Page - XXX - in Otto Bauer (1881–1938) - Thinker and Politician

xxx foreword boasted a statement that exceeded its original purpose of assessing Social Democracy’s possible future development and touched upon the roots of Bauer’sconceptionofdemocracy: Wearedemocratsandsocialists.However,wearenotpetty-bourgeoisvul- gardemocrats,whocounterposedemocracytosocialism,putdemocracy over socialism, andareprepared to jeopardiseor even surrenderall the socialistelementsthattherevolutionhaswonforthesakeofdemocracy. Wearedemocrats forthesakeofsocialism. AccordingtoBauer,democracyisnotintrinsically legitimisedasmajorityrule, but is subordinated to and legitimised by socialism. Hence, democracy becomesameans toapredeterminedend.However, this alsomeans that the order can be reversed: socialism can be introduced before democracy if the historical circumstances demand it. That is why Bauer could interpret and acceptRussianBolshevismas ‘despotic socialism’withoutgreatdifficulty– in thehopeandbelief, of course, that theprocess of democratisationwouldbe developed later on.With respect to this, Karl Kautsky – inwhose footsteps Otto Bauerwalked until he discovered and began to justify ‘despotic social- ism’ –was a betterMarxist and democrat. He did not capitulate to the illu- sion that a dictatorshipwith terrorist featureswould ever turn into a demo- cracy.What ismore,hemaintained the idea thatBolshevismwouldcollapse, which, for the timebeing, eclipsed theMarxist perspective of capitalist col- lapse. Thus, we can only conditionally consider Bauer a flawless democrat. Not only based onhowweperceive democracy today, but even in terms of how his contemporaries, Karl Renner andHans Kelsen, distinguished it. Rather, weshould regardhimasademocratwhoadhered todemocracyprimarilyor exclusively because,most of the time, it appeared to himas the safest road to socialism. It is no accident that there is not a single paragraph inBauer’s collectedworkswhere theauthorpositively refers to thecontinuedexistence ofamulti-partysysteminafuturesocialist society.Bauerdidnotopenlystate whathe,asaconsistentMarxist,wascompelledtothink: thatthebasis forthe existenceofdifferentpartieswoulddisappearwiththedemiseofantagonistic classes. To preserve the liberty and creativity of the responsible individual was a different issue for Bauer, who was a humanist and defender of the classical legacyof theEnlightenment.This attachment to individual freedom waspreciselywhatseparatedhimfromBolshevisminspiteofallappearances. Suffice it tosay,healsohopedthat individual freedom, likedemocracy,would berestoredintheSovietUnion.