Roger
Silverman
* * *
*
PART 6: THE BIRTH OF
PASOK
What were the options for the
ruling class? The bourgeois paper VIMA pointed out: “the maintenance of
democracy has become dangerously difficult as the government becomes daily
weaker, with no sign of any alternative.” Karamanlis himself pointed
out: “Democracy in Greece was always unstable. Periods of democratic
government were brief, few and far between. Greece may be confronted with the
dilemma between communism and dictatorship.”
The right wing hankered after a
new dictatorship. But after the lessons of 1967, such a measure would be
resisted to the last drop of blood. Never again would the Greek workers submit
without a fight. In any case, the army today would be entirely unreliable. A
conscript army composed of radicalised young workers, repressed by the fascist
officer caste bequeathed from the civil war, it could never in current
conditions be used against the workers. A new coup would blow up in the generals
faces, like that of Spinola in Portugal in March 1975. The only prospect for the
ruling class was a succession of weak coalitions, intriguing and jockeying for
position in the shifting quicksands of parliament.
Sooner or later, the ruling
class would have to cede power to a government encompassing some or all of the
workers’ parties. In Greece, this could have earth-shattering repercussions.
Quite alone in Europe, Greece had never had a government in which any workers’
party had ever been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. It would be seen
by the workers as a green light for a wave of strikes and occupations. It would
hold back the workers’ fury for barely a moment before throwing their parties
into even deeper convulsions. Under the smokescreen of such a government, a new
coup would be plotted.
Finding themselves without a
stable traditional political channel, the workers were fighting out their
battles on the industrial front. At the same time, without a unified independent
trade union organisation either – since the civil war, the frail trade union
movement had been controlled by the government – there had been a spilling over
of industrial militancy into ad hoc action committees and
semi-official factory councils, and partially a localised recapture of the
official trade union bodies. That is another factor making for an explosive
movement.
The working class had a high
political consciousness that was at variance with the programmes of its
political parties. Its awareness derived from its rich and varied experience,
the sharp alternation of political regimes,. The modern history of Greece is a
study on the role of the state. The workers understood the role of the monarchy
and also the impotence of the bourgeois republic. They understood the
limitations to the power of the military, and they had valuable experience of
the fraudulence of referendums and parliamentary elections. At every election in
Greece, a different system of proportional representation had been used, to tilt
the balance on every occasion to the right, in keeping with current
circumstances.
They had a clear memory of the
record of the political dynasties. They remembered what Karamanlis had stood for
in the days before the junta – and they remembered too the failures of
Papandreou’s leadership in the 1960s. They had learned the need to resist a
future coup – but they had learned also that even the most heroic sacrifice in
civil war is not enough, unless the workers were armed also with a clear
programme and a leadership that can be trusted.
They were fighting now with
every nerve and sinew, because they realised instinctively that unless they won
their historic goals and overthrew the bloodthirsty capitalist system now, while
the relationship of forces was favourable to the workers, then it would not be
long before they were menaced by a new dictatorship so ferocious that it would
make the colonels’ regime look positively liberal by comparison.
Thus, a gaping vacuum existed
to the left of the CP. The workers and the youth with their instinctive
revolutionary aspirations were disenfranchised. But history moves in the most
circuitous routes to overcome the obstacles put up by encrusted bureaucracies.
It was the unlikely personage of Andreas Papandreou – Harvard economist and
radical demagogue, his head swelled by the ovations of 1965, his prestige built
up among the workers by EDA itself, and sniffing the chance to stake a claim to
leadership of the left – who became the pole of attraction to the radicalised
youth.
At the decisive moment, he had
entirely misjudged the situation, and shrugged off the junta’s collapse as
“the NATO solution”. Like many of his kind, he correctly read the
minds of the professors and politicians with whom he rubbed shoulders, but
assigned to the masses at all times only a passive role.
The key to the future seemed to
be PASOK, the party founded by Andreas Papandreou to fill the vacuum left by the
break-up of the CP. As with other southern European socialist parties at the
time – parties swept forward by the energies of youth seething with radical
ideas, new parties which had no crystallised hierarchy of trusted functionaries
who could contain and dampen down the creative exuberance of the rank and file –
the youth flocked to its banner and tore it initially to the left.
Within months of its
foundation, Papandreou the Harvard economist found himself talking in a language
no less unfamiliar than Karamanlis did. “We are not social-democrats. We
must pass beyond capitalism to a socialist transformation. The fact that we have
chosen a democratic path does not mean that we are historically naive. We put
the burden on the shoulders of the opponent.” Meanwhile, at other times
Papandreou called for “the co-operation of the ruling party in the
establishment of national unity”.
For a time, PASOK was
undoubtedly the furthest left mass party in the world. However, as a volatile
centrist party it lurched from left to right, adventurist to chauvinistic.
Always unstable parties in transition between the poles of revolution and
reformism, PASOK was even more peculiar, being based on a single personality,
focussing the workers’ hopes for a new leadership.
In his first gush of
enthusiasm, Papandreou had promised: “It is imperative that differences
and tendencies exist. If somehow we had managed, either with brainwashing or
policing, to agree unanimously, then we would end up with a bureaucratic type
arrangement, something which our movement condemns explicitly.” However,
Papandreou was terrified of any spontaneous activity by the rank and file, and
in particular of the Marxist wing which could act as a catalyst in polarising
the party. In reality, this self-proclaimed democratic party embarked on a
savage wave of arbitrary expulsions and mass closure of branches, as soon as a
coherent opposition tendency developed. So afraid was Papandreou of the rank and
file that he even appointed non-members of the party to police it as regional
officials!
Nevertheless, he was dragged
after three years, grudgingly, to the construction of a genuine stable party
with a secure framework. Area and pan-Hellenic conferences were held – the
precaution being first taken of a blood purge of Marxists, the dissolution of
some of the best branches, the appointment of phoney delegations, with rigged
discussions, appointed chairpersons, the bullying and restriction of delegates
from the floor... Nevertheless, a forum for mass participation was being
painfully erected at last.
Despite its early
protestations, the party apparatus soon proved to be viciously bureaucratic. The
leadership got away with these measures by a combination of factors, including
its largely petit-bourgeois active composition, the small-scale artisan nature
of wide strata of the working class, and above all the absence of any political
traditions of workers’ democracy.
The monopoly of a vicious
Stalinist bureaucracy on the labour movement for four decades had left deep
scars. On the death of the Stalinist leader Zachariadis, his house was found to
contain a private cell in which was found the corpse of a Communist Party
central committee member who had raised criticisms of the party’s civil war
strategy! The tradition of merciless victimisation of political opponents is
powerful.
The creation of PASOK could
turn out to be a gigantic stride forward for the working class. By thrashing out
a policy corresponding to the militant mood currently sweeping the working class
– and that is the force that had really created PASOK, not the whim of a
political celebrity – it could have been transformed into a mass revolutionary
party. But on the basis of erratic zig-zags by an uncontrolled bureaucracy, it
could only disintegrate.
Had the time come at last to build a party worthy of the heroism of the Greek working class?
Had the time come at last to build a party worthy of the heroism of the Greek working class?
No comments:
Post a Comment