The definitive work on Eastern Europe’s revolutionary period and the unique working-class experiment of Red Vienna

This is the story of the decline and fall of an empire, a region devastated by war, and a world stage fundamentally transformed by the Russian Revolution. Bauer’s magisterial work — available in English for the first time in full — charts the evolution of three simultaneous, overlapping revolutionary waves: a national revolution for self-determination, which brought down imperial Austro-Hungary; a bourgeois revolution for parliamentary republics and universal suffrage; and a social revolution for workers’ control, factory councils, and industrial democracy.

The brief but crowning achievement of Red Vienna, alongside Bauer’s unique theorization of an “integral socialism” — an attempted synthesis of revolutionary communism and social democracy — is a vital part of the left’s intellectual and historical heritage. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. Bauer tells the story of the Austrian Revolution with all the immediacy of a central participant, and all the insight of a brilliant and original theorist.

First Section: War and Revolution

The Southern Slavs and the War

The Czechs and the Empire

The Poles and the Central Powers

German Austria in the War

Second Section: The Upheaval

The Formation of the “Nation-States”

The Disintegration of the Empire

The German-Austrian Republic

National and Social Revolution

Third Section: The Predominance of the Working Class

Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Forces

Between Imperialism and Bolshevism

The Revolution in the Factories

The State and the Working Class

Fourth Section: The Period of Equilibrium Between Class Forces

Economic Upheaval and Social Regrouping

The Struggle for Republican Institutions

The Battle Against the Counter-Revolution

The People’s Republic

Fifth Section: The Restoration of the Bourgeoisie

The Monetary Catastrophe

The Geneva Treaty

The Outcome of the Revolution and the Tasks of Social Democrac

Index