From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece (1924-1949)

From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece (1924-1949)

The document that follows, which is meant to serve as an outline introduction to the rest of this collection, consists of an extract from a much longer article published by Diethnistis (Internationalist) publications in Greece, written during the dictatorship of the colonels and published in 1979. Our English text is a slightly amended version of that contained in Documents of the Workers Vanguard (Greece) under the title of Fifty Years of Mistakes and Betrayals of the KKE (pp.124-59), omitting that part dealing with the period after the end of the Greek Civil War.

The author, Loukas Karliaftis (Costas Kastritis) was born in 1905, and started his revolutionary career as a member of the tendency of Tzoulatis, the left. tendency of the Socialist Workers Party of Greece (SEKE), at the age of 16 in 1921. He has remained a Communist and a Trotskyist ever since. From 1927 onwards he was an organiser for the Archeiomarxists in Athens and the Piraeus and in the neighbouring towns. A shoemaker by profession, he played an energetic part in the early years of the Greek trade union movement. He was sent to Thessalonica in 1930 to organise a municipal election campaign for an Archeiomarxist candidate, organised Workers Step, was arrested, but escaped. He was arrested again in Kavalla (Macedonia), and was sentenced to a month in prison. He was again arrested in Xanthi in Macedonia, and was then exiled without trial. Then he was brought up before a court and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, but escaped on his way to exile.

As a member of the Archeiomarxists he functioned as an organisational link alongside Giotopoulos (Witte) (1901-1965), and in the early 1930s led the Trotskyist campaign for the United Front that gained significant support amongst the working class, even though it was eventually undermined by the Stalinists. As a leading member of the Central Committee-of KOMLEA (the Archeiomarxists, the Greek Section of the International Left Opposition) in 1932 he represented about 50 trade unions led by them in discussions to form a United Front with other trade union leaders. Although he supported Witte in his agreement with Trotsky over the German debacle of 1933 and the need for a new international, when Trotsky broke with Witte he took Trotsky’s side in the dispute and became a leading cadre of the split led by Vitsoris in 1934, which united with the OKDE of Pouliopoulos in 1938 to form the EOKDE, the Greek section of the newly formed Fourth International.

He was again exiled for one and a half months in 1935, and was again arrested and tortured in 1938, spending the next few years in prison camps at Acronauplia and Neokastro on Pylos along with hundreds of KKE (Greek Communist Party) militants. He played an important part in organising the Trotskyists during and after the Second World War, and took an energetic part in the events of December 1944, narrowly escaping assassination by the OPLA (the Stalinist Secret Police) earlier in the year. By then he was bringing out the journal Workers Fight, and secured a majority after the unification congress of the Greek Trotskyist groups in 1946, becoming its General Secretary. In this capacity he was the organisation’s first speaker at the debate held with the Stalinists in Athens in October 1946. He was afterwards cut off from the rest of the international Trotskyist movement due to the civil war and the repression that followed it. The Greek Section led by Christos Anastasiades remained loyal to the International Secretariat of Michel Pablo during the split of 1953, and the Karliaftis tendency broke with them in 1958. When contacts were renewed abroad the document of the International Committee of 1961, World Prospects for Socialism, was translated, and links were made with the International Committee of Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert in 1964, the Karliaftis group becoming its Greek section.

As leader of the Ergatike Protoporeia (Workers Vanguard) along with L. Sklavos, he took an energetic part in the revolutionary disturbances that shook Greece in the summer of 1965, and the group sent representatives to the Third World Congress of the International Committee in 1966. The group split just before the coming to power of the dictatorship of the colonels in 1967, and many of its members were either imprisoned or fled abroad. Continuing his revolutionary activity under the colonels, Karliaftis was arrested and interrogated, but was released due to his age. When the International Committee recognised the group of Sklavos as its official section in 1972, Karliaftis’ tendency was expelled, and when the dictatorship came to an end it had been overtaken in numbers by the organisations loyal to the International Committee and the United Secretariat. It has published a monthly journal, Diethnistis (Internationalist) since 1964, and has produced a large number of pamphlets, as well as translations of the writings of Trotsky into Greek. Karliaftis’ major work, published under the pseudonym of Costas Kastritis, is his ’Istoria tou Mpolsebikismos sten ’Ellada (History of Bolshevism in Greece), published by Ergatike Protoporeia, of which four volumes have appeared to date. The journal from which our text is taken also includes substantial pieces bearing on the history and politics of his organisation, The Balkans: Ingredients of an Explosion (1971), A Criticism of Six Years of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Relation to Its Greek Section (1972), The November Events in the Light of Marxism (1974) on the Polytechnic Uprising, The Bolivian Revolution and the Deviations of the FOR (1971) and The War Question and Pabloite Revisionism (1966).

The latter text, which contains important insights into the history of the Greek and international Trotskyist movement during the Second World War, was also printed in Fourth International magazine (International Committee), volume 8 no.3, Winter 1973, pp.134-6, and was discussed by Voix Ouvriere (the modern Lutte Ouvriere group) in On the Degeneration of the Fourth International. Concerning a text of the Workers Vanguard, and Origin of the Degeneration of the Fourth International in Class Struggle/Lutte de Classe, new series no.1, February 1967, pp.18-26, and no.2, March 1967, pp.14-8. The document on The Bolivian Revolution and the Deviations of the FOR is also to be found in Fourth International magazine (International Committee), volume 7 no.4, Summer 1972, pp.l53-62, and in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, volume 6, New Park, 1974, pp.128-50. It brought forth a rejoinder from Savas Michael, the leader of the Workers International League, the group that had split from Karliaftis’ Workers Vanguard and remained loyal to the International Committee, Workers Vanguard and the Bolivian Revolution, in Fourth International, volume 8 no.1, Winter 1972-73, pp.7-14, reproduced in Trotskyism versus Revisionism, volume 6, pp.151-68, which contains a number of interesting details about the history of Greek Trotskyism and of Archeiomarxism touched upon in the article below. These observations are expanded into an alternative analysis of the history of this period in the Resolution of the Fifth Congress of the Workers International League, Greek Section of the Fourth International (Fourth International magazine, volume 8 no.2, Spring 1973, pp.61-9), and a letter from Nikolaou on behalf of the Workers Vanguard group of Karliaftis (7 February 1973, in Fourth International, volume 8 no.3, Winter 1973, p.134) elicited the response of a full scale historical treatment that should be read alongside this account, in the Reply to Workers Vanguard from the Greek Section of the International Committee (Fourth International, volume 8 no.3, Winter 1973, pp.137-56), and the History of the Greek Civil War (Fourth International, volume 9 no.1, Summer 1974, pp.22-37, and volume 9 no.2, Autumn 1974, pp.61-84)

Karliaftis has also provided a wealth of material on the history of Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece. His La Naissance du Bolchevisme en Grece (two parts, of which only the first is available in English) takes the story of the Greek Communist Party up to 1924, and Trotskyists and Archeiomarxists in the Concentration Camps of the Metaxas Dictatorship (1936-40) and In Devotion to P. Pouliopoulos and the Militant Trotskyists/Archeiomarxists Killed by the Fascists and the Stalinists (in English and French) deal with the war years, from which we excerpt a number of passages below (pp24-37). There are also two editions of his theoretical magazine Internationalist that touch upon this subject, including Andreas Papandreou, l’ex-Trotskyste, Le ‘Declarationiste’ et le Capituleur, and Cannon and the SWP: On the Track of the Social-Betrayers in Front of the Second World War (January 1983), as well as another in English dealing with economic perspectives (July/August 1984).

The same period dealt with here is covered by a personal memoir, Agis Stinas’ Memoires, published by Editions La Breche-PPC, Montreuil 1990 at a cost of 130 francs, translated from the Greek of his Anamnesis, first published in two volumes in 1977 and again under a single cover in 1985. It is this book that was reviewed by Alison Peat in Revolutionary History, volume 3 no.1, pp.44-6. General accounts of the Greek Civil War in English vary in both approach and scope. The policy of the Greek Communist Party appears in such general surveys as Ian Birchall’s Workers Against the Monolith, London 1974, pp.22-3 and 30-2, Adam Westoby’s Communism since World War II, Brighton 1981, pp.24-8 and The Evolution of Modern Communism, Cambridge 1989, pp.142-4, and in a series of articles in Workers Press of 29-31 January 1975. Other general accounts include D. George Kousoulas, The Communist Party of Greece Since 1918, 1956, and Revolution and Defeat: The Story of the Greek Communist Party, Oxford UP, 1965. A right wing view extremely hostile to the Greek Communist Party is W.C. Chamberlin, Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Greek Communist Party, Washington, 1963. Stalinist accounts are to be consulted in M. Sarafis and M. Eve, Background to Contemporary Greece, 1990, and Dominique Eudes, The Kopetanios, New Left Books, 1972, a useful description written from a Maoist/guerrillarist point of view, which can be supplemented by the remarks of Vafiades (‘General Markos’) in the interview published under the title of The Crimes of Greek Stalinism, in Labour Review, volume 7, no.4, November 1983, pp.26-30. The grisly story of the fate of the refugees in the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’ and the Soviet Union comes out in a review of Thomas Dritsos’ Why Do You Kill Me, Comrade? which was printed in The Atrocities of Greek Stalinism, in Labour Review, volume 7 no.6, January 1984, pp.26-9. The Greek Trotskyists’ own overview of the Civil War appears in The Present Situation and Our Tasks, printed in July 1949 in Workers Fight, the clandestine organ of the International Communist Party of Greece, and translated into French in La Trahison stalinienne en Grece, in Quatrième Internationale, 7th year, volume 7 nos.8-11, October/November 1949, pp.33-8. There are also earlier and shorter accounts in Terror in Greece (Workers International News, volume 6 no.1, October 1945, pp.l7-9) and The Guerrilla Movement in Greece' (signed ‘GD’, in Workers International News, volume 7 no.4, June 1948, pp.11-6), both of them from Workers Fight, along with a first-hand report by Alice Condos, Inside Greece, in Socialist Appeal (Britain), no.29, mid-August 1946. A few other accounts exist dealing with the civil war in its earlier phase, but with no indication that they rely upon any first hand reporting. Among them we might mention that appearing in Fourth International magazine in 1944, which was reprinted as From Greece’s Revolutionary History in Labour Review, volume 9 no.2, September 1985, pp.21-38, and Civil War in Greece in Fourth Internationol (SWP), volume 6 no.2, February 1945, pp.36-49. A few more details of the Stalinist murders and the repression began to appear in the Trotskyist press abroad after contact was re-established in 1945. Trotskyism in Greece, published in the Socialist Appeal of the British RCP (mid-August 1945) speaks of the shooting of 254 Archeiomarxists and Trotskyists in Thessalonica, and a little more information comes to light in Inside the Fourth International: Greece, in Fourth International (SWP), volume 6 no.10, October 1945, p.319.

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The domination of the Thermidorian regime of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the bureaucratisation of the regime, the overthrow of the soviet system, the revision of the Constitution of October, the bureaucratic structure of the plan, the industrialisation (at first at snail’s pace, later at maximum) and collectivisation, and the incorporation of the kulak into Socialism (“Kulaks enrich yourselves”), the crisis in the relations between town and country (the grain strike), concessions to the bourgeoisie, etc, and the general revisionist line of Stalinism, encapsulated in the reactionary theory of ‘Socialism in one country’ – all of this isolated the position of the Soviet Union, strengthened restorationist elements (the kulaks) and along with the threat of external intervention, led the Soviet Union to the brink of the abyss. The Bonapartist regime of Stalin destroyed democracy, abolished workers’ control, annihilated hundreds of thousands of party members and carried out an unprecedented orgy of crimes.

It imposed its bureaucratic, revisionist and counter-revolutionary methods within the Comintern as a whole, and it went down in history as the organiser of the defeats of the workers’ movement, beginning with the USSR.

In Greece, the Stalinists placed themselves at the service of the Kremlin bureaucrats, supporting their criminal tactics and their suppression of all the old Bolshevik and Trotskyist vanguard, as well as subjugating the new generation, but they were also able to develop by exploiting the authority of the USSR and the traditions of the October Revolution.


Rise

The rise of the Stalinist leadership after 1924 over the KKE, to begin with through Khaita, the Secretary of the local committee of Athens, occurred in a period of a general offensive and domination by the Kremlin triumvirate against the Comintern parties, a period of defeat for the Bolshevik-Trotskyist tendency of the world Communist movement, and of the predominance of Thermidor in the USSR. It occurred after the major defeat of the proletarian revolution in Germany in 1923, without a fight, thanks to the rightist evaluation of the situation by the Zinovievist-Stalinist administration of the Comintern and of the Brandlerite leadership of the German party, in a period in which the Stresemann government thought itself to be the last government of German capitalism.

In Greece, Stalinism rose along with the retreat and defeat of the great general strike of 1923, which was drowned in blood by the ‘democratic’ dictatorship of Plastiras, and the retreat of the movement for the transformation of the war into a revolution. The first Social Democratic rule of Georgiades-Sideris [1] choked off the enormous rise of the mass movement caused by long-term military adventures, as well as by the influence of the October Revolution. But the development was dialectical. The struggle against the war and the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government to solve the problems offhe masses raised to the forefront the old fighting tendency of Pantelis Pouliopoulos and his elite co-workers. Pouliopoulos became secretary of the KKE, and the OKNE [2] was in the hands of the Pouliopoulos tendency. The old fighting spirit on the basis of the October Revolution penetrated to the tiniest villages. Similarly, from the war rose the revolutionary movement of the war wounded, which was dependent on the Archeiomarxist organisation and was headed by S. Verouchis [3] (the Stalinists tore him to pieces during the Nazi occupation) who led the General Confederation of Disabled and War Veterans.

The ultra-left, adventurist line of the Comintern in 1924-25 cost the movement new defeats with the coups in Estonia and Bulgaria, and sent the Greek workers’ movement into a temporary new retreat after its rise in 1925. This ultra-left lurch was followed by ultra-rightism.

From the Fifth Congress of the Comintern the Stalinist bureaucracy sought allies outside the proletariat, in the pseudo-peasant ‘International’, in the Macedonian-Bulgarian Federalists, in the left democrats, in the English trade union officials, etc. In China, the alliance with Chiang Kai-Shek, and Wang Ching Wei and his officers, the liquidation of the Communist party into the Guomindang, and the Menshevik-revisionist line of the bourgeois democratic revolution, led the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 to betrayal, and brought calamity to the Canton uprising (30,000 were victims of Stalin’s friend, the butcher Chiang).

In Greece, the right zigzag was linked with adventures by the deformed Stalinist tendency, semi-alliances with Plastiras [4] against the Metaxas-Gargalides [5] movement (instead of an independent KKE intervention) and with proposals for collaboration with the ‘democratic’ Papanastasios [6] the murderer of the workers, and against the Pangalos dictatorship, on the proposals of Zachariades [7] in Salonika and of Khaites from exile in Anafe [8] for the open support of the KKE for the dictatorship.

The rightist zigzag of the Stalinists culminated in slogans of support to ‘bourgeois democracy’, and of the ‘pure democracy’ of Khaites and Zachariades (1926).

With this adaptation within the confines of capitalist ‘democracy’ they closed off the halting rise of the movement that occurred after the war and helped the bourgeois system overcome the great postwar crisis of Greek capitalism.

In contrast with the politics of self-determination up to separation for the oppressed nationalities, according to the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, Kolarov and Dimitrov denounced the Greek delegation of Pouliopoulos-Maximos for opportunism, and imposed the unrealistic slogan: “For a United and Independent Macedonia and Thrace”.


Contradicted

The slogan was completely unrealistic and contradicted the Leninist line of selfdetermination, which presupposed support to the nationally oppressed masses who had already begun fighting, as was the case with the Macedonian nationality, who included those inhabiting areas in Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, but who did not have a basis within the solid mass of Greeks in the Macedonian-Thrace area. Thus almost ail the KKE cadre were sent into exile on a programme of independence for Macedonia-Thrace, and Pouliopoulos, the secretary of the KKE, was taken to court with the threat of execution, where he gave an heroic defence of the line of self-determination. To save the honour of the KKE the slogan was withdrawn. But the KKE disintegrated.

They used demagogy – for pure reformism – against all those who thought the slogans on the ‘national’ question were wrong, and “those who later spoke of the simple protection of the minorities in the past elections” as New Beginning put it in 1926, had betrayed the Leninist principles of self-determination up to separation. They called them ‘rightist’ – they who only recently had supported Pangalos and were now supporting ‘left democracy’. These were “vulgar opportunists”, said Pouliopoulos in New Beginning.

After the fall of Pangalos, the Stalinists in the events that followed opened up a foul and dishonest slander campaign and tirade against the KKE secretary Pouliopoulos. The split that opened up in the ranks of the KKE in exile from which Trotskyism emerged could have been avoided. They recruited Smeral and Remmele, and they isolated and expelled Pouliopoulos as a ‘rightist’! The expulsion of the secretary of the KKE followed the expulsion of the Secretary of the Comintern, Zinoviev, and the rise of the liquidationist operations of the clique that ruled in the Kremlin among all the Communist parties in the world. In other words, they expelled the most enlightened, internationalist and advanced Marxist revolutionaries. They dissolved the movement of the War Veterans. Thus they sank into the swamp of opportunism. The victory against the internationalist left was due to the low political-theoretical level and to the concentration of petty-bourgeois and even lumpen elements due to the unceasing degeneration of the KKE.

The number of major strikes declined significantly between 1920 and 1930. The trade union movement was split by the pseudo-Socialists, and the split was formalised with the founding of the United Confederation.

The ‘third and last period’ of capitalism followed, which was the ‘Third Period of the betrayals of Stalinism’. The noncombative ‘combative demonstrations and political strikes’ brought the KKE to its knees. The trade unions fell to pieces. The strike wave was destroyed, and the prisons and barren islands filled up, and all with nothing to show for it.

The Stalinists thought that the relatively short economic boom would be a longterm stabilisation. But the great crisis of 1929-30 astonished them. On their evaluation of this they framed the politics of the ‘Third Period’.

Pouliopoulos, after his return from the Fifth Congress, defended himself firmly against the dishonest and disruptive activities of the fraudulent Stalinists and started a fight against the bourgeoisdemocratic orientation. After his expulsion he started the Neo Xekinema (New Beginning), a development towards Trotskyism which closed with his legendary death in Nezero by the shots of a Fascist officer in June 1943.


Excelled

In the meantime, in 1924 the Stalinist Khaita tendency had excelled itself and expelled from the KKE General Council the Archeio leader, Tzoulatis. [9] Tzoulatis, together with Ligdopoulos, the first delegate to the founding congress of the SEKE was a continuator of the Communism group which had raised high the banner of the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky, fought for the victory of the October revolution, and for the 21 Conditions, the first documents of the Third International and the basic classic work of Marxism, and had completed the union of the Greek movement with the Third International. From 1923 it published the Archives of Marxism, the theoretical organ that supplied the original movement with Trotsky’s documents Whither Russia? and Where is Britain Going?, and the fight against the Stalinisation of the KKE which was called ‘Bolshevisation’, showed the firm orientation of the Archeio on the side of the International Left Opposition.

Together with Tzoulatis, dozens of Trotskyists were expelled, betrayed by the apostate Apostolou. [10] (Among these were the secretary of the largest trade union group of store clerks, Karliaftis, and the majority of the Youth groups in Athens.)

The pogrom of expulsions in 1924 also included the party organisation in the Piraeus, for its ultra-left line during the 1923 strike, with the slogan “Seize the ships” directed towards the sailors. Along with them was the Seitanidi group Towards the Masses which took its name from a similar slogan of the Comintern.

The origin of all these expulsions undoubtedly lay in the Stalinist Kremlin and they were carried out by the Stalinist faction of Khatia and company.

During the period after Pangalos (1927-30) Trotskyism developed. The Neo Xekinema (New Beginning) of Pouliopoulos discredited the degenerated leadership of the Stalinist KKE. It raised questions about the great split between Stalin and Trotsky. It noted the degeneration of the KKE and foresaw that Archeiomarxism would contribute cadres to the movement of the future. But it also fought against the particular character of Archeiomarxism and its liquidatory work against the KKE.

Spartacus put into action the slogans of the New Beginning – for the creation of a serious Communist Party upon a correct basis. They centralised a staff of coworkers unrivalled in their theoretical and political formation. They declared their solidarity with Trotskyism, and publicised the Declaration of the 83. They also gave us the rich documents of the International Left Opposition, and thus raised the level of the movement. And the chief coworkers of Pouliopoulos such as Nicolis, Maximos and others became distinguished at all levels of the class struggle.

The Spartacists revealed the disastrous results of the ‘Bolshevisation’ of 1924 (with the introduction of 5,000 new members and the fall in the revolutionary level of the ranks of the KKE) which was nothing but part of the Stalinisation of the KKE.

During this period of 1927 to 1930, despite the relative ‘stabilisation’ which according the the Stalinists was an ‘organic stabilisation’, we had an intense crisis in prices and wages which precipitated strike struggles.

The tendency of the Archeiomarxists – of Trotskyist orientation – entered into open trade union work. Dozens of unions passed into their hands, more than 10 unions in Athens and as many in Thessalonica. They took over the Kokinias Local Centre in the Piraeus and the Local Centres of Podaradon and Kaisarianis in Athens. They organised important strikes such as the one at Lipasmate. They led the industrial strikes at Kokkaldikou and in Keremidadon, strikes against which the army was mobilised.

Equally heroic were the strikes of the bakers with Trotskyists in the leadership headed by Soula-Sakko, of the shoemakers (headed by Lampi, who went over to the Spartacists) within the context of the general strike which the Stalinists led, and of the confectionary workers in the industrial factories. They led strikes in Salonika, in Agrinni, in Patras, etc.

The strangling of democracy and the shameless outbursts of insults against the ‘Archeio-Trotskyists’ as “traitors” and “fascists” led to a civil war within the trade unions.


Decline

Unacceptable methods were used by both sides, both by Stalinists and Archeiomarxists. They reflected the decline of the movement due to the degeneration of Stalinism from the political programme of Bolshevism, whose principles only Trotsky’s Russian Opposition could supply. The people who hissed Trotsky in his first oppositional demonstrations and did not scruple to label Pouliopoulos with insults of “betrayal” went to the extent of murdering Archeiomarxist trade unionists, the baker Georgopapadato and the shoemaker Lada. Georgopapadato and Lada were the first martyrs of the Trotskyist movement in our country.

The accumulation of defeats and the crisis of the CPSU and the Comintern with the split of Zinoviev and Kamenev could not but influence the KKE, where we had the split between Spartacus and the Stalinists. The regime of KhaitaEftihiadi-Zachariades was overthrown and replaced by the regime of Theos and Siantos, which also fell and was succeeded by Zachariades (the GPU had the last word on these changes).

The Archeiomarxists fell into the crisis of the ‘Third Situation’ of 1927, which on the one hand expressed the tendencies of a political development which began to take place and on the other hand the influence of Stalinism within the Left Opposition.

In 1929 a ‘factional crisis’ broke out, which was led by Soula. In essence there were no programmatic or tactical differences, but only organisational problems. To tell the truth, these problems were caused by a lack of democratic centralism and by the personal and autocratic regime which Giotopoulos, the successor of Tzoulatis, had imposed upon the Archeiomarxists. Furthermore, there was a lack of a clear programme, which only the platform of the ILO of Trotsky was able to provide to rearm its Greek adherents. But these two tendencies were the most proletarian of the few that still existed in the international movement. On the other hand, according to Pouliopoulos, there were in the KKE a large number of members drawn from the lowest elements of the proletariat, from the lumpen proletariat and from the petty-bourgeoisie with an anti-proletarian psychology.

Finally, the group led by Pindaros, which was called ‘Democratic Centralism’, in fact launched such a perspective itself in 1930. The affiliation of the Archeiomarxists to the ILO was necessary in order to make democratic centralism work.

A crisis hit Spartacus during the same period. But this crisis was more general, and it had its roots in the deeper turmoil that was occurring in the Soviet Union, due to the bureaucracy’s betrayal of the revolution.

In 1930 Spartacus made a statement: At no other time – it said – had the collapse of the KKE become so catastrophic. At no other time was the retreat of Spartacus so great. At no other time was the Archeiomarxist group so strong.

In fact, as the events of 1930 showed, the Archeio-Trotskyists took the initiative of the unemployed struggle away from the KKE. From large meetings, drawing in over 1500 unemployed in Athens and as many in Thessalonica,they formed their 50-member committee in Athens and their 30-member committee in Thessalonica and mobilised wide layers of unemployed for bread and jobs.

A meeting near the Acropolis of between 3,000 and 4,000 unemployed people was drowned in blood. In Thessalonica, a meeting at the Fountain was broken up in a three hour long struggle with hordes of mounted police.


Official

In 1930 the Archeiomarxists became the official section of the ILO. The competition that took place in 1927-28 between the Archeiomarxists and Spartacus to become the official section of the International Left Opposition in Greece tended to favour the Archeiomarxists. Before the astonished eyes of the ILO representatives when they came to Greece, hundreds of militants demonstrated, devoted adherents of Leon Trotsky, who were Archeiomarxists who accepted Trotsky’s platform, and agreed to unite with Spartacus. But Spartacus refused to unite unless the Archeio disavowed its past. Thus it remained outside the ILO. The Archeiomarxists assumed the name of Bolshevik-Leninists.

The crisis of 1930 brought on a new upsurge. The dilemma of Fascism or Communism was once more on the order of the day. Germany was now the key to this situation, said the famous pamphlet of Trotsky.

The retreat of the KKE from proletarian revolution, the breaking of the United Front against Hitler’s rapid rise, the ultra-leftism, the theory of ‘social Fascism’ which obstructed the class front, the defeatism of “first Hitler, then us”, all ruined the movement and brought Hitler to power without a fight. Centrism was transformed into opportunism.

The campaign of the Trotskyists of Pali ton Taxeon (Class Struggle), of Spartacus, and of the Leninist Opposition for the united anti-Fascist front, and Trotsky’s famous What Next? and The Only Road, which the Bolshevik-Leninists published, and the general upsurge of the workers, compelled the KKE to make a turn, at the eleventh hour. But yet again their line split up the united anti-Fascist front. Now they talked of the ‘United Front from below’.

The struggle of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Archeiomarxists) within the trade unions for the programme of the United Workers Front won over substantial forces at the expense of the KKE. If the Spartacists had not refused to give them the four votes they carried, the whole Workers’ Centre in Athens would have passed over to them from Kalivas’ hands.

In 1933, the Bolshevik-Leninists, being at the head of the Workers’ Centre is Kalamata, led the great general strike, which was smashed although the militarists could not assert their control over all the sections of the army. Here the KKE was led by Manolea, who was well known as a member of parliament, but who passed over into the service of the Metaxas dictatorship like a common agent.

With the revolutionary upsurge, in the first student strike of 1929, which lasted 50 days and shook the university and the state, the Archeio-Trotskyists with their organ Student headed by K. Anastasiadis and Pliako and 20 or so other militants pushed aside the Stalinists led by the Velouchiotis-Klaras [11] brothers, to take the leadership of this strike.

The Trotskyists fought side by side with the Stalinist OKNE (Communist Youth Organisation of Greece), which started to decay and degenerate, whereas previously it had great struggles and great gains to its credit.

A discussion meeting took place, with Vitsoris as speaker for the official organisation, Pouliopoulos for Spartacus, and a representative of the Stalinists, where the opponents of the Workers’ United Front, the Stalinists, were hissed.

In the trade union movement, all the tendencies organised for the United Workers’ Front. A high level meeting took place between Kalomiris, Stratia, Dimitratos and the Kalivas, and the representatives of the trade unions of the Bolshevik-Leninists, Karliaftis and Sakkos. But the Stalinists and reformists attacked the Workers’ United Anti-Fascist Front in Greece as well. With the historic defeat of 1933, which led to the slaughter of thousands of anti-Fascists, the storm of counter-revolution in Europe, and the threat of war, Trotsky declared that any hope for the rebirth of the Comintern and its parties was lost. The parties that were unable to rise above this seismic catastrophe died.

Now he raised the banner for the creation of new parties and a new International.

In Greece, the ‘Bolshevik’ tendency of Vitsoris, Karliaftis, Theodoratou, Sakkos, Papadopoulos and Verouchis was the first to raise the banner of the Fourth International. It declared that the KKE had died along with all the Communist Parties of the Third International, and it started to build the Revolutionary Party of the New International.


Slide

The decisions of the Sixth Plenum of the KKE in 1934 brought about a general abandonment of an orientation towards the proletarian revolution, and a slide into the anti-Marxist politics of class collaboration, along with the beginning of the class collaborationist Popular Fronts. The passing over of the KKE to the strategy of the ‘democratic dictatorship’ of workers and middle and poor peasants, not as Lenin had understood it, but with the incorrect form of the Stalinists (for a regime intermediate between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and that of the working class) led our workers’ movement to great catastrophe and defeats, and confirmed the death of the KKE as a revolutionary organisation.

The Trotskyists, with an article in Class Struggle, and especially with the famous document of Pouliopoulos, showed with firm arguments that Greece was not semifeudal but a capitalist country, with all its relative backwardness. They discredited the view that “there do not exist the necessary minimum material conditions for the Socialist revolution”, with the conclusion that the unfinished bourgeois-democratic tasks will be solved only by the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the model of the Permanent Revolution. But the betrayals continued without end.


The KKE, allying with the Liberal Party in 1935 and rejecting the United Worker-Peasant Front against reaction, helped the Venizelists [12] to deceive the anti-Fascist masses and to prepare easily even from 1935 their compromise with the deposed king and restore him. When he was restored, the Popular Front (KKE) sowed dire illusions in the masses that “a new period of liberal idylls is opening up” and officially went and kowtowed to the palace. (Pouliopoulos, The Popular Front in Greece).

In the context of class collaboration, in 1935-36 the KKE renewed the collaboration of the past decade with the ‘democrats’ and the ‘democratic’ officers and dictators, launched the slogan of a ‘democratic coalition’, signed the Sklavena-Sofouli accord and supported the Liberals in parliament, who went on the rampage with their anti-working class politics at the expense of the masses, for example the Idionym Laws. Rizospastis [13] demanded a government of the KKE, Papanastasios and the anti-Fascist officers!

In May 1936 a general strike of tobacco workers broke out and extended into a general strike in Thessalonica, and Metaxas' regime murdered strikers. Thus a revolutionary uprising of the masses was provoked. The murderers locked themselves in the police departments. The bourgeoisie panicked, and while Trotskyists like Pantazis called for a government of tobacco workers, the Stalinists (Theos) betrayed the strike with the intervention of the liberals in Parliament. Metaxas headed towards a dictatorship without facing any opposition.


Collusion

The establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship was a result of the collusion of the Court and the Premier to hold back the ascent of the working class movement as it manifested itself in the general uprising of 1936, and to prepare the “internal front” for the coming war. The dictatorship would not have triumphed if the workers’ movement had not been castrated by the Popular Front. The KKE curbed the working class, and instead of sharpening and broadening the struggle against monarchic-capitalist reaction, it blunted the edge of the class with the conciliationism of the Popular Front. In the final analysis the KKE became the basis of victory of the Metaxas dictatorship.

Then came the Second World War. The theory that the Popular Fronts would avert war was shown to be mistaken. The Popular Fronts stifled the class contradictions, and the bourgeoisie, safe in the rear, felt safe to enter the war.

In the beginning the Kremlin rejected relations with Hitler. But then the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed. The Stalinists could not believe it. Then, however, they began their new tune: for the “poor” and “anti-plutocratic” countries against the “glutted” imperialists. These anti-Fascists passed into the service of National Socialism and of its finance capital, and stifled the anti-Fascist sentiments of the masses. When Hitler broke the non aggression pact, the Stalinists made a 180 degree turn. Now they allied with the Western imperialists. They now discovered that the war of the Western Allied imperialists was “progressive” and “anti-Fascist”, and they made a holy alliance with the bourgeoisie of their “own” state in favour of bourgeois democracy. They now passed over into support for the war. They exploited the pro-Soviet and anti-Fascist mood of the masses and brought over the oppressed onto the side of “our allies”. All the ‘Socialist’ and ‘Communist’ parties betrayed disgracefully the traditions of proletarian internationalism.

In Greece Zachariades called on the workers to submit to the ‘fascist’ Metaxas in order to fight Mussolini and Hitler, and to defend with their blood the bosses’ fatherland! The KKE became even more chauvinist than the parties of the extreme right! With the “theory of the two poles” Zachariades justified the double dependence of the politics of the KKE upon the Soviet bureaucracy and upon British capitalism: “In the war a realistic foreign policy for the EAM and the PEEA [14] would have to move between two poles: the European Balkans with the Soviet Union at its centre, and the Middle East with its centre in Britain. A correct policy would be to tie together these two poles.” (Zachariades, Plenum, 1945). In reality this double dependence was leaning only to one side, because the entire organisation and policy of the Stalinists “against Hitlerism” came under the direct control of the General Staff of the Middle East. (With the necessary capitulation to sterling of ELAS as well as Zervas). [15]

During the Metaxas dictatorship and in exile, in the prisons, on the barren islands and in the concentration camps, the Trotskyists became united. The two related tendencies from which Trotskyism arose – the Spartacus-Pouliopoulos tendency, and the New Road tendency of Vitsoris, Kastritis and Theodoratou – united.

Once more, in the Second World War as in the First, Pouliopoulos was to be found in the anti-war, anti-capitalist, internationalist camp. The crisis of 1930 had brought him to the forefront against the coming storm of Fascism and war. He became the pole of attraction for all the cadres who had originated front Archeiomarxism, and later from the factions that had gathered around the KEO and the Leninist Opposition of the KKE (LAKKE), whose leaders were Soula and Pablo. [16]

With the unification Pouliopoulos now became the unquestioned leader of all the Trotskyists who remained loyal to the Fourth International, and he fought ceaselessly against all the social chauvinist opportunists who capitulated during the war.

The slogan of the Trotskyists was elaborated by Pouliopoulos in June 1937:


Independent revolutionary struggle for the establishment of a government of workers and peasants – that is the direction of struggle in the period through which we are passing, and only thus will the workers be saved from the catastrophe and horror of war.


United Front struggle for the overthrow of the monarchist dictatorship in Greece, for the imposition of the immediate political and economic demands of the workers, and for the speedy preparation of the rule of the workers and peasants.

For Marxists the war was not progressive for the two blocs outside the Soviet Union, as the social-traitors trumpeted. As Lenin wrote: “War does not cease being imperialist because charlatans and petty-bourgeois philistines throw out a sugared slogan. War is an extension of the politics of finance capital. The fundamental point is to know what class is carrying out the war. War is imperialist when it is carried out by the bourgeois class for its predatory goals.”

Pouliopoulos added: “There is no greater deception than that which is committed by Stalinism and Social Democracy with the propaganda of the so-called ‘anti-Fascist war’.”

The participation of the Soviet Union on the side of Western imperialism did not modify the character of the war of her imperialist Allies.

During the occupation the most shameless social-patriotism was shown by the so-called resistance movement of the KKE, EAM, and ELAS, with the slogans of “struggle against the occupying forces” and for the “victory of the Allies”. We declared the occupation to be a phase of the continuing war. Its character had not changed. Neither was the question of ‘national uprising’ or ‘national liberation’ posed. The deception of the masses with pro-Soviet and anti-capitalist tendencies, who had been led into support for the war of the western imperialists and the domestic bourgeois class, was the most dishonest deception of the masses, in contrast to the Leninist lines of transforming the war into civil war, and for the defeat of ‘our own’ country.

Lenin wrote: “The national question in the imperialist epoch is characteristic of colonial and dependent countries which are permanently dependent on the imperialist governments.” “The temporary occupation of Europe by Hitler’s troops”, wrote the Internationalist [17] of August-September 1965, “did not create a national question, just as the now permanent occupation by the ‘Allied’ troops does not create a question of national liberation.”

Trotsky, as a result of the occupation of half of Norway by Hitler, declared that this occupation did not change our slogan of transforming the war into civil war, exactly because the temporary character of an occupation does not create a permanent colonisation and thus the question of national liberation.

The first guerrilla war of ELAS was an extension of the social-patriotic defence of the bourgeois state, according to Zachariades, of Greece under the ‘Fascist’ Metaxas. Its goals were not Socialist, but completely nationalist, patriotic, against merely the Axis powers, and chauvinist.


Chariot

The pro-Soviet demonstrations of the KKE and ELAS leadership were in the spirit of pro-Allied declarations, pro-American, pro-English and pro-French, with which they aimed to mislead the masses who had confused pro-Soviet tendencies, and to tie them to the chariot of the war.

The Trotskyists were defenders of the Soviet Union, but with the only valid means, that of revolutionary anti-capitalist class revolution and of the transformation of the war into revolution in the capitalist countries, not by the shameless submission of the Communist parties to the governments of the capitalist countries.

The basis of the ELAS forces was plebeian cadres from the countryside, because basically only those drugged by the nationalist slogans of the social-traitors would volunteer (another way being forced recruitment). The ‘ELAS Reserve’ meant in practice placing in reserve the proletariat of the cities. Naturally many proletarian fighters went over to guerrillaism because they were misled, still believing in the Stalinists.


But the military aid that such groups offer to the Soviet Union is insignificant. On the other hand, destroying the class thought of the workers, developing chauvinism, tearing the workers away from their struggle, sowing splits among them, and turning them against the German soldiers, these groups disarm the working class, and tie the German proletariat to their bourgeoisie and to Hitler. And they prepare the destruction of the German and world revolution. (Thesis of the 1944 Conference of the Fourth International).

But the organised groups, militarily disciplined, despite the misled masses of leftist combatants, were “objectively in goals and action, militarist, nationalist, basically counter-revolutionary, and in the service of national capitalism and of Anglo-American imperialism.” (Thesis of the 1944 Conference of the Fourth International).


Aimed

The methods of ELAS had no relation to the Leninist tactic of revolutionary defeatism, basically the destruction of the bourgeois state, defeat of ‘one’s own’ country, arrest of the officers, fraternal action at the front, and soviets in the army, but they aimed at the destruction of all Germans, as the Kremlin said, sabotage and the victory of the national army, etc.

The tactics of ELAS were not the relentless struggle of classes but a compromise of all parties, of Kanellopoulos [18] and Papandreou, as far as an agreement with the counter-revolutionary guerrilla groups of Zervas, and the ‘democrats’ of Psarou, with the blessing of the English staff. The slogan was for a National Front and a national government.

The Lebanon, Caserta and Varkiza treaties were treaties signed by the leadership of EAM/ELAS. The Trotskyists condemned them. They were beneath the contempt of all the militants of the movement. It was simply the logical extension of guerrilla nationalism. It was not by accident that de Gaulle congratulated the Stalinist national resistance.

The feelings and the struggle of the masses against Fascism, like those in favour of peace and against war, are progressive. They are of a spontaneous character, an expression of the inevitable revolt not only against the Fascists but against the domestic bourgeoisie, one of whose sections identified itself with German and Italian Fascism.

The duty of Trotskyists was to sharpen these tendencies of the masses, and to orient them towards class and Socialist goals. In this sense they were found at the head of strikes (mainly those of clerical workers at that time) as well as against round-ups, against arrests and Nazi murders, and in solidarity with the hungry who were breaking into the storage bins of the black marketeers, etc.

In this way they provided hundreds of victims. Below we give a list of the Trotskyists killed by Stalinists. Most of them fell because of the barrier of fire organised by the KKE headed by the GPU agent Bartzotas [19], in order to prevent the independent intervention of the revolutionary workers and of the Trotskyists from taking their place on the first of the barricades during the December uprising.

In the period before December the secretary of the united Trotskyist organisation, Kastritis, narrowly escaped from an assassination attack. But hundreds of others ...

All these crimes against the Trotskyists, along with the Stalinists’ operations in the cells of the Stalinist security, make up a story that has yet to be written.

The following Archeiomarxists were killed:

The whole organisation of Agriniou that went over to guerrilla warfare in that area: P. Anastasiou, M. Kapetanakis, L. Kapetanakis, M. Xanthopoulos, M. Zisimopoulos, K. Ladas, Themelis, Karoyeridis, Pagonis, a student, and many others. Of the old cadre of the KKE, and later of the Trotskyists, were the leader of the Workers’ Centre of Agriniou, etc, along with More, Touris, Pliakos, Bambakis, and dozens of others.

The following were killed from the Opposition in the KKE:

Asimidis, an old cadre of the KKE, Doubas of the party organisation in Agriniou, and many others.

The uprising in the Middle East gave another opportunity for the chauvinist role of EAM/ELAS to be manifested in the war.

Infuriated by the slaughter and the destruction of war, the infantry threw down their weapons. The front broke up in all parts of the Middle East. The capitalist chain broke in the Greek link.

The war should have entered the phase of its transformation into a civil war, if there had existed a strong Trotskyist party, and if the chauvinist forces of EAM/ ELAS with their pro-war propaganda in support of the Allies had not fallen on the rebellious infantry. Churchill’s staff disarmed all the infantry with the use of backward troops. He interned them in camps. Then the Stalinists began to work in support of the continuation of the war and for a government of Papandreou and EAM, while the Trotskyists inside the camps faced assassination attempts from those who had refused to transform the war into a Socialist revolution.

One occupation followed another, when the defeated troops of the German-Italian imperialists withdrew, the Anglo-Saxon troops entered Greece. This is what we said at the time, and we put out a proclamation of ours which was circulated in thousands, saying that it was a big lie that the Allied troops were entering Greece as liberators.


Tricked

The December events confirmed our view. The ‘national liberation struggle’ against the ‘occupier’ was a disaster for the masses, who had been tricked into supporting the alliance of the Soviet bureaucracy and the Western imperialists.

“Welcome to our allies, welcome to our friends” – the walls were filled with welcome posters, and the streets rang with the shouts of the followers of the KKE. Tens of thousands drugged by the slogans of “national liberation” welcomed Scobie triumphantly, and later Eisenhower and Montgomery, who drowned Greece and Cyprus in blood. (Nowadays those who had been allies of the imperialists only yesterday changed their tune, and shout “Americans out”. Their line was always determined by the directives of the Moscow bureaucracy.)

The revolutionary upsurge caused by the destruction of war, despair and hunger culminated in the December events. As with the revolt in the Middle East the uprising sprang from below. In fact there existed all the preconditions for the transformation of the war into a Socialist revolution – a deep crisis, a rapid turn to the left, a desire for revolutionary change, and a paralysis within the ruling class.

According to the directives of the Stalinist leadership of the Soviet Union, the KKE in Cairo made an agreement with Papandreou. It submitted itself to the demands of the British imperialists which had been agreed in the Stalin/Churchill/ Roosevelt accord. The Soviet embassy in Cairo was the godfather of the legal child of the counter-revolution, the Papandreou government of ‘Socialists’ and Stalinists.

The Stalinists Zevgos and Porphyrogenis entered the government. This was ministerialism a thousand times more treacherous than that of the ‘Socialists’, Millerand, MacDonald, Thomas, Noske and company. They entered a government for the reconstitution of bourgeois rule (“first of all reconstruction and work”) and for the stifling of the revolutionary storm which the war had provoked, just as happened in France and Italy. The KKE being relatively dominant in the Greek peninsula carried Papandreou on its back. The December counterrevolution was prepared with the slogans of a ‘Government of National Unity’.

“For a people’s state” triumphantly cried the Stalinists. “For a people’s state and law” cried Papandreou, and this law was passed with the bombs and bullets of Scobie and Papandreou on bloody Sunday in December.

ELAS, which had occupied the whole country, entered the December conflict. The rank and file ELAS members fought heroically. But the leadership did not leave the initiative to the ‘reserve’ ELAS proletariat. It feared their spontaneous initiative. Even in the fire of a civil war it held out its hand to the bloody hands of Scobie and Papandreou, and for a ‘Government of National Unity’. Churchill reached Athens in haste and in a state of panic. He ordered reinforcements. While he organised the crushing of the December struggle, his lackeys in the KKE visited him in the Great Britain hotel, and implored a peaceful solution.


Quixotic

They believed that the Allied governments should try Liber and Scobie. On 17 December Rizopastis and the heroes of the slogan “Americans out”, the quixotic ‘anti-imperialists’, put out an SOS “to the great Anglo-Saxon country of America”. There was no mention of the intervention of the world and Russian proletariat! Some ELASites who were revolutionists laid a mine to blow up the ‘Great Britain’ and Churchill. But the capitulationist leadership of the KKE intervened, and stopped them from dynamiting Churchill.

Only a patch of land in Zervas’ territory, another small islet in Syntagma Square, and Makryianni and Sotiria were in the hands of Churchill, Liber, Scobie and Papandreou. And yet something incomprehensible happened for those who could not understand, unlike the Trotskyists, what a capitulationist bureaucracy meant.

An ELAS trumpet blew for retreat. The December struggle was betrayed. The revolutionary Socialist desires of the masses were betrayed. And the Greek movement experienced a major new defeat.

Churchill declared to the world that the December events were the work of the Trotskyists. This was correct in the sense of the long term struggle of Trotskyism for the transformation of the war into a revolution, in the sense of the pressure of the radicalised masses whom the adherents of Permanent Revolution objectively represented, and in the sense of their untiring, relentless, anti-Popular Front struggle for the independent intervention of the masses, which exercised a great influence upon the rank and file of the KKE, EAM and ELAS.

It was misleading, however, in the sense of Trotskyists being in the leadership of the movement. Because within the class front there occurred an unprecedented slaughter of the Trotskyists (according to the message of Bartzotas to the GPU, 800), in order to stifle the revolution.

The betrayals continued. The first act of the ruling class after every war or defeated revolution where the masses have taken up arms, is disarmament. This was done by the Popular Front of the KKE itself and by Sofianopoulou, by means of the filthy agreement in Varkiza.

With this the EAM/ELAS/KKE leadership secured their own immunity in the ‘horror’ of the betrayal. All the officers of ELAS became enrolled in the National Guard (correctly so). But 70,000 ELAS guerrillas were disarmed and given up to the mercies of the reaction, of the Fascist scum. There was one exception, Aris Velouchiotis (Klaras) and his group took a left wing stand against the agreements that the bureaucracy made.

The second guerrilla war developed on a progressive basis. The war turned Greece into a powderkeg which threatened to explode and shake capitalism to its foundations. The black market, speculation and starvation wages sharpened social discontent. The gap between the poor and the new rich became an abyss.

The turn to the left was rapid. The masses who had shed their blood for ‘liberation’ against the Fascist occupier now saw that capitalist slavery still existed. It was only a change of the guards. The Anglo-Saxon imperialists had replaced the Hitlerites.

The domestic ‘democrats’ who had been threatened by a victorious revolution in December, now became ferocious to stifle the workers’ movement. Setting side by side the executioner Papandreou with the ‘pro-Soviet’ Sofianopoulou, they managed to disarm 70,000 guerrillas, and later allowed the hordes of state auxiliaries to slaughter the betrayed combatants of both city and country.

The guerrillas were led into the dishonourable trap of war for the victory of the Allied imperialists, believing that in this way they were helping the Soviet Union, but Stalin, instead of demanding a peace without annexations such as Lenin called for, had sold out Greece to the Anglo-Saxons.

Thus, persecuted and murdered in their homes and fields, they returned to the mountains. This time, they took up arms against ‘their own’ capitalist rulers, and the guerrilla war took on a class and progressive character.

Velouchiotis, with the indomitable courage which characterised him, came into violent opposition with the capitulationists of Caserta and Lebanon, and the disarmers of Varkiza. He simply constituted the left wing of the bureaucracy, the ‘Reiss tendency’ as we would say in the case of Russia, or of the Mao tendency at its beginning and not in its Bonapartist decay. The Trotskyists who were alongside him in his staff were not murdered at a time when dozens of others were butchered according to Zachariades’ orders.

He expressed the tendency which opposed the leadership, and which had been expelled after the betrayal and the defeat of December, and of the awakening of the vanguard and the class in general.

Zachariades’ KKE expelled him for indiscipline, slandered him for ‘treason’ and betrayed him. Thus in June 1945 he was surrounded and killed. Zachariades betrayed him hand in hand with the counter-revolution.

But the guerrilla war developed. The arch-capitulationists were forced to support it in order to derail it. With Vafiades [20] in the leadership, it became the fear and terror of the bourgeois class and of the British and American imperialists. The war reached up as far as Athens and Parnitha [21], as the government admitted. Stalin’s Kremlin sold out the second guerrilla war, as it did with the December culmination of the first. The KKE of Zachariades, despite and against the knowledge of the leader of the ‘Democratic Army of Greece’ Vafiades, who insisted on guerrillaism, wanted to fight a conventional war and produced nothing but a disastrous defeat, within a chain of defeats.

We were in solidarity with the second guerrilla war, and on the side of the revolutionary peasants who supported its leadership.

We declared, however, that guerrilla war in the mountains was equivalent to the abandonment of the class struggle in the cities and villages. It (guerrillaism) disregards the struggle for wage demands and reforms. (They did not make reforms even in the places they controlled.) It isolates itself, it breaks unity with the workers, and it leads to an impasse. It is a solution born of the weakness of the workers’ movement. The peasantry, which forms the basis of guerrillaism, with its dispersion and its individualistic psychology, cannot have a strength analogous to its size. It cannot attain Socialist and internationalist goals. The peasant class cannot but vacillate, either behind the bourgeoisie or behind the proletariat.


Majority

The proletarian revolution cannot win without the revolutionary party winning the leadership of the majority of the proletariat. To win it must base itself upon soviets as organs of the United Front of the workers and peasants. Guerrilla war ignores the strategy of winning over and mobilising the masses, ignores the soviets, and avoids the front with the workers. Its petty-bourgeois, bourgeois or collaborationist leadership fears workers’ control and democracy, and often silences its critics.

Revolution starts from the centre of capitalism, but guerrilla war starts from its periphery. Concentrating the struggle in the mountain isolates it from the huge reserves of the cities, and contributes to the unfavourable relation of forces and the counter-revolution. Revolution organises the supreme technique of the mass uprising, the flood of workers. Guerrilla war cannot win in a conventional fight against the superior military means of the enemy.


Hegemony

Only the working class can become the motor force of the Socialist revolution. Its hegemony comes from its position in production, from its forces and from the Socialist goals set for it by history:


The fact that individual Communists are in the leadership of the present armies does not at all transform the social character of these armies ... It is one thing when a Communist Party, firmly resting on the flower of the urban proletariat, strives through the workers to lead a peasant war. It is an altogether different thing when a few thousand or even tens of thousands of revolutionaries, who are truly Communists, or only take the name, assume the leadership of a peasant war without having serious support from the proletariat. (L.D. Trotsky, Peasant War in China and the Proletariat)

From the end of 1946 we foresaw correctly: “Guerrilla activity alone cannot defeat the capitalist attack. Left only to its own forces the new guerrillaism, sooner or later, is obliged to succumb.” (Karliaftis’ speech on behalf of the KDKE in the debate with the KKE)

And the confirmation was tragic. The city movement was betrayed, the guerrilla war was sold out by Stalin to his Anglo-Saxon Allies, and Tito closed the borders to the guerrillas. The government of the mountains was not recognised by Moscow, Belgrade and Sofia. It remained without international proletarian support (world mobilisations, volunteers, etc.), and without tanks and airplanes. And in the end, the adventurist intervention of Zachariades, transforming the guerrilla war into conventional warfare, became disastrous. This is what Markos Vafiadis, leader of the ‘Democratic Army of Greece’ (DSE) and president of the ‘Provisional Democratic Government’, says in his document of November 1948:


The abstention from the elections by the KKE was incorrect. The KKE created illusions in the people for the peaceful solution of the Greek problem. It did not believe in the possible victory of guerrillaism. It saw it as a means of pressure and engaged in indecisive politics, while the capitalist reaction was gaining time and organising its forces. During this period the mass movement retreated to the cities. From mid-1947 the voluntary recruits to the DSE in the country did not even reach 10 per cent.

At the Fifth Plenum of the CC of the KKE in January 1949 Vafiadis and Hatzivasiliou were made scapegoats, and labelled ‘capitulationists’ and ‘Trotskyists’.

The turn of Partsalides [22] came at the Seventh Plenum in May 1950, when he was denounced as a ‘factionalist’, and ‘opportunist’ and a ‘Trotskyist’.

In a short while the disagreements of Karageorgis, the editor of Rizopastis, and lieutenant general of the DSE, became pronounced. “Zachariades failed in the second phase of the guerrilla war,” he said, “just as Ionnides and Siantos did in the first phase ... He lacks confidence in Stalin to the point of appearing in opposition to him.” And he referred to the rottenness which existed inside the KKE.

Karageorgis, who had taunted the Trotskyists in speeches addressed “to some birds who chirp in the ravines”, now saw that the chirping of the guerrillas’ guns posed no threat to capitalism.

This was not the fault of the heroic guerrillas, but of the general line of the KKE and of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Zachariades was later to characterise Siantos as a provocateur, and his policy, in the cheap agreements of Lebanon, Caserta and Varkiza, as “incorrect politics which basically comprised a submission to the interests and pursuits of the British imperialists”.

But this was really a condemnation of the line of national resistance, and it is well known that the responsibility for all of it lay with the Kremlin directives.

Loukas Karliaftis



Notes

(The footnotes are those of the author unless otherwise stated)

1. Georgiades-Sideris – right wing leaders of the Socialist Workers Party of Greece.

2. OKNE – the youth organisation of the Greek Communist Party founded in 1922.

3. S. Verouchis – a leader of the Trotskyist Archeiomarxists who had lost his eyes during the war between the Greeks and the Turks in Asia Minor, and Secretary of the Union of the War Disabled, which he led to victory, and was repeatedly sent to prison. In 1943, taking part in the anti-Nazi resistance movement on his own responsibility, he was executed by the Stalinists along with 800 others. His body was thrown to the wild dogs by the Stalinists while he was still half alive.

4. Plastiras – a bourgeois ‘liberal’ politician, formerly a general.

5. Ioannis Metaxas (1871-1941) was a right wing general who ruled as dictator between 1936 and 1941 [Editor’s Note].

6. Papanastasios – a bourgeois ‘democrat’.

7. Zachariades – Stalin’s foremost supporter in Greece, trained along with Khaitas in the Stalinist school of Koutvi in Russia, and installed as General Secretary of the Greek Communist Party by the Stalinist Comintern. He was the chief organiser of all the executions of Trotsky‘s followers in Greece. The policy of the Greek Communist Party brought about the Metaxas dictatorship straightaway, and Zachariades was put in prison and moved to Germany by the Nazis. Mysteriously released, he went back to Greece to carry out new betrayals during the civil war. After the smashing of the second guerrilla war he was made the scapegoat by Stalin and was expelled from the party, dying recently in Russia.

8. Anafe – a barren island.

9. Tzoulatis – along with Ligdopoulos, leader of the Socialist Youth in Athens (1916), and the first martyr of Bolshevism in Greece. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party of Greece at its founding conference in 1918, and along with Giotopoulos split from the SWPG in the same way that Lenin did (1919). He published the journal Communism (1920-21) in which he fought for the 21 Conditions of adherence to the Communist International, and rejoined the SWPG in 1921, where he built up a faction publishing the journal Archives of Marxism (May 1923), and consistently orientated towards Trotsky from 1923 onwards. He was thus the first Trotskyist in Greece, and was finally expelled from the party at the beginning of 1924.

10. Apostolou – a leader of the Archeiomarxists, one of the few who went over to Stalinism.

11. Aris Velouchiotis was a famous left wing Stalinist leader during the resistance movement, who rejected the directives of the Greek Communist Party to hand over his group’s guns. Expelled from the party as a ‘Trotskyist’, he was soon after trapped mysteriously and executed by the Greek army.

12. Eleutherios Venizelos (1864-1936) was a well known bourgeois leader of the Liberals, frequently in office during the early part of the twentieth century [Editor’s Note].

13. Rizopastis (Radical) is the daily paper of the Greek Communist Party.

14. The PEEA was the ‘Provisional Democratic Government’, or ’Government of the Mountains‚.

15. Zervas was a bourgeois ‘anti-Nazi’ leader.

16. Michel Pablo (Michael Raptis) later became leader of the Fourth International after the war.

17. Diethnistis (Internationalist) is the theoretical organ of the Workers Vanguard (Trotskyist) of Greece.

18. Kanellopoulos was a right wing bourgeois politician.

19. Bartzotas was a notorious leader of the Stalinists who produced a statement for his masters in the Kremlin during the second guerrilla war stating proudly that over 800 Trotskyists had been executed by the OPLA, the Stalinist militia, in Greece.

20. Vafiades – a left wing Stalinist leader who was expelled from the Central Committee as a bourgeois agent, and now lives in Russia.

21. Parnitha (ancient Mount Parnes), a mountain near Athens.

22. Partsalides was a top leader of the Stalinists, both in the EAM and amongst today’s Eurocommunists.

From The Archives Of The American And International Left –From The International Bolshevik Tendency-The Police By The CWI

Click on the headline to link to the International Bolshevik Tendency website.
Markin comment:

This archival issue of the International Bolshevik Tendency journal may be of some historical interest for old "new leftists,” perhaps, as well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist and other periodicals from other leftist organizations, past and present, periodically throughout the year.
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1. Trade Union Rights! The Police and the Labour Movement

Workers taking industrial action— particularly when organising picketing, a vital trade union right— have time and again come into conflict with the police. With the Tones' new anti-trade union legislation, there are likely to be even bigger battles. Trade unionists defending jobs and living standards fact the threat of jail either through non-payment of fines or "contempt of court", or through collisions with police trying to enforce limits on picketing or alleging "obstruction" or "public order" offences.

Ironically, however, one of the last groups of potential strikers to be threatened with imprisonment were the police themselves. This was under the last, right-wing Labour government. The episode was only publicised much later. The Sunday Times (9 August 1981) revealed: "The chairman of the Police Federation, Jim Jardine, was threatened with imprisonment as recently as 1977 though the threat was kept a secret at the time. It happened when police, angry at low pay, howled down Merlyn Rees, the Home Secretary of the day, at a meeting in Westminster Hall. Jim Jardine (a serving police constable) was told by a senior officer that calls for strike action would have to be strongly resisted otherwise he would be taken to court and face imprisonment under the 1964 Police Act (under section 53 which prohibits 'causing disaffection')."

Strike action by the police was headed off with an immediate 10 per cent rise and the promise of an inquiry into their pay. When the Tory government returned in 1979, Whitelaw announced the big increases recommended by the inquiry with a big fanfare, clearly attempting to buy the police's loyalty for future confrontation with the labour movement. However, it is clear that in the period of police discontent before 1977 police were leaving at a rapid rate, not only because of pay and conditions but because of disquiet at the way they were being used against strikes and demonstrations.

The 1977 episode points to the contradictory character of the police. While an arm of the state—increasing one of the "armed bodies of men" who make up the capitalists' repressive apparatus—the police, like the armed forces, are composed of men and women drawn overwhelmingly from the working class, and they have their interests and demands as workers. The police pay disputes of 1970, 1975 and 1976-77 aroused growing demands for genuine trade union organisation and action. The demand for the right to strike was intensely debated. A majority of constables in a number of areas indicated in referenda that they wanted strike action. The inspectors were against striking, but the sergeants wavered in between. At the Police Federation conference in Scarborough in May 1977 an overwhelming majority voted for strike action. Federation leaders undoubtedly feared that some constables would take wild-cat action if the leadership failed to move.

Grievances about pay and conditions and frustration with the Federation had clearly produced the beginnings of trade union consciousness among many police men and women. Among a minority, moreover, industrial militancy had clearly begun to stimulate a more generalised class consciousness, with a questioning of their role and their relationship with the labour movement. At Scarborough a young Metropolitan constable said: "We're no different from other workers. We may wear funny clothes and do society's dirty work for them. But we come from the same stock as other workers. (Boos) We have only our labour power to sell, not capital." (Quoted in Robert Reiner, The Blue-Coated Worker) His speech was greeted with cat-calls and shouts of "Commie", etc. Clearly, while militant on pay, the majority of delegates still voiced backward, if not reactionary sentiments towards the labour movement and on social issues. But the very fact that this class-conscious attitude could be expressed by one delegate, even if he represented only a tiny minority at that stage, is very significant.

The ranks of the police were affected by workers' struggles from 1970-77, and many police looked to Labour for progress. But the police, like most other workers, were disappointed by the Labour government's failure to implement its programme. Labour's Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, summarily rejected their call for the right to strike, while trying to persuade them quietly to accept the government's wage-restraint policy. The record of the Labour government, to say the least, was hardly calculated to swing the police ranks towards the labour movement.

The 1977 episode, in itself, underlines the need for the labour movement to adopt a worked-out policy towards the police. While opposing the repressive use of the force, Labour must nevertheless appeal to the police ranks. While campaigning for democratic accountability of the police, the movement must also call for trade union rights for the police, with the replacement of the Police Federation by a genuinely independent union organisation. It is not only a question of defending the economic interests of the police, but of working to bring the ranks of the police into the orbit of the labour movement.

This has been opposed by some pseudo-Marxists as "Utopian". They want to write off the police as "one reactionary mass", as though they were a completely uniform, immutable instrument of repression. This is a completely one-sided, incorrect view which takes no account of the changes which can be produced by events.

It is undoubtedly true that there are reactionaries in the police. Clearly, there are racialists and some fascist sympathisers within the ranks, and democratic accountability would be used to make sure that these were weeded out. In recent years, moves from the top to shape the police into a more repressive force and the aggressive operational tactics increasingly adopted by local police chiefs has led many of the more reasonable types to leave the force. Recruiting and training is undoubtedly directed towards producing the kind of police the state requires under new conditions. But ultimately the mood and outlook of the police, the balance between their repressive role and the police ranks' own class demands, still depends on the balance of class and political forces in society.

The 1968 May events in France are an example of the way the police can move under conditions of crisis.

The mass strike movement, which involved ten million workers, was actually "detonated" by police repression of student demonstrations, particularly by the brutal actions of the riot police, the para-military CRS. However, as one writer on the police, Tom Bowden, comments: "...While the police were prepared to brutally subdue one of their natural opponents, middle-class students, they were most unwilling to batter those whom they felt to be their worker brothers into submission...Accordingly, they tacitly let it be known that operations against workers could not only cause a grave crisis of confidence within their ranks but also the possibility of what would in effect be a police mutiny." (Tom Bowden: Beyond the Limits of the Law.) In fact, leaders of one of the police unions stated publicly that they would not move against workers. The police were neutralised, or in the case of some sections, drawn behind the workers' movement, and De Gaulle's government was suspended in mid-air.

Another example was in Germany at the end of the First World War. In the crisis, the labour movement took over Berlin, appointing Emil Eichorn, a leader of the left-wing Independent Social Democrats, as police president. "Under his command," writes one of Rosa Luxemburg's biographers, "the police seemed to be turning into a revolutionary institution." (Peter Netti, Rosa Luxemburg). It was the move of the reactionary central government under the right-wing Social Democrats Ebert and Noske to depose Eichorn which precipitated the "Spartakist" uprising in January 1919.

In Britain, too, the mass struggles of the working class between 1913 and 1919 gave rise to a struggle within the police for an independent trade union. The illegal Police and Prison Officers Union gradually forged links with the labour movement, and its leaders called for the democratisation of the police. There had been strikes of the Metropolitan Police over pay in 1872 and 1890. But the most significant strikes were in 1918 and 1919 during the post-war crisis. In 1918, almost all of the Metropolitan force of 19,000 came out in sympathy with their leaders who had been victimised. However, in 1919 a second strike, which led to battles with the army in Merseyside, was broken by the authorities. The government made concessions on pay and conditions, but purged the militants and completely smashed the union. The Police Federation was then established as a tame substitute for a union. At the same time, moves were made to undermine the powers of local watch committees and establish firm central control over local forces.

These examples should be enough to show that the police are not one, unchanging reactionary mass. The police, too, are affected by the crisis in society—and can be influenced by the working class when it moves into action. A correct policy towards the police on the part of the labour movement, however, is a vital factor.
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2. Policy of Force – and the Need for Democratic Control

The riots which erupted in Brixton, Toxteth and other cities in the summer of 1981 once again focused attention on the role of the police. In particular, they highlighted the almost complete lack of accountability, and the need for the labour movement to campaign for the democratisation of the police.

The explosion of anger on the streets arose from the terrible conditions faced by workers in the inner-city areas, especially black workers and youth: mass unemployment, rotten housing, inadequate education, health and social facilities etc. But the street clashes also reflected widespread resentment and anger at the police which had built up over a period of years. The labour movement, while defending workers' rights to defend their areas from attack, cannot support looting, arson and petrol-bombing as forms of protest. However, it has to be recognised that in almost every case the riots were sparked off by provocative police action. In Brixton, as was soon revealed, there was the intensive Swamp '81 operation, and a number of brutal arrests and raids. Similarly, in Toxteth a number of arbitrary, heavy-handed arrests sparked off the conflict. These particular incidents, however, were only the tip of the iceberg.

In March 1979, Lambeth Labour council, completely dissatisfied with its lack of control over policing in the area, set up its own Working Party on Community/Police Relations. It concluded (in January 1980) that there was evidence of widespread racism by the police and that they were regarded, particularly by black people, as "an army of occupation". In London and other cities there has been growing anger at the racial bias of the police. The increasing number of "passport raids" has highlighted the police's role in enforcing racialist immigration laws. There is also anger over racial attacks. In the past five years 26 black people have been murdered, with only one or two arrests for these crimes. In the London area there were 2,426 violent attacks on Asians alone in 1980. Very few of these crimes were solved.

In Brixton and other areas of London there was also a strong reaction against the intervention of the Special Patrol Group. Few of the black youth or Labour activists could forget the SPG's responsibility for the killing of Blair Peach after the anti-NF demonstration in Southall (23 April 1979). Before the Brixton upheaval, the inquest on the Deptford fire had emphasised the inability and apparent reluctance of the police seriously to investigate this horrendous crime as a racialist attack. Protest from Labour MPs and civil rights groups had also drawn attention to the scandal of deaths of suspects in police custody. Between January 1970 and June 1979, 245 people died in police custody, with the rate rising from seven a year to forty-eight a year. It was the refusal of the Liverpool police chief, Kenneth Oxford, to reveal the contents of an internal inquiry into the death of Jimmy Kelly which brought about a head-on collision between the Labour councillors on the area police authority and the Chief Constable. Oxford arrogantly expressed the attitude of hard-line police chiefs towards elected police committees. He attacked some councillors for their "vituperative, misinformed comments", and reportedly told members of the police authority to "keep out of my force's business." Liverpool councillors decided to set up a working party to look into the "role and responsibility" of the police authority. After this reported in February 1980, Councillor Margaret Simey, a long-standing member of the authority, commented: "I realise now that there is no hope of running a big modern police force on rules that are no more than a gentleman's agreement" (Weekend World, ITV, 23 March 1980). "Mr Oxford does not seem to think the police committee is worth proper consideration, and the Tory majority do not seem to think that there is anything wrong with that" (Observer, 21 October 1979).

The clashes between Labour councillors and police chiefs in Lambeth (Brixton) and Liverpool (Toxteth) were early warnings of the explosions to come. The conflict over the role of the police authorities in these two key areas, as well as in West Yorkshire (where there was also a council enquiry in 1978) and Lewisham (where in 1980 the council threatened to withhold its contribution to the Metropolitan police), underlined the complete lack of democratic accountability as far as the police were concerned.

Yet the police were not always unaccountable to local authorities. When, after the formation of the Metropolitan police in 1829, police forces were gradually created in the boroughs, they were under the control of "watch committees" made up of council members, who appointed the constables, and their officers, and fixed their pay and controlled their work. When the county councils were reformed in the 1880s, "standing joint committees" were created, comprising of half county councillors and half local magistrates, with similar powers to the borough watch committees. "The control of the watch committees was absolute," writes one historian of the police (T A Crichley, History of the Police in England and Wales). "In its hands lay the sole power to appoint, promote and punish men of all ranks, and it had powers of suspension and dismissal. The watch committee prescribed the regulations for the force, and subject to the approval of the town council determined the rates of pay." In some boroughs the chief police officer was required to report weekly to the watch committee. There was, however, continuous pressure from the government to establish stronger central control of the police; but this was resisted by local interests. Throughout the 19th century the Home Secretary's main role was that of ensuring all areas recruited and maintained adequate police forces, which was carried out through the inspectors of constabulary.

This relationship was not just the product of administrative convenience. It reflected the balance of class forces, and the political relations flowing from them. The borough councils were dominated by the industrial and commercial capitalist class. They paid for the police through the rates, and therefore they insisted they controlled the police. The industrial middle class were suspicious of central government, which they associated with extravagant and unnecessary expenditure, and which they feared would interfere in their affairs on behalf of the aristocratic oligarchy which dominated central government. The propertied middle class which championed parliamentary government took it for granted that a body like the police, which potentially had enormous power, should be democratically controlled.

This, however, was in the era before the working class had become an independent political force. Even at the end of the 19th century only a small minority of workers had the vote. When the great majority of working class men gained the vote in 1918 (all women in 1928) the property owning classes changed their tune. They were no longer concerned about the aristocratic oligarchy, which had been eclipsed by industrial capitalists, but they certainly feared the growing strength of the labour movement. The end of the First World War in 1918 brought a massive radicalisation of the workers, with enormous struggles and strike battles. Labour councillors began to be elected in many towns and cities, with the emergence of a number of Labour-controlled councils. The .attempt of the state to take control of the police out of the hands of local government and concentrate it centrally was also made more urgent by the police strikes of 1918 and 1919.

After the strikes, the Desborough Committee was set up to overhaul the whole police structure, and many of its recommendations were adopted. One recommendation was that the power of appointment, promotion and discipline should be transferred from the watch committees to Chief Constables. This, however, was still resisted in Parliament, and the powers remained formally in the hands of watch committees until 1964. However, in one way and another the powers of Chief Constables were considerably strengthened. So too was the "informal" central influence exerted by the Home Office (and the Scottish Office), especially as central government now provided half the cost of maintaining local forces. The element of democratic control through the watch committees was slowly but surely strangled. The last vestiges of accountability, moreover, were allowed to disappear largely without opposition from the labour movement, controlled in that period by the right-wing leadership.

The 1960 Royal Commission on the Police concluded that the main problem of police accountability was controlling Chief Constables. They "should be subject to more effective supervision," said the report—but this was to be done by making Chief Constables more accountable to central government, not to local watch committees. The Royal Commission's recommendations were put into effect by the 1964 Police Act (and the Police (Scotland) Act, 1967). Borough watch committees and county standing joint committees were replaced by police authorities, made up of two thirds councillors and one third magistrates. Local authorities still paid for half of the cost of the forces, but their Chief Constables, backed up by the Home Office, quickly established the principle that "operational questions" were outside police committees' scope. In practice, the 1964 Act institutionalised and legalised the situation established after 1945. The new police committees are not even committees of the local councils, but independent statutory bodies. This effectively divorces them from council control. In some authorities, like Liverpool, the councillors are not even allowed to ask questions on the police authority.

In theory, the police authorities appoint the Chief Constable and can dismiss the Chief Constable "in the interests of police efficiency." But these powers are strictly subject to the Home Secretary's agreement. In theory, the police committees can question the Chief Constable on his annual reports, or ask him for special reports. In practice this is very difficult. Most Chief Constables' annual reports give very little information on policing methods, and they particularly avoid the most contentious areas of policing.

Most of the police chiefs strongly resist all proposals for increased democratic accountability on the grounds that it would subject the police to "political control". They try to perpetuate the myth, important for gaining public acceptance of their role in the past, that the police are an arm of a "neutral" state. They are, according to this view, "above" politics and sectional interests, and ultimately answerable to the equally "neutral" and "independent" judiciary. The recent changes in police policy themselves refute this liberal myth.

The Police Act and other legislation of the early 1960s for the most part merely institutionalised changes which had already taken place. But it was the stormy events which opened the 1970s, a new decade of crisis, which brought the really significant changes in police planning and training. The Tory government under Edward Heath came to office in 1970 with unemployment over 1 million for the first time in postwar Britain. The Tories set out to take on the working class, aiming to break the power of the trade unions through the 1971 Industrial Relations Act. But Heath's moves against the trade unions provoked massive opposition from the organised workers, which eventually defeated his attempt to use the law and special courts to shackle the unions. The most significant of the industrial battles which shook the Heath government was the 1972 miners' strike. The decisive battle took place at Saltley Gates where 30,000 miners' pickets and other industrial workers blockaded the Midlands coal depot. The police were defeated and forced to retreat. This was not only a crushing blow to the Tory government, but demonstrated to the capitalists the weakness of their state when faced with organised, mobilised workers.

In response, the government instigated an immediate review of its security policy, covering everything from policing the streets to dealing with an insurrection. The strategists of capital were preparing for the possibility of revolution. Raymond Carr, the Tory Home Secretary, set up a National Security Committee to review all aspects of main- taming public order and to produce new "contingency plans". The committee reported in 1975, after the return of the Labour government. Labour changed the name of the body to the vaguer "Civil Contingencies Committee", but adopted all its main recommendations. This major review led to a programme of equipping police forces with modern technology for surveillance and holding records and with new riot gear. New training meant the police were being prepared for riots and for confrontations with demonstrations, strike pickets, etc. More special units were set up to act as para-military squads as and when required. In 1977 riot shields appeared on the streets for the first time in Britain (apart from Northern Ireland) when the police moved against anti-fascist demonstrators protesting against a National Front march through Lewisham. At the same time, however, plans were made for the use of the army to back up the police in emergencies. Joint operations, as at London's Heathrow airport in 1974, were staged, supposedly to counter alleged terrorist threats, but clearly aimed at getting the public used to seeing the army operating with the police on the streets. Then, in 1977/78, the Labour government actually called out 20,000 troops to take over fire-fighting duties and break the strike of the firemen taking action against Labour's pay-restraint policy.

These developments make it clear that the "iron fist" thinking of the Andertons and McNees does not merely express the hardline outlook of a number of reactionary police chiefs, but reflects the new perspective of the strategists of the ruling class themselves. They have recognised that the relative social peace of the post-war period ended with the ebbing of the economic boom. They see that the coming period, with the continued catastrophic decline of British capitalism and the inevitable erosion of living standards, will be one of head-on conflict with the working class. They have therefore discarded the old 'liberal', 'democratic' face of the British ruling class and instead are presenting a brutal, repressive visage. These developments, particularly with the perspective of the Andertons, make it vitally important for the labour movement to campaign for the democratisation of the police.

If the working class is to preserve the economic gains and the democratic rights that it has wrested from the capitalists in the past, it must carry through the socialist transformation of society. Past gains cannot be preserved indefinitely within the rotten framework of a crisis-ridden capitalism. In transforming society, it is Utopian to think that the existing apparatus of the capitalist state can be taken over and adapted by the working class. In a fundamental change of society, all the existing institutions of the state will be shattered and replaced by new organs of power under the democratic control of the working class. While basing itself on the perspective of the socialist transformation of society, however, the labour movement must advance a programme which includes policies which come to grips with the immediate problems posed by the role of the police.

The movement must campaign along the following lines:
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The police must be returned to the authority of local government police committees, with powers like those of the original watch committees. The local police committees should have the power to appoint and dismiss Chief Constables and senior officers. They should be responsible not only for the police's physical resources but for "operational questions", i.e. day-to-day policing policies. The Metropolitan Police, which at present is only formally accountable to the Home Secretary, should also be made accountable to a democratic Greater London police committee

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The police committees should ensure a genuinely independent complaints procedure under the complaints board composed of democratically elected representatives. They should ensure that the appropriate disciplinary procedures are implemented.

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The police committees should ensure that any racist elements or fascist sympathisers within the police are weeded out of the force.


Through such police committees, the labour movement, in areas where Labour controlled the local councils, would be able to establish democratic checks and controls on the role of the police. In the past, before the working class had emerged as an independent political force, the spokesmen of big business and the middle class insisted that the police were democratically accountable. Now, the labour movement, which represents the overwhelming majority in society, must demand that democratic accountability is extended to cover this force which, it is claimed, exists to protect the interests of the public.

Labour must also demand:
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The abolition of the Special Patrol Group and other similar units.

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The abolition of the Special Branch and the destruction of political files and computer records not connected with criminal investigations.

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The right of the police to an independent, democratic trade union organisation to defend their interests as workers.


3. Fighting Crime?

"Law and order" has long been a favourite electioneering slogan of the Tories. They try to represent any criticism of the police as an attempt to undermine "the fight against crime". Calls for democratic accountability are portrayed as "politically motivated" moves to undermine the police's "neutral" and "impartial" role. At the 1977 Tory Party conference, for instance, Whitelaw claimed that it was "part of a left-wing mythology" that "there was something despicable, almost immoral, in discussing the prevention of crime at all." Contrary to Tory mythology, however, Marxists are not opposed to the police taking action to catch criminals and to protect people's safety and personal property. Working-class people are naturally concerned about crime, and especially alarmed about increasing violence. But the Tones, by elevating the "moral" issues and the abstractions of "law" and "legality", want to turn attention away from the social roots of crime.

What better answer to the Tories than the comments of the Boston Police Commissioner, Robert Di Grazia? "We are not letting the public in on our era's dirty little secret," he wrote: "that those who commit the crime that worries citizens the most—violent street crime—are, for the most part, the products of poverty, unemployment, broken homes, rotten education, drug addiction and alcoholism, and other social ills about which the police can do little, if anything." Di Grazia does not draw any radical conclusion about the problem of upholding "justice" in society divided by extremes of wealth and poverty—within a system based on the legalised expropriation of workers' surplus value by the capitalist class. Nevertheless, Di Grazia eloquently denounces the "politicians (who) get away with law and order rhetoric that reinforces the mistaken notion that the police—in ever greater numbers and with ever more gadgetry—can alone control crime."

His criticisms certainly apply to Thatcher's government. Unemployment, Mrs Thatcher said after Brixton erupted in April 1981, was not the cause. The real cause, she implied, was the breakdown of "respect for the law" and the erosion of "moral values". The Tories cannot accept that their economic policies which have had a shattering effect on the youth, have helped create the conditions for conflict on the streets. If there has been a breakdown of previously accepted social norms of behaviour and of traditional morality, they cannot see that the terrible alienation of young people created by the profit system is a powerful contributing factor. Like the politicians Di Grazia criticises, Thatcher and Whitelaw simply back the arming of the police with more powerful equipment: riot gear, water cannon, CS gas, plastic bullets, and, increasingly, firearms. They also support heavier sentences in the courts, and a tougher regime in prisons and juvenile detention centres.

The Tories' approach reflects the thinking of the professional police chiefs. Some, it is true, have spoken out against the crude, hard-line stance of the Andertons and Oxfords. John Alderson, Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall (who retired in April 1982) is a notable example. Alderson said after the riots: "One thing is certain, it is no answer to resort to brute force to control people." Alderson, whose liberal approach is in sharp contrast to that of most other police chiefs, advocates "community policing". In his view, the primary concern of the police should not be "law enforcement" but the welfare of the community and the amelioration of social conditions which foster crime. He recognises that unless the emphasis is on prevention and unless the police have the confidence and support of the people they are supposed to be protecting, there is no hope of effectively "fighting crime".

But the new breed of hard-line police chiefs, like Anderton (Manchester), McNee (Metropolitan), and Oxford (Merseyside), regard Alderson's views as quaintly old-fashioned. They consider that they are coming to grips, no bones about it, with the realities of a society which cannot afford to put the emphasis on social welfare. Unlike Alder- .son, they are not primarily concerned with fighting crime of the traditional sort. They are now preoccupied with the task of defending the status quo in an industrialised, capitalist society increasingly torn by economic crisis and class conflict. To base policing on support and co-operation from the public would, under these conditions, be unrealistic. Any form of democratic accountability is seen by these hard-liners as a potentially dangerous restraint on their ability to use brute force as and when they consider it necessary. They work on the assumption that the police is a force to be used to uphold a framework of authority, which they define as "law and order". From this perspective, "community policing" is seen as little more than a public relations exercise.

The statements of Anderton and the others make it clear what they really mean by upholding "law and order": not the protection of ordinary people from violent assaults, burglaries etc, but the defence of big business, property and the capitalist state from the growing threat of an increasingly radicalised and militant working class. Speaking on Question Time (BBC-1, 16 October 1979), Anderton said: "I think that from the police point of view that my task in the future—that basic crime as such—theft, burglary, even violent crime—will not be the predominant police feature. What will be the matter of greatest concern to me will be the covert and ultimately overt attempt to overthrow democracy, to subvert the authority of the state, and, in fact, to involve themselves in acts of sedition designed to destroy our parliamentary system and the democratic government in this country."

Fighting crime, for chief constables like Anderton, is not the same thing as catching criminals at all. Listening to this and other of Anderton's statements, what doubt can there be that by "democracy" he really means the capitalist system? In practice, "sedition" and "subversion" mean any attempt by workers to use their democratic and trade union rights to defend their interests. For example, the Association of Chief Police Officers complained to the parliamentary Home Affairs Committee (February 1980): "Today the right to demonstrate is widely exploited, and marching is the most chosen form of demonstration adopted by protestors. Irrespective of the peaceful nature of the procession the numbers involved bring town centres to a halt, business is disrupted and the public bus service thrown out of schedule. In short, a general annoyance is created to the normal process of daily life."

How readily have police chiefs resorted to blanket bans on marches under the 1936 Public Order Act, in reality to prevent anti-fascist demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. On a number of occasions, however, Anderton and McNee were prepared to muster an enormous number of police to escort a handful of fascists through the streets, supposedly to defend their democratic right to demonstrate! Police chiefs are also seeking through parliamentary Bills to extend their control of marches, requiring advance notice and seeking to impose their own "code of practice" for demonstrators which would virtually have the force of law.

The police chiefs have been cautious in supporting legislation which would inevitably mean head-on collision with mass trade union forces. They learned some lessons from Saltley Gates and Edward Heath's ill-fated Industrial Relations Act. However, the police have steadily stepped up their harassment of labour movement activists. In a "field manual" produced by a senior London officer in 1977, new recruits were advised to watch out for people who "although not dishonest in the ordinary sense, may, owing to extreme political views intend to harm the community you have sworn to protect." It goes on: "while there are subtle differences between these types of extremists and thieves, it is difficult to put one's finger on material distinctions."

This is the attitude which increasingly underlies routine policing. Clearly, the simple catching of criminals is much less important to the police chiefs, despite the Tones' law and order demagogy, than protecting the system against anyone who has the temerity to defend their interests or propagate their views. The labour movement does not condone crimes of violence (but it equally condemns the appalling cult of violence fostered by business interests through films, television and other media). Nor can the movement, while understanding the social causes of crime, support robbery as an "individual way out" of the problems facing workers. We have no sympathy with vicious criminal elements who are as much a menace to the workers as to big property owners, and whose activity provides the state with the excuse for strengthening repressive powers.

But the need to counter criminal activity does not give the "guardians of the law" the right to act as though they are a law unto themselves. Fighting crime does not justify the harassment and ill-treatment of suspects; or excuse denying suspects adequate legal defence or the twisting or fabrication of evidence. Fighting crime does not justify savage sentences or brutal, inhuman conditions in prisons; and it does not justify racial bias or arbitrary and oppressive policing. Overcoming crime for socialists, means fundamentally the eradication of the social conditions which produce crime. But within the present society, democratic accountability of the police, far from undermining the "fight against crime" would remove the obstacles created by an undemocratic, unaccountable and increasingly repressive police force.