The Austrian Revolution

Otto Bauer, Eric Canepa, Walter Baier

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642592160
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This is the story of the decline and fall of an empire, a region devastated by war, and a world stage fundamentally transformed by the Russian Revolution. Bauer's magisterial work — available in English for the first time in full — charts the evolution of three simultaneous, overlapping revolutionary waves: a national revolution for self-determination, which brought down imperial Austro-Hungary; a bourgeois revolution for parliamentary republics and universal suffrage; and a social revolution for workers' control, factory councils, and industrial democracy.

The brief but crowning achievement of Red Vienna, alongside Bauer's unique theorization of an "integral socialism" — an attempted synthesis of revolutionary communism and social democracy — is a vital part of the left's intellectual and historical heritage. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. Bauer tells the story of the Austrian Revolution with all the immediacy of a central participant, and all the insight of a brilliant and original theorist.

PART I

WAR AND
REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 1

THE SOUTHERN SLAVS AND THE WAR

Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia precipitated the World War. Its immediate cause was the collision of the Habsburg Empire with the aspirations to freedom and unity of the Southern Slav people.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the Southern Slav bourgeoisie developed from Southern Slav peasant tribes. Under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, these tribes struggled against the foreign domination and national fragmentation that were features of feudalism in Yugoslavia. This struggle was the bourgeois revolution of the Yugoslavs; its goal was the liquidation of the feudal relations of domination on Southern Slav soil; and this national revolution of the Yugoslavs was the war’s point of departure. It ushered in the national revolution that brought down the Habsburg Monarchy.

Already in the ninth century the Slovenes—the northwestern tribe of the Southern Slav people—had succumbed to German domination. The Slav peasants in all of Slovenia became bound to German landlords through corvée and interest payments. The manor was German, while the peasant village was Slovene. German landlords were followed by German burghers who founded towns in Wend regions; the towns were German but the villages remained Wendish.^a Class and national divides coincided here. In the nineteenth century the Carniolan poet France Pešeren still complained:

As a rule German is spoken in this country by the lords and ladies, who issue orders; And Slovenian by those who are in the servant class.

For a millennium the Slovene language was a mere peasant vernacular and the Slovene people a nation without a history. A Slovene school system could not emerge because schools were only for the sons of German landlords and burghers, not for Slav farmers. A Slovene literature could not develop, for who would want to write in a language that only ignorant, illiterate peasants spoke? When, in the turbulent days of the Reformation, Protestant preachers tried to preach the Gospel to peasants, one of them, Primož Trubar, observed that “there was not a single letter or register, still less a book, written in our Wendish language, because it was thought so rude and barbaric that it could be neither written nor read.” Trubar and Juri Dalmatin, who translated the Bible into the Slavic peasant language, had to borrow hundreds of words from foreign languages since Slovenian only had designations for concepts relevant to peasant life. The bloody Habsburg Counter-Reformation put a swift end to these first attempts to create a Slovene literary language; Trubar’s heretical writings were burned, and for two more centuries the Slovene language again disappeared from literature.

And just as the Slovene peasants had no part in any aspect of higher cultural life for a thousand years, so they also had no part in any aspect of state life; only the landlord class, not the peasants, were participants in the life of the state. With subjection to the German landlords, the Slovene peasants fell under the dominion of the German Duchy of Carantania; along with the lands into which the Duchy was divided, it became part of German-Austria. It was through the seignories in which the Slovene peasants labored for the German feudal lords that the political domination of German-Austria was established over the Slovene tribe.

Five hundred years after this destiny befell the northwestern branch of the Yugoslav people, the same happened to the southeastern branch. After the defeat at Kosovo (1389), the Serb princes became vassals of Turkish magnates; after the catastrophe of Varna (1444) Serb lands became Turkish provinces. The Serb people became a subjugated, exploited rayah.^b The towns became Turkish castles, with only the villages remaining Serb, and Turkish sipahis^c and Greek priests ruled over the Serb peasants. Only in Bosnia did a part of the national nobility assert itself; but it could assert its possession and title only at the cost of accepting Islam and thus becoming part of the ruling Ottoman system. And so the Serb people also fell under foreign domination.

Only at the center of the Southern Slav area of settlement, in Croatia, could a national political system assert itself. Only there did the people live under the dominion of a national rather than foreign nobility. But there, too, fierce clashes resulted in the continual loss of pieces of national independence. Threatened by the Turks, the Triune Kingdom of Croatia was not in a position to protect Dalmatia from the Venetians, and so this Slav country came under foreign Italian domination. Croatia itself, however, at first threw the Turkish menace into the lap of the Habsburgs. Then, after the Turks had been driven back, the Croatian nobility, whose privileges were threatened by Habsburg absolutism, threw itself into the arms of Hungary in order to defend its feudal rights by uniting with the more powerful Magyar nobility, even at the price of state independence. In this way, between the Turks and Venetians, between Austria and Hungary, the Croatian nobility lost national and state independence. Many noble families were eradicated in the Ottoman Wars. Others ended on Austrian gallows during the Kuruc Wars. German, Magyar, and Italian feudal lords inherited the latifundia of the Croatian magnates. The rest of the Croatian high nobility succumbed to the powerful force of attraction of Viennese court customs; while Latin was the lingua franca of the Sabor^d and the official language of the authorities, the educated nobility used German or Italian in daily life. Only the uneducated peasant nobility, the Zwetschkenjunker,^e still spoke Croatian. The Croatian nobility, however, relinquished Croatia’s special state rights and united with the Magyar nobility as una eademque nobilitas^f to defy Habsburg absolutism: When Joseph II abolished serfdom in Hungary and Croatia, the Croatian Sabor transferred its fiscal and military conscription authority to the Hungarian parliament, hoping the latter would protect it against the emancipation of the peasants. And so Croatia became a mere territory affiliated with Hungary, and the Croatian nobility then was no longer a vehicle for national culture and national independence.

Feudalism thus left the Yugoslav peoples a terrible legacy; their territory was divided by Austria, Hungary, Venice, and Turkey. Over the local Slav serfs there were German lords in Slovenia, Italian lords in Dalmatia, Magyar ones in the Banat^g and Backa, Turkish sipahis in Serbia, and Muslim beys^h in Bosnia. Everywhere the Yugoslavs became a peasantry without a history, dependent tenants of foreign lords; even in Croatia the national nobility was estranged from its ethnicity. The only bearer of national life was the peasant. But the horizon of the poor uneducated peasant hardly extended beyond the boundaries of the manor. The Wendish peasants of Carinthia regarded the Carniolans as foreigners, and the Catholic peasants in Croatia hated their Greek Orthodox neighbors as infidels. There was no consciousness of the national commonality of Yugoslav peoples. It took a long succession of violent upheavals to lead the Yugoslav people up from this condition of servitude, fragmentation, and lack of history.

The war that Joseph II and Catherine II launched in 1788 against Turkey was the turning point in Serbian history. Austria now called the Serb rayah into battle against Turkish domination. This call found its strongest echo in the small split-off from the Serb people that had settled in Hungary a century earlier under the leadership of the fugitive patriarch of Ipek. Many of the Serb colonists earned their living from commerce, as uprooted, transplanted peoples are wont to do; and in this way a mercantile Serb bourgeoisie developed, some of whose sons found their way to German universities and there fell under the influence of eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature, experiencing the shift from Church Latin to German that was occurring at the time within the sciences. At this point lively movement began to occur among Hungarian Serbs. Schools and church communities were founded: Dositej Obradović and Vuk Karadžić substituted the Church Slavonic school language with the vernacular, “just as it is spoken in the market place and is sung in round dances,” and in so doing created the new Serbian written language and the beginnings of Serbian literature. However, at the same time the clash of weapons also roused the rayah on the other bank of the Sava. Irregular Serb voluntary corps fought under Austrian command against the Turks. And if Austria surrendered the Serb rayah to the Turks once again, as the terrifying news about the beginnings of the Great French Revolution drew the attention of the Viennese Court toward the west, the military feats in which they had just been involved strongly reinforced the self-confidence of Serbs. “What have you made of our rayah?” the Turks then complained.

The war had revealed the weakness of the Turkish feudal state in the face of modern absolutism. Realizing this, Sultan Selim III attempted a reform of the military and the political system on the European model. The Janissaries rose up against these attempted reforms. The governor of the Belgrade Pashalik, Hadji Mustafa Pasha, even mobilized the Serb peasants against the rebellious Dahia.ⁱ Thus in 1804 the Serbs revolted, led by Kara Djordje. But as soon as they subdued the Dahia the rebelling rayah aimed its weapons against Turkish domination altogether. This was the beginning of the great liberation struggle of the Serb peasants against Turkish feudalism. Promptly instrumentalized by Russia and Austria, and just as promptly betrayed by the Tsar and the Emperor, at bottom the Serb peasants were fighting for their freedom. The first uprising brought autonomy to the Serbs: the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) established state autonomy and the Treaty of San Stefano (1878) the recognition of independence from Turkey. And with the growth of the state the nation emerged; the state created the Serbian school system and the Serbian bureaucracy whose sons brought back European ideas from foreign universities. Slowly and gradually a bourgeoisie began to separate from the peasantry and became the vehicle of the emerging national culture. And so in the course of a century a nation grew out of the rayah.

What the 1788 Ottoman War was for the Serbs, the War of the Fifth Coalition in 1809 was for Croatia. The Kingdom of Illyria, founded by Napoleon, united Slovenia, Croatia, and Dalmatia for the first time into a state; it liberated the peasants from corvée and patrimonial jurisdiction; it introduced Slovenian as the language of primary schools. To be sure, by 1813 Austria reestablished the old regime; however, once the impulse was there its effect continued. Croatian students in the universities of Vienna and Pest now dreamt of “Illyrian” freedom, of the national unity of all Southern Slav peoples. The national liberation struggles of Germans and Italians, of Poles and Magyars, were their models. They eagerly took up the then nascent Slavonic Studies. This was at first only a movement of a few young enthusiasts, but it soon gained historical significance. Ljudevit Gaj, the first to have established a standard spelling for Croatian, was the leader of the Illyrian movement; striving for the national unity of the three “Illyrian” peoples, he based his orthography on the same Shtokavian dialect from which Vuk Karadžić had formed the Serbian literary language. Thus, Croats and Serbs arrived at a common written language. And this literary movement became a historically effective force when the Croatian nobility began to embrace it.

After the 1830 July Revolution in France, the struggle of Hungary’s parliament against the Viennese Court assumed a revolutionary character. The reactionary Croat nobility came into conflict with the Magyar reform movement, putting up resistance when the Hungarian parliament wanted to impose equal rights for Protestants in Croatia, too. It was furious when demands to abolish the peonage of the peasants began to be raised in Pressburg^j and Pest. When Hungary replaced official Latin with Hungarian, the Sabor resisted its introduction into Croatia. In this case it availed itself of the Illyrian cultural movement and introduced Croatian as the state language. Threatened by revolutionary Hungary, the Viennese Court took the side of the Croatians. In 1848, when Hungary’s revolutionary movement led to full-fledged revolution, Jellacic’s Croatian contingent subdued revolutionary Hungary and revolutionary Vienna for the Habsburgs, while at the same time the Serbs of the Banat struck at the Hungarian Revolution from behind. But the Yugoslavs soon became acquainted with the “gratitude of the House of Austria.” To be sure, triumphant absolutism severed Croatia and Serbo-Hungarian Vojvodina^k from Hungary, only to subject them to the same brutal tyranny to which Hungary was subjected. And after 1859 and 1866, the Habsburgs concluded their peace with the Magyar nobility at the expense of the Southern Slavs. Vojvodina was once again handed over to Hungary. Dalmatia remained in Austria, and it was refused annexation to Croatia, while the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was imposed on Croatia itself. The vestige of its old constitutional independence, which the compromise allowed Croatia, became a mere semblance. The bans^l were appointed by the Hungarian government. The state parliament was based on elections in which, thanks to the narrowly configured census suffrage, officials made up the majority of voters; since the right to vote had to be exercised publicly, no official could dare vote against the government. As a result, the bans appointed by the Hungarian government could put together the state parliament as they pleased. In essence, Croatia became a Magyar pashalik ruled with brutal force and cynical corruption. The twin hatred for the Viennese Court, which had betrayed it after 1848, and the Magyar ruling class, which had oppressed it since 1868, filled the soul of the Croatian people.

With this twin hatred, the Croats grew into a modern nation. However much Magyar foreign domination aimed at disadvantaging the country, its nineteenth-century economic development nevertheless broadened the urban bourgeoisie. However small the vestige of constitutional independence the Compromise of 1867 wanted to leave, this nevertheless ensured the country a national school system up to the university and academy levels. And so here too a national bourgeoisie arose as a bearer of national culture. In political life after 1868 the bourgeoisie gradually substituted the nobility.

However, the Croats did not feel they were a tribe of a unified Southern Slav people but rather a distinctive nation. The students of the 1830s had dreamt of Illyrian unity; but when the nobility seized leadership of the national movement for themselves, the battle cry was no longer the natural right of “Illyrians” to unity and freedom but rather the historic right of Croatia to have a constitutional state in which neither Serbs nor Slovenes had a part. The students influenced by the European Enlightenment may have regarded the distance between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs to be no greater than that between Protestant and Catholic Germans; but when the Croat petty bourgeoisie and peasants entered the political arena led by the clergy, they brought with them their hatred of the Serb schismatics. Magyar dominion exploited this conflict and exacerbated it by supporting the Serbs “with no history” against the Croats who were demanding their historic right.

The idea of Yugoslav unity was still more alien to the Slovenes than to the mass of Croats. The Serbs had won their state in a revolutionary assault. In Croatia, national evolution could cling to the vestige of past state independence. The Slovenes had no state, no cities, and no bourgeoisie. To be sure, Austrian primary schools in the nineteenth century here too made a national literature possible by teaching the peasants and petty bourgeoisie to read. But literature—written not for the intelligentsia but for peasants—had to use the peasant vernacular if it was to find readers. It was on this that Illyrianism’s attempt to win the Slovenes, too, to the common Serbo-Croatian literary language foundered, despite the close relationship between Slovenes and Croats; the Slovenes created their own literary language out of the Carniolan peasant vernacular. But the literature this small and poor people could produce had to be meager; and at first its political history also appeared meager. Only with gradual democratization could the Slovene petty bourgeoisie and peasants create the germ cells of national self-rule; after the granting of suffrage in 1882 to the “five-gulden men,”^m the Slovene petty bourgeoisie conquered the town council of Laibach,ⁿ and the Slovene peasants one year later the Carniolan state parliament, which had up to then still been dominated by the big German landowners. Only through terribly arduous struggles could this small people wrest the minimal requisites for cultural life from the German-Austrian bourgeoisie, which, angry and insulted by the impertinence of Slovenes forcing it to grant some very few parallel classes in a German Gymnasium, overthrew a government in 1893.

But however great the impediments were against which all branches of the Southern Slav people had to push forward, the result of the whole nineteenth-century development was still the development everywhere— in Serbia as in Croatia, in Dalmatia and in Slovenia—of a national bourgeoisie that had assumed intellectual leadership of the Yugoslav peoples and through schools, the press, and organizations had also suffused the petty bourgeoisie and peasant masses with national consciousness. For this national consciousness the degrading status to which the Yugoslav people were still consigned at the beginning of the twentieth century had to be intolerable.

As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of the Yugoslav people lived under foreign domination. In Old Serbia and Macedonia the Turks still ruled; there Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks fought against one another and against Turkish rule in wild guerril...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Otto Bauer and Austro-Marxism
• Preface
• Part I: War and Revolution
• Part II: The Overthrow
• Part III: The Hegemony of the Working Class
• Part IV: The Equilibrium of Class Forces
• Part V: The Restoration of the Bourgeoisie
• Works Consulted by Bauer
• Glossary
• Index of Persons
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover