New initiatives needed in fight against austerity IN THE WAKE of his victory in the June 2 parliamentary elections in 1985, Greek Premier Andreas Papandreou launched a brutal rusterity drive in September of the same year. It provoked very trong opposition from the workers' movement, which continued n January and February of this year. The strength of the opposicion split the trade-union organization of Papandreou's party, PASOK tself, which dominated the Greek Confederation of Unions (GSEE). There has been a complex play within the labor movement between he PASOK regulars, the PASOK dissidents, and the two Communist Parties, the KKE-Exterior and the KKE-Interior, of which the former s by far the strongest. Papandreou's election strategy of stampeding the left voters to rote for PASOK in June 1985 to block the right was aimed mainly gainst the KKE-Exterior. It was largely successful. In the municipal elections last fall, the KKE took a more hostile stance to the PASOK efusing to support it in the second round. The result was that the right took many important municipal governments, including Athens.
In its rivalry with PASOK, however, the KKE does not seem to be avoiding the problem of zigzags that undermined the credibility of he French Communist Party, for example, and in large part led to its present crisis. The following are excerpts from the editorial in the March issue of Spartakos, the paper of the Greek section of the Fourth International, which commented on a new shift by the KKE Exterior.
GREECE their objectives in parliament. And they drop it if it ceases to serve that function, if it exceeds certain limits.
That is the real key to the KKE's position. The February mobilizations and the upsurge that was starting everywhere carried the danger of going beyond parliamentary limits and outflanking the KKE from below. The masses were coming into action demanding satisfaction of their demands right now. That would have very quickly revealed what is consciously concealed by the KKE - that there is no way to reconcile the interests of the workers with those of the capitalists, that a policy that does not aim at a break with capital and its system cannot be adequate for advancing the struggles of the majority of the Greek people.
Why did the KKE become the best defender of bourgeois democracy? So that no one would ask, "What if the PASOK government falls?" If a strong workers' move. ment, demanding satisfaction of its demands, managed to topple a bourgeois government (including the PASOK one), then it would have taken a decisive step toward understanding the only solution to the crisis and toward achieving it - that is a government of the working people themselves, control of the economy by the working people and a break from the capitalist logic of the "free market."
We have a long way to go to get there. We need victories, we need self-confidence. The capitalist attack through the PASOK government is too serious to leave the task of defence against it in the hands of the KKE. This time, despite the attempts to push the movement back, despite the difficulties, the recomposi tion of the workers' movement makes it possible to take initiatives of many sorts.
Initiatives by the workers at the base. Mobilization of all workers in their workplaces, in their organizations, in their neighborhoods, participation of all in making the decisions that concern them. Struggle committees everywhere, with the aim of breaking the government's policy.
Initiatives to put pressure on union bodies to advance actions that strengthen and express the workers interests. Initiatives advancing the demand for escalating and coordinating the struggles. Is there some way, maybe, to break the government's policy workplace by workplace or industry by industry?
Initiatives by all activists moving in an anti-capitalist direction. They are the only ones who can contribute decisively to apply a concerted tactic of pressure on, and outflanking of, the reformists.
23
"Now, we are seeing some lightminded strikes to get attention. Let's strike for real, if the great majority of the working people want that."
With that astonishing statement on February 23, [KKE-Exterior leader] Florakis officially confirmed his party's practical course a few days after the vast mobilizations in the public and private sectors.
The KKE split the dynamic strikes of OTOS and GENOP-DEN, pushed the Municipal Workers' Federation to sign a "labor peace," and gave the green light to winding down the struggles of all the federations and Workers Centers, which had gone into a critical phase. Overnight the actions that the KKE itself proposed, pur sued and supported turned into "light-minded" mobilizations.
The KKE's pretext was based solely on a position taken by Metsotakis [a leader of the right-wing New Democracy (ND) party]. Only the ND raised the question of a snap
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987 election (and everyone else saw that was just for propaganda purposes). But "the party of the struggles" turned tail, frightened by the possibility that maybe there would be elections, maybe the PASOK would fall, maybe it would be blamed.
The KKE forgot all about the PASOK not being "capable of change." It forgot that up until then it had stuck to the slogan "neither PASOK nor the right." It went back to full support for Papandreou.
These sudden changes of line do not surprise us in the least. They are neither accidental nor incomprehensible. The reformist leaderships in general and the KKE in particular have only one sort of logic - wretched parliamentary cretinism.
What the reformists see in the mobilizations of the workers, farmers, students and youth is not the dynamic of an alliance against the same system, but simply votes. They see mass coordinated extra-parliamentary struggle simply as a means of pressure for