The Fear of the Newspaper Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ) of the Spectre of Communism

The NZZ is not exactly a local newspaper, but is internationally distributed and appreciated by representatives of international finance capital as their spokesman. From their point of view it was apparently necessary that their editor Lucien Scherrer spoke out on 27 April 2019 in an extra long article entitled “Mao is alive – the Left and their falsification of history” and launched anticommunist attacks upon the ICOR organizations MLGS and MLPD. Scherrer also had no scruples to publicly attack our comrade Silke T, so endangering her professional livelihood. Our full solidarity goes to her and the comrades in Switzerland.

Bourgeois journalists, politicians, historians are insistently attempting to destroy the outstanding role played by Mao Zedong in the liberation of the Chinese people, even long after his death. In 1945 the liberation struggle freed them from the imperialist Japanese invaders, so saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Japanese soldiers and, for the first time, enabling a worthwhile existence for hundreds of millions of people. After the victory over the Chinese bourgeoisie and big landowners 70 years ago, the workers and peasants were able to build up a socialist state with broad initiative of their own, where soon no one had to suffer any longer from hunger. As a result of natural catastrophes and the technological backwardness at the start, many people died in the founding years of the people's republic. Mr. Sherrer attributes this to the “Great Leap Forward”, arbitrarily maintaining their number to be 45 million, a grossly inflated figure. That is a complete falsification of history!

Why is socialism again being brought into connection with “millions of dead people”? Could it be that Mr. Scherrer is afraid of the increased questioning of capitalism among young people? Do the 70 million refugees worldwide have nothing to do with the neocolonial exploitation of Africa, for example, by international finance capital? Weren't 60 million people killed during the 2nd World War incited by German imperialism? The Korean and Vietnam Wars, which were decisively led by US imperialism, each caused 4 million deaths among the civilian population. And aren't hundreds of thousands presently dying as a result of the transition to an environmental catastrophe caused by the profit economy?

People like Scherrer are using anticommunism in an attempt to save the capitalist system. The socialist way out of capitalism is supposed to be obstructed. They like to maintain that socialism “failed” in Eastern Europe or in China. No, it was betrayed instead in the 1970s after Mao's death by a new bureaucratic-capitalist class under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, which turned China into a new-imperialist country. This development only proves that socialism will be destroyed if the working-class and people's masses do not carry out the dictatorship of the proletariat with determination against all attempts to restore capitalism.

The anticommunism of the ruling class is their desperate attempt to hold up the course of history toward socialism. Marx and Engels already attacked it in the Communist Manifesto with the words “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.” And today Mao enjoys growing esteem in China – just as Stalin is highly recognized far beyond Russia for his role in the victory over the barbaric Hitlerite fascism.

In 1946 the famous German author Thomas Mann called anticommunism “the basic folly of our epoch”.

In 2010 revolutionary parties and organizations united worldwide to found the ICOR. In the meantime its numbers have grown to 57 organizations. At its founding they declared: “The desire and search for a society liberated from exploitation and oppression has to become a force for changing society which overcomes the basic evil of the imperialist world system. The ICOR has arisen from the practical necessity to respond to the destabilization of the imperialist world system by developing to a higher level the revolutionary liberation struggle against imperialism and for socialism.” (from the Founding Resolution)

The worldwide movement of the youth “Fridays for Future”, the yellow-vest movement in France, working-class protests in Hungary, Serbia, the Czech Republic or Bosnia, in Brazil, Bangladesh or the USA raise the question of whether the existence of humanity and the environment can be maintained under the domination of the capitalist profit system or whether we must actually abolish this system in order to survive.

For the ECC, the Coordinators

Jeroen Toussaint and Joachim Griesbaum