ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century modern socialists and communists believed that community of goods required the territory of a nation-state or even of an amalgam of countries. The ‘enormous organizational apparatus of state control over the economy’ set up in wartime Germany needed only to change hands to turn into an ‘instrument of socialism’. According to Ulrich Kluge, the revolutionary movement that swept through Germany was the product of military disaster and socio-economic crisis. Even moderates like Haase and editor of the party daily Die Freiheit, Hilferding, believed that a beginning with the socialist transition should be made. In the early years of the twentieth century a distinct ‘Austromarxist’ group of theorists emerged, with Hilferding, Max Adler, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner as main proponents. In summing up, the German Independents and Otto Bauer’s Austrian socialists no longer made the creation of a socialist economy dependent on socialisation in a number of countries.
