Der Feind steht (noch immer) links. Kontinuität & Aktualität des Antikommunismus

In the organizer's words:

At the second event in our lecture series, Anton Schmidt will talk about the history and present of anti-communism and its significance for the defense of emancipatory movements.

Once again, there will be an opportunity for discussion and hanging out together afterwards.

Anti-communism is as old as the workers' movement itself. As early as 1848, Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that "all the powers of old Europe" had united in a "holy hunt" against the spectre of communism. Since then, anti-communism has accompanied left-wing theory and practice in various forms. And even after the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism at the end of the 20th century, anti-communism persisted. To this day, attacks against the political left are based on classic anti-communist enemy stereotypes, even without decidedly communist actors. Debates about wokeness are blurred with the conspiracy narrative of "cultural Marxism", climate protests are defamed as the "green RAF" and the Berlin campaign "Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co" is associated with the GDR. The lecture sheds light on how anti-communism manifests itself historically and in the present and how this ideological consensus weakens emancipatory movements and restricts social alternatives and political imagination.