The Austro-Marxists 1890–1918

A Psychobiographical Study

Mark E. Blum

• Éditeur: The University Press of Kentucky
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185859
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: European History

In the brilliant world of Vienna at the turn of the century four men—Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, Max Adler, and Friedrich Adler—sought to develop political and economic resolutions to the racial and cultural tensions that were beginning to strain the bonds of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this highly original study of these Austro-Marxists, Mark E. Blum uses the insights of depth psychology to trace the roots of their political philosophy in their family and social backgrounds. The Austro-Marxists 1890–1918 is the first book to offer a systematic examination of the thought and milieu of these four thinkers. The only major work on the subject in English, it is a significant contribution to the history of European socialism and, in particular, to the development of Marxist thought outside Russia.

I

1890-1914

We all know that our actual life is more or less a deformation of our potential life . . . the task is for one to test his actual life within his given situation against what his life could be. As a biographer, this allows us to test the degree of integrity the actual life has.

—José Ortega y Gasset

1

The Austro-Marxist Idea

The Austro-Marxists did not represent a “school of thought.”¹ They were separate thinkers who shared membership in the Social Democratic party but were a generation younger than its founders, lived in or were closely associated with life in Vienna in the quarter century before World War I, and contributed significant theoretical and practical analyses of the many social issues that concerned the party.² Although each man adhered to such Marxist concepts as the dialectic in history, class conflict, and the alienation of the worker from the value of his labor, each based his thinking on different philosophical positions, and so treated these concepts in different ways.

Even when the Austro-Marxists seemed to share common ideas, as when Otto Bauer used Karl Renner’s notion of “personality” as a basis for national identity, Bauer’s transformation of the concept created a distance between the men. Renner was essentially a man of “common sense” for whom materialism was self-evident. He preferred John Stuart Mill to Hegel, so although he saw the importance of ideas in influencing history, he approached social reality as a reformist within a stable world; he did not see the world as a place of dialectical change based upon laws of social transformation. Bauer, on the other hand, saw in every living thing and social institution a competitive striving for survival; his thought was close to Social Darwinism, and he preferred Marxism, perhaps because of the class struggle and the human values associated with it. Bauer believed that the dialectic in history was a law that had its own reality in the material world and was not dependent upon the translation of this reality in human consciousness; the numbers that made up each social class, and their relative strength within the social fabric, determined the movement of history. His quantitative view of how classes transformed history, though never clearly drawn, indirectly reflected his understanding of biological competition and natural selection.

Max Adler was a neo-Kantian, who brought his analysis of human consciousness to every historical event or social issue. Among the Austro-Marxists, he came perhaps the nearest to Marx’s Hegelian notion of a dialectic movement of events based upon human motivation and thought, guided by social structures created by certain orientations of human idea and value. Renner’s study of legal norms in various periods of Western culture could have helped Adler for it demonstrated the interaction between social conditions, laws based upon these conditions, and human values, as well as the change in these relationships over time. Renner, however, saw these interactions and changes from a Lockean viewpoint, in which a gradual emendation and accretion of ideas could transform society, not as the result of a radical altering of consciousness and social structures to correspond more truly to the social being of individuals, as Max Adler’s amalgam of Kant and Marx implied.

Otto Bauer was attracted to the radical implications of Adler’s neo-Kantian Marxism as a young man but rejected it as a “metaphysical” diversion, favoring a natural law of the environment over one of the mind. Friedrich Adler shared Max Adler’s certainty that an interaction of human consciousness and the material world created a dynamic, which was the foundation for individual and group movement in history. Friedrich Adler, however, studied the mind as an adherent of the physicist-epistemologist Ernst Mach, who denied that the Kantian a priori categories of consciousness existed and for whom absolute laws in thinking, science, or social planning were anathema. Mach’s relativism was based on his view that because material being created and conditioned consciousness, every new historical ordering of environment and society required new measures and values to enable the human society to correspond and to cope with what existed. The relativism had radical implications, for society could be transformed every generation if the changes met reality. The material determinism of Mach’s view was also attractive to Friedrich Adler because it enabled dialectical materialism to find justification in the natural sciences. Neither Renner, Bauer, nor Max Adler could accept the denial of enduring measures or laws of human and societal development.

There was a second major reason why the Austro-Marxists did not represent a school of thought besides their diverse orientations to Marx, nature, and culture. An authentic school of thought shares a body of clearly defined concepts, which it applies as interpretive and explanatory mechanisms in treating the realities with which it deals. A school of thought is a body of ideas that can be a medium and a guide for later thinkers and remains valid over time. The ideas of the Austro-Marxists, with a few exceptions such as Renner’s study of legal norms, were time-bound because they stopped short of the thorough, empirical grounding that would have clarified their operational definition and allowed their testing in experience to demonstrate their validity and reliability. Nevertheless, the ideas of the Austro-Marxists stimulated even when they failed to solve; and although the pressures of these men’s milieu and personality needs curtailed the clarification necessary to make their ideas survive over generations, they still can be applied to present problems.

Intellectuals in contemporary Europe have looked to the Austro-Marxists for insight into theoretical and practical questions of integrating socialism and democracy. Young socialists and Eurocommunists such as Detlev Albers, Josef Hindels, and Lucio Radice, are attracted especially to Otto Bauer’s thought.³ Among the ideas considered relevant for contemporary concerns are Bauer’s post–World War I views that social revolution should be stimulated among the working classes in all countries and that workers should be aided in cooperation across national boundaries, whether the nations are communist, socialist, or capitalist.⁴ We will see that this notion was rooted in Bauer’s prewar view of the fundamental, evolutionary nature of the class struggle. Only a socialist who experienced the multinational issues of Austria before World War I could appreciate the need for a broader base of cooperation than nation and could perhaps intuit an avenue of solution. Other contemporaries have turned to Max Adler as a source for the critical study of consciousness that may shed light upon the forms social institutions assume or might assume given the nature of social intelligence.⁵ The Eurocommunists and social democrats of modern Europe have found a rich source among the Austro-Marxists for approaching the problems of unifying the European community in a social democratic polity, but much original thinking is necessary to complete the Austro-Marxist perspectives.

The appearance of unity among the Austro-Marxists, noted by historians such as Raimund Loew, was created by their common concerns, which bridged philosophical differences, enabling them to cooperate in practical projects for common ends. They were members of a political party that had an articulated mission of social change—the creation of a socialized, democratic state. As such, they considered themselves intellectual leaders with the common responsibility to be “vanguards of the proletariat,” educating the masses in the scientific criticism that would enable them to accept the Marxist view and prepare them to participate in the tasks of social change. The Austro-Marxists collaborated in developing educational programs for workers and students, though a close look at the curriculum and pedagogy shows that their personal differences carried into all these activities. The necessity to win political power in Austria led to cooperation among the Austro-Marxists within the tactical decisions of everyday Austrian Social Democratic policy, including their support of socialist participation in the Austrian parliament. The radical philosophy of Max Adler and the integral role of class struggle in the thinking of Otto Bauer strained their cooperation with the bourgeois political parties, but the weight of the pacifistic, civilized norms of Viennese culture dominated the thinking of both men; they joined their fellows in the maintenance of a unified political program that was much more evolutionary than revolutionary, reflecting, as Vincent J. Knapp has indicated, more a Lassallean democratic socialism than a Marxist socialism. Before World War I the Austro-Marxists were prone to follow the lead of Victor Adler and the other party fathers in matters of practical policy; after the war some of the more radical implications of Marxist social theory were promoted by Max Adler and Otto Bauer, even though the prewar norms of compromise and vacillation still accompanied these trends.⁶ On the nationality question the Austro-Marxists joined the majority thinking in their party, which favored the hegemony of German culture within a multinational Austria, in short, the system that had existed for centuries. There was a sound economic reason for continuation of a state that included territories in which other nationalities were the majority of the population; the truncated German Austria after World War I demonstrated their wisdom in seeking to maintain a larger, more economically varied territory. In 1897 the Austrian Social Democratic party had created a federal structure for its organization in an effort to appease the separatist aspirations of other Austrian nationals within the party. Its state policy was similar but did not emanate from a sense of equality; rather, it was a compromise all the German-Austrians agreed upon in order to preserve the state as it was.

Every period of culture inherits a particular set of problems and a momentum in social behavior from its antecedents. This inheritance affects what individuals in that society come to consider as valid purposes, as well as how they choose to pursue those purposes. Although the Austro-Marxist inheritance contained many biases and cultural weaknesses, it included a respect for science and the historical breadth and depth of European humanism. The Austro-Marxists wished to modify society, but even more vital for them was the completion of a scientific basis to serve that change. Their interest in the historical development of ideas and in epistemology reflects the value their culture placed on mental experience and thought; conversely, it indicates the lack of reinforcement the culture gave to change in the material facts of the environment. The Austro-Marxists, and Austrian Social Democrats, ascribed to Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach, that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”;⁷ yet they realized that scientific study of the problems of life in society in many dimensions was needed to prepare a ground for thorough, effective action. Their treatment of ideas as entities to be studied, rather than too quickly applied, did not reduce them to ineffectual social agents.

Karl Marx, whose thought grew in a time and place when western European culture reinforced material change in social, economic, and political conditions, never completed an adequate epistemology to support his ideas of praxis, dialectical materialism, or alienation; his writings on the role of consciousness and language in cultural activity are more suggestive than demonstrative. Moreover, he did not develop evidential studies that clearly demonstrated his general theory of dialectical development of social-cultural institutions in history, although his work on capital was a model for such studies. One man cannot transform society by himself. Marx’s seminal ideas awaited the work of social theorists such as the Austro-Marxists, who could bring facts to light through investigations of law, politics, industries, art, education, and so forth, which validated and amplified the constructs Marx had bequeathed to his Nachwuchs.

The full development of an idea in its meanings and applications requires generations. An idea provides the what, why, how, where, and when of what it comprehends; it provides the direction of the evidence that will substantiate it and suggests methods to pursue its validation in culture. One generation may work at articulating the broad or environmental implications of an idea; a second generation may devote its thought to methods of proof; a third generation may dedicate itself to applying the idea as a change agent in culture.⁸ The Austro-Marxists were an ideal generation to complete the establishment of proofs for Marxist thought. They had inherited a stable if oppressive society; their conative and cognitive education proceeded by reasoned steps. They were not Marxist revisionists, for unlike Bernstein they did not see Marx’s ideas as inadequate for modern society but rather as needing full development. The problems of their generation were dictated by the comprehensive scientific and social paradigms of their forebears, which carved out a universe of meaning that awaited detailed proofs and social implementation.

The strongest element of the Austro-Marxist set of ideas was its connection to past thought. Their writings always had a relational explicitness that linked their ideas to cultural predecessors. Max Adler’s study of pioneers in socialist thought, Wegweiser. Studien zur Geistesgeschichte des Sozialismus (1914), remains a readable and informative source of intellectual history. Relational thought has positive and negative implications in the development and transmission of effective ideas, and the Austro-Marxists exemplified both. When one stresses relational thought, he can have a healthy counterpoint with the past or present thinker, developing another’s thought in the light of his own ideas and thus broadening the context of argument. He can use the other’s evidence and argument to legitimize his own. Such a habit of mind breeds an evolutionary attitude toward one’s social environment; because the main idea one treats has existed over time, the world in which the idea was engendered is respected. The negative elements of relational thinking enter with this respect for past thought. When a thinker adheres to the principal definitions and implications of a past thinker, he may consider himself part of a family, for the secure meaning provided by an accepted thinker in a past generation, particularly if he has created a school of followers, can be comforting. The genealogy of fellow thinkers allows the same easy access and support in idea that a family tradition secures. The Austro-Marxists tended to devote an inordinate amount of energy to what Nietzsche condemned as Epigonentum, a historicity of thought that subtly negated the creation of new ideas. Evolution often requires a revolutionary short-term action, as Freud demonstrated in his relation to medical psychiatry. Leon Trotsky avoided the Austro-Marxists while he lived in Vienna before World War I because he sensed that their awe in the face of their cultural fathers would rule them out as revolutionaries.⁹ Nevertheless, relational thought provides one’s contemporaries, as well as intellectual historians, with a coherent network of ideas and sources with which to assimilate a statement. The Austrian-German intellectual, as a rule, promoted cultural evolution through the care he took in providing a well-annotated guide for all those interested in continuing study or practice in the ideas and institutions he celebrated. Max Adler’s Wegweiser, Karl Renner’s Staat und Nation (1899), Otto Bauer’s Die Nationalitaetenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (1907), and Friedrich Adler’s Ernst Machs Ueberwindung des mechanischen Materialismus (1918), each a major work of the author, are excellent histories of ideas.

The Austro-Marxists were not untouched by the intellectual current of “subjectivity,” which Europe cultivated between 1890 and World War I. The subjective value of human thought and the human personality was reaffirmed against the materialism of the nineteenth century. Austrian-German intellectuals were leaders in this return to selfhood. The art of expressionism, the physics of relativity, the psychodynamics of the unconscious, and literature, drama, and poetry emphasizing individual existential responsibility surrounded the young Austro-Marxists. Max Adler and Friedrich Adler were particularly susceptible to these influences, perhaps because of an inherent psychological di...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: 1890-1914
• Part Two: 1914-1918
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index