Salvationist Hope, Terrorist Dictatorship

Surveying the condition of international socialism two decades after it was sundered by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer wrote of the need to unite “the ethos of democratic socialism and the pathos of revolutionary socialism.” Bauer argued for transcending the dichotomy between reform and revolution, asserting that each possessed something urgent: the need to salvage the positive conquests of bourgeois civilization, “the irreplaceable c...