GREECE
Helmeied rie
NEW LINK
IN
CAPITALISM'S
CRISIS
IN
S.EUROPE by MANOS SIMONIDIS
On May 24 and 25 Greece experienced its first general strike since the fall of the military dictatorship and the reestablishment of parliamentary rule under the leadership of Constantine Caramanlis. The strike call had been issued to mobilize the working masses against a bill placed before the National Assembly by the Caramanlis government. The bill was aimed at a de facto suppression of the right to strike through the imposition of various restrictive measures, the most important of which require that ten days' warning be given before any strike, outlaw strike pickets, ban political strikes (it is the Ministry of Employment that will decide whether or not a strike is political), and grant the government the right to draft strikers. Lascaris, the minister of labor, presented the bill, claiming that uncontrolled strikes were damaging democracy and that if democracy were to disappear, "a very long fascist night would descend on Greece. " For his part, Minister of Economic Coordination Paligouras accused the opposition of "carrying legislative powers out onto the streets. " The deputies of the two Communist parties walked out of the Assembly, leaving the representatives of the EDA (Democratic Leff) and the Center party the task of voting against the government bill.* Called at the last minute for the day on which the draft law was to be discussed in the National Assembly prior to being voted on the following day, the strike was unable to prevent the vote. Nonetheless, the strike did mark an extremely important milestone in the development of the Greek workers movement, both in terms of the mobilization and above all in terms of the combativity it revealed. *The Communist party-exterior is the pro-Moscow CP. The designation "exterior" derives from the fact that the leadership was outside Greece during the period of the dictatorship. The Communist party-interior split from CP-exterior during the period of the dictatorship on the basis of positions close to those of the Italian Communist parly. The denomination "interior" was adopted because the leadership opposed "orders" coming from the outside. Its base in the working class is much inferior to that of the CP-exterior; its internal regime is more liberal: The PASOK (Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement) is a centrist organization of a Social Democratic type founded and led by Andreas Papandreou. The EDA (Hellenic Democratic Left) is a Social Democratic party that served as the cover for the Communist party (banned since the civil war) before the military coup of April 1967. The Center party, led by George Popondreou, was the major bourgeois party of limited reformist tendencies before the military coup. It is a minority today. Some of its major representatives have moved to the right and entered Caramanlis's New Democratic party; others have gone to PASOK.
GREECE This combativity was manifested very suddenly on May 25. On that day several thousand construction workers leaving a strike meeting disregarded their leadership's orders to disperse and marched to the Ministry of Employment and then toward the National Assembly. They were halted en route by a police barricade. Police, backed up by antiriot tanks, charged the workers, clubbing them and launching tear-gas grenades. Broken up into small groups, the construction workers were soon joined by other young workers and students. For twelve hours they confronted the police, erecting hasty barricodes of their own, attacking tanks with paving stones, and sometimes "ighting hand-to-hand against the police. They asserted the ir refusal to allow the forces of repression to take command of the streets, their refusal to bow their heads and flee in face of the deployment of state violence. The official balance-sheet was this: one old woman killed by a police tank (a beggar, according to the radio!), more than 160 wounded, and more than 150 arrested, thirty-seven of whom were remanded to Athens city courts on charges of "refusing to obey the orders " the authorities and disrupting public peace. " On June 4 twelve of the thirty-seven charged were sentenced to two years in prison. It is to be noted that some of them, members of the Communist parties or of Maoist groups, have yet to receive any support whatsoever from their organizations. The explosion was not limited to Athens. The events that transpired on the island of Rhodes on May 26 give an even better idea of the mobilization in the country. For thirteen hours more than 2,000 demonstrators confronted the antiriot forces of the gendarmerie on the quays of the port, protesting against the anchoring of an American aircraft carrier and destroyer (6, 000 men on the two ships). The government immediately declared that the two ships would lift anchor the following day and that the crews would not disembark. The demonstrators set fire to the basement of the building housing the leaders of the gendarmerie and overturned the car of the bishop of Rhodes, who had come to pay a visit to the commander of the aircraft carrier.
The reformist parties lies with the political parties that called the strike against a bill which the government was duty bound to support." This communiqué concluded by announcing der. The government issued a warning to the PASOK and the CPs, which were allegedly "playing a double game, in parliament and in the streets."
Since it is well known that this is not at all the case, it is clear that the government's aim was to compel these parties to disavow the workers vanguard that manifested Itself on May 25. And the reformists did not disappoint the government. In their haste to prove their innocence, they went so far as to become informeis. Rizospastis, the daily of the CP-exterior, reported on May 28 that a cadre of the party had called the police on May 25 to report that 150 demonstrators were outside the party headquarters and that, according to this cadre, they ought to be arrested. The article expressed indignation at the failure of the police to arrive. For the CP-exterior, this constituted the proof that the clashes of May 25 were the work of "extremists and police provocateurs. " The front page of the May 26 Rizospastis carried headlines about "obscure forces of disorder, " reducing the confrontations, which had a clear and obvious class character, to simple police manipulations. How could such a situation have arisen after two years of a political situation under the control of a government whose chief, Caramanlis, had been greeted as a liberator, whose party had received 54 percent of the vate in the legislative elections?
July 1974 tall of the junta
Ever since its establishment just after the fall of the dictatorship, the Caramanlis government has taken advantage of its image among the masses. Coming to power after the dictatorial junta, which had relied exclusively on police violence, the new government put itself forward as representing the reintroduction of democracy, and it was able to fully utilize the democratic trickery it set up. The massacre that had followed the uprising at the Polytechnic Institute in Athens in November 1973 had been one of the police masterpieces of the policy of the military junta. After that massacre, Caramanlis was able to take up the torch with great chance of success. He was facing an extremely disorganized working class. The vanguard that had expressed itself on the occasion of the uprising at the Polytechnic Institute had been either decimated by the blows of repression or absorbed by the reformist parties (a result of the political weakness of that vanguard). What remained of the vanguard was isolated, lacking organic links with the masses and without roots in the workers movement. The political capital accumulated by the Greek bourgeoisie through the transition from the dictatorial regime to Caramanlis's democracy went hand in hand with an important tactical concession to the workers movement: recognition of its political existence through granting authorization to the workers political parties. This was a radical political change from the whole postwar period, and it was seen as such throughout the country. For the first time since the end of the civil war that had followed the second world war, the workers parties were granted the right to exist legally. Taking account of the very weak level of political development of the workers movement, the bourgeoisie counted on being able to use the reformist parties for a rather long period as factors of stabilization, the aim being to curb any radicalization or rise of the working class. The CP-exterior, CP-interior, and PASOK acted in the manner hoped for by the leaders of the bourgeoisie. But their joint efforts were not sufficient to prevent the rise of a powerful movement for trade-union demands. The overtaking of these parties by the mobilization of the masses comes at a time when Caramanlis finds himself without reserves in face of the demands of the workers, given the very strong inflation that has racked the economy since 1973-74, End of the postdictatorship period In order to prevent the development of the workers movement, Caramanlis used the tricks of the perfect apprenfice Bonaparte: blackmail during the elections under the slogan "Caramanlis or the tanks"; appeal for national unity against the so-called Turkish danger; pandering to nationalist sentiment with his fraudulent "threats" to quit NATO. The period of "national unity" - in other words, the temporary consensus assembled around Caramanlis -came to an end in 1975. During this period the prevailing conditions of legality had permitted the development
July 1974 returning exiles of some struggles, the circulation of ideas, the opening of discussion, and political propaganda by all the currents of the left and far left. When the effects of the international economic crisis hit Greece, the bourgeoisie undertook to make the working class bear the costs by reducing living standards with the aim of making Greek products more competitive on the world market; the perspective was to enter the Common Market. To directly control the workers movement, the Caramanlis government established a state trade union system through a national union federation whose functioning was controlled and leaders appointed by the government. But this instrument of Greek capitalism proved ineffective precisely in the sort of situation it had been designed to prevent or curb. Placed before the reality of the growing rise of the workers movement, the government resorted to an escalation of repression in an attempt to cut the mobilization short and preserve the benefits that had been inherited from the dictatorship. This bourgeoisie, which had governed through the use of force virtually uninterruptedly since the war, rediscovered its old reflexes against the working class. The most advanced mobilizations and exemplary strikes were systematically attacked by the regime in order to prevent them from spreading within the working class. Selective blows against the most advanced actions were combined with generalized repressive operations (on April 21 and July 23, 1975, and now on May 25, 1976). Blackmail, threats to return to dictatorship, became more concrete in the eyes of the masses, for whom yes-
GREECE terday's tanks have become today's antiriot tanks. The old torturers reemerged in the form of repressive forces identical to those bodies that have emerged throughout capitalist Europe in recent years. There is no longer any doubt that the policy of the Caramanlis government has failed
The rise of the movement for trade-union demands continued. It was marked by very tough and prolonged struggles and also by its extension fo all the exploited layers, from the steel workers to the teachers in the private schools, from the factory workers of the Pitsos and Isola appliance plants to the bank employees, from the Olympic Airways employees to the typesetters. The general strike of May 25-26 marks a qualitative turn in the workers movement.
Even though the slogan of a general strike had not been raised, even though this strike was not called on a centralized basis but rather through separately issued calls by individual unions, even though the reformists clearly acted to limit the scope of the strike by having the unions under their control vote for the principle of twenty-fourhour work stoppages on either May 24 or May 25, the very massive strike nevertheless offered the workers themselves a demonstration of their own strength and became the clearest experience in class unity. The strike also dealt a severe blow to state trade unionism, which was bypassed and contested from all sides by a movement whose cry was "State out of the unions!"
KATE Emergence of a vanguard Incapable of containing the rise of the workers, the policy pursued by the Caramanlis government was also incapable of preventing the rebirth and development of the vanguard. This vanguard had received a rude blow with the massacres at the Polytechnic in November 1973.
That was when it had appeared for the first time. Its first independent mobilizations since those events occurred with the demonstration last May 4 called by the whole far left to protest against the death of Sideris Isidoropoulos, a 17-year-old high-school student and member of the group Militant Communist Organization, who was killed on the eve of May 1. Isidoropoulos had been chased by the police while pasting up May Day posters; he was run down by a car and killed. On May 4 some 30,000 people assembled in front of the Polytechnic Institute and decided to march on the National Assembly, in spite of a police ban. On two occasions police backed up by light tanks and fire hoses barred the route of march, and on both occasions they turned tail and withdrew in face of the determination and combativity of the demonstrators. Proof was given that the heritage of what happened ot the Polytechnic in November 1973 had not been lost, that the vanguard existed and was fighting and advancing on the road opened up by the Greek November. The demonstration was transformed from a protest against the murderous blows of the bourgeois state into an anti-government demonstration whose central slogan was "The Polytechnic was only a start, soon it will be Caramanl is's tum!" (after the colonels). Some may have believed or hoped that this reemergence of the vanguard was simply the product of exceptional circumstances: the emotion caused by the death of Sideris Isidoropoulos and the burial the following day of parliamentary deputy Panagoulis, who died under conditions that remain obscure. But such people were to be disappointed, for on May 24 this same vanguard, refusing to disperse after the meeting of strikers, violating the orders of the reformist leaderships, marched to the Ministry of Employment, victoriously imposing its will on a government that had trumpeted with all the media at its disposal that no demonstration would be tolerated after the strikers! meeting. And the next day, it was this same vanguard that answered the deployment of police violence with its own spontaneous self-defense. The population of Athens supported the demonstrators on May 25. The vanguard is not isolated from the masses, In the days that followed, all the newspapers, from those of the far right to those of the Ps, waged a hysterical campaign against "uncontrolled violence. " But this lying campaign of denunciation of "provocations" did not receive the hoped for response among the working class. Since the workers disregarded the so-called dangers threatening the nation and since the effects of the prolonged weakening of the working class under the dictatorship were clearly eroding at an accelerated pace, the bourgeoisie decided to deal a head-on blow to the workers movement. The ridiculously low increases of 10 percent for the lowest wage categories at a time when inflation is running at more than 20 percent a year and the passage of the antistrike law constitute open provocations to the workers. Since the reformist parties have proven incapable of containing the rise of struggles, the bourgeoisie is establishing the legal framework through which to assemble the means for a direct confrontation with the workers movement.
Fiot police prepare to attack a For the working class, May 24 and 25 were days of a rapid and sharp accumulation of experiences. The workers are reconstituting their political forces and anticapitalist consciousness on a mass scale. The true nature of the bourgeois-democratic state that succeeded the police state of the colonels is being fully revealed. The anti-working-class law against strikes will pose difficulties for the development of struggles and for the vanguard within the working class, but it will not break the ongoing rise of the workers, for future strikes now threaten to take on the character of clashes with the repressive organs of the state. The restriction of legality Imposed on the working class by this new law will have the effect of compelling some or even all of the workers to go beyond Caramanlis's legality in order to wage their struggles. The necessity of the workers' developing their own structures of self-organization and selfdefense to wage and profect their struggles is thus posed sharply and squarely. The aim of the government is not to return to the past but to create an atmosphere of insecurity and permanent fear among the workers in order to paralyze their actions without necessarily reestablishing the atmosphere of terror that prevailed in the past. The far left In the new political context thus created, the impact of the events of May 24-25 goes well beyond the present political capacities of the vanguard. What was involved was a violent confrontation between the working class and the Caramanlis government, but things will not remain at that level, The shock continued for several days, thus testifying to the strength of the mobilization. The workers vanguard being born in these struggles has not been broken. It has emerged out of the concentration of workers in the new industries established during the dictatorship. If lacks traditions and is not subject to the bureaucracy of the unions controlled by the state nor is it dominated by the bureaucracy of the unions controlled by the Communist parties.
Surprised or unable to understand what was going on, some political groups went so far as to disavow the struggles of May 25. This was the case with the Maoist organization EKKE (Greek Revolutionary Communist Movement). Others considered these confrontations a political error, considering them justified only because of the police repression and not because of their anticapitalist logic. Others were incapable of continuing the struggle during the days that followed May 25. Revolutionary Marxist militants were alone in waging a campaign against the arrests and against the police terror of the government. For instance, the only meeting responding to government repression, denouncing the trials of the indicted militants, and denouncing the campaign of the two Communist parties and PASOK (the campaign aimed at claiming that provocateurs were responsible for May 25) was held on May 31, sponsored by some far left organizations which explained the meaning of the confrontations. These organizations were the Organization of Internationalist Communists of Greece (section of the Fourth International), the Revolutionary Communist Front, and the Internationalist Communist Union, three Trotskyist organizations that have been formed during the past two years. Their public meeting, which drew a great number of left and far left worker militants (several hundred altogether) was held in spite of the presence of police concentrations in the area. For the past two weeks the bourgeois press has been waging a hysterical campaign against the Trotskyist comrades. The June 3 issue of Vradini, the newspaper of Caramanlis's New Democratic party, gave front-page coverage to a statement by the minister of public order announcing that investigations would be continued and extended to discover the instigators of the events and that the necessary means would be brought to bear. It was said that the three Trotskyist organizations that had held the May 31 meeting bore responsibility for the confrontations with the police. To round out the picture, the newspaper also denounced urban guerrillas. Further. down on this same front page, the Trotskyists were attacked for "sowing disorder against the new trade-union law and for forgetting that Trotsky had favored the integration of the trade unions into the state in the USSR in 1921. " This is an indication of the government's fear of the sudden irruption of workers combativity and of the inability of its "trade-union" system to keep the working class in check. But it remains the case that this lack of elementary organization of the working class in face of the consequences of the world economic crisis, due to the delays accumulated under the dictatorship while the industrial proletariat was becoming concentrated and thereby transformed, must be overcome as quickly as possible. The social and political specific weight of this working class must find its own class expression both economically and politically. That is the most Immediate task of revolutionaries in Greece, June 4, 1976
7
Paris Commune
ON ThE