90 years of the February fights

Declaration of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Austria (PdA), Vienna, 12 February 2024

On 12 February 1934, revolutionary sections of the base of the Republican Protection League and the workers' movement in Austria engaged in armed struggle against the authoritarian régime under Engelbert Dollfuß. This was an attempt to put a stop to the process of fascisation, which had been manifesting itself in all clarity since March 1933, but had already become apparent beforehand.

The orientation of decisive sections of Austrian big capital and big landowners towards the establishment of a fascist dictatorship shapedlike the Italian model had historical foundations. In the autumn of 1918, the bourgeois parliamentary republic was merely imposed on the big bourgeoisie. At the time, it could count itself lucky that the counter-revolutionary and reformist approach of the leadership of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDAP) had saved it from the socialist revolution demanded by the working class. However, the urge for authoritarian autocracy, reaction and violence, which fundamentally characterises big business in the imperialist stage of capitalism, remained. As capitalism entered the stage of its general crisis, this urge gave rise to fascism as a crisis strategy, in the form of movement and as a form of rule. Social democracy made it possible for the bourgeois parties and their paramilitary organisations to move from the defensive back onto the offensive and into government.

The establishment of the Heimwehr movement as an openly fascist movement correlated with the policies of the Christian Social governments in the course of the 1920s, which began as counter-reformist and turned into a creeping process of fascisation. With these instruments - fascist terrorist groups on the one hand, and the bourgeois state's apparatus of violence, which was untouched by social democracy and falsely regarded as class-neutral, on the other - big business went on the attack. This process was supported internally by the Catholic Church and externally by the fascist governments in Italy and Hungary.

The aim of genuine Austrian fascism, Austro-fascism in the Heimwehr movement and parts of the Christian Social Party (CSP), was to destroy the labour movement, eliminate democracy and establish a fascist dictatorship. How serious the most reactionary forces of the Austrian bourgeoisie were about this was demonstrated by the bloody suppression of the July revolt in 1927 at the latest. In ideological and programmatic terms, the Heimwehr movement no longer minced its words in 1930 with its "Korneuburg Oath". And so, in March 1933, the Christian Social Chancellor Dollfuß used a difficulty with the rules of procedure in the National Council to shut down parliament and switch to government legislation. Initially, some basic political rights were restricted and the Republican Protection League and the Communist Party were banned. In his programmatic speech on Vienna's Trabrennplatz in September 1933, Dollfuß then formulated the goal of establishing a "social, Christian, German state of Austria based on the estates and under strong authoritarian leadership". The newly founded "Fatherland Front" was to be developed into a fascist unity party.

While the conscious and revolutionary sections of the Austrian labour movement, including communists, socialists and social democrats, called for active resistance against fascism, the SDAP leadership continued to play down the demand. Until the very end, it relied on a negotiated solution with those who had not only long since decided to establish the fascist dictatorship, but were already working on its realisation. This policy pf capitulation of the Social Democratic leadership did not come out of thin air, it was the logical and internally consistent continuation of the counter-revolutionary policy at the end of the First World War, the reformist policy in the first post-war years and the constant retreat in the years that followed. All the pseudo-radical phraseology used by the leading ideologues of social-democratic "Austromarxism" was merely a distraction and misdirection of the working class. In reality, the "strategy" of the SDAP, as laid down in the "Linz Programme" of 1926, favoured the rise of fascism. Not only could the path of "Austromarxism" never lead to socialism, as leading "Austromarxist" theorists preached, but it also led logically to the defeat of the labour movement and the establishment of the fascist dictatorship.

This meant that the anti-fascist resistance had to be organised from the button. When the uprising initially began in Linz on 12 February, it was with the express disapproval of the SDAP leadership. It were mainly ordinary members of the Republican Protection League, the SDAP and its supporting organisations who were prepared to offer armed resistance. While the SDAP leadership abandoned the February fighters and in some places Social Democratic functionaries even engaged in open betrayal, the Austrian Communists unconditionally backed the attempted uprising and joined it. However, they were unable to give the struggles a decisive turn, as the forces of the Communist Party were too weak at the time. The defeat of the fighting workers in the short Austrian civil war was almost inevitable, thanks to the social democratic policies of the previous years as well as the wrong structure, strategy and the inadequate to non-existent armament of the Protection League. As a result of the defeat, all social democratic organisations were banned, and on 1 May 1934 the Austrian "corporative state", the open Austro-fascist dictatorship, was formally established.

In the following years, it was primarily the Austrian communists who became active in the anti-fascist resistance. Due to the obvious failure of the SDAP leadership, many former Social Democrats joined the KPÖ during these years, whereby the Austrian communist movement became a political force with mass influence for the first time under the most difficult conditions of illegality. Alongside the KPÖ, the grouping of "Revolutionary Socialists" (RS) was formed in the anti-fascist resistance, which initially saw itself as distinct from the old social democracy, but then merged with them in 1945.

However, the Austro-fascist regime was not brought to an end by the anti-fascist resistance of the communists and socialists, but by a rival fascism, by German Nazi fascism. On the one hand, the German Hitler regime was endeavouring to incorporate Austria into its territory for political, economic, and military strategic reasons, which is why the Austrian branch of the NSDAP was supported accordingly and the Austrofascist government was put under pressure. On the other hand, there was also a growing pro-"national socialist" faction within the Austrian bourgeoisie, which saw its imperialist interests better represented by German-fascist imperialism than by the Austrofascist state, which was relatively weak in terms of foreign policy. In March 1938, the German Wehrmacht invaded Austria and at the same time the Austrian Nazis seized power for the time being. This was followed by the annexation of the country by Germany and six years of German-fascist foreign rule.

It was the preceding years that had paved the way for Hitler to enter Austria. On the one hand, the destruction of the Austrian workers' movement by Austrofascism had eliminated the potentially strongest force in the fight against Nazi fascism, and after four years of Austrofascist dictatorship, the regime was also unable to mobilise to defend a democratic order. On the other hand, both the Austrofascists and the Social Democrats had ideologically ensured that the German annexation was massively facilitated by their false German nationalist position on the national question, according to which the Austrians were Germans and Austria a German country. Only the Austrian Communists rejected this view at the time and in previous years and declared their support for the independent Austrian nation, backed by the German Communists, the Communist International and the USSR. Once again, it was primarily the communists who continued the resistance under the new fascist regime, not only as an anti-fascist struggle, but also as a national struggle for freedom. The fact that Austrian sovereignty, state independence and democracy could be restored after the Second World War was, on an international scale, largely thanks to the USSR politically and the Red Army militarily.On an internal Austrian scale, it remains primarily the merit of the communists to have ensured the Austrian contribution to the fight against Nazi fascism and for Austria's freedom.

In a further assessment and categorisation of the February fights, it should be noted that the myth of "shared guilt" must be rejected. It is clearly the fault of the reactionary forces in the Christian Social camp and in the Heimwehr movement for eliminating democracy and bringing about the civil war. They established a fascist dictatorship in Austria in 1934. February 1934 thus marked the extreme escalation of the class struggle in the form of armed conflict. The armed resistance of sections of the working class was right and necessary and the only thing to criticise is the fact that this struggle was or had to be waged too late, poorly organised and structured and hence strategically wrong; because the leadership of the SDAP was responsible for the fact that the fighting workers found such starting conditions. It is therefore not surprising that today's SPÖ leadership is once again adopting a class-neutralised standpoint, speaking of a general human "catastrophe" for which the working class and the bourgeoisie are equally responsible. This is where the SPÖ leadership meets with the ÖVP, the successor party to the CSP, in a joint social partnership falsification of history. There can never be "shared guilt" between fascism and anti-fascism.

If one wants to grasp the concrete reason for this approach and viewpoint of the SPÖ, it actually lies in the "social partnership-based class harmony". The final abandonment of the class struggle, which was at least still mentioned in words in the First Republic, and of the class standpoint on the part of the SPÖ, not least in its view of history, formed the basis of the Second Republic, in which the SPÖ and ÖVP should and wanted to share power as brothers and sisters. In this way, the SPÖ was given largely equal access to political power and state functions and became an integral part of the state monopoly system in Austria - the SPÖ leadership was prepared to sell out the interests of the working class for this; in return, the ÖVP (and thus the bourgeoisie) received a working class that had been subjugated by the SPÖ- and ÖGB-leadership and was supposed to resign itself to capitalism and no longer waste any thought on class struggle, revolution, and socialism. Ideologically, this meant that the SPÖ leadership adopted the entire arsenal of the old CSP and new ÖVP: Anti-marxism, anti-sovietism, and anti-communism, while anti-fascism was to play hardly any role at all; the illusion of the "social market economy", which was to replace the goal of socialism; social partnership, which replaced class struggle, even at the lowest level.This is the content of the social-democratic-conservative consensus, which was to be the political and economic basis of rule in the Second Republic and the inviolability of capitalism. And when the "neoliberal" turnaround was also heralded in Austria in the 1980s, the SPÖ-leadership willingly went along with this capitalist offensive and even implemented it itself in government and against the interests of the working class.

The February fights of 1934 are not class-neutral, but must of course be viewed from a proletarian class standpoint. They were a courageous, but already desperate attempt to avert the real catastrophe, fascism. Thus the February fighters saved the honour of the Austrian working class, which had been abandoned by the SDAP leadership, even if the battles ended in defeat. At the same time, an analysis of fascism as a bourgeois form of ruling reveals that it is the open dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of monopoly and finance capital. We can draw conclusions from these facts.

For the labour movement, the failure to put an end to the bourgeois state and capitalism in 1918 took its revenge in 1934 and afterwards. The SDAP leadership succeeded in maintaining an apparent unity of the working class by means of a certain verbal radicalism and keeping its revolutionary sections, for example in the Communist Party, largely isolated. However, since this meant unity with the opportunism and revisionism of the SDAP leadership, it also meant their dominance in the labour movement. The consequences of the wrong opportunist policy and revisionist theory and strategy were fatal. Thus one lesson of the February fights - or rather of the years 1918-1934 - is that the organisational separation of the revolutionary Marxist sections of the workers' movement from opportunism and revisionism is essential. Both on the defensive and on the offensive, the working class needs a class party capable of fighting and based on Marxism-Leninism. This is once again confirmed by the development of the SPÖ since 1945, which abandoned any socialist perspective after the Second World War.

Today, the SPÖ has degenerated into a party that mainly represents the interests of Austrian and European monopoly capital. However, the influence of revisionism in the world communist movement from the mid-1950s onwards, which contributed significantly to the end of the USSR and the socialist states in Europe, also emphasises this necessity. Austria needs a Marxist-Leninist party, something that even today's KPÖ, which has an honourable history, no longer represents. Only such a party will be able to work, act and fight successfully to overthrow capitalism along with its imperialist and fascist manifestations, to carry out the proletarian revolution and to build socialism.

In this sense, the Party of Labour of Austria strives to preserve and defend the anti-fascist legacy, the militant tradition and the revolutionary perspective of the February Fighters. Honour their memory!

Against fascism, imperialism and capitalism!

For democracy, peace and socialism!