Austria’s capital city is famous for its model public housing and social services, the legacy of municipal socialism in the 1920s. But it’s been decades since the Social Democrats have done anything to build on this record. Now a new leftist party is working to turn Vienna red again.
Sigmund Freud often regretted the fact that most of his patients were drawn from the upper classes. But when socialists turned Vienna “red” after World War I, neurotics both rich and poor gained access to free treatment and new experimental methods.
Rising from the ruins of World War I, in the 1920s Vienna’s socialist administration was famous for its innovative housing and public health programs. But at the heart of “Red Vienna” were its services for children, guaranteeing that even the poorest young people could share in the joys of childhood — and the foundations of a fulfilling life.
Few major cities have welcomed the world’s oligarchs and kleptocrats like London has. Yet nestled within the neoliberal dystopia, London’s neighborhoods reflect the long and ongoing struggle to transform Britain’s capital into a self-managed, social-democratic municipality for its residents.
The fight over pandemic prevention isn’t just about surviving the coronavirus. It’s about our potential to build a more collective and compassionate society. Despite Donald Trump’s absurdities, most Americans are ready and willing to adopt solidaristic measures.
Slowly but surely, the idea of social housing — a public housing model most commonly associated with the socialist government of “Red Vienna” — is moving from being a leftist dream to a concrete policy agenda item in a number of US states.
The COVID-19 era eviction moratorium has given rise to a new journalistic genre: the “renter from hell” narrative, portraying landlords as the real victims of the crisis.
The Austrian socialist architect Josef Frank resisted modernists who wanted to make homes look like workplaces — an idea with new resonance in an age when so many of us are working from home and feel like we can't escape from our work.
Media pundits hail the economist Karl Polanyi as a brilliant theorist of capitalism and a thinker for our time. In order to understand Polanyi’s ideas, however, we need to see him in the context of his own time: Europe’s "age of catastrophe" in the early twentieth century.
Born this day in 1900, Anna Seghers was one of Germany’s great modern writers, an internationalist and anti-fascist through the darkest hours in German history. Her works are a monument to the dignity of the oppressed.
Under capitalism, housing is a commodity, which means it principally exists to make rich people richer rather than meet human needs. That gap between making money and making profit distorts a whole range of life outcomes for average people — and real estate agents play a critical role in that process.
Building a humane city should start from the premise that every person deserves a decent place to live. And the only way to accomplish that is through collective action, carried out by working-class movements.
Born into a blue-collar family on the eve of World War II, Curt Sørensen became Denmark's most prominent Marxist intellectual. He insisted that Marxism wasn't just a tool for academic analysis — rather, it had to be an aid to the workers' movement, learning from and feeding back into practical efforts to achieve socialism.
The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. We need a bold new housing agenda that includes millions of new social housing units, universal rent control, an end to speculative profiteering, the elimination of homelessness, and a federal homes guarantee.
Stephen Cohen, who passed away earlier this year, resisted ideological conformity at every turn. The great historian of Nikolai Bukharin and the Russian Revolution left behind a deep body of work that will remain invaluable for generations of socialists to come.
Polish economists like Oskar Lange and Michał Kalecki produced highly creative models of how a socialist system could work, balancing equality and efficiency. But Poland’s Communist government neglected their ideas, sowing the seeds of its eventual demise.