War and revolution: the case of Austria 1914-18 In the summer of 1914, the slaughter of the First World War began. The Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (‘SDAP’), formerly considered one of the ‘model parties’ of the Second International, completely capitulated to the mood of patriotism and war fever that swept the Habsburg Empire. The support of the SDAP leaders for the Habsburg war machine was a shock to most of the party ranks. In effect, the leadership paralysed the party, blocking any activity that could upset the war effort. But by early 1915, a handful of young socialists and trade unionists started illegal work, organising resistance against the war. A group of left Social Democrats around the young revolutionary socialist Franz Koritschoner – the newly formed Linksradikalen (‘Left Radicals’) – learned about the efforts to organise the scattered internationalists at the Zimmerwald conference. In this way they got in contact with the Bolsheviks grouped around Lenin in Zurich. They started to build an organised opposition within the Austrian Social-Democratic movement, after the second international anti-war conference in Kienthal in 1916. The Left Radicals would become the first nucleus of the future communist movement in Austria. Through Karl Radek, they established contact with the Left Radicals in Germany, who produced an internationalist paper which they then distributed in Austria. The Left Radicals called for systematic propaganda amongst the working class, taking an internationalist class position on the war. Their initiative, however, was persecuted by the party leadership and refused by the left reformists.
https://marxist.com/war-and-revolution-the-case-of-austria-1914-18.htmThe Paranoia of Officialdom: Age Verification and Using the Internet in AustraliaAustralia, in keeping with its penal history, has a long record of paranoid officialdom and paternalistic wowsers. Be it perceived threats to morality, the tendency of the populace to be corrupted, and a general, gnawing fear about what knowledge might do, Australia’s governing authorities have prized censorship. This recent trend is most conspicuous in an ongoing regulatory war being waged against the Internet and the corporate citizens that inhabit it. Terrified that Australia’s tender children will suffer ruination at the hand of online platforms, the entire population of the country will be subjected to age verification checks. Preparations are already underway in the country to impose a social media ban for users under the age of 16, ostensibly to protect the mental health and wellbeing of children. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 was passed in November last year to amend the Online Safety Act 2021, requiring “age-restricted social media platforms” to observe a “minimum age obligation” to prevent Australians under the age of 16 to have accounts. It also vests that ghastly office of the eSafety Commissioner and the Information Commissioner with powers to seek information regarding relevant compliance by the platforms, along with the power to issue and publish notices of non-compliance. While the press were falling over to note the significance of such changes, little debate has accompanied the last month’s registration of a new industry code by the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. In fact, Inman Grant is proving most busy, having already registered three such codes, with a further six to be registered by the end of this year. All serve to target the behaviour of internet service companies in Australia. All have not been subject to parliamentary debate, let alone broader public consultation.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/01/the-paranoia-of-officialdom-age-verification-and-using-the-internet-in-australia/Ralph Miliband : Socialism and the Myth of the Golden PastTHE belief has been widely and successfully fostered in recent years that socialism in the countries of advanced capitalism has gone into a steep and probably irreversible decline, and that the general embourgeoisement of capitalist societies has all but destroyed its appeal in those countries. There might still be some support, it is conceded, for a modern, reasonable, up-to-date, attenuated version of socialism; but anything more than this is doomed to hopeless failure and certain electoral disaster. Western social-democratic parties have mostly accepted some such view, and have found in it a further justification for their already well-developed propensity to define socialism as capitalism, only better. But there are also many socialists who reject that definition, yet who have come to accept the notion of socialist decline, of the past as militant and committed, and the present as unregenerate. The purpose of this essay is to question this reading of socialist history. Socialist decline in these highly industrialized countries presumably means that at some particular point of time, at some point of the historical curve, socialist prospects were better, more hopeful, in the sense that there were then more socialists about, or, if there were not more of them, that socialists were then at least of better, higher quality, more clear-minded, or class-conscious, or committed; also, that there was, at some stage in the past, more popular support for socialists in the working classes, among the young, among intellectuals, and that, from this high point, there has been a perceptible, not to say a catastrophic, reduction in that support, so that socialism in the West, save in its loosest sense, is at a greater discount with every passing year. Nor, it is generally added, is this in the least surprising, given the difference in conditions of life between the poverty-stricken past and the relatively affluent present. This view of the past is now pretty well taken for granted. One would therefore expect the evidence for it to be blindingly obvious, or at least very easily obtainable. But it is not. In fact, the evidence points mostly the other way. The period most obviously relevant, from a socialist point of view, to a comparison between the past and the present is the inter-war years, and this is also the period most favoured as providing an illustration of the thesis of socialist decline. However, it may be useful to consider first the more remote past, whose socialist virtues, as compared to the present, have also found nostalgic supporters. For this purpose, two separate periods may be distinguished, the pre-1870s, and the three decades or so before 1914.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1964/xx/goldenpast.htm