Okay so everyone’s gone off about another ooh-aah Vienna public housing article. So, for context,

The Thing About Red Vienna Is

That as the Austro-Hungarian Empire modernized from an agrarian economy, nobility from rural areas diversified their economic bases by selling or mortgaging their local holdings and buying land in the capital, which they then developed for rent. In this way industrial workers’ monthly rent replaced annual harvests as their income stream – Marx was really quite literal about the continuity between the feudal liege and the urban landlord.

So when the empire collapsed Vienna ended up in a shrunken Austria in which urban residents outvoted all domestic rural power and felt no obligations whatsoever to nobles now in other countries, so if “control of Viennese housing” was the nexus of economic power they could just seize it themselves and blow raspberries.

How’d that go? Well, eventually the old money types raised an army in the countryside and those Vienna housing projects were actually the final redoubt of the leftists before artillery softened them up and the rightists established one-party “Austrofascism”.