Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934

by Helmut Gruber

From 1919 to 1934, the Socialist government in Vienna sought to create a comprehensive working-class culture, striving to provide a foretaste of the socialist utopia in the present. In Red Vienna, Gruber critically examines the impact of this experiment in all areas of life, from massive public housing projects and health and education programs to socialist parades, festivals, and sporting events designed to create a "new" working class. The Socialist program faced enormous obstacles, arising from the exaggerated expectations of the socialist leaders and their conventional cultural vision, from the resistance of workers, and from the competition of commercial and mass culture. Gruber then evaluates the limited and partial success of the Viennese "model" -- clearly the most comprehensive in the West and a democratic alternative to the Bolsheviks' experiment in Soviet Russia -- to pose general questions about attempts to fashion culture from above.

Genres: History, Politics, European History, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published August 22, 1991

Reviews

[Nitram12 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zanimljiva tema

[A Whelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful and historical study which complicates my own understanding of the Red Vienna era which looms large in the mind of a 21st-century social democracy-curious Marxist. The key points which Gruber captures well are that the Viennese socialist government made a serious tactical blunder in focusing almost entirely on the political and cultural developments of the working class with virtually no attention to adjusting the economics of the situation. The result was a perverse paternalistic shade of vanguardism, or as Gruber puts it — a concrete challenge to Gramsci's call for a counter-hegemonic culture to be built prior to seizing state power. The social democrats led by Otto Bauer prioritized a precarious electoral strategy which time and again relied on a faith in the benevolence of a Catholic / Christian Democratic-infused state to support their red programming (spoiler: this largely did not happen, especially in moments of class violence such as July, 1927 and the Austrian Civil war).

Towards the end, Gruber writes: 'A cultural program projected from above onto a population below is designated to remain the expression of an elite.' This argument should not be taken mechanistically if for nothing else but Gruber's clear Soviet antipathy, but he has a point in the case of Austromarxism precisely because of the lack of any economic socialist agenda. If the materialist conditions do not change, how could there be a fundamental change in working class structure? Not to mention that the Austromarxist credo 'against the idea of force, the force of ideas' perfectly captures Lenin's critique that one cannot be a Marxist if they oppose revolution.

The book features a surprising bit of editorializing and conjecture based on minimal datasets, but certain sections were extremely well-researched and compelling. In particular, the deep study of 'municipal socialism' and the public 'palace' housing complexes, and of course the chapter on party culture which dives into actual party literature to critique specific institutional policy such as libraries and festivals. I think I will need to return to this chapter in the coming months for how it refracts Soviet bibliographic literature.

[Paul]

"This is an extremely important book--the way Mein Kampf is an important book. It's a vicious political hatchet job conducted against one of the most productive eras of the twentieth century, politically, economically, culturally."

[The above sentence is the first in an ongoing review of Gruber's book that will be updated periodically in WOID. Stay tuned.]

Paul Werner, PhD, DSFS
Editor-inter-Pares,
WOID
http://theorangepress.com/woid

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting in a few places, but generally this book is pretty dense and pretty vague.