CONCERING THE NEW PROGRAMME OF THE AUSTRIAN SOCIALIST PARTY
The reasons why the Austrian Socialist Party has provided itself with a new programme at what might be called vertiginous speed are nowise to be sought in need that has suddenly arisen for theoretical clarity concerning the party's future path. The real reasons are located several storeys lower down, at a very different level, and have their roots in the shock which the disappointing outcome of the last elections to the National Council gave the Austrian S P's leading stratum. The 13 May 1956 results were, not at all the expected permanent parliamentary guarantee for the coalition, but a bourgeois Austria in which the possibility of governing without and against the S P began to be sketched out. A year later, for the elections to the federal presidency, a bourgeois united front was achieved. Now despite its failure, despite the success represented by the election of Schärf, the SP leaders did not recover from their shock. Instead of saying clearly that the bourgeoisie does not have a parliamentary majority at its disposal in Austria when the working class takes a firm stand, they interpreted Schärf's success as a confirmation of the desire of the majority of the Austrian people to see the coalition maintained : instead of standing up all the more strongly against the Austrian Völkspartei, they followed the line of increased adaptation to the bourgeoisie.
The new slide to the right of the SP leaders finds its personal expression in the designation of Pittermann as the new president of the party. With Pittermann there has stepped forward that breed of political administrators who see unprincipled manœuvres as the supreme art in politics. The SP then also made the self-contradictory attempt at an agreement with the Catholic Church and simultaneous advances toward the liberal bourgeoisie of a traditionally anticlerical orientation, i e, the progeniture of the Nazis. By the attempt to separate the Church from the Oe V P at the cost of ideological and political concessions, it was a question of bringing pressure on the latter and keeping it favorably disposed toward coalition; by the offers to the "liberal bourgeoisie, " the FPO was to be excluded as a possible coalition partner of the Oe V P. Within the framework of this unprincipled policy, the decision to work up a new party programme was conceived only as a supplementary manœuvre. It was a question of showing the bourgeoisie that the S P's "socialism" did not transgress the limits of capitalism. The open break with Marxism was to deprive the Oe VP of its argument about the "red
The new programme was to say to the marginal strata perpetually oscillating between the classes: "You may vote S P" even if you remain Catholic or "national." But to the extent that the new programme was to express something concrete, that was to be the real line of the present leading stratum of the SP. It is indeed to these tasks that the answer was given by the "draft for a new programme for the S P" which was presented to the party's Salzburg Congress in the Autumn of 1958
In the course of the discussion, the party leadership - an unheard-of thing - ran up against an almost unanimous rejection. The draft, as a result of its wordiness, its length, and its lack of clarity, was a badly edited document even from a purely formal viewpoint, and this
circumstance contributed to its rejection; but the criticism to which it was subjected was nonetheless of a predominantly political nature. For the most rightist representatives of those "bourgeoisified" strata who recent years have come forward in the SP and who aim the most noisily at breaking with Marxism and demanding the abolition of the old traditions and symbols, those who want to change the S P from a workers' party into a peoples' party - for these representatives the draft did not go far enough. It turns out that the hullabaloo raised by these "ballast-heavers" was greater than their weight. For the criticism of those who still base themselves consciously on the working class and who represent the potential lett within the s !, carried more weight. That had to be taken into account, especially in drawing up the text of the definitive programme. The result is a document which maintains, it is true, the basic conception of the draft, but which avoids the draft's open repudiation of Marxism, which formulates the delicate passages with more caution and skill, and which has even made a complete turn concerning the attitude to take toward the revolution of the colonial peoples. The fact remains, nevertheless, that its ditterence from the spirit of the Linz Programme of 1926 is striking.
The Linz Programme - leaving aside its weaknesses on the question of the conquest of power by the working class - was a Marxist programme. We cannot really say as much for the new programme. In its economic goals and in its political and social demands, it does not go outside the field not only of the capitalist social order, but even of the bourgeois state, with all the attributes which that possesses in Austria, such as the break-up into provinces, the Economic Chambers, etc, come out at every moment in the programme as facts established so to speak once for all. What was determinant for the authors of the programme was not the "vision of future society," but the text of the Federal Constitution that they had beside them.
And what now of socialism in the new programme? It is a question of a combination of a "public economy"
private economy" in which, side-by-side with a state "dirigism" described as planning, free competition and private entrepreneurial initiative must continue to
That is why the SP calls for a more just system of property and a better functioning economic system, which the full disposal of the decisive factors of production shall belong to the public economy. This implies that the initiative of the entrepreneur, competition, and the price mechanism will be able to operate broadly within the framework of an economy exclusively at the service of the community.
In this "socialism," they have not forgotten to introluce paritary commissions. For the workers and clerical employees the pillars of economic democracy are the trade unions and the labor exchanges, factory councils and employees' delegates; for the entrepreneurs and independent workers, they are the chambers and the free representations of interests. The pillars of economic mocracy are to torm economic commissions which wi d the government as well as the legislative bodies i economic problems.
To the extent that orientation and planning are in question here, they must be limited to investment and
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL tinance policies, 1e, to keyness well known recipes tor guaranteeing full employment. In other words, the "socialism" of the new programme is nothing but a sort of transposition of the coalition system into the economic field. But such phrases as those where it is said that enterprises "whose situation of power endangers the general economic and political interest" must be socialized, are words that commit to nothing, compared to a policy which is ever more in retreat before the attacks of the Oe V P against nationalized industry. After all, it was necessary to call these enterprises by their names, i e, certain institutions and industries, eg, the banks, rawmaterial firms, etc. Of course, that would have been too binding!
The programme having been thus laid out in its fundamental part in such a way that it could be accepted also by the bourgeoisie, it might have been expected that at least in its immediate demands it would have defended specifically workers' interests. That is not the case, either. The Linz Programme had included in its immediate part a large number of suitably deepened and strongly emphasized demands. But the new programme scarcely goes beyond generalities and phrases that do not commit to anything. In important fields, it remains far behind the Linz Programme that was considered to have been outstripped. There is a lot about democracy, but it chooses for example the field of the particularism of the provinces, which was imposed on the working class in 1920 under extreme reactionary pressure, whereas the first political demand of the Linz Programme was "the unitary Republic on the basis of a democratic local administration instead of the Federal State." The new programme thus helps to perpetuate the domination of reactionary cliques in the majority of the federal states. It abandons the demand for the total separation of Church and State, which is in itself a specific demand not of socialism but of bourgeois democracy, Austria, where, despite all the assertions of pious Socialist cabinet-ministers, the Catholic Church constitutes one of the main supports of the power of the bourgeoisie, that is of the highest importance. But the new programme capitulates in ideology and in practice before the Church.
The true axis of the new programme is the interests of the bourgeoisified workers' bureaucracy, precisely that stratum that holds the leadership of the SP. This line found its open expression in the draft. The definitive text is a concession made to those forces in the SP that continue to base themselves on the workers' rank and file in the party. In this connection it must not be lost sight of that this workers' base had on the whole a passive attitude during the discussion; the discussion, properly so called, took place within a stratum of members limited in number compared to the membership as a whole. The criticism of the potential left wing, weak and unorganized, did not endanger the draft's basic line, the policy of coalition raised to the height of a party dogma; it scarcely dared even to attack it. But it was strong enough to prevent an open break with Marxism, and to oblige the programme commission to formulate certain passages more skilfully. And on one point the commission even had to make a complete turn.
The draft had found the means of reducing to the same common denominater of dictatorship: fascism, that sanguinary tool of big capital; the regime of bureaucra-
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL tically degenerated or deformed workers' states; and the regimes that arose trom the anti-imperialist liberation struggle of "backward" and oppressed peoples! Democratic socialism, the draft said peremptorily, is the "mortal enemy" of all these regimes!
The definitive text of the programme dodged taking a position on the problem of the workers' shoving them under the table. But concerning the liberation struggle of the colonies, it now says:
[.] the Oe SP rejects the imperialist policy of the old capitalist powers, as well as the policy of imperialist expansion of Soviet Communism. It calls for the rapid liquidation of the vestiges of colonialism, and salutes the liberation movement of all peoples.
The Oe S P considers indispensable a collaboration on a basis of equality of rights and free consent between the highly developed industrial states and the countries in a condition of economic (uneconomic aid must be granted without political conditions ....
Leaving aside the "policy of imperialist expansion of Soviet Communism, we have here the best phrases of the whole programme. Even though the criticism of the lett had something to do with it, this change of opinion also reflects the modification in the relationship of forces on a world scale, to the disadvantage of imperialism which has occurred and which continues thanks to the advances of the colonial revolution. And it is therein that lies - despite the camouflaged break with its own past - the hope of a development favorable to the proletarian-socialist forces within the Austrian Socialist Party.