We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea without benefit of a dock, or an opportunity to select the best replacement parts.
—Otto Neurath
The four Austro-Marxists stood naked in the essential limitations of their personalities and language during World War I. Wartime conditions put their characters and the principles they espoused over the years of their maturation to the crucial test of a society in chaos. Each man had sought to live within the aegis of socialist principle and the ideational and behavioral norms of the Austrian Social Democratic party. The conflicts between socialist principle and party norms emerged clearly after 1914. As long as the disjunctions between ideal and action that were normative for any Austrian Social Democrat could exist unchallenged, the Austro-Marxists functioned successfully within Austrian-German culture. But when these reinforcing social norms collapsed in the face of an emergency in the entire culture, a call to forms of action that were congruent with socialist principles went unheeded, and the language each man used to maintain his prewar sense of normalcy proved inadequate for steering him toward social effectiveness or personal health.
The attempt to find personal integrity within social chaos can bring the best elements of one’s humanity to the service of everyday life. Each Austro-Marxist had moments during World War I when the healthiest strands of his character guided his action. Karl Renner’s essential fairness and desire for a society that included all social points of view in a political solution each party could live with informed his political personality in the last weeks of World War I. Otto Bauer’s ability to mediate between diverse interests and generations kept a divided party together in the same period. Max Adler found his ideological clarity in the middle years of the war, and his voice was one of the first to call socialists back toward their previously stated principles. Friedrich Adler had the courage to challenge the ersatz norms of his party fathers and follow a personal course of action.
The tragedy of the Austro-Marxists is that the healthier character traits they expressed in an isolated period during World War I were negated by accompanying traits that were bred in the unhealthy prewar and wartime milieus. Renner’s German chauvinism and desire to be effective politically outstripped socialist principle. Otto Bauer’s need for a cohesive party family turned his ability to mediate differences into a dissimulating ability to mask differences and compromise clear action. Max Adler’s tocsin became, as it was before the war, a set of ideas that had no corresponding principles of action. Friedrich Adler distorted principled action with a political assassination whose overcompensatory nature must be seen as designed to end his political search for effective individuality.
The self-defeating and politically impotent actions of the Austro-Marxists have opened the question of cultural and personal health in the study of political history. Why is there a disjunction between one’s articulated principles and one’s attempts to live these principles in political or personal life? We have seen that a culture can educate its citizens in practices that allow the dissonance between thought and action to be denied. Norms of ideation can allow incomplete thought to be rewarded. Norms that isolate thinkers from each other on the basis of political affiliation or sterile competition enable theory to become infused with metaphors that serve the thinker’s personality rather than an objective focus.
Each Austro-Marxist intuited at some point in his career the dangers that beset his theory and action. Renner’s insight during World War I that an almost pathological striving for truth created imbalanced perspectives which were projected upon the working class typifies the sudden clarity the Austro-Marxists were capable of achieving in moments of their lives. Then, the individual and collective unconsciousness of social reinforcement closed their eyes to the essential problem of their political efficacy. Within the emotional bitterness of disappointed dreams, each Austro-Marxist was quick to blame his fellow for that man’s failure of mind and language to grasp objective truth. Karl Renner wrote of Otto Bauer: “The things that were becoming, the people of the new generation, he did not see immediately, rather he took the easily effaced hallmark for the essence of the thing itself. [Bauer’s] spirit did not live with the things, rather amidst the images of them.”1 Bauer, in turn, wrote of Max Adler: “Max Adler was never a politician in the real sense. Just as he remained trapped in the intellectual idealism of the Kantian school, so had his political thought never freed itself from the intellectual idealism, which could not be considered too meaningful to the needs and misery of the proletariat’s class struggle, but only meaningful in the struggle and redemption of the socialistic ideal.”2
Max Adler sought the real and scorned idealism as much as Bauer. And Max Adler’s statement on the theme of reality, perhaps the most sensible, was directed toward Friedrich Adler and his adherence to Ernst Mach: “Under the concept of social life a new conceptual realism has developed in recent times which leads almost every thinker right into a new metaphysic. Social life, society, appear only too often as essences-in-themselves, either as a secret connection between people, or more often a power over them, which includes them all as part of its elements. . . . In reality, however, it appears to me that we cannot seek social life other than the only place where it is really given, and that is only the case in the particular individual.”3
Friedrich Adler’s words about Karl Renner’s relationship to the state give us a final picture of the abyss of metaphor that separates a man from his own life: “The ‘idea of organization’ of 1914 [Karl Renner’s idea of the state permeating all levels of life] is a perspective in which only the forest and not the trees are seen. This metaphysical idea of organization will interest those individuals whose job it is to maintain the functioning of organizational mechanisms. The organization as an end in itself becomes an idea, upon which bureaucrats of all classes and all kinds unite.”4
Each Austro-Marxist isolated a different aspect of the politics of metaphor, that language disorder that subordinated its adherents to an exclusive image that dissociated them from the very goals they sought, a full life, and effectiveness in the making of a just and creative society. Yet the position of the Austro-Marxists as above average intellects and thinkers who respected the continuity of an idea in the culture was evidenced in their theoretical production, which if incomplete in ideation and biased in judgments, deliberated issues with scope and counterpoint and frequently with new insight, thus providing its inheritors with a solid base of literature to approach the issues of their culture. Moreover, the Austro-Marxists dedicated their lives to a principled cause, and even if their political action was ineffective in achieving its goals, the men moved the idea of social democracy into the normative options of European culture, where it is practiced today.
The question that remains in the wake of the lives of the Austro-Marxists is how one may contribute effectively to change in a society. When cultural norms enforce certain blindnesses and problems that must be corrected, how can an individual rise above this milieu in his own social action? As Marx once said, “Someone must teach the teachers,” for we tend to promulgate our own upbringing. The study of the Austro-Marxists has pointed to two directions by which an individual may improve his culture with a minimum of metaphorical distortion of his professed intent. The first and most important is self-awareness: one must clarify his own motives as he considers the general welfare. The second is careful inquiry, so that policies for social improvement are developed on the basis of scientific knowledge. Both these directions are ingrained in Austrian humanism, and we inherit these standards from Austrian culture in the work of men such as Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, and other exceptional artists and scientists. Perhaps it is more difficult to pursue politics with such a twofold rigor, for in affecting the lives of a society directly one must face the immediate force of events as they occur. History does not allow the social activist time to test solutions in a laboratory. But a recognition of one of the most significant Social Democratic principles—human interdependence—may create a modesty in the social activist that will encourage him to use the scientific studies and humanistic insights of others whose life commitments enable them to test ideas. Perhaps we can rebuild society with better parts despite its constant crises and inherent blindnesses. Certainly, we must do better than the Austro-Marxists and Austrian Social Democracy in creating a norm of inquiry that can inform action, but we must feel a deep compassion for the Austro-Marxists and the Austrian culture when we see the scope of the cultural problem—change in history—that is our own to solve.