
Remembering Red Vienna
Though tragically snuffed out by the rise of fascism, Red Vienna was an island of socialist organizing and workers' power worth commemorating.
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Though tragically snuffed out by the rise of fascism, Red Vienna was an island of socialist organizing and workers' power worth commemorating.
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.
The workers of Red Vienna struggled to secure their basic needs — through militant organizing and political power.
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.
To solve the housing crisis, we may have to go back to the future.
From Vienna to Chile, the success of social housing for the working and middle classes shows how beautiful homes can coexist with urban housing for all.
A Green New Deal can’t deliver economic or environmental justice without tackling the housing crisis. We should go big and build 10 million beautiful, public, no-carbon homes over the next 10 years.
What would a bold left-wing housing plan look like? Let’s build ten million new, public, no-carbon homes in ten years and guarantee housing for all.
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.
In the 1950s and '60s, New York City’s cooperative housing embodied the egalitarian dream of modernist architecture.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky is renowned as creator of the first fitted kitchen, designed to cut the time devoted to household chores. But her “social architecture” was just part of her deep political convictions — a journey that led her to the Communist resistance against Nazism.
Amid the radical upheavals of the early 1900s, the Austro-Marxists tried to marry revolutionary aims with reform-minded practice.
In March 1919, Hungary saw the creation of a short-lived revolutionary state. We look at the significance of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and its attempted transformation of art and culture.
Austria’s far-right Freedom Party has deployed populist rhetoric to swell its base. Now the party is eyeing state power.
Composer Hanns Eisler was a lifelong communist and self-described Jacobin. His music provided the soundtrack for both the tragedies and triumphs of German antifascism.
Today in 1918, Eugene V. Debs delivered the speech that landed him in jail. We reprint it here in full.
Leon Trotsky's brief 1917 stay in New York City left a mark on the American socialist movement.
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.
The late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm recounts the origins of International Workers' Day.