Understanding the Greek Communists

Nikos Lountos

Syriza is not the only left-wing in some cases - like that of the nine-month party in . Where did the steel worker strike in Athens- it was KKE Communist Party come from and unionists who led the struggle. Even in where is it going?1 electoral terms, the Communist Party had The prospect of a victory in Sun- the largest share of votes on from day’s Greek election is big news, and the the fall of the dictatorship in 1974 until international left has taken notice. The at- Syriza’s rise in May 2012. tention is welcomed, but ’ Proof of the general pull to the left that electoral prowess has obscured what the Greece has experienced in recent years, in real political landscape in the country is the elections of May 2012, the KKE not like. only avoided being squeezed by Syriza’s After all, Syriza is not the only left- success, but had its best performance in wing party in Greece, and by some mea- twenty years (8.5 percent). But things sures it is not even the largest. In orga- changed immediately after, in the June nizational terms, the Communist Party of elections. The party won only 4.5 percent, Greece (KKE) is bigger. Ignoring it, as its worst result in the modern era. most of the Left is content to do, means The KKE’s rhetoric is clearly to ignoring a force with important roots in Syriza’s left. Its programs declare that the trade union movement and the longest capitalism cannot be reformed, and that history of all surviving Greek parties. we shouldn’t have illusions of transforming European Union institutions. In a recent speech, Dimitris Koutsoumbas, the party’s general secretary said:

KKE serves one goal: for the working class to take power so that we can live better days, with prosperity for the people. The proposals of KKE lead to this goal and follow this cri- terion. Not on the basis of how much the economy can Communist Party representatives hold take. Because this is a capi- ten out of the forty-five seats on the board talist economy, which - under of Greece’s labor confederation, and in whichever management or gov- the last student union elections in 2014, ernment - produces crises, un- its lists received 18.5 percent of the vote. employment, and poverty. Those affiliated with Syriza got only 6.5 percent. What’s more, many of the labor This anti-capitalist discourse makes the struggles of the last years cannot be un- Communist Party an easy target for those derstood without KKE participation, and who label it a ‘political fossil’ engaging in 1This article was written just before the general election won by Syriza and was first published in the online magazine Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/

19 an out-of-touch ultra-leftism. Some - in- This shouldn’t be all that surprising. cluding members of its small internal op- After all, the two parties share a common position - attribute its recent electoral fail- history. The KKE was founded in 1918 as ures to this radical discourse. the Socialist Workers Party of Greece and The reality is that the KKE has been took its present name in 1924. Its foun- paying for its sectarianism more than its dation was part of a twin birth with the radicalism. The KKE not only opposes General Confederation of Greek Workers common action with other political forces (GSEE). on the Left, but it’s stood apart from the In a country for which the Great War broader mass movement in recent years. started two years earlier, in 1912, with the One of the most notorious examples of First Balkan War, and ended four years this mentality can be found in the KKE’s later, in 1922, with the defeat of the Asia analysis of the ‘Squares’ movement,’ the Minor Campaign, the antiwar movement series of occupations and mass assemblies fused with internationalist labor traditions in squares that emerged in Greece in 2011. from the recently annexed Macedonia and The Nineteenth Congress of KKE com- with inspiration from the Russian Revolu- ments ‘The so-called ‘movement of the out- tion. raged’ was supported, encouraged - if not Pandelis Pouliopolis, the party’s first even planned - by mechanisms of the rul- general secretary, was removed from the ing class, with the aim of manipulating, leadership in 1927 for aligning with Leon preventing radicalization.’ Trotsky’s Left Opposition. In 1931, Nikos In recent analysis, party intellectuals Zachariadis, with the support of Stalin’s claim that both the rise of the neo-Nazi Comintern, became the new leader of the and Syriza are byproducts party, beginning a conservative turn. An of the ‘confusion’ of the movement devel- analysis of Greece as a half-feudal country oped in Syntagma Square. So, far from be- served as a basis for replacing the goal of ing an ultra-leftist party, in the traditional socialist revolution with that of a ‘bour- sense of the concept that describes parties geois democratic’ one. that don’t recognize the need for any inter- In May 1936, the version of Popular mediate action but the call to revolution, Front tactics adopted by the Communists the KKE is actually sketching out an un- paralyzed it as the government crushed bridgeable gap between an indispensable a tobacco worker revolt in Salonika and revolution and the movement’s miserable other labor insurgencies. The dictator- condition today. ship imposed in August of that year almost The level of the movement is, of course, completely destroyed the KKE. measured by the number of votes the KKE The Communist Party, however, man- takes in the elections. This circular ar- aged to resurrect itself and become a mass gument produces a self-fulfilling prophecy: party within years, not least of all for the movement cannot go forward if the its efforts resisting Axis occupation dur- party doesn’t become stronger, but the ing World War II. Party membership from party is weak because of the movement’s 15,000 in 1942 to 412,000 within two years. low level of class consciousness. Under the KKE’s leadership, the goal This argumentation, in its essence, is of national liberation was tied with the not very far from Syriza’s claims that the push for deep social change. But con- moderation of its own slogans is a result of strained by the Soviet Union, the KKE put the supposedly low level of struggles. its armed forces under Allied command in

20 1944, didn’t dare take power during the re- had run in the elections asking to be voted volt of December 1944, and disarmed the as a junior coalition partner in government. movement two months later. When the But in 1985, when Pasok made a sharp Greek Civil War erupted in 1946, the Com- turn to austerity, the Communist Party munists found themselves outgunned and joined the ranks of the labor movement less prepared than they would have been and managed to gain from the disaffection just a few years before. from Pasok in the 1986 local elections, but But even after defeat in 1949, the KKE distanced itself from the most militant sec- once again showed its resilience. Despite tions of the working class who were launch- the massive repression, a new working- ing an indefinite strike action. class movement helped the Greek Demo- The response of the two Greek Com- cratic Left’s (EDA, the front group of munist Parties to the new conditions was the underground KKE) electoral surge in influenced by the changing global politi- 1958. A round of struggles in the 1960s cal climate in the late 1980s. Celebrat- culminated with the July Days of 1965, ing their common endorsement of the Eu- when successive governments imposed un- ropean Community and acceptance of pri- democratically by King Constantine col- vate sector entrepreneurship, they merged lapsed under the pressure of mass mobi- into an electoral coalition () lizations. EDA’s and KKE’s strategic lim- that was later turned into a party. The de- itations didn’t provide a way forward other cision to form a coalition government with than elections to a movement that wanted (June 1989), and some to challenge the whole regime. months later with both New Democracy The return of dictatorship in 1967 and Pasok, led to the disappointment of showed the power that the Greek ruling hundreds of thousands of . class still possessed. This defeat, combined KKE split from Synaspismos in 1992 with international crisis in the Communist after having already seen the majority of parties, triggered by May ’68 and the So- its youth splitting to its left, but some of viet response to the Prague Spring, led to the KKE’s well-known cadre and MPs re- the split of KKE’s Central Committee in mained in the more moderate formation. two parts, and consequently into two par- Meanwhile, Pasok was left almost unchal- ties, KKE and KKE Interior which would lenged in the movement against the ne- later embrace . It is in oliberal New Democracy government. The this second grouping that the majority of results of the 1993 elections reflect this: Syriza has its origins. Synaspismos remained out of parliament, In the 1970s, the KKE survived as the not being able to pass the 3 percent thresh- bigger of the two parties and consolidated old. KKE fell to a new low, 4.5 percent. this position after the fall of the dicta- The two decades that followed present torship. But following the trend of other the key to explaining today’s constellation Southern European countries, it couldn’t of the Left. In a way, one could talk of match the rise of the center-left (Pasok, the a Greek exception: both radical parties social , went from 13.6 percent passed through a bumpy period of reor- to 48 percent in seven years). ganization and accumulation of forces, but The KKE offered a moratorium to the with a general shift to the left. first Pasok’s government in 1981, hold- Unlike other European countries where ing back any labor and student struggle Communist Parties were transformed into against the social democrats. The party full-fledged social-democratic parties in

21 the 1990s, in Greece this move was re- of the history (1918–1949) that was pub- sisted. Greece was different, because the lished in 1991. movement itself provided a milieu of new The rewriting is deep and iconoclastic, radicalization, forcing the left parties to up to the point of recognizing that the Pop- compete in order to relate with it. The ular Front policy of KKE in the 40s led to role of the organized presence of the anti- the defeat of the 1944 uprising. If we don’t capitalist left in the struggles of that see this left turn as far as theory and his- decade is also indispensable to understand- tory are concerned, through the prism of ing this process. the tactics of isolationism in the real move- Throughout the 1990s, the KKE man- ment, the rebuff of the December 2008 up- aged to rebuild its youth section and the rising from KKE’s general secretary would party machine, through the consecutive seem an enormous contradiction. rounds of school student and university oc- Aleka Papariga, then general secretary cupations and through leading the move- of the party, said infamously that the ment against the war in Yugoslavia in Communist Party was not supporting the 1999. Until the first years of the 2000s, events that erupted in Greece after the the Communist Party leadership, even as murder of a school student by a police of- it avoided common action with the rest of fice because ‘in the real popular revolution, the Left, still attempted to relate with the not even one glass would break.’ The KKE working class breaking from PASOK, even can make references to the civil war as the inaugurating a coalition with Dikki, a left- culmination of the class struggle in Greece wing split from Pasok that won 6.85 per- - overshadowing even resistance to Nazi oc- cent in the 1999 European elections. cupation - but reject barricades set up by But a hard isolationism took over quite school students. quickly within the Communist Party. The All this doesn’t mean that the KKE tactics of calling separate demonstrations was not part of the struggles. Commu- during labor strikes gave way to completely nist militants and trade unionists have separate calls for antiwar demonstrations led strikes in a way that at some point during the Iraq War in 2003. In effect, made well-known neoliberal journalists the KKE stood at a safe distance from the (and their bosses) start refusing to invite explosion of activism around the anti-war KKE members to participate in TV de- movement, allowing the Pasok-controlled bates, because it’s a party that ‘doesn’t union bureaucracy to assume leadership of respect the law’. The KKE’s discourse strike actions against the war. claims that it isolates itself because the Isolationism was not another turn to most important task is not to let the van- the left. On the contrary, it was a result of guard of the movement get carried away an inability to combine the pressures com- by the opportunist tendencies that shape ing from radicalizing movements with the the mass movements. The result has been electoralist strategy of the party. This turn that party didn’t manage to act as a home had its reflection into a process of ideologi- for the radicalized layers coming from two cal re-positioning by the KKE’s leadership. sides: the youth that could not see them- A vivid example of this transformation is selves in a revolution with no glasses bro- that after publishing the second volume of ken, and other workers disillusioned from the history of the party, covering the years voting Pasok after 2011 and the introduc- 1949–1968, in 2012, the central committee tion of the austerity programs. decided to directly rewrite the first volume During the latest round of massive

22 struggles since 2012, the gap between the but they will be products of this ‘people’s KKE’s radical discourse and actual tactics power’ in the distant future. grew even more apparent. Koutsoumbas The KKE managed to regain some of began to sat that there is no governmental the lost electoral ground in the 2014 Euro- solution to the crisis, except if the working pean elections - a sign of another type of class itself takes power: ‘Representatives disillusionment, this time with perceived of the workers, who will be elected in the moderation on the part of Syriza. It seems workplace ... will be controlled by those that in Sunday’s general elections this re- who elected them, will be revocable at any bound will go on. KKE positions itself as time, will not be taken out of production, a left opposition to a coming Syriza gov- will not have any extra privileges.’ ernment. On this line, he could have lots of com- mon ground with , the radical But this left opposition will only be grouping of the extraparliamentary left. useful if it’s willing to work in joint action But, unlike Antarsya, the KKE says that with all the sectors of the working class fighting for not paying the debt or break- who want to break with austerity using ing with the European Union and the eu- their own organized force, rather than just rozone, are demands that can’t be artic- waiting for Syriza’s strategy of accommo- ulated by the movement here and now, dation to fail.

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