(The following succinct commentary on the broader import of the military take-over in Greece for the revolutionary forces of Western Europe and the rest of the world was written by the well-known author of Traité d'Economie Marxiste, soon to be published in England and the United States. It appeared in the May 13, 1967 issue of the Belgian socialist weekly La Gauche of which Mandel is editor-in-chief. ]
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It is too soon to draw up a definitive balance sheet of the military take-over in Greece. We still lack the necessary information, especially on the extent of the popular resistance since the coup d'état.
: But certain lessons are already imperatively evident and it is time for them to be absorbed by all workers and vanguard nilitants.
(1) Any assumption that the acuteline to left sectors. The monthly La _Sinistra announced a special issue on Cuba with big posters that appeared on the walls of the main political centers throughout Italy.
What worried the PCI leadership was not only the favorable results of this action but the fact that the job of putting up the posters was done by teams of PCI militants who wanted in this way to show their solidarity with the magazine and the Cubans.
The revolutionary Cuban line is a big headache for the PCI leaders. Aside from the open attacks levelled by Amendola in his report to the Central Committee, more stringent attacks are being voiced in private discussions.
Among the arguments used by the squads in Piazza Navona when they tried to haul down the PSIUP banners were the following: "You are bloodthirsty: so many people are dying in Vietnam and you want five more Vietnams!" "What do these slogans mean: that we have to start up guerrilla war in Italy?" "This line might be good for Cuba, not for Italy."
Of course, when you lack a serious political line, you can only attack a revolutionary line with arguments that are completely ridiculous.
OF GREECE
Mandel
ness of social contradictions will be softened -- internationally or nationally -- and the stability of democratic liberties will be guaranteed and socialism can gradually triumph through the peaceful parliamentary and electoral road has once again been refuted. The maintenance of these liberties is a function of a determinate relationship of forces between the contending classes.
When parliamentary democracy incurs the risk of no longer serving the interests of big capital, and the latter is not paralyzed by the action of the masses, this regime can be castrated or discarded within a few hours.
(2) The illusion that we live in a regime where the real power is in the hands of parliament, or the voters, has likewise been refuted. Parliament and the electorate hold no more than a superficial and limited power. The decisive power is in the hands of capital and the "armed men" in its pay. The state is not parliament but an apparatus based on
these "armed men."
Those who refuse to see this obvious fact and simply affirm that we live "under democracy," while forgetting or concealing the bourgeois nature of this state, deceive themselves or deceive others.
(3) The arrest of all the militants of the left -- including, according to General Patakos, numerous people that the dictatorial regime itself considers "innocent" (Le Monde, May 11, 1967) was carefully prepared by a system of blacklists, informers and wire-tapping devices operating for years. This system functions in all the NATO countries, under NATO's cover, within the framework of the struggle against "internal subversion," including Belgium (now NATO headquarters).
It has been reinforced in our country within the framework of the measures taken "to maintain order" voted for by the Belgian Socialist party. Those who have endorsed NATO as an instrument for defending "democracy against communism" should now be red-faced.
(4) Those who deny that there is any difference between a bourgeois democratic regime in which the workers have a minimum of liberties to organize trade unions, prepare strikes, stage demonstrations, publish papers, and a dictatorial and fascist regime, and who wrongly employ the term "fascist" to designate regimes which are not so, have once again exhibited their political stupidity, a stupidity that is worse than mere foolishness.
Such a view disarms the workers
confronted with the threat of a "strong"
or fascist state which can still be
crushed if the workers combat it in time
with sufficient force and vigor.
Go now and explain to the eight
thousand Greek political prisoners, to
the workers deprived of their trade
unions, that the military take-over has
changed nothing, since fascism already
prevailed in Greece before the colonels
took power!
(5) The military coup d'état fol-
lowed upon formidable demonstrations of
the Greek working masses in the summer
of 1965. At that moment the masses were
disposed to overthrow the monarchy and
dismantle the army, if not to take power
and bring about the downfall of capital-
ism. Their leaders curbed their struggle
and penned them into a purely electoral
perspective. That demobilization has now
borne its bitter fruit.
Every extensive mobilization of
the masses which is halted halfway without
fundamentally modifying the relation of
forces provokes demoralization among the
workers and a thirst for revenge in the
camp of reaction. The entire history of
the twentieth century confirms this law.
We lived through its application in Bel-
gium after the general strike of 1960-61.
This is a warning to those artful
tacticians who wish to start this busi-
ness all over again and are likewise pre-
paring the triumph of the "strong state"
in this country -- provided the masses
let them get away with it!
UNDERGROUND "PATRIOTIC FRONT"