One of Austria's Most Popular Mayors is a Marxist

By Joseph Lobodzinski

It’s hard to imagine someone with Marxist leanings holding an influential position in neoliberal European politics. Ever since the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to brand yourself as a communist would be a political death sentence throughout most of Europe.

The Alpine nation of Austria is no different in this regard. For leftists, its political terrain is as tumultuous and difficult to traverse as the steep mountains and hills that make up much of the country’s geography. Despite having an expansive welfare state that would make many American politicians’ heads spin, fit with universal healthcare and tuition-free public college, the country of approximately nine million people is roughly 55% Roman Catholic and is arguably one of the more socially and politically moderate countries in all of Europe. The center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ) and center-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP) have dominated Austrian politics since the end of the Second World War.

Yet, one of Austria’s most influential and popular mayors is an open Marxist.

On September 26th, 2021, the second largest city in Austria, Graz, held municipal elections to determine its city council and mayoral office via a party-line ballot. The Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), which led the mayoral coalition of Graz heading into the election, was favored to defeat the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs, KPÖ) which up until that time was the second largest political party in the city’s government.

Entering Election Day, the ÖVP was leading all polling, and was expected to win the most votes, giving it the privilege of forming the city’s governing coalition, as it had previously enjoyed in many elections prior.

However, by the time all the ballots were received and counted, the KPÖ had won, obtaining 28.8% of the votes cast.

Shocking many across the country, the continent, and the world, Elke Kahr, a Communist city councilor who is the leader of the KPÖ’s Graz chapter, quickly formed a coalition government with the Greens and Social Democrats. By November 17th, 2021, she had become the first communist mayor of an Austrian city.

A bronze-colored bust of Karl Marx soon found itself as a main piece of decor in the Mayor’s office.

Almost immediately after taking office, Kahr went straight to work implementing policies helping the city’s most vulnerable populations.

Growing up as an orphan who was raised by a family that lived in low-income government housing within the city, one of her main goals is to “redistribute wealth” and “alleviate the problems of the people in our city as much as possible.”

Kahr’s government has done much to address poverty across Graz. They have produced a budget devoid of additional support to real estate speculators; increased the rent deposit fund; capped rents in city-owned housing with the money that would have otherwise been spent financing private constructors to build exorbitant housing; cleaned up the city by instituting a freeze on rates for garbage and sewage collection; protected city trees that contribute to producing clean air; opened public housing to non-EU citizens; and reduced fees for public transportation. Finally, the city government has also unleashed a plan to install a new, extensive tramline by 2025 and to give every child a bicycle to advance their goal of making the city carbon neutral by 2040 in order to follow the standard set by the national government.

And if that wasn’t enough, Kahr gives away €88,000 of her €120,000 mayoral salary — often to retirees, migrants, and individuals with health problems who are struggling to pay different monthly bills. “I’m simply convinced that politicians make too much,” she says.

In an interview with Jacobin, Kahr laid out how her journey to becoming Mayor was one that took nearly four decades of organizing through the Austrian Communist Party to demonstrate commitment to the residents of her city. “You have to be in touch with how others live and work if you are going to be a useful party for people,” she explained.

“I joined the KPÖ in 1983 because I was looking for a political home and community that resembled how I pictured a just and equal society. Over the decades, and in all my various roles — first as a KPÖ employee, then as a city council member, and later as the head of the party in Graz — the one thing I’ve wanted was to serve people. I’ve wanted to do everything I can to make sure that the party works with people to further the causes that are important to their lives.”

Kahr has also attributed some of her success to rejecting the excesses of past communist governments. When pressed about the history of communism and state socialism, she said, “Of course, crimes have been committed in the history of the communist movement as well, and they need to be openly discussed... among the many human lives on Stalin’s consciousness were no small number of great communists.” 

However, she emphasized the importance of maintaining the Communist brand, and to not shy away from the political ideology when placed under scrutiny. “Anything else would be false advertising.”

It seems by distancing herself from the usual perceived negative connotations of Marxism, through years of organizing and building relationships with her constituents, as well as developing policies for the struggling citizens of her city, Kahr has found a recipe for electoral and political success.

And now, nearly one year into her term as Mayor, she touts an impressive 65% approval rating among city residents. 

Elke Kahr’s example may just illuminate the path that European leftists should follow to win political office, particularly at the local level. In the Mayor’s own words, “We can’t end neoliberalism in one city. But we can do everything to ensure that people aren’t burdened even more.”

Movements Aren't Won or Lost in Elections: Putting India Walton's Campaign for Mayor of Buffalo in Context

(Photo: Friends of India Walton)

By Russell Weaver

India Walton — the progressive, working-class, 39-year-old, Black mother-of-four who stunned Buffalo’s Democratic establishment with her June 2021 upset win in the Mayoral Primary Election — appears to have lost her bid to become the city’s Chief Executive. As of this writing, she’s received 41% of the General Election vote, with unnamed write-in candidates (but, presumably, Primary loser and 16-year-incumbent, Byron Brown) winning the remaining 59% of ballots cast. 

Some observers, including Brown, have been quick to characterize Walton’s loss as a “rebuke” of her leftist brand of politics, stating that her General Election performance should serve as a “warning” to Democrats that leftward movement will cost the party at the ballot box. To paraphrase the celebratory words of New York State’s Republican Committee Chairperson on election night, Brown did not simply beat Walton — he defeated a socialist movement in Buffalo.  

Funny thing about movements, though: they’re not won or lost in an election. Rather, movements progress through phases of an iterative, nonlinear process. Engineer-turned-activist Bill Moyer, who’s frequently credited with steering the Chicago Freedom Movement toward its focus on fair housing in the 1960s, labeled this process the Movement Action Plan (MAP) – a concept he originated, developed, experienced, and refined through a lifetime of organizing. 

In brief, MAP proposes that successful social movements pass through eight phases: 

1. During “normal times,” systemic problems like economic inequality or housing insecurity are not prominent on the public agenda. The problems, and the policies that sustain them, are relatively overlooked by the public and mainstream media.

2. Small networks of organizations and activists with expertise on a systemic problem use official channels (e.g., media, courts, public hearings) and organizing campaigns to focus attention on that problem.

3. Growing attention to the problem produces “ripening conditions” wherein more organizations and people become sympathetic to the movement’s positions. To Moyer, by this stage some 20-30% of the public are aware of and opposed to the problem.

4. One or more highly visible “trigger events” animates the problem, clearly illustrating the need for change to a broad audience. During this “take off” phase, people and organizations flock to the movement in greater numbers. For Moyer, the fraction of the public aware of the problem and opposed to the policies or institutions responsible for it reaches 40% in this stage (recall: Walton won over 41% of General Election votes).

5. Seeing the movement’s gains during “take off” as a threat to the status quo, powerholders mobilize their disproportionate power and resources against it, blocking its more transformative demands from being implemented. At least some members of or sympathizers with the movement see these unachieved demands as failure. This “perception of failure” leads to attrition.

6. The movement’s experiences with external pushback and internal attrition help sharpen its analysis of power and of the social, economic, and institutional relations that produce and sustain systemic problems. It uses that analysis to build or expand prefigurative institutions that model solutions to those problems (e.g., in India Walton’s case, community land trusts like the one she co-founded to promote affordable housing in Buffalo). Over time, “re-trigger events” bring problems back to life and again draw people and organizations to the movement in numbers. In Moyer’s experience, this is the stage of “majority public opinion,” where most people come to see a problem in terms of the policies and institutions that create and sustain it. Thus, it’s also the stage where most people come to oppose the status quo and the powerholders who uphold it.

7. No longer just opposed to the status quo, a public majority embraces what were previously “feared” alternatives (i.e., the movement’s more transformative demands), creating the environment for structural change. In Moyer’s terms, this is a stage of “success,” where incremental proposals no longer pacify the public as they once did. Instead, old policies and institutions are changed or dismantled, new ones are built, and people and organizations from the movement begin to replace powerholders who still seek to block transformative social change.

8. Finally, in what Moyer called “continuing the struggle,” the movement works to extend successes, fend off attempts to undo progress, and transcend the boundaries (spatial, social, or political) of its prior victories.

The champions of the status quo sounding the death knell on Buffalo’s progressive movement either aren’t thinking at the MAP temporal scale; or, more likely, they’re intentionally conflating Walton’s election loss with evidence that progressive politics aren’t capable of taking root in the existing political-economic system, thereby attempting to accelerate attrition from the Buffalo-based movement that Walton’s come to represent.  

Don’t fall for that tactic.  

Walton’s campaign pulled back the curtain on Buffalo’s “resurgence” narrative, highlighting how the city’s pro-growth economic agenda has exacerbated inequality, creating wealth and benefits for affluent developers and property owners while making life more precarious for the disempowered masses. She helped elevate systemic problems like housing insecurity, food deserts, and care deficits to the public agenda. And, perhaps most importantly, she advanced alternative policies and institutions — public—community partnerships to build networked land trusts, participatory budgeting, a public bank, and more — that have the potential to address those problems at a structural level.  

Not long ago, these proposals — which her opponents breathlessly call “radical socialist” — might not have won much favor in a “moderate, business friendly” city like Buffalo. But Walton just captured over 41% of the general electorate, while bringing scores of people (especially young people) into progressive politics. Her campaign was a trigger event that helped the movement reach “take off” (stage four). Her loss will be perceived by some as a failure (stage five). But, in truth, it’s a transition point.  

The speed and ease with which establishment Democrats and Republicans joined forces to drag Brown over the finish line as a write-in candidate laid bare the real fight. It’s not about shifting power from one political party to another — but from the opulent minority to the working-class majority. Notably, Walton seemingly won over Buffalo’s working-class communities. On that backdrop, and with the Mayoral election in the rearview mirror, Buffalo’s progressive movement looks poised to drive headstrong into MAP stage six: institution building.  

By working outside of elected office (for now) to continue building the prefigurative, people-centered organizations that Walton’s campaign promised to everyday Buffalonians, progressives in the city can institutionalize their recent gains. That way, when the next “re-trigger event” calls Buffalo’s collective attention to the city’s worsening inequality, concentrated poverty, housing insecurity, or related problems — and such an event will inevitably occur, given the choice to keep a developer-friendly strategy in place — the movement will have ready-made infrastructure on which to greet the general public, whose eventual rejection of business-as-usual will come with demands for transformative alternatives (stage seven).  

India Walton might have lost an election, but she also might have helped Buffalo progress more than halfway through the stages of a winning social movement. Now isn’t the time for despair, but for sustained building and organizing: “success” is arguably just a stage (or two) away. 

Russell Weaver is a Rust Belt-based geographer and data analyst who studies economic democracy and spatial patterns of inequality. Follow him on Twitter @RustBeltGeo 

The Hunger Gamerization of American Police and the Community

[PHOTO CREDIT: VIOREL FLORESCU/North Jersey/Landov]

By Jason Michael Williams

On December 20th, 2014 in the late afternoon social media and television news stations were flooded with reports regarding the execution of two NYPD officers . Later into the day Mayor de Blasio held a press conference where NYPD officers protested his presence by turning their backs to him. One lesson that stems from this atrocity is that all lives should matter, including both officers and innocent civilians. As a result of conflict, both sides (police and community) have had to taste the unnecessary flavor of premature death, and for what? In response to the shooting of the two NYPD officers,Charlotte Schnook made a compelling argument on Facebook:

“Marxist gate keeper theory: police are the enforcers of the hierarchy, and the more abusive the hierarchy gets, the more abusive the police will get, thus the conflict between the proletariat and the law enforcement will snow ball.

You take a job in which you maim, execute and abuse working people, eventually one will treat you the same. Is it horrific? Yep, but revenge has never been pretty…

The police can either stop this abuse of people, or EXPECT this to become more common because folks aren’t sitting ducks forever. “

Although some may take issue with the argument being made by Charlotte, I believe she is making a profound point. Charlotte is, in effect, describing the extent to which American policing to many communities of color and increasingly others have become tyrannical and hyper-repressive. There had been other op-ed articles on the illegitimacy of policing, however, what these articles fail to take into account is the extent to which police illegitimacy has long been a factor in the Black community. This tumultuous relationship between police and Blacks does not exist in a vacuum like so many are painting it out be. In fact, according to many criminologists and police scholars, American policing began in the South with the slave patrols (Balko, 2014), and yet like then, today, the response to the outcries of Blacks on this issue is non-acknowledgement and condemnation-on par with the story line of “The Hunger Games,” no?

The sole duty of the slave patrols was to maintain white supremacy to the detriment of the Africans who were enslaved and denied their humanity- point blank! If a discussion is to take place regarding the tumultuous relationship between Blacks and the police, it must begin there. It must start with the fact that much as not changed-that, in fact, when police officers are in communities of color the feeling is still very much like the slave patrol. Moreover, today police resources and power are still disproportionately situated within communities of color; meanwhile criminals in Washington, D.C., on Wall Street, and other corporate criminals go unnoticed and unaffected by justice. This unwillingness to focus police resources on other areas of crime is also observed via the FBI uniform crime report which seems to purposely focus solely on what may be considered street crime-not white collar or political crime, the crimes of which do the most harm to the public (see also, Friedrichs, 2003).

This concentration of police power within communities of color is on par with the theme of “The Hunger Games” in the sense that these repressed communities see the cops as the gatekeepers of the elite. They do not recognize the police as a legitimate force there for their protection, and their viewpoints ought to be acknowledged. Thus, the police officer’s job (to them) is to enforce often racist and classist laws (among others) for the sole purpose of maintaining the alignment. The results from these practices are further used to legitimize the subordination of the affected groups at the behest of the ruling class which subsequently maintains superiority (see Giuliani’s remarks on Black crime).

In fact, this is the primary reason why victims of state violence are immediately vilified and made to appear as if death was deserved (e.g., as in the case of Brown, Myers, Garner and countless others). Official statistics are rarely used to address crime problems forthrightly, but are rather used as mechanisms of justification for majoritarian trickery that masquerades as justice for all. Meanwhile, communities of color are being torn apart by a “justice system” that is obsessed with delivering rigid and unremitting punishment more than anything even remotely related to the word justice. One can walk into any American inner-city and see these results for himself.

Surprisingly after the Ferguson decision there seem to have been an uprising in consciousness surrounding the nearly tyrannical power of American police in communities of color and the near illegitimacy and outright silliness of the American justice system. People from all walks of life are protesting in defense of the notion that #BlackLivesMatter and these protests are disrupting business as usual. These protests have angered police unions across the nation, thus sending the message that certain people have not the right to protest and exclaim freely in America that they too matter, that the continued murdering of innocent Black lives at the hands of the state should be unacceptable in a free society. Hunger Games-like?

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the murdering and brutalization of Black bodies with impunity is as American as apple pie. America has a history of tolerating such brutality, and this history has yet to be confronted because the ruling elite has decided that it does not matter. This devaluation of people’s feelings and experiences is what gives rise to Katniss Everdeens (the victor in The Hunger Games). The systematic exclusion of the repressed will almost always lead to conflicts and catastrophe on both sides as witnessed with the shooting of the two NYPD officers. The question is how does a civilized society respond to this?

Additionally, Charlotte’s argument is rooted in histories of physical violence against the marginalized and the utter reckless indifference of the ruling class against excluded communities since the beginning of American civilization. This hegemonic destruction of marginalized experiences, bodies, and voices disguised as justice and fact is unhealthy and an affront to democracy and basic human decency. The current conflict is symbolic of the bottom having had enough. The bottom is reacting to an authoritarian body in ways that describe their lack of hope. Case in point: The gentlemen who decided to kill the two NYPD officers was not only acting in his lonesome, but clearly he was a young man without hope, and one affected by police violence. Society should focus on what created his hopelessness. Or perhaps society should wrestle with the fact that a Black is killed by an officer every 28 hours. Or that since 911, there have been more police killings of civilians than soldiers killed in the Iraq War. Hunger Games?

The question that lingers now is whether or not society will respond in a manner on par with the ruling elite in The Hunger Games or a manner consistent with democratic values. The test of America sits before us right now as the world watches in disbelief while American exceptionalism is steadily torn to pieces due to socially manufactured poisons that this nation has yet to confront. The shooting of the two NYPD officers should be condemned, but it should not hinder the change needed in the American criminal justice system, otherwise there will likely be more casualties. Both sides have much to lose, and with that said a change must come if the legitimacy of law enforcement and justice is ever to existfor all in this nation.

A version of this article was published on Truthout. Permission to reprint granted by author.

Works Cited

Friedrichs, D. (2003). Trust criminals: White collar crime in contemporary society, 2nd ed. Beverly Hills: Wadsworth.