ABSTRACT
The Austrian Social Democratic Party was constituted as a united and supranational party with a broadly Marxist programme at the party congress which met on New Year’s Eve of 1889 at Hainfeld, the ‘Bethlehem of Austrian Socialism’. 1 There are a number of reasons why the party was formed at such a relatively late date. The economic backwardness of Austria had retarded the formation of a large and class-conscious industrial working class. Unity had been hampered by national differences and by regionalism, a problem that was not helped by the natural admiration of the German Austrians for the SPD in the Reich. The determination of many German Austrians to follow the model of their northern comrades gave the movement a certain Greater German bias, later to be found in the enthusiasm of Austrian Social Democrats for the Anschluss in the years before 1933, which was hardly attractive to socialists from the other nationalities of the Dual Monarchy. The repression of the working-class movement, particularly after the anti-socialist laws in Germany in 1876, exacerbated the already very marked tendency towards factionalism, making the formation of an effective and united party all the more difficult. Followers of Lassalle quarrelled with admirers of Schulze-Delitzsch, Proudhonists quarrelled with anarchists, nationalists quarrelled with internationalists. There had been considerable progress in the years before Hainfeld, particularly in the field of workers’ education, and in 1869 there were 13,350 Austrian members of the First International. 2 But previous attempts to form a united party, such as the Neudörfl conference in 1874, had achieved very little. It was the combined effects of the depression from 1873 which made the Austrian labour movement far more receptive to Marxist ideas, and the undoubted diplomatic skills of Viktor Adler that made Hainfeld possible.
