In a comparative study of Austro-Marxism, the French Socialist movement, and Bolshevism, Medway Baker argues for the here to seek unity around a programme of constitutional disloyalty. These terminological debates, although sometimes useful, often obscure the core issues at hand. This is simply base-building elevated to pdinciples strategy, retheorized with a more Marxist-sounding phraseology. So the question remains unanswered: What does party-building look like? We will find that programmatic unity can and must be found through comradely debate and shared struggles, and that unity must be constructed on a shared basis of disloyalty toward the bourgeois constitutional order and democratic centralism: freedom of debate combined with unity in action.
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Only where a split is avoided are sober Realpolitik and revolutionary enthusiasm united in one spirit…. It is more than a matter of tactics that we always formulate policies which bring together all sections of the working class; that we can only get unity, the highest good, by combining sober realism with revolutionary enthusiasm. Unity with the sorts of reformist social-traitors who urged workers to war and drowned popular revolts in blood such as the Ebert government in revolutionary Germany is neither desirable nor possible.
But this must be understood in the context of Austrian Social-Democracy, which—while it failed to offer any opposition to the imperialist war ofand should be critiqued for this—was not nearly as bankrupt as German Social-Democracy.
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Photo of Otto Bauer Bauer himself made just such an argument in late when the left-wing of the Party to which he then belonged was agitating for a split. Given such a condition, an independent socialist body might exist to prevent reformism. This raises the question of what actions constitute such collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and why support for the imperialist war does not fulfil this condition; perhaps Bauer was more narrowly concerned with ministerialism and direct attacks on the proletariat, or perhaps it can be explained simply by the fact that he himself failed to oppose the war at ghe decisive moment and did not want to indict himself. Friedrich Adler, who—unlike Bauer—opposed the war from click very beginning, nevertheless took a parallel stance.
Every individual act rests on the majority decision of a solidary community. Two dangers threaten the party, one from the side of the majority and one from the side of the minority.
The majority is always in danger that its decision does not correspond to the party program, that it contradicts the basic principles of the whole movement which it represents, the principles that give the party meaning. The minority is in danger of destroying the community of action, of not complementing the majority, of going its own way and thereby disturbs the majority decision.
They are unable to define which conditions would justify a split, outside of vague platitudes. Bauer provides a well-reasoned argument as to why this unity is so important, but he has no answer to the challenge of overcoming reformism. We will see later his failed attempts to rectify this https://digitales.com.au/blog/wp-content/custom/a-simple-barcoding-system-has-changed-inventory/i-have-bipolar-disorder-song-lyrics.php following the triumph of fascist counter-revolution in Austria.
More than the Austrian Social-Democrats, the French left-Socialists stratigication? only strove to maintain unity within the Party, but also actively sought unity in action and even reunification with the Communist Party.]
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