Athens Greece: Cops murder a 16 year old

[papageorgiou12]

Deep thoughts there, dennisr! Do you have ANYTHING substantive to reply to my last post besides the usual trot one-liners?

 

[dennisr]

trotsky wrote quite a few lines if I remember correctly. I leave you to hang yourself - you don't need any help - pap12

 

[papageorgiou12]

My "regards" to your "xekinima" comrades. They have been busy lately conquering the masses

 

[Captain Hurrah]

What is it like to be on the wrong side of history?

 

[ayatollah]

And one other thing! Correct me if I am wrong, but the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, 35 years after the infamous 20th Congress of the CPSU when your buddy Khrushchev carried out a scathing attack against Stalin and after which policies contrary to the ones proposed by Stalin were adopted across the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries. So if there was "no resistance by the working class", if there existed "a bankrupt corrupt system with no mass support", why is Stalin (who had died almost 40 years before) the one to blame? In the same vein, maybe we should blame Lenin or (lo and behold!) Trotsky!

Poor old Nikita Krushchev - lifelong service to the parasitic bureaucratic class which hijacked the gains of the 1917 October revolution , and you accuse the old butcher of being a pal of mine ! All the old apparatchnik wanted , once Stalin was safely dead, and his old mate Beria had been dragged out of the Central Committee meeting to be summarily shot, was to put the rule of the New bureaucratic "Communist" class on a more rational footing -- after all those years of Stalin's psychotic terror/purges of the Party apparatus itself. It is true that Stalin's purges were absolutely essential, the "heavy lifting" to wipe out all possible social forces opposing the new bureaucratic ruling class, and to mold the Party to be an absolutely compliant tool of that class domination - behind the facade of "socialism" and "marxism" - but by Stalin's death, the party bigwigs had had quite enough of being terrorised themselves thank you !

The USSR didn't fail because Krushchev and his successors eased up just a bit on the use of mass terror (just a tad, the Gulags only emptied by a bit - slave labour in the USSR - and Particularly China, was always a significant economic production resource), it failed because it was a corrupt , inefficient system which its population was happy to let die. You really need to explain WHY the working class of the USSR so easily allowed ALL the state's resources to be stolen by the newly restored orthodox capitalist class after the Gorbachev reforms backfired into the collapse rather than rejuvenisation of the system. The REASON is, that as far as the masses of the USSR were concerned , Stalinism as a system, was seen as benefitting only the Nomenclatura of the Communist Party elite, and no-one else was prepared to fight for it.

Give Krushchev a break Papa12, he was definitely one of YOURS, heart and sole - he just wasn't completely BONKERS !

 

[papageorgiou12]

ayatollah,

unfortunately you have read too much Trot literature in your youth, supplemented later on by the "historical" fairy tales of Conquest and the like. It is to be expected, of course! Since the 1930's Trotskyites and the western intelligence services have walked hand-in-hand all across the globe (remember POUM and Georgie Orwell?).

 

[chilango]

ayatollah Since the 1930's Trotskyites and the western intelligence services have walked hand-in-hand all across the globe (remember POUM and Georgie Orwell?).

It says an awful lot that you're still peddling this irrelevant nonsense when the Greek proletariat are in the situation they are in.

 

[chilango]

I think we've finally found an answer to the age old question:

"What's a Greek Ern?"



Boom-tish.

 

[ayatollah]

question from Papa12:

"So, ayatollah, can you show us ONE successfull socialist revolution led by your anti-Stalinist leftists?"

Well there WAS a biggie Papa12... Who was it built the Red Army from scratch , was Lenin's absolute right hand man during the revolution itself and its early years afterwards, and played the decisive organisational role in the October Revolution AND the defeating of the Whites and their Foreign backers in the Civil War ? Kuba/Stalin ? Nope... his role was small and his running of his part of the front VERY incompetant. It was LEON TROTSKY you deluded aparatchnik.

Now as it happens I have plenty of criticisms of Leon Trotsky's positions as well , eg, his temporary "Militarisation of Labour" idea, his arrogant incompetence over Kronsdadt, failure to effectively tackle the thorny core problem of the "Leninist" model of the revolutionery party. The fact is though that the Revolutionery Socialist 1917 Bolshevik Party Central Committee were pretty much ALL purged by Stalin eventually - so claiming the key socialist revolution of the 20th century as in any way a "win" for Stalin and his cronies is pure stalinist fantasy.

Given the undoubted significance of the KKE in the current Greek crisis we can only hope that your blind Maoist/stalinism is NOT typical of the entire Party, and that if/when the Greek working class moves to direct confrontation with the capitalist system your deluded fantasies of strategy and organisation and political objectives is pushed to one side by the mass action. We can hope anyway.

ps. It has been well established for decades that Koba/Stalin was for years before the revolution a grass for the Czarist intelligence services - he was after all always a psychotic petty criminal - always mixed with the criminals rather than the politicos during his brief spells in the detention camps. Still he was a horrendously abused child, filled with an unquenshable psychotic rage (hidden behind his cold, cunning exterior) against the world in general because of this severe abuse (as, interestingly, were Hitler and Saddam Hussein). BUT, What's YOUR excuse, Papa12 ?

 

[papageorgiou12]

question from Papa12:


ps. It has been well established for decades that Koba/Stalin was for years before the revolution a grass for the Czarist intelligence services - he was after all always a psychotic petty criminal - always mixed with the criminals rather than the politicos during his brief spells in the detention camps. Still he was a horrendously abused child, filled with an unquenshable psychotic rage (hidden behind his cold, cunning exterior) against the world in general because of this severe abuse (as, interestingly, were Hitler and Sadaam Hussein). BUT, What's YOUR excuse, Papa12 ?

1. "Established" by whom? Conquest and his ilk?
2. A rehashing of all the old fables about Stalin: an abused child, mingling with criminals, psychotic...what a bunch of crap. In the absence of real arguments the Trots have always relied on pseudo-psychological explanations. And in such a direction, there is of course no bottom in the barrel.
3. One is left to wonder how come Lenin trusted Stalin from the early days of "Marxism and the National Question" to the post-revolutionary years when he was entrusted with the position of Secretary of the Party. Of course, the Trots prefer not to discuss the days before the Revolution when their LD was not even a member of the Bolshevik Party, when he was in sharp conflict with Lenin, because, as Lenin said, Trotsky never understood the role of the peasantry in the revolution. He never managed to do till the end!

By the way, ayatollah, you seem to have read and accepted Trotsky's megalomaniac take of what transpired during the October revolution. It is your right, but do not fool yourself that it is necessarily the correct interpretation of events.

 

[papageorgiou12]

One more point, ayatollah: personal attacks ALWAYS characterize those who make them and the level of their intellect.

 

[chilango]

Can we get back to what's going to happen / is happening in Greece please?

 

[audiotech]

Yes, that would be good.

 

[Streathamite]

3. One is left to wonder how come Lenin trusted Stalin from the early days of "Marxism and the National Question" to the post-revolutionary years when he was entrusted with the position of Secretary of the Party. Of course, the Trots prefer not to discuss the days before the Revolution when their LD was not even a member of the Bolshevik Party, when he was in sharp conflict with Lenin, because, as Lenin said, Trotsky never understood the role of the peasantry in the revolution. He never managed to do till the end!

except that Lenin wa ssharply critical of Stalin, and much more in line with Trotsky, in the final few years before his death

 

[ayatollah]

Can we get back to what's going to happen / is happening in Greece please?

I can well understand your impatience with this stuff chilango - I think we've pretty much flogged a long dead horse to death AGAIN -- though the apparent ossified Stalinist politics of the KKE (and if one reads their website it is obvious that papageorgiou12 is by no means a maverick KKE member) will undoubtedly play a very seriously negative role in the struggle in Greece going forward, so it was worth knowing about. I think we've covered it now though too.

 

[papageorgiou12]

Need I remind chilango et al that the one responsible for our detour into Soviet politics was ayatollah who started puffing about the supposed Stalin iconography in KKE's site. Maybe conveniently enough to digress from KKE's positions today that I had tried to present and that have been gaining new followers day by day.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

Yeah, let's get away from worship of Lenin, Stalin and Leon 'war communism' Trotsky.

 

[JHE]

Paul Mason, a fairly prominent broadcast journalist in Britain, has claimed more than once in the past couple of weeks that an alliance of the Greek Communist Party, Trotskyite groups and the Green Party has over 40% popular support in opinion polls.

Could someone who knows Greece - perhaps Papageorgiou or Dimitris - clarify this, please? Is there any such electoral alliance? If there is, what is its programme and has it really got 40%+ support?

 

[audiotech]

I read it as a quite a 'broad left sweep', with 42.5% in the polls, but the KKE has refused to join this possible alliance.

 

[papageorgiou12]

Just the information and we can make the interpretations later.

The so-called 40% of the "Left" refers to a sum total in recent opinion polls of 3 main political forces:
1. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) with around 14%.
2. SYRIZA, an alliance of various left-wing parties and groups, primarily SYNASPISMOS (a party of ex-eurocommunists, ex-members of KKE that left in 1991, etc) and smaller ex-Maoist, trotskyite, etc groups. (10%)
3. The so-called "Democratic Left", a splinter group of SYNASPISMOS - a very moderate, eurocentric party, with no organizational strength, whose poll popularity (16%) will probably be short-lived. In any case, this party, although verbally disagreeing with the austerity measures, accepts the necessity of honoring the "commitments" of the Greek state and is gearing up for a possible participation in a bourgeois government after the next elections.

So the so-called "left" majority is essentially a fiction that a) is used by the bourgeois parties as a boogeyman to regain some of their lost popular trust and b) as a false and misleading slogan by some left forces, given the deep differences between the forces mentioned above.

 

[JHE]

OK, thanks for the info.

Is there likely to be an alliance between the KKE and the SYRIZA in the coming elections (assuming they are held)?

 

[ayatollah]

OK, thanks for the info.

Is there likely to be an alliance between the KKE and the SYRIZA in the coming elections (assuming they are held)?

I think we can take it as a resounding "NO", JHE. Unfortunately the KKE seems to think it has the historic "agent of history", monopoly on leading the working class.

 

[Riklet]

So the so-called "left" majority is essentially a fiction that a) is used by the bourgeois parties as a boogeyman to regain some of their lost popular trust and b) as a false and misleading slogan by some left forces, given the deep differences between the forces mentioned above.

We're not popular, it's bourgeois state propaganda!

Proper lols. Real 'cut off your nose to spite your face' stuff this. What's your/the KKE's position and current solutions then? You're not even going to try and engage with forming an organized/united left to combat the austerity measures being wrecked upon greece?

 

[Captain Hurrah]

I think we've finally found an answer to the age old question:

"What's a Greek Ern?"



Boom-tish.

Ern didn't actually believe the shit he came out with, though.

 

[chilango]

I read it as a quite a 'broad left sweep', with 42.5% in the polls, but the KKE has refused to join this possible alliance.

Can any parliamentary alliance actually stop/reverse the cuts though?

a) Would these parties actually go through with it? or would they, as so often in the past, sell out in return for a seat at the table?

b) Even if the Left said "No" and tried, through parliament, to reject austerity, would they be allowed to do so? or would they be replaced (by whatever means) by technocrats/national govt/the generals? Could we see a situation where Greek protesters are fighting the police t defend the parliament building?

Personally, and this is just opinion, I think the Greeks (and soon the rest of us) need to be building alternative democracy and structures in communities (and workplaces and so on) to replace/by-pass the failing state. Long haul, little steps etc. etc.

 

[chilango]

Just the information and we can make the interpretations later.

The so-called 40% of the "Left" refers to a sum total in recent opinion polls of 3 main political forces:
1. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) with around 14%.
2. SYRIZA, an alliance of various left-wing parties and groups, primarily SYNASPISMOS (a party of ex-eurocommunists, ex-members of KKE that left in 1991, etc) and smaller ex-Maoist, trotskyite, etc groups. (10%)
3. The so-called "Democratic Left", a splinter group of SYNASPISMOS - a very moderate, eurocentric party, with no organizational strength, whose poll popularity (16%) will probably be short-lived. In any case, this party, although verbally disagreeing with the austerity measures, accepts the necessity of honoring the "commitments" of the Greek state and is gearing up for a possible participation in a bourgeois government after the next elections.

So the so-called "left" majority is essentially a fiction that a) is used by the bourgeois parties as a boogeyman to regain some of their lost popular trust and b) as a false and misleading slogan by some left forces, given the deep differences between the forces mentioned above.

Thanks.

Any of these parties seriously committed to rejecting the austerity measures?

Or will they accept a compromise of "less harsh" austerity?

Given the pressure they would be under if they formed a govt that rejected austerity would any of these parties actually stand and fight to defend themselves?

 

[papageorgiou12]

I am leaving the personal insults aside - they do characterize the ones making them.

Regarding KKE's approach towards a so-called "left" government, I wrote the following a couple of days back:

I think that the most important conclusion that KKE has reached from the Chilean and other experiences is that, under conditions of a relatively developed capitalism, it is illusionary (verging on the criminal) to struggle for "left governments" as intermediate forms of state power. Governments that would supposedly take measures to protect working class interests WITHOUT coming into direct conflict with the bourgeoisie at the level of the economy (control of monopolies on production), state institutions (army, police, etc), international alliances (EU, NATO, etc). In our opinion, if such a government ever arises on the ground of the bourgeois parliament, it would be under conditions of a very sharp class struggle (and this is something that is NOT happening in Greece right now) and it would be short-lived and would be judged by its ability to quickly move forward in overthrowing capitalism. However, such a historical possibility, should not make us put forward today slogans about the formation of such a government.

Unfortunately, besides KKE, most of the major political formations on the "Left" (for example, SYRIZA/SYNASPISMOS) put forward such slogans (i.e the formation of a parliamentary left government) as the urgent tasks of the day, whitewash the EU by arguing that such a government could negotiate a temporary halt to debt repayment, achieve economic growth (presumably capitalist economic growth) and, through a number of reforms at the level of the EU ("democratization" of the European Central Bank, issuance of eurobonds, etc), would manage to keep all sides satisfied. The leader of that oportunist formation, Tsipras, even argued yesterday that such a "left government" could form alliances with Monti in Italy, with the leaders in Portugal, etc!

Such positions can only foster illusions in the working class and the popular strata, can lead to quick disappointment when the "left" government would not be able to deliver and push back the movement for decades.

 

[chilango]

I am leaving the personal insults aside - they do characterize the ones making them.

Regarding KKE's approach towards a so-called "left" government, I wrote the following a couple of days back:

I think that the most important conclusion that KKE has reached from the Chilean and other experiences is that, under conditions of a relatively developed capitalism, it is illusionary (verging on the criminal) to struggle for "left governments" as intermediate forms of state power. Governments that would supposedly take measures to protect working class interests WITHOUT coming into direct conflict with the bourgeoisie at the level of the economy (control of monopolies on production), state institutions (army, police, etc), international alliances (EU, NATO, etc). In our opinion, if such a government ever arises on the ground of the bourgeois parliament, it would be under conditions of a very sharp class struggle (and this is something that is NOT happening in Greece right now) and it would be short-lived and would be judged by its ability to quickly move forward in overthrowing capitalism. However, such a historical possibility, should not make us put forward today slogans about the formation of such a government.

Unfortunately, besides KKE, most of the major political formations on the "Left" (for example, SYRIZA/SYNASPISMOS) put forward such slogans (i.e the formation of a parliamentary left government) as the urgent tasks of the day, whitewash the EU by arguing that such a government could negotiate a temporary halt to debt repayment, achieve economic growth (presumably capitalist economic growth) and, through a number of reforms at the level of the EU ("democratization" of the European Central Bank, issuance of eurobonds, etc), would manage to keep all sides satisfied. The leader of that oportunist formation, Tsipras, even argued yesterday that such a "left government" could form alliances with Monti in Italy, with the leaders in Portugal, etc!

Such positions can only foster illusions in the working class and the popular strata, can lead to quick disappointment when the "left" government would not be able to deliver and push back the movement for decades.

Thanks PG. So what would the KKE do in the hypothetical event of a "broad left" alliance being mooted in coming elections? Would the KKE enter a "Left" govt? vote against it? organise something else outside parliament - if so what?

 

[papageorgiou12]

chilango,

I think it is proper for a communist party to make predictions and chart its course based on realistic assumptions. What are the realistic assumptions of TODAY based on my opinion:
1. There is widespread dissatisfaction and anger with the austerity measures, but still no daily involvement of the majority of the working class in the class struggle (strikes in the workplaces, demonstrations, other forms of local actions, etc), despite occassional positive outbursts.
2. There is an erosion of the mass support of the main bourgeois parties (social-democratic PASOK, "conservative" ND), but still no mass movement of support towards radical alternatives. This can be judged in many ways, including the still strong presence of the social democrats in the trade unions.
3. The bourgeoisie is even grooming one of the "left" parties above ("Democratic Left") for inclusion in a bourgeois government. Anyway, it is not at all certain that this particular party will gain in the actual vote the percentages that are being predicted in the opinion polls.
4. You cannot yet detect any signs of a disintegration of the state mechanisms (army, police, bureaucracy, etc).

Based on the above, I do not think that a "left" government is a even a remote possibility in the coming elections. What is possible (and desirable) is a shift in the correlation of forces, with a significant increase of the popular vote for KKE and a decrease of the vote for the bourgeois parties. This would make difficult the daily running of the bourgeois coalition government (that would almost certainly be formed after the elections) and would create better conditions for an upsurge of the working-class movement (trade union and otherwise) that is the only long-term solution that can lead to a sharpening of the class struggle.

 

[ayatollah]

The tragedy of Papageorgiou12's position outline above, is that so much of it is CORRECT. The Left getting sucked into yet another weak facade of "government", when the mass of Greeks are not yet ready for major confrontation with capitalism WOULD simply lead to a Chilean Allende situation. So the radical/revolutionery Left as a whole does need to continue to build its strength , and NOT get trapped in being in government until a position approaching dual power is much nearer ... timing is all. The TRAGEDY is that the KKE's own version of "third period Stalinism" , whereby every other Left organisation seems to be simply discounted as some sort of "bourgeois tricksters", and only the KKE is seen as having a monopoly right on leading the class forward (and of course beyond the revolution in a one party state), will inevitably fragment the radicalised working class and the struggle as it approaches direct confrontation with the capitalist state.