In the run-up to its 19th congress, on 11-13 April, the Greek Communist Party (KKE) pleasantly surprised us by publishing much debate, mainly in its paper Rizospastis.
On paper it appeared as a disagreement between the advocates of the “theory of stages” from the KKE’s 15th congress (1996) and the leadership’s new “revolutionary” line of socialism as an immediate demand,
In reality a large chunk of KKE members had understood the duty to form a united front with Syriza aiming at a government of the Left, dialectically linked to working class struggle and organisation. The large losses for KKE in the elections of May and June 2012 opened up discussion. As workers’ struggles erupted and Pasok’s support collapsed, the KKE went from 8.2% in the 2007 elections, and 7.5% in 2009, to 8.5% in May 2012, and 4.5% in June 2012. A significant number of party members attributed the poor electoral results to KKE’s sectarianism.
The two articles that most openly criticised KKE’s sectarianism and refusal to participate in a united front with other left wing organisations were those of Antonis Skylakos (a veteran member of KKE and a KKE MP for years) and Nikos Bougiopoulos (a Rizospastis journalist and author of the book It is Capitalism, Stupid, who has an appeal far beyond KKE).
Antonis Skylakos stated: “If the Party wanted to rally wider masses, it should encompass and form a united front with all those layers that were affected or destroyed by the monopolies and imperialism, who have experienced state repression in their ‘skin’.”
Bougiopoulos stated: “the party can approach Socialism only as a mirage. The ‘popular alliance’... is an ‘alliance’ only with ourselves”.
“On the ‘non-payment movement’, we said: Do not pay, but first workers’ power. Debt: we said: No to debt, but first workers’ power… Memorandum: we said: It is not the memorandum, but capitalism, the crisis and the fact that we do not have not workers’ power”.
Mentrekas, a member of the KKE Central Committee, replied to the dissent: “Some articles by former CC members of KKE and certain Rizospastis journalists... rest on lies and vile slanders and exploit distortions hurled against our party by anonymous internet factionalists and our political class opponents... It is obvious that these writers do not care to convince the members of the Party, but with their writings to offer the capitalist class a weapon against the Party... Let the plutocracy and the system, aided by the forces of opportunism, rage. No matter how hard they try, KKE will not be disarmed politically and ideologically. KKE has confidence in the working class and its strengths”.
The congress itself saw almost no opposition. Prominent members of KKE who had openly expressed dissent failed to get elected as delegates.
KKE general secretary, Aleka Papariga, in her opening speech, claimed that 96.8% of party members had voted in favour of the Central Committee positions and the new program, 97.3% in favour of the KKE constitution, and 98.9% for all three texts!
The harmony was so great that the conference ended a day early. All votes were completed on Saturday night, 13 April, although the congress had been planned to continue to Sunday 14th.
The congress elected a new Central Committee, which elected a new general secretary, Dimitris Koutsoubas. But the departure of Aleka Papariga after 22 years at the helm of the party did not signify any change in political line. Koutsoubas is considered to be a hard-liner and an advocate of the party’s “purity”.
The KKE proposes a “Popular Alliance”, but to be made up from KKE, PAME (KKE’s trade-union front), PASEVE (KKE’s front for craft workers, merchants, small shopkeepers etc.), PASSY (KKE’s front for peasants and small farmers), MAS (KKE’s youth front in university students and colleges), and OGE (KKE’s women’s front). “The Popular Alliance is in agreement with the position proposed by the Communist Party for the rallying of all anti-monopoly, anti-capitalist forces within society, striving for workers’ power — a rallying expressing and serving the interests of the working class and its social allies. The Popular Alliance today [is] determined via the action of PAME, PASEVE, PASSY, MAS, OGE. The Popular Alliance is not a coalition of political parties”.
Even on the trade-union or community level, KKE excludes any possibility of a formation of a united front with forces that are outside its orbit. As for the united front on a political level, that is postponed until future parties arise which “express the position of petty-bourgeois strata” but nevertheless defer to the KKE.
On paper, the theses of the 19th congress were a shift to the left, a clean break from the “theory of stages” and the supposedly anti-imperialist duties of the working class, counterposed to and prioritised above the anti-capitalist socialist struggle.
The KKE abandoned previous strategies which gave priority to “overcoming Greek capitalism’s feudal delays”, or to the achievement of national independence, democracy and development of heavy industry in Greece, as a first stage before socialism.
The shift should create the basis for a serious discussion of the great defeats of the popular movements and the left in 1944-45, and of the opportunistic choices of KKE’s party leadership in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, which culminated in 1990 with participation in an (emergency) coalition government led by ND (Greek equivalent of the Tory party).
However, when the Central Committee of the KKE sets transition to socialism as a direct aim, it proposes no “indications and road plans” on how to achieve the aim. All that was spelled out in the theses was to avoid untimely struggles (such as the slogan of the government of the Left) and to wait until “the objective conditions of the socialist revolution come onto the working class’s daily agenda.”
The KKE’s rejection of the theory of stages is not a shift towards Trotskyism, the theory of permanent revolution, and the program of transitional demands, but a response to KKE’s tactical needs and its anxiety to survive.
The KKE’s leadership self-preservation instincts were triggered by the pressure from its rank and file for a united front with Syriza. Instead of the tactics to be determined by the strategic aim, the strategic aim has been constructed and “fabricated” in order to justify the pre-decided tactics.
After the October Revolution, in the years up to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922 and before Stalinism blighted the movement, the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern devoted attention to the question of how to prepare and gather the forces of revolution under non-revolutionary conditions.
They developed two precious concepts: United Front and Transitional Program. KKE rejects them both, replacing them with caricatures.
In the place of the United Front, the Central Committee of the KKE counterposes its “Popular Alliance” between KKE and KKE fronts.
Rather than adopting the method of the Transitional Programme, KKE denounces as “reformism” every struggle, movement or point of view that does not pose in a direct way, the question of ownership of the means of production! We wait to learn of any strikes or struggles led by KKE and PAME which postulated the ownership of the means of production as an immediate demand.
In the whole of the theses, KKE says nothing on how to achieve the transition from the current level of consciousness and struggles of the workers to the seizure of power by the working class. And so the reference to the socialist revolution becomes absolutely harmless to the system, a promise of a religious type.
If the KKE were really a revolutionary and communist party, it would adopt the tactic of “united front” with Syriza. The KKE should have responded positively to Syriza’s call for electoral cooperation after the May elections in preparation of the elections of June.
Then workers would have listened more carefully to KKE’s often-justified criticism of Syriza’s reformist programme. Even if cooperation with Syriza had turned out to be impossible, KKE could have come out publicly to say: “because Syriza refuses to adopt a socialist program of transitional demands-as the only response to the crisis, we refuse to form a government with Syriza, but we will grant Syriza a vote of tolerance, we will support every positive measure of the Government of Syriza, but we will vote against any anti-working class measure”. That would be more like the united front tactics adopted by the Bolsheviks and the Comintern in its the early years.
In the 19th Congress theses there is not one word about the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. Nothing about the movements of “indignant citizens” inspired by those revolutions in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Israel, the USA and Russia.
And in Greece itself it says: “With the exception of the portion of the labor movement who rallied in PAME, the self-employed in the PASEVE and the peasants in PASSY, the working class and popular masses were significantly unprepared to the new offensive of capitalism...”
“The labour movement was not prepared to fight back... Some manoeuvres were made by the compromised trade union bureaucracy, who were dragged into successive strikes, although not substantially supporting them...”
Yet in the last two and a half years the working class movement in Greece has organised over 20 general strikes, three of which were 48-hour general strikes within 8 months. In the summer of 2011 over two million people took part in the “indignant citizens” demonstrations and Papandreou was driven to the brink of resignation.
The wave of strikes and occupations of public buildings in October 2011 had as its climax the 19 October general strike and a protest with over half a million protesters in Syntagma Square. Anti-government demonstrations in the 28 October “national celebrations” led to the resignation of Papandreou and the formation of the three party coalition government led by the banker Papademos.
We have also seen the mushrooming of non payment movements (tolls, transportation and most significantly regressive property tax), the “potatoes” movement and other movements of direct basic food product distribution by small farmers which bypass the middlemen and provide relief to the people’s hunger...
But the KKE Central Committee concludes: “the labor movement was not prepared to counterattack the new circumstances. Its struggle did not measure up to the size of the attack... The so-called indignant citizens movement and occupation of the squares was... dominated by reactionary slogans, slogans of micro-bourgeois democracy, with the aim of hitting the class-orientated combative working-class movement”.
If the Left really wants to be a party of struggle that “dares to fight and dares to win”, it must reply with great seriousness to the basic question posed by working-class people and by the circumstances: what would itself do, if in power, to counteract the financial ruin and social disintegration, not in the distant future ideal socialist conditions, but here and now.
The answer, the transitional program of the Left, should not be understood as a collection of demands and development projects, but as a roadmap, with key stations, prioritizing objectives, description of forms, which will establish a convincing left “narrative” for the transition from the social jungle of today to the socialist society tomorrow.
The window of historic opportunity opened for the left by the big capitalist crisis is still open.
