Austro-Marxist Interpretation of Fascism

Abstract

In the period prior to the second world war, the Austrian social-democrats made a greater effort than other reformist labour movements to fit their own particular experiences and 'the actions which had been forced upon them into the [Marxist] system and to construct a science for their domestic use.'1 In certain respects, AustroMarxism, the result of these efforts, deserves for all its weaknesses to be set alongside the contemporaneous achievements of psychoanalysis, twelve-tone music and the 'Vienna School' of jurisprudential positivism. As a unified theoretical 'school', AustroMarxism was created in 1906 by Max Adler (1877-1937), Otto Bauer (1882-1938), Rudolf Hilferding.(1877-1941), Karl Renner (1870-1950) and a few others, and although it disintegrated under the impact of the first world war and the subsequent revolutionary processes, it continued to exert considerable, even international, influence as a movement of the socialist centre. Its members, despite the feuds they fought among themselves within the bosom of the Social Democratic Party organization feuds which, however, never went so far as to split that organization irrevocably continued to hold certain fundamental points of theory in common. And for a long time, both in their theory and their practice, they occupied a middle position somewhere between Bolshevism and Reformism.2 This essay sets out to examine how Austro-Marxism's leading representatives responded intellectually, at different periods, to the rise of fascism in all but a few European societies in the years between the two world wars. With what did the Austro-Marxists identify fascism? Into what categories did they try to fit it? To what causes and conditions did they attribute its appearance? The essay will, however, be concerned only marginally with the predictions Austro-Marxists made about the future course that fascism would take.