(the first third plus an additional small section)
We, the militants who were in Athens (all those who escaped: Tamtakos, Voursoukis, Aravantinos, Rigas, Kallergis, Stinas) got together the next day and reconstituted the group. Our position in regard to the EAM and its army, as toward the nationalist movement in general, was strictly determined by our position in the face of imperialist war. There was no divergence there at all.
Two days later, with a typewriter and a duplicator which we had managed to get hold of, Tamtakos and I worked all night on printing the first publication of the group, in a hovel in Aigaleo. This was without exaggeration the first clear and limpid voice of socialist revolution in the nightmarish conditions of the second imperialist war, perhaps not only in Greece but in the whole world.
Our voice found an echo. Rapidly, old militants and young workers and students gathered under our flag. Those who were dispersed in the provinces descended on Athens, beginning with Tsoukas.
Our activity became bigger every day. Tracts, flyers circulated by the thousand. Slogans covered the walls. The cries of the khonia[1] resounded in the night. People heard, saw and read other slogans than those that they had come to expect from the Stalinists and other nationalist organisations. In place of the slogans of nationalist hatred were those immortal slogans of fraternisation between peoples, of the transformation of the fratricidal war between peoples into a war of peoples against their exploiters The workers read the wall slogans and the tracts with an undeniable sympathy: “It is capitalism in its entirety which is responsible for the carnage, devastation and chaos, and not just one of the two sides!”; “Fraternisation of peoples and soldiers against the executioners who are killing the peoples!”; “Fraternisation of Greek workers and Italian and German soldiers in the common struggle for socialism!” ; “National unity is nothing but the submission of the workers to their exploiters!”; “Only the overthrow of capitalism will save world peace!”; “Long live the world socialist revolution!”...
At the end of the fourth or fifth month, the group got hold of some typographical characters and a hand press. Its journal, Workers’ Front, its tracts and its leaflets were printed from then on. Its voice, the voice of revolution, resounded in all the working class districts of Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki. A voice loud and clear.
During all that period of intense activity of the group, Mastr. and Sm., two old proletarian militants who had not previously belonged to our tendency, joined it and were on its central committee. Apart from the escapees, such as Thymios and Stam., all the members were young, boys and girls. Kids of eighteen went from the EPON[2] and the school benches into our ranks in the full understanding of what they were doing, in full understanding of the ideas and the risks. They came to fight and die with us. The enthusiasm, the audacity, the self-sacrifice of these young people, was something we had only known in revolutions.
The internal life of the group was absolutely democratic, with regular weekly assemblies where we gave an account of our activity and criticised it, and where we decided future activity. Decisions were the result of real collective debate. And everybody applied them without distinction or exception. When the number of members grew, rendering the assemblies practically impossible in the absolute clandestinity in which we lived, representative conferences were held regularly, preceded by free debates. There was a publication committee for the journal, but every member could write in it.
Today we know that no other group in the world defended the principles of revolutionary defeatism with such clarity, courage and intransigence during the nightmare of the second imperialist carnage. Without doubt no other group had displayed an activity similar to, or on the same scale as, ours in conditions where death dogged our every step. We had been the only political group in the whole world who, in conditions infinitely more difficult and more dangerous than in 1914-1918, had continued the heroic tradition of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.
The intellectual, moral and psychological situation of the popular masses was at the time very different from what we had known under the Metaxas dictatorship and in spring 1942, in the transfer section of Piraeus.
Under the dictatorship, from one end of the country to the other, up until the Italian invasion, the masses had fallen into passivity and indifference. Fear ruled the land. Fear had literally paralysed those who, linked in one way or another to the movement in the past, hadn’t been put under surveillance or arrested by the Security Police, as it paralysed the dilosias*. Whenever they happened to come across us they always had some exceptionally important work to do and did not have time to discuss. Twice I asked old comrades and friends to give me a place to stay for two or three days, at the time when we were checking if our house was under surveillance, but they refused both times. It is very easy to find excuses to justify their fear in front of their conscience. That state which the “ex-revolutionaries” had fallen into provoked more pity and disgust among us than indignation.
During the winter of 1941-1942 Athens and Piraeus were only populated by human wrecks, in the moral as well as physical sense. Human skeletons who begged, who cried and who died.
We knew the situation in those two towns. Those images were engraved in our brains. When, in the transfer section of Halkis, we discussed probable occasions when we could escape, some people, quite a few, said: “To go where? To do what? Beg? But who from?” Some of those comrades didn’t escape because of this, when they could have done so. They stayed, to quickly find themselves in Larissa and Haïdari. And from there to Kournovo and to the firing squads of Kaisariani.
But what we, the escapees, found in Athens was very different from what we thought we’d find there.
The economic situation had improved slightly. Nobody was dying of hunger anymore. The International Red Cross had organised soup kitchens for everyone. Each person, without exception or distinction, had a plate of beans or gruel every day at noon. The bakeries gave out a few grams of bread every day with a ration card. On Athens’ streets, in Monastiraki and elsewhere, you could find raisins, tinned food and other foodstuffs on stalls in the open air. The smokers could supply themselves with the tobacco of their choice, loose or in cigarettes, in open air “shops”. Some restaurants and tavernas were open and you could find something there. The black market also provided some not bad delicacies for those who could pay in gold pounds.
Prices rose day by day. The Bank issued currency daily, and almost every day it added more zeroes to the notes. A one drachma note became a ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million etc. The first word of a “merchant” coming to sell something was “I don’t have any small change”. That is to say thousand drachma notes. Two days later, or even the next day, it meant ten thousand drachmas. And so it went.
The economic situation had changed, but also, first of all, the people themselves. People had got back on their feet. They found themselves again, and with that their dignity, their courage and their determination to fight. And everyone knew that this time it wasn’t the phalanga or castor oil which awaited them, but the firing squad. Nobody was afraid though. Young people and women in particular displayed an unbelievable contempt for danger. In fact danger and death was normal. Even the “former”, the “ex”, and the dilosias became fighters again. How people change! Who can give a logical explanation for this phenomenon of the metamorphosis of cowards into heroes, so common in history and which is so decisive in peoples’ struggles for their emancipation?
Organisations were created. Duplicated or printed journals were circulated clandestinely. Slogans covered the walls and the asphalt of the street. Groups of partisans had already appeared in the mountains. Strikes broke out. Demonstrations were organised.
We found ourselves there at the beginning, and what characterised that period was the selfless solidarity of everyone towards everyone else, independent of political differences, and the free debates on the content, forms and methods of struggle. Alas, that period didn’t last long.
The nation is a product of history, like the tribe, the family, the city. It has a necessary historic role and must disappear when that is fulfilled.
The class bearing that social organisation is the bourgeoisie. The national state coincides with the state of the bourgeoisie, and historically, the progressive work of the nation and of capitalism joined together to create, with the development of the productive forces, the material conditions for socialism.
That progressive work came to an end with the epoch of imperialism, of the great imperialist powers, with their antagonisms and their wars.
The nation has fulfilled its historic mission. Henceforth wars of national liberation and bourgeois-democratic revolutions make no sense.
Proletarian revolution is now the order of the day. It doesn’t create or maintain nations and borders but abolishes them and unites all the peoples of the earth in a global community.
The defence of the nation and the fatherland are in our era nothing other than the defence of imperialism, of the social system which provokes wars, which cannot live without war and which leads humanity to chaos and barbarism. This is as true for the big imperialist powers as it is for the little nations, whose ruling classes can only be accomplices and associates of the great powers.
“At this time socialism is the only hope for humanity. Above the ramparts of the capitalist world which is finally crumbling, shining in letters of fire are the words of the Communist Manifesto : socialism or the fall into barbarism.”
(R Luxemburg, 1918)
Socialism is a matter for the workers of the whole world, and the terrain of its creation extends across the globe. The struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and for the setting up of socialism unites all the workers of the world. Geography fixes a division of labour: the immediate enemy of the workers in each country is their own ruling class. It is their sector of the international front of struggle of the workers to overthrow world capitalism.
If the toiling masses of each country are not conscious that they form just one section of a global class, they will never be able to set out on the road of their social emancipation.
It is not sentimentalism which makes the struggle for socialism in a given country an integral part of the struggle for a world socialist society, but the impossibility of socialism in one country. The only “socialism” in national colours and national ideology that history has given us is that of Hitler, and the only national “communism” that of Stalin.
The struggle inside the country against the ruling class and solidarity with the toiling masses of the whole world, such are the two fundamental principles of the movement of the popular masses for their economic, political and social liberation in our time. It’s the same for “peace” as for war.
War between peoples is fratricide. The only just war is that waged by peoples who fraternise across nations and borders against their exploiters.
The task of revolutionaries, in times of “peace” as in times of war, is to help the masses to become conscious of the ends and means of their movement, to rid themselves of the domination of the political and union bureaucracies, to take their own affairs into their own hands, to have no confidence in any other “leadership” than that of the executive organs which they have elected themselves and which they can revoke at any moment, to acquire consciousness of their own political responsibility and first and foremost to emancipate themselves intellectually from the national and patriotic mythology.
These are the principles of revolutionary marxism as Rosa Luxemburg formulated them and applied them practically and which guided her politics and her action during the First World War. Those principles guided our politics and our action in the Second World War.
We are going to measure and appreciate the politics and action of the EAM under the Occupation with the help of some definitions and landmarks.
2. The “Resistance Movement”, that is to say the struggle against the Germans in all its forms, from sabotage to guerrilla warfare, in the occupied countries, cannot be considered outside the context of imperialist war, of which it is an integral part. Its progressive or reactionary character cannot be determined by the participation of the masses, nor by its anti-fascist objectives nor by the oppression by German imperialism, but in terms of the reactionary or progressive character of the war.
ELAS like EDES[3] were armies who continued the war against the Germans and Italians inside the country. That alone strictly determines our position in regard to them. To participate in the resistance movement, under whatever slogans and justifications, means to participate in the war.
Independently of the attitudes of the masses and the intentions of its leadership, this movement, because of the war which it conducts in the conditions of the second imperialist massacre, is an organ and appendage of the Allied imperialist camp. (...)
4. All the actions of the EAM in Greece were profoundly reactionary. By its whole policy, with all its forces, it ruined the spirit and the class consciousness of the workers. It excited the masses against the Germans and also excited the German soldiers against them, rendering their fraternisation with the Greek workers impossible. The majority of killings of Germans had no other result than to provoke ferocious reprisals from the occupation authorities which in turn provoked the population even more. In no way did it dare to interfere with individual property or to defend the elementary interests of the poor peasants against their exploiters. On the contrary, it was on the best terms with the rich peasants and the Church, and in the regions where it dominated, with its legislation and its armed forces, it zealously upheld the protection of property, the family, religion and “morality”.
Political reforms, democratic freedoms, self-administration, popular tribunals, the elections of the PEEA[4], etc., were so much deception and farce.
The organisational structure of the EAM like that of the ELAS was purely military, and the most severe discipline reigned. Any initiative coming from the base was impossible, and those who were murdered because they had the courage to express some sort of objection can be counted in the hundreds. Their hatred was aimed from the start at any critique, any manifestation of the left.
Thousands of non-commissioned officers, officers and commanding officers, active or reservist, from the army, from the navy, from the air force and the police entered ELAS. The cadres of EAM in the towns were in the great majority of cases petty bourgeois nationalists. The composition of the National Council (the Parliament of EAM which met in May 1944 in Koryschades[5]), according to information given by Siantos, was the following: 4 university professors, 1 teacher in a higher business school, 8 generals, 23 workers (of the Siantos, Kalomiris, Stratis or Mariolis type[6]), 5 private employees, 20 officials and employees of banks and public services, 5 industrialists, 23 peasants (of the Gavriilidis and Terzopoulos type[7]), 9 journalists, 15 doctors, 25 lawyers, 6 soldiers, 4 clerics, 1 engineer, 1 entrepreneur, 2 agronomists, 1 archaeologist, 10 lecturers, 4 kapetanios, 3 artisans, 1 chemist, 1 notary. Two dozen of them were former deputies and senators of the “revisionist” Chamber of 1936.
The politics of EAM precisely reflected its structure and its social composition. A nationalist movement in the service of imperialist war.
5. The patriotism of the masses and their attitude in regard to the war, so contrary to their historic interests, are well known phenomena since the previous war, and Trotsky, in a large number of texts, had tirelessly foreseen the danger that revolutionaries would be surprised and that they would let themselves be carried away by the current. The duty of internationalist revolutionaries is to hold themselves above the current, and to defend against the current the historic interests of the proletariat. This phenomenon cannot be explained purely by the technical means used, propaganda, the radio, the press, the marches, the atmosphere of exaltation created at the beginning of the war, but also by the state of the spirit of the masses, which results from the previous political evolution, from the defeats of the working class, from its discouragement, from the destruction of its confidence in its own strength and in the means of action of class struggle, from the dispersion of the international movement and from the sapping opportunist politics carried on by its parties.
There is no historic law which fixes the delay before which the masses, initially carried away by the war, finally come to their senses. It is the concrete political conditions which awaken class consciousness. The horrible consequences of the war for the masses make patriotic enthusiasm disappear. With discontent mounting, their opposition to the imperialists and their own leaders, who are their agents, ceaselessly deepens and wakes up their class consciousness. The difficulties of the ruling class grow, the situation evolves towards the breaking of internal unity, the crumbling of the internal front and towards revolution. Internationalist revolutionaries contribute to the acceleration of the pace of this objective process by intransigent struggle against all the patriotic and social-patriotic organisations, open or hidden, by the consistent application of the policy of revolutionary defeatism.
6. The consequences of the war, in the conditions of the Occupation, have had a completely different influence on the psychology of the masses and their relations with their bourgeoisie. Their class consciousness has sunk into nationalist hatred, constantly reinforced by the barbaric behaviour of the Germans. Confusion gets worse, the idea of the nation and its destiny have been placed above social differences, national unity is reinforced, and the masses are even more submitted to their bourgeoisie, represented by the organisations of national resistance. The industrial proletariat, broken by the previous defeats, its specific influence exceptionally diminished, has been a prisoner of this terrible situation for the whole of the war.
If the anger and the rising up of the masses against German imperialism in the occupied countries was “justified”, that of the German masses against Allied imperialism, against the barbaric bombardments of workers’ neighbourhoods was, just as much justified. But this justified anger, which is reinforced by all means by the bourgeois parties of every stripe, can only be exploited and used by the imperialists for their own interests. The task of the revolutionaries still remaining above the current is to lead this anger against “their own” bourgeoisie. It is only that discontent against our “own” bourgeoisie which can become a historic force, the means of ridding all humanity of wars and destruction once and for all.
From the moment that the revolutionary in war time simply makes an allusion to oppression by the “enemy” imperialism in his own country, he becomes the victim of the narrow nationalist mentality and social-patriotic logic, and cuts the links which unite the small number of revolutionary workers who remain faithful to their banner in different countries, in the hell into which capitalism in decomposition has plunged humanity.
7. The struggle against fascism “is only realisable in the framework of internal conflicts, when the struggle poses in practice the problem of the political regime. But if we mechanically apply the laws and methods of struggle of different classes in one and the same nation to the imperialist war, that is to say the struggle of one and the same class of different nations, we will be purely and simply illusionists and charlatans” (Trotsky). The struggle against the Nazis in the countries occupied by Germany was a trick and a means which Allied imperialism used to chain the masses to its war chariot. The struggle against the Nazis was the task of the German proletariat. But it was only possible if the workers of all countries fought against their own bourgeoisie. The worker in the occupied countries who fought the Nazis was fighting on behalf of his exploiters and not for himself, and those who carried him and pushed him into that war were, whatever their intentions and justifications might be, agents of the imperialists. The call to German soldiers to fraternise with the workers of the occupied countries in the common struggle against the Nazis was, for the German soldier, a misleading trick of Allied imperialism. Only the example of the struggle of the Greek proletariat against its “own” bourgeoisie which, in the conditions of the Occupation, means to struggle against the nationalist organisations, would have been able to arouse the class consciousness of the conscripted German workers and make possible fraternisation, and the struggle of the German proletariat against Hitler.
Hypocrisy and trickery are as indispensable to the conduct of war as tanks, planes or heavy guns. War is not possible without the conquest of the masses. But for them to be conquered they have to believe that they are fighting for their own good. All the slogans, all the promises of “freedom, prosperity, the crushing of fascism, socialist reforms, a popular republic, defence of the USSR”, etc., aim at this goal. This work is above all reserved for the “workers’” parties, who use their authority, their influence, their links with the toiling masses, the traditions of the workers’ movement… so that the masses can be more easily tricked and slaughtered.
The illusions of the masses in the war, without which it is not possible, do not make it any way progressive, and only the most hypocritical social-patriots can use this to justify it. All the promises, all the proclamations, all the slogans of the SPs and the CPs in this war were only illusions.
8. The social-patriotic character of support for the resistance movement is brought into particularly sharp relief in the regions that EAM completely controls. It has both the space and the geographic borders of a “country”, with parliament, government, courts, concentration camps, prisons, police and tax collectors, in a word, a state, which conducts an official war against the Germans. In what way, in its class nature, can this state differ from any other bourgeois state? What do the workers and poor peasants have to defend in this war, and in what way does it differ from that conducted by the government of Metaxas?
And even if the political reforms, self-government, popular courts etc., had not been illusions, even if the political regime had been similar to that of Russia after the February Revolution, even then, the workers would not have been able to participate in the war. They would only have fought once they had political power in their hands. Such was the position of Lenin and Trotsky against the powerful wave of “revolutionary patriotism” which had then submerged Russia for the defence of the “revolutionary democracy” after the February Revolution.
9. The transformation of a movement into political combat against the capitalist regime does not depend on us and the force of conviction of our ideas but the nature of the movement itself.
“To accelerate and facilitate the transformation of the movement of resistance into a movement of struggle against capitalism” would be possible if that movement, in its development, had been able to itself permanently create, in class relations, consciousness, and in the psychology of the masses, conditions more favourable to its transformation into a general political struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore into a proletarian revolution.
The struggle of the working class for immediate economic and political demands can transform itself in the course of its growth into a whole political struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie. But it is rendered possible by the very form of this struggle: the masses, by their opposition to their bourgeoisie and its state and by the class nature of their demands, rid themselves of their nationalist, reformist and democratic illusions, liberate themselves from the influence of class enemies, develop their consciousness, their initiative, their critical spirit, their confidence in themselves. With the extension of the field of struggle, ever greater numbers of the masses participate, and, the more deeply the social soil is dug, the more the class lines are strictly distinguished and the more the revolutionary proletariat becomes the principle axis of the masses in struggle. The importance of the revolutionary party is enormous, to accelerate the pace, for awareness, for the assimilation of experience, for the comprehension of the necessity of the revolutionary taking of power by the masses, for organising the insurrection and ensuring its victory. But it is the movement itself, from its nature and its internal logic, which gives strength to the party. It is an objective process of which the politics of the revolutionary movement is the conscious expression. The growth of the “resistance movement” has, also by its very nature, the exactly opposite result: it destroys class consciousness, reinforces nationalist illusions and hatred, disperses and atomises the proletariat even more into the anonymous mass of the nation, submits it even more to its national bourgeoisie, bringing to the surface and to the leadership the most ferociously nationalist elements.
Today what remains from the resistance movement (nationalist hatred and prejudices, the memories and traditions of that movement which were so habitually used by the Stalinists and Socialists) is the most serious obstacle to a class orientation of the masses.
If there had been objective possibilities for its transformation into a political struggle against capitalism, these would have manifested themselves without our participation. But we saw no trace of a proletarian tendency, even the most confused, coming from its ranks.
10. “The transformation of the war into a civil war is the general strategic task to which all the work of the revolutionary movement must be subordinated during the war” (The Fourth International and the War). The shifting of the fronts and the military occupation of the country, as in almost the whole of Europe, by the armies of the Axis do not change the character of the war, do not create a national question and do not modify either our strategic objectives or our fundamental tasks. The task of the proletarian party in these conditions is to sharpen its struggle against the nationalist organisations and to protect the working class from anti-German hatred and the poison of nationalism.
Internationalist revolutionaries participate in the struggles of the masses for their immediate political and economic demands, trying to give them a clear class orientation and opposing themselves with all their strength to the nationalist exploitation of these struggles. Instead of taking it out on the Germans and the Italians, they explain why the war broke out, a war of which the barbarism we live in is the inevitable consequence, courageously denouncing the crimes of their “own” imperialist camp and bourgeoisie, represented by the various nationalist organisations, calling the masses to fraternisation with the Italian and German soldiers in the common struggle for socialism. The proletarian party condemns all patriotic struggles, however massive they may be and whatever their form, and openly calls on workers to abstain from them.
Revolutionary defeatism in the conditions of the Occupation encounters horrifying and never previously seen obstacles. But the difficulties can not change our tasks. On the contrary, the stronger the current, the more rigorous must be the attachment of the revolutionary movement to its principles, the more it must intransigently oppose the current. Only that policy will render it capable of expressing the sentiments of the revolutionary masses of tomorrow and being at their head. The policy of submission to the current, that is to say the policy of reinforcement of the resistance movement, would have added yet another obstacle to the attempts at class orientation of the workers and would have destroyed the party.
Revolutionary defeatism, the correct internationalist policy against the war and against the resistance movement, expresses today and will always express in the revolutionary events to come all its strength and value.
When the people stood up and found themselves again, after the tragic days of winter 1941, in more than just the struggle for survival, discussions began on the situation that created the occupation of the country and the tasks which it made necessary. How are we going to fight? What political content will the struggle have? What forms will it take and what means will it use? How to organise?
The people asked themselves these questions in a completely new political context. Political parties had not existed since the time of the dictatorship. Nobody accorded them any importance and very few still remembered them. This was also true for the Greek CP, which had been even more discredited, with the passage of a whole series of its leading cadres into the service of the dictatorship, and with the Provisional Leadership**.
The resistance of the people to the dictatorship, spontaneous and unorganised, limited itself to hiding and helping the New Zealand soldiers who had not been able to escape with their units, rendering unusable and destroying German and Italian vehicles, and above all the action of the saltadors[8]. One day history must recall these intrepid kids. They jumped on the German vehicles while they were moving, ripping open sacks of supplies with their pen knives and throwing the contents onto the road: bread, tinned food, flour etc. And people picked it up. It is for them that they did it. For themselves they kept nothing. Many lost their lives or were tortured. Who wrote down their names? At least of those who died? No historian of the resistance preoccupied himself with them, none dedicated even a few lines to them. They didn’t have fine-sounding names, didn’t belong to any party or organisation, were not bearded[9], didn’t wear hats[10], their chests were not decorated with cartridge belts, nor with chains and daggers and there is no photograph of them taken in various “heroic” poses. In spring 1942, I knew two of them in the transfer section of Piraeus. One of them was called “Demon”. Apart from their audacity and their contempt for the death which awaited them, their modesty, their dignity, their indifference in regard to themselves was the most impressive thing, along with their concern for others, their solidarity towards the weakest, the most frightened, the most hungry of their fellow detainees. They had a word or a gesture for everyone. I would particularly like to stress, in that virgin political period of the resistance, the solidarity without political or partisan distinction, the reciprocal trust, the free discussions, without animosity or hatred or attempts to impose themselves, the sincerity, the modesty, the simplicity, everything which characterises a popular movement when the tutors, the bosses and the professional saviours are absent.
This period couldn’t last long. Its duration was closely linked to the conditions of the war and the Occupation. Commandos began to arrive from the Middle East, to set up radios, organise espionage and carry out generalised sabotage.
Former members of the CPG, mostly dilosias, were put in position to take the initiative and were capable of it, but they lacked authority. EAM, which had already been formally created, started to develop itself gigantically, so as to eventually cover the whole political terrain of the country, when some former leading cadres enjoying the trust of the members took over the leadership of the CPG. That is to say when Siantos and Ioannidis escaped[11]. They were not missed. After the leadership of the party had got over a few hesitations and involved itself in the partisan war (maybe some faded remains of their former revolutionary ideas), they gave themselves the task of organising the national resistance in the mountains as well as in the villages. The leading cadres of the CPG undoubtedly knew how to organise and to lead, all the more so because scruples were as unknown to them as they were foreign. The organisational capacities and severe military discipline of Bolshevism entered into the service of imperialist war.
All those who wanted to fight recognised the organisational and leadership capacities of the CPG and joined EAM without hesitation. The capacities of the CP in these areas had already been well known for a long time. ELAS was staffed by hundreds of active or reserve officers of all grades and all specialities.
The objective conditions were scandalously favourable to the CPG. It acted as a guarantee to the masses as to the supposedly anti-fascist character of the imperialist war, such as the realisation of the solemn and categorical promises of the “Big Three” about democracy, peace, the suppression of famine and fear, the right of peoples to decide for themselves etc. The influence of the USSR was still very strong then, and, for the masses, the USSR in Greece was the CPG. Without doubt it would be difficult to find in history a misunderstanding as tragic as the one which existed then and which continues to exist today to a certain extent, between what the masses believed about the CPG and what that party consciously set out to do.
EAM was already the only military and political force in the country which mattered. Thus it felt strong enough to demand the monopoly of the resistance and to present itself as the only patriotic organisation in the country. This pretension translated itself into a short term ultimatum: all the partisan groups which continue to exist outside the ELAS must choose between immediate integration or extermination. Whoever does not belong to the EAM organisations in the towns and villages is an agent of the Gestapo, or the carabinieri, or the Quisling government, which amounts to the same thing. In calumny, in provocation, lying, machination, hypocrisy, trickery, the Stalinists have beaten all historical records. Who doesn’t remember the case of Sarafis[12]? One day Rizospastis wrote that “sections of ELAS have seized known agents of the Italian carabinieri Sarafis et Kostopoulos”, and two days later, the same Sarafis was solemnly promoted to military chief of ELAS.
The Khites*** then made their appearance. These groups were organised and armed by the Germans and carried out the armed struggle against the Communists with their authorisation. Whoever was not a Khite was a Communist for them. In Athens, the inhabitants of Pangrati, Thission, Kypseli and Metaxouryon lived in permanent danger of being beaten, arrested or executed by them. Everyone knew that their boss was Grivas[13].
At the same time, with the agreement of the occupation authorities, the Rallis[14] government organised security battalions (tsoliades). The majority of their men were recruited from the criminal underworld. They were free to steal, to rob and to kill when they felt like it. And they didn’t stint on these things. It was unthinkable that they would be called to account. It was then that the OPLA also went into action. This was a sort of GPU or Okhrana in the service of EAM.
What happened in Greece at that time didn’t happen in any other occupied country, at least not on such a scale, with such a long duration and above all with such savagery and fanaticism.
In the mountains ELAS engaged in furious fighting with other groups of partisans in defence of its monopoly of the partisan movement. The occupation authorities replied to the partisan’s attacks against the occupation army’s men, government agents or military installations, as they did to various forms of sabotage, by massive executions of hostages, burning and razing whole villages and massacring their inhabitants.
In the towns, particularly in Athens, the Khites killed, the tsoliades killed, OPLA killed, they tortured on Merlin Street[15], every day courts martial pronounced condemnations to death, with execution being immediate. Every day the army took over neighbourhoods, with the rounding up of men in the squares and arrest, or even execution on the spot, for those picked out by men wearing masks[16], and searches in houses, in shops and in the streets. Such was everyday life, at least in Athens.
The solidarity, the trust, the free discussion of the first days had disappeared , without leaving the slightest trace in the spirit or in the vocabulary. What you heard now was: “Where are you? In what organisation? Where do you take your line from?”
If you came across the tsoliades at night, there was the search, the theft of your wallet, your watch, your wedding ring if you had one, your pen and anything that had value in their eyes. Afterwards you could go. It got to the stage where you didn’t ask for an apology anymore. If you had gold teeth it was better if you didn’t show them when speaking.
In the case of a meeting with the Khites, if you could prove you didn’t belong to the EAM, in the best scenario it would be a beating, in the worst you would be killed or maimed. If at night you passed by the sectors where they were stationed and you didn’t stop at the “Halt!” to have your papers checked, they would open fire immediately. An. Man. and I came within a whisker of being killed. We went out late at night from Kareas, where we had had a meeting, and, without being aware of it because of the darkness and the driving rain, in Pangrati we came across the fortified house of Papageorgiou, in Prophitis llias. In response to the “Halt!” we immediately threw ourselves on the ground, while machine gun bullets flew over our heads. We crawled away, without anything happening to us, except that the five or six eggs in my pocket had been broken so we went hungry.
If you passed through a rural zone controlled by EAM, most probably looking for supplies, it would mean immediately being intercepted and brought in front of an “official”. He would ask for your “papers” which had to be provided by EAM on its territory. If you didn’t have them, there was a report, arrest and being taken under escort to the immediately senior “official”. There, there would be a new report to his superior and a new escort to take you in front of him. There again, always in order, reports, receipts of delivery and acknowledgement of receipt etc. From official to official and from village to village up to the most competent authority, each time there had to be a journey on foot across the rocks of at least five or six hours. There you stayed in detention until the arrival of instructions on your correct political position in relation to EAM in your region. In case of doubt or suspicion you were lost.
In the latter years of the war, a territory where EAM was the state, in every sense of the word used by Engels, existed in occupied Greece: government, ministries, secretaries, bureaucratic hierarchy, tax collectors, police, courts, prisons, concentration camps and even special investigation police under the command of Zoulas and Makriyannis. But above all, there was an army: battalions, regiments, divisions, corps, command posts, headquarters, general staff, kapetanios and political commissars. A regular army with a very strictly military structure, of fifty thousand men. This is without counting the ELAS reserve, with at least fifty thousand other men under arms. It also had cavalry and a navy.
But the popular force organised from EAM in the towns and villages was far superior in number, and its influence extended even further. All that military and political force was under the absolute control of the CPG.
Never had any political party in the country possessed such formidable military and political power, never had any party had so much influence on the masses.
Outside a very limited region in Epirus where Zervas was established and which he controlled, there was no aspect of the struggle against the occupation authorities in the whole of the rest of the country, in the towns or in the countryside, which EAM was not responsible for and which it did not decide on. All the military operations of ELAS came to be led within the framework of the plan fixed by head quarters.
Here are a few facts which illustrate the nature of its military activity.
On 27 April 1944, at Molaï, they killed a German general and three members of his escort. The Germans executed two hundred hostages in reprisals, and a military detachment received the order to kill everyone that they met on the road from Molaï to Sparta. Most of the two hundred hostages who were executed on the First of May 1944 were old militants of Akhronaflpia. Of these, Maniadakis, Ioannidis and Bartzotas had been handed over to the Germans in April 1941.
The next day, they killed two German soldiers in Kyriaki. The Germans executed a hundred and ten hostages and burned the village.
Those who ordered the killing of the general and the two soldiers knew perfectly well that executions of hostages and massacres of innocent people would follow. They knew it because it had already happened hundreds of times.
In response to the killing of men from the army of occupation or agents of the government, the occupiers executed ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred hostages. In response to the destruction of sections of the German or Italian army by the partisans, they massacred the villagers of the region, burning and razing the villages.
In no history of the resistance, in no Memoir of its leaders, can you find an explanation or any kind of justification from a military point of view of this tactic. For sure sacrifices are inevitable in a struggle. And in some cases, they shouldn’t even be prevented, however heavy they are, but only when they are indispensable to the final success. How and in what way did the murder of a few men from the army of occupation contribute to the “liberation of the country and democracy”, when it was certain that thousands of innocents would pay for them, that thousands of villagers would be homeless?
There must surely have been a reason, but it had nothing to do either with the liberation of the country or with democracy. Thousands of innocent poor people lost their lives without anybody knowing why, neither they nor those who killed them.
They killed women because, pushed by hunger or the need to save their children, they gave themselves to the German or Italian soldiers for a tin of food or a crust of bread. One of the highest authorities of “progressive thought” suggested the type of punishment to inflict in such cases. “Mark, he wrote, on their forehead with a hot iron a ‘P’ for perjurer and prostitute”. For the “lover” their crime was a capital one. They had carried out an attack on national dignity, not to mention the danger of bastardising the race. The Glinos book, What EAM is and What it Wants, must remain for the education of future generations, while for sure they are recommended to equip themselves with a gas mask to protect themselves from the poisonous vapours rising from every word and every page.
They killed women because they had washed the clothes of German and Italian soldiers, they killed workers because they worked in German companies.
This “national liberation movement”, as it characterised itself, also liquidated the national minority question, which neither the dictatorships nor the most reactionary governments had dared to do: EAM exterminated the Slavo-Macedonians, and Zervas the Albanians of Thesprotia.
When Badoglio capitulated, an entire Italian division, the Pinerolo division, passed over to the Greek resistance[17]. A popular movement inspired even in a rudimentary way by the most confused and outdated democratic principles would be able to influence the soldiers and make them come over to its side without difficulty. What did the EAM-ELAS, in the name perhaps of “proletarian internationalism”, do? Solon Grigoriadis teaches us in his History (Volume 2, pp. 69-70):
“On the evening of 4 October 1943, in the common head quarters of the partisans[18] at Pertouli, the Italian general Infante was suddenly surrounded by a group of elasites[19] who ordered him to hand over his personal revolver. From that moment that Pinerolo division changed its role: from ally to prisoner. Thus began the final act of the Italian Second Army on the slopes of Pinde.
At the same time, all the sections who had retained their equipment were disarmed by the forces of the First Division of ELAS, without any resistance (...)
The disarmed Italians then suffered a terrible fate. They were abandoned in miserable camps, in hovels or mud huts. The harsh winter of Pinde fell on them like a calamity. Chased from everywhere in a panic by the incessant cleansing offensives of the Germans, abandoned by everyone – by the British, who took their time in giving out the sum of 10 shillings per month allocated for each of them, because of the difficulties of communication, and by ELAS, because of the continual battles. They were cut down en masse. Dozens of dead were collected every day from their bivouacs which all humanity had abandoned, and thrown into mass graves.”
It is a historian who wrote this, a cadre of ELAS and a supporter of EAM. And that is sufficient to illustrate the real content of this movement and the real objective of its leadership.
The same historian informs us that ELAS had the objective of seizing the Italians’ arms, not to use them against the Germans, but so as to have superiority in armaments after the retreat of the German troops, which everyone thought was close. And they didn’t just take arms but also boots, raincoats and blankets. So as to clothe “their own”.
This ELAS operation counts amongst the most bestial and inhuman crimes of the war. It was above all the surest means of preventing the fraternisation of the partisans with the German and Italian soldiers -the prevention of the thing which, in all reactionary wars, provokes panic and terror in all those responsible for the massacre of peoples: their exploiters and rulers. What Italian or German soldier would dare to pass into the ranks of the partisans, knowing that they would be disarmed and robbed, and left to die of hunger and cold ?
In Autumn 1943, we believed that the decisive hour of the war had arrived. In Italy, Mussolini had been overthrown by his own party and the general Badoglio put himself in charge of the government. He first surrendered, and then openly passed over to the Allied side against the Germans. The Italian army was disbanded. Part of it was taken prisoner by the Germans and the majority of them were executed. The others tried to find asylum and refuge where they could. Many houses, in the towns as well as the countryside, opened to them and welcomed them, and so many were saved. EAM didn’t so much as lift a finger: such acts of humanity were unknown and foreign to it.
Insistently, the word went round that the working class had undertaken an autonomous action in northern Italy, that it had seized some factories and that workers’ councils had appeared. We believed then that the October Revolution would finally be followed up, that it was the beginning of the transformation of the fratricidal war between peoples into a war of peoples against their exploiters. The editorial of our journal, Workers’ Front, was entitled: “The Lvov Government”. We saw in the Badoglio government the equivalent of the first Russian government after the February Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar.
At the same time the food and clothing shops closed and the market disappeared from Athens, for purely speculative reasons. The spectre of famine, of the terrible winter of 1941, menaced the capital once again. But this time the people did not let themselves die of hunger. The exasperated masses filled the streets of Athens in immense crowds, with women at the head and mothers in the front line. The doors of shops and warehouses were smashed to pieces and the masses looted the goods and clothing which they found there. In the warehouses of the big shops around Omonia they found an incredible quantity of women’s clothes. The women of Kaisariani, of Polygonos and other poor neighbourhoods helped themselves to plenty.
At the same time a series of strikes broke out with a clear class content. The German soldiers not only didn’t intervene but they looked at the looting of shops and strikers’ demonstrations with the greatest sympathy.
So as to satisfy both the soldiers and the masses and perhaps to prevent dangerous developments, that is to say their fraternisation, the German administration arrested two olive oil merchants, bringing them very quickly in front of a military tribunal, condemning them to death and hanging them in Amerikis Square with a sign round their neck: “Profiteer. Enemy of the people”.
Our group set about an impetuous activity. Thousands of tracts and flyers were circulated. We entered into a greater and greater contact with the masses. We talked to them about the workers’ councils in Italy and about the revolution which had begun and they listened with emotion and enthusiasm.
We actively participated in the pillage of the warehouses. Some comrades forced open one on Mavromichalis Street, full of pastries of the highest quality. People formed a queue and the pastries were distributed in an orderly fashion, without those who distributed them keeping anything for themselves. We broke open another one, in Vathis, full of bars of soap, which were then distributed in order, to each person in turn.
EAM was completely disoriented. What was happening in front of their eyes was not what they expected, was incomprehensible to them. They saw with stupefaction that the situation was slipping from their fingers. They tried to intervene in the looting without succeeding and asked for a part of it for the Partisan Administration (ETA), without obtaining it.
An official from EAM came to the warehouse that we had forced open and where we were distributing the pastries and asked us very severely who we “took the line” from. We addressed ourselves to the crowd and told them that they had to answer this gentleman who wanted to know where we “took the line” from. Laughter, disapproval and booing answered him. The gentleman left and was quite rightly astonished at the indiscipline of people with regard to EAM and the lack of respect for its representative.
Yet all these events were only a fleeting light in the darkness.
We don’t know and we never knew if there were really revolutionary demonstrations in northern Italy. The German troops very quickly seized the whole of northern Italy and that region was proclaimed the “Socialist-Fascist Republic” under the presidency of Mussolini, who German parachutists had already freed. Anglo-American troops progressed from the south of Italy, where the Badoglio government was considered an ally.
The masses had disappeared from the streets of Athens, EAM was perhaps even stronger than before and we, who had for a moment felt the popular wave carry us to the heights, saw ourselves once more isolated and even more against the current.
But this fleeting light was able to show which policy, which slogans and above all which actions could arouse the consciousness of the masses bleeding for the interests of their exploiters. In the masses who had looted the shops of the Greek merchant-exploiters, and in the strikes with a clear class content, the conscripted German workers had seen their brothers, recognised themselves, themselves and their class. But that didn’t last long and it could not have been otherwise in those conditions which were so incredibly contrary to the revolution.
Let’s note then, that in this context, the Unified Organisation of Communist Internationalists of Greece (EOKDE) made its existence known by a lamentable tract talking about associations and cooperatives.
From the beginning of 1944, it was even more obvious that the military collapse of Germany was a simple question of time, and of a time which was very near. On the Russian front, the German troops were being hit severely. The Allied troops progressed in Italy from the south towards the north. The whole of Africa was in the hands of the Allies. In the air the Anglo-Americans had crushing superiority. German cities were bombed relentlessly: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich were turned into ruins. There were more than a hundred thousand dead in Dresden, all of them women, children and old people. The Allies bombed as bestially as the Germans in their time, with even more fury. The American airmen were particularly resolute. Their objective was the working class neighbourhoods. We knew them here too, with the bombardment of Piraeus, when the mortuaries filled up with dead and the hospitals with wounded. Here also it was almost all women, children and old people.
In June 1944, it was the Normandy landings, while the Russian troops swept all before them. From one end to the other, Germany burned. The world of the Twentieth Century became the apocalypse. Hitler committed suicide after killing his wife, who he had only just married. Goebbels committed suicide after having slaughtered his children and his wife. The other Nazi chiefs disguised themselves and tried to run away and hide. An end without glory for those who wanted to conquer the world.
Trotsky wrote that, a second birth being always easier than the first, the proletarian revolution in this war would be easier than in the first. But the war ended and the revolution did not appear in any part of the world.
The principal reason for the absence of the revolution can be found perhaps in the years which preceded the second imperialist war. And even before the 1930s, apart from a few exceptions, on the political scene we only knew of robots deprived of their judgement and critical spirit, who could only march in line and under command, under Hitler, Stalin or some ridiculous dictator or party boss in the other countries. The workers’ movement had been emptied of its substance as an autonomous revolutionary movement and, via the Stalinists, was used for the needs and interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. The way was open to war when, with the help of the Stalinists, the last fires of revolution were extinguished in Spain, France and Greece.
The form, so unfavourable to revolution, taken by the Second World War is a second reason, also very important. The military occupation of almost the whole of Europe by German troops created objective and subjective difficulties for the reconstruction of the movement and the awakening of the class consciousness of the masses never seen before. In the midst of Occupation, they could not see anyone else responsible for their terrible situation apart from the Germans. The bestial measures of the occupation authorities, provoked by the Stalinists in many cases, fed nationalist hatred and reinforced nationalist propaganda.
The Stalinist leader Zevgos wrote in his Journal that history would designate them, him and his own, as traitors equal to Scheidemann and Noske. “Traitor” is not a suitable word. They fought franticly and in the most disgusting fashion against socialism, the revolution and its militants because the interest of the social stratum which they represented, a stratum which is the most enraged enemy of the movement of the toiling masses for their emancipation, imposed itself. They were not mistaken, they knew very well what they were doing.
During this war the Stalinists feared revolution even more than Churchill and Roosevelt did. Their principal objective as German imperialism crumbled was to mercilessly nip in the bud any attempt, any tendency, any suspicion of independent revolutionary action. Stalin, who had spoken five years before publicly and shamelessly about “the rights of poor nations”, meaning Germany and Italy, shouted with all his strength: “Germany isn’t going to fool us anymore with its mantle of socialism, break it”. And the armies which had been unleashed on Europe broke it. In Europe the Russian troops did not act like those of Robespierre or Bonaparte, but like the hordes of the Holy Alliance, of Cavaignac and of Thiers. Their government let them carry on without restraint, reinforcing the sentiment of vengeance for everything which the Germans had done to their country. They advanced irresistibly, sweeping everything before them, destroying, looting, killing, raping, everywhere spreading panic, terror and horror.
Poland, Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria passed under the military occupation of Russia and, at the same time as it was inventing “people’s democracies” and naming puppets as governors, it was plundering them through heavy reparations, dismantling and transporting whole factories to Russia, imposing unfair “treaties” and obliging the population to look after the occupation troops.
From Poland alone – by means of the agreement of 16 August 1935 which obliged Poland to supply coal to Russia at the price of two dollars a tonne, when the price on the international market was sixteen dollars – it sucked one hundred million dollars per year, that is to say a sum which the British imperialists never extracted from all their investments in India. It took a hundred million dollars from Manchuria, which was a Japanese colony, by way of reparations and the “people’s democratic” sister East Germany paid three billion six hundred and fifty million dollars in compensation.
Besides the Stalinist puppets, the most reactionary and corrupt cadres of the old regimes participated in the “people’s democratic” governments set up by it.
Where the installation of Stalinist regimes wasn’t possible, the Communist parties, whether from fear of independent action by the working class, or because they had contracted obligations toward their allies from the cynical division of the world into zones of influence, threw all their strength into the defence of the old regime. In France and Italy they participated in governments of “national unity” and disarmed on behalf of the resistance organisations and all the armed people, re-establishing “order”. They classified strikes as reactionary and in every response to workers’ demonstrations they spoke about the need to first of all reconstruct the “national economy”. That is to say that the workers must tighten their belts and work to build up the regime of their exploiters.
EAM aimed, as was specified at its foundation, at the expulsion of the conqueror and the setting up of a republic. But, despite its imposing military force, unimaginable for a political party, and despite its enormous influence on the masses, it did not achieve either of its two objectives. It did not chase out the conquerors and it didn’t set up the republic.
ELAS “liberated” the country when Germany was militarily crushed and when the German troops were retreating from all the occupied countries. And if there had not existed a single partisan, if none of the events which plunged the country into mourning and despair had happened, the German troops would still have left, as they left Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Yugoslavia, Northern Italy.
Despite everything which has been written and said about the liberation of various towns by the “heroic ELAS”, despite the parades, the “presentation of arms” to “heroic personalities”, we and not a few others know that the Germans had already left the towns that ELAS “liberated”.
What is true for EAM is also true for Tito, who never missed a chance to proclaim that it was not the Red Army which had liberated Yugoslavia, as it had liberated Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, but rather him and his partisans. But Tito as well, and his thousands of partisans, had liberated Yugoslavia when Germany collapsed and when its troops retreated.
The horrific battles on the plains of Normandy, on the steppes of Russia and in its own sky had brought about the fall of Germany. More precisely, the fate of Germany had already been decided on the Russian front, before the Allied landing in Normandy. The armoured columns which had swept Europe had already received severe blows and been subjected to decisive defeats in Russia. The more the Russian people remain passive and submit, the more formidable is their uprising, whether to break their chains, as in 1905 and 1917, or to tighten them as in the Napoleonic era and during the “Great Patriotic War” of 1941-1945. And it was not socialism, which they had tasted for a short while in 1917-18, nor the appeals of Stalin which made them rise up with the ferocious determination of victory or death, but the bestial behaviour of the Nazis and the undisguised plans of Hitler for their genocide and physical extermination. From the moment that the people had risen up with that ferocious determination, nobody could hold them back. Germany would have fallen even without the Normandy landings.
The “liberation” of the country by ELAS is a myth maintained and cultivated by the most “progressive” part of the bourgeoisie so that the patriotic tradition and spirit of the resistance, the greatest obstacles to a revolutionary class orientation of the masses, are maintained.
The survival of the people assured by EAM makes up part of the same myth[20]. EAM only provided the soup kitchens of the International Red Cross with its committees, cooks and distributors.
The question is not one of why EAM did not take power[21], but rather why it gave it up. Well before the German troops left the country EAM was already the only organised political and military force. It exercised real power in the countryside as it did in the towns. That monopoly of power was its constant objective throughout the Occupation. Its army, its armed corps, its divisions, its regiments, its squadrons of cavalry, its command posts, its head quarters were destined for that.
Its well-known military activity against the occupation authorities, everything which thousands and thousands of innocent people had paid for in blood and tears, was something which could be led by small groups of partisans. A decisive confrontation with the German troops was beyond its capabilities and its leadership and its high command never made such a thing the order of the day, nor envisaged it.
The army of EAM, very well organised with a severe discipline, with a majority of brave fighters and capable and seasoned officers at its head, was destined to take over power immediately after the retreat of the occupiers.
And yet, at the last moment, it renounced its principal strategic objective, which it had already realised. Under persistent pressure from the British, after protests, resistance, haggling, it finally ended up with totally unacceptable concessions.
It first of all recognised the Papandreou government[22] as the legal power in the country and participated in it. Who was it made up of? Politicians barely in the consciousness of the people, unknown youths and forgotten old men. It’s Churchill who nominated the ministers. The criterion for the sharing out of ministries by party was their electoral strength in 1936. As if nothing had happened since which could influence the thought, the consciousness and the ideas of the masses. EAM participated with five ministers. But only two were Communists. The three others were uncertain personalities, from those used by the CPG to camouflage itself and present EAM as a front of supposed organisations.
But Caserta[23] made the most monstrous concession. ELAS recognised Scobie[24] as its military leader, certainly with all the responsibilities and powers of military chiefs in time of war. Scobie’s first order after the retreat of the Germans was that ELAS should not enter Athens. And it did not enter even though the majority of the popular masses called for it, expected it and had prepared a triumphal welcome.
They nominated a certain Spiliotopoulos, entirely unknown until then[25], as the military governor of Athens.
The Papandreou government acted according to a very well premeditated plan. It first sent Zevgos, one of the bosses of EAM, into Greece[26] to prevent any “aventurist” action. The government was afraid of the massacre of the tsoliades and the Khites, because its plan envisaged using them against ELAS. And Zevgos carried out his mission. Perhaps it was then that he felt remorse and wrote in his Journal that history would describe them as traitors.
The German troops left Athens on 12 October, after having laid a wreath to the Unknown Soldier. The Occupation had lasted four years[27], six months and five days.
The “national” government of Papandreou triumphantly entered Athens on the 17 October. There were huge demonstrations and rallies. All of Athens was on the streets. Enthusiasm, joy, tears. Papandreou hoisted the flag on the Acropolis. The Prime Minister of the “liberation of the country” could not be surpassed in his speeches: everything that the people wanted, he promised them. But, at the same time that he repeated in each of his speeches that the laocracy[28] would be set up in the country, he prepared in secret with the British the crushing of EAM-ELAS.
How can we explain these climb-downs and concessions which the EAM made towards the British and this government without either strength or influence? Today everyone knows, but even at that time those who knew were already quite a few.
The “Big Three” who, while appealing to the peoples to serve as cannon fodder, promised that after the crushing of German fascism the peoples would be free and could decide their fate themselves, that peace and freedom would reign over the world and that fear and famine would disappear forever, were at present the conquerors and masters of the world, sat down at Yalta, and between morsels of caviar and streams of vodka, divided up the world as they had the vineyards of their ancestors. In the course of this division Greece fell to the British. And Britain firmly decided not to let her go[29].
There is no doubt that the leadership of EAM knew this.
What did the “national” government do?
Inflation rose rapidly, the gold pound went from a few million to a billion and a half drachma. And Svolos[30] will go down in history as the minister who liquidated the domestic public debt with half a drachma. Porphyrogenis was a minister of Labour similar to Gonis, Dimitratos, Bakatselos and Laskaris in every way. He responded to workers’ demands like his French and Italian colleagues, who had first of all to reconstruct the “national economy”. And that Communist minister, to facilitate the reconstruction of the capitalist economy, abolished the law put in place by the Germans which prohibited bosses from laying off workers. From then on the bosses could lay off anybody without justifying it to anyone.
(…)
Our stay in the Internationalist Communist Party of Greece**** didn’t last long, and it could not have been otherwise. Our political differences with this “party” were on the same basis as those that we had with the CPG. Its internal regime was a caricature of Bolshevism. Its political activity nonexistent. Moreover an unbearable atmosphere of hostility towards the members of our group reigned within it. The two other tendencies lined up together in their attitude towards us. The “internal bulletin”, in which we had the right to criticise, and where we had effectively criticised the ICP and the Fourth International, had ceased to appear for a long time. In our internal meetings, we continually asked ourselves these questions: What are we doing here? Why remain? We ran the risk of becoming mouldy in our turn. Then we left in the spring of 1947.
Starting in April 1937, facing the imminence of war, our group had rejected the slogan of “defence of the USSR” and from then openly defended the view that the task of the Russian proletariat in the war was to overthrow the Stalinist regime and to take power. Nevertheless we had never undertaken a critique of Trotsky’s positions on the social nature of the USSR. However, this never had an influence on our practical political action. More exactly, our positions and our action were opposed to what they had to be for a partisan of the Trotskyist theory of the degenerated workers’ state.
Comrade Castoriadis, at the beginning of 1945, and comrade Stam., in 1946, had stated that the political action of the group was incompatible with the theory of the degenerated workers’ state, and that the group had to reject it. But the group as a whole only lined up with that thesis in September 1947. That is to say that this theory for the first time became an object of debate and critique. And the sentiment that we had all felt then turned into irritation and anger against ourselves for our blind faith in Trotsky.
Social democracy had contested the means and the methods of the passage to socialism. In reality it was certainly a question of a social stratum who, thanks to the struggles of the working class, were assured of a privileged place in capitalist society, and who, with their theory of the peaceful and gradual march towards socialism, defended at the same time their privileged position and the society which had assured them of it.
Trotsky, with the theory of the degenerated workers’ state, opposed the very content of socialism.
The historic object of the modern social revolution was not the economic, social and political emancipation of the working class, but the statisation of the means of production and planning. It was a question of a “gigantic social conquest”. Such was the fundamental criterion for assessing the class nature of society; and whether the labouring masses were in power or whether they were subjected to wage slavery, bound and gagged, and the country just a vast concentration camp, did not enter into this estimation.
Socialism would follow afterwards, when the development of the productive forces and the augmentation of the mass of social wealth will have prepared the indispensable material conditions. This is precisely what was already said about capitalism when it was vigorous: that it was preparing the material conditions for socialism. And here we are talking about the historic justification for exploitation. For Marx, between capitalism and classless communist society was inserted the period of class domination by the proletariat. He called this stage socialism. For Trotsky , between capitalism and socialism was inserted the degenerated workers’ state, that is to say the dictatorship of the bureaucracy over the working class.
When Russian troops occupied most of Poland in September 1939, Trotsky wrote that the regime installed by the Russians was progressive, but there existed the danger that it would create the illusion amongst the workers that bureaucracy could play their role in their place. In his proclamation on the war, in May 1940, he wrote that what the Stalinists had done in Poland showed that the strangled and betrayed October Revolution was still alive. The October Revolution for Trotsky was naturally the statisation of the means of production.
But is it really an illusion of the workers that the bureaucracy can replace them in the creation of “workers’” states? The illusion is to believe that such an impossible thing can in reality even happen. Those states which, for Trotsky and the Trotskyists, are “workers’”, rather than “degenerated”, are born without the working class and against it. In this case it is not a question of illusions: all the “workers’ states” born since then and that the Fourth International has saluted in joy and enthusiasm and inscribed in its annals are the deeds of Stalinists. And since the Stalinist bureaucracy is not emancipated humanity but a system of exploitation with statisation of the means of production, the working class became simultaneously a dominant and dominated class. Dominant in the “dialectico-historic” sense of the term, since the means of production are statised, and dominated since it is something else which occupies power in the state, in the means of production, and everywhere else.
Trotsky was the most incompetent and the most incapable theoretician of socialist revolution. He was one of the principal leaders who, by their words and deeds, by “dialectic” and machine guns, barred the way to revolution and placed the workers under the yoke once again.
Our organisation broke all political and organisational links with the Fourth International in the autumn of 1947.
The Second Congress of the Fourth International had an enlarged character and some organisations which were not members of it took part. Comrade Castoriadis represented ours. He set out his views, which were also those of our organisation, on the Fourth International, the USSR and Trotskyism.
[1] “Funnel”, an improvised megaphone which enabled night time speeches to be made from the roof tops.
[2] Panhellenic Organisation of Youth, the youth organisation of EAM.
* Literally, “the declarers” – those political prisoners who had signed a document renouncing communism in return for their freedom during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-41) – Translators Note
[3] The National Democratic (or Republican) League of Zervas.
[4] Greek initials of the Political Committee of National Liberation, the government formed in 1944 by EAM. The PEEA organised clandestine legislative elections across the whole territory in April 1944. But they only had one candidate per district, that of EAM.
[5] A mountain village in the centre of the country.
[6] Bureaucrats of the Stalinist, reformist, trade union and agrarian apparatuses.
[7] Same as 6.
** A reference to the notorious incident, described in Chapter 5, in which the police effectively took over the Greek CP for a while, creating their own central committee, the Provisional Leadership. - Translator’s Note
[8] Literally, the “jumpers”.
[9] The beard, an almost obligatory attribute of the partisans, daggers and cartridge belts were designed to show the continuity with the kleftes of the war of independence.
[10] The guards of the boss of ELAS, the mavroskoufides (“black hats”), wore astrakhan hats taken from an enemy unit which they had massacred.
[11] Zachariadis, handed over to the Germans, had been deported to Dachau.
[12] General Sarafis, one of the principal protagonists of the Venizelist coup d'état of 1935, had tried to create a resistance organisation in competition with ELAS, before being captured by it and passing into its service.
*** Named after their organisation, which was known by the Greek letter “Χ” (pronounced “Khi”), the first letter of the word “Christ”. These fascist killers were good Christians… - Translator’s Note
[13] A colonel who made a second career in the ‘50s leading the nationalist anti-British guerrillas fighting for the unification of Cyprus with Greece.
[14] The third and last “Collaborator” government.
[15] Merlin Street, the headquarters of the Gestapo in Athens.
[16] The local grasses, their faces hidden with masks, pointed out members of EAM.
[17] When Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943, the Pinerolo division, made up of ten thousand men and equipped with modern weapons, stationed in central Thessalia, passed into the zone controlled by the resistance, and its commander, general Infante, negotiated his rallying to the Allied camp with the British and the partisans.
[18] In July 1943, under pressure from the British military mission in Greece, ELAS and EDES (the partisans of Zervas) accepted the creation of a common head quarters of the resistance placed under the orders of the British HQ for the Middle East. This was set up in Pertouli, a village on the mountain of Pinde, to the north east of Thessalia.
[19] ELAS fighters.
[20] EAM, according to some historians, claimed the paternity of the soup kitchens organised by the Red Cross.
[21] Historians and commentators generally pose the problem in these terms.
[22] Georges Papandreou, second-rate liberal politician, former minister, father of Andreas. When the CP founded EAM, it offered the presidency to Papandreou, who stupidly declined the offer. Papandreou was the Greek screen for Churchill. The latter closely followed the evolution of the situation in Greece and personally led British policy in the country.
[23] In the suburbs of Naples. The British head quarters had left Cairo and from then on was in southern Italy. The Caserta agreements were signed on 26 September 1944.
[24] A British general, delegated from the Allied high command.
[25] Spiliotopoulos had been the commander of the gendarmerie in 1941.
[26] From now on the Greek government in exile was installed in southern Italy, where it had followed the British headquarters. Zevgos was one of the two Communist ministers of EAM in this government.
[27] Three, in fact.
[28] Synonym for democracy, with more of a “left” nuance, more plebeian; often translated as “people’s democracy” (in the Stalinist sense of that term). Laocracy, a very vague slogan, was the key note of EAM propaganda.
[29] It was in October 1944, four months after Yalta, that Churchill and Stalin in Moscow divided up the zones of influence in the Balkans between them. Churchill got Greece. The Yalta Conference only took place after the events mentioned here.
[30] University lecturer. Figurehead of the non-Communists of EAM. The “Svolos stabilisation” introduced a new drachma which was equivalent to fifty thousand of the old ones. This devaluation was accompanied by a freeze on wages.
**** Stinas’ organisation had taken part in a “Unification Congress” with the real Trotskyists (Pouliopoulos’ Unified Organisation of Internationalist Communists) in July 1946. Stinas saw no point in this but went along with what the majority of members wanted. They ended up uniting with the Trots in the short-lived “Internationalist Communist Party, Greek section of the Fourth International”.