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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, pp.10-15.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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THE COUP in Greece at the end of November merely replaced one military regime by another. The apparatus of repression and censorship remains intact. Students arrested a week before the coup continue to fester in jail. The bayonet still provides the main backing for the government. However, the fact that the coup took place is indicative of the crisis which is confronting military rule – a crisis which could easily develop into something much more radical than the replacement of one army officer by another as president. The significance of the crisis of military rule in Greece cannot be overestimated. Chile gave heart to reactionary forces throughout the world by seeming to prove that there was a relatively easy way of dispatching a powerful working class movement. Greece, by showing the limitations of a regime based upon repression alone when faced with a rising tide of popular struggle, should provide heart to the working class movement internationally. This article, written after discussions with members of the Greek organisation, Socialist Revolution, analyses the rise of the military dictatorship in Greece and the factors that have been driving it into crisis. |
IT IS CUSTOMARY in liberal circles in the west to regard the colonels’ coup of 1967 as an aberration from a previous history of ‘normal’ democratic development, based upon the perversely reactionary views of a minority of army officers. But the reality of post-war Greek history has been quite different to this picture.
In 1944, the forces of ELAS, the wartime anti-Nazi resistance movement led by the Communist Party, were in effective control of most of the country. But by agreement between Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, Greece was to form part of the western sphere of influence. A civil war followed in which the country was almost literally reconquered for the exiled royal government by British, and later American, military and economic intervention. The police and armed militia who had served the Nazi occupation forces were taken over by the royal government and used against the left. All the apparatus of repression now used by the military junta – torture, concentration camps on distant islands, government control of the unions – were developed in this period.
The return to democratic ‘normality’ in the fifties left this apparatus untouched. Under the right-wing premier Karamanlis (1952-62) the Communist Party remained illegal. The party was reformed under another name (EDA) but both it and the centre opposition were effectively excluded from power by a machinery of electoral rigging and political intimidation. A police blacklist of ‘non-nationalists’ estimated at one million names was kept. Anyone on it could not obtain the ‘certificate of national probity’ which was necessary for any job with the government, a firm doing government work, or for such diverse activities as getting a drivers’ licence, a passport, or a place in a university.
In the countryside the police intimidated farmers known to support the opposition, and villages which voted the wrong way were denied funds for roads, schools and other works. Ballot papers were checked to identify opposition voters, and double voting was common; in the 1961 election, unusually rigged even by Greek standards, the opposition estimated the total of double votes at 500,000. Anti-Trade Union laws restricted the right to strike; strikers were attacked by police and sometimes conscripted into the army. And under a structure devised by a TUC mission to Greece during the civil war, headed by the young and rising Vic Feather, right-wing domination of the Trade Union Federation was ensured by a structure which guaranteed votes to right-wing ‘dummy unions’ often with only a dozen or so members.
Meanwhile the army regularly received 40 to 50 per cent of the official budget and was almost totally independent of control by even right-wing parliamentary politicians. The officer corps was dominated by a right-wing secret society known as IDEA, formed by the British in 1944. Enormous secret funds, uncontrolled by parliament, went to the army and the secret police, and were effectively controlled only by the ‘parallel government’ of army officers and the court circles.
In short, Greece in the fifties was a fairly normal part of the southern and western European fringe of the ‘free world’. Along with Turkey, Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy and Ireland, its main export was people. Seven per cent of the population emigrated in this period; by 1960, 100,000 a year were leaving the country, half of them skilled workers, and most going to the booming economy of West Germany.
AS WITH the rest of Europe’s outer fringe, the late fifties saw a change. The postwar boom in Europe led to a flow of capital into Greece attracted by lavish tax concessions.
The economic growth of the fifties strengthened the working class and a new generation grew up that had not known the demoralisation and defeat of the civil war. A professional-technocratic middle-class also emerged, with dreams of an independent industrialised ‘progressive’ capitalist democracy although the native Greek bourgeoisie proper had little interest in industrial investment.
The Karamanlis regime was unable to cope with the ‘growing opposition. Protests at the blatant rigging of the 1961 election, the murder of the left wing MP George Lambrakis in 1963 (subject of the film Z), the growth of massive popular demonstrations, the rise of industrial militancy, all led to Karamanlis resigning and an election in which the veteran liberal politician, George Papandreou, could enjoy success.
In fact Papandreou was an old-style machine politician. He was actually the prime minister who had ‘invited’ British troops into Greece in 1944, starting the chain of events that led to the civil war, in which he had been one of the liberal figleaves for the right wing. A skilful operator in the traditional game of clique-ridden liberal parliamentary politics, he had succeeded in welding the factions of the centre into a united party, the Centre Union. In 1962 and 1963 he had stomped the country in a demagogic campaign that caught the voters’ imagination by promising an end to the corrupt and regressive ‘old regime’ and a new deal for workers and peasants. He rode to power on a wave of mass discontent which he later found difficult to control.
Despite support from the left-wing Communist-Party dominated EDA, the Centre Union government could not contain the rising movement of working class struggle, which for the first time did not face immediate police and army repression – although armed police were used to break a particularly militant miners’ strike near Athens.
It became more and more difficult for Papandreou to keep the King and the army happy without running the risk of alienating his own supporters. There were pressures from the mass movement for changes in the military apparatus – particularly when revelations proved the complicity of the army in the murder of Lambrakis. From the other side there were attempts to implicate Andreas Papandreou, the premier’s son, in a ‘left wing plot’ concocted during a right-wing frame-up trial. The premier tried to resolve the situation in 1965 by taking over the war ministry, previously in the hands of a right wing minister, himself. Instead the King dismissed Papandreou and appointed a right wing government.
The royal action led to months of mass struggle, with continual political strikes and daily riots in the streets of Athens. Papandreou, naturally enough, was not prepared to give any lead to the movement. And EDA instead of leading the movement into a real struggle against the King and the military apparatus canalised it behind the slogan of new elections. Throughout 1966 the wave of mass struggle continued; a record number of days were lost in strikes. Finally the King appeared to ‘compromise’ at the end of the year. New elections were promised for May 1967. Meanwhile a ‘non-party’ caretaker government would hold office for the intervening five months. Papandreou agreed to the compromise, forming a de facto coalition with the right wing opposition, despite a storm of protest in his own party led by his son.
And the EDA still left the movement without political leadership, staking all on the elections to come and the prospect of a centre-left coalition. As a result the movement was demoralised while the right wing prepared.
In April 1967, only four days before the election campaign was due to start, the army took over, so providing the answer to the problem of stabilising capitalist rule for which main sectors of the ruling class and their foreign backers were looking.
US BACKING was crucial to the success of the colonels’ junta-its leader Papadopoulos was head of the Greek equivalent of the CIA, and in regular touch with his American opposite numbers and paymasters. This gave him a headstart over the other right-wing factions, and as long as the economy continued to expand, the main centres of capital and the King acquiesced in his rule, although there was disgruntled opposition from the various cliques of parliamentary politicians who were left without any function.
The first four years of the colonels’ rule coincided with a period of general expansion in world trade. Share prices rose 50 per cent in the year after the coup, and incomes from profits and rents grew by 15 per cent in 1968-69 as against four per cent in 1966-67. But for workers, during the period that the colonels were still riding the world boom, ‘the increase in real purchasing power was insignificant’.
Though the boom kept the bourgeoisie happy and assisted the army and the police apparatus to contain the working class, it hardly concealed the internal weaknesses of the junta. There were massive trade deficits, financed by inflows of foreign capital, most of it purely speculative; industrial investment in the 1967-71 period was half that of the 1963-66 period, and real-estate speculation was the main growth area. Foreign investment remained export-oriented and had little domestic spin-off. Invisible earnings from shipping did not alter the shipowners’ preference for actually building their ships in Japan or even Belfast (see Onassis’ stake in Harland and Wolff). Remittances from foreign workers in Germany kept the balance of payments stable – but were also vulnerable to any downturn in the world economy.
THE WORKING CLASS in Greece is relatively small. The 1971 census showed that 52 per cent of the labour force were in agriculture, and 35 per cent were workers in industry, the services and public administration. Of these in turn, only 12.8 per cent were manual workers in manufacturing industry.
Until the development of such modern large plants as the Esso-Pappas complex in Salonica and the Skaramangas shipyards, Greek workers were concentrated in traditional industries such as tobacco, clothing, food and drink, and construction. Workplaces were small, and unions often localised, with national agreements developing only in the 1950s. Under the Feather system already referred to, the larger, more militant unions were outvoted by right-wing breakaway unions at national level.
But even the right-wing leadership which had headed the GSEE throughout the Civil War and the Karamanlis regime, was sacked by the junta in their first wave of repression in 1967, when 158 unions were dissolved and their property confiscated, and hundreds of known militants sent to concentration camps. The leadership was replaced by appointees from the labour section of the secret police and other right-wing bureaucrats. While the unions still officially exist, a series of decrees lay down state censorship of all union leaflets and publications; illegalisation of all strikes by state employees, and all other strikes deemed by the junta not to be ‘in the material and moral interests of the workers’; a minimum period of six years with the same employer before running for any union office; state fixing of national minimum rates after ‘consultations’ with the unions; and union agreements to apply only to union members.
This makes it all the more remarkable that the regime shelved its intention, announced in the 1968 five-year plan, to abolish a 1920 law on redundancy compensation and unfair dismissal, and to ‘reform’ the sickness and unemployment insurance funds to ensure that the entire cost was borne by workers’ contributions. So strong was rank-and-file feeling against these attacks that the junta-appointed leaderships of 24 unions protested. Likewise in 1969 an attempt to lengthen the legal minimum working day in the building trade was abandoned in face of threatened action by the traditionally militant construction workers.
Other substantial erosions of conditions did however take place, to be set against the apparent stability of real wages in the four-year boom period. Legal restrictions on shop and office hours have been abolished, and safety regulations on Greek ships have been relaxed and are hardly enforced in any case. The result has been an alarming rise in the rate of deaths on Greek ships from fire, overloading, and worn-out equipment – 135 in 1970 alone.
Since 1971, rising inflation and frozen wages have cut into real living standards. Starting in 1971, a rash of unofficial strikes spread in 1972, including stoppages in a Salonica plastics factory and a power-station site in Piraeus. September of this year actually saw the first official strike since the coup-by trolleybus drivers – which ended after half a day with the union demands granted.
Discontent has also been rising amongst the peasantry. Though land reforms in the inter-war years gave the peasants the land, the peasants have remained squeezed between the high prices charged by the big firms from whom they buy fertilizers, tractors, machinery and other supplies, and the low prices they are paid by the food wholesaling monopolies. What these two do not take between them goes in interest on loans to the Agricultural Bank. The only escape from these pressures has been emigration.
The effects of the junta’s policy has been to tighten this squeeze. In particular, peasant co-operatives have been repressed in the same way as the trade unions. The retailing cooperatives which competed with private wholesalers have been dissolved and their assets hived-off to private interests, some of whom have been granted exclusive purchasing rights which enable them to drive down the prices received by small farmers even further. The Greek-American millionaire, Tom Pappas, for example, has been granted the exclusive right to buy tomatoes from the farmers in western Greece.
Thus the peculiar vulnerability of the Greek economy to the problems in the world economy has deepened the social crisis of Greek society since 1971. In the last year in particular, with the cost of living up 45 per cent and only a 25 per cent increase in wages, discontent has mounted.
THE GROWING economic crisis and the popular discontent with the regime had the effect of giving new heart to the old bourgeois politicians. They saw that the military alone could no longer guarantee the economic advantages provided for the ruling class immediately after the 1967 coup. And at the same time the Greek and foreign interests that had backed the coup began to see the need to broaden the base of the regime by bringing it into some sort of alliance with the old bourgeois politicians. In this way it was hoped to reduce popular pressures which might lead to the forcible overthrow of the junta at some point.
Pressure in this direction was increased by the mounting student revolt, beginning in 1971. But contacts between the junta and the old politicians had begun in 1970, after the wave of repression in the regime’s first years had come to an end. The ‘constitution’ issued by the junta in 1968 provided for a parliamentary front, while real power would stay with the army. Foreign affairs, security and defence were to be out of parliament’s control, and a constitutional court had the power to vet all parties and candidates. Any party claiming to represent workers or peasants was banned in advance.
At first the old parties had rejected the junta’s constitution, but by 1970 they were tacitly prepared to work it, in view of the increasing need to provide a safety-valve for mounting opposition and, incidentally, job prospects for themselves. By 1972 the parties were demanding the holding of the elections promised in the constitution. Agreement seems to have been reached with the right-wing ERE party, the right wing of the Centre Union, and the King for a return of the King, and a joint military-civilian cabinet to act as a ‘bridge’ for elections.
But these first moves towards a ‘liberal’ face for the regime were disrupted by the outbreak of the student revolt.
Greek higher education was extremely archaic and in need of reform to bring it into line with the needs of modern capitalism. An educational reform had been planned by Papandreou, to meet the need for an increase in the supply of trained personnel to big business. The scheme, financed by the World Bank, continued under the junta, and new universities and technical colleges multiplied.
The junta’s ‘Charter of Higher Education’ issued by the junta in autumn 1971 provided for rigged student elections, stiff disciplinary councils, big-business domination on the board of governors, and a heavy increase in the workload and in examination pressure. The early student movements of 1972 concentrated on issues of academic freedom, discipline, and free speech, and Communist Party and Centre Union student leaders tried to keep things that way. But the demands escalated to include attacks on the dictatorship itself, and on the big business forces which clearly stood behind the education reform. In the demonstrations and occupations in Athens in February and March of this year, the open support of workers was evident. The link was even closer by October.
Meanwhile the bloody repression of the student revolt in the spring broke the honeymoon between the old politicians and the colonels. The old dilemma of whether to join Papadopoulos or replace him reappeared, as the regime’s total lack of any real social base was exposed. With nothing but police terror to rely on to prevent mass organisation, the regime was dangerously unstable. The students had shown it was possible to defy the junta and the lesson was not lost on the workers. The junta’s only reply was a wave of repression, amidst claims that the student unrest was a plot by the old politicians.
From exile in Paris, Karamanlis called for the junta to resign and give way to ‘a strong and experienced government’. The first signs of unrest began to appear in the navy, and in May came the royalist naval mutiny. After it was crushed, the regime abolished the monarchy, and declared that elections would be held ‘sometime in 1974’, under a new republican constitution with Papadopoulos as president. Meanwhile a civilian government was appointed under a pre-junta politician, Markezinis.
BUT THE NEW attempt at normalisation ended with the Athens student and worker rising of November. An occupation by students of Athens Polytechnic on Wednesday 1 November demanding the abolition of the conscription of students, the abolition of the student branch of the security police, and other educational demands, soon escalated into a general revolt of university technical and high-school students. Ten thousand students joined the occupation. A co-ordinating committee of student delegates was set up, with worker representatives as well. Other universities in Patras and Salonica were occupied, and the student radios broadcast for worker support and the overthrow of the junta.
By this time, the students were no longer concerned with exclusively students’ problems. Their demands were now mainly political demands. The radio station emphasised:
‘Our struggle is firstly, anti-junta – we fight for the overthrow of the junta; secondly, anti-fascist-we fight for the establishment of an anti-fascist democracy; thirdly, anti-imperialist – we fight to achieve Greek independence from foreign interests.’
The escalation from student demands to general political demands was explained by the students themselves as the result of the realisation that their problems could not be solved under the junta regime and the monopolies which backed it.
Workers, especially building workers from the big construction sites, began to respond to the call from the radio station. By noon all the roads within a quarter of a mile of the Polytechnic were flooded with people and demonstrations were starting in many directions. People began to try to seize various ministry buildings, particularly the ministry of public order, and the first clashes with the police occurred. Buses and trolley buses were overturned and used as barricades, The students at the polytechnic were joined by a committee of high school students, a committee of workers and even a committee of peasants who had come to Athens from Megara.
The joint student-worker committee issued a call to extend the struggle further.
‘The character of the struggle, which began as a struggle of students and now embraces the whole people, is a struggle against both the military dictatorship and the local and foreign monopolies that support it. It is a struggle for power to pass into the hands of the people ...
‘Spread the call for committees to be set up at every place of work with the aim of preparing workers to come out on an economic and political general strike.
‘Down with the rising prices. Americans out. Down with the junta. All people out on the streets. Set up factory committees. For a united action front.’
By the evening the demonstrations were at least 100,000 strong, with bitter clashes taking place with the police, who were now reinforced with armoured cars and attacked the demonstrators with machine guns in hand. Nevertheless at midnight a three miles radius was occupied by the demonstrators.
Finally, at about 1.30 a.m. the army moved in to ‘restore order’, using tanks and tear gas. Eventually, after much shooting it was successful. But the junta paid a heavy price for resorting to such naked repression. It was noticeable during the first skirmishes between the troops and the demonstrators that soldiers, and even a few junior officers, were hesitant about moving into the attack. In the days that followed there were growing numbers of reports of deep discontent among the rank and file of the army about the role they had been required to fulfil.
In 1967, the military coup had been successful because the mass of workers were politically disoriented by years of bitter struggles for which the CP dominated left had provided no clear focus. The army officers had been able to move without facing the sort of politically coherent mass opposition which might have threatened their hold over the rank and file. Now mass opposition was emerging and even massive NATO armaments could not guarantee the reliability of the army indefinitely.
A week after the student-worker uprising, the Greek generals tried to secure their position by dumping Papadopoulos, the man who had above all symbolised military rule since 1967. By doing this, they may have bought themselves a few weeks or even a few months’ grace. But they have not solved the fundamental problems that make the uprising possible. A change in the military leadership cannot in itself deal in any way with the growing economic crisis. And it certainly is not going to destroy the growing awareness of workers and students of their potential strength.
ONCE AGAIN, the danger to the Greek ruling class itself of the instability of military rule has been made clear. Greek, British and American capital as well as the CIA, all want a ‘Karamanlis solution’ to replace a regime which has no way of dealing with mounting unrest except by a repression which threatens the system itself. But every step towards such a ‘liberalisation’ by a re-structuring of the repressive apparatus, leads to new upsurges from workers and students; the pressures in this direction can only mount as the economic crisis forces Greek workers to fight to defend their wages and conditions, and reduces the regime’s room for manoeuvre.
Behind all the talk of ‘democratisation’ from the pre-1967 parties lies the fact that the same military police apparatus has governed Greece since 1944, with varying degrees of parliamentary cosmetics. It is now divided, as are its backers, over how much ‘democratic’ decoration it can afford without unleashing uncontrollable pressures. The demands for radical democratisation and modernisation of what is still an economically backward country, cannot be carried through without putting in danger that apparatus – and with it the whole Greek ruling class.
Although the regime fears the results of easing repression, it also dreads the consequences of its present isolation continuing. The ‘Karamanlis solution’ would aim to solve the dilemma by bringing the old political cliques to the support of the regime, while leaving the repressive apparatus intact as a permanent threat to be waved at those really pushing for the interests of workers and peasants. It is a sign of the inherent instability of Greek capitalism that there is fear of even this solution. Faced with crisis, a backward capitalism like that of Greece cannot afford to buy off the discontents of any significant section of the population. And that means that even a carefully limited liberalisation under Karamanlis could rapidly lead to clashes with the military-police apparatus on which Greek and world capital depend for their rule.
The liberal opposition in Greece puts forward demands which limit themselves to vague talk about a ‘restoration of democracy’. In this they are supported by both factions of the Greek CP, who regard such ‘democratisation’ as a stage which must be reached before any talk of social change can begin. But ‘democracy’ in the abstract could mean a Karamanlis (or even a younger Papandreou) democracy in which the police and army remain intact, ready to intervene when the ruling class considers the democratic process to have got out of hand.
The extent to which the Communist Party is prepared to go in pushing the line of ‘unity of all democratic forces’ was shown in February this year, when the general secretary of the ‘internal’ faction of the CP, Babi Drakopoulos, was on trial. His main defence was that his party hopes to co-operate with the army and the exiled king in a return to ... ‘normality’.
The head of Karamanlis’ party, the ERE, Kanellopoulos, made a statement during the week between the worker-student uprising and the replacement of Papadopoulos, in which he called for all political parties to form a government of national unity. At the time of the civil war Kanellopoulos called the island prison camp of Makronisos ‘the new Parthenon of Greece’. But this did not stop Drakopoulos from endorsing the call for a government of national unity, adding only that the CP should be one of the parties represented in it. Another ‘democrat’ to whom the CP looks for an alliance is Papaspirou, the Minister of Justice who signed the death warrants of the last Communist leaders executed after the civil war.
Significantly, such politics made it impossible for the CP to take the lead of the student demonstrations that led to the uprising. The pro-Moscow faction of the party opposed the occupation of the Polytechnic, saying that it would scare away people who opposed the junta. And the ‘internal’ faction of the party (which takes a line similar to that of the Italian CP, independent of Moscow) opposed the call for a general strike. Fortunately all this was too much for the spontaneous militancy of the majority of students, who instead endorsed the demand for an extension of the struggle which revolutionary socialists argued for.
In effect, the line of the CP can only serve to confuse those workers and students whose militancy represents the biggest threat to the military regime. And if the regime is overthrown, it will mean trying to tie workers to an alternative capitalist solution to Greece’s crisis.
Revolutionary socialists do not, of course, abstain from the struggle to overthrow the junta and for democracy. Far from it. But what is necessary is to give a real content to the slogan for democracy, linking it with the struggles over economic issues and for political liberties which have been driving workers and students on to the streets.
The demands which have to be raised in Greece have to relate to the political rights of workers and peasants – the right to organise, the right to strike, the right to demonstrate. These have to be linked to the question of building a popular mass movement that will both struggle for the immediate economic demands of workers and peasants and confront the power of the army and police. In this way a movement can be built able to smash the military and police forces – and without such a movement any talk of democracy is merely discussion on how to provide a new superficial covering to the real forces running Greece throughout the post war period. But to raise such demands means not merely opposition to the present junta but also the various bourgeois politicians who would like to help it solve the problem of stabilising capitalist rule in Greece.
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