n this atmosphere, the correspondence between Marx and Engels was one of the books that I needed most, and one that stood closest to me. It supplied me with the greatest and most unfailing test for my own ideas as well as for my entire personal attitude toward the rest of the world. The Viennese leaders of the Social Democracy used the same formulas that I did. But one had only to turn any of them five degrees around on their axes to discover that we gave quite different meanings to the same concepts. Our agreement was a temporary one, superficial and unreal. The correspondence between Marx and Engels was for me not a theoretical one, but a psychological revelation. Toutes proportions gardèes, I found proof on every page that to these two I was bound by a direct psychological affinity. Their attitude to men and ideas was mine. I guessed what they did not express, shared their sympathies, was indignant and hated as they did. Marx and Engels were revolutionaries through and through. But they had not the slightest trace of sectarianism or asceticism. Both of them, and especially Engels, could at any time say of them selves that nothing human was strange to them. But their revolutionary outlook lifted them always above the hazards of fate and the works of men. Pettiness was incompatible not only with their personalities, but with their presences. Vulgarity could not stick even to the soles of their boots. Their appreciations, sympathies, jests even when most commonplace are always touched by the rarefied air of spiritual nobility. They may pass deadly criticism on a man, but they will never deal in tittle-tattle. They can be ruthless, but not treacherous. For outward glamour, titles, or rank they have nothing but a cool contempt. What philistines and vulgarians considered aristocratic in them was really only their revolutionary superiority. Its most important characteristic is a complete and ingrained independence of official public opinion at all times and under all conditions. When I read their letters, I felt I, even more than when I read their writings, that the same thing which bound me so closely to the world of Marx and Engels placed me in irreconcilable opposition to the Austrian Marxists .

These people prided themselves on being realists and on being businesslike. But even here they swam in shallow water. In 1907, to increase its income, the party set out to establish its own bread-factory. one that was dangerous in principle and utterly hopeless in any practical sense. I fought against the venture from the start, but I was met with a smile of condescending superiority from the Vienna Marxists. Nearly twenty years later, after many vagaries and losses, the Austrian party had shamefacedly to hand it over to private hands. In defending themselves against the displeasure of the workers who had made so many futile sacrifices, Otto Bauer tried to prove the necessity of abandoning the factory by afterward quoting, among others, the warnings I had given them at the outset. But he did not explain to the workers why he had failed to see what I had seen, and why he did not act upon my warnings, which were not all the result of my personal powers of insight. I based my opinions neither on the situation in the bread-market nor on the state of the membership of the party  , but on the position of the proletariat party in capitalist society. This seemed like dogmatic theorizing, but it proved to be the best criterion. The confirming of my warnings only meant the superiority of the Marxist method over its Austrian counterfeit.

Victor Adler was in all respects far above the rest of his colleagues. But he had long been a sceptic. In the Austrian scramble, his fighting temper was wasted on little things. The vistas of the future were obscure, and Adler turned his back on them, sometimes demonstratively. “The business of a prophet is a thankless one, and especially in Austria,” this was the constant refrain of his speeches. “You may say what you like,” he said in the lobby of the Stuttgart congress, apropos of the above-mentioned Australian prophecy Zero Moment Of Truth, “but for my part I prefer political predictions based on the Apocalypse to those supported by a materialistic interpretation of history.”