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Review of The Austrian Revolution by Otto Bauer, edited by Walter Baier and Eric Canepa (Haymarket Books, 2021)

The end of World War I was a moment of world-historical importance. The collapse of the once-powerful Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires brought the catastrophic conflict to a close and paradoxically opened the way to renewed conflagration as the peoples of radically reconfigured Central and Eastern Europe struggled to revise a settlement imposed upon them by the victorious Allied powers.

Germany and Soviet Russias centrality to that revisionist effort, which ultimately precipitated World War II, often push the histories of the regions smaller participants into the background. Overshadowed by grand narratives of the period that portray them primarily as pawns or bit players in great power politics, their rich histories thus remain little known to outsiders.

The First Austrian Republic is one of those lesser-known states. Once the center of power in a massive, multinational state comprising fifty-five million inhabitants, the Austro-Hungarian Empires dissolution in 1918 transformed Austria into a polity of six million people, of which one-third lived in Vienna, the former imperial capital. With the exception of its ignominious demise at the hands of Nazi Germany in 1938, this republics fascinating story has drawn relatively little attention from outsiders.

That is why the appearance of Otto Bauers classic study, The Austrian Revolution, ably translated for the first time by Walter Baier and Eric Canepa, is such a welcome addition to the English-language literature on Austrian history. First published in 1923, the book examines the republics early years from the perspective of one of European socialisms leading theorists and one of Austrias most important political actors. It is a work of history deeply informed by the authors concrete political experience as well as his commitment to a Marxist approach to understanding unfolding events.

Otto Bauer was a man of wide-ranging interests and talents. Born in 1881 into a prosperous, liberal Jewish family, he was trained in law at the University of Vienna, where, as a member of the Socialist Student League, he joined a circle of young intellectuals later regarded as the founders of the Austro-Marxist School who believed it was their task to further develop the social theory of Marx and Engels, to subject it to criticism, and to place their teachings in the context of modern intellectual life. Despite disparate disciplinary interests, members of this group, including Karl Renner (law), Max Adler (philosophy), and Rudolf Hilferding (political economy), were united in their undogmatic approach to Marxist theory.

Bauers initial main interest was the nationalities question, an issue that repeatedly convulsed Austria-Hungarys political life as Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Italians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Poles, among others, vied for power in a semi-absolutist system dominated by German-Austrians. In 1907, at the age of twenty-six, he published The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, which attempted to theoretically undergird social democracys effort to build a cross-territorial, cross-ethnic movement while still preserving the cultural and legal rights of the empires myriad nationalities. This effort ultimately failed, but the book established Bauer as a leading socialist thinker.

Meanwhile, as a member of the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP), he also demonstrated an enormous capacity for political work. In 1907, Bauer founded Der Kampf (the Struggle), which became the partys leading theoretical journal; wrote almost daily on a wide variety of issues for the partys flagship newspaper, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung (the Workers Paper); and in 1914 became the SDAPs secretary and the obvious successor to the partys aging leader, Victor Adler.

Bauer did not oppose the SDAP leaderships decision to back the imperial governments declaration of war on Serbia in August 1914, which effectively triggered World War I. Immediately drafted, he was captured by the Russians in November and spent the next three years as a prisoner in Siberia. Released after the fall of the tsar, he returned to Austria in September 1917 after a sojourn in revolutionary Petrograd, which radicalized but did not convert him to Bolshevism.

Back in Vienna, Bauer played a major role in Austrian politics as the empire disintegrated along ethnic lines, and he succeeded Adler as the partys de facto leader. In November 1918, the Austrian Provisional National Assembly created a provisional government dominated by the Social Democrats, with Karl Renner serving as chancellor and Bauer as foreign minister.

Bauer saw up close not only the creation of the new Austrian Republic, but the governments decision under duress to sign the harsh Treaty of Saint-Germain, which required Austria to assume the empires guilt for starting the war, imposed a heavy reparations burden, and forbade Austria from unifying with the new German Republic. Bauer, believing a rump Austria was economically unviable, had made unity with Germany the linchpin of his foreign policy. He stepped down following the governments acquiescence to the treaty in September 1919 and turned his attention to party affairs and parliamentary politics.

Bauers history tells the story of the democratic republics early years, a period of both great promise and deep economic and political crisis where the limits of the new parliamentary order exploded into full view.

Arranged in five chronological sections, the books first part treats the nationalities question and its relation to the war and revolution. In four extensive chapters, Bauer examines how prewar tensions between the Hapsburg monarchy and the empires subjugated ethnic groups erupted into war in 1914 and the implosion of the state four years later. In Bauers view, it was the Hapsburg regimes fear of the rising national aspirations of the South Slavs, a people long subject to servitude, fragmentation, and a lack of history at the hands of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Turkish overlords, that drove it to declare war on Serbia.

The war initially seemed to overcome the ethnic and class divisions that had rent imperial society, but it ultimately accelerated a process of national revolution that had been underway for decades. By 1918, after four years of enormous casualties, privation, and military failure, the empire had lost its legitimacy and was too exhausted to restrain the forces of democratic reform and national independence.

Of course, for dominant German Austrians the issue of national identity was different. Noting that the conflict between our German-ness and our Austrian-ness runs through all of German-Austrias recent history, Bauer traces the oscillating attitudes of different German-Austrian social classes toward unity with Germany or support for the multiethnic empire they controlled. In 1914, the bourgeoisie considered this conflict essentially resolved as Germany and Austria-Hungary joined together in a patriotic defensive war. Indeed, they were joined in this attitude by the workers movement, which, despite its internationalist commitments, was gripped by the fear of Russian victory.

This outlook did not last, however, as the war dragged on and antiwar sentiment, especially in the labor movement, gained steam. Bauer provides substantial detail on the internal process in which the SDAP, too, came to oppose the war and to support the principle of self-determination for the empires peoples.

By the end of October 1918, the Hapsburg regime was finished. In part two, Bauer describes the collapse of the war effort and the victory of popular rebellions that created new national states across the former empire, including in German Austria. There, Bauer argues, a revolutionary process unfolded that was national, democratic, and social in content.

Austrias democratic revolution, he writes, was completed by November 12 with the creation of a Provisional National Assembly. But the social revolution continued. Over the next two years, until its defeat in the first round of postwar parliamentary elections, the SDAP dominated that body. During this stretch, under what Bauer titles The Hegemony of the Working Class, the state was able to carry out substantial pro-labor reforms, including the eight-hour working day, collective bargaining rights, and workers councils in the workplace.

Yet the radical transformation of Austrian society faced many challenges, from within and without. Like many Social Democratic leaders, Bauer regarded himself as a socialist revolutionary, but he also feared the chaos and violence that revolution could bring. His analysis of events in Vienna makes clear he was no admirer of the Bolshevik model. When radicalized soldiers abandoned military discipline, seized private property and government rations, and attempted to form a Red Guard, Bauer dismissed their actions as the revolutionary romanticism of Bolshevism. He was relieved when most of the soldiers went home, and he supported the creation of a new army, the Volkswehr, consisting largely of workers, including many Social Democrats, which he believed saved the country from the imminent danger of anarchy and enemies on the frontier.

In Bauers view, the social revolution initially began in the barracks of the Vienna garrison, where soldiers rebelled against their officers, and then spread among the workers, who mobilized for mass demonstrations in favor of a republic. It was the culmination, he argues, of decades of Social Democratic efforts to guide the working class toward democracy. The national revolution, he writes, became the business of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution the bearer of the national revolution.

The events leading to November 12 generally had broad cross-class support, even in the conservative countryside, but Bauer insists that the step-by-step actions of the unified Left were decisive in winning a republic with little bloodshed. For him, the creation of the parliamentary order, buttressed by new institutions such as factory councils, fashioned the framework for a further advance toward socialism, a process that would be orderly and eschew the violence of Bolshevism.

In part three, Bauer examines the attempts of the SDAP-led government to improve workers conditions and puts forward his ideas for organizing a new, socialist economy.

At the same time, however, he doesnt paper over the obstacles Austrias political isolation abroad, its internal social and political divisions (especially between the anti-socialist Catholic peasantry, urban bourgeoisie, and socialist-dominated industrial centers); its deepening poverty in the face of rocketing inflation and food, fuel, and raw materials shortages that blocked the governments more radical aspirations. He shows how the left-wing government had to maneuver to avoid war with neighbors covetous of Austrian territory, fend off intervention by Western powers fearful of the spread of communist revolution, and resist being dragged into the revolutionary events in Hungary, where the proclamation of a Soviet Republic in March 1919 sparked renewed regional warfare that ultimately triggered a successful counterrevolution.

Plunged into this combustible environment, Bauer was convinced that the labor movements task was not to establish a Bolshevik-style dictatorship of the proletariat, but rather to act as a brakeman of the revolution. In his view, workers needed to use their newfound power prudently, and it was social democracys duty to prevent them from undertaking potentially ruinous actions for illusory aims. To that end, he writes, the SDAP-led government was in constant contact with key nongovernmental organs of the labor movement, such as the trade unions and workers and soldiers councils to promote policies that could realistically be pushed through the National Assembly.

This was hard and often unpopular work workers frequently demanded more than the government could deliver but Bauer insists it was essential to the process of educating the working class and raising their level of political consciousness. Bauer could justifiably argue that the government did what it could under difficult circumstances.

Still, he exaggerates the SDAPs success establishing its ideological hegemony among the masses, which, he claims, through purely intellectual struggles [had] broadened their intellectual horizon, kindled their intellectual agility, and maximized their drive to self-actuation. Like other Austro-Marxist intellectuals, Bauer was a teacher at heart, and had long thought that educating workers politically was the socialist intellectuals most basic activity. As the movements later failure to secure majorities would reveal, he overestimated the SDAPs ability to win over the working class and other social groups.

In parts four and five, Bauer analyzes the shifting power relations among Austrias social classes and how they clashed or coalesced in the political arena. Even before the SDAP lost the first parliamentary elections to its erstwhile coalition partner, the Christian Social Party, in the fall of 1920, it was apparent the peasantry and bourgeoisie had recovered from the political shocks of the revolution and were less willing to cooperate with labor.

Since the Christian Socials were at odds with the pan-German nationalists and lacked an absolute majority in parliament, Bauer believed that an Equilibrium of Class Forces, as he labels it, existed in the country that would still allow the workers movement, mobilized in the SDAP, the unions, and myriad other organizations, to exercise power. By 1922, however, he had concluded that, by mastering the inflation crisis with the help of international high finance, the Christian Socials had managed to stitch together a coalition of the peasantry, the petty-bourgeoisie, and the whole of the bourgeoisie (industrial and financial). The bourgeoisie, as the heftiest social force, thus asserted its control over the republic.

That control was not complete, however. Bauer points to the SDAPs robust popularity in the republican army and abiding stronghold of Red Vienna, where the party consistently commanded absolute majorities and launched a sweeping set of reforms in many spheres of urban life. He knew that, over time, a strong bourgeois government could undercut these gains, but he believed the SDAP would be able to overcome its recent setbacks and regain the initiative. The Right would fail to resolve the countrys ongoing economic and social crises, and the Social Democrats could bring white-collar employees and small tradesmen to its side, overthrow the bourgeois government, and reconquer workers power.

Despite such radical rhetoric, however, Bauer rejected the use of mass action unless the bourgeoisie tried to destroy the republican constitution. Victory was to be achieved within the framework of parliamentary politics.

It did not turn out the way Bauer wished. In the end, Social Democracy never returned to power, and the Christian Socials assiduously prepared the ground to overthrow the republic in 1934. While Austrias labor movement did offer violent resistance, its leadership, including Bauer, only supported taking up arms when it was already too late to be effective.

Though Bauers The Austrian Revolution appeared a decade earlier, its analysis of the revolution and of the system that emerged from it casts light on his approach to politics, a factor that was of substantial importance to the republics demise and points to what Peter Gay called the dilemma of democratic socialism. Bauer stood at the helm of a party of six hundred thousand members fully 10 percent of the entire population that consistently won over 40 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. To box out the SDAPs Communist rivals and to maintain the movements unity, he often used the radical rhetoric of class warfare and called for the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.

In practice, however, he remained committed to parliamentary politics and was unprepared to seriously consider other means. In a political environment in which the anti-republican Right had no qualms about resorting to ruthless violence, the fate of the republic was sealed.

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Otto Bauer and the Austro-Marxists Wanted a Socialist Revolution in ... - Jacobin magazine

The Paris Commune ended in mass violence with the slaughter of thousands of Communards on the barricades and the burning of much of the city. This final struggle forged the Commune as an iconic event in the history of socialism and the collective memory of popular struggle.

Yet it is now only vaguely remembered that before the Communes demise, the people of Paris had set about reconstructing authority and governance in the city along unprecedentedly revolutionary lines, grounded in the popular euphoria surrounding the central governments retreat from Paris on March 18, 1871.

Despite near-constant threats to the Communes existence from the rival government occupying Versailles, the audacious common folk of Paris imagined and began to constitute a new city and a new politics of their own design. Time, as it turned out, was short.

The surrender of Napoleon III to the Prussian army on the outskirts of Paris in early September 1870 had set the stage. A provisional government faced little choice but to mobilize the population in defense of Paris and other major cities.

Into this political space a broadly republican popular movement leapt forward to provide organization for resistance and to claim the right to self-governance. This meant enhancing the National Guard, organized in neighborhood-based units and only minimally under a central leadership already badly discredited by the military debacle of the previous weeks.

Encircled by the Prussian army, Parisians endured months of privation unequally distributed along class lines. At the same time, cut off from outside political and military support, Parisians invested local government, reinforced by the National Guard, with greater authority, through the localization of activity.

That strategy included the formation of cooperatives, local political clubs, and secularized public schools. November municipal elections brought a significant augmentation of the Lefts influence, though well short of a dominating presence except in a handful of arrondissements.

The advent of the Commune came only in the aftermath of a succession of events that profoundly altered the political stakes for a besieged Paris. First came the signing of an armistice on January 28, 1871, between the provisional national government ensconced outside the city at Versailles and the Prussians.

The terms of the armistice proved humiliating and included the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, a substantial indemnity payment, and a brief symbolic march of Prussian troops through the heart of Paris. A newly emboldened, broadly republican movement in which the Lefts influence had grown dramatically seized the role of defending the fatherland by asserting Pariss autonomy.

The months of resistance and hunger set the stage not only for national resistance but for a civil war. On the one hand stood the Communards, and on the other, a discredited national government barricaded with its middle-class supporters at Versailles and in the rural areas adjacent to Paris.

The governments failure to recapture cannons that were under the control of the Central Committee of the Parisian National Guard crystalized an already polarized politics. The central government added fuel to the fire by rescinding the Communes moratoriums on the sale of goods in government pawnshops and reinstituting the payment of rents and other bills that had accrued during the siege.

For an all-too-brief period, before being overtaken by brutal and ultimately cataclysmic suppression at the hands of central government troops under the command of Adolphe Thiers, the Paris Commune provided a unique setting for new forms of local governance to crystalize and challenge the traditions of urban bourgeois hegemony.

Following the final withdrawal of the central government in March, the Commune issued a succession of declarations outlining in broad principles what was already being carried out to varying degrees in the streets and arrondissements. The first order of business was to establish viable democratic polities and governing procedures in the spirit of the Proudhonist vision of local associationism, which had deep roots among Parisian working people.

Municipal elections on March 26 produced a new governing council for the self-declared Commune of Paris. While attacking bureaucratic control by setting maximum salaries of officials and breaking lines of authority from the central government, the Commune also limited the claims of landlords and creditors, affirmed municipal liberties, and circumscribed religious authority.

The communal vision came somewhat more sharply into focus with the famous April 19 Declaration, even as the prospects for all-out civil war deepened. A month of political contention and two municipal elections had set the stage for a programmatic statement of far-reaching scope. The former mayors and deputies had shown their class colors and largely retreated to the protective embrace of Adolphe Thierss Versailles government-in-waiting.

The Declaration of April 19 was vague at key points, and its aspirations were ultimately overwhelmed by the imperative to defend militarily the fragile social and political space within which the Commune defined itself. Nonetheless, it delineated the outlines of an alternative social order. This was to be a city within a federation of similarly constituted cities.

Such a locally constituted republic would forge an alternative unity of French citizens. Through the free exercise of liberties within self-governing municipalities, cities would claim democratic control of their own budgets and administration. They would expand municipal services, create a whole new set of institutions ranging from public schools to cooperative workshops, and while not directly attacking property, would universalize power and property, as circumstances might dictate.

Their vision was prescriptive, open-ended, and optimistic about the promise of municipal self-government. Future generations of municipal socialists would draw inspiration from that promise and the project of social regeneration. More importantly, the experience of governing in those early days suggested more powerfully than prescriptive declarations the tangible meaning of the municipal social republic envisioned.

Though piecemeal and incomplete, the Commune took some concrete steps to implement this vision both before and after the declaration. Some initiatives had been rooted in communal resistance to monarchist authority over the years immediately preceding the Commune.

The massive reconstruction of Paris at the hands of Baron Georges-Eugne Haussmann during the prior two decades took on legendary status, thanks in part to his own self-promotion. The construction of wide boulevards less susceptible to barricading and the destruction of many old, central working-class neighborhoods created a new urban landscape into which the rapidly expanding population of Paris flowed with unpredictable consequences.

That expanded population included large numbers of construction workers and stonemasons, some of whom had long been part of regular seasonal migrations to Paris from other parts of the country, like the Creuse. Their slow displacement from the central boarding houses and hiring fairs of the Place de Grve accompanied more permanent settlement in the new working-class neighborhoods on the periphery.

Whether by reputation for chronic contention with authorities or because of the new solidarities in their adopted neighborhoods, the stonemasons and other building workers were overrepresented among the arrested and deported Communards following the final street battles in late May.

Systematic studies by Jacques Rougerie, Manuel Castells, and others confirm that this urban revolution was not driven by a new proletariat but rather, as Rougerie termed it, an intermediate working class which included building workers, traditional artisans, and a significant component of shopkeepers, clerks, and professionals. As Castells put it:

They were the people of a great city in the process of mutation, and the citizens of a Republic in quest of its institutions.

David Harvey has shown that the Haussmannization of Paris in the years after 1848 produced urban space more starkly organized on class lines that set the stage for the upheaval of 1871.

Ironically, the bourgeois transformation of Paris created conditions that promoted a diverse new citywide working class infused with the scent of a broader internationalism that potentially challenged the bourgeoisies superior command of space. And that challenge, as Roger Gould has argued, grew precisely out of the neighborhood solidarities of these new urban villages that encompassed a new class.

Harvey and others have enumerated workers urban initiatives in the Commune that reflected their own claims over the control of Parisian space. The organization of municipal workshops for women; the encouragement given to producer and consumer cooperatives; the suspension of the night work in the bakeries; and the moratorium on rent payments, debt collections, and the sale of items from the municipal pawnshop at Mont-de-Pit reflected the sore points that had bothered working-class Paris for years.

In some cases, during the days immediately following March 18, as Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray recounted, former subordinate employs assumed new responsibilities, as happened for instance in the postal service. They had to improvise with limited resources in the face of sabotage by departing higher officials.

The Communes brutal denouement has, in some respects, obscured the innovative, localist social and political reforms that it briefly instituted and that it passed on to social democratic reformers who, in the 1890s and beyond, sought to craft a municipal socialism shorn of the revolutionary aspirations and the risks that were all-too-brutally embodied in the crushing of the Commune.

Memory of the Commune lingered for decades, not only in the nightmares of the bourgeoisie and their reformist allies but among social democrats who, like their Communard forbearers, saw in the city the opportunity to address the immediate grievances workers continued to face and to dream of an alternative social and political order they might constitute in cities.

The paradox of brutal defeat in defense of what increasingly came to seem the utopian promise of municipal revolution was not lost on subsequent commentators. Contestation over the memory and meaning of the Commune unfolded most vigorously among socialists themselves.

Karl Marxs The Civil War in France in its earliest editions provided almost instant history of the events in Paris as they unfolded. Drawing on what limited sources he could find newspaper accounts, smuggled letters, and occasional firsthand reports Marx cobbled together a report to the General Council of the First International delivered in late May 1871 just days after the final massacre of Communards. Marxs agenda was multilayered, and each layer subsequently fed into the memory and constructed meaning of the Commune.

First, he sought to assert the proletarian character of the revolt, though he would subsequently revise that assessment. Second, and perhaps most basically, he defended the nobility of the Communards revolt and sacrifice, seeing it as a watershed event in the promulgation of socialism, though its immediate consequences were clearly more ambiguous.

Third, he stressed the state-dismantling and state-building features of the Commune in ways that implicitly challenged the anarchists celebration of what they asserted was its nation-statedestroying character. Subsequently, he would belittle the moderation and feel-good measures undertaken by the Commune in the days and weeks following its initial creation.

A further subtext in the responses of Marx, Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and other Marxists was the continuing ideological war with Proudhonist associational influences, which, in their view, had been all-too-manifest in the Commune. Its emphases on localism, decentralized democracy, and producerist cooperative economy were seen as harbingers of a different socialist order, one that subsequently would continue to animate the practical reform programs of municipal socialists.

The horrific scenes of the Communes suppression between May 21 and 28 provided ample material for the elevation of those events to legend. Estimates of those slaughtered in battle or by execution ranged from seventeen thousand to forty thousand. Nearly fifty thousand were arrested, many sent into exile as far away as the French colony of New Caledonia in the South Seas.

Subsequent observers would continue over the next decade and more to attempt to make sense of the stirring events in Paris or, in the case of anti-Communard bourgeois commentators, to contest or efface its memory. In France, socialist politics became a tangled web in which the Commune served as a touchstone for both possibilist and impossibilist factions.

Paul Brousse, who served a political apprenticeship as an anarchist, came to believe in the revolutionary promise cities held, despite the failure of the Paris Commune. He advocated le Socialisme Pratique wherein meaningful socialist measures could be achieved on the local level prior to revolution at the centre.

The key was a shift in tactical thinking away from violence toward politics. Others drew parallel conclusions, albeit in different contexts. Mary Putnam, an American living in Paris as the events of May 1871 unfolded, enjoyed close ties to a family sympathetic to the Commune and believed the events she witnessed signified a legitimate defense of municipal rights.

The Commune continued to be honored as a moment of socialist martyrdom, and anniversaries and other symbolic occasions provided opportunities to affirm the sacrifices of the Communards on behalf of socialism. International commemoration of the Commune and particularly the date of March 18 became, in the words of Georges Haupt, an idea, a profession of faith, and a confirmation of a historical future, of the inevitable victory of the proletarian revolution.

But even as commemoration of the Commune became a fixture of socialist rhetoric and iconography, so did the debates over its meaning intensify. The relevance of the Commune to the ongoing project of socialist transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the deep polarization within the movement itself.

American socialist Phillips Russell, visiting Paris in May 1914, on what turned out to be the eve of the Great War, joined a procession of thirty, perhaps forty thousand . . . working men and women, and children too, in commemoration of the Commune. The huge crowd grew suddenly silent as it approached a wall in the Pre Lachaise cemetery.

This was the spot where, as Russell recalled, the workingmen and women, who took charge of Paris forty-three years ago and ran it peacefully and well, had been mowed down by the army of Thiers, their bodies piling in heaps against the wall. Deeply impressed by the commemoration, in the face of a massive police presence, Russell learned that the spirit of the Commune still lives in the hearts of its working people.

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The Paris Commune Was a Unique Experiment in Running a City for ... - Jacobin magazine

HB 1, the Vouchers for Anyone bill, has passed the Florida House along party lines. In the name of school choice, Rep. Ralph Massullo has stated his approval for this legislation.

HB 1 and its Senate companion, SB 202 will deal a blow to our public school funding. So far there has been no real explanation of where the funding will come from to give almost $8,000 to every student who wants it.

Even wealthy families who now homeschool or send their children to fancy private schools will be eligible for the handouts. The private schools are free to choose which students they will accept, and what they will teach.

Get more from the Citrus County Chronicle

Sounds a bit like socialism for the wealthy! And a nice boost for the for-profit private schools who benefit from our tax dollars.

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Socialism for the wealthy | Letters to the Editor | chronicleonline.com - Citrus County Chronicle

In the wake of International Womens Day 2023 which saw women, queer people and their siblings in struggle in the labour movement take to the streets globally, over 200 socialist feminists from every habitable continent gathered in Vienna on 18 and 19 March for the first-ever ROSA international conference. Activists from 20 different countries in person, and more on zoom, who are fighting against the deeply misogynistic capitalist system and the recent right-wing backlash came together to discuss how best to bring our struggle forward, more urgent now than ever before. ROSA and ISA members were accompanied by delegations from socialist feminist groups active in Prague and in Budapest who we had fruitful engagement with about how to strengthen the socialist feminist struggle globally. Guest speakers included Angeline Van den Rijsse, socialist and Belgian trade union leader, Dunia from Aid Access and Parisima Khoran from the Woman Life Freedom Iranian solidarity movement.

Discussions ranged from historical analyses of socialist feminist pioneers such as Clara Zetkin and Eleanor Marx to the inspiring feminist movements of Woman Life Freedom in Iran and Ni Una Menos in Latin America, to the trans struggle for liberation from the rigid gender binary, to ongoing struggles against war and imperialism, gender-based violence and attacks on abortion rights, to tactical debates on how to bring more working-class women into trade unions and build for effective feminist strikes as a vital component of our movement.

Hearing from Rosa activists from all continents on their struggle against oppression really showed that attacks on women, queer people, and workers are global and systemic. Despite the dire reality that we are all fighting the same battles, the conference was an incredible testament to international solidarity. It was a loud and clear call for all of us to join the movement, a movement of feminist struggle against all oppression.Attendee

With activists from South Africa, US, India, Israel and Palestine, Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, the overwhelming trend of the lively discussions over the course of the weekend was the interconnectedness of all of our struggles. While each delegation contributed valuable insights from the particular history and challenges of their country, it was clear that the recent global attack on the victories of the feminist movement required nothing less but deep international solidarity from socialist feminists all over the world. After the opening rally, ROSA activists gathered to send a message of solidarity to Justina Wydrzynska, an activist who was recently arrested for providing abortion pills to a woman in Poland, where the state has brutally imposed a near complete ban.

A social event was organised for Saturday night. Music of struggle filled the room, with ROSA activists singing and dancing along to Nina Simones Feelin Good and rallying song of resistance Fascists Bound to Lose. Poignant anti-racist and feminist poetry was recited, with activists in the audience chanting alongside performers in support. The closing rally ended with a moving rendition of the socialist-feminist anthem Bread and Roses in which all 200 attendees participated.

The music and poetry on Saturday night were really powerful. I thought the social aspect was important for allowing unplanned discussion and for creating a sense that we are all fighting together a sense of hope. Attendee

ROSA in Ireland recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. ROSA in Ireland cut its teeth in the throes of the abortion struggle in Ireland, in which it played a vital role in helping to win free, safe legal abortion, including up to 12 weeks on request with no restrictions. Since then, ROSA has been established in many more countries and has been enriched on the streets in struggle around the world. The 2023 ROSA international conference brought this to new heights and was the first socialist feminist conference to ever take place in Vienna and a first for ROSA. By Sunday afternoon, the consensus was clear it would not be the last. After a new wave of feminism emerged in the 2010s, it was taken to new heights in Iran in the early 2020s. The Conference was summed up with the intention to ensure that this revolutionary feminism continues and that its imbued with anti-capitalism, solidarity of all the exploited and oppressed, and socialism.

The motivating formal and informal discussions, sing-alongs and deep solidarity felt throughout the weekend exemplified what we are and will continue to fight for: give us bread, but give us roses too!

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Socialist Feminism || Give Us Bread, but Give Us Roses Too - International Socialist

Samajwadi Party (SP) national president Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday said the party was committed to realising Dr Ram Manohar Lohias dream of protecting the Constitution.

The Samajwadi movements effect will be visible in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Akhilesh Yadav said while paying tribute to the socialist icon on his 113th birth anniversary at Lohia Park here.

The SP chief said this is the place which socialist people frequently visit to seek inspiration from Lohia. He also said Lohia wanted every person to get the benefit of constitutional provisions.

The capitalist system is widening the gap between haves and have-nots in society. Socialist movement is needed today, he added.

Akhilesh Yadav also said the BJP-ruled Central and state governments together have presented 17 budgets, but the public was still troubled by inflation and unemployment.

At another function, SP national general secretary Shivpal Yadav on Thursday said that Ramrajya and socialism are synonymous.

Thats why Dr Lohia used to hold Ramayan melas, he said, while releasing the book Bhagat Singh-Dr Lohia by socialist author Deepak Mishra and the cover page of his forthcoming book Ramrajya, Rashtriyat, Varanasi Samajwad.

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Akhilesh Yadav says socialist movements effect will be visible in 2024 Lok Sabha polls - Hindustan Times