Introduction
Helene Bauer, born Gumplowicz in Krakow in 1871, was one of the leading economists of Austromarxism. She held a Ph.D. in Economics and State Sciences from the University of Zürich. She defended her dissertation Die Entwicklung des Warenhandels in Österreich [On the Development in the Merchandise Trade in Austria] in 1905. She published numerous essays around the pressing economic and political issues of her time, like the economic transition from the Austrian Empire into the Republic in 1918-1919, food shortages and the crumbling economy after the end of the Great War, the housing crisis, and housing reform in Vienna, property levy and socialization, the crisis in the world economy and the rise of fascism, etc.
She belonged to an intellectual circle closely connected to Austria’s Social Democratic Workers’ Party in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, known as “Austromarxism”. They aimed to create a new socialist society by d...