Wither the revolt?
An important political rally and debate took place on January 31st in the Sporting Stadium, in Athens, Greece. More than 2000 left militants attended coming from all over Greece to discuss on the crisis, the December revolt and its prospects.
It was called by 10 organizations of the far left regrouped in Greece mainly in two front formations: MERA( Front of the Radical Left including the New Left Current/NAR that had split from the CP in 1989, EEK, the Greek Section of the CRFI, EKKE, a small Maoist group, and independent leftists) and ENANTIA(United Anti-Capitalist Left including the SEK/SWP- the co-thinkers of the British Cliffite SWP- two Althusserian groups, the Greek co-thinkers of the French LCR, and some independents).
A report was presented initially, signed by nearly all the organizations with the exception of one black sheep (or black goat or black cat): EEK. The dividing line became clear in the debate.
During the revolt in December 2008, the storm has driven different converging and/or conflicting political tendencies within the extra-parliamentary left. The social explosion after the killing of the young Alexis propelled forward fresh forces of rebellion that clashed not only with the riot police, the capitalist State, and the government of murderers’, but also with the entire bourgeois political parliamentary system, the official left, particularly the ossified Stalinist Communist Party which was and is still hostile to the revolt, the trade union bureaucracy and every political, social and cultural institution of the existing establishment. Many features of May 68 re-appeared 40 years after the events in France.
The forces of rebellion- a young generation of precarious, cheap, black labor and chronic unemployment, living a present of misery in a world without future- went and still are moving beyond the established organizations of the far left and even of the anarchist networks, although both the anarchists and the far left were active from the first moment of the revolt. But as the revolt was escalating, more and more far left groups started to retreat from direct action, repeating ad nauseam, in the most distorted way, tired criticisms against “spontaneity” and the need of a “central political proposal”, associated especially with the prospect of early elections. EEK opposed any retreat; it was involved to direct action in every field, ready to learn from this unique historical experience, open to the new. We tried to analyze every moment the situation, making our own programmatic proposals, fighting above all for the organization of a General Political Strike of the workers’ movement to overthrow the government, to open the road to a socialist way out from the crisis and workers’ power.
Apart from the Stalinists who devoted two articles( one of them it was a front page Editorial in their daily) slandering EEK as “agents provocateurs”, our opponents in the far left , including some of our long standing allies in NAR, started to accuse us to be “semi-anarchists”, “ultra-leftists”, and “fetishists of direct action”. At the same time a majority of NAR (a strong opposition within NAR was against that move) approached ENANTIA, particularly the Greek Cliffite SWP, and started preparations for a joint meeting to announce “the unity of the anti-capitalist left” and a common electoral list for the Euro-elections and the national parliamentary elections.
The result of this convergence was reflected in the programmatic points and the proposals of the common report to the Sporting Stadium rally. The entire concept is dominated by current discussions and preparations in Europe, particularly the coming founding Congress of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France initiated by the LCR, as well as the disastrous experiences of “Respect” in Britain and Rifondazione in Italy. Efforts are made to establish “broad anti-capitalist parties or fronts” where both reformist and revolutionary currents could co-exist. “Anti-capitalism” is defined as everything moving against capitalism but without necessarily a revolutionary direction, from the left of social democracy to the revolutionary (or ex-revolutionary) left and the anarchists. All demarcating lines between reform and revolution are abandoned in the sake of “unity”. The electoralist aims of that kind of regroupment are combined, if not hidden, behind a lot of social and pacifist activist “movementism”.
Not by accident the rally in Sporting Stadium started by reading a message sent by the LCR signed by Alain Krivine and Yvan Lemmaitre, written in this spirit. The proposal of an “Initiative for the Unity and Common Action of the anti-capitalist Left”, linking MERA-ENANTIA and evolving into a common electoral list in the coming elections, was hailed as a similar experience as that of the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste (NPA) in France.
Despite the pretense of democracy, the procedures were bureaucratically predetermined to not allow a real discussion. The list of speakers was pre-arranged among the SEK/ SWP and the NAR majority leaders, fixed some days before the meeting. The (non elected) presidium wanted to prevent the only declared opposition, EEK, to speak more than 5 minutes! They eliminated from the list of speakers well known comrades who are leaders of important industrial proletarian struggles (like the victorious strike in the big ex-Pechiney factory in Boetia) or councilors in the local government in working class regions. We had to fight even to impose as a speaker comrade Katerina Matsa, the most known figure of the revolutionary left in Greece because of her decades long struggle for a social movement against drug addiction. Finally they allowed only her and Savas Michael-Matsas, the general secretary of EEK, to address the rally presenting our “heretical” views.
For EEK, the regime crisis in December has opened a new stormy period, full of zigzags but where the very question “what class can provide a way out from the capitalist crisis and should rule society? »is clearly posed. We do not deny but we stress the need for unity in action among all left and popular forces in any particular front, in defense of the right to work and all workers’ demands, against privatizations and redundancies, for free, public education and health, for freedom against State repression and brutality. But we insist that the world capitalist crisis has revolutionary implications. We are accused to be “catastrophists” seeing a “linear connection” between the struggle to overthrow the right wing government and the struggle for workers’ power- which is a lie. We fight for the overthrow of the present and any capitalist government by mass action, stressing that only a workers’ government based upon the mobilized, self -organized masses can meet the urgent needs of the masses, expropriate the banks, and the closing factories without compensation under workers’ control, repudiate the foreign debt to the international usurers of finance capital, kick out NATO, its military bases, all the US and EU imperialists, transform the country into a bastion of struggle against imperialism and for socialist unification in the Balkans, in Europe, in the world.
In contradistinction to the “maximalist” views of EEK, the other organizations separate the struggle for the overthrow of the present government from any perspective of workers’ power, which remains “premature” for them. Even the December revolt in their eyes lacks a class character because the official trade unions did not mobilized en mass. It is totally false to see the social revolt as the action of a non class youth and of some lumpen or déclassé elements. This is more or less the mainstream bourgeois view. As a matter of fact the country and Europe is in transition from upheavals such as the revolt in Greece or the General Strike in France to revolutionary situations generated by the world systemic crisis of capitalism. The question is not how soon the workers’ will seize power but in what direction have to move, starting from now on.
A second point of confrontation on program was in relation to Europe. EEK fights for a revolutionary break from the EU, for its abolition and the socialist unification of the European Continent in a United Socialist States of Europe. The other organizations and the report presented to the meeting call for an “anti-capitalist break” with the EU, rejecting any struggle for the socialist unification of Europe. It is clear that with such an essentially nationalist program we cannot agree; it is unthinkable to go together even on a unique list in the coming Euro-elections.
It is not a tactical issue, where to confront a direct danger by the bourgeois parties to marginalize the Left, we have to form a temporal electoral bloc of workers’ parties to win a seat for a working class representative. In the present conditions, the revolutionary left in the coming elections, either Euro-elections or national parliamentary elections, has to make use the opportunity to advance its propaganda for a revolutionary communist alternative to the bourgeois impasse and the Center left scenarios, for example a PASOK/SYRIZA government à la Prodi.
The leader of SEK/SWP Panos Garganas made clear, in his speech, that his organization (and its allies in ENANTIA and, unfortunately, in MERA) consider “elections as the central political stage”. Katerina Matsa of EEK replied that the central political stage is the class struggle arena itself, not the parliamentary system controlled by the class enemy.
EEK denounced the undemocratic methods by which a fake unity is forged from above for electoralist reasons. We demanded a National Conference of MERA to decide what to do and not to accept without a vote the ultimatum presented in the rally by the leaderships of ENANTIA and the MERA majority, with full responsibility of the NAR leaders.
Surprisingly for them, the absolute majority of the participants in the meeting gave a triumphant reception to the speeches of the two EEK speakers, interrupting them very often with thunderous applause, particularly when the revolutionary communist alternative was presented. Our intervention produced a crisis in the ranks of our opponents and former allies, as we had made very clear that we refuse to join this liquidationist road to the reformist swamp and we refuse to repeat the disaster of the British Respect in Greece or to join the NPA fraud in France. Our position is unshakeable. Nevertheless we accepted the proposal of the NAR leadership to discuss with them in a bilateral meeting next week. They claim that “the thunderous applause to EEK was a call …to remain in MERA”; we have replied already publicly that it is not EEK that is splitting from MERA but the other way round, NAR is departing from the revolutionary policies fought by MERA for a decade now.
Meantime, while the traditional far left organizations were in the Sporting Stadium event, young artists and other forces of rebellion had occupied the National Opera House demanding the liberation of the arrested in the rebellion, solidarity to the Bulgarian hero of the working class Kostandina Kuneva, real conditions for artistic creativity- “to transform art into revolt”. They renamed the National Opera House “Popular Stage in Rebellion”, and they organized a popular fiesta in the roads of Athens, very far from electoralist anxieties. They know better what a “central political stage” is.
February 2, 2009
__Savas Michael
