Posts Tagged ‘Greece’
Greek Communist Party Attacks World ‘Anti-Imperialist Platform’.
“A peculiar amalgam of political forces” says the Communist Party of Greece (Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας, Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas, KKE)
Many people may have, perhaps unfairly, failed to notice the World Anti-Imperialist Platform. The British affiliate is the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist), known as the Brar Business. This group, with strong links to the Stalin Society, was formerly a pillar of George Galloway (and now Chris Williamson’s) Workers Party of Britain.
This is their political stance:
This is the World Anti-Imperialist Platform:
People may have missed the second issue of its anti-imperialist Organ, published at the beginning of this month,
1. Work Socialism and War
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin [with G. Y. Zinoviev]
2. Article Glory to the heroes of Stalingrad!
Harpal Brar | Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
3. Faced with the Euro-Atlantic warmongers of a potentially exterminating third world war:
Build a new Communist International, relaunch the Global Anti-Imperialist Front and give impetus to the struggles of the international working class!
Fadi Kassem | Pole of Communist Revival in France (PRCF);
Georges Gastaud | Initiative Communiste (IC), France;
Boris Differ | Pole of Communist Revival in France (PRCF)
4. The political stance of the Communist Party of Greece … a communist stance?
Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action)
5. 10 commandments of the most volatile opportunism and revisionism
Patelis Dimitrios | Collective of Struggle for the Revolutionary Unification of Humanity, Greece.
The international relations section of the Communist Party of Greece (CPG) published on April 1, 2023 an
“overwhelming” (read vehement) criticism of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP) on the party’s website.
Ardent spotters , Michael P to the fore, have got the backstory to the pieces attacking the Communist Party of Greece PKK.
The Greek Party has 21 MPs in Parliament.
The CPGB (M-L) does not even have a Parish councillor.
On the so-called World Anti-Imperialist Platform and its damaging and disorienting position
Article by the International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE
A peculiar amalgam of political forces
An amalgam of political forces is involved in the activities of the WAP, where social democratic forces, such as the aforementioned PSUV and a South Korean organization (People’s Democracy Party) that has come out of the blue, play the main role, together with some Communist and Workers’ parties, such as the Hungarian Workers’ Party, the Communist Party (Italy), the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the Russian Communist Workers’ Party (RCWP), the Lebanese Communist Party, the Maoist Communist Party of Great Britain (M-L), the Pole of Communist Revival in France, etc.
Moreover, as the Communist Party of Mexico1 denounced, even nationalist, racist and reactionary political forces participated in the events in Caracas. Such were, for example, the nationalist Spanish organization “Vanguardia Española” (Spanish Vanguard), whose roots go back to the nationalist philosopher Gustavo Bueno, who was an active Phalangist fighter and supporter of the fascist dictator Franco in the 1950s. The “Vanguardia Venezolana” (Venezuelan Vanguard) is of a similar ilk.
Two unknown organizations from Greece participate in the WAP, lacking of mass action and social basis: the “Collective of Struggle for the Revolutionary Unification of Humanity” (D. Patelis) and the “Platform for Independence” (V. Gonatas), which lately have been marked by an intensification of anti-KKE sentiments, often choosing the slippery slope of provocative attacks via the Internet.
Imperialism as an “abnormal situation” that can be remedied…
The WAP presents a completely reversed picture of the global reality we are experiencing. From its analyses, we cannot understand that we live in the capitalist system, since the concept of capitalism has been banished from every related statement (e.g. the founding Paris Declaration, the materials of the recent Caracas meeting).
…
Like this bit,
“National sovereignty, regional unions, new global financial architecture or socialism?
The WAP, as we have already pointed out, has rejected the struggle for socialism and promotes the struggle for national sovereignty, the formation of regional unions and a new global financial architecture, which, despite the preservation of capitalist relations of production, will ensure “freedom and equality of nations, allowing each country to follow a sovereign and independent economic agenda without outside interference”.
Not to mention,
“The WAP carefully conceals the fact that both in China and Russia the bourgeois classes, the monopolies, are in charge, dealing and clashing with the monopolies of the USA, the EU and other capitalist states and with each other. Neither side of the conflict, therefore, is innocent as a dove, as the WAP describes them, but all of them are vultures. China even directly challenges the US supremacy in the imperialist system. As Lenin has pointed out, when imperialist vultures clash, the right side of history is not to pick the side of the weaker vulture so that it can take the place of the more powerful one. The right side of history is to choose the side of the peoples against the camp of the capitalists, who sometimes gain from peace and sometimes from war, shedding the blood of the working class and the peoples.”
…..
The negative critique of the Platform is the best part of the text, I lay a hefty bet that the KKE has domestic policies one can disagree with, “the KKE is absolutely opposed to Greece remaining in the European Union…” “The KKE advocates Greek patriotism and left-wing nationalism alongside proletarian internationalism and considers it its patriotic duty to oppose Greece’s EU membership…”
More criticisms of the Platform, have followed:
The Greek Elections after the Syriza defeat (and MeRA25’s new 9 seats): some initial observations.
Syria Loses, Yanis Varoufakis Backed MeRA25 Enters Parliament with 9 seats.
Greece’s centre-right opposition party New Democracy has won the nation’s snap general election.
With most districts counted, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras admitted defeat to his rival, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
New Democracy has 39.85% of the vote so far, with Mr Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party in second place with 31.53%.
Current projections give New Democracy an outright majority, as the winner receives 50 extra seats in parliament.
This is clearly not a crushing defeat for Syriza who got a respectable 86 seats.
The rigid Communist Party, Communist Party of Greece (Greek: Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας) maintained their position, stuck like a block of granite, with the same 15 seats they got in 2015.
The following (see for more information, below) is not widely reported:
This was welcome:
One can expect those on the left who are hostile to Syriza, and who advocate an anti-EU strategy, to circle like vultures over these results.
One of the first will doubtless be the Greek academic, Costas Lapavitsas.
At present he is best known for his lectures on the need for the British left to embrace a No Deal Brexit.
The Professor often draws on his experience of Syriza,
Interviewed in the Red-Brown Spiked he stated in December last year;
‘The left must fight for a real Brexit’
What did your experiences in Syriza teach you about the EU?
Costas Lapavitsas: They taught me that the EU is ruthless when it comes to negotiations. It only understands the language of power.
…
It is obvious that the Tory government and the Tory Brexiteers are incapable of preparing for No Deal. It is now up to the left to tell people that it is perfectly possible to leave without a deal and that we should not be scared of it.
In the page of the sovereigntist leaning and pro-Brexit US journal Jacobin, he argued at the start of July against left-wing internationalism and in favour of “command over national space” to create a socialist Britain free from everything bad “engulfing” the rest of the continent.
It is vitally important for the Left in the UK and Europe that the Labour Party should continue to uphold the result of the 2016 referendum. It is even more important for the Labour Party, even at this late hour, boldly to air arguments in favor of the radical potential of Leave. For readiness to exit the European Union is the true test of socialist opposition to the neoliberal iron collar currently throttling Europe.
…
The European left is in a state of weakness and confusion, clearly exhibited in the European elections of 2019. To recover, it must first realize that confronting neoliberal capitalism in Europe implies a rupture with the European Union. It should then start forming the political and ideological vehicles to support true internationalism and solidarity among the European peoples. This is the hardest challenge for twenty-first century socialism in Europe. It is still possible for the British Labour Party to grasp the unique historical opportunity offered by Brexit to open a path for the rest of Europe.
Lapavitsas Is a member of Popular Unity, (Greek: Λαϊκή Ενότητα (ΛΑΕ), Laïkí Enótita, LAE).
Mr Brexit Bolshevik’s party got this score.
| 15,948 | 0.28 | 0 |  0 |
The SWP backed Front of the Greek Anticapitalist Left (Greek: Αντικαπιταλιστική Αριστερή Συνεργασία για την Ανατροπή, ΑΝΤ.ΑΡ.ΣΥ.Α.).
A much more respected Greek critic of Syriza, Yanis Varoufakis, who backed Remain in the UK 2017 Referendum, says,
The only ray of hope in this bleak setting is the entry of MeRA25 into Parliament. DiEM25’s electoral wing in Greece was the pleasant surprise, entering Parliament with 9 MPs despite a total lack of funds and a sustained campaign of demonisation by the establishment and Mr Tsipras’ government.
This is their result:
| 194,212 | 3.44 | 9 |
Here.
Greek Communist Party “Explains” Homosexuality and “Bourgeois Human Rights”.
“I am free to experiment and then choose my sexual identity” – Bourgeois Human Rights says KKE.
This has been signaled on the Marxism List and is so extraordinary that it merits a wide readership particularity amongst those who consider the Greek Communist Party ‘progressive’ for its opposition to Syriza.
On the Cohabitation agreement.
Kommounistiki Epitheorisi, the political-theoretical journal of the CC of KKE (Issue 1, 2016).
“On December 22, 2015 the bill “Cohabitation Agreement, exercising of rights, criminal and other provisions” was passed in parliament by the procedure of a roll call vote. In total, 193 MPs voted in favour and 56 against. The parliamentary groups of SYRIZA, PASOK, POTAMI and the Union of Centrists (Enosi Kentron) voted in favour of the law. Differing positions of MPs were observed in NEW DEMOCRACY and the Independent Greeks (ANEL).
This legislative initiative had been widely publicized throughout the previous period both through the electronic and print media and by various homosexual organizations as “a step forward for modern Greece”, “with the principle of equality as a starting point and with an eye on Europe ‘.
Theoretical background:
The institutional recognition of homosexual cohabitation is pursued in the name of human rights, with a focus on ensuring individual rights, including sexual. The legal recognition of cohabitation by individuals with homosexual orientation is viewed as safeguarding minority rights. It is an aspect of the bourgeois concept of individual rights, pluralism, and the right to diversity, to self-determination of the body. It is expressed slogan “I am free to experiment and then choose my sexual identity.”
Homosexual orientation or alternating between homosexual and heterosexual orientation is presented by sections of intellectuals and artists, especially to the youth as an unconventional, dissident, and radical form of behaviour, as a “way” to overcome outdated perceptions of women’s position in society, about sexuality, as a “form of conflict with authority, based on the male-dominated society.” It projects the concept that “sexual identity is something fluid”, socially and linguistically constructed. This is the philosophical current of postmodernism and postmodernity that ultimately denies the objectivity of biological sex which is the basis for a predominantly heterosexual sexual orientation. It argues that “gender is not what we are, but what we do.”
It ignores or conceals the class factors that led to the different positions of the two sexes and the ruling classes in the evolution of society, from the primitive community household in the first class society onwards. In the passage from one socioeconomic formation to another, surplus products appear, produced to meet community needs. Some products were produced in excess due to the development of the means of production and work implements, the cultivation of land, herds, which came under the ownership of men who appropriated the surplus, the surplus product. The owner of the surplus began to distance himself from the need to work for survival, exploiting the work of prisoners of war, slaves. The woman could not overcome the inherent biological differences she had with her husband that render her more vulnerable in nature. To protect the need for the reproduction of the species, she could not stray far from the community household that lost its social character with the onset of the first class division of society, with the exploitation of man by man. Moreover, the need for wealth to be inherited by the “legitimate” offspring of the man was established. In this way, the domination of the man over the woman was institutionalized at both an individual and social level.
By bypassing the social causes which imposed overwhelmingly different social behaviours between the sexes, these theories lead to the denial of the biological differences between men and women, ultimately denying the objectivity of biological gender identity.
The Communist Party from 2008 onwards had expressed reservations and concerns about the fact that the enactment of the CA for heterosexual couples was in essence a first step towards the enactment – through its expansion – of a corresponding agreement for same-sex couples. For this reason, KKE had voted “present.” In any case, if Greece had not enacted a CA for heterosexual couples, it would not have been accused of discrimination. There is the possibility, however, of Greece being accused of discrimination with the same logic because it makes no legal provision for marriage between same-sex couples with the respective rights and obligations arising from it (adoption etc.).
This is the key section:
The biological origin of humankind is the result of a male-female sexual relationship, which as such, is of interest to and is regulated by society. Objectively a child that is raised by a same-sex couple, from the first determinative years of its life, acquires a distorted perception of the biological relationship between the sexes. A correct perception of this relationship is an essential ingredient for its smooth psychosomatic and social development.
Which is not mitigated by this:
In summary, the KKE considers that sexual orientation is a private matter, like cohabitation. Sexual orientation, sexual relationships or sexual satisfaction does not produce social rights. The institutionalization of the cohabitation agreement for same-sex couples is essentially an extension of the family institution to these couples. Experience from other countries shows that when a cohabitation agreement or gay marriage was legislated, it paved the way for the adoption of children.
It is important to note that the KKE condemns and is absolutely opposed to any behaviour or practice that is targets people on the basis of their sexual orientation. It considers attacks unacceptable, but also any other related abuse. For this reason, in Parliament it voted in favour of an amendment that makes provisions for the severe punishment for any such behaviour.
Tendance Coatesy 