A View From The Left-Greek Trotskyists Launch Newspaper

Workers Vanguard No. 1089	6 May 2016

Greek Trotskyists Launch Newspaper

We are proud to announce the publication of the first issue of The Bolshevik, newspaper of the Trotskyist Group of Greece, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The launching of The Bolshevik is a modest but important step in the consolidation of a Greek section of the ICL, whose banner was first planted in Greece in November 2004 with the TGG’s founding. A regular press, even of limited frequency, is essential to our purpose: to cohere the nucleus of a revolutionary vanguard party of the kind that V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks forged to lead the working class to power in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

With Greece mired in a deepgoing economic crisis, the new paper will give the TGG an instrument for intervention in the struggles of the exploited and oppressed. Previously, our Greek comrades had issued multiple pieces under the Spartacist masthead. These included Greek translations of articles on the class nature of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state and our fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. TGG comrades also wrote key articles on developments in Greece, underlining our opposition to the imperialist European Union (EU) and to the bourgeois Syriza party and pointing to the need for a workers party to fight for working-class rule. Many of these articles have been reprinted in Workers Vanguard and other publications of the ICL.

The name The Bolshevik was chosen to stress the continuity of consistent Trotskyism, represented in Greece by the TGG, with the political program that animated the October Revolution. This purpose is mirrored by the insignia on the masthead: the worker’s hammer and peasant’s sickle, overlaid by the number “4.” The hammer and sickle was the symbol of the Soviet state that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution. The four symbolizes our fight to reforge the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938 to continue the fight for world revolution in the face of the Stalinized Communist International’s betrayals.

Unlike elsewhere in Europe, the Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE) remains a mass reformist party with major influence and roots in the working class. In contrast to the various Stalinophobic fake Trotskyists, the TGG does not ignore the KKE, but strives to win its base to genuine communism. With sharp polemics against the class-collaborationist illusions pushed by the KKE and our other opponents, The Bolshevik promises to be a vital tool to this end.

The first issue contains three substantial articles. The front page addresses the need for a revolutionary leadership of the working class in Greece and is combined with a reprint of the “Enough!” call initiated by the TGG in July 2015 (printed in English translation in WV No. 1072, 7 August 2015). At the time that statement was issued, the working masses had just voted down more EU imperialist-dictated austerity in a national referendum. This result showed that workers were eager to fight. The expectation by many working people that the ruling Syriza party would get a better deal from the EU was quickly shattered when Syriza agreed to new starvation terms. Rather than lead workers in militant struggle against the EU at this crucial moment, the KKE leadership echoed the imperialist fear campaign that Greece exiting the euro and EU would be a catastrophe. The Bolshevik article notes:

“It was in the context of this opening for the working class to come forward in struggle that the Trotskyist Group of Greece issued the 17 July call.... It was a call on the workers of Greece and their allies to build workers committees of action to repudiate Syriza’s capitulation to the banks and EU by fighting to get out of the euro and EU and for demands that address the burning needs of the workers and the oppressed. These demands necessarily transcend what is ‘possible’ under capitalism, pointing to the need for a government that will act in the interests of the working people and be subordinated to them. We called for common class struggle of Greek, German and other European workers together against all the EU imperialists! We sought to strike a flint to ignite proletarian struggle.”

Rounding out the contents of The Bolshevik is the back-page article on our struggle against capitalist counterrevolution in Germany in 1989-90 and a reprint of “Thermidor in the Family” from Trotsky’s book The Revolution Betrayed (1936). The former is a reprint of a forum given on the tenth anniversary of the ICL’s fight against capitalist counterrevolution in East Germany, together with an introduction polemicizing against Greek left groups for their refusal to defend the Soviet Union and other deformed workers states. The latter is packaged with a polemic against the KKE for upholding the reactionary institution of the family, as shown by its opposition to civil partnership and the right to adopt for gays. The polemic is reprinted on page 2.

The TGG press is a new vehicle for introducing radical youth and militant workers, along with immigrants and other oppressed layers, to a Marxist program. We encourage readers with Greek-language capacity to subscribe. A subscription costs $2 for four issues and can be obtained by writing to the address: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.