I’ve always been really interested in Austria, think it’s a pretty fascinating country, as one of the only Western Global North countries that had some form of stint under socialist control (unfortunately, the Nazis snuffed that out pretty quick just before WWII started, and the Western allies took Austria afterward so socialism wasn’t even on the table post war). Karl Marx Hof is one of my favourite buildings.
I saw a lot of discussion of this way back on Reddit /r/communism, where they were claiming all of the communist parties in Austria aren’t/are no longer communist/ML, and that there’s basically no real communist movement in Austria. A lot of hate for KPÖ and PDA. But, seeing how all the discussions are in English and not German, by mostly non-Austrians, I imagine it suffers from the same information barrier problem that happens every time the English speaking internet tries to talk about what’s going on in a non-English speaking country, and clearly /r/communism has a lot of issues with the judgements of the majority userbase, as pointed out here and that got blown wide open with the Russia-Ukraine war.
Since reading those discussions, I’ve always wanted to know more about communism in modern Austria but never got the chance to. So, any communists actually in Austria, what’s the actual state of communist parties and general communist movements over there, from your perspective?
The communist party in austria has pretty much been nonexistent in state wide politics since the 1950s. However in recent years the KPÖ has had some sucesses in local polls, mostly due to the persons running, but also due to missing alternatives on the left. In Graz, the second biggest city, the mayor Elke Kahr is in the KPÖ, however Graz has always been a strong bastion for them. More suprising was the result in Salzburg, where in the state Salzburg the KPÖ was the 4th strongest party, and in the city Salzburg even the second stronges.
The party program was mainly focused around making rent cheap, I think a topic that our social democrats would have had these points in the 70s as well. The party program is in no way communist in a ML sense, but I think that is ok, because the revolution won’t happen on the polling booth, but it can lead to more power to the working class, which can be used as a basis.
There are also two communist student parties, that stick to their name a bit more, but high school politics is sadly pretty irrelevant.