History
The preliminary organization of the VSStÖ was formed in 1893 in Vienna. In the beginning, it was more a student debate club that was sympathetic to young workers and the union movement. It fought for general elections in which both men and women could vote, free access to universities, and against bourgeoisie science. The resistance to nationalist and anti-semitic movements at universities led to discrimination and attacks against members of the Socialist Students and led finally to the prohibition of the VSStÖ during the Austrofascism period until the end of World War II.
After the liberation from the National Socialists by the Allied Forces in 1945, the Socialist Students were actively involved in the foundation of democratic student representation, which was established in 1946 as the Austrian National Union of Students. On the ideological basis of Marxism, the VSStÖ has subsequently fought for free and open access to universities, sufficient social funds for students, gender equality, and has taken an active role in the peace movement as well as the anti-globalisation.
Read more about this topic: Socialist Students Of Austria
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)