Page - 74 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

74 siting futurity enced the violence of the state in the form of its police force, and where more recently they have been experiencing the violence of global finance capital in the form of the real estate market. In the “Anarchy in Ottakring” chapter of Die Anarchie der Vorstadt: Das andere Wien um 1900 [Unruly Masses: The Other Side of Fin-de-siècle Vienna], Maderthaner and Musner detail, in addition to the funeral of Franz Schuhmeier, the “wretched” liv- ing conditions in the district (2008, 19) and the fabled riot that took place there on September 17, 1911 — the first time since the revolutionary struggles of 1848 that the army fired on the people of Vienna, “[s]omething that had not happened even during the most violent storms of the struggle for universal suffrage” (ibid., 7). Their account builds on Otto Bauer’s, whose name has be- come synonymous with Austro-Marxism. For Bauer, “it was the ‘global calamity’ of inflation, intensified in Austria by a series of particular circumstances, that had driven the mass of Viennese working people to ‘desperation’ and inflamed an ‘ordinary street demonstration’ into the (apparently) ‘aimless revolt’ of the sub- urbs” (ibid.). For Maderthaner and Musner, “this uprising rep- resented more than what Otto Bauer so brilliantly analyzed in terms of economics and politics” (ibid., 19). More was at stake, namely, a form of inscription in which the district was clearly positioned as “a world outside of bourgeois rationality and ur- ban order” (ibid., 20). This “instrumental narrative” created the conditions for “the ‘colonization’ of the suburbs and their com- prehensive reordering, when necessary deploying police and military means” (ibid., 21). In the twenty-first-century, coloni- zation has taken on a new form, namely, property development, which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, has resulted in violence as squatters desperate for a roof over their heads have sought shelter in buildings left empty and been forcibly evicted.13 13 An example at the time of writing was those forcibly evicted from Neu- lerchenfelderstrasse 35 as soon as their story hit the headlines (“Polizei räumte besetztes Haus in Wien” 2018). One can understand how galling they must find it that the authorities prefer to let buildings stay empty and fall into disrepair, rather than allow people to inhabit and care for them at no cost.