[fse-esf] Petition against Repression of Left in Czech Republic

[Alex Callinicos]

Since 2003 some Czech right-wing politicians have systematically built up what is sometimes called 'belated anticommunism'. It is mainly aimed at comparing Communism with Fascism before the law but is quite clearly designed to also discredit any left-wing critique of contemporary capitalism. Red-menace-rhetoric has been employed many times not only against the still existing Communist Party but against the timid Social Democratic Party, too.

The Communist Youth League is an organisation openly sympathising with Stalinism and therefore an easy target. But even according to its own figures it only counts 600 members in a population of 10 million and has never threatened anybody personally.

Now the Communist Party is in the crosshairs of the same politicians who demanded to outlaw the Communist Youth League. 

Please consider signing and spreading our open letter. This will help us in the anti-Stalinist left to combat the constant poisoning of the political atmosphere in the Czech Republic in favour of neoliberal orthodoxy.
Please send any signatures to both th_fr at gmx.net and ondrejslacalek at seznam.cz. 

Open letter on the prohibition of the Communist Youth League:

To be left-wing is not a crime.

Only a few days before the Czech municipal and Senate elections, on 16 October 2006, the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic banned the organization Communist Youth League (KSM). The recent wave of Czech purpose-built anticommunism reached its climax to date. It no longer limits itself to dividing society into supposedly 'good' and 'evil' and to spreading hatred against citizens on the ground of their persuasion, it no longer only represents the labelling of opinions as 'criminal'. It now clearly shows that it also leads to constraints on the freedom of expression and association. 

Even if the subjective motivation of individual anticommunists may be sincere, the results of their actions closely resemble the aim of totalitarian and authoritarian movements during the whole of the last century: the suppression of political debate, the narrowing of possible alternatives, the exclusion of certain points of view. 

Regardless of whether we like the Communist Youth League, we are indifferent to it or we dislike it, we can hardly ignore by the justification for its banning. What is its 'criminal idea', according to the Ministry of the Interior? The aspiration to transform the private property of the means of production into social property and the siding with revolutionary change? That, of course, puts a wide spectrum of opinion, people and organisations in the imaginary dock.

Private property of the means of production is not an age-old matter of course, but a historical construct. The critique of this construct and the will to overcome it are part of a whole range of political attitudes and projects and they are also the base of modern socialism, the point of departure for the majority current of all of the modern left. To claim that the demand for social ownership of the means of production is a crime is to say that modern left-wing thinking has criminal roots.

Revolution means a swift and fundamental social change. It isn't a coup d'etat but the manifestation of a social movement. Nowhere is it said that it has to be bloody and violent and sometimes it wasn't. If it wasn't for the revolutions in England, the US and France, modern democracy wouldn’t have been established. If it wasn't for the revolution of 1989, the Czech Republic wouldn't exist and neither would its democratic regime. If the Ministry of the Interior banned revolution, will it now proceed to ban those who support the social changes that occurred seventeen years ago? Will it dissolve itself and the whole state that derives its legitimacy exactly from the social change called 'Velvet Revolution'?

The crimes of the pre-1989 regime were only possible because so few people raised their voices against them. They were not the expression of the 'criminal' ideas of Communism (abused and distorted by that regime) but above all the result of social conformity. We should therefore be wary not of a concrete intellectual current but of enforced conformity and the suppression of otherness. The current bout of 'belated anticommunism' can easily serve as a tool for enforcing consent and for justifying the persecution of those who won't toe the line. 
That is why we protest the prohibition of the Communist Youth League and call for the immediate revocation of the ban.
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