Otto Bauer (1881–1938)

A member of the Austro-Marxist school, Otto Bauer wrote this erudite volume of 600 pages when he was only 26 years old. It was a brilliant achievement for so youthful a writer, but rather lacked finish. The book’s lengthy theorizing about the sources of national culture, the origins of European history, and the nature of the Jewish problem, makes quaint reading today, and even in 1907 some readers must have had difficulty struggling through a mountain of information on the Austrian nationality problem before arriving at Bauer’s theory of imperialism. It was this which established him as a new magnitude in the field of Marxist scholarship, though within three years his brilliant sketch was to be superseded by Rudolf Hilferding’s massive treatise. It may be remarked that for all its weaknesses and its occasional touches of naïveté, Bauer’s analysis of the national question in Eastern and Central Europe was far superior to the subsequent productions of the Leninist school.

On imperialism, his starting point is the growth of global rivalries and the consequent relative shrinkage of interest in purely European affairs. The question he raises is why the great powers increasingly tend to place their foreign and military policies in the service of expansion to the less developed regions of the globe, and the explanation he suggests is that the periodic cyclical depressions characteristic of capitalism accentuate the urge of capital to secure guaranteed spheres of influence in preindustrial countries, where investment opportunities are better and profit rates higher. He helped to popularize a thesis which has now become familiar, but was far from being widely accepted in the first decade of the century. He also stressed that free-trading England was the chief victim of the protectionist policies adopted by other nations, notably Germany and the United States.

He deduced that in any exchange between industrialized and backward areas, even under complete free trade and in the absence of political control, surplus value is pumped out of the latter into the former, because the ‘higher organic composition’ of capital under advanced technological conditions means that surplus profit accrues in a proportion favoring the capitalists of the more industrial region at the expense of those with whom they trade. The stress of his argument would seem to lie on the idea that capitalist expansion leads to imperialist annexation because under modern conditions the strongest concentrations of capital--the cartelized industries and their allies, the banks--require guaranteed markets and politically controlled fields of investment from which foreign competitors are excluded. His attitude towards this development was somewhat ambiguous and even left room for the suggestion that the whole process is economically progressive in that it equalizes profit rates and helps to establish a global economy. He even conceded that workers might profit from protectionism and expansionism, at any rate in their capacity as producers, though on balance the adverse effects of cartels and tariffs were harmful to their interests as consumers. It is only when the political consequences of imperialism--mounting armaments, weakening of parliamentary control, spread of authoritarian attitudes at home--come into play that systematic distrust changes into open hostility on the part of the class-conscious workers. Hence, he thinks that Social-Democracy and imperialism are incompatible, the more so since imperialism clearly heightens the danger of war, while at the same time it undermines democracy at home. If labor’s long-term and short-term interests are not identical, it was at least conceivable that a situation might arise in which people would prefer to follow a rival movement which promised the more immediate satisfactions: at the expense of conquered races and in the name of ‘National Socialism’. It was to be Bauer’s misfortune that in the 1930s such a situation did in fact arise, and that his Australian Social Democratic Party proved helpless to meet it. [1961]… (mer)

Written after the rise of Fascism in Central Europe and the temporary eclipse of the labor movement, this final production of the Austro-Marxist school may be regarded as Otto Bauer’s political testament. Though conceived under circumstances very different from the hopeful anticipations of earlier work in 1906, it displays the same unshakeable confidence in the ultimate triumph of democratic socialism. There was a remarkable consistency in Bauer’s outlook. While he had no illusions about the ‘revolutionary proletariat’, he relied on the internal dynamic of class conflict under capitalism to bring about the socialist transformation. As he saw it, capitalism and democracy were becoming incompatible, and it was just this which would compel the labor movement to abandon its reformist illusions and undertake the conquest of political power. [1961]… (mer)