Description
Book SynopsisThis is the story of the decline and fall of an empire, a region devastated by war, and a world stage fundamentally transformed by the Russian Revolution. Bauer’s magisterial work — available in English for the first time in full — charts the evolution of three simultaneous, overlapping revolutionary waves: a national revolution for self-determination, which brought down imperial Austro-Hungary; a bourgeois revolution for parliamentary republics and universal suffrage; and a social revolution for workers’ control, factory councils, and industrial democracy.
The brief but crowning achievement of Red Vienna, alongside Bauer’s unique theorization of an “integral socialism” — an attempted synthesis of revolutionary communism and social democracy — is a vital part of the left’s intellectual and historical heritage. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. Bauer tells the story of the Austrian Revolution with all the immediacy of a central participant, and all the insight of a brilliant and original theorist.
Table of ContentsFirst Section: War and Revolution
The Southern Slavs and the War
The Czechs and the Empire
The Poles and the Central Powers
German Austria in the War
Second Section: The Upheaval
The Formation of the “Nation-States”
The Disintegration of the Empire
The German-Austrian Republic
National and Social Revolution
Third Section: The Predominance of the Working Class
Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Forces
Between Imperialism and Bolshevism
The Revolution in the Factories
The State and the Working Class
Fourth Section: The Period of Equilibrium Between Class Forces
Economic Upheaval and Social Regrouping
The Struggle for Republican Institutions
The Battle Against the Counter-Revolution
The People’s Republic
Fifth Section: The Restoration of the Bourgeoisie
The Monetary Catastrophe
The Geneva Treaty
The Outcome of the Revolution and the Tasks of Social Democrac
Index
