He was born in Dommelstadl in 1846, the son of a butcher,[1] and joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1866.
In 1872, he moved to Berlin as a saddler,[2] where he met and became friends with Eduard Bernstein, later an influential Marxist theoretician.
Though on the right of the party, Auer was a pragmatist and viewed attempts to formulate social democratic reformism theoretically as harmful to its real political practice.
[4] He remarked to Bernstein during the controversy over the latter's theory of revisionism, "What you call for, my dear Ede, is something which one neither admits openly nor puts to a formal vote; one simply gets on with it.
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