From Ideology to Utopia

When Ernst Fischer died of a heart attack on 1 August 1972, while on holiday in the Styrian village of Deutsch-Feistritz, there came to a close one of the most interesting careers in the history of postwar European communism. (Le Monde 3 August 1972, in its obituary, ranked Fischer close behind the great Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukacs, for richness and originality of thought). Originally a Social Democrat, Fischer joined the diminutive Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Osterreichs, KPO) in 1934 and rose rapidly to become a member of the party's central committee and one of its leading theoreticians. He served this party and the international communist movement in zealous and unquestioning fashion until Khrushchev's revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 caused his comfortably Manichaen view of the world to crumble. Rather than abandoning the movement, however, he laboured over the course of the following decade and a half both to probe the causes of the disease of Stalinism and to evolve a new Marxist-Leninist vision

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