LONDON GLASGOW NEW YORK
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IBADAN NAIROBI DAR BS SALAAM LUSAKA
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English translation of Karl Renner's The Institutions of Private Late
and their Social Functions (£) Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. 7949
English translation of all other excerpts in this volume and Selection
© Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode 1978
Introduction © Tom Bottomore 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior permission of Oxford University Press
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Au8tro-Marxi8m.
I. Communism—Addresses, essays, lectures
I. Bottomore, Thomas Burton II. Goode,
Patrick
335.4'o8 HX15 77-30292
ISBN 0-19-827229-4
ISBN 0-19-827230-8 Pbk.
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.,
London, Fakenham and Reading
Preface & Acknowledgements
The texts translated in this volume are intended to provide an
introduction to the work of an important and influential group
of Marxist thinkers whose writings are still little known in the
English-speaking world and are greatly neglected elsewhere.
With the exception of Karl Renner's study of law the major
books of the Austro-Marxists have not been published in
English, and there has been no comprehensive account of
their work as a whole. My introduction to the present volume
will, I hope, remedy this deficiency in some degree by pre­
senting a brief account of the context and scope of their
achievements, both intellectual and political.
The initial translations were made by Patrick Goode, and
they were then revised by both editors. Patrick Goode also
contributed most of the editorial footnotes and compiled the
bibliography. In editing the translated texts we excluded some
passages, and occasional footnotes, which referred to current
events and policies, or quoted writings, that would be of rela­
tively little interest to the present-day reader. These omissions
in the text are indicated by a three-point ellipses (...). Edi­
torial footnotes are distinguished from those of the authors
by the sign [Eds.].
I am grateful to a number of people for access to material
used in my introduction, and for comments on early versions
of it. In particular, I should like to thank Professor Ernst
Herlitzka, Director of the Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiter­
bewegung (Vienna) and Dr. Hans Schroth, Librarian of the
Verein, for giving me access to material in their archives and
permitting me to quote from it. Professor Marie Jahoda and
Dr. Peter Milford were kind enough to comment on some
parts of the introduction and I have benefited from their
suggestions, as well as from those that were made by Patrick
Goode.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the University
of Sussex for grants from the Arts Research Fund which
enabled me to visit Vienna on two occasions.
VI PREFACE
Copyright permission for the publication of these trans­
lations has been given by Dr. Peter Milford for the excerpts
from Rudolf Hilferding’s writings, and by Dr. Franz
Hentschel, Director of the Verlagsanstalt ‘Vorwärts’ AG
(Vienna) for the other texts. In one case, the extract from The
Institutions of Private Law and Their Social Functions by Karl
Renner, trans. A. Schwarzchild, Routledge & Kegan Paul
Ltd., London, 1976. Reprinted by permission of the
Publishers.
T om B o t t o m o r e
Contents
INTRODUCTION i
I. GENERAL VIEW OF
AUSTRO-MARXISM 45
O tto B auer What is Austro-Marxism ?
O tto B auer Max Adler: A Contribution to the
History of Austro-Marxism
Editorial Introduction to the first issue of Der
Kampf
II. THE THEORY AND METHOD OF
MARXISM 57
M ax A dler The Sociological Meaning of
Marx's Thought
M ax A dler The Relation of Marxism to
Classical German Philosophy
M ax A dler A Critique of Othmar Spann’s
Sociology
M ax A dler Causality and Teleology
O tto B auer Marxism and Ethics
R u d olf H ilfer d in g The Subjectivist
Outlook in Economics
K arl R enner Problems of Marxism
III. NATIONALITIES, NATIONALISM,
AND IMPERIALISM 102
O tto B auer The Concept of the ‘Nation’
O tto B auer Socialism and the Principle of
Nationality
K arl R enner The Development of the
National Idea
M ax A dler The Ideology of the World War
IV. REVOLUTION AND
COUNTER-REVOLUTION 136
M ax A dler The Sociology of Revolution
O tto B auer Political and Social Revolution
O tto B auer T wo Revolutions
viii CONTENTS
O tto B auer Problems of the Austrian
Revolution
O tto B auer Fascism
V. DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP 187
K arl R enner Democracy and the Council
System
O tto B auer The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
VI. THE DEVELOPMENT OF
CAPITALISM, SOCIAL CLASSES,
AND CLASS CONFLICT 204
R u d olf H ilfer d in g The Capitalist
Monopolies and the Banks
O tto B auer The World View of Organized
Capitalism
M ax A dler Metamorphosis of the Working
Class ?
K arl R enner The Service Class
VII. IDEOLOGY AND CULTURE 253
M ax A dler Ideology as Appearance
M ax A dler The Cultural Aims of Socialism
K arl R enner The Development of the Law
W ilh elm H au sen stein The Social and
Political Context of Art
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE PRINCIPAL
AUSTRO-MARXISTS 286
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 292
INDEX 3OI
Introduction
i. What is Austro-Marxism ?
The term ‘Austro-Marxism’ was apparently coined by an
American socialist, Louis Boudin, a few years before the First
World War,1 to describe a group of young Marxist thinkers in
Vienna—the most prominent among them being Max Adler,
Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, and Karl Renner—who were
also active in the Austrian socialist movement. Through their
books, their journals, and their political activities, they had a
considerable influence upon European socialism in the first
two decades of the twentieth century, as critics of ‘revisionism’
in German Social Democracy and exponents of a form of
Marxism which could claim to be a rigorous and undogmatic
science of society while retaining its revolutionary character.
Later, after the rise of Bolshevism, they occupied a position,
both intellectually and politically, between the increasingly
reformist Social Democratic parties and the newly established
Communist parties; a position that was symbolized by Fried­
rich Adler’s role in the creation of the short-lived ‘Second-
and-a-half’ International.2 But in the postwar period, after
1 See the article by Otto Bauer, pp. 45-8 below. Boudin published, in 1907, a
book entitled The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (reprinted 1967) in which he
defended Marx’s theory against the criticisms formulated by Böhm-Bawerk, Bern­
stein, and others. His book was translated into German, and it became more widely
known in Europe than in the U.S.A., where it attracted little attention. A few years
later Boudin met some of the Austro-Marxists in Europe, and it was presumably at
this time that he began to refer to them by this name. After the First World War,
with the decline of the American Socialist party, Boudin ceased to be active in party
politics, but he continued to write on Marxism and socialism, and he maintained his
association with the Austro-Marxists. Much later indeed, after the Second World
War, he corresponded quite extensively with Friedrich Adler about a book he hoped
to complete on the development of Marxism during the past century; and in one
letter (28 February 1951) he refers nostalgically to \.. what I still believe to have
been our Golden Age, the unforgettable period of the first decade of this century’.
In the same letter he mentions Otto Bauer’s article and his own coinage of the term
‘Austro-Marxism’.
2 See Julius Braunthal, History of the International, vol. ii (1967), pp. 230-6,
264-5. This nickname was bestowed upon it by representatives of the Third Inter­
national. It was formed at a conference in Vienna in February 1921 as the Inter-
2 AUSTRO-MARXISM
the defeat and dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire, the
influence of Austro-Marxism in the European socialist move­
ment declined, and although it remained a powerful force in
Austria until 1934 its particular contribution to international
Marxist thought was overshadowed by new intellectual and
political trends, and gradually came to be largely forgotten.
This oblivion is quite undeserved, for the Austro-Marxists
made a notable contribution to the development of Marxist
social science, and their analyses of the changes in twentieth-
century capitalism, as well as their studies of Marxism as a
method of social inquiry, retain much of their value today.
The first important fact to be noted about their work is that it
was the product of a distinctive ‘school’ of thought. Most
other eminent Marxist thinkers of this century either contri­
buted an individual reinterpretation of Marxism, in the man­
ner of Sorel, Gramsci, or Lukâcs, or formulated mainly the
doctrines of new political movements, as did Lenin, Trotsky,
and Mao Tse-Tung. But the Austro-Marxists elaborated, so
to speak, a scientific programme, a systematic framewoik of
ideas within which intellectual inquiry—and more parti­
cularly, social research—could be carried on in a co-ordinated
way by a group of thinkers.
From this aspect their work is broadly comparable with
that of the school which developed around the Frankfurt
Institute of Social Research;3 but the concerns of the two
schools were very different, and they might be said indeed to
represent two extreme and contradictory forms of Marxist
thought. In the early years of the Frankfurt Institute some of
its associates had a strong interest in sociological, psycho­
logical, and historical research, encouraged by the first
Director of the Institute, Carl Grünbeig (who himself had
close relations with the Austro-Marxists) ;4 but when he was
succeeded by Max Horkheimer the main emphasis came to be
3 See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination : The Frankfurt Institute of Social
Research, 1923-1950 (1973).
4 See below, pp. 9—10.
national Working Union of Socialist Parties with the aim, in Friedrich Adler's
words, of trying ‘to organize the International of the future’, and dissolved again,
after failing to establish co-operation with the Third International, in May 1923
when a congress of Socialist parties decided to create the Labour and Socialist
International.