Introduction

Introduction On 1 May 1893 Viennese students Karl Renner (23), Rudolf Hilferding (16), and Max Adler (20) proudly and enthusiastically joined the ranks of tens of thousands of people as they marched through the streets of Vienna to mark International Workers’ Day. These young men already knew one another from their participation in a student group that met regularly in a local café, the Heiliger Leopold, to discuss socialist literature. Now they were going into the streets as part of a mass movement, whose growing international influence was marked by worker rallies across the continent. Proclaimed by the newly formed Socialist International in 1889, May Day demonstrations aimed to generate support for the eight-hour day and other reforms to benefit workers. Like other socialist parties throughout Europe, Austria’s Social Democratic Workers’ Party (sdap) mobilised its own following for the rally, and the three friends were thrilled to march behind the party’s top leaders. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy did not welcome such demonstrations, however, and hostile police were out in force. When the marchers began to sing songs calling for a republic, indeed, a ‘red republic,’ the police intervened and arrested some of the students. Fortunately for those arrested, the intellectual leader of the group, Julius Sesser, had family connections with a high-ranking judge and was able to facilitate their release the next day. This event had two more important results, however: first, it put the students on the radar screen of the police, who put them under surveillance; second, it brought them considerable prestige among party leaders, who began to pay more attention to them.1 Police surveillance did not deter the young socialists. The student group changed its meeting place every week and also moved the discussion out of doors as Renner, Adler, and Hilferding often walked the streets until the early morning hours talking about the ideas of Immanuel Kant, Ernst Mach, Karl Marx, and others. Two years later they participated in the creation of the Freie Vereinigung Sozialistischer Studenten und Akademiker (The Free Association of Socialist Students and Academics), chaired by Max Adler. This organisation had no official connection to the sdap, but party leaders such as Victor Adler and Engelbert Pernerstorfer promoted its formation and ‘for three decades [it was] the intellectual and social meeting place of all the socialist students at the University of Vienna’. Many participants rose into the leadership of the 1 Renner 1946, pp. 250–1. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004351967_002 2 introduction sdap. By 1899 Hilferding had succeeded Adler as chair and Otto Bauer joined the group after his arrival at the University of Vienna a year later.2 The four young men who later became the chief exponents of Austro- Marxism came to know one another and to work together at a propitious time for the Austrian labour movement. Socialism was on the rise. Like the Interna- tional, the sdap recently had emerged as a united organisation after decades of government repression and internal division between groups of ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’. Under Victor Adler’s leadership, the factions came together at the Hainfeld Congress of 1889, where they passed a party programme whose basic principles – with some adjustments – would guide the party’s outlook and political practice long into the future. Initially drafted by Adler, who was known more for his practical skills than his theoretical acumen, it was revised by Karl Kautsky, the editor of German Social Democracy’s leading theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, and one of Europe’s foremost interpreters of Marx. The Hainfeld Programme, like its more famous counterpart, German Social Democracy’s Erfurt Programme of 1891 – also written by Kautsky along with Eduard Bernstein – was divided into two main parts. The first part laid out a set of basic principles resting largely upon a Marxist understanding of capitalist development. The fundamental cause of inequality, it asserts, does not rest upon faulty political institutions, but rather upon the private ownership of the means of production, which ensures the exploitation of those who own only their ability to work. This relationship, secured by the capitalist state, is responsible for the ‘economic dependence’, ‘political powerlessness’, and ‘stun- ted intellectual growth’ of the people and for the ‘mass poverty and growing misery for ever broader strata of the population’. Although the colossal growth of the productive forces creates the potential for enriching the whole of society, this cannot be achieved unless the means of production are transformed into the common ownership of the whole people. This transformation is the histor- ically necessary task of the class-conscious proletariat organised as a political party. To organise the proletariat, to make it conscious of its tasks, and to pre- pare it for the struggle to ‘liberate the entire people, regardless of nationality, race, or gender’,the party was prepared to use all ‘practically and legally accept- able means’.3 The second part of the programme asserts that the sdap is an international party and condemns the privileges of nations, of birth, and of gender. It then raises a host of concrete demands for civil rights, protective labour legisla- 2 Renner 1946, pp. 245, 250, 279; Kurata 1975, p. 23. 3 The entire text of the programme is provided in Part 1..

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