New initiatives needed in fight
GREECE their objectives in parliament. And they drop it if it ceases to serve that function, if it exceeds certain limits.
That is the real key to the KKE's position. The February mobilizations and the upsurge that was starting everywhere carried the danger of going beyond parliamentary limits and outflanking the KKE from below. The masses were coming into action demanding satisfaction of their demands right now. That would have very quickly revealed what is consciously concealed by the KKE - that
IN THE WAKE of his victory in the June 2 parliamentary elections in 1985, Greek Premier Andreas Papandreou launched a brutal rusterity drive in September of the same year. It provoked very strong opposition from the workers' movement, which continued n January and February of this year. The strength of the opposicion split the trade-union organization of Papandreou's party, PASOK tself, which dominated the Greek Confederation of Unions (GSEE).
There has been a complex play within the labor movement between he PASOK regulars, the PASOK dissidents, and the two Communist
Parties, the KKE-Exterior and the KKE-Interior, of which the former s by far the strongest.
Papandreou's election strategy of stampeding the left voters to vote for PASOK in June 1985 to block the right was aimed mainly against the KKE-Exterior. It was largely successful. In the municipal elections last fall, the KKE took a more hostile stance to the PASOK efusing to support it in the second round. The result was that the ight took many important municipal governments, including Athens.
In its rivalry with PASOK, however, the KKE does not seem to be woiding the problem of zigzags that undermined the credibility of he French Communist Party, for example, and in large part led to its present crisis. The following are excerpts from the editorial in the
March issue of Spartakos, the paper of the Greek section of the
Fourth International, which commented on a new shift by the KKE
Exterior.
"Now, we are seeing some light-
Let's strike for real, if the great majority of the working people want ruth at toKE-Exterior leader
Florakis officially party's practical course a few days after the vast mobilizations in the public and private sectors.
The KKE split the dynamic strikes of OTOS and GENOP-DEN, pushed the Municipal Workers' Federation to sign a "labor peace," and gave the light to winding down the struggles of all the federations and
Workers Centers, which had gone into a critical phase. Overnight the actions that the KKE itself proposed, pur and supported
"light-minded" mobilizations.
The KKE's pretext was based solely on a position taken by Metsotakis
[a leader of the right-wing New
Democracy (ND) party]. Only the
ND raised the question of a snap
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987 election (and everyone else saw that was just for propaganda purposes). But "the party of the struggles" turned tail, frightened by the possibility that maybe the PASOK would fall, maybe
The KKE forgot all about the PASOK not being "capable of change." It forgot that up until then it had stuck to the slogan "neither PASOK nor the right." It went back to full support for Papandreou.
These sudden changes of line do not surprise us in the least. They are neither accidental nor incomprehen-
The reformist leaderships in general and the KKE in have only one sort of logic - wretched parliamentary cretinism.
What the reformists see in the mobilizations of the workers, farmers, students and youth is not the dynamic of an alliance against the same system, coordinated extra-parliamentary struggle simply as a means of pressure for there is no way to reconcile the interests of the workers with those of the capitalists, that a policy that does not aim at a break with capital and its system cannot be adequate for advancing the struggles of the majority of the Greek people. best defender of bourgeois democracy? So that no one would ask, 'What if the PASOK government falls?" If a strong workers' movement, demanding satisfaction of its demands, managed to topple a bourone), then it would have taken a decisive step toward understanding the only solution to the crisis and toward achieving it - that is a government of the working people control of the economy by the working people and a break from the capitalist logic of the "free
The capitalist attack through the PASOK government is too serious to leave the task of defence against it in the hands of
This time, despite the attempts to push the movement back, despite the difficulties, the recomposition of the workers' movement makes it possible to take initiatives of many
Initiatives by the workers at the base. Mobilization of all workers in tions, in their neighborhoods, participation of all in making the decisions mittees everywhere, with the aim of breaking the government's policy.
Initiatives to put pressure on union advance actions strengthen and express the workers'
Initiatives advancing the demand for escalating and coordina• ting the struggles. Is there some way, maybe, to break the government's workplace by workplace or industry by industry?
Initiatives by all activists moving in an anti-capitalist direction. They are ones who can contribute decisively to apply a concerted tactic of pressure on, and outflanking of,
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against austerity