Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Aleka Papariga-The CP position of refusing to participate in bourgeois government (Pt. 2)

Pt. 1.

In conditions of rapid deterioration of the people's standard of living and while the workers' movement -- despite its important struggles, ones with a broader resonance in Europe -- still lags very much behind in terms of organization and impact, the bourgeoisie manages, despite its own dead-ends, its own difficulties in managing the crisis and in achieving a speedy economic recovery, to maintain the stability of its power. Indignation and rage may grow, yet class consciousness may well lag behind in such conditions. In these conditions, there are grounds for both radicalization and roll-back, decrease of demands. This second trend is currently powerful, whereas radicalization does occur, but in a slow pace and with setbacks.

In these conditions, the formation of a coalition government, based on the prestige of the KKE, appeared to be something positive or at least as a lesser evil.

Today [2013], the KKE's estimations and predictions are being confirmed. The bourgeois government has adjusted itself to a new form, that of coalition between bourgeois parties despite their differences. We have witnessed attempts and plans to reshape the bourgeois political system. A part of this process is the restoration of modern Social Democracy through the opportunist formation of SYRIZA, whose basic organizational structure derives from the KKE split and is accompanied by Social Democratic, Trotskyist and Anarchist forces. Today, in Greece, instead of the ND-PASOK binary we have the ND-SYRIZA binary, as a transitional stage toward the reshaping of the bourgeois political system.

The political antagonisms between liberal and reformist-opportunist policy move, despite occasional differences, in the direction of an open support of monopoly capital, and share as a feature the recovery of capitalist profit-making, accompanied by great unemployment, relative and absolute immiseration, while bringing within them the seeds of a new cycle of crisis, deeper than the current one. Post-elections [of 2012], opportunism has accomplished a blatant right-wing turn in its program and slogans, since it knows that it has the chance to govern.

The antagonisms between the liberal and the Keynesian model of management have been thoroughly tested throughout the twentieth century.

The alteration between the liberal and the Keynesian model of economic management has brought, throughout the twentieth century, cycles of economic crisis, has intensified intra-bourgeois and intra-imperialist contradictions and has led to two World Wars.

In the period 1989-1991, opportunism rejected Marxism-Leninism. It applauded the victory of counter-revolution and indeed proclaimed that humanity will now enter the path to democracy and peace. Today, when capitalism has been demystified in the eyes of the peoples, when the EU has belied the expectations of millions of workers in Europe, opportunists appear as accusers of the KKE and of its refusal to participate in government, arguing that we refuse Leninist doctrine, the directions of the Communist International, etc.

Let me open a parenthesis here. We must underline that our party, having studied its own history and the history of the International Communist movement, is critically disposed toward older, mistaken approaches and draws conclusions from them. Thus, after the decision of the 18th Congress of the KKE we have appraised, for instance, that the 20th Congress of the CPSU (February 1956) and its thesis on the "diversity of paths of transition to socialism under certain preconditions", its position, as well, on "peaceful coexistence" had been connected with the possibility of a parliamentary transition to socialism in Europe, a strategy that preexisted in some CPs and that dominated others eventually. This position was essentially a revision  of the conclusions drawn from Soviet revolutionary experience and constituted a reformist and social democratic strategy.

Antagonisms between capitalist states, which of course contained the element of dependency, as happens in the imperialist pyramid, were not properly analyzed. What predominated was the mistaken view that there was a relation of "subjection and dependency" of every capitalist state from the USA. As a result, what was adopted was the strategy of "anti-monopoly government", a form of a stage between capitalism and socialism, which was expected to solve problems of "dependency" on the USA. Thus CPs chose a policy of alliances with bourgeois forces as well -- those characterized as "nationally minded", in opposition to the so-called "comprador" elites.

The stance of many CPs toward Social Democracy was also integrated within this strategy. CPs were dominated by a mistaken assumption that Social Democracy is divided into a "left" and a "right" wing, something which drastically weakened the front against it. In the name of the unity of the working class (which had as its goal the creation of coalition governments with Social Democracy or a part of it), CPs made serious ideological and political compromises, while the proclamations of unity on the part of Social Democracy did not aim at overthrowing the capitalist system, but at detaching the working class from the influence of communist ideas and at the alienation of its consciousness.

We must acknowledge that our party, the KKE, was for a long time oriented toward similar strategic approaches, ones that were historically not justified. The CP strategy that had as its goal, within advanced capitalist states, the creation -- on the basis of the Parliament -- of an antimonopoly parliamentary government, the strategy that saw the passage to socialism as one that comes through the broadening of bourgeois democracy and the state ownership of corporations, the great electoral percentages of CPs in France and Italy and their participation in bourgeois "center-left" governments of EU states, not only failed to substantially change the correlation of forces, but they further bolstered opportunist deviation and the shrinking of communist forces throughout Europe. 

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