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The Greek CP (KKE), for better or for worse, is the primary organizer of the resistance to the austerity drive in Greece. But when you have photos of hooded people consulting with the cops and then attacking the protest with police truncheons, it really brings the rise of fascism to mind. Keep in mind that Hitler advocated "national socialism". When you have such thugs attacking ordinary working people fighting unemployment and hunger in the name of "smashing the state", there is something dangerous afoot.
Just after I wrote these words, this comment showed up on my blog under my video clip of masked, hooded people in black attacking the PAME protest in Athens last October:
Classic police-organized attack. They pull their snitches and lumpens in for the ride. Maybe some fascist wannabes. The purpose is probably two-fold. 1. Show a broader strata that the communist party can be attacked in the streets, and 2. Propagandize that the communist party cooperation with liberalism is one of the reasons that the "Greek people" are at the mercy of the bankers (posing in this capitulation to the bankers in fact while maintaining a so-called independence much like other fascist propaganda). Some people may have forgotten that the fascists movements have always picked up disenchanted workers and used the rhetoric of "socialism" and "worker's pride", etc., etc. The flip side of this coin is the utter capitulation of the Greek Party to the role of bourgeois liberalism and their capitalist system for creating value. Nowhere in the depicted speech of the Greek Party "analyzing" the events is there any attack on capitalism as such. In place of that is a vague "workers will resist" but not through mass demonstrations. In other words, "We'll keep it off of the streets because we know it frightens you."
One of Trotsky's signal contributions to Marxism and thus to the workers was his analysis of Fascism and how the Stalinist parties set the workers up for the catastrophes. We know that these defeats by fascism and liberalism became WWII, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc., with the loss of millions and the un-winding of the clock, eventually to the collapse of the Soviets and the co-option of the Chinese state to imperialism. Here the Greek so-called communists are performing the same mission for the capitalists and their thugs waiting in the wings. Once the economic crisis deepens even more, the Greek workers and any middle-class allies they have will tire of the platitudes. They will get tired of spinning their tires. Then the Brown-shirts, some of whom will be these so-called anarchists "activists without theories or leaders", will take to their streets for more definitive action that will clothed in the rhetoric of the fatherland, mom, and apple pie, perhaps Greek pastries. In the United States, it is difficult for the rulers to launch a full-fledged fascism precisely because the workers' political representatives have been those shared with the capitalists themselves. It is difficult to maneuver the electorate to attack the bourgeois themselves, so the billionaires settle for attacking "the liberal, the leftist" press, which is of course, themselves. This is just part of the shell game they play with the clueless workers in the United States along with the equally clueless "activists" who believe that throwing mud pies is the equivalent to challenging the most power capitalist system and state that has ever existed.
The Greeks do not have a dual power situation at this point. They need to move to that point. The Greek Communist Party is the major obstacle of that move since it has the conceptual grip on the mass consciousness and believes that conjugal visits with capitalist ministers makes for great entertainment. The Transitional program would help break that conceptual grip. But the problem of course is that a leadership actually interested in ending the capitalist crisis by ending capitalism has to move that agenda. That is not going to happen with the Greek Communist Party and it is certainly not going to happen with brain-dead so-called anarchists. Possibly there is the opportunity for factions in the Greek Party. If not, a new party moving this agenda can do it, but it will never be by some rump group of so-called Trotskyists debating the flotsam and jetsam of missed opportunities to sell newspapers or trust accounts. All of that is irrelevant to the issues at hand and the comrades need to get off of it.
There has been dual power emerge in the Arab Spring and a powerful movement exist in the region. It is largely co-opted by bourgeois clerics promoted by the imperialist press and embassies intent on preserving the capitalist states. But they have only a tentative hold. Every opportunity exist to link that dual power with the Greek and Spanish struggles and that would rapidly spread to China and India, possibly further. Who knows, maybe the Russians would wake up. All of it has to be based on the dual power and a leadership that realizes the implications of power that challenges the bourgeois state at its roots. The program has to move the dual power to ultimate power and has to involve the co-opting of the army ranks into the dual power and the isolation of the generals, ministers, clergy, etc. Without this, the dual power will collapse into the new repression as the Egyptians generals are attempting with their friends at State and in NATO. The billionaires met recently to map out how they are going to move on this as well as their foisting of their economic restructuring upon the backs of workers, farmers, shopkeepers, etc.
I think that is where a challenge is, not on whether one or the other bottle thrower, mask wearer is right or wrong. They are totally irrelevant to the big picture of what is occurring. They are a mere bourgeois distraction to what needs to be done. One issue that might be of relevance is how to tackle the legacy of Stalinism and how to create checks and balances to bureaucracies of the state and party. This involves the super-ceding of the national state and bourgeois political conceptions. To a large extent it would involve the demilitarization of the state. Trotsky hinted in one piece that the workers in the factories and councils needed to be armed to the teeth. No one has really thought this through, and it is a glaring deficiency in our theories. Of course, the capitalists and slavers had no problem moving ahead with their revolutions without a blueprint. They did have the issue of "representation". Mostly people want equity. There can be no equity under capitalism or under a bureaucratic state of paper-shuffling bumpkins too lazy to work. I have not read the Transitional Program recently, so that is something to do soon. Cheers. Here is to the MIA, one really useful resource!
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