BOOKS

...These were principles generally accepted within the 200 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 Social Democracy and were also originally shared by the RS...

...It "lies not so much in pointing out the injustices of communism as in demonstrating that in a social atmosphere of which Marx never dreamed, capitalism can survive and flourish...

...The remnants of the SDP machine were attracted by the new Communist Party line primarily because it offered them protection and shelter...

...The February revolt was for Bauer only one battle lost but absolutely no proof that his policy had been wrong...

...The labor movement was made up of four main branches: the party, labor unions, cultural organizations and consumers' cooperatives...

...Sometimes, however, Heilbroner betrays a lack of knowledge with regard to the less subtle parts of Marx's theory as, for example, when he writes that in recent times "not only wages had gone up, but the very source of the surplus-value had diminished: hours were far shorter...

...Buttinger, who was in charge of negotiations with the Communists, proved himself a brilliant psychologist and tactician...

...The "mathematical school" is relegated to the "underworld of economics," together with Bastiat, Mandeville...

...If they worked for the party, they had minor jobs with hard work and small pay...

...in negotiations with the Communists and also with the Schuschnigg government...

...The socialist elements were most numerous among shop stewards, local activists, college students and minor party officials...

...If the practical politicians were against Marxism, they considered the problem solved by remaining that much more devoted to Marxism...

...It took years of bitter inner struggle until the most intellectually active among the RS freed themselves of the traditional cliches...

...When they knew that: "Their own good will—nonessential according to the main tenets of the doctrine—was the best part of them...

...Some of them occupied elevated positions where they came to be symbols of the dualism Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 197 in the movement...

...it was at the same time the climax of the European labor movement which had recognized the Austrian party as the "model" party of the Second International between the two World Wars...

...Finally, Heilbroner bows low before one of the slyest "pupils" of Marx, Josef Schumpeter, of whom it is asserted that he saw for the first time "that economics was not enough—that it is part, but not the whole, of the history-making process...

...Now, moral stamina counted more than intellectual versatility...

...The February revolt was the first great opportunity for the Communists in Austria...

...Buttinger realized the "depth of the cleavage" and also that he had: arrived unawares at that border line of traditional party conceptions, which, in the history of the labor movement, had been crossed only by those who turned their backs completely on both doctrine and movement...

...A very intricate system of licensing made it practically impossible for a worker to start his own business and a total lack of night schools prevented him from improving his position by studying...

...But what did the conditions into which they had grown offer in support of their Socialist assurance of victory...

...The message of the RS lies in their conduct, their Iife and struggles...

...Now at last, socialists could concentrate on their own ideas pure and unadulterated...

...The second and less well-known echelon of the party bureaucracy which took their place was soon decimated by the police...

...in court, jail and concentration camps and finally, emigrated, in Paris and New York...

...In Austria, you had to work an hour for a pack of cigarettes, a day for your shirt, a week for your shoes and a month for your suit...

...The main concern of the RS was neither Herr Schuschnigg's policy nor his boring homilies, but the power of his government...

...It must also be remembered that this was the heyday of the United Front swindle, a line particularly difficult to attack after the crushing February defeat...

...In the legal period, he was a district secretary of the party...

...who) read and loafed, and the next day...

...preferred hiking, swimming or fishing...

...The Austrian Social Democratic Party's international prestige was well deserved...

...instead, it had put fascism in the saddle...

...Buttinger the leader is obviously one of the most important figures of the book...

...But theory per se, the intellectual effort required for generally valid solutions, was never their main concern...

...Actually there had been a continuous decline ever since the failure of the revolution in 1918...

...This economist, who gave to modern economic practice the semblance of a theory taken from the false theories of Malthus, Proudhon, and Silvio Gesell, a theory that is daily defeated by the practice it describes, is here celebrated partly for his skill in money-making, for his luck in love, his taste in art, and for being a curious combination "of an engineering mind and a hopeful heart...

...The RS members were the most critical and the most active part of the underground, had a sound conscience and were thereby completely impervious to Communist demagoguery...

...198 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 Few who consider themselves socialists will disagree with Buttinger'sthe RS's—tenet: that man must not remain forever under the blind sway of "social conditions," that he can rise successfully against an order that denies his humanity...

...Hundreds of thousands were also members of labor unions or cultural organizations...

...The struggle of the RS against the party bureaucracy and the fight against their own illusions were only different forms wherein the same fundamental conflict had to be resolved...

...204 • DISSENT • Spring 1954...

...But the more important positions in the party, the unions and cultural organizations as well as most elective offices, were--generally speaking—occupied by the second group, the hard-headed realists...

...In Heilbroner's opinion, in short, Marx was not wrong in his analysis and his predictions but they related to European capitalism and its lack of American democracy, to a time "when the working day was long, and when wages were, by and large, little more than it took to keep body and soul together...

...Buttinger's description of this aspect, so crucial for every underground, is particularly impressive...

...scores of local newspapers and magazines flowed off mostly party-owned presses . The movement provided not only educational activity but also sports, recreation and hobbies...

...so-called "modern economics" defies all attempts at dramatization and Heilbroner finds himself restricted to the classics, their forerunners, deviators, and epigones...

...were certainly not clearly defined but changed from issue to issue because these two tendencies battled as strongly within the mind of each activist as within the party itself...

...The RS used their illegal party as the main lever in their struggle with existing society and its irrationality...

...Frederick Praeger...

...Buttinger expresses their fundamental abhorrence of Communism in one sentence: They had learned that the intellectual and political world of Russian Communism was the ugliest distortion of their socialist ideals, the most menacing denial of their own moral essence...

...Workmen were the core of the movement when Austrian Social Democracy was born in 1888...

...These two groups, socialists and hard-headed politicians...

...This struggle took place on four fronts simultaneously: against the fascist government, the Communist Party, the remnants of the old party machine, and, last but not least important, their own illusions...

...He remained steadfast by its theoretical foundation: the "objective factors" determining the flow of history, the "scientific nature of socialism" and the "historical inevitability of socialist victory...

...The suddenly "revolutionized" party hacks were thus not only spared the vitriolic attacks of the Communists but also escaped the critics in their own ranks...

...And he does not fail fully to appreciate the first great attempt to reconcile capitalism and social welfare in the "calm and buoyant reasonableness of John Stuart Mill...

...He admires Ricardo for his scrupulous objectivity: "though a landlord himself [Ricardo] was the enemy of the landlords," which was an easy thing to be for a man who made his money on the Stock Exchange...

...The party had grown big in its long struggle for the political franchise and had become the political steward of "the broad masses of the population...

...All were formally independent but, in fact, coordinated parts of the common movement...

...In Buttinger's book, they rise again for us...

...Unfortunately, however, Heilbroner's apparent "objectivity" is only one way of submission to the current "line" of the American state-ideology...

...The American proletariat refused to "wake up" despite all European predictions, and the parties united in the Labor and Socialist International seemed to move farther and farther away from any revolutionary position...

...the labor movement was his only hope for a better future...

...Nowhere in the world was the bond between the working class and socialism stronger...

...Even his interpretation of Marx, as far as it goes, is done quite "decently...

...And even though "the laws of motion which Marx's model of capitalism revealed may still be visible in American capitalism...

...other businesses, such as banks, bookstores, printing plants, hotels and restaurants, bakeries, a shoe factory and even a department store were operated by the movement...

...for, as these questions in his view are largely "moral" questions, it depends on "whether we will let corporations grow unchecked and whether we will allow business cycles to develop their full momentum unchecked...

...Top drawer professional politicians were excluded from illegal activity for reasons of security...

...It was— if not a state within a state--a new culture within the old society to which it was as strongly opposed as it was conditioned by it...

...All who want to fight as socialists against Moscow will enjoy the chapters where Buttinger gives us an effective plan for defeating the Moscow agents...

...But Schumpeter's exploitation of Marxism for anti-Marxian purposes still finds its uses, although it, too, speaks of the death of capitalism...

...Not recently, however...

...Most of them were either skilled mechanics or white collar workers, few were unemployed...

...Important district organizations in Vienna and hundreds of local clubs throughout the country were taken over by them...

...The "inevitability of socialism" had become no less questionable...

...The bulk of the working class was solidly united within the Social Democratic movement...

...Austrian capitalism was, if not capitalism at its worst, certainly capitalism at its lowest...

...Now the end of legality also put an end to the dilemma of a party which wanted to remain legal under semi-fascism and which tried at the same time to retain its revolutionary socialist character...

...Apparently, he forgot the Marxian distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value and the increased exploitation accompanying increased productivity that exceeds working-hours cut down...

...This had been done before by Marx, of course, who saw in political economy a fetishistic expression of social class relations determining the structure and ideology of capitalist society...

...Their initial success was only possible because many socialist militants were so disappointed with their own party that they accepted the Communists at face value...

...Heilbroner's work is "positive" throughout, suited to the taste of the times, as anything "negative" is now suspect and "objectively" subversive...

...their political existence posed difficult problems which they tried to solve as best they could...

...This movement was unbelievably broad and diversified...

...Otto Bauer was a man of an entirely different stature from most of the professional politicians who had remained within Austria...

...Most certainly they are not the new would-be scholastics who discuss this issue in deep seriousness...

...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 203 There is nothing seriously wrong with Heilbroner's interpretation of the various economic theories...

...VICTOR STRAUSS How to Serve the Dismal Science THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS...

...wanted to visit museums or art galleries—but also if you were given to such innocent pastimes as stamp collecting or canary breeding, not to forget yodeling—the movement was ready for you...

...The Viennese Arbeiterzeitung was the biggest full-size paper in a city where the party also published a popular daily tabloid...

...Buttinger takes us through this movement in its entirety...

...But it would be a mistake to see in the story of the RS and therewith in Buttinger's book, a systematic critique of socialist theory and practice...

...And thus, the answer to Marx is not Marx-baiting...

...The party was noted for its skill in combining an apparently highly revolutionary militancy with practical politics and—witness the famous welfare institutions of Red Vienna—for its great administrative ability...

...He presents these economists as "worldly philosophers," for their theories tried to comprehend the social mechanism as a whole, not only the changing price and market relations...

...Their questions are still waiting for answers...

...He loves them all: the genius Adam Smith, even though the world of laissez-faire was the world in which "boys and girls—all above ten years old—were whipped day and night, not only for the slightest fault, but to stimulate their flagging industry...

...The Austrian worker knew that he had to rely on the progress of his class for his own personal progress...

...On the contrary...

...This is not to say that there were no socialists among the higher-ups...

...We see the RS in small discussion circles and at party conferences...

...He has the rare gift of immediacy and his people are neither waxworks nor preparations of a socio-economic taxidermist...

...The policy of the RS was inspired by their contempt for the Moscow marionettes whom they beat on every point...

...Many had passed through socialist educational organizations and already had a long party history...

...and since the end is a phenomenon of tomorrow there remains for today only the tremendous success...

...and Henry George...

...The old party with its contradictory theories and methods had shaped their concepts, their whole personality...

...For years they had been deeply worried about the party's policy which they nevertheless, out of a sense of duty, had continued to defend...

...The party was the biggest in the country and owed this success in no small measure to the remarkable power of its machine...

...It was he who finally had to accept the burden of the discussion with Otto Bauer whom he admired so much...

...Their apparatus was ready...

...His style is direct and plastic, free of abstractions and meaningless generalizations...

...By Robert L. Heilbroner...

...Police, district attorneys, judges and concentration camps were serious and, often enough, overpowering enemies...

...they live...

...Former critics turned primarily against the revolutionary aspects of Marxism...

...And this seems necessary, of course, if only to combat the prevailing indifference towards the dismal science that beats all previous neglect...

...Social Democracy was not just another political party...

...play chess, 196 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 music or football...

...The RS were all former Social Democrats...

...Their opponents from the "Left" reacted rather naively to the challenge presented by the development of the labor movement...

...Politics too, knows the horror vacui, and the Communists dominated the scene, if only for a time...

...Simon and Schuster, New York, 1953, 342 pages...

...Like all other socialist parties, the Austrian combined two main tendencies within itself: the revolutionary aim of a socialist society in the future with the pursuit of practical politics in the present...

...The criticism from the "Right" was that of the succesful practical politician...

...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 199 The RS was such a movement and consequently in an excellent position to combat the Communists...

...but Buttinger the author is by no means a blind admirer of his political past...

...But this development did not end their conflict with the old party...

...The policy of the RS is an indispensable practical guide for fighting the Communists...

...Their criticism of Marxism Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 201 was not directed against its revolutionary aims but against its wrong concept of the individual's role in society...

...How could they disregard the role of the individual when the existence of the movement and their personal freedom as well depended primarily on the character of the individual...

...The movement of the "Revolutionary Socialists" was the most dramatic...

...The peaceful policy of the Socialists had failed so abysmally that many workers felt the Communists, who had always advocated radical tactics, should be given their chance...

...The New Men, at the same time, grew more and more convinced that if conditions ever again should be in a state of flux, a Socialist victory would depend exclusively on the revolutionary readiness of the working class parties and leaders...

...The RS were not the first socialists who criticized Marxism...

...But Buttinger is hardest on himself and discusses his own developments with candor and irony, without the slightest trace of admiration or even selfpity...

...For, who are the people in a position to determine where the heresy ends and the conspiracy begins...

...In February, 1934, the Austrian working class rose against the Dolfuss regime, which trailblazed Hitler's total conquest, and were crushed by the Heimwehr...

...Whether you wanted to read or study...

...liked to go to concerts or to the theater...

...The RS of Austria do not fit into this scheme...

...They drew a thick line through the past, called themselves new men and began their own new movement under the name of "Revolutionary Socialists...

...the heroes of the past—Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, and the Utopian Socialists...

...But a few months of Communist duplicity were sufficient to make them see the true character of the new saviors...

...The advocate of the "instinct of workmanship," the "only loafer in a highly respectable community...

...As a political party, it vied with all others, and the gentle art of vote catching pervaded not only its style and conduct but also its structure...

...From the child-labor horrors of early British capitalism to Marx's pawn-shop visits, from the gangster-play of the American robber-barons to a rendezvous with Veblen, dangling a black ladies-stocking 202 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 from his hands, there is never a dull moment...

...The book is "jazzed-up" with biographical data, milieu descriptions, muckraking and a little bit of Kinseyism...

...they gained control over shop stewards in large factories, penetrated the unions and captured several complete formations of the Schutzbund—the Socialist military arm...

...The economic crisis had not advanced their revolution, as many expected it would...

...unselfish militants and smart professional politicians...

...The Austrian working class had very early embraced socialism as its political philosophy...

...Austria was the only country where the Communists completely failed under illegal conditions and where the socialists succeeded, even to the point of reducing the CP to the small conspirative sect it had been before...

...Marx was great but American capitalism is greater and altogether it is a great world...

...On the whole, however, this is a fair presentation of Marx's ideas, even though Heilbroner adopts the false identification of Marxism with what passes as "Marxism" in the Russian state-ideology...

...He acquaints us with many people on all levels, from Frau Meier who becomes a symbol under his hand of the unknown party militant, a Viennese Jimmy Higgins, all the way to the very top: to Otto Bauer, the leader and foremost theoretician of the party, to Karl Seitz, the Mayor of Vienna, and Karl Renner, the first President of Austria...

...loafed and read," who did not like the business-aspects of capitalism as they seemed to hinder the full unfolding of an industrial society in which science and technique rule, Heilbroner treats with particular affection, although "like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses...

...workmen remained the backbone throughout its existence...

...It is obvious that such an enormous mass organization attracted people of highly diversified character, ability and ambition...

...Some have become important again and will not like his critical appraisal of their not-so-distant past...

...But the conditions of their own struggle forced them to revisions...

...To determine the questions "of whether corporations will naturally grow larger or whether we will suffer from business cycles," Heilbroner refers to a mysterious "we...

...Their new role of leadership brought the RS in direct contact with the emigre party leadership, particularly with Otto Bauer...

...in the underground movement, he rose fast to become, at 28, its chairman and recognized leader...

...Heilbroner's modern heroes are Veblen, Keynes, and Schumpeter...

...But Keynes is truly Heilbroner's man...

...He was not only the theoretician and the symbol of revolutionary socialism within the party, but also its most important political leader...

...Economics, according to Robert Heilbroner, is not "only a matter for professors but is the science that has sent men to the barricades...

...They refused to accept social determinism because they saw in social determinism the greatest obstacle in their struggle for a socialist society...

...This way has found a formulation in Sidney Hook's Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No, which enables the American politicians to destroy their own democracy in the name of democracy...

...expression of Austrian socialism...

...neither is anything new revealed, nor anything related that cannot be found elsewhere, though not in such an elegant and pleasurable form...

...the blow was not less severe for the socialists, but on them it had also purifying and liberating effects...

...Austrian business operated obsolete plants with insufficient funds at minimum efficiency by the very simple credo of high prices and low wages...

...The Communist, Ernest Fischer, found out that even a clever trickster is without power against a firm conviction...

...In consequence, the leaders of the RS were almost automatically swept to the top...

...By his own past, Buttinger is excellently qualified to write the story of the RS...

...He understands Malthus' point of view sympathetically, even though it has "a melancholy hue" in the desire to deprive the poor of the "pleasures of the poor," and to increase parasitical consumption because the population tends to outrun the food-supply...

...The end of capitalism is here seen as the result of its success, not its failure...

...It was the fundamental old spirit of the socialist movement that leaped up from its sick bed as it were, for a last time, rushed into the open air, saw the huge hostile armies, and dauntlessly resolved to replace the armor of the past with new, more effective weapons...

...Buttinger himself underwent in this time a process of maturation which he describes with the greatest candor...

...All is done in a wonderfully "breezy" style, making this book undoubtedly the most readable tract on economics ever undertaken...

...In 1932, 648 thousand dues paying members, or 10 per cent of the total population, were organized in 1720 party locals...

...they emphasized the success of the labor movement within the existing order and wanted to leave it there...

...On the contrary...

...More than 1000 co-op stores were spread over the country...

...The RS can only be understood by understanding their motives...

...The source of their strength was emotional...

...They are all great men for Heilbroner, the critics and apologists of capitalism alike, nice men to boot, although some of them—Saint Simon, Fourier, and Owen—he finds slightly touched...

...Their criticism is nevertheless fundamentally different from that of all preceding groups...

...How could they continue believing in the objective factors, if the worst machinations of the party bureaucracy remained protected by this theory...

...not so the Communists...

...Disappointed again, they were now ready for an independent, really socialist movement...

...Complicated aspects of Marx's theory, probably out of respect for the general reader, are slighted-over, as for instance the question of the value-price transformation that concerned the subtler Marx-critique and anti-critique...

...The RS suffered bitter losses until they learned that cockiness and recklessness, so often confounded with boldness and - courage, were just as harmful as cowardice and over-carefulness...

...Illegality was completely numbing for the vast majority of hard-headed politicians who often lost their livelihood together with their party...

...Austria was dominated by a strange combination of police state, bigotry and protectionism which cut off people of working class origin from the possibility of advancement...

...Austria had neither "yellow unions" nor a Communist party worth mentioning...

...Russia, from being their main hope, became a dark menace...

...By its very nature the SDP was incapable of going underground and therefore completely unprepared...

...In their criticism, the RS distinguished keenly between Marxism and Marx himself: They are determined to continue the age-old battle in spite of all defeats, all authorities, all powers of society, and in this determination they feel as close as ever to Marx...

...But the occurrence of the business-cycle and the fact of corporations already precludes the existence of a "we" whose democratically exerted moral will will maintain America as "an island of success in a poverty-stricken, confused, and antagonistic world...

...What they thought to be new in themselves was in fact nothing but the ageold human revolt against injustice, absurdity, and ugliness in life...

...The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers...

...The first consequence of the abortive February revolt* was the outlawing of the movement...

...they are faced with a set of remedies which spring from social attitudes quite beyond his imagination...

...He tells the events as they occurred and calls the actors by their true names...

...Joseph Buttinger's book, "In the Twilight of Socialism," is the history of the Austrian socialist underground from the victory of Austro-Fascism in February 1934 up to Hitler's Anschluss in March 1938...