The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 74/No. 9      March 8, 2010

 
Czech ban is danger to workers
(editorial)
 
The move by the Czech courts to ban an ultrarightist group, which calls itself the Workers Party (DS), is a danger to the labor movement. The government is taking advantage of the fact that the DS is hated for its racist, anti-working-class activity to set a precedent that will be used against workers in the future. Interior Minister Martin Pecina has already said the courts must also go after “extremism” that “promotes communism.”

The ban hands the DS an opportunity to portray itself as the victim, diverting attention from its reactionary views against oppressed nationalities, immigrants, Jews, and homosexuals and its criminal assaults on people of the oppressed Roma nationality.

The idea of banning rightist outfits is widely promoted by capitalist politicians in Europe. Like the rest of the continent, the Czech economy is deeply affected by the world capitalist depression. It’s in this context that incipient fascist groups like the DS arise, appealing to middle-class layers and workers to blame immigrants, Jews, and Roma for the crisis, not the capitalist system.

But the capitalist crisis also inevitably produces efforts by the working class to defend itself. The Czech government is getting ready for that now by putting in place ways to counter the workers movement as it begins to organize resistance.

What is needed to defeat racist, anti-worker groups like the DS and its counterparts all over the world is a fighting labor movement that counterposes working-class solidarity to reactionary scapegoating and tells workers the truth about who their real enemies are—the wealthy capitalists who today hold power.

As Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian revolution, wrote in 1939, “Under the conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced members. That is the law of history. The workers must learn to distinguish between their friends and their enemies according to their own judgment and not according to the hints of the police.”
 
 
Related articles:
Czech government moves to ban ultraright group  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home