AUSTRIAN REVOLUTION

Published in 1923, this book stands unique as an analysis of the Austrian revolution in Central Europe in 1918-21's internal dynamics and the costs of defeat. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. It 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. 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. 'It is largely thanks to Otto Bauer's The Austrian Revolution that I discovered the richness of the Austro-Marxist tradition and the many affinities between the writings of Bauer and of our Gramsci, especially on the question of hegemony.' - Luciana Castellina, co-founder of Il Manifesto. The Austrian Revolution is one of the classics of Marxist political analysis comparable to Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire or Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. Well illus, heavyweight 400 page paperback.