War and revolution: the case of Austria 1914-18

The Russian Revolution of 1917 shook the world and sparked a series of revolutionary events internationally. In this article, Konstantin Korn and Emanuel Tomaselli look at the way the revolutionary process unfolded in Austria towards the end of the First World War, including an overview of the general strike of January 1918, and how the Social-Democratic leaders betrayed the movement.

[This article was originally published as part of issue 47 of In Defence of Marxism magazine, get your copy here]

In the summer of 1914, the slaughter of the First World War began. The Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (‘SDAP’), formerly considered one of the ‘model parties’ of the Second International, completely capitulated to the mood of patriotism and war fever that swept the Habsburg Empire.

The support of the SDAP leaders for the Habsburg war machine was a shock to most of the party ranks. In effect, the leadership paralysed the party, blocking any activity that could upset the war effort. But by early 1915, a handful of young socialists and trade unionists started illegal work, organising resistance against the war.

A group of left Social Democrats around the young revolutionary socialist Franz Koritschoner – the newly formed Linksradikalen (‘Left Radicals’) – learned about the efforts to organise the scattered internationalists at the Zimmerwald conference. In this way they got in contact with the Bolsheviks grouped around Lenin in Zurich. They started to build an organised opposition within the Austrian Social-Democratic movement, after the second international anti-war conference in Kienthal in 1916.

The Left Radicals would become the first nucleus of the future communist movement in Austria. Through Karl Radek, they established contact with the Left Radicals in Germany, who produced an internationalist paper which they then distributed in Austria. The Left Radicals called for systematic propaganda amongst the working class, taking an internationalist class position on the war. Their initiative, however, was persecuted by the party leadership and refused by the left reformists.

Radicalisation

The initial patriotic fever, however, didn’t last long. By 1916 it had become obvious that there was no end in sight to the war, which had already racked up a massive death toll. The troops in the trenches faced unimaginable horror, whilst workers on the ‘home front’ were gripped by hunger.

It was in this context that Friedrich Adler – son of Victor Adler, the founding father of the SDAP – shot the Austrian prime minister in a desperate act of protest against the war. Adler defended himself with an impressive speech at his tribunal, in which he condemned the imperialist warmongers and the passive role his party was taking towards them. As a result he became a hero in the eyes of the war-weary masses.

Lenin, in a letter to Franz Koritschoner, defended Adler’s act of terrorism against the moralistic condemnations in the SDAP’s press. But Lenin also explained that “as revolutionary tactics, individual attacks are inexpedient and harmful”.

According to Lenin:

“Adler would have been of much greater help to the revolutionary movement if, without being afraid of a split, he had systematically gone over to illegal propaganda and agitation. [...] Not terrorism but systematic, prolonged, self-sacrificing activity in revolutionary propaganda and agitation, demonstrations, etc., etc., against the lackey-like opportunist party, against the imperialists, against one’s own governments, against the war – that is what is needed.”^[1]

Without doubt such revolutionary propaganda and agitation would have found fertile ground. The unbearable conditions in the factories, with workers forced to work 12-14 hours a day, the militarised regime in the workplaces, and widespread hunger, all served to radicalise the working class. As a result, the number of strikes and bread riots increased significantly in the winter of 1916-17.

‘Revolution for peace’

The news of the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917 had an electrifying effect across Europe. It showed to the internationalist activists that the war really could be ended through a revolution.

Such was the mood on a day in May 1917 that when a worker collapsed from hunger at the ‘Arsenal’ – the biggest arms factory in Vienna which employed 20,000 workers – the workforce immediately walked out. Within hours, most of the factories in Vienna had joined them in solidarity. It was clear that a revolutionary situation was developing.

The government became afraid that the revolutionary events in Russia could be repeated in Austria. They therefore decided to give the reformist leaders of the SDAP more freedom of action, in order to provide a safety valve to release some of the pressure building from below. They reasoned that by promoting the reformists to the head of the growing movement, they would guide the energy of the masses into ‘safe’ channels – from the point of view of the regime. As such, the SDAP press was allowed to call for peace, and the party was integrated into the state’s welfare programme.

The SDAP, organised a public meeting “for Peace” on 11 November 1917. Their plan was for 2,000 selected labour movement officials to come together in the Konzerthaus to listen to the party leaders.

But as events transpired, the Bolsheviks successfully took power on 7 November, which sent a shockwave around the world. The Arbeiter Zeitung referred to it as “a revolution for peace”.

Instead of the stage-managed SDAP meeting on 11 November, 15,000 workers showed up for a tumultuous rally, which had to be accommodated in a nearby skating rink. Thousands of workers then marched to the Ministry of War in Vienna – out of the control of the party leaders – to celebrate the victory of their Russian brothers and sisters. This was another manifestation of the developing revolutionary ferment in society.

Brest-Litovsk

The Bolsheviks’ Decree on Peace, which they passed immediately after they took power, gave hope to the masses all over Europe. The subsequent peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk (modern-day Brest, Belarus) between Soviet Russia and the ‘Central Powers’ (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria) started on 22 December. They were the hot topic for weeks to come.

Trotsky, who represented Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk, skillfully used the proceedings as a platform to expose the predatory interests of the imperialists of all sides.

Whilst the Bolsheviks called for a democratic peace, without annexations or indemnities, the imperialists of the Central Powers, mainly the more confident German generals, sought to grab all they could from the new workers’ state. As such, all the imperialists’ talk about ‘defence of the fatherland’, and ‘protecting the rights of small nations to self-determination’ was revealed as deception before the eyes of millions.

This strategy definitely had an effect on the minds of the mass of workers in Austria and Germany, who followed the reports from Brest-Litovsk with great attention.

Lenin and Trotsky firmly believed that the Russian Revolution was only the starting point of the world revolution. The chain had broken at its weakest link, but due to the impact of the imperialist war and the Russian Revolution itself, would continue to break in other countries.

The Habsburg Empire was clearly the next candidate for revolution. In the winter of 1917-18 the regime had reached its material limits. Three-and-a-half years of war had consumed most of the economic resources of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the unresolved national question – mainly the oppression of the Slav peoples – added to its unavoidable fall. It desperately needed to get out of the war in order to safeguard the regime. However neither its imperialist allies (Germany), nor its enemies (Britain, France and the USA) would accept Austria-Hungary leaving the war by itself.

Given this blockage at the top, and the pressure for peace building from below, the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk were a catalyst for the revolutionary processes in Austria.

Tensions reach boiling point

In the winter of 1917-18 the Left Radicals played an important role in organising anti-war protests in Vienna. Their group of around 100 comrades had become the focal point of the revolutionary youth movement, and they had managed to build strong links to a network of worker activists in the armaments industry.

Government war bond poster from 1916 depicting the double-headed eagle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Vienna in the background / Image: public domain

Together they started to plan for a general strike on 24 January with the aim of ending the war. Linked to this, they propagated the idea to form workers’ councils as organs of workers’ power, following the example of the Russian soviets. They founded an organisation called the “Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council” in December 1917 for this reason. But events developed faster than the group imagined.

The attempt by the German and Austrian governments to shipwreck the peace talks with Russia provoked enormous discontent. In response to the growing pressure from below and to control the heated mood in the factories, the SDAP, organised massive rallies for peace for 13 January 1918. Despite the leadership’s best efforts to control the situation, a social explosion nevertheless erupted in the factories the very next day.

Trotsky later commented positively on these events:

“During a pause in the negotiations, which lasted about ten days, there developed in Austria a tremendous ferment and labour strikes broke forth. These strikes signified the first recognition of our method of conducting the peace negotiations, the first recognition we received from the proletariat of the Central Powers about the annexationist demands of German militarism.”^[2]

It was clear that the revolutionary process was developing.

The January strike

On 14 January 1918 the already low flour rations were cut once again by half. For the masses, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

When news of this spread in the early hours in Wiener Neustadt – an industrial town south of Vienna where the Left Radicals had one of their strongholds – workers at the Daimler motor factory refused to start the machines and met in the courtyards. Their response was unanimous: “Strike!” They marched to the town centre, carrying banners calling for an immediate peace and ‘down with the government’, and started to gather in workers’ councils, ‘Arbeiterräte’, which were essentially the Austrian equivalent of soviets.

A strike committee was elected and took the decision to approach the other factories in the town and nearby areas. Within hours, 10,000 workers from the whole industrial district in southern Lower Austria were on strike. This region later became known as the ‘Bethlehem of Austrian communism’.

Workers’ councils came into being everywhere. What started as an economic struggle within a day developed to a revolutionary mass movement calling for the end of the war ‘by any means’. The young Left Radicals spread the news of the strike movement to the factories in Vienna, and even to Berlin. In their leaflet The People Arises!, published on 16 January, they wrote:

“The masses do not want neither victory nor the glory of weapons, they want immediate peace, peace by any means necessary. The interests of the masses are not represented by the government, but by Lenin and Trotsky with their international principals of the self-determination of the peoples.”^[3]

The Left Radicals’ leaflet popularised a programme of four demands:

1. Immediate ceasefire on all fronts!
2. The peace delegates for any negotiations have to be elected by the people!
3. The militarisation of all workplaces has to be abolished immediately! All restrictions on the right of association and any other political freedoms have to be removed!
4. Friedrich Adler and all the other political prisoners have to be released immediately!

The leaflet boldly called for “workers of all other countries [...] to rally around the red flag of the Russian Revolution! [...] Mistrust the patriotic workers’ 'leaders'. Elect workers’ councils like in Russia and victory will belong to the mass power of the proletariat!”^[4]

The ideas of Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk were clearly getting an echo.

Such was the mood that on 17 January, Karl I, Emperor of Austria, sent the following telegram to Foreign Minister Graf Czernin in Brest-Litovsk:

“I must once again assure you most emphatically that the entire fate of the monarchy and dynasty depends on the conclusion of peace in Brest-Litovsk as soon as possible. For Courland, Livonia and Polish dreams we cannot overturn the situation here. If peace doesn't come about, there will be revolution here, no matter how much there is to eat. This is a grave warning at a grave time.”^[5]

Reformists co-opt the movement

The leadership of the Austrian labour movement in the period before the war had built up an enormous political authority. But this was shaken under the new conditions of war and growing radicalisation, which was finding only inadequate expression in the traditional mass organisations.

Fraternisation of German and Russian soldiers after the armistice on the Eastern Front in December 1917 / Image: public domain

This put the Social-Democratic leadership in a difficult situation. How were they to wrest back control over this unforeseen movement from the revolutionary elements that were coming to the fore? On 16 January, after two days of hesitation, they decided to ride the tiger and called for the spreading of the strike movement to all of Austria, and to call for the election of workers’ councils in all industrial areas. Their main slogan was “the end of the war as soon as possible”.^[6] This slogan in itself was in no opposition to the needs of the regime.

By 18 January the number of striking workers grew to 100,700 in Vienna, 122,622 in Lower Austria, and the strikes spread to Upper Austria, Styria, Budapest, Cracovia, Brno, Trieste and elsewhere. By 19 January the strikes involved 750,000 workers. The Left Radicals did not have the necessary strength to lead a movement of this scale.

The objective conditions not only for a general strike but for a successful revolution existed everywhere. A popular saying in those days was: “Let’s talk Russian to our rulers!”

The newly formed workers’ councils, however, were now under control of the reformists. Most representatives were elected in the workplaces, and therefore reflected the mood on the ground. But the SDAP and trade union bureaucracies also sent their officials and leaders directly into the councils, which gave the reformists a clear advantage.

The revolution betrayed

Otto Bauer, the theoretical leader of the left reformists (the ‘Austro-Marxists’), later wrote in his balance sheet on the Austrian Revolution:

“We wanted the strike as a big revolutionary demonstration. The escalation of the strike to revolution itself, we could not want.”^[7]

As a petty-bourgeois tendency, the Austro-Marxist leadership refused a revolutionary break with capitalism, and did everything they could to keep the bourgeoisie in power. This was a conscious political orientation, as Lenin had pointed out since the start of the war. Although they briefly played with the Russian Revolution as a means to stabilise the situation of the Habsburg regime, ultimately they saw Bolshevism as a threat to their leading position in the labour movement, which had to be fought by all means.

Bauer tried to justify his counter-revolutionary position with the excuse that were there a successful revolution in Austria, it would be met immediately with an invasion of German troops. But in reality, the coming to power of the Austrian working class would have had an incredible impact amongst the working class in Germany, where a revolution was also developing. A class-based appeal to German troops and workers to follow their lead would have had an electrifying effect. The sending of German troops in such conditions would have rapidly accelerated the revolutionary process.

Facing the workers’ uprising, the reformist leaders knew they had to present results to pacify the workers. On 17 January, echoing the programme of the Left Radicals, they published a declaration to the government with four demands:

1. The peace negotiations must not fail because of territorial demands and should be conducted by constant information and under the ‘conditioning influence’ of representatives of the working class.
2. Reorganisation of the food supply for the population.
3. Democratisation of the municipal vote.
4. End to the militarisation of the workplaces.^[8]

This sounded similar to the programme of the Left Radicals, but did not pose the key question of power. In fact, the demands had been agreed with the government in advance, who were prepared to accept them – promising ‘further negotiations’ on the issues – in exchange for the Social Democrats calling off the strike.

On 21 January – the eighth day of the movement – the workers’ council in Vienna, controlled by the reformists, voted with a big majority to end the strike. In several meetings, however, there were heated debates, as many workers were furious at the suggestion that the strike could be called off at this critical stage, when they wanted nothing less than an immediate end to the war. A number of factories continued the strike for some days, and new cities entered the movement, but they were left isolated by this sellout.

The strike was broken and the leaders of the Left Radicals were imprisoned or sent to the front. They were charged with high treason for calling for “the overthrow of the existing order and the Austrian state”.

With the Left Radicals shattered, there was no visible political force capable of helping the workers to draw the necessary conclusions from this defeat. The developing revolutionary movement was derailed by this wave of state repression, which had severe consequences for the process of the formation of the Communist Party in the coming months. The Social Democracy had regained its control over the working class for the time being.

The end of the January strike was a setback for the revolutionary movement, but it was not the end of the story. The depth of the revolutionary process was shown in the first days of February 1918 with the mutiny of the sailors in the Adriatic port Cattaro (modern-day ‘Kotor’, Montenegro). This mutiny – under the red flag – was clearly influenced by the January strike, but came when the strike movement was already finished. In June a new wave of strikes and mutinies erupted in several regions of Austria.

The missing subjective factor

The January strike marked a major change in the way the Austrian Social Democracy viewed the Russian Revolution. From now on they presented themselves as open enemies of Bolshevism.

Karl Kautsky, the theoretical leader of the ‘Centrist’ wing of the Social Democracy and a critic of the October Revolution, became the mouthpiece of the Austro-Marxists. In 1918 he waged a polemic against the Bolsheviks arguing that:

“The Bolshevik Revolution was based on the supposition that it would be the starting point of a general European Revolution, and that the bold initiative of Russia would summon the proletariat of all Europe to rise. [...]

“According to this theory, the European Revolution formed the best defence of the Russian Revolution. […] The Revolution which would bring about socialism in Europe would also be the means of removing the obstacles to the carrying through of socialism in Russia, which are created by the economic backwardness of that country.

“This was all very logically thought out, and quite well founded, provided the supposition was granted, that the Russian Revolution must inevitably unchain the European Revolution. But what if this did not happen? The supposition has not yet been realised.”^[9]

Kautsky shamefully hid the fact that the revolution did indeed spread to Russia’s neighbours in Europe, as the Bolsheviks predicted. And that it was precisely the reformist leaders of the Social Democracy who consciously betrayed the revolution when it first emerged in Austria in January 1918. They would do so again in the coming months, whenever the revolution developed insurrectionary features both in Austria and Germany.

The proclamation of the Republic of German-Austria, 12 November 1918 / Image: public domain

The intervention of the masses finally brought the war to an end. In the autumn of 1918 the mass of soldiers, workers and peasants from the different corners of the empire, had enough. They were not prepared to die anymore for the emperor in Vienna. Soldiers deserted en masse. The army command chain collapsed and the various nationalities that had been oppressed under the empire split off and formed their own states, such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia).

In Vienna, tens of thousands of soldiers dominated the life of the city in the last days of the war. They called for better conditions and refused to accept the authority of the officers. A new army was formed, the Volkswehr (‘People's Militia’), which was controlled by the soldiers' councils. In this situation also the workers took the initiative, went on strike, and organised a mass demonstration in the city centre to call for the end of the monarchy.

Terrified of the masses, the deputies of German-speaking Austria elected the Social Democrat, Karl Renner, to be the chancellor of a newly formed German-Austrian state. And on 12 November, the new Republic of German-Austria was proclaimed from the parliament building in Vienna, three days after the proclamation of the German Republic in Berlin.

On the ground, power was in the hands of the working class, which was armed. But with the Social Democrats of both Austria and Germany thrust into government, their reformist leaders did everything possible to hand power back to the capitalists, confining the revolution to the establishment of a democratic republic and the promise of eventual unification into a single German Republic.

The problem therefore was not the lack of revolutionary opportunities for the workers of Europe to take power, but the lack of the subjective factor – the presence of trained revolutionary parties and leaders capable of guiding these revolutions past the inevitable betrayals of the reformists.

To help build such a leadership was therefore the urgent task that Lenin and Trotsky set themselves with the founding of the Third International.

References

^[1] V I Lenin, ‘To Franz Koritschoner’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 35, Progress Publishers, 1973, pg 238-239

^[2] L Trotsky, ‘At Brest-Litovsk’, The Proletarian Revolution In Russia, The Communist Press, 1918, pg 350

^[3]  Quoted in H Hautmann, Die verlorene Räterepublik, Europa Verlag, 1971, pg 51, our translation

^[4] ibid.

^[5] Quoted in H Hautmann, Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Österreich 1918-1924, Europaverlag, Wien 1987, p. 157, our translation

^[6] Arbeiter-Zeitung, Vol. 30, No. 16, 16 January 1918, pg 1, our translation

^[7] O Bauer, Die österreichische Revolution, Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923, pg 65, our translation

^[8] Arbeiter-Zeitung, Vol. 30, No. 17, 17 January 1918, pg 1

^[9] K Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, National Labour Press, 1919, pg 62-63