Austrian Workers’ Tragic Heroism (1934)

From the March 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers all over the world have been moved to admiration by the heroic resistance of the Austrian workers, fighting in defence of their trade union and political organisations. These men were organised in a party to which we are opposed, a party whose policy we know to be wrong, but that should not, and does not, prevent us from welcoming the spirit in which they defended themselves. Their conduct is a proof that the working class can produce men and movements as tenacious, and possessed of as much endurance and integrity, as anything the ruling class can show, despite the manifold advantages of their position.

The fighting in Austria began on Monday morning, February 12th, at Linz, where, according to the official account, Social Democrats resisted with rifle-fire a move by police and Heimwehr to occupy their head-quarters. On the previous day the Heimwehr – the armed organisation of Anti-Hitler Fascists – after frequent conferences with Dr. Dollfuss, in whose government they are strongly represented, had decided upon the dissolution of all municipal councils controlled by the Social Democrats (including the Council of Vienna), and on the suppression of the Social Democratic Party. The Social Democrats were well aware that their hour had come; they must either yield without resistance, or face the whole power of the State and the Heimwehr. The attack had long been threatening and the Social Democrats had prepared for it months ago by notifying all members and branches that in any one of several eventualities (e.g. an attempt by the Government to occupy the Vienna City Hall), all members and branches were to take the initiative of a general strike without awaiting further instructions. This was to prevent the Party and the trade unions from being disorganised by a sudden seizure of their headquarters and the arrest of their officials.

Immediately the news came of the events in Linz the leaders in Vienna met to consider their course of action. They were only too well aware of the military weakness of the workers in face of the armed force at the disposal of the Government, and were in favour of waiting until the Government made a further declaration of policy, expected that day, regarding the Heimwehr threat to the municipal councils. However, for reasons which will be explained later, the workers were no longer prepared to accept the advice of the Executive Committee of the Social Democratic Party. They took the initiative themselves. Trams, trains, newspapers, a large number of factories, and the electric light and gas plants were brought to a standstill, but the strike was not by any means general.

The Government had all its plans ready and promptly declared martial law. It seized the City Hall, arrested Social Democratic leaders, and commenced a powerful attack on the barricades, trenches, blocks of flats, and other buildings which the workers’ defence corps (declared illegal a year ago) had occupied. The defence corps retreated from the centre of the city to working-class quarters, where they hoped to be able to defend themselves.

The workers were terribly hampered by the Government’s full control of communications. Different areas even of Vienna were completely isolated by troops. The workers inside these areas had no means of communicating with those outside owing to the military barriers and the seizure of the telephones. The Government was thus able to make the fullest use of wireless broadcasting as a means of discouraging and dividing the workers. They hit upon the clever scheme of broadcasting the deliberate lie that Bauer and Deutsch, two prominent leaders, had fled to safety in Czecho-Slovakia. The effect of this on the Social Democrats can be well imagined. The workers at Linz tried in vain to seize the broadcasting station. The workers were also hampered by the arrest the previous week of local leaders of the Workers’ Defence Corps, and by shortage of even light arms and ammunition – the Government had been confiscating these steadily during the past year.

That the workers had arms in their possession at all is a sufficiently unusual circumstance to require explanation.

In most cases the arms were those brought home at the end of the war when the army supported the Republican overthrow of the Monarchy. It is stated that some other arms and munitions were smuggled from abroad in recent months. The Social Democrats had no artillery, only rifles, machine-guns, and some hand-grenades, while the army, the police, the Heimwehr, and other Government-armed bodies, were immeasurably better equipped. Without any loss of time they began the assault on the workers’ strongholds in various parts of Vienna and other towns with field-guns, howitzers, armoured cars and armoured trains. From all accounts the Government used aeroplanes only for purposes of observation, and one newspaper report states that, at Linz, two aeroplanes were even used by the Social Democrats to distribute propaganda leaflets.

Heavy fighting went on not only in the Capital, but in Linz, Steyr, Graz, Innsbruck, and other provincial centres. Women took part in the defence as well as men, and a number were killed.

For four days and nights the fighting continued with terrible losses on the workers’ side. Hour after hour their barricades and the buildings they occupied were smashed and blown up by artillery. It was not sentiment, but the provisions of the Peace Treaty which deprived the attackers of heavy artillery, or the destruction would have been even worse. These politicians, with Christian and patriotic phrases on their lips, released this inferno on their own Austrian fellow citizens, men, women and children, during a time of peace. The gallant military men placed artillery in position to fire on the tenement houses in which there were women, children, and bedridden persons, and opened fire without giving them an opportunity to escape. They had taken the precaution, too, to place their artillery at a safe distance – out of range of the rifles and machine guns of the Social Democrats.

The Government was probably surprised by the vigour of the defence, which, perhaps, explains their declaration on the opening day of the struggle that they had it well under control. On the other hand, this may have been a deliberate lie, like many other statements they issued. The Social Democrats gained some minor successes here and there for a time, but only before the full strength of the Government forces had been brought to bear. Never at any time had the Social Democrats the slightest chance of success, unless backed up by a revolt in the regular army. This was rumoured, but falsely. (The one English newspaper which gave colour to reports of a Social Democratic victory – The Daily Herald – was the journal which, a few months since, was hailing Dollfuss as the defender of democracy!) The struggle was not even a forlorn hope, for there never was any ground for hope.

It was a desperate and spontaneous decision to be crushed fighting rather than to be crushed without that gesture of defiance. As one Social Democratic leader wrote in Vienna during the struggle, it was, in effect, an unequal battle between “old rifles and a few cartridges” on the one side, and artillery and machine-guns on the other. Prince Starhemberg, Heimwehr Commander, himself commented on the poor equipment and deficient military leadership of his Social Democratic opponents. He said that at Linz, the workers had only rifles, 15 machine-guns, and a few hand-grenades – no match at all for trained troops with artillery and abundant ammunition and small arms. (The Prince expressed his profound admiration for the courage of his defeated opponents, and nobly tempered his class hatred by hoping that the captured leaders would be shot instead of hanged!)

One lie needs to be nailed, that is the Dollfuss Government’s defence that it was resisting a plot to seize power.

True it is that the Party and the trade unions had determined beforehand to try to resist suppression, but there is not the slightest evidence to support the Dollfuss story. So ludicrous was it that several correspondents of British newspapers went out of their way to expose it.

For example, Mr, John Segrue, special correspondent of the News-Chronicle in Vienna, says (February 17th):

“Vice-Chancellor Fey …. organised the plan that goaded the workers into resistance. Last Sunday, in a speech at Strebersdors, near Vienna, he told the Heimwehr that Dr. Dollfuss was “one of them,” and added that he intended to begin work in earnest against his enemies on the following day, …. the workers’ movement was one of resistance, not of “rebellion.” ”

The Editor of the Economist (February 17th) takes a similar view. So plainly was this the case that the Times, in an editorial on February 13th, openly regretted that the Heirnwehr had succeeded in preventing Dollfuss from coming to an arrangement with the Social Democrats.

The cold-blooded nature of the attack on the workers, organised and planned by the Government and the Heimwehr, can be seen from the fact that, on February 9th (i.e., three days before the attack began), Leopold Kunschak, leader of the Christian Social Party on the Vienna Municipal Council, proposed that his party (that is Dollfuss’s own party) should collaborate with the Social Democratic Party in order to avoid a continuance of the inflammable situation then existing throughout the country. This was at once agreed to by Dr. Danneberg, speaking for the Social Democrats, and by the Social Democratic Mayor of Vienna, Karl Seitz.

Instead of accepting the proposal, Dr. Dollfuss hastily gave a press interview, on February 10th, brushing it aside and proclaiming the Government’s intention to carry out “unchanged” the plans it had made. Major Fey repeated this.

Dr. Dollfuss deliberately refused even to meet representatives of the Social Democratic Party – the largest single party in Austria – while the fighting was in progress, although he knew they wished to arrange a peaceable settlement, subject only to the Party and the trade unions not being suppressed. Dr. Dollfuss and Major Fey had decided that workers’ blood must be spilled and wantonly went on with their plans to bombard the blocks of flats with artillery.

The Penalty of Defeat

What price the Austrian workers have paid, and have yet to pay, for their armed resistance it is impossible to say. Estimates of the deaths among the defenders vary from a few hundreds to nearly 2,000. Dr. Dollfuss says only 241, but this may be another piece of propaganda, no more reliable than the official broadcasts during the fight. A number of executions have taken place, and imprisonments and confinements in concentration camps are expected on a wholesale scale. Also the Dollfuss Government has declared the trade unions and Social Democratic Party illegal (this was expected, anyway) and, with the capitalists’ notorious disregard for the rights of the workers to any little property they may possess, has confiscated the funds and premises of the suppressed organisations. He has also imitated Hitler down to the last dishonesty of stealing the workers’ paper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and continuing its publication under the same name, but by nominees of his own, and carrying on propaganda for his party.

If the executions have not been as numerous as intended by the victors, this is due to the protests by foreign ambassadors. That Christian gentleman, Major Fey, promised “hangings all over Austria,” and celebrated the victory of his troops by engaging more hangmen.

The first prisoner who was hanged was badly wounded – which outraged some of the foreign newspaper correspondents. They might, however, have recalled the similar execution of James Connolly in Dublin, in 1916, at the hands of the British Government.

Before dealing with the events which brought the Social Democrats to their present position, it will be useful to explain some of the parties and forces operating in Austria.

Parties and Forces in Austria

The Government is a coalition between the Christian Social Party (Dr. Dollfuss, Chancellor), the Fascist Heimwehr (Major Fey, Vice-Chancellor) and certain smaller groups. Major Fey is Commander of the regular army and police and works in close co-operation with Prince Starhemberg, who commands the Heimwehr, an officially-supported party-army upwards of 40,000 strong and practically equal to regular troops.

The Christian Social Party is strongly Catholic, and is composed largely of peasants, but with a fairly strong working class wing. The peasant element of the Christian Social Party and the so-called “Middle class” in the towns, lean towards the Fascist Heimwehr, while its working class wing and the poorer peasants were disposed to co-operate with the Social Democrats in the defence of Parliament and the Republic.

The Heimwehr declares itself frankly Fascist, differing from Hitler only on two points, opposition to Nazi doctrines about Aryan racial superiority and opposition to Austria being united with Germany. The Heimwehr are financed and supported by Italy.

Then there are the Nazis, financed and supported from Germany, who want union with Germany.

Both Heimwehr and Nazis, and the Heimwehr sympathisers in the Christian Social Party, favour suppression of the trade unions, and the abolition of Parliamentary Government.

At the 1930 General Election the Christian Socials obtained 35 per cent, of the votes, the Social Democrats 43 per cent., leaving only a small minority of votes to be divided among the Landbund (a small agrarian party supporting Dollfuss) and the Heimwehr and other small groups.

With the rise of Hitler in Germany the Christian Socials have lost heavily both to the Heimwehr and to the Nazis, and at the Provincial elections in 1932 their vote in Vienna was only 20 per cent., compared with 60 per cent given to the Social Democrats. The latter are a reformist party based on the trade unions and having a programme rather like that of the I.L.P. a few years ago, but dressed up in more Marxian terms and showing a somewhat better grasp of the workers’ position. Their conception of Socialism does not go beyond State control of banks, industry, etc. The Social Democrats have their chief strength in Vienna and provincial towns, but are weak in rural areas. They, too, have lost some support to the Nazis in recent months.

Owing to the weakening position of the Christian Socials and the growing strength of the Heimwehr and Nazis (both threatening and preparing for armed revolt with foreign aid – from Italy and Germany respectively), Dolfuss has had to look for support outside his party. At one moment a year ago it seemed as if he might be willing to follow the advice of the democratic wing of his party and seek Social Democratic support. Whether he intended to do so or not, and whether if he did, it was ever more than a manoeuvre directed to crushing them later, it is impossible to say. In any event, the Social Democrats were in a difficult position. If they supported Dollfuss they feared losing the confidence of the more independent groups of workers.

Dollfuss decided, however, to turn to the Heimwehr, who, although weak in voting strength (perhaps 20 per cent. of the votes) are strong in arms due to Italy’s support.

Among the economic factors influencing the parties are the following. The peasants have been hit by falling prices and demand lower taxation and lower wages, ends which they hoped to achieve by crushing the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions. Hotel keepers and others dependent on tourist traffic, particularly near the German frontier, favour the Nazis, because union with Germany, or, at any rate, a cessation of the present strained relations with Germany, would restore to them the German tourist traffic at present prevented by .the German Government. Army officers and ex-army officers, and many groups of professional workers, look hopefully to a restoration of the monarchy as a provider of jobs – they therefore support the monarchist groups in the Heimwehr and Christian Social Party. As an offset to Germany’s bait of restored tourist traffic, the Government and the Heimwehr are trying to arrange Italo-Austrian-Hungarian commercial and customs treaties.

The working-class supporters of the Christian-Socials and the Nazis are to a considerable extent attracted simply by the promise of jobs and promotion. Quite a large part was played by this factor in the Fascist movement in Italy and the Nazi movement in Germany. Unemployed and other workers join these movements because they are promised appointment to Government and other posts rendered vacant by the dismissal of Social Democrats when once the Fascists get power. Dollfuss has been pursuing this line busily during the past year and thousands of dismissals are now taking place.

One factor which may prove of some importance, but is of minor importance now, is that Dollfuss is trying to strengthen three other small armed militias in order to lessen his dependence on the Heimwehr. It remains to be seen whether he will succeed or whether the Christian Socials will be gradually pushed aside by their Heimwehr allies under the pressure of the efforts of the Nazis to set up a pro-Hitler dictatorship.

Many observers, including two principal leaders of the Social Democratic Party, anticipate that the violent suppression of their party and the trade unions will drive many former Social Democrats over to the Nazis.

The ironical position has arisen that the Nazi Movement in Germany is broadcasting appeals to the Austrian workers to rally round Hitler as the defender of Socialism and of the working class against the brutal tyranny of Dollfuss and the Heimwehr!

In spite of the Russian Government’s pose that it is the defender of the working class everywhere, it appears to have maintained an attitude of “correct diplomatic neutrality.”

The Social Democrats

Let us now attempt to weigh up the weak points of the Social Democrats’ position.

The first point to notice is that the Social Democratic Party in Austria was a reformist party, although superior in many respects to its counterparts in Germany and England. Its supporters have been won by its programme of reform demands and by its efforts to carry them out (for example, its large-scale housing schemes in Vienna). It has itself helped to encourage the propaganda for union with Germany, which has lately caused it to lose some of its support to the second of the two Fascist movements, the Nazi movement.

From 1918 onwards, until last year, one plank in the official programme of the Social Democrats and of the trade unions was to seek union with Germany. On the rise of Hitler this point was suddenly dropped, but no organised movement can escape the consequences of years of mistaken activity by suddenly renouncing it. Many workers who had been encouraged to believe that unity with Germany mattered, have continued to believe it – going over to the ranks of the Nazis. Then, again, the Social Democrats supported the War and took part in the Coalition Governments of the early post-war years, co-operating to stabilise the capitalist republic – with some of the very people who have crushed them now that their help is no longer needed.

Lastly, being built up on the confused doctrines of reformism instead of on a clear understanding of Socialist principles, the Social Democratic Party found itself faced with a dilemma from which there was no escape. The leaders have for years preached the need to strive for so-called practical, every-day reforms, as stepping-stones to a distant Socialism. But in order to justify this position they had also to claim that the achievements were in themselves of great value. They had to tell their followers that the housing schemes of Vienna, and the various other little gains and liberties, were vital inroads into capitalism and must be defended at all costs. Consequently, when the Government finally made a frontal attack on the Vienna Council the Social Democrats had either to fight or else admit that these things were not worth fighting for. To do the latter meant renouncing the doctrines of a lifetime of propaganda, and was unthinkable. Yet the fact remains that it is not worth while for a workers’ movement to go down in suicidal glory for the sake of the nominal control of part of the machinery of local government.

Neither in Austria nor anywhere else have the workers’ organisations made any serious inroads into capitalist control. The only way of doing so is for a party solidly based on Socialist knowledge and conviction to gain control of the machinery of Government, national and local, including the armed forces. Attempts by a minority to seize power by force of arms against those who control the Government and the armed forces, or attempts to resist the Government, are always foredoomed to failure except in the rare and exceptional event of the armed forces themselves going over to the workers. Therefore, a workers’ movement which understood the nature of power would never get itself in the false position occupied by the Social Democrats. It would never imagine that it had crippled capitalism and overawed the ruling class when in reality it had only been invited into a nominal share of the Government in order to tide over a period of transition during which the capitalists were not sure of their grip on the situation.

Then again, a well-grounded movement would never have cherished the illusion that Austrian workers could ignore the Great Powers and the neighbouring countries. Austria is the cockpit where Italy and Germany are fighting out their commercial and territorial rivalries, with France, England and Czecho-Slovakia also playing a hand. It has long been said that France for various reasons had exacted a pledge from Dollfuss that he would not suppress the trade unions and Social Democrats, and it is certainly curious that the attack on them followed sharply after the overthrow of Daladier’s Government in France.

Italy, as a result of the peace treaties, had gained much territory and had pushed Austria-Hungary – Germany’s close, ally – off the Adriatic Sea. If Germany were now to absorb the much-diminished Austria, a German drive towards the Adriatic would again have to be feared by Italy, not to mention the likelihood that Germany would seek to regain the .German-speaking territories taken by Italy from Austria. In this situation the Italian Government supplies money and arms to the Heimwehr, and is alleged recently to have promised Dollfuss unlimited support against the Austrian Nazis, on condition that he first smashed the Social Democrats and trade unions. Dollfuss, as abject a figure as MacDonald, has carried out his part of the bargain.

Against the armed forces of the Government, backed up by foreign powers, the Austrian Social Democrats, becoming weaker in numbers, and weaker even in the matter of small arms, under the constant Government searches and confiscations, had no defence. The international trade union and labour movement was helpless to do more than pass resolutions and now to collect a little money for the victims.

Realising the hopelessness of armed resistance, the Social Democratic leaders urged the workers to ignore the Government’s deliberate attempts to provoke them, and tried to play for time. Again and again they offered conditional support to Dollfuss and offered to give up their arms if he would disarm the Heimwehr. Their very willingness to give Dollfuss no excuse was one of the factors which made the workers’ weak forces still weaker at the final clash, for, as a Social Democratic Leader explains in the Press report issued by the ” Labour and Socialist International ” (February 18th), many workers became very dissatisfied with the executive’s attitude. When, therefore, on February 12th, the executive again counselled delay, the workers acted on their own initiative, thus losing what advantage there would have been in a more unanimous action, and giving Dollfuss a slight tactical advantage in the chance to argue that he was resisting a plot to seize power.

The truth is, as was pointed out in these columns in June, 1933, when dealing with the Austrian situation, that a party which struggles for a series of reforms is bound to be divided at the moment of crisis – those on one side counselling another coalition in order to safeguard the reforms already won, while those on the other side urge independence and resistance. It was true, then, as we said, that the Austrians faced a problem to which there was no solution. A better understanding among the Austrian workers could not have turned defeat into victory, but it would have prevented the illusion being held that armed resistance was a practicable possibility. They would have realised the hard but inescapable truth that the first step is to win a majority, and that, when that is done, there is still no road to Socialism except through the control of the machinery of Government, including the armed forces, and that the Socialist movement must be organised internationally.

We admire the great courage of the Austrian workers and only regret that they should have been in a position in which such heavy sacrifices were demanded without the possibility of commensurate achievements.

Edgar Hardcastle

How well is the "Welfare State"? (1957)

From the September 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from August Socialist Standard).

The reader of the previous articles under this title will have seen that all is not well in the “Welfare State.” It is, besides, significant that more often than not, the term is applied sarcastically, as a joke. If the writer quoted the pattern of Austria, this is only because of his first-hand information on a country with a reputation for, and boasting of, its social welfare schemes, even though equally frequent criticisms of its social evils flatly contradict the praise.

Thus a recent Vienna daily paper wrote: “We still have a fearful housing problem, with all the social evils and misery resulting therefrom. No long queues of automobiles, no fine facades, and no richly stocked and brilliantly illuminated shop windows should deceive us about the ugly pictures behind. Despite the enormous economic progress of the last few years, Austria is not yet among the well-to-do of this earth ” . . . "Let us carry the wave of readiness to help which we showed towards the Hungarian refugees, into our own land. Let us, when the appalling need of the neighbour has been alleviated, clear away our own misery! ” What? Misery in the Welfare State, of which the "socialist” Sozial-minister Proksch says: "The Welfare State brings welfare to everybody and therewith guarantees well-being to every citizen.”

Money for the Salzburg Festival

When the “socialist” Vice-chancellor was touring the country in a campaign to get himself elected as federal president, he discovered to what he called his "astonishment” that in addition to the large depressed areas of Lower Austria and the Burgenland, there are “depressed areas” also in Carinthia and in the province of Salzburg which had not directly suffered from Russian depredations and loot. In winter one-third of all insured persons are without work there. The burgomasters who had come to listen to the candidate, told him of their cares and their troubles. "When I am in Salzburg,” said one of them, "I see work proceeding on the Festival Playhouse; it is very nice, but when I come home and see the cows standing knee deep in water, because of the lack of protective river embankments against floods, which turn roads into an impassable quagmire, I ask myself whether there really is no money for us. Every day tractors have to haul out autos stuck in the mire.” (Millions throughout the world might ask themselves similar questions when they read of the astronomical sums spent on armaments, and that a small clique of parasites can live in luxury and idleness in the fine resorts of the world while the people everywhere are grappling with terrible housing problems and sink daily deeper into the quagmire of their misery). Similar conditions obtain in other countries, regardless of whether they are kingdoms, republics, democratic or totalitarian, whether they falsely style themselves Socialist or Communist, or what you will. The ruler of all of them is King Capital, with his retinue of privileged drawers of rent, interest and profit, and leaving to the mass of the people the residue, of poverty and misery. To those who want a distinction to be made between this and the other side of the iron curtain, here is what it amounts to:—

Two Sides of the Iron Curtain

Economically, the iron heel of capitalism treads and exploits the workers in the West as in the East, differences of standards of living notwithstanding. Whether private owners of property and bond-holders of nationalised industries use their wealth for the purpose of living on rent, interest and profit (the surplus-value wrung from the workers), as in the West, or whether all the surplus-value is exclusively collected, controlled and disposed of by a clique of usurpers of power, ruling by means of their secret police and the armed forces, as in the East, makes little, if any, difference to the exploited—the working class. The latter are without property anyway on either side of the iron curtain, and have to exist on the sale of their labour-power to the employers. And on BOTH sides the State disposes, as it thinks fit, of the wealth and the surplus value (exacted either direct from the industries or by taxation), a huge amount of it going, of course, to the maintenance of its coercive machinery: the judiciary, the police, and the armed forces.

Politically, the iron heel of capitalism crushes the critic and the opponent of the powers that be in the East by deportation to forced labour camps, prison or death; to the West by sacking him from his job, and so exposing him to pauperism.

King Capital still rules

Labour leaders and “communists” may prattle of past "proletarian revolutions," of “Declarations of the rights of man," of “social justice." The much boasted “Rise of the working class" finds the workers still on their knees before their master: Capital. He looks down upon them and only smiles a superior smile at assertions that he is supposed to be dead and done. And when last year in Hungary some of his infuriated victims attacked and felled to the ground a monument to one of King Capital’s particularly brutal and obnoxious defenders, thunder and lightning struck the earth, and the world still reverberates from the impact. 200,000 had to flee for their lives and others paid and are still paying, the penalty for their foolhardy desecration and blasphemy, and for their illusions.

No, the “Rise of the working-class" (which should more appropriately be called “the rise of the labour leader") and the socialism of the “Socialist International" has not affected the rule of capital and money. Kings, ex-kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, Indian and Arabian potentates, big land-owners, shipowners, and other millionaire industrialists and magnates, bishops and popes still live in their sumptuous castles and palaces, leading lives of luxury and idleness. They need not fear for their property and privileges as long as the working-class vote for the Gaitskells and the Bevans, as they did for the Attlees and Ramsay MacDonalds, and their colleagues on the Continent, the Guy Mollets, the Spaaks, the Ollenhauers, the Neeuis, the Schaerfs, and the rest of the lackeys of capital. Labour leaders now contribute their plans and suggestions to the so-called “Disarmament" talks in London and thereby demonstrate to the capitalist class that they are at least equal to, or claim to do better than the other statesmen in an effort to save the big Powers' talks from final breakdown. Like all the other statesmen, the “International Socialists" assembled in Vienna to July did not even mention the Cause of the multitude of problems confronting the world, but tendered advice to the Powers. They “viewed with deep concern the continued tension among the big Powers. A glance at the centres of tension in Europe, North Africa, in the Middle and Far East, confirms in a shocking manner the uninterrupted threat to, and violation of, the principles of self-determination of the peoples, the danger to the holy and unassailable rights of the personality, of freedom and social justice." (Vienna Arbeiter Zeitung, 7/7/1957). We will save the reader from more of the platitudes and claptrap of the Resolution agreed to by this “International Socialist Congress," but what Mr. Gaitskell said in the discussion on the international situation bears repeating and remembering. He called “for a separate agreement not tied to a general disarmament pact, to stop atomic and hydrogen bomb explosions." “It would be wrong," he said, “to make the suspension of tests dependent on a ban on nuclear weapons, although Socialists wanted this too."

So today it is disarmament and atom-control, tomorrow it will probably be a crusade against, or for. Colonialism (with the French “socialist" Guy Mollet for, and the Austrian “Marxist," Dr. Benedikt Kautsky, against), or any other problem facing the capitalist class. Kautsky describes England and France as the “sick men of Europe," and advocates the eradication of the last trace of colonialism, if the “unification of Europe" is to be achieved. Now Germany was unified before the war, America achieved its unification long ago, but has this solved the social problem? Is it really too much to ask of a “Marxist" to try advocating the eradication of capitalism for the solution of its problems?

It is a pity that Kautsky cannot persuade his comrade Mollet to write off the (French) colonial empire, as Holland has done, according to Kautsky, with such conspicuous success that it is “one of the economically healthiest states on the Continent." Millions of natives in the liberated colonies will probably still be looking for the benefits of having exchanged one clique of exploiters (the foreigner) for another set (the native).

Nonsense about India, Japan, etc.

Under the slogan: “ Like Renner, like Korner," the “Socialist Party of Austria" have been boosting one of their leaders. Dr. Adolf Schärf, for the job of Austrian President, and indeed, if these leaders emulate their predecessors in one thing more than in another, it is in betraying their ignorance of Socialism; or, if they do understand it, in betraying the great cause. If the late Dr. Renner asserted that “two of the greatest empires are already being controlled by the working-class," the S.P. of Austria’s vice-chancellor, back from a world tour, reported to the Party conference that:

“In India Socialism had become a matter of course. Gandhi had made the fundamental ideas of democratic Socialism the common ideal of the Indian people.”

“The Congress Party’s programme can be considered as almost socialistic. Even those who do not want to be Socialists, can no longer do without its ideas.”

Dr. Schärf found “big socialist movements in Nepal and in Pakistan"; to Ceylon the Prime Minister is a “socialist." In Burma the government is under “socialist leadership." In Indonesia one million “socialist" votes were polled at the last election.

Japan was also reported to have its tremendous “socialist" movement. One town—Kioto—with 1½ million inhabitants, has a “socialist" administration— like red Vienna.

Israel has its “socialist" Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, whose party is the “strongest in the land." Emulating the British Labour Party, which brought in the A-bomb, the Israel “socialist" government is now said to be contemplating its introduction also. Although the Austrian “socialist" Vice-Chancellor was one of the chief promoters of the new Austrian army, there has been no suggestion yet of emulating the big brother across the Channel in the matter of A-bombs. They are apparently content with “conventional weapons"—for the time being, at any rate.

Concluding his report, Dr. Schärf said: “In the wide territories of which I have spoken. Socialism is so strong that even classes whose interests are not represented by Socialism acknowledge its superiority, and endeavour to benefit as much as possible by its ideas."

Ignorant of Socialism

The fact that prominent leaders like those quoted see millions of Socialists throughout the world and Socialism having already become a world power, proves that the misrepresentation of Socialism and the theft of Socialist symbols is either so deeply ingrained as to have made those leaders quite unconscious of their fraud, or that they have never at all understood the implications of the great cause. The dilemma which America presents to these pseudo-Socialists would seem to well bear out the point. Here is a country reputedly not only with a standard of living higher than in any “socialist" or "Welfare State” but also with social services on the European pattern, though denying that these things have anything whatever to do with Socialism. It is a policy of mere self-preservation for capitalism, nothing else. So, with a sneer at those "pundits” who would "represent America as purely capitalistic,” Dr. Scharf attributes it all to Socialist influence, although he has to admit that there is no big Socialist party in America.

Socialists could wish nothing better than that the statements that there are already millions of Socialists throughout the world were true, because the end of capitalism and war would then be within sight; but unfortunately it is not so.

A question that invariably crops up at “International Socialist” and “Communist” Party Conferences is the framing of a declaration of principles. A difficult job indeed for parties without principles, and operating with nothing but capitalist reform programmes fraudulently clothed in vague and distorted Socialist language. So the committees appointed to work out a new party programme usually shelve the task and no more is heard about it

Even when these leaders on occasion vaguely declare their aim to be the “liberation of the peoples and man from their dependency on a minority which owns and controls the means of production,” their actual policy is in direct contradiction to any such aim. The real implications of Socialism are completely ignored, so much so that most workers, when told that under Socialism there could, of course, be no buying and selling, will say that they never heard of it, and call it a Utopia. Yet if Socialism does not mean the end of these things, the word would be meaningless. The writer cannot do better than quote here from the leaflet “Introducing the SOCIALIST PARTY of Great Britain,” which says:—

“The aim of the S.P.G.B. is to replace Capitalism by a world-wide social system in which the means of production and distribution would cease to be privately owned and would pass to the whole community. This would bring to an end the present competition for markets and sources of raw materials between the different countries that causes international rivalries and leads to war. Under Socialism goods would not be produced for sale and profit but would be produced solely for the use of mankind. All forms of income derived from property (profits, rents and interest) would disappear. The economic problem to be tackled by a Socialist society would be the problem of organising the able-bodied population to cooperate in producing food, clothing, houses, and all the other articles and services needed for the full life of human beings. All persons would have free access to the things they needed, production and distribution being in accordance with the Socialist principle:—'From each according to ability; to each according to need'.”

"Socialism cannot be brought about inside the Capitalist social system. One social system must be replaced by the other and Socialism is necessarily international.”

Rudolf Frank

(To be continued).

How well is the "Welfare State"? (1957)

From the July 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from the June Socialist Standard).

Health in the Welfare State

Those who sing the praises of the European Welfare States and of the land of the highest wages and greatest prosperity—the U.S. A.—seem to be quite unaware of or to deliberately ignore the ugly, cruel, stupid and tragic features which the model states in both hemispheres have in common. In the totalitarian countries behind the Iron Curtain where Press and platform do not often dwell on the ugly side of things at their end, and where, therefore, information and statistical data on social affairs are not so easily accessible, ignorance may be excusable, but this cannot be said of the peoples of countries where books and Press supply the damning facts and figures with critical comment.

The 1955 report of the largest Austrian Health Service, with close on one million insured persons, provides perhaps the clearest picture of the state of health of the people. In that year the service had to deal with half a million cases of illness. Three million sickness certificates had to be issued.

Prescriptions totalled 8,700,000, which works out at 10 per person per year. In each 1,000 insured persons 193 insured persons or members of the family were treated in hospital. 375,000 bills for spectacles, foot supports, artificial limbs, bandages and other accessories had to be paid, 9 million days of illness were registered, and 3 million days in hospitals. There were 672,000 cases of dental treatment.

These are the records of only ONE, though the largest, Health Insurance Fund to which other sick clubs and the private practitioners have to be added. The city’s many hospitals and clinics are woefully short of beds and are invariably overcrowded. So are the institutions for the mentally sick. The number of inmates in the Vienna mental institutions and lunatic asylums has trebled since 1950. In that year the largest institution took in 735 persons and in 1955 the number rose to 1192. Even if it is true that alcoholism has a lot to do with it, it must be pointed out that frustration and the hard and nerve-racking conditions under which the mass of people have to live and work are in very large measure responsible for people taking to drink and driving them mad.

In a budget debate it was disclosed that in Austria no less than 4,200 million schillings were spent on alcohol, which is half a milliard more than the year before, and two milliards on tobacco. In Germany the situation is even worse, with nearly 50 per cent more on both items. How hopeless the problem is for the reformer or the apostle of anti-alcoholism is clear from the fact that prohibition, or even curtailment of the production of beer, wine and Schnapps would involve the loss of 348 million schillings for the government's tax collectors, not to speak of the serious effect on employment. An increase of alcoholism is noticeable in almost the whole world. Sweden has had to take drastic steps to restrict the rapidly increasing consumption of alcoholic drinks. A report says that since the abolition of rationing in 1915, offences and crimes have frightfully increased. If the number of unfortunates who have been and are being driven mad by the iron heel behind the iron curtain, is probably incalculable, the number of persons in mental institutions in the “free world” countries is no secret—it is, for example, 750,000 in the U.S.A.

Crime

This chapter is not intended to deal with such deeds (perpetuated by governments) as training young people in the use of instruments of mass murder and destruction. Whatever can be said about war in the jungle and in the wild and woolly past of the human race it is now and has been for a century already—a crime. True, it is so regarded not only by Socialists, but unless you are consistent in your condemnation and earnestly concerned with the all-important question of the real cause of the dastardly deed and prepared to work, as Socialists do, towards the elimination of that cause, the mere expression of your moral or sentimental indignation remain ineffectual and futile. Thus, with all their professions of peace and desire for disarmament, the welfare states and the totalitarian regimes continue the status quo, with all its contradictions and imbecilities—poverty and misery in die midst of ever-increasing accumulation of wealth and possibilities of enjoyment of life for everybody—in other words: with Demon Capital in the saddle. Whilst chewing platitudes about peace, freedom, sovereignty and social justice, the Labour Government of the United Kingdom brought in the atom-bomb, and in another welfare state—Austria—it is the very leaders of the “Socialist Party of Austria” who are the chief promoters of a new army. And in order to imbue the young recruits with the necessary fighting spirt, welfare statesmen and writers continue as in pre-welfare days, to give to historical events the bias required by the national (read capitalist) interests. So important is the fostering of that spirit to the powers that be that if for example, there was no “Südtirol question," both Rome and Vienna would have to invent one.

Our purpose in this chapter was, however, to deal with the crimes committed not by order or at the behest of governments, but by individuals driven to desperation and anti-social acts by an anti-social and insane system of society. It is to show that in the welfare state most of the evils inseparable from the money system flourish as abundantly as ever before. Burglaries, robberies with violence, theft and larceny, shocking murders and assaults, cruelties to children, etc., are on the order of the day. In January the leading article in a Vienna newspaper wrote: “With great alarm the public learns that the number of murders and general crimes with violence have for weeks again sharply increased. The excitement about the brutal assault on a postman last Saturday has hardly abated when news comes of a new far more terrible crime. In their tumble-down barracks an old couple was found battered to death and robbed of what little savings they possessed. A youth of 17 was afterwards arrested for the murder." The same paper reported the murder of a 25-year-old wife by her husband. Two boys of 17 and 18 raped and murdered a girl of 15 on her way home. A one-arm invalid killed his wife and six children with an axe. Another man murdered his wife and four children. Six boys stole within a short time 31 autos. “Christmas is the time"—another paper wrote—“in which the number of suicides and attempted suicides is far above the average. Among the many “tireds-of-life" this Christmas was the 40-year-old A. H., who gassed herself and her two children."

It is interesting that within a few days of one paper boasting that Austria was a land without gangsters, there occurred no fewer than three bank robberies in classical gangster style, with autos and the rest (two in the country and one in Vienna), in one of which two young robbers perished. And so one could go on ad infinitum, every day bringing new reports of crime and tragedies. Rarely are they reported in the foreign press, since every country has more than enough locally to fill their own regular columns of police and court reports.

In these unholy and unblessed orgies of crime, cruelty and fraud which, by the way, give employment to whole armies of policemen, gendarmes, prison guards, and wardens and executioners, lawyers and judges, reporters and printers and photographers, detectives and special transporters, in addition to experts in safety devices, safe-makers, etc., etc., the annual number of convictions of all kinds over recent years is invariably just over 100,000 in this country, 20 per cent. of which are for criminal killing and assault; the rest are for fraud, embezzlement, blackmail, insurance swindles and other “scandals."

With the Socialist's preference for quoting his enemies confirming the truth of his statements and criticism, here is what the Austrian Sozialminister Proksch said at a conference of the “Aktion Jugend am Werk” (7/11/1956): It is the tragic fate of the young about to start a profession, to be faced with unsettled problems. The advisory committee tries to help them in making a decision, but what good is this to them when there are no suitable openings and nobody wants them. It is hypocrisy to accuse youth of being spoiled and depraved when nothing is being done for their professional education. What is to become of a youth who has to wait months and sometimes longer for a chance of an apprenticeship? One must not be surprised if young people eventually become criminals." Remarkable, is it not? that this same Sozialminister should only a few months earlier have declared: “The Welfare State brings welfare to everybody, and with it assures well-being to every citizen”

If it will console British readers that things are said to be worse in America, here is what Sir Basil Henriques, former chairman of East London Juvenile Court, said after he had spent 51 days in the U.SA discussing juvenile delinquency in 20 cities and 14 States: "Every court where I sat I heard cases which were more serious than any I have heard in my 33 years on the bench.” On the television, he said: “I saw nothing but murder, divorce and prison scenes.” And if you should happen to get hold of a book “Never Come Morning," by Nelson Algren, you may come to the conclusion that really Sir Basil could hardly have exaggerated.

Accidents at work

The number of accidents at work is rising from year to year. From 1953 with 129,449 accidents, with 422 killed, it rose to 162,500, with 670 killed, in 1956. They do not only bring physical pain for the worker and mental depression (fear of losing his job) of the injured, but also distress to wives and children left behind after the death of their breadwinner. Almost unnoticed in the sensational revolt in Hungary and the Suez conflict, there occurred (in October 1956) the terrible tragedy when a bridge under construction and serving in the building of a dam at the Ottenstein power stations collapsed burying 10 workers under huge blocks of concrete. The accident, coming after the previous year's catastrophe at the Kapron dam, added its tragic quota to the already great number of widows and to the 25 orphans left behind after the previous disaster. Twelve more children were orphaned on 19th and 20th March when their parents lost their lives in a cycling accident near Salzburg.

So is the tragedy of accidents aggravated under capitalism by an individual having to provide for a number of others (wife, children, old folks) who are, through the breadwinner's death, deprived of the wherewithal to live. Under Socialism, when no individual will be dependent on another individual for his means of sustenance, but when every man, woman and child will be the responsibility of the whole community, any unfortunate accident to an individual will then not involve such tragic consequences to others. (This aspect will be dealt with more fully later in this series of articles.) 

Rudolf Frank

(To  be continued.)

How well is the "Welfare State" (1957)

From the June 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from March Socialist Standard).

Housing in Vienna

In the face of the general poverty of the mass of the people, any assertion that the workers are supposed to be the owners of nationalized industries is not only a mockery; it is a downright fraud and an insult to their intelligence. Even the assertion of house-owning by the workers is for the overwhelming majority nothing but an illusion. Of the 100,000 flats built by the Municipality of Vienna since 1922, not one can be claimed by the occupier to be his property. They all are owned and controlled by the share and bondholders of the Municipality and the Banks. The occupiers are there on sufferance; i.e., on condition that, and as long as they can pay the rent, the same as in all the houses belonging to private landlords or the State. Failure to meet this obligation involves the loss of the accommodation. No, "welfare" does not go so far as to make you the owner of "your" flat. While this municipal building activity may be said to be a bright spot in the jungle of the housing market, the problem remains really and truly a terrifying one.

Dr. Nuna Sailer, speaking on the social background of the problem of youth, said the whole question is marked by the indescribable housing conditions in Austria. In Vienna more than two-thirds of all flats still consist of only one room and kitchen. The larger part of the flats have not even their own water supply. There are no statistics on the number of beds in the individual households. Inspectors see appalling conditions when visiting homes. Children of four still sleep in cradles, prams or boxes, chests of drawers, trunks; two or three little stools and similar makeshifts serve as “beds.” As a result of a comprehensive investigation, it was found that 12 per cent of all children shared their parents' bed. About a tenth of them are from 14 to 18 years old.

It is obvious that apart from a lot of other evils due to such lack of dwelling space, the child cannot learn or do its homework. Bad housing conditions also lead not only to quarrels, but to a complication of the problem of youth in the family. Out of 72,000 marriages in 1949 there were 18,000 divorces. Today almost 40 per cent of all children have no father, 20 per cent. are illegitimate, a large number come from unmarried couples, the remainder are orphans.

167,044 flats are needed in the whole of Austria, according to the latest statistical records. Behind this dreary figure there are hundreds of thousands of human tragedies. Not included in this figure are the many thousands of families which must dwell in old, derelict, insanitary places; those 167,044 families are looking for accommodation and have no home of their own at all. They live herded together with relatives or as sub-tenants. The sorry record is held by Vienna, where in spite of all municipal building, there is a lack of 62,741 flats. "On the question of how the shocking balance sheet of Austria's housing misery could be remedied," said a reporter, “the statistical office can, of course, give no information."

Even the various homes for the homeless (cases of ejection, etc.) in Vienna have 200 family applicants on their waiting lists, although they offer only temporary abodes of some sort.

One must read the columns in the newspapers describing the housing conditions and the awful ordeals of all those thousands of families in quest of a home, to realize the amount of human suffering and degradation.

Just the same in Paris and London and Brussels

And those interested in conditions in other countries will learn that housing conditions there are even worse. According to official statistics, there are 1,180,000 dwellings in Paris, 260,000 of which have no water, 250,000 no gas, and 60,000 no electric current The action of a priest, the Abbé Pierre, who undertook to arouse the public conscience after more and more people had been found frozen to death in the streets of Paris, would indeed seem to fully bear out what has been said about Paris on that score.

After reading a report of conditions in a working class district in Brussels ("one of the most chromium- plated capitals in Europe"), the young king of Belgium made a secret six-hour tour of the district and “got a shock.” The priest who accompanied him said afterwards: "The king was distressed at what he saw," and said that "it is a tragedy that humans should have to live in such conditions." He visited 30 tenements. One housewife mistook the bespectacled, studious-looking king for a sanitary inspector. She showed him a broken-down lavatory shared by 17 families. “Look at that," she told the king, "and to think the landlord has one in marble."

What a correspondent (an estate agent) in the London Times (12.6.1956) said on the housing problem in another Welfare State, England, literally fits the situation in this country when he writes: “. . . several of the 50 families we have had to deal with in the last three months have been on a council list for anything between five and 12 years." After describing the impossibility of wage-earners being able to buy a house, the correspondent says: "We have tried lately not to make our small society known, from despair at coping with any more cases of most cruel hardship; young couples turned out of their lodgings on arrival of a baby; husbands separated from their wives and children; families living crowded in one room, others in L.C.C. hostels for as much as three years. Every council in and around London sees the problem as of overwhelming urgency."

There is probably not one of the “fair cities of the world" where the mass of the inhabitants are not herded together often in what can only be described as slums and suffer the physical and mental torment which such atrocious housing conditions bring in their train.

“Get children and lose your job"

It is not only the housing question that terrifies many women at the prospect of having children; it is the fear of losing their jobs or the difficulty of getting one, apart from numerous other considerations—all due to the fact of poverty. In their despair they resort to illegal operations, imploring doctors to perform them, with the result that when eventually found out, physicians and patients go to prison. In February this year a trial took place at the Vienna Court when no fewer than 300 women and a number of doctors had to stand trial for such illegal action. Under the heading: “Weeping women, grinning listeners,” the Arbeiter Zeitung reported how people outside the court fought with fists for seats. One can only imagine the ordeal of women having before the judge to answer embarrassing questions about the most intimate particulars of their married life. One has to bear in mind that there are women who have no parents, no home and no jobs and who threaten to commit suicide unless the doctor helps them. Again and again women bring children into the world in the open, because they have no homes, no money, no work. After reporting on one of these cases, the paper says: “Now the woman is in hospital. She gets food and has a bed. Then she will move with her child to a Central Children's Home. But What then? She has no home.”

Child mortality

Dr. H. Czermak, of the Vienna University Clinic for Children, declared before the Society for Children's Welfare that Austria showed the highest infantile mortality in West and Northern Europe. In this country, Dr. Czermak revealed, eight healthily born children die every day. One might ask what sense there is in preaching the increase of births and to punish women and doctors for interfering with the growth and development of new life when the economic conditions of the family make it impossible for the woman to do without the earnings from a job? Even the inveterate apologists for wage-slavery, such as the Arbeiter Zeitung, have to confess that the low wage earned by the husbands absolutely forces women to go to work. What to do with the children while the mother is at work, that is the problem. And what does the “Socialist” Party of Austria propose as a remedy for this and the other social problems? Socialism? Not on your life! Create more children's hostels, where the poor things can be deposited while the mother is at work! And setting up a marriage and family advisory committee and service to repair broken and ill marriages!

“Our welfare workers can sing a very nasty song indeed of the conditions which they find in such marriages in which there are children. Most of the 5,000 children in the municipal institutions come from such marriages” “The shocking fact,” said the deputy mayor, “induced us to set up a committee.”

That these conditions are not confined to Austria, but prevail all over the capitalist world, was confirmed by the International Youth Aid Society, which stated that of 900 million children, 600 million are undernourished, badly clothed, insufficiently housed and not properly protected against illness.

Suicides in Austria

In a leading article under the heading “Died on the Welfare State,” Die Presse (19.4.1956) wrote:

  "In the city of Vienna suicides are on the order of the day. In the last decades they have increased to such a frightful extent that the public scarcely takes notice of them. Two or three lines in the papers, often not even so much, coolly report that X, Y, Z could no longer cope with their conditions of existence mid saw no other way out than death.  . . . Also, yesterday, one could read that a 65-year-old war invalid hanged himself in a room of the Health Insurance Premises. He had been sent from one department to another until he could no longer stand it and decided to end it all.  . . . This case is sad proof that even the finest National Insurance Law, however cleverly it may be conceived and well meant, can never provide a solution of the social problems of our days, but brings the danger, like the innumerable other welfare, health-insurance and old age protection laws, to become a soulless mechanism, which in the end crushes those Whom they were intended to help."

And under the heading: “Many suicides in Austria,” the Arbeiter Zeitung reported that in 25 countries, with a total of 400 million people, about 72,000 persons commit suicide every year. Austria is always found among the group topping the list, with Japan, Denmark and Switzerland. Whatever the reports say

about causes, there is no doubt whatever that the overwhelming majority drift to suicide, just as they do to crime through poverty. And who does not know by now that the cause of poverty is Capitalism.

At the time of writing, a local theatre produces the drama “Poverty,” by Anton Wildgans, in which, among other working class catastrophies, a small postal clerk (another nationalized industry said to belong to the people) dies after an illness which was for his family an almost greater catastrophe than his death. Said a theatre critic: “The play verily has lost nothing of its poignant actuality.”

Rudolf Frank

(To be continued).

How well is the "Welfare State" (1957)

From the March 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

A number of European countries which have or had Pseudo-Socialist Governments (the kingdoms of Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Holland, or where Labour and Social Democratic Parties are in coalition governments with avowed Capitalist parties as in Austria) are styled "Welfare States.” The term is not used for Russia and her satellites behind the iron curtain; they style themselves Communist but, as the Socialist Party of Great Britain has pointed out ever since the Russian upheaval in 1917 (see summary of articles collected in the pamphlet "Russia since 1917”), Russia with all the basic features of a Capitalist mode of production and with the workers' lack of understanding Socialism, cannot be a Socialist state. Events have not only proved the correctness of our contention, but revealed the sorry fact that the tyranny which the 1917 upheaval overthrew was replaced by another variety in many respects even more hideous.

If in the course of social development even Capitalism has to be considered as a step in man’s march forward to a classless, moneyless, frontieriess and povertyless society, future generations will nevertheless stand aghast at the gruesomeness of the episodes by which that stage is marked. Cruel as the French Revolution of 1798 was. which, like Russia in 1917, also marked the end of Feudalism and the advent of Capitalism it was almost a parlour affair in comparison with Russia. As if their past orgies of massacres and deportations of millions to forced labour, and as if last year’s Treaty with Austria (after 10 years of military occupation and loot), by which the Russian Government secured, as the price for their withdrawal from this country, such important industrial and territorial concessions, rights of mineral exploitation, control of installations extending over 10 and more years, in addition to a payment of 150 million dollars ransom, had not been enough to show their Capitalist character, we have now to witness the bloody slaughter of Hungarian workers, showing still more glaringly the hideous face of the Russian variety of the Capitalist monster.

Just as Great Britain and France are fighting to regain control of the Suez Canal, Russia is fighting to keep control of Hungary’s factories, rich mines and mineral Springs, chemical industry, Uranium deposits, and of the mass of exploitable cheap Hungarian labour, yielding huge profits with which to finance Russia’s gigantic armament programme. The strategic importance of Hungary is another asset in the Russian scheme of things.

But lest the reader thinks of the Western "Welfare States” as holding the key to peace in the world and to the solution of the social problems, or to be on the road to Socialism, the following should enlighten him.

The "Welfare State” continues the status quo, i.e. the private and State ownership of the means and instruments of wealth production, exploitation of man by man through the wages system, and production of the means of life for sale and profit. The Socialist attitude is uncompromising hostility to Capitalism in all its forms and variations, since Socialists are only interested in, and stand for a fundamental change of the economic basis of society and of the status of the workers of the world.

The reader can judge the conditions in one of the typical “Welfare-States"—Austria—and form his own opinion on the merits of this latest description.

Austria as it really is

Centred as it really is it would not be surprising if the foreign visitor and tourist who comes to Austria, bent on sightseeing and enjoyment during a holiday, learns and sees no more of the country than its scenic beauty of mountains and valleys, forests and lakes, some of its historic monuments, medieval castles and ruins of ancient strongholds, its palaces, monasteries, abbeys with their centuries old libraries and other cultural treasures. Visitors to Vienna may also see the extensive municipal tenement houses, the great building activity, the huge blocks of fiats in process of construction, as for example opposite the Opera House to replace the Henrichshof burned down in 1945 with all its hundreds of luxurious apartments. Close by, huge business premises are arising from the ashes of the de Luxe Hotel Bristol, whilst other luxury hotels on the Ringstrasse which had been occupied by Russian military personnel, are now considered uninhabitable by their international clientele of parasites. Visitors may learn too that only after 10 years of repair work was it possible to reopen last November the two national theatres. The venerable St. Stephen’s Cathedral is still surrounded by scaffolding, and visitors can see right opposite it the plain and not so beautiful new buildings as glaring proof of how near the famous old church itself was to total destruction through bombing and fighting during the war.

Visitors coming for purposes of trade, and Trade Union and other delegations, may, in addition see or be shown over some of the more important industrial enterprises, dams and power stations, social welfare centres and institutions, etc., etc.

Those who had been to Vienna some years before, will be struck by the sight of new and resplendant railway stations. Of the six stations three were bombed out of existence, but out of the ruins of the others there have arisen the new Westbahnhof and the Südost station.

Visitors will note too the shops stocked with commodities of every imaginable kind from the four corners of the earth, and the streets swarming with vehicles of every description, from Cadillacs to Volkswagen.

The average visitor accustomed to judging by appearances cannot but be impressed by what he must consider as evidence of prosperity of the country’, until his attention is drawn to the reverse side of the medal. It is indeed when one looks beneath the surface of things and enquires under what conditions the people live and do all this work and operate all these services, that to talk of welfare and prosperity is not only a very superficial description but utterly untrue as far as the lot of the mass of the people is concerned.

It cannot be denied that there is prosperity—in some quarters. There are about 600 Austrians who state their taxable annual income to be more than one million schillings which even at only one million works out at 3,000 Austrian schillings per DAY, but 47 per cent. of the social insured persons have to exist on an income that does not rise above S1,100 per MONTH (about £15), whilst tens of thousands have no more than a few hundred schillings for a whole month to live on.

Among the prosperous ones are also the managers and administrators of the State, the Welfare-State—its Presidents, Ministers, State-Secretaries, Professional Politicians, the President and functionaries of the Federation of Trade Unions, the Directors of the Banks including the Workers Bank, of the Mineral Oil Administration (nine directors chosen from the “Socialist" Party of Austria and 11 from the Volkspartei), the Directors of the National Bank (four from each of the parties), and the rest of the managers of the foul exploiting system of Capitalism, which for all these leaders of the two big political parties is indeed a veritable “welfare state.”

While business is booming and bringing millions of extra profits to shareholders of the industrial enterprises like the Steyr-Daimler-Puch-Werke, the Voest, the Veitscher Magnesit, the Alpine Montan A.G., the Socony Vacuum Petroleum Co., the Fiat, Elin, Böhler, and the others, the workers of practically every industry have been forced to strike or threaten to strike within the last 12 month, starting with the municipal tramwaymen early in the year. One of the last industries to follow in the series were the bakers who, after a week’s strike, succeeded in getting their wages increased by a miserable few shillings, whilst the bosses are now making extra profits to the tune of more than 40 million S per year out of the promptly raised prices of all bread products. The civil servants who, before the election in May, had been promised wage adjustments, could only enforce them by the threat of a strike.

The fact alone that the wealth-producers are forced to constantly fight, threaten and eventually resort, to strikes to prevent their standard of living, low as it is, from sinking still deeper, and that they can be locked out and victimized for propagating and taking protective action, should long have taught them and roused them to a realisation that they are a downtrodden and humiliated class. Here is concrete evidence that the “Welfare State” has not altered their degrading position.

To begin with, in order to live at all, a property-less person—and they are 90 per cent. of the people—must have a job with some property-owner, an employer. Since the workers have not even the right to work, they find themselves thrown upon the labour market, reduced to begging the chance to work, degraded to the level of a mere commodity like chalk or cheese, exposed to all the insecurity and the general vicissitudes of a market, and, when employed, they are robbed through the wages system. If the word “robbed” is considered to be an exaggeration or an unscientific term, the question must be asked and answered: Since value and wealth is produced ONLY by the application of human labour power to nature-given material, where does the accumulated wraith, and where do the profits come from, if not from the unpaid labour of the workers? And why does the working-class, in spite of all their labour and 100 years of the most astounding technical progress, remain poor?

Winter Unemployment reaches 100,000

“It is incorrect,” said the Austrian Sozialminister Proksch “to speak of full employment in this country. We have no full employment as long as we have the problem of unemployment in winter.” Whilst unemployment is highest in winter, the figures for. the other seasons are invariably around the 100,000 mark. So that the constant talk by the rest of die politicians and the Arbeiter Zeitung that there is full employment, is not only incorrect, but downright deceiving humbug, especially when it is well known that considerable parts of the country have been “depressed areas’' for years. In Berndorf where the Austrian Krupp Works before the war employed some 5,000 workers in the production of high-class metal goods, but are now practically at a standstill, all hopes of the building up of a new industry have been dashed, just as there is now bitter disappointment in other parts where the signing of the State Treaty in May, 1955, had been expected to bring relief. “If help is not soon forthcoming, the situation will become catastrophic,” declared the report after the conference of the Socialist Party of Austria. Most of the workers there have been on the dole for years. All the other towns in the area, the largest of which is Neustadt, are sending appeal after appeal to the Government in Vienna for help in their appalling plight. “Ominously looms over the town the question what is to be done when, in a few years, the reconstruction work has been completed?” Thus the Labour politicians and the Arbeiter-Zeitung, who are always telling the workers of “our” oil, “our” iron, and “our" magnesit. and who refer to “our” nationalized industries as being the property of the people, clearly admit this talk to be so many lies and so much humbug. For, if the workers owned these things, or even a fraction of the country’s wealth produced by them (and by them alone), there could not arise such a problem as “what is to become of the workers when the work has been completed.” It can arise only where the mass of the people, the working-class, are IN this society, but not OF it, where they are just so many hands to do the work and make Profit for those who DO own the land and the factories and the means of transport, and do it all for just the bare necessities of life and to pro-create their kind, In other words where the name worker is synonimous with poor. It would seem that catastrophes such as earthquakes, tornadoes and wars bringing destruction and devastation, are welcomed by the workers since they provide work—reconstruction work—and make for full employment, which is all the Labour politicians seem to be concerned with in the Welfare State.

Imagine also the incongruity of the Minister for nationalized industries, i.e. for the industries that have become the “property of the people,” sending out circulars appealing to the managers of those industries to do their utmost to “provide jobs for workers old and infirm who are hit by misfortune of physical disabilities or unemployment.” In other words: here are people said to be the owners of the chief industries in this “one of the richest countries in Europe,” living nevertheless in dire poverty, still compelled to go, cap in hand, humbly begging the chance of a job—in their own industry! You might well ask: How come that—as even the Arbeiter-Zeitung has to confess—“if in a working-class family husband and wife do not both earn, there is hardly enough money for the most necessary things, and if there is a child, the purchase of a suit or even a pair of shoes is a problem.”

Rudolf Frank

(To be continued.)

Liberation and Loot in Austria (1955)

From the July 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Austria has had another liberation—the fifth in this generation, i.e. since the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which in its time and turn had itself played the role of “liberator” of other nations) became the simple Republic Austria. That was in 1918 when it was liberated from the Hapsburg Dynasty. In 1934 the country was liberated from the “Reds,” in 1938 from the Dollfus-Schuschnigg dictatorship, in 1945 from Hitler-Germany’s “national Socialism” and in 1955 we record the liberation from the Four-Power occupation. Although every one of these previous “revolutions” had at the time been declared by the respective engineers and managers and their Press as decisive and final (at least for a thousand years), who would have the temerity in the face of the almost general acclamation to assert that the present (1955) liberation was not a more outstanding event than the others? Does it not only bring final “freedom, independence, sovereignty, peace and social justice” to Austria, but also augur well as an example of good will and pacification returning to a greatly troubled world in general? In hundreds of articles and broadcasts this was impressed upon the people. The Vienna Press this time was unanimous. Nationalistic Press hysteria celebrated veritable orgies. After more than 260 futile conferences in these last 10 years, and another 9-day conclave behind locked doors this month of May, the foreign Ambassadors finally arrived at an agreement to be submitted to and signed by the proxies of the Four Big Concerns concerned, plus Austria. At long last, freedom and independence had been secured.

The ceremonies which included of course receptions and banquets took place in the Palace of Belvedere and the Castle of Schönbrunn (which latter had seen within its walls such other one time liberators as Napoleon, and subsequently housed the famous Vienna Congress in 1815). Workers had to work overtime to give an extra shine to the historic places for the occasion. The delegates were feted and profusely photographed—their pictures must have gone round the whole world. Crowds called for the repeated appearance of the ministers on the balcony, just as they had done at the Hotel Imperial in 1938 after the entry of yet another liberator in Vienna. All the church bells rang out; a special thanksgiving service was celebrated in St. Stephen’s Cathedral by H.E. Cardinal lnnitzer himself, who, like the late great “Socialist” statesman Dr. Renner, had in 1938 voted for Hitler and the Anschluss. If the Holy Trinity of Press, Radio and Pulpit, were unanimous in jubilation, it cannot be said that the people as a whole justified the exuberant enthusiasm with which they were credited by the publicity directors. Not only cynics, jesters and sceptics, but earnest and thoughtful folk generally) many doubtless pondering over the distressing and uncertain fate of their husbands, sons and brothers still behind the iron curtain, did not seem to be able to forget their cares and worries or get themselves to believe in the bright future that was said to be ahead.

Was it that after all these boasted achievements of freedom and independence the mass of the people discovered that, as a witty Frenchman said: “The more it changes, the more it is the same thing”; was it that people's thoughts turned to the Monday morning when those who were dependent on an employer or, worse still, dependent on the dole or public assistance, would start the “new era” of freedom and independence not in abundance and security, but in the same penury as yesterday? Or was it that when Austria's minister showed from the balcony of the castle the signed document to a waiting crowd, another historic episode sprang to people's minds—the picture of Mr. Chamberlain (back from a conference with Hitler—flourishing the "Peace in our Time” document from another balcony a twelve-month only before the outbreak of World-war II? Or was it the knowledge that the liberators did not give freedom and independence as a free gift, but exacted a high price for it and imposed a heavy burden to meet? Was it that the people could already hear the well-known call for increased production, and sacrifices to be brought for the blessing of freedom and sovereignty? Was it the constant consciousness of all these wretched, harassing and depressing things that did not allow the people as a whole to justify the universal enthusiasm alleged to stir one and all?

The fact is that, though there certainly is general and well justified relief here at the prospective departure of not only the Muscovite, but of all the other occupation elements from Austria, the working-class have become more or less tired of promises and sceptical of Treaties and Pacts made by statesmen and politicians on behalf of their masters. Socialists hope that the truth we keep hammering in, namely that all the freedoms in capitalism put together still leave the mass of mankind shackled and unfree, will soon be realized in wider circles and that the workers will at last strive for the ONE FREEDOM which is not a farce: the emancipation of the working-class of the world from the thralldom of the exploiters of labour.

Now what credentials had and have all these liberators, past and present, for their actions? What cause have they served? Have they served the all-important cause of ridding the world from poverty, insecurity, class-conflict and war? What problem have the 45 wars and “revolutions” in the last 100 years solved for the mass of the people—the working-class? Have the unspeakable tragedies, the untold ruins and rivers of blood and tears been justified that accompanied “liberations” down to this day? Has the fundamental status of the world's wealth-producers as mere objects of exploitation been altered or even advanced one iota towards one of free men? Is it no longer a condition of the workers’ very existence that they have a job in some profit-making enterprise? Have they even secured the miserable enough right to work? Ask the young who left school, or those whom Capitalism calls old, too old at 45 or even at 35, and they will tell you heartrending tales of woe of their difficulties in securing that indispensable thing: a job with some employer, i.e. with some exploiter! “Collier's Magazine” (7.1.1955) brought a revealing picture of a queue of “old people” lined up at a Chicago Labour-Exchange with an article headed: “Shocking as it is, people in the prime of life are denied jobs because of their age.” And what was the solution offered by secretary Mitchell of the Department of Labour in this “freedom and independence” enjoying U.S.A.? “Find places for old workers and MAKE PROFITS from their production, or be taxed much more heavily than now in order to sustain them as non-workers.” (As if you helped a man by sustaining him in idleness and casting him out of society.) No sentimentalities here about human dignity. “The only solution,” says Mitchell bluntly, “is to HIRE the older worker and MAKE A PROFIT from his production.” Just about the same time a debate is raging in a Vienna Trade-Union paper (Solidaritat) on the very same subject of the “too old for a job.” Among a number of letters reproduced in the paper was a mournful but otherwise courageous epistle from a woman saying, among other things:

  “Science endeavours to prolong man's life. What for? You are hardly 40 years of age—willing to work, with sense of duty and with much experience in life, but practically cast out of human society."

We are often told that we must wait for Socialism because of the lack of understanding and of human dignity of the millions of workers in the "backward” countries. Well, since Capitalist spokesmen in advanced and cultured countries can insult the workers by, for instance, distinguishing between them and “intellectuals,” and telling them to their face with brutal bluntness that they are nothing but HIRED objects to make profit from, and since these spokesmen can get away with it with impunity, we ask, where is the difference between the cultured and the uncultured slaves, as far as enlightenment on their social position and a sense of human dignity is concerned? With all your greater experience and opportunities, you have not yet learned that it is the damnable system of Capitalist exploitation that is the cause of your and their misery and degradation! Indeed, in Russia and in China the need of repressive measures and an all-penetrating secret police, the terror the purges and forced labour camps (not to speak of the massacres) by which the Bolsheviks established and maintain their regime of State-Capitalism, would show that there was and is as much opposition in these backward countries as in the Western World. Neither the frequent frank and outspoken confessions in avowed Capitalist publications of the shocking features of modern society, nor the evident humbug and hypocrisy, the lying, deceit and cant of “Socialist” and “Communist’’ leaders seem to stir you to intelligent action in opposition to the horrible system they all serve and want to perpetuate.

But to revert to our latest “world sensation.” In order to illustrate by concrete example the difference between facts and fiction (which differences are often blurred these times), here is what one of the actors in this sensation, the Soviet Union, pretends to stand for, as stated in the organs of the Russian occupation forces and the Communist party in Austria:

  “All that oppressed humanity has ever dreamt, all that the founders of scientific socialism had predicted in their works, has here (on one-sixth of the earth) been realized. A new era in the history of mankind began in 1917."

Now many of the Baltic and Balkan countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, half of Berlin and part of Austria, have had the “new era,” the Soviet dream of humanity brought to them.

Speaking for Austria, most people here will, when the “new era” apostles are gone, think of their experience with the latter as a nightmare rather than as a dream of paradise. And this even though this country has not seen the Bolshevik’s blessings on the same scale as their own people and others have. Some people even speak of a Soviet “weak spot” for Austria and point to the “sudden” (after ten years!) decision to let the Austrian government take a turn in establishing their own “new era.”

No more convincing proof of the Russian liberators’ disinterestedness and generosity could be given than this “sensational” State-Treaty. After having for ten years had the onerous job of controlling and collecting the profits from no fewer than 454 large and small Concerns (including the Danube Steamship Co.) with some 63,000 workers, the Russian liberators will hand them back to Austria on payment of a paltry 150 million dollars, plus delivery of one million tons of crude oil annually for ten years, plus the right to seek for oil in various parts of Austria during eight years and in the event of the discovery of new sources to exploit them for 25 years, and plus other trifles. Then there is the renunciation of the further use of the prisoner-of-war labour-force. Considering the loss of profits which this entails for the Soviet government, they insist that Austria should make compensation by at least paying henceforth for the prisoners’ keep and eventual return home. Further proof of Soviet “chivalry” is also provided by their readiness to readmit into the paradise the 30,000 to 40,000 people who had for incomprehensible reasons forsaken the land where the age-long dream of humanity had been realized. (For equally incomprehensible reasons these refugees have declined the noble offer).

Why then, you may ask, were the negotiations conducted behind locked doors, and why this delay in releasing the full text of the Treaty? Could it be that, after all, the delegates had misgivings or pricks of conscience? Were they afraid that if all the articles were published unvarnished, people might discover discrepancies and disparity between professions and reality before the Press had done their preliminary doctoring and explaining away? (The Arbeiter Zeitung for example did their share of sugaring the pill by assuring the public that though the ransom Austria has to pay was no small amount, it was by no means too high a price for the full economic independence. . . .) Could it be that the delegates were ashamed of finding themselves in the same position as all their forerunners:—the negotiators of treaties after all the 45 odd wars of liberation in the last 100 years, of which the world now knows that it never was a question of liberation or lofty ideals, but of grab and loot? Had the hitherto fact of the grab of the goldmines in S. Africa by the British Capitalists, or the Treaty of Versailles (or any other of the dozens of liberation cum grab-crusades) been present in the delegates' minds? Did they perhaps become aware—as they studied the instructions received from their masters for the negotiations—of the manifest analogy of their position with that of thieves (having fallen out over the division of the loot) trying to come to at least a partial and temporary understanding after a ten year quarrel between themselves? Anyway, since another party of burglars, the German Capitalists, are now bitterly protesting against the confiscation of all their loot from the war, and with the thieves’ quarrels continuing unabated elsewhere, anything beyond registering with relief the withdrawal of occupation forces from this theatre of operations—Austria— would be misplaced and unwarranted. For, getting rid of foreign occupation Powers does not mean getting rid of oppression as the people also of many other lands in Europe in Asia and Africa must have learned to their bitter disappointment. So far liberations and revolutions have always meant the exchange of one bunch of exploiters for another, while native rulers of backward countries have often proved worse tyrants even than the foreign exploiters and oppressors they ousted.

The fact is that rulers and leaders all stand for the appropriation and accumulation of wealth by a world privileged class, wealth that is produced by and filched from the mass of the people through the modem wages-system. Asiatic and African leaders have not studied for nothing at the European and American universities.

If war is loot for all to see, it is not so dear and evident in peace-time, though loot is the pivot of the whole mechanism of Capitalism in war and peace. In peace, the robbery taking place, as it does, in the complex process of production, is obscured by the wages-system. Glaring proof of this legalized robbery is. however, the fact that a 100 years of marvellous technical achievements and tremendous increase of wealth produced by the working-class, have left them in a condition of poverty and insecurity. Once the worker comes to understand this crucial fact and recognizes it as the cause of his predicament, he will realize that all these fine words about “liberation. freedom and independence, peace and social justice” are but so many bourgeois slogans and illusions to hide the brutal facts of their thieving system. Already in the French Revolution which put the Bourgeoisie into power, it was “Liberté, égalité, fraternité ” which gulled the destitute masses into fighting the feudal enemies of their enemies, the rising Capitalist class, with the result that down to this day the above mentioned fine words mock the poverty-stricken French workers from every public building. It is certainly remarkable that it should still be possible for politicians to dispense and find listeners to these old outworn hollow phrases.

Enough has been said on the preposterous Nazi—and Bolshevik claim of having inaugurated a new social order, a “people’s democracy’’—this swindle is now too obvious and well known. But how little “freedom, independence and democracy” etc., mean to the working-class under Capitalism even in the “free world” countries: the U.S., Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, is shown by the fact that the status of the workers there is likewise that of property-less wage-slaves, dependent for their very means of existence, on the precarious chance of securing a job with some employer. Such a status does not and cannot make for the enjoyment of life. Work under such circumstances can never be identified, as it ought to and will be under Socialism, with real satisfaction and pleasure; it is only done to keep the wolf from the door. And wherever people have to work for wages, to make profit for an employer, any accident, illness, or other physical or mental disability—not to mention the factor of age—becomes something akin to a family catastrophe. The employers, even of the Welfare State, will quickly make you understand that they are not a welfare institution; but mean to make the Concern for which they have hired you, pay—the shareholders want their loot all the time.

Unfortunately, in so far as workers have not become altogether apathetic towards politics, they are, despite all disillusions), failures and frustrations still putting their trust in leaders and falling for the day to day affairs that invariably are only concerns of their enemies: the Capitalist class. It is a commentary on the policy and activity of the so-called “Socialist Party of Austria,” the “Communist” party and their fellow travellers everywhere that so far from getting the workers interested in, and educated to Socialism, they are busy assisting the Capitalistic state in building up still more devastating armaments. Not to be left behind by their big brother in England, who is all for the production of A-H-bombs, the Austrian Socialist Party and Communist Party, are now debating the form of the new army with at least ’‘conventional weapons.” No doubt, the S.P., having a quarter of a century ago organized the Schutzbund with a view to opposing by force of arms the power of the state, and thus invited the disaster and terrible fate it met in 1934. have learned a lesson. It is. however, not a lesson Socialists teach, but a lesson for leaders how to keep their jobs. The red colour of the banners carried by the ill-fated Schutzbund, with the inscriptions Freiheit, Gleichheit, Bruderlidikeit, Freundschaft,” etc., will be replaced by different dyes and inscriptions. It will be the red-white-red variety and perhaps the Double-Eagle. Sure, it will warm the cockles of the hearts of many an old Austrian soldier and general, though other people will contemplate the spectacle of trooping the colour, philosophically saying to themselves : Well, the more it changes, the more it is the same thing.

Rudolf Frank