Dude, who even knows.
Post with 7 notes
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”.
Post reblogged from left unity with 2,183 notes
When I met Eva late last year, she looked smart in a jean jacket with a neatly tied silk scarf around her neck, small dangly earrings and cropped curly hair. Over the course of the last 44 years, as she continued to teach English to fifth through eighth grades, Eva’s rent increased almost fivefold, to 270 euros from 55, but her wages increased more than 20-fold, to 3,375 euros a month from 150. Viennese law dictates that rents in public housing can increase only with inflation, and only when the year’s inflation exceeds 5 percent. By the time she retired in 2007, Eva’s rent was only 8 percent of her income. Because her husband was earning 4,000 euros a month, their rent amounted to 3.6 percent of their incomes combined.
That’s about what Vienna was aiming for back in 1919, when the city began planning its world-famous municipal housing, known as the Gemeindebauten. Before World War I, Vienna had some of the worst housing conditions in Europe, Eve Blau notes in her book, “The Architecture of Red Vienna.” Many working-class families had to take on subtenants or bed tenants (day and night workers who slept in the same bed at different times) in order to pay their rent. But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation.
Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it. […]
Post reblogged from Deep Learning State Machine with 17 notes
In brief, the “Schreckenstage” (“days of horror” or “days of terror”), as they were called by newspapers at the time, were pivotal for the future of Austria. They were a major setback for the Social Democratic Party, which had done well in the April 1927 national elections, narrowly losing to the Christian Socialist Party and its allies. Worse, they enabled the fascist Heimwehr to attract new members and increase its threat to Austria’s democracy.
The riots began as a massive protest against a court decision that had freed three men who had, admittedly, shot and killed two people (an invalid war veteran and his eight-year-old nephew) in a peaceful Social Democratic march in the city of Schattendorf. The court decision was rendered during the evening of July 14, 1927. From most contemporaneous accounts, the protest on July 15th arose spontaneously, catching both the police and Social Democratic leaders by surprise.
Huge crowds of workers and other supporters of the Social Democrats assembled on the Vienna Ring near the University, City Hall, and the Parliament Building. Reportedly, the workers planned to march from the working districts of the city to the parliament and ministry of justice (located across a plaza from the parliament building), then return to their work places and homes. The crowd numbered, at its peak, about 200,000 people or more.
At about 10:00 a.m., the flow of the crowd was blocked at the plaza in front of the Palace of Justice building. This building was guarded by a small number of lightly armed security forces. For some reason, a small Calvary unit rode into the large crowd on horses, with sabers drawn, apparently to try to drive it back toward the Ring. Shortly after that, police security officers fired their pistols into the crowd from the steps of the Palace of Justice.
Enraged, some members of the crowd armed themselves with bricks, tools, boards, and other materials they obtained from a nearby building site. They successfully stormed the Palace of Justice, forcing the police to retreat to higher floors of the building. Shortly thereafter, the building was set on fire. When the fire department came to fight the fire, its trucks were stopped by the crowd which refused them access to the burning building.
The violence escalated in the afternoon when large numbers of police officers came to the Palace of Justice area, and other parts of town, armed with heavy rifles, and began to shoot at groups of people on the street.
The leaders of the Social Democratic Party, belatedly, sent members of its militia, the Republican Guard, to the streets to help calm the crowd. It exhorted Party members to return home. Also, it called a national strike of transportation and communication workers to protest the shooting. At the same time, it refused to provide protesting workers with weapons from its huge arsenal, which included rifles and machine guns.
The clashes between protesters and police continued into the night of Friday, July 15th. By July 16th, the violence had greatly declined, though skirmishes continued. On July 17th, encountering strong resistence in the country’s provinces to its strike, and hearing of plans by the Heimwehr to assemble an army to march into Vienna, the Social Democrats called off the strike.
During the three days, about 85 marchers and bystanders were killed, as were four police officers. About 600 police officers were wounded, 120 of them badly. Between 300 and 500 civilians wounded. Over 1,500 people were arrested.This is the prelude to the Austrian civil war 5 years later when democracy ends in Austria
I think if we’re talking Austrian precedent it would be Red Vienna to the Blue cities - if the leftist movement has the dominant cities but the rightists have the country, they can extract resources from landlords through taxation to build their glorious utopia… until the landlords in the countryside they’ve been leaving alone raise troops there and crush them. America’s not a one-city state like Austria though, where if you hold the countryside and you siege one city you have everything.
Source: eclecticatbest.com
Post reblogged from Deep Learning State Machine with 24 notes
In a later attack on sexual abstinence literature, Wilhelm Reich singled out the harmfulness of designating an arbitrary age—twenty or even twenty-four—as medically appropriate for the onset of sexual intercourse. In his experience as a sex counselor, he maintained, those who had not made the transition from masturbation to intercourse by the age of twenty experienced difficulties in doing so later.
Socialists trying to prevent incels.
Link reblogged from left unity with 791 notes
Portland Republican says party should use militia groups after racial attack →
White people see white nationalist violence and decide white people are under attack. Cool beans.
Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal, however, told the Guardian that recent street protests had prompted Portland Republicans to consider alternatives to “abandoning the public square”.
“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” he said. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”
Asked if this meant Republicans making their own security arrangements rather than relying on city or state police, Buchal said: “Yeah. And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.”
Asked if he was considering such groups as security providers, Buchal said: “Yeah. We’re thinking about that. Because there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are like Nazis.”
Can’t make this shit up. Like this is a public call for armed white supremacists to show up to protests, rallies, marches and to “protect” Republicans from us. These white men cannot help but support racist violence even when confronted with its abject harm to all.
Alright, I see this close up and I got sympathy for the Multnomah Republicans.
A thing to address the underlying “how can they do X, and expect Y?” is the people doing X and expecting Y here don’t see themselves as the same. The MultCo Republican Party aren’t behind the free speech-branded events designed to pit based stickmen v. antifa - that’s a YouTuber from Vancouver WA.
(And BOTH these social media alt-righters AND the Republicans had independently told the slasher off when he’d showed up to events, on the grounds he wasn’t an ally, just a fighty weirdo asshole looking for a pretense. The Portlanders I know most involved in left protest have been trying to push back on blaming even alt-righters, cause they know that “that guy showed up, I hope no one holds him against us” feel. Also they point out he’s rootless and unstable, been shot in the face by cops and spent years in prison, maybe where he learned that deadly but unsexy down-the-jugular slash, and had the habit of latching on to any cause that lets him antagonize people.)
What the actual Multnomah Republicans have been up to lately is:
- A “March 4 Trump” in a park in the country clubby suburb of Lake Oswego - that drew Good Night White Pride types but cops kept the peace. That’s where the slasher-to-be showed up and they told him off.
- The 82nd Street Rose Parade in Portland. The Republicans had a section, some SJNGO resume-polisher said he’d rally to resist it and separately some riseup email threatened to physically disrupt it. The organizers asked for more police, the city said no, so they called the whole thing off rather than give in to demands to exclude the Republicans. (The neighborhood fixtures are SE Asian immigrant neighborhood businessmen with all the anticommunist rightism that implies, the county party holds meetings at one of their restaurants, so.)
And yeah, if your major party can’t even hold Norman Rockwell events because your rivals in city administration won’t bother to defend them from political paramilitaries, cause maybe #resistance, that’s a problem, and I sympathize with the notion that it’s those guys’ duty to address it completely at their own expense.
And the slashings aren’t something that would make the GOP accept this, and they take claims that that makes it ok, or even necessary, as further provocation, an insulting non sequitur. The recent killer voting Bernie and Stein is way too thin a reed to pin it on leftism, but I’ll say it’s reasonable grounds for the Republican Party to not feel on the hook for a guy they specifically ran off on their own initiative long before.
If there’s a lesson, as far as the Republicans are concerned, it’s that heated tensions attract and empower hotheads, and that tensions should be calmed. And that while “one major party, the currently ruling one, accepts that they cannot hold Norman Rockwell-type events in rival-administered cities” might calm tensions on this subject, it is a wrong answer, un-American, and that “political and civic society institutions reaffirm and enforce that Norman Rockwell-type electioneering, even that which empowers rival forces, should be respected, even when disliked”, which would also calm tensions, is right.
Liberalism! It has its charms. And yes, this particular communique is a threat, and the threat is “if you abrogate liberalism, and backstop your rule with political paramilitaries it doesn’t mean we roll over and you just win, jfc.”
It’s a Weimar escalation cycle all over again, for all that leftists fault the SPD for trying to reign in left-streetfighters, mainline rightists faulted it for not crossing their base to discipline the ruffians enough, “what choice did you leave us but those who would?”
Photo reblogged from Maps on the Web with 239 notes
How Sweden would have looked like if it used the same electoral system as the US in the 2014 election.
Source: reddit.com