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From International Socialist Review, Vol.30 No.3, May-June 1969, pp.44-48.
Originally published in Weg und Ziel, July-August 1968.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
I met Otto Bauer for the last time in the summer of 1936. Starhemberg had resigned. Schuschnigg had won the struggle for power and the race for a pact with the Nazis. The Heimwehr [counter-revolutionary militia] was splitting up into groups and cliques. And France stood under the aegis of the Popular Front government.
I was traveling – on a false passport – from Prague to Vienna to discuss the possibilities of the new situation and of closer collaboration with the Revolutionäre Sozialisten [Revolutionary Socialists]. I wanted to have a talk first with Otto Bauer and we agreed to meet in Iglau.
We walked up and down the railway platform for several hours. I remember that night in the train station, the unsteady, flickering light, the locomotives harshly interrupting our discussion, this honest, unforgettable discussion, disagreement and hope, great hopes we both held for the Popular Front, the coming unity of the working class, a synthesis of Communism and democracy, of “integral socialism.”
Even after I went over to the Communist Party I retained my affection for Otto Bauer, whose inner contradiction I realized on the eve of July 15, 1927 – the power of his thought, the purity of his character, and his hesitation in the face of all revolutionary decisions. He lacked the hardness of his political antagonist Ignaz Seipel [Monsignor Ignaz Seipel, the leader of the Catholic reactionaries], his fanaticism and ruthless decisiveness.
Power was not the element of this major thinker, speaker, and publicist. Fundamentally he was no politician. After Victor Adler’s death, he was the intellectual leader of the Social Democracy, its great spokesman. But he had no influence in the party apparatus. He worked through words, not by acts. He was inhibited by “the fearful doubt of one who sees the consequences of actions too clearly.” This is Hamlet reflecting on the campaign of the foolhardy, unthinking Fortinbras – Hamlet the hesitating intellectual in a time out of joint.
In this railway station between East and West, I told him about the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International.
“I believe in the sincerity of the new Communist policy,” Otto Bauer said, “and I agree with you that this congress was a great historical event. The alliance of the democratic workers parties with the Soviet Union has not only become possible; it is a historical necessity. The Soviet Union is the strongest socialist power center in the world. We’re heading toward a world war. We Marxists in the Social Democracy must do everything in our power to overcome petty-bourgeois, vulgar democratic prejudices against the Soviet Union.
“A defeat for the Soviet Union in the war would throw the cause of socialism back generations. A victory for the Soviet Union would be the greatest possible spur to the liberation struggle of the international working class.
“You know that I observed the Russian revolution and its results with many fears and many hopes. My fears were not allayed but my hopes were more than fulfilled. A socialist society is arising in the Soviet Union.
“Only the dictatorship was capable of achieving this transformation. The construction of socialism is more completely achieved than I had dared hope; achieved – at a high price, at the price of individual freedom, which lowers the human level. But the successes are astonishingly great – and I understand your intoxication with them.-You must feel that way – by your nature. You are a believing, I might almost say, a religious man.
“That is just what I am not. I am capable of enthusiasm, yes. But my failing is the opposite – scepticism, stubborn individualism.”
[Fischer] “But at the Social Democratic World Congress you denounced its halfway measures, its – as you put it – wishy-washiness, its inner contradictions. And you said what a wonderful thing it would be to fight for a common goal in a unite’d party.”
[Bauer] “Yes, that was the sense of my words. I said that the split in the working class had divided us ourselves, divided our intellect from our feeling, had cursed us with the spirit of halfway measures; that it would be a wonderful thing to be able to stand for a whole cause as a whole man.
“Haven’t you subjected yourself to a dogma? Haven’t you renounced your critical faculties? Don’t you overlook the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat has become an all-powerful apparatus, that the bureaucracy, the police, and the military give the orders. I might add that this development was inevitable. And however much this may disturb us we must give our total support to the Soviet Union. The fate of socialism throughout the world depends on the victory of the Soviet Union. Whoever makes war on the Soviet Union is the mortal enemy of us all.”
As always when he spoke passionately, his voice became soft and deep. We remained standing, and looked at each other in the half-light of the glimmering railway station night.
“Why don’t you come to Moscow?” I asked impulsively. Silence. Then: “What do you mean by that?”
[Fischer] “I mean it literally, not symbolically. Come to Moscow! Talk to Stalin, Dimitrov, Ercoli (Togliatti)! Say what you think, listen to the answers they give you, weigh all the pros and cons freely, and ...”
[Bauer] “And – ?”
[Fischer] “Decide! It would be magnificent if ...”
His answer came in a low voice.
“Everything is decided. I am not going to Moscow. Don’t misunderstand me. I reproached you for leaving us – but on the side you are on now lies victory, the future. My place is not there.”
[Fischer] “Why?”
[Bauer] “For many reasons. I cannot go as a tourist like just anybody. My visiting Moscow would give rise to misunderstandings on all sides. In the long run it would do more harm than good. Jumping from one bank to the other is not enough. We must build a bridge, a firm and enduring one.
“You there, I here, we must build a bridge from both sides. I will spare no effort to explain the world-historic meaning of the Soviet Union to my Socialist colleagues and urge them to form a sincere alliance. But let us both not overestimate the influence we individuals can have on the overall developme it. You are inclined to overestimate the subjective factor, as Lenin called it. But the historical process transcends us all.”
[Fischer] “Isn’t this process also conditioned by us?”
I replied to this familiar view of Otto Bauer that everything that happens had to happen that way. Unconsciously, he needed this exaggeration of historical materialism to justify his own indecisiveness in critical situations.
He shook his head:
[Bauer] “The war will achieve what our best arguments could not – the unification of the working class and the European revolution. You accuse me of indecisiveness, but there is nothing I want more than the European revolution.”
[Fischer] “With all its consequences?”
[Bauer] “Yes. But look, in any new society all the old traditions retain their grip. To transform capitalist society into socialist society the proletariat needs a strong state. However, the state power won by the proletariat can take the most diverse forms, from revolutionary democracy to a dictatorship of the apparatus.
“It is no accident that Hitler won in Germany while the Popular Front took form in France – and Russia’s past also conditioned the form of the dictatorship. I have already said that I consider the development in Russia inevitable and approve of the socialism that arose even under those conditions. Nonetheless, I would not be able to implicate myself in the use of such dreadful methods.
“I hope that you persist, I wish it sincerely, because you are not a hard man. On the road to the European revolution we must help along a development which on the one side will overcome Communist doctrinairism and on the other democratic doctrinairism. The proletariat must win its dictatorship in order to smash capitalism. But then it is faced again with the task of winning democracy, not bourgeois democracy, which remains a form of capitalist class rule, but socialist democracy, the self-management of a classless society.”
Otto Bauer fell silent, looked past me, then at me.
[Bauer] “What you call indecision, I would call discord, because each of us represents only one profound social contradiction. Bourgeois democracy, two-edged, contradictory, has infected all classes with its opportunism, its utilitarianism, even the working class. It has hidden the economic bondage of the broad masses from them, but still effected a liberation.
“This heritage must be taken into socialism. I mean by this that there must be a guarantee of the freedom and dignity of every individual against the arbitrary will of those in power, of the free competition of ideas, of equal participation in all the decisions of society.”
[Fischer] “The Seventh World Congress has appealed for the defense of democracy, corrected the errors of the past, called for serious efforts to unite the working class.”
[Bauer] “It was a first, perhaps decisive step toward unity, toward overcoming the crisis of socialism. I have great respect for the courageous way Dimitrov discussed the misjudgments and muddles of the past. We in the Socialist International must admit that the Social Democracy, in its parliamentary cooperation with bourgeois parties, in its horsetrading for reforms, felt closer to the bourgeois democrats than its Communist class brothers.
“Yes, we must go further in criticizing our past, we in the Socialist and you in the Communist International must come to a common historical, dialectic analysis of the causes in order to prepare the way for an integral socialism. The first world war split the proletariat; the second world war, which we must face, will unite it and thereby achieve integral socialism.”
Although I myself considered this war almost inevitable, I was shocked that Otto Bauer expected a socialist revolution and the unification of the working class only as a result of the war. And was it so certain that such a war could transform reformist parties into revolutionary ones, that a united working class would come out of it? Of course, the Popular Front in France pointed to this. But Otto Bauer placed his hopes primarily on a German revolution resulting from a defeat of Hitler Germany and strove insistently to overcome my doubts on this.
He developed the idea that the task of Marxists and of Communists was to fight for revolutionary ideas and to educate revolutionary cadres inside the reformist workers parties, cadres for overcoming the reformist stage of development.
First of all, I objected that the education of such revolutionary cadres on the reformist level of development would lead, in critical situations, not only to conflicts but to splits. Because action tends to follow the idea. What should Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg have done? Stay in the same party with Noske? Only protest his activity? But then – wishing that Otto Bauer’s hopes would not turn into disillusionment – I listened to him, I interrupted his passionate outpourings only from time to time.
He spoke of the function of the Revolutionäre Sozialisten in Austria as a link between the Soviet Union and the Social Democratic parties. It went without saying – he thought – that their model was the Russian Bolsheviks, the most glorious and triumphant of underground parties. Knowing the limitations of bourgeois democracy, they drew their confidence, hope and strength from the victories of the proletarian dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
[Bauer] “In a short time we will discuss the strengthening of unity in action with you. I authorize you to speak in my name. I am giving you a few lines. And I hope that some day we will belong to one united party.” [1]
The lines he gave me helped little. The man who stood at the head of the Revolutionäre Sozialisten rejected them contemptuously. Otto Bauer meant nothing to him.
And today?
Otto Bauer’s hopes have not been fulfilled. The Social Democracy remembers its own only reluctantly. Many Communists think of him with the old resentment. But it is time, it seems to me, to speak not of his errors and misjudgments but to speak of him as a major figure in the Austrian and European workers movement.
1. In order to check my memory of this last talk with Otto Bauer, I took his book Zwischen Zwei Weltkriegen (Between Two World Wars) and for the sake of accuracy adopted many formulations from it. I am not concerned with using these recollections to develop my argument but with bringing Bauer’s personality out of the twilight.
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