Every discussion on Greece starts with the comment that Greece is a laboratory of social engineering where the strength of the resistance of the working class against austerity policies is being tested.
I want to add on this that Greece is also a laboratory for the left where new ideas and strategies are being tested.
We are walking in an unmapped territory where traditional historically confirmed theories are again placed under the exhaustive test of the criterion of practice. New challenges and new questions appear and new answers are being sought.
The discussion on revolutionary strategy today only makes sense, from a Marxist point of view, if one affirmatively answers these two questions:
• Is there a historical structural crisis of the world capitalist system?
• Does the working class have a revolutionary potential?
I will also add that one has also to answer affirmatively the question:
• Does the dilemma REFORM OR REVOLUTION is still valid?
Of course we all know that what distinguishes revolutionaries from reformists is the Marxist theory of the state.
Let me remind you of Lenin’s statement that what distinguished a true revolutionist from a reformist was the fact that the revolutionist kept on spreading revolutionary propaganda even though the period was not revolutionary or pre-revolutionary. Continuous socialist revolutionary propaganda, prepare the working class for entering the inevitable explosions of its discontent with the system with a growing awareness of the need to challenge the system as a whole...
But there is more to it…and this is what this paper is going to try to deliver
The historical context
Greece is one of the few countries in which the forces of the far left despite their longtime fragmentation have succeeded in constructing a front of collaboration, the Front of the Anticapitalist Left (Antarsya).
The effort to build an anticapitalist front in Greece has a long history.
In 1989, the Greek section of the FI, OKDE-Spartakos, along with other far left groups, created the Alternative Anticapitalist Coalition (EAS).
In the mid-1990’s MERA (Front of the Radical Left) was formed around (New Left Current - NAR) a left split from the Communist Party. NAR left the Greek CP (KKE) after its participation in two consecutive class collaboration governments in 1989 (with the rightwing New Democracy), and later in one with the addition of the Greek social democracy (PASOK).
Apart from NAR, the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK), the Maoist group (EKKE) and a radical ecologists’ group participated in MERA.
Although MERA regrouped important forces of the Greek far left, it did not managed to acquire an important social implantation.
The period starting in the mid 2000 was a turning point.
After the university students’ movement in 2006-2007 (Article 16) and the primary teachers’ strike in autumn 2006, given the key-role played by MERA and other far-left activists and the relatively passive role of SYRIZA and the KKE, it became obvious that a political void/vacuum existed to the left of reformism.
In the elections of 2007 we ended up with two different anti-capitalist fronts, the older MERA and the newly found United Anticapitalist Left (ENANTIA), which included OKDE-Spartakos, the IST section (SEK) and two radical left ex-eurocommunist/maoist groups (ARAN and ARAS). Both fronts scored a little more than 0.1% in the national election.
The events of December 2008, the riots against state repression, the rebellion of the urban proletariat revealed the need for a new coherent political formation to the left of reformism.
The Communist Party (KKE) denounced the movement and stayed aside; SYRIZA offered its typical support but played a marginal role in the actual course of the events; the anarchist groups were neither able nor willing to offer a political perspective for the mass movement.
The far left played a remarkable role in the demonstrations and the assemblies and meetings organized in the occupied universities and in various neighborhoods. It tried to bring a political perspective in the mass movement BUT the central reference point and coordination were missing.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that just after the December riot, during the first months, ANTARSYA (Anticapitalist Left Coalition) was founded with the participation of most of the groups previously belonging to MERA and ENANTIA. The new project was launched through several local anticapitalist assemblies and a big national meeting in a full basketball stadium.
Why am i giving this historical account???
I want to show that the formation of Antarsya was not a top to bottom process…Antarsya is not the outcome of a mental schema conceived in the minds of far left leaders.
The formation of Antarsya was a necessity because of the politics of Syriza and of the KKE in the previous period.
In the struggles against the austerity policies, against the memoranda imposed upon the working people by the governments of ND and PASOK, ANTARSYA played a very important and sometimes even a leading role.
Antarsya has real social roots and plays a crucial mobilizing and organizing role in social movements, universities, workplaces (students-EAAK, primary – secondary teachers, municipal workers, transport workers /Athens Metro, Union of Public Employees etc.).
Problems of Revolutionary Strategy
For the past 3 years in ANTARSYA, two different political projects coexisted: one that saw ANTARSYA as a transitional political formation towards a broad radical anti-EU left front mainly represented by ARAN and ARAS and another one that sees ANTARSYA as an existing anticapitalist front that has to be further implanted in the workplaces and in the social movements with the prospect of being transformed into a genuine mass revolutionary working class party in the future.
This second project is supported by OKDE-Spartakos and the SEK to varying degrees. The interesting case was that NAR, which is by far the biggest component organization of ANTARSYA, was constantly oscillating between these two projects, its final position being determined by its internal balance of views.
The different projects in ANTARSYA were a distorted reflection of the debate that takes place internationally on “the broad party strategy”.
Antarsya’s project 1 related very favorably to the formation of the PU and was seeking some kind of electoral alliance with it or even a fusion on the basis of the discussions held at some point between PU and Antarsya.
Project 2 has kept a distance although SEK participated in the discussions with the PU and OKDE-Spartakos did not.
As I mentioned before, at some point there were discussions between Antarsya and Popular Unity. I am not in a position to know exactly what was discussed because OKDE-Spartakos did not participate in the discussions.
Three weeks before the elections there was a convention of the National Council of Antarsya to decide on the election tactics. Of the 85 members present, 15 voted in favor of a common electoral slate with the PU, or to be more precise, in favor of joining the PU, because the PU never accepted a common electoral slate but favored Antarsya groups and individual members joining the already existing PU structures and accepting the PU program.
These 15 members of the National Council were the delegates of ARAN and ARAS. These two groups left Antarsya and joined the PU. I am not in a position to know the precise conditions of their agreement with the PU, and I think it adds nothing important in the course of events that followed. However, for the historian of the future I have to mention that a minority of ARAN decided to remain in Antarsya and did not follow the majority in the PU.
Antarsya then formed an electoral alliance with the Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK), the sister party of Argentinian Partido Obrero (PO).
The Antarsya members fought a “heroic” battle in these elections. The election result of Antarsya, at the level of the left vote, and taking in consideration the introspection of the last months where discussions about the relation with the Left Platform were at its peak, was satisfactory.
Antarsya increased its vote in absolute numbers and percentage in both the urban regions and the periphery. Still the national average (0.86%) does not correspond to the potential and the dynamics that Antarsya exhibits in the streets, in the workplaces, in the universities and in the neighborhoods. The question of how to transform the influence in the mass movement into electoral support is central touching on all aspects of “revolutionary strategy”.
I will attempt to formulate an answer with reference to Ernest Mandel: “There is not the slightest contradiction in saying that the overwhelming majority of the masses can at the same time vote for the reformist parties and partially break with them in practice” (Revolutionary Marxism Today, Chapter 1: Socialist Strategy in the West, NLB 1978, pp. 42-45).
This is the outcome of an analysis having as a premise the uneven development of class consciousness – an idea that the reformists find hard to grasp. At the same time, a discussion focused on Program and not on the development of Consciousness cannot deliver either.
The masses may think that the only useful way of voting in the parliamentary elections is for the Socialist or Communist Parties and at the same time they may think that the struggle against the reaction in the colleges and the workplaces can only be successful if they act independently of these parties.
The result of elections can vary according to whether they are held in isolated booths or in mass assemblies, in an atomized or collective way. For example, the result for a call for strike action will be different in a mass meeting or postal vote.
Below, I will briefly discuss two aspects of revolutionary strategy:
Alliances/ United Front
This is a pressing issue. I will repeat that within a united front framework we are going to cooperate with the PU militants in the workplaces and in the social movements but it is a different issue altogether to engage in programmatic discussions with them with the prospect of joining a «broad left party».
Let me elaborate…The policy of the United Front has a double dimension: strategic and tactical.
The united front responds to the following strategic objective: to unify the working class in the course of a revolutionary process. To stimulate this development, this movement must create the conditions of "the class independence" of the workers with respect to the bourgeoisie, and aim at the self-emancipation and the self-organization of the popular classes.
Thus, while making clear at each stage of the class struggle its content and its forms, striving for the unity of the workers and their organizations is a permanent element of the politics of revolutionaries.
But the policy of the united front is also a political tactic, which depends on the general goals of revolutionary politics.
Indeed, as Daniel Bensaïd explains, "The united front always has a tactical aspect. The reformist organizations are not reformist from confusion, inconsistency or lack of will. They express social and material crystallizations... The reformist leaderships can thus be tactical political allies to contribute to unifying the class. But they remain strategically potential enemies. The united front thus aims at creating the conditions that make it possible to break with these leaderships, at the moment of decisive choices, with the best possible relationship of forces, and to detach the broadest possible masses from them". (Crisis and strategy, 1986).
For Marxists, the united front is only one of the methods of the class struggle. In these given conditions, the method is completely unusable: «it would be foolish to want to build an agreement with the reformists for the carrying out of the socialist revolution» ( Trotsky, How to Defeat Fascism?).
In any case, because now I see new analyses in the international left press praising the role of the PU in a future realignment of the Greek left, I would emphasize that the «Broad Party Strategy», where anticapitalism concedes to the programmatic hegemony of reformism, proved itself bankrupt in many cases (Brasilian PT, Syriza or PU). The sooner we understand this, the better for the working class.
OKDE-Spartakos has been constantly arguing for independent class politics, for the autonomous political expression of the working class and the social movements which in the present period in Greece is reflected by the autonomous presence of Antarsya.
In a series of documents we have genuinely justified our disagreement with the “Broad Party Strategy” and the reasons why we opposed the SYRIZA project based on a revolutionary Marxist analysis and the best traditions of the Fourth International. Our analysis has been tragically verified. It took a 3rd memorandum imposed upon the Greek working people so that the class nature of left reformism is exposed. Today, the PU wants to repeat the same failed experiment. They want to re-establish the good SYRIZA of 2012 with the same program.
A call for an electoral alliance (an electoral front) with the reformists at the expense of the anticapitalist program is nothing less than a call for an accommodation to the existing state of affairs. We favour the “United Front” which is formed around specific issues and does not require a programmatic agreement among the organizations involved. On this basis, I think we should be open to cooperate with other left organizations including the PU in antifascist, antiracist work and on other crucial issues as prioritized by the social movements and their intervention and ours converge.
The issue of workers control
We are entering a new period of social instability, a new period of struggles. In this new period OKDE-Spartakos and Antarsya will fight in their privileged terrain, the workplaces and the mass movement.
Our first task will be to launch “action committees” in the work places bringing together militants of Antarsya, PU, KKE and the rest of the left. These committees are instrumental in coordinating action since the National Trade Union Federation (GSSE) is in the hands of bureaucrats supporting the memorandum. So, any mobilization has to be the work of the “Action Committees”.
Further more, OKDE-Spartakos will campaign around the slogan “Occupy, operate the closed factories”. Hundreds of industrial plants have been abandoned by the capitalists and the workers have been fired. We want to extend the example of VIOME (a self-managed plant in Northern Greece) which for the last 5 years remains isolated and bring workers self-management and workers control of the economy back in the agenda. We also see this as a necessary answer of the workers movement itself to the problem of unemployment which runs still at 25%. Workers and unemployed should not depend on the mercy of the capitalist state to survive. They have to emerge in the scene as active agents.
This is not an easy task and its shortcomings have been discussed again and again. But under the present circumstances, it is a unique way to solve immediate problems and in the long term restoring confidence in the consciousness of the working class.
A strategy of workers’ control has many pitfalls. Any attempt by the workers to actually run a few factories isolated from the rest of the economy is doomed to failure, because they’ ll have to enter into competition with capitalist firms and submit to the unavoidable obligations of that competition.
But revolutionary socialists, while understanding these pitfalls and dangers, will not be inhibited by them to the point of abstaining from attempts to broaden the class struggle through these challenges to capitalist authority. There is no other way to develop anti-capitalist consciousness among hundreds of thousands and millions of workers than along this road. Propaganda through the written or spoken word can convince individuals by the hundreds and, in the best of cases, by the thousands. Millions will be convinced only by action.
To initiate, broaden, and generalise these experiences, we need a revolutionary organisation. Without such an organisation, isolated experiences or initiatives of groups of workers will remain just that: isolated experiences. The role of the centralisation of consciousness, of generalisation of experience, of continuous transmission of knowledge, as against the inevitably discontinuous character of mass struggles, can be played only by such an organisation.
