The first demonstration in Vienna against Israel’s terrorist war was a complete success with 2.000 participants. The demonstration was called by the Antiimperialist Camp, the Arab-Palestine Club and the League of Socialist Revolution (LSR) and supported by well-known Austrian Social Forum activists like Leo Gabriel and Hermann Dworczak. Read more...

The death of Jorg Haider, the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, was no loss to humanity. Indeed, many will be pleased to see the end of this right wing demagogue who celebrated the memory of the Waffen SS and praised the "employment policies" of the Third Reich. However, his passing may prove to be a benefit to the extreme right in Austria. Read more...

Interview with Nina Gunic, a member of the League of Socialist Revolution (LSR), Austrian Section of the League for the Fifth International and a candidate of the new LINKE (LEFT) electoral list in Austria Read more...

The collapse of Austria's coalition government has accelerated the formation of a new alliance of forces to the left of the Social democratic Party that could lead to the formation of a new workers' party. The first, tentative moves towards a new grouping were taken after the Social democratic Party (SPO) suffered a humiliating electoral defeat in provincial elections in May. While the SPO has still historically grown connections to the working class it is quite clear that the vanguard of workers are turning away from it. Read more...

Our internationalist May Day demonstration in Vienna was a complete success. More than 1.500 people marched on the "Ring"  a broad street in the centre of the city  under the slogan "Let us Resist together!" Michael Proebsting reports.The internationalist May Day demonstration takes place since 2005 when the League for Socialist Revolution (LSR)  Austrian section of the LFI  and a left-Stalinist organization (Communist Initiative) took the initiative to organize a demonstration independent of the social democratic and Communist Party apparatus. Since then we have succeeded in forming an alliance with a number of immigrant organizations from Turkey and other countries and Austrian left-wing groups. Read more...

The demonstration was the high point of a campaign for several months and took place on the Saturday before the ratification of the treaty in the parliament by the Social democratic, the Conservative and the Green party. The League campaigns against the EU-Reform treaty because it is an important step towards building an imperialist EU-state apparatus to increase the neoliberal attacks, the militaristic policy around the globe and to reduce the democratic rights in Europe. (for a detailed analysis of the treaty in German language you can download our pamphlet [INT http://arbeiterinnenstandpunkt.net/stor/broschueren/EU-Reformvertrag_s-w.pdf]here[/INT]. Read more...

The website of Permanent Revolution Network (PRN) attempts a critique of the political positions and practical activity of ArbeiterInnen Standpunkt (ASt), the Austrian section of the League, during the recent mobilisations against the new “Grand Coalition” government in Austria. Their polemic, “Protests in Austria: the left’s response” by Dave A, posted on 1st February 2007, combines downright lies, political illiteracy and a devastating self-exposure of their attempts to form an unprincipled international bloc. In this article Michael Proebsting responds for the ASt and League for the Fifth International. Read more...

In January the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) agreed to form a new government. In itself this is nothing surprising. Most people expected it and similar coalitions have governed Austria for most of the post-war period.

But then something very unusual happened. In the days before the inauguration there was a public outcry against the programme of the new government. On the day of the inauguration itself several thousand gathered at Ballhausplatz, outside the official residence of the chancellor and the president, and heckled the new ministers crossing the square. Read more...

The 21st June was not only a day of handshakes between Bush, the Austrian chancellor Schüssel and the rest of the EU’s top politicians. It was also undeniably a day of protest against the Bush visit, against the aggressive, militarist policy of US imperialism but also of the European Union. Both the Austrian and the world press reported extensively about our actions (see below). Read more...

The question of youth was absent from the agenda of the Florence meeting. So too were young people. This was curious because Franco Russo of RC specifically encouraged Revolution to attend and even to submit a section of youth for the Charter. Whilst Revolution representatives spoke to it, no one else did. In summing up, Franco commented on the obvious lack of young people as protagonists. Indeed. Read more...

Before this parliamentary decision, entry to Austrian universities was not limited (with the big exception that you have to pay 364 Euros in tuition fees per semester - another legal change this right wing government enforced three years ago). Now, with the new laws, universities are allowed to take the arbitur exams (the notes of the high school exams) or make one or several special tests at the beginning of the semester and to select the students. Read more...

Mayday 2005 was different from the last years. To be precise it was very different. Usually the huge social democratic rally is followed by a left-wing demonstration controlled by the Communist Party. The CP apparatus controls the speakers’ list and the whole profile of the demonstration. In the last few years this demonstration has declined to a few hundreds. Traditionally it was followed by separate march by the Turkish left. Read more...

Austria is little more than one hundred kilometres from the centre of the fighting in Bosnia and shares a border with Slovenia. The war is having a big impact on political life, as Michael Gatter of ArbeiterInnen-standpunkt, Austria section of the LRCI [Editor: now the League for the Fifth International], reports. Read more...

“Every country gets the politicians it deserves” goes the old saying. Certainly, in the figure of Kurt Waldheim, the Second Republic has found the personification of its own vital ideological lies and the living symbol of the political hypocrisy of its ruling class. The mastermind and the accomplice in the general staff of the German Wehrmacht as the Federal President, the man who was an ex-Nazi before 1945 and an obliging democrat after, the man who tries to sell his notorious silences over his own wartime past as a genuine lapse of memory—Waldheim is certainly no “historical accident” for Austrian democracy. On the contrary, as the head of state he has given this system exactly the image it deserves—the face of the fellow traveller and supporter of the fascist dictators whose “doing his duty” in the world war was accepted by the domestic bourgeoisie as an excellent credential for his later career as a representative of democratic class rule. Read more...