Author: Central Committee of the Union of Socialist Youth
The Union of Socialist Youth firmly condemns the draft law initiated by members of the USR party, a project aimed at banning communist organizations, the symbols associated with them, and criminally sanctioning political expression and historical memory, with penalties of up to 10 years in prison. According to the provisions made public, this initiative introduces so-called “opinion crimes” and opens the path to ideological repression in a state that claims to respect political pluralism.
Through this project, USR openly assumes the role of a neo-fascist party, seeking to eliminate ideological opponents by law and to criminalize an entire political and social tradition, motivated solely by the growing nostalgia generated year after year by the capitalist policies that they themselves support. The criminalization of communism is not a democratic act, but a practice specific to authoritarian and reactionary regimes, applied whenever the capitalist order enters into crisis and can no longer be maintained through social consent.
The USR initiative does not target only the present, but also seeks to erase and punish the past. From Nicolae Bălcescu, who linked national emancipation to social justice and land redistribution to peasants, to the Romanian socialist movement, to the communists thrown into bourgeois–landlord prisons, and up to the period of socialist construction, the history of the struggle for sovereignty and equality is the direct target of this draft law. The banning of symbols and organizations is nothing more than an attempt to amputate collective memory.
The period of socialist construction in Romania, including that under the leadership of Nicolae Ceaușescu, cannot be annulled through legal articles and criminal stigmatization. Regardless of the real contradictions and errors of the era, the material realities are undeniable: accelerated industrialization, national control over strategic resources, universal access to work, education, healthcare, and housing, as well as an independent foreign policy oriented toward Romanian state sovereignty. The total demonization of this period is an ideological operation meant to justify the national destruction that followed after 1989.
It is no coincidence that this project appears at a time when the political class annually celebrates the events of 1989, propagandistically presented as a “victory of freedom,” although they paved the way for the restoration of capitalism, deindustrialization, external subordination, and the exodus of millions of Romanians. The banning of communism is used to conceal the failures of the present.
Although the regime installed after the counterrevolution claims stability, its legitimacy is increasingly fragile. The experience of recent decades has clearly shown that capitalism means repeated crises, austerity, precarity, and the absence of any real perspective for young people. This is precisely why USR and other reactionary forces are attempting to block, through legislation, any genuine political alternative.
UTS categorically rejects the historical revisionism promoted internationally and warns that the banning of communism has, throughout history, always been the prelude to repression, the restriction of democratic rights, and the consolidation of the dictatorship of capital. Interwar Romania and Europe in the 1930s provide clear lessons in this regard.
This anti-communist offensive cannot be separated from the pressures exerted on the judiciary and from the general tendency to concentrate power in the hands of an economic oligarchy. Anti-communism is the classic instrument through which bourgeois regimes in crisis attempt to preserve their domination.
The Union of Socialist Youth calls for the immediate rejection of this draft law and appeals to all communist, socialist, progressive, and democratic organizations to oppose the neo-fascist drift represented by USR. Romania’s future cannot be built through censorship, repression, and ideological bans, but through reopening the path toward sovereignty, social justice, and popular power.
Co-signatories of this appeal:
- Uniunea Tineretului Comunist PCR XXI (Union of Communist Youth PCR XXI)
- Radnička Omladina (Worker’s Youth – Serbia)
- إتحاد الشبيبة الشيوعية الفلسطينية (Palestinian Communist Youth Union)
- Kommounistikí Neolaía Elládas (Communist Youth of Greece)
- Революционный коммунистический союз молодёжи (Revolutionary Communist Youth League (Bolshevik) – Rusia)
- Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterjugend (Socialist German Workers Youth)
- World Federation of Democratic Youth