Austro-Marxism and the Habsburg Crisis: A Non-Territorial Response to the Conflict of Governance and Class

This article re-examines the national theory of Austro-Marxism as a response to the dual crisis of the late Habsburg Empire: the paralysis of imperial governance and the erosion of cross-national class solidarity. Karl Renner and Otto Bauer proposed a non-territorial federal scheme based on the personal principle and cultural autonomy, reconstructing the nation as a cultural community grounded in individual registration. By severing the link between nation, sovereignty and territory, they sought to reopen space for class politics while preserving the imperial state. The article argues that this scheme was an institutional proposal shaped by the specific contradictions of the Empire’s socio-economic structure. Its failure reveals a tension that recurs in contemporary discussions of non-territorial autonomy: the success or failure of institutional designs for plural societies is determined less by their internal coherence than by their capacity to respond to the material conditions of the societies they seek to govern.