Austria’s Communist Party hasn’t had an MP since 1959. But after years showing its worth in bread-and-butter local campaigns, the party has a realistic chance of a breakthrough in Sunday’s general election.
September 29, 2024
Source: Jacobin
Image by DimiTalen, Public Domain Dedication
Rarely in Austria’s history has a general election been so unpredictable as this Sunday’s vote for the country’s federal parliament. While polls in recent months have shown a head-to-head race between the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), there is also some movement on the long-dormant left wing of the spectrum. The Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) has a realistic chance of returning to parliament for the first time since 1959.
Much of the reason owes to an organizational overhaul that the KPÖ began some three years ago. In June 2021, it elected an entirely new leadership, which shifted the party’s strategic focus toward building local and regional-level structures, as well as providing direct aid to working people.
Since then, through a series of electoral advances in Styria (electing a Communist mayor of Graz), Salzburg, and Innsbruck, the KPÖ has laid the groundwork for the jump to the national parliament. In the process, it has developed the concept of the “useful party.” KPÖ politicians and activists hold “social office hours” where they help constituents navigate government bureaucracies and even provide them with direct financial support. This is made possible by the party’s elected officials, who take home from their salaries only what an average Austrian tradesperson earns (about €2,500 per month) while donating the rest to a social aid fund.
All in all, the KPÖ has focused on bread-and-butter issues, and especially exploding rent prices. This has built up its profile as the top party for affordable housing. Whether this approach will be enough to regain national representation remains to be seen. In Austria, parties need to win at least 4 percent of the national vote to enter parliament; polls currently put the KPÖ between 3 and 4 percent.
Tobias Schweiger, the lead candidate on the KPÖ’s electoral slate, has served on the party’s National Executive since 2021. He sat down with Jacobin’s Magdalena Berger to discuss the challenges of party building, what the KPÖ’s “social office hours” might look like on the national level, and ideas for initiatives such as a socialized energy sector.
Magdalena Berger
The KPÖ has long been described as a classic cadre party, with rather high obstacles to joining. While it is more open today, it’s still not necessarily easy to become a member. There are anecdotes of people wanting to become active within the party but giving up after not being contacted by the party following an initial meeting. Why might that be?
Tobias Schweiger
For a small party that relies a lot on volunteer labor, it’s difficult to build structures from the ground up that facilitate participation. This is especially true in Austria, where the culture views party membership as the be-all and end-all of political participation. But [onboarding new members] is much easier when you can rely on paid party apparatuses, when your organizers and community managers are employees with time and technical resources.
This is not to say that it isn’t a priority for us to enable people to get active with us. However, our national team is relatively small, and sometimes classical organizational procedures don’t go entirely smoothly. Especially for a party that has a pronounced bottom-up structure and puts considerable responsibility in the hands of its locals, transformations [like the one the KPÖ has been through in recent years] are often complex.
It’s virtually unavoidable that such changes are messy, particularly in work-intensive areas. Integrating prospective members is one of the most error-prone areas in the structure of any organization. We’re aware of the problem, but we often lack the resources we need.
Magdalena Berger
Do you think that the party’s recent successes at the state level have strained its structures? The KPÖ has become a significant presence fairly suddenly, after decades of irrelevance.
Tobias Schweiger
Yes, of course. Integrating prospective members depends on a number of factors. For example, on a surface level, people have noticed that it has taken a long time for someone from the party to get in touch with them. But for it to be possible at all to contact people and invite them to a meet and greet, a whole series of processes must be in place, such as up-to-date, internal schedule coordination and a tight communication network. In other words, it requires more work than just one person calling a list of people on one day.
In recent years, we’ve changed a lot in order to move beyond merely interpreting the world and toward organizing everyday class interests. That demands an extraordinary amount of attention to detail — and time.
Magdalena Berger
As you’ve described, you’re trying to build a party from the ground up. Is the timing of the current elections inconvenient, given how far along you are in this process? Are the national structures developed enough?
Tobias Schweiger
I don’t think we can say that the election is coming too early. For years, we found that electoral campaigns weren’t optimal for building organizational structures. However, we’ve corrected this analysis in the current election year. Our locals have drawn a lot of motivation — from the polls, but also from the solid result in the EU election, where we nearly made it into the European Parliament.
At the moment, our locals are undergoing an incredible amount of structural development. More people are taking on responsibility. Things that required a lot of work one year ago are now done without a second thought. This is partly because an electoral campaign has a clear goal and a clear beginning and end — a collective mission.
Still, many of the events organized in a classical electoral campaign aren’t sustainable in the longer run — take info stands, for example. But we’re seeing that things can go hand in hand, that structures can be built that will be functional after an election. At any rate, an election comes when it comes. For us, the election is definitely accelerating the party’s development.
Magdalena Berger
In an interview in 2022, you said that the “state of the party is not what we’d like to see in a Communist Party.” A goal of the leadership at the time was to make the KPÖ capable of campaigning and making political interventions. How far have you come in realizing this goal?
Tobias Schweiger
It’s hard to assess our ability to intervene politically. But there have been moments that have illustrated how far the KPÖ has come. We should really take seriously the national government’s claim (made by Minister Karoline Edtstadler this April) that they have increased [housing] vacancy taxes because the KPÖ gained popularity over the housing issue, and they want to take the wind out of our sails.
There is anxiety that a critical mass for a left-wing oppositional force could form. This is also evident in how focused the bourgeois press is on our position on war and peace. There’s a fear that the opinion of what is in fact the majority of society on this issue might gain political expression — outside of the [far-right] FPÖ, which of course addresses the issue through a shallow populism. These arguments have brought us more relevance than we’ve had in decades.
When it comes to other sociopolitical issues, we probably haven’t yet achieved the same level of relevance. In that sense, we are far from satisfied with where we are at.
Magdalena Berger
In other words, you’ve come a long way but not yet reached your goal?
Tobias Schweiger
There have been many positive developments in recent years. In particular, we have come to view solidarity projects as a real cornerstone of party development. This is a substantial advance precisely because it has implied a change in our understanding of what a party is. This may sound small, but it’s a major step.
Magdalena Berger
This understanding is closely connected to your aim to make a tangible difference in people’s lives — to be “useful.” How would a KPÖ parliamentary group make a difference in people’s everyday lives in this country?
Tobias Schweiger
We could do what we’ve been doing on a much greater scale by geographically expanding our social office hours. More people would then have access to them, and we would have greater insight into what people in different regions view as the main social problems. While I believe that people throughout Austria face quite similar problems, the specific information we get from office hours is still relevant.
It also makes a difference whether people read in the newspaper about the [Communist] mayor of Graz helping someone or whether they know someone personally who has received support from the party or have interacted with us themselves.
Magdalena Berger
Have you already considered the specifics of how this project could be expanded? Holding office hours on a national level is more complicated than doing so locally. They might be accessible to someone in Vienna, the national capital, but what should a KPÖ voter do who lives seven hours away in Vorarlberg?
Tobias Schweiger
This hasn’t been finalized yet, but our plan is to define areas for which different people will be responsible. This would mean, for example, that I might offer regular social office hours not only in Vienna but also [at the state level] in Lower Austria. We still have to decide on what makes the most sense.
If we make it into parliament, we’ll probably win around seven seats. Our seven members of parliament would then donate most of their salaries, substantially increasing our social fund.
Magdalena Berger
Members of Austria’s parliament currently earn around €10,000 a month before taxes. KPÖ elected officials make a pledge to only keep about €2,500 after taxes. That comes out as a major amount for direct aid provision.
Tobias Schweiger
Exactly. This would also allow us to enable people in different parts of the country to conduct office hours themselves — to give them the financial means to do so. This would be a significant change, with a direct impact on local people.
We’ve decided that our social fund should mainly exist to provide money to people in urgent need. Part of the money also goes to expanding and financing our solidarity projects. One such example is our free kitchens, an important project that supports food security.
The project has been quite successful and is being offered by more and more locals because it brings together people from various social groups. Neighbors, precarious students, and people living in poverty sit together and get to know one another, and a space emerges where people talk about what’s going on in their lives. It’s almost like a collectivized social office hour, but also a democratic space. Organizing these events is extremely cheap, but locals have limited budgets.
If we enter parliament, the considerable increase in our financial resources would open up new possibilities for action. Another potential outlet is our party newspaper, Argument, which we recently revived. Our goal is to turn it into a monthly paper, then a weekly, and finally a daily in order to essentially build a counter-public.
Another priority is political education. This can mean organizing seminars or hosting speakers who have something interesting to say — events that allow us to advance the party intellectually. Once we set up a party academy, we will have a serious structure for continuous intellectual networking and activity.
Magdalena Berger
So, you see joining parliament as a way to foster the party’s intellectual development?
Tobias Schweiger
Yes, and this brings us back to our ability to intervene politically. The immediate intervention that a party can make is always only one element of what a communist intervention in society can mean. An intellectual structure is another part of that. Right now, there are hardly any intellectuals championing the KPÖ in the bourgeois press, let alone formulating demands that go beyond our own.
Entering parliament wouldn’t instantly solve all of these problems. But it would mean achieving a critical mass in terms of finances and personnel that could at least be used to address them.
Magdalena Berger
At the same time, making it into parliament also involves dangers. Particularly for governing parties, there’s the risk of beginning to view the state as something to merely be administered. How do you approach this tension between electoral success and the trap of reformism to which others have fallen victim, such as Germany’s Die Linke?
Tobias Schweiger
Even on the national level, this question is not quite so urgent. We don’t want to join a governing coalition with anyone, and no one wants us as coalition partners. We mean it when we say that parliament needs an oppositional force that is not simply part of the political spectrum.
In parliament, you receive a greater share of the bourgeois public’s attention. And at the moment, there is a clear overlap between the objective need for a KPÖ in parliament and our subjective interest in this. We want to be an oppositional social force, a counterforce.
Magdalena Berger
But mightn’t parliamentary work cause you to lose sight of the goal of a liberated society?
Tobias Schweiger
There’s a tension there. Of course, parliamentarism has thousands of pitfalls. On noncore issues, there’s a tendency to formulate positions that actually fall short of what should be the positions of a Communist Party. I’ve also noticed this as lead candidate.
But the thing is: I’m aware of this. I seek out lively exchange with party members so that we can correct one another, something that is made possible by the interpersonal solidarity within our party.
Magdalena Berger
Let’s discuss the KPÖ’s positions. Your electoral program demands that “housing, energy, health care, healthy food, and a livable environment” be communally organized. Does this mean these areas should be socialized?
Tobias Schweiger
Socialized housing is far more comprehensive an agenda than the specific demands we are currently making. But there is still a connection. If you advocate public housing, this typically means advocating for a state-level project. Whether this project is truly socialized is an open question. It depends on whether people have a say in how apartments look and how they’re used.
This has always been important to us — to say that it’s not just a matter of creating state-owned apartments but also of ensuring that they have value for the people. Housing shouldn’t simply be affordable; it should allow for democratic participation.
Maintaining a perspective beyond the state and capital, we should recognize that communally designed public housing will of course be easier to transform than housing that has been built as an individual’s speculative asset. How housing is designed will determine whether or not it will be adaptable to a new social order. That’s what I mean when I say there’s a connection between our demands and socialization.
We are, of course, aware that calling for more public housing in isolation is not communism. Every sociopolitical force should advocate more public housing today.
Magdalena Berger
You understand the demand as more or less a first step.
Tobias Schweiger
Yes. We’ve elaborated on this more rigorously in our demand for basic energy security. In Austria, our energy companies are almost nationalized, but they exist as stock corporations. This means that although they are state-owned, their purpose is to make a profit for shareholders. Their interest lies in profit maximization, as we saw during the recent energy crisis in particular.
We say that there should be basic energy security. Electricity for fulfilling fundamental needs should be provided free of charge, and all electricity consumption beyond that should be progressively priced. This would facilitate ecological regulation, but it would above all eliminate energy poverty in one fell swoop.
Magdalena Berger
And how might this be implemented?
Tobias Schweiger
We would have to re-socialize the already nationalized energy companies. Step one would be to return to a collective use principle, or to restructure the energy stock corporations into nonprofits in the hands of the state. But this is only one of the things that would need to happen. The way companies currently produce energy prevents them from moving away from fossil fuels and divesting from international raw materials markets.
This shift would require a massive expansion of renewable energy, but this often meets with popular resistance, as people don’t necessarily want, for example, wind turbines in front of their house. So, we say that these semi-state or state companies should be restructured into renewable energy cooperatives in which the people are a direct stakeholder. These energy cooperatives would then be incorporated into the state as nonprofit energy companies. Firstly, this would give the people a direct say, and secondly, it would create a trend reversal. Wind turbines would no longer be a means of production owned by someone else and used by them to produce my energy for profit. Rather, they would become a guarantor that my home will never go cold or dark.
And just like when it comes to the question of housing, this kind of infrastructure can be more easily transformed given changes in the overall balance of power vis-à-vis the state and capital. These are our “transformative approaches,” which of course cannot avoid the fundamental question of how society should be organized. But they allow us to already start building the infrastructure we need today and tomorrow, and to do so with an eye toward their future adaptation.
Magdalena Berger
You said earlier that nowhere are you quite so attacked as on issues of war and peace. I’ve noticed the KPÖ is quite vocal on Russia, Ukraine, and Austrian neutrality — but somewhat less so on Israel and Gaza. Why might that be?
Tobias Schweiger
I would say that daily media cycles in Austria are partially to blame. To the bourgeois public, there is a difference between the two conflicts. They don’t actually care about Israel and Palestine, let alone the people there. They may project their resentments onto the conflict, but they’ve grown used to its escalations for decades. For them it’s enough to periodically assert (a pro-Israel) “Staatsraison” and attack anyone who interprets the situation differently.
Russia’s war of aggression has changed how Austria conducts foreign policy, shifting it away from how it has advanced its diplomatic interests for decades. It has threatened the hegemony of the geopolitical model that Europe and the US — with all its contradictions — have pursued and developed for decades.
Magdalena Berger
But wouldn’t you say that the party itself is also to blame? The Young Left and the Communist Youth of Austria, essentially your two youth organizations, launched a joint campaign in 2022 called “Youth Against War.” Today, when I look at the communication channels of the Young Left, I see barely anything about Israel and Gaza, even though the topic is politicizing young people with immigrant backgrounds in particular.
Tobias Schweiger
I think it’s important that our position on Israel and Gaza be relevant to lived realities here. As opposed to a mere article of faith, it should offer people possibilities to act. Austria could intervene in geopolitics in a way that befits its neutrality. It could say: “We believe that the best way to bring about peace for the civilian population on the ground is a two-state solution.”
But Austria hasn’t even recognized an independent Palestine, so achieving this recognition should be in the foreground of our foreign policy activism. Of course, the demand for recognition should go hand in hand with other demands, such as for a cease-fire and negotiations. But a long-term perspective is also important.
This might sound more boring than a lot of what’s out there. But at the same time, debates about internationalism often miss something: people feel like they have truth but no power. And truth without power leads to feelings of powerlessness, which in turn lead to resignation. This produces frustration but no vision for a liberated society — and also no answer as to how I can connect conflicts and power relations in Austria to crucial issues of internationalism.
Magdalena Berger
Final question: After the election, what comes next for the KPÖ?
Tobias Schweiger
Whatever happens, we will continue to develop as an organization. This will involve important projects such as expanding our free kitchens and office hours. These two projects are now so widespread that we can refer to them as general projects. But many other ideas are in the works. In Innsbruck, the KPÖ has organized outings to gather wood for stoves, and in St Pölten, it has hosted clothing swaps that have put young women in particular in touch with the party.
We are building a party that enlivens neighborhood life while working to build socialism. That was our goal prior to the election and will continue to be so afterward. The only difference the election result will make is the financial means we have to pursue this goal.
Image by DimiTalen, Public Domain Dedication
Rarely in Austria’s history has a general election been so unpredictable as this Sunday’s vote for the country’s federal parliament. While polls in recent months have shown a head-to-head race between the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), there is also some movement on the long-dormant left wing of the spectrum. The Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) has a realistic chance of returning to parliament for the first time since 1959.
Much of the reason owes to an organizational overhaul that the KPÖ began some three years ago. In June 2021, it elected an entirely new leadership, which shifted the party’s strategic focus toward building local and regional-level structures, as well as providing direct aid to working people.
Since then, through a series of electoral advances in Styria (electing a Communist mayor of Graz), Salzburg, and Innsbruck, the KPÖ has laid the groundwork for the jump to the national parliament. In the process, it has developed the concept of the “useful party.” KPÖ politicians and activists hold “social office hours” where they help constituents navigate government bureaucracies and even provide them with direct financial support. This is made possible by the party’s elected officials, who take home from their salaries only what an average Austrian tradesperson earns (about €2,500 per month) while donating the rest to a social aid fund.
All in all, the KPÖ has focused on bread-and-butter issues, and especially exploding rent prices. This has built up its profile as the top party for affordable housing. Whether this approach will be enough to regain national representation remains to be seen. In Austria, parties need to win at least 4 percent of the national vote to enter parliament; polls currently put the KPÖ between 3 and 4 percent.
Tobias Schweiger, the lead candidate on the KPÖ’s electoral slate, has served on the party’s National Executive since 2021. He sat down with Jacobin’s Magdalena Berger to discuss the challenges of party building, what the KPÖ’s “social office hours” might look like on the national level, and ideas for initiatives such as a socialized energy sector.
Magdalena Berger
The KPÖ has long been described as a classic cadre party, with rather high obstacles to joining. While it is more open today, it’s still not necessarily easy to become a member. There are anecdotes of people wanting to become active within the party but giving up after not being contacted by the party following an initial meeting. Why might that be?
Tobias Schweiger
For a small party that relies a lot on volunteer labor, it’s difficult to build structures from the ground up that facilitate participation. This is especially true in Austria, where the culture views party membership as the be-all and end-all of political participation. But [onboarding new members] is much easier when you can rely on paid party apparatuses, when your organizers and community managers are employees with time and technical resources.
This is not to say that it isn’t a priority for us to enable people to get active with us. However, our national team is relatively small, and sometimes classical organizational procedures don’t go entirely smoothly. Especially for a party that has a pronounced bottom-up structure and puts considerable responsibility in the hands of its locals, transformations [like the one the KPÖ has been through in recent years] are often complex.
It’s virtually unavoidable that such changes are messy, particularly in work-intensive areas. Integrating prospective members is one of the most error-prone areas in the structure of any organization. We’re aware of the problem, but we often lack the resources we need.
Magdalena Berger
Do you think that the party’s recent successes at the state level have strained its structures? The KPÖ has become a significant presence fairly suddenly, after decades of irrelevance.
Tobias Schweiger
Yes, of course. Integrating prospective members depends on a number of factors. For example, on a surface level, people have noticed that it has taken a long time for someone from the party to get in touch with them. But for it to be possible at all to contact people and invite them to a meet and greet, a whole series of processes must be in place, such as up-to-date, internal schedule coordination and a tight communication network. In other words, it requires more work than just one person calling a list of people on one day.
In recent years, we’ve changed a lot in order to move beyond merely interpreting the world and toward organizing everyday class interests. That demands an extraordinary amount of attention to detail — and time.
Magdalena Berger
As you’ve described, you’re trying to build a party from the ground up. Is the timing of the current elections inconvenient, given how far along you are in this process? Are the national structures developed enough?
Tobias Schweiger
I don’t think we can say that the election is coming too early. For years, we found that electoral campaigns weren’t optimal for building organizational structures. However, we’ve corrected this analysis in the current election year. Our locals have drawn a lot of motivation — from the polls, but also from the solid result in the EU election, where we nearly made it into the European Parliament.
At the moment, our locals are undergoing an incredible amount of structural development. More people are taking on responsibility. Things that required a lot of work one year ago are now done without a second thought. This is partly because an electoral campaign has a clear goal and a clear beginning and end — a collective mission.
Still, many of the events organized in a classical electoral campaign aren’t sustainable in the longer run — take info stands, for example. But we’re seeing that things can go hand in hand, that structures can be built that will be functional after an election. At any rate, an election comes when it comes. For us, the election is definitely accelerating the party’s development.
Magdalena Berger
In an interview in 2022, you said that the “state of the party is not what we’d like to see in a Communist Party.” A goal of the leadership at the time was to make the KPÖ capable of campaigning and making political interventions. How far have you come in realizing this goal?
Tobias Schweiger
It’s hard to assess our ability to intervene politically. But there have been moments that have illustrated how far the KPÖ has come. We should really take seriously the national government’s claim (made by Minister Karoline Edtstadler this April) that they have increased [housing] vacancy taxes because the KPÖ gained popularity over the housing issue, and they want to take the wind out of our sails.
There is anxiety that a critical mass for a left-wing oppositional force could form. This is also evident in how focused the bourgeois press is on our position on war and peace. There’s a fear that the opinion of what is in fact the majority of society on this issue might gain political expression — outside of the [far-right] FPÖ, which of course addresses the issue through a shallow populism. These arguments have brought us more relevance than we’ve had in decades.
When it comes to other sociopolitical issues, we probably haven’t yet achieved the same level of relevance. In that sense, we are far from satisfied with where we are at.
Magdalena Berger
In other words, you’ve come a long way but not yet reached your goal?
Tobias Schweiger
There have been many positive developments in recent years. In particular, we have come to view solidarity projects as a real cornerstone of party development. This is a substantial advance precisely because it has implied a change in our understanding of what a party is. This may sound small, but it’s a major step.
Magdalena Berger
This understanding is closely connected to your aim to make a tangible difference in people’s lives — to be “useful.” How would a KPÖ parliamentary group make a difference in people’s everyday lives in this country?
Tobias Schweiger
We could do what we’ve been doing on a much greater scale by geographically expanding our social office hours. More people would then have access to them, and we would have greater insight into what people in different regions view as the main social problems. While I believe that people throughout Austria face quite similar problems, the specific information we get from office hours is still relevant.
It also makes a difference whether people read in the newspaper about the [Communist] mayor of Graz helping someone or whether they know someone personally who has received support from the party or have interacted with us themselves.
Magdalena Berger
Have you already considered the specifics of how this project could be expanded? Holding office hours on a national level is more complicated than doing so locally. They might be accessible to someone in Vienna, the national capital, but what should a KPÖ voter do who lives seven hours away in Vorarlberg?
Tobias Schweiger
This hasn’t been finalized yet, but our plan is to define areas for which different people will be responsible. This would mean, for example, that I might offer regular social office hours not only in Vienna but also [at the state level] in Lower Austria. We still have to decide on what makes the most sense.
If we make it into parliament, we’ll probably win around seven seats. Our seven members of parliament would then donate most of their salaries, substantially increasing our social fund.
Magdalena Berger
Members of Austria’s parliament currently earn around €10,000 a month before taxes. KPÖ elected officials make a pledge to only keep about €2,500 after taxes. That comes out as a major amount for direct aid provision.
Tobias Schweiger
Exactly. This would also allow us to enable people in different parts of the country to conduct office hours themselves — to give them the financial means to do so. This would be a significant change, with a direct impact on local people.
We’ve decided that our social fund should mainly exist to provide money to people in urgent need. Part of the money also goes to expanding and financing our solidarity projects. One such example is our free kitchens, an important project that supports food security.
The project has been quite successful and is being offered by more and more locals because it brings together people from various social groups. Neighbors, precarious students, and people living in poverty sit together and get to know one another, and a space emerges where people talk about what’s going on in their lives. It’s almost like a collectivized social office hour, but also a democratic space. Organizing these events is extremely cheap, but locals have limited budgets.
If we enter parliament, the considerable increase in our financial resources would open up new possibilities for action. Another potential outlet is our party newspaper, Argument, which we recently revived. Our goal is to turn it into a monthly paper, then a weekly, and finally a daily in order to essentially build a counter-public.
Another priority is political education. This can mean organizing seminars or hosting speakers who have something interesting to say — events that allow us to advance the party intellectually. Once we set up a party academy, we will have a serious structure for continuous intellectual networking and activity.
Magdalena Berger
So, you see joining parliament as a way to foster the party’s intellectual development?
Tobias Schweiger
Yes, and this brings us back to our ability to intervene politically. The immediate intervention that a party can make is always only one element of what a communist intervention in society can mean. An intellectual structure is another part of that. Right now, there are hardly any intellectuals championing the KPÖ in the bourgeois press, let alone formulating demands that go beyond our own.
Entering parliament wouldn’t instantly solve all of these problems. But it would mean achieving a critical mass in terms of finances and personnel that could at least be used to address them.
Magdalena Berger
At the same time, making it into parliament also involves dangers. Particularly for governing parties, there’s the risk of beginning to view the state as something to merely be administered. How do you approach this tension between electoral success and the trap of reformism to which others have fallen victim, such as Germany’s Die Linke?
Tobias Schweiger
Even on the national level, this question is not quite so urgent. We don’t want to join a governing coalition with anyone, and no one wants us as coalition partners. We mean it when we say that parliament needs an oppositional force that is not simply part of the political spectrum.
In parliament, you receive a greater share of the bourgeois public’s attention. And at the moment, there is a clear overlap between the objective need for a KPÖ in parliament and our subjective interest in this. We want to be an oppositional social force, a counterforce.
Magdalena Berger
But mightn’t parliamentary work cause you to lose sight of the goal of a liberated society?
Tobias Schweiger
There’s a tension there. Of course, parliamentarism has thousands of pitfalls. On noncore issues, there’s a tendency to formulate positions that actually fall short of what should be the positions of a Communist Party. I’ve also noticed this as lead candidate.
But the thing is: I’m aware of this. I seek out lively exchange with party members so that we can correct one another, something that is made possible by the interpersonal solidarity within our party.
Magdalena Berger
Let’s discuss the KPÖ’s positions. Your electoral program demands that “housing, energy, health care, healthy food, and a livable environment” be communally organized. Does this mean these areas should be socialized?
Tobias Schweiger
Socialized housing is far more comprehensive an agenda than the specific demands we are currently making. But there is still a connection. If you advocate public housing, this typically means advocating for a state-level project. Whether this project is truly socialized is an open question. It depends on whether people have a say in how apartments look and how they’re used.
This has always been important to us — to say that it’s not just a matter of creating state-owned apartments but also of ensuring that they have value for the people. Housing shouldn’t simply be affordable; it should allow for democratic participation.
Maintaining a perspective beyond the state and capital, we should recognize that communally designed public housing will of course be easier to transform than housing that has been built as an individual’s speculative asset. How housing is designed will determine whether or not it will be adaptable to a new social order. That’s what I mean when I say there’s a connection between our demands and socialization.
We are, of course, aware that calling for more public housing in isolation is not communism. Every sociopolitical force should advocate more public housing today.
Magdalena Berger
You understand the demand as more or less a first step.
Tobias Schweiger
Yes. We’ve elaborated on this more rigorously in our demand for basic energy security. In Austria, our energy companies are almost nationalized, but they exist as stock corporations. This means that although they are state-owned, their purpose is to make a profit for shareholders. Their interest lies in profit maximization, as we saw during the recent energy crisis in particular.
We say that there should be basic energy security. Electricity for fulfilling fundamental needs should be provided free of charge, and all electricity consumption beyond that should be progressively priced. This would facilitate ecological regulation, but it would above all eliminate energy poverty in one fell swoop.
Magdalena Berger
And how might this be implemented?
Tobias Schweiger
We would have to re-socialize the already nationalized energy companies. Step one would be to return to a collective use principle, or to restructure the energy stock corporations into nonprofits in the hands of the state. But this is only one of the things that would need to happen. The way companies currently produce energy prevents them from moving away from fossil fuels and divesting from international raw materials markets.
This shift would require a massive expansion of renewable energy, but this often meets with popular resistance, as people don’t necessarily want, for example, wind turbines in front of their house. So, we say that these semi-state or state companies should be restructured into renewable energy cooperatives in which the people are a direct stakeholder. These energy cooperatives would then be incorporated into the state as nonprofit energy companies. Firstly, this would give the people a direct say, and secondly, it would create a trend reversal. Wind turbines would no longer be a means of production owned by someone else and used by them to produce my energy for profit. Rather, they would become a guarantor that my home will never go cold or dark.
And just like when it comes to the question of housing, this kind of infrastructure can be more easily transformed given changes in the overall balance of power vis-à-vis the state and capital. These are our “transformative approaches,” which of course cannot avoid the fundamental question of how society should be organized. But they allow us to already start building the infrastructure we need today and tomorrow, and to do so with an eye toward their future adaptation.
Magdalena Berger
You said earlier that nowhere are you quite so attacked as on issues of war and peace. I’ve noticed the KPÖ is quite vocal on Russia, Ukraine, and Austrian neutrality — but somewhat less so on Israel and Gaza. Why might that be?
Tobias Schweiger
I would say that daily media cycles in Austria are partially to blame. To the bourgeois public, there is a difference between the two conflicts. They don’t actually care about Israel and Palestine, let alone the people there. They may project their resentments onto the conflict, but they’ve grown used to its escalations for decades. For them it’s enough to periodically assert (a pro-Israel) “Staatsraison” and attack anyone who interprets the situation differently.
Russia’s war of aggression has changed how Austria conducts foreign policy, shifting it away from how it has advanced its diplomatic interests for decades. It has threatened the hegemony of the geopolitical model that Europe and the US — with all its contradictions — have pursued and developed for decades.
Magdalena Berger
But wouldn’t you say that the party itself is also to blame? The Young Left and the Communist Youth of Austria, essentially your two youth organizations, launched a joint campaign in 2022 called “Youth Against War.” Today, when I look at the communication channels of the Young Left, I see barely anything about Israel and Gaza, even though the topic is politicizing young people with immigrant backgrounds in particular.
Tobias Schweiger
I think it’s important that our position on Israel and Gaza be relevant to lived realities here. As opposed to a mere article of faith, it should offer people possibilities to act. Austria could intervene in geopolitics in a way that befits its neutrality. It could say: “We believe that the best way to bring about peace for the civilian population on the ground is a two-state solution.”
But Austria hasn’t even recognized an independent Palestine, so achieving this recognition should be in the foreground of our foreign policy activism. Of course, the demand for recognition should go hand in hand with other demands, such as for a cease-fire and negotiations. But a long-term perspective is also important.
This might sound more boring than a lot of what’s out there. But at the same time, debates about internationalism often miss something: people feel like they have truth but no power. And truth without power leads to feelings of powerlessness, which in turn lead to resignation. This produces frustration but no vision for a liberated society — and also no answer as to how I can connect conflicts and power relations in Austria to crucial issues of internationalism.
Magdalena Berger
Final question: After the election, what comes next for the KPÖ?
Tobias Schweiger
Whatever happens, we will continue to develop as an organization. This will involve important projects such as expanding our free kitchens and office hours. These two projects are now so widespread that we can refer to them as general projects. But many other ideas are in the works. In Innsbruck, the KPÖ has organized outings to gather wood for stoves, and in St Pölten, it has hosted clothing swaps that have put young women in particular in touch with the party.
We are building a party that enlivens neighborhood life while working to build socialism. That was our goal prior to the election and will continue to be so afterward. The only difference the election result will make is the financial means we have to pursue this goal.
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