Revolutionaries Organize Against Brutal Greek Dictatorship

Revolutionaries Organize Against Brutal Greek Dictatorship

From Bulletin Vol. 7 No. 3

After more than three years of repressive measures aimed at beheading the working class, Greece’s ruling clique of colonels still faces opposition at home and abroad—now replenished by young and undefeated militants. 

The Workers’ Internationalist League is building inside and outside Greece to provide the revolutionary leadership so urgently needed to combat the reformists and Stalinists: the main stumbling-blocks to a defeat of the right-wing junta. 

As one WIL, member told us in a recent interview: "We are trying to unite the working class on an all-Greece scale, our task being to overthrow the junta and establish a workers’ and peasants' government." 

An integral role in this fight is played by production of "Oratis Allagis" ("Time of Change"), a monthly newspaper; soon to be printed fortnightly. 

In Greece itself, many older militants have been jailed or are hamstrung by the repressive laws and the well-staffed special police who carry them out. 

The majority are also still under the politically pernicious influence of the Stalinists - though the Stalinist-controlled EDA movement is now banned. 

These same Stalinists were saying, until the day of dictatorship - April 21, 1967 - that a coup was impossible. And it was the EDA’s misleadership of the huge struggles for reform after the liberal Georges Papandreou was made Prime Minister in 1963 that paved the way for the colonels. 

Yet even on the eve of the coup, the Stalinist youth leaders were telling their branches - claiming 65,000 members - that dictatorship could not come.

The result was that the most militant members were caught by the police and asked to sign a declaration refuting communist ideology. The leadership held a neutral position on signing the declaration while secretly giving the word that youth sign. 

Vanguard elements of the youth movement agreed to betray each other so that the police would not arrest lesser-known members. 

There are still between 1,500 and 1,700 militants - young and old, arrested on the night of the coup - who are held without trial. Another 1,500 are under sentence. 

Because of a lack of revolutionary leadership, fighting against the dictatorship has been spasmodic. 

ARRESTS 

Plain-clothes special branch men and women mix with people at dances and football matches - especially where the youth congregate. Many arrests take place on the basis of secret information gained through police infiltration of groups. 

In every locality the police now have two headquarters - their own and the special branch office. 

In industry too, the special branch work as informers on the factory floor. 

The dictatorship had dissolved all trade unions, expropriated union funds and jailed many leaders. It became illegal to be a member of any organization. 

Now there are police - controlled unions, used to further suppress the working class. In many cases elected trade unionists were dismissed. 

The junta has organized the youth into a 20,000-strong military-style prototype of the wartime Hitler youth and Greek fascist youth. 

School pupils are forced to join this organization (the Alkimos) and dress up in uniforms for parades and manoeuvres. Before the coup, the Alkimos had only 1,600 members. 

The other side to this is the hatred of the oppressed youth for the junta. 

They played a big part in the nationwide reaction to the regime when 500,000 people held a spontaneous demonstration at the funeral of Papandreou on November 3, 1968.

Unemployment is extremely explosive. The National Bank of Greece held a competition for 200 posts, and 2,000 took part. 

UNIVERSITY 

To apply for a university place a prospective student has to sign a certificate of social beliefs. Even if an applicant’s parents participated in antigovernment action as far back as 1946, he is banned from a college education. 

Once in the college or university, the student comes under the ever-watchful eyes of the special-branch officers who operate there. 

Many sections of the youth have illusions that "parliamentary democracy" is a solution to ending the repression that leads many of their friends and parents to the police and military torture chambers. 

The majority of the younger people have not experienced the Papandreous of this world, and the Stalinists and revisionists exploit these illusions. 

Young people write slogans on walls and make Molotov cocktails, facing the danger of being shot by state forces. 

There is a difference, though, between what the youth and the liberals mean by "democracy." 

Papandreou was elected on the promise of new liberties. But these never came and the gigantic struggles of 1956 and 1966 took on a revolutionary form. They were misled and betrayed by the "peaceful road to socialism" policies of the EDA. 

It is the lessons of these struggles and the defeat of April 1967 which must be taught and learned in order to direct the revolutionary spirit and ingenuity of the Greek working class, and particularly the youth, behind the political leadership of the Workers’ Internationalist League: to completely unmask the Stalinists and reformists and to organize for the overthrow of the Greek torturers.

2,000 Trotskyists March In London May Day

 

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New transcription of Wohlforth's Theory of Structural Assimilation!

 

New transcription of Wohlforth's Theory of Structural Assimilation!https://t.co/iGIj3KgyQJ

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HO CHI MINH - A POLITICAL ASSESSMENT

(This article definitely bears some of the signs of the adaptations to Asian Stalinism expressed most directly by Michael Banda, yet it is still qualitatively better than the worst of Banda's work.)

HO CHI MINH - A POLITICAL ASSESSMENT 

BY ROBERT BLACK 

The political life and contribution of Ho Chi Minh was rich with contradictions. There can be no doubt that he contained within himself, and came to personify, all the anti-imperialist hatred and fighting spirit of the colonial peoples. This was recognised as much by his enemies as his allies. 

We pay an unstinting tribute to this anti-imperialist tenacity in Ho and recognises that his qualities as a leader have undoubtedly done much to inspire resistance to imperialism, not only in Vietnam and southeast Asia, but throughout the entire colonial and semi-colonial world. 

But a Marxist estimation of his life must go deeper than this. 

An ever-present factor in his mature political career always dragged him back from total victory and enabled the enemies of the south east Asian people to steal back what had been torn from them on the political and military battlefield. 

NEGATIVE

That negative factor was Stalinism’s counter-revolutionary politics. 

Like Mao Tse-tung, Ho instinctively yearned to do battle with imperialism and the internal forces of reaction within his native country. 

But also like Mao, his political development as a communist leader coincided with the ebbing of the European revolutionary tide. Stalinism, not Leninism, became the predominant force in the Communist International after 1923, and it left its indelible mark on all those who were not theoretically prepared to understand and fight it. 

After a short stay in France, where he attended the 1920 Tours Congress of the French Socialist Party (voting with the majority that split to become the French section of the Communist International) Ho moved to Moscow. 

There he studied for three years at the University for the Toilers of East, arming himself politically for his return to Indo-China and the battle against French imperialism. The tragedy of Ho, and with him whole generations of devoted revolutionaries, was that he found himself thrown into political campaigns for which, because of Stalinism, he was politically ill-equipped. 

Ho’s political tutor, with whom he returned to China in 1925, was Borodin, the man responsible for the application of the policy of the ‘‘bloc of four classes’’ in the Chinese Revolution up to the 1927-1928 massacres.

Stalin’s theory of the ‘‘two-stage revolution’’ was foisted on the immature Chinese Communist Farty, forcing it into a suicidal alliance with the Kuo Mintang under the leadership of the anti-communist butcher of the workers and peasants, Chiang Kai-chek. Perhaps Ho, like Mao, learned to distrust the political line of Stalin after the defeat of the first Chinese Revolution. 

If he did not, the events of 1945- 1947 surely must have done. 

The first Gaullist administration of September 5, 1944, contained two Stalinist ministers, Billoux and Tillon. 

The working class was in a revolutionary mood. Many were armed. Only by giving the governmenta more ‘left’? face could the tottering capitalist regime begin to stabilize itself’. 

The return of Maurice Thorez, CP secretary, from Moscow was the signal for de Gaulle to elevate this ‘‘Communist’’ to the position of vice-president until May1947, when the Stalinists were dismissed following a sharpening of the ‘‘Cold War.’’ 

Back in Indo-China, Thorez’s “comrade’’, Ho Chi Minh, having heroically organized the resistance of the Vietnamese people to Japanese imperialism, began to press for the removal of all traces of French colonial influence. After several skirmishes between Ho’s forces and the French colonial troops, large-scale fighting broke out in November 1946. French forces bombarded the towns of Haiphong and Hanoi, with thousands dead and wounded. 

STALINISTS 

The war, which was to end with the crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu, had begun - with no fewer than five Stalinists remaining in the French government. 

More than that, the Stalinist Billoux was Minister for Defence and was personally responsible for the prosecution of the war against the Viet Minh. 

The French Stalinists never resigned from the French government. They were thrown out. 

Right to the end they continued to uphold the ‘‘rights’’ of French colonialism in Indo-China. 

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were on one side of the barricades, Thorez, Stalin and French imperialism on the other. 

But like Mao, Ho remained silent. He never publicly denounced either Thorez or his political tutors in the Kremlin. He was to pay for this silence once again in 1954, when, through the intervention of the Soviet bureaucracy and Molotov, imperialism was able to salvage the southern half of Vietnam from the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu. 

Right to the end, the Stalinist bureaucracy struggled to deflect Ho from his chosen goal of the unification of Vietnam. 

But a stubborn refusal to follow such ‘‘advice’’, even when prompted by an organic loathing of imperialism, is no substitute for a worked out, international revolutionary strategy. 

Ho turned his back on the factional struggles and theoretical lessons of the inter-war years and devoted all his political energies to the Indo-Chinese struggle. 

At a certain level, this concentration paid tremendous dividends, but now its long-term weaknesses are more and more revealed. Like the Chinese Revolution of which it is a part, the struggle in Vietnam has to break out of the confinements forced upon it, not only by imperialism, but by the Stalinist theories of its leadership. 

Ho was a supporter of Stalin’s theory of ‘‘socialism in one country’”’ and though he suffered many times from the practical consequences of that theory when applied by Thorez, Stalin and Molotov, he clung to it to the very end. 

Ho’s persecution of the Vietnamese Trotskyist *movement flowed from that failure to break from the politics of Stalinism. 

The Vietnamese section of the Fourth International was in the vanguard of the struggle against French imperialism, and spearheaded the Saigon insurrection of 1945 against the returning French troops. 

Despite their unconditional, but critical support of the provisional government set up under Ho’s leadership, many members and supporters of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement were killed by the Viet Minh, greatly weakening the common struggle against imperialism. 

We do not forget these crimes committed against our movement by Ho Chi Minh, any more than we seek to play down his very real contribution to the struggle against world imperialism. 

The lesson of Ho Chi Minh’s life is surely that that that all the qualities of militancy and courage (which Ho possessed to the full) are still not enough to bring victory. 

Marxist theory, which today can only be Trotskyism, is the essence of the strategy for victory.

Civil war in Ulster? WITHDRAW TROOPS NOW

Civil war in Ulster? WITHDRAW TROOPS NOW

From Newsletter, August 16, 1969

At the time of writing, 300 British troops are standing by on the outskirts of Londonderry ready to intervene in what has been described as the most serious riots yet seen in Northern Ireland. 

Acting, no doubt, in collusion with the so-called Labour government of Harold Wilson, the Ulster Tories have banned all meetings and marches, thus taking away the basic democratic rights of the working class, both Protestant and Catholic, with one stroke of the pen. 

In what has been described by eye-witnesses as an orgy of unprecedented police brutality, two men have been shot at the height of the street fighting. 

This situation can only be described as one of civil war in which the ultra-right government of Ulster in alliance with Wilson and the Labour traitors have encouraged provocations which will now enable them to bring in the armed forces. 

There was some speculation in Ulster, says the “Evening News” of August 13, 1969, “that the troops may be used to relieve weary police.” This is a formula for the intervention. 

The capitalist press has gone out of its way to describe the disturbances as the results of a holy war between Catholics and Protestants. 

Whilst in some cases it may take this form, it is basically nothing of the sort. The real reason lies in the economic crisis now affecting the six counties and stemming from the worsening position of British capitalism as a whole. 

Chronic unemployment, the threat to jobs, rotten housing, low wages and rising prices have drawn tens of thousands of ordinary men and women into bitter conflict with the so-called forces of law and order. 

The capitalists are determined to crush the Catholic and Protestant workers alike. To do this they drag out all the old prejudices, pageantry and lies from the past. But the truth will out. 

What is at stake is the future of the working class as a whole not only in Northern Ireland, but throughout the length and breadth of Britain. 

That is why it is necessary to organise the maximum mobilisation to force Wilson to withdraw the troops immediately.