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Friedrich Adler
On October 21, 1916, Friedrich Adler, a leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, assassinated Prime Minister Karl von Stürgkh in a politically bankrupt act of terrorism, which flowed from the Austrian SPD’s turn away from a socialist perspective oriented to the working class.
Friedrich Adler was the son of Victor Adler, the “father” of Austro-Marxism, a trend in international social democracy that sought to maintain a veneer of Marxist theoretical orthodoxy at the same time as it adapted to the Austro-Hungarian state and its participation in the imperialist world war that had erupted in August, 1914.
Leon Trotsky, leading Russian revolutionary, described the political physiognomy of Austrian social democracy. He wrote, “Around Victor Adler, the first and greatest victim of his own method, grouped the mediocrities, the lobby politicians, the routinists and the careerists to whom there was no need, as there was for their leader, to blaze out a path through the wearying chaos of Austrian politics from revolutionary conceptions to complete skepticism in order to remain sworn enemies of any revolutionary initiative and of mass action. The miserable prostration of the official bosses of Austrian socialism revealed itself at the outbreak of the war in the form of an unbridled servility towards the Austro-Hungarian state.”
As leader of Austrian social democracy from 1911, and editor of its theoretical publication, Friedrich Adler adopted a stance towards the war that owed more to pacifism and outraged moralism than revolutionary internationalism.
Trotsky later contrasted Adler’s act with the stand taken by Karl Liebknecht, the German socialist leader, who had led a mass demonstration against World War I in May 1916. Trotsky wrote, “Friedrich Adler is a sceptic from head to foot: he does not believe in the masses, or in their capacity for action. At the time when Karl Liebknecht, in the hour of supreme triumph of German militarism, went out to the Potsdamerplatz to call the oppressed masses to the open struggle, Friedrich Adler went into a bourgeois restaurant to assassinate there the Austrian Premier. By his solitary shot, Friedrich Adler vainly attempted to put an end to his own scepticism. After that hysterical strain, he fell into still more complete prostration.”
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