Greek Resistance in WW2: Patriotism or internationalism?

Submitted by ICConline on October 23, 2006 - 09:38

In mid September an article by Jack Ray was posted on the libcom website: A short
history of the Andartiko - the Greek Resistance partisans who fought against Italian
and German fascist occupation.
The author says that nowhere in Europe during the Second World War was the
resistance as simple a question as good guys in the hills with rusty rifles, and bad
guys wearing swastikas and burning villages. Yet, to be honest, thats the impression
you get. We hear about the radical, democratic working class spirit of the
movement, that there were guerrilla fighters who wanted to create a peoples
democracy, but that the potential for revolution was betrayed. It brings to mind the
view of leading SWP member, Chris Harman, in popularising Trotskyist mode:
Resistance movements had emerged which seemed to be a foretaste of revolutionary
change in much of Europe (A Peoples History of the World).
Not like in the movies
Books and films have done a lot to glamourise the various resistance movements over
the years, distinguishing the military actions of the guerrillas from the manoeuvres of
the official armies. In Rays account, we read about the theft of a German flag from
the Acropolis, the daubing of graffiti, and the patriotic singing of the national anthem
at the funeral of a nationalist poet that was an opportunity to voice opposition. But
he also tries to give us a picture of the organisation of the resistance.
For example, the Greek Stalinist party (KKE) played a key role in the resistance
movement and was one of the main forces behind the formation of the National
Liberation Front (EAM) in September 1941. The EAM became a whirlwind of
activity, establishing sections for civil servants, workers, women, students, school
kids, as well as town and village committees. All this was hesitantly working toward
April 1942 and the founding of the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) and
physical force resistance. Ray makes claims for the relatively autonomous action
of individual groups, but admits that they were generally sympathetic to the KKE.
The areas that came to be dominated by the EAM are described as liberated.
Liberated zones started governing themselves as autonomous communities, run by
elected village committees, whose work was to be overseen by monthly mass meetings
of all the villagers. This was in tune with the needs of the resistance, and the EAM
sought to export the local self-government model across the country. The reason for
using this emerging 'people's democracy' was, in Rays words, because it was
vital in a country with poor communications and scarce supplies that an effective
form of administration could keep the war effort going.
Following Italys surrender to the Allies in September 1943, EAM/ELAS controlled
most of the country by the end of the year. In March 1944 it announced the formation
of a provisional government. In October 1944 the German army started a rapid
withdrawal because of the continuing advance of the Russian Army into the Balkans.
The ELAS quickly lost contact with the German rear guard, and merely filled in the

vacuum they left (Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War). Ray admits that the EAM set
out to restore order rather than seize power, but seems here to have forgotten that, to
keep the war effort going you need an effective form of administration.
In late 1943 EAM/ELAS administered two-thirds to four-fifths of Greece (Kolko
op cit). They administered most of the villages, collected taxes, supplied schools and
relief, endorsed private property, and even the churches to the extent of gaining much
clerical support (ibid). What this means is that EAM/ELAS set the base in the
creation of something that the governments of Greece had neglected: an organised
State in the Greek mountains (CM Woodhouse, Apple of Discord). Rays text does
mention the establishment by the EAM of a secret police force and andartes
courts, but youll have to look elsewhere for an understanding of the functioning of
the state for the war effort.
Class antagonisms in times of war
Agis Stinas was a part of the Trotskyist movement in Greece from the early 1930s
until his final break with the Fourth International in 1947. In International Review 72
we published some extracts from his Memoirs translated from French. There are also
extracts translated by Antagonism on their website. The significance of Stinas and his
comrades lies in their defence of an internationalist standpoint, in continuity with the
revolutionary position established in the First World War, against the participation of
the working class in imperialist war.
In a report from the Stinas group in July 1946 they characterised support for the
Greek resistance as social patriotic meaning to use socialist language in the
defence of a patriotic position. The social-patriotic character of support for the
resistance movement is brought into particularly sharp relief in the regions that EAM
completely controls. It has both the space and the geographic borders of a country,
with parliament, government, courts, concentration camps, prisons, police and tax
collectors, in a word, a state, which conducts an official war against the Germans. In
what way, in its class nature, can this state differ from any other bourgeois state?
What do the workers and poor peasants have to defend in this war, and in what way
does it differ from that conducted by the government of Metaxas? There is no
ambiguity in this, it insists, a territory where EAM was the state, in every sense of
the word used by Engels, existed in occupied Greece.
The resistance is seen here in the context of a global conflict. Not taken in by talk of
socialism or liberation, Stinas recognised it is as A nationalist movement in the
service of imperialist war. The resistance movement, that is to say the struggle
against the Germans in all its forms, from sabotage to guerrilla warfare, in the
occupied countries, cannot be considered outside the context of imperialist war, of
which it is an integral part. The framework for this understanding: The defence of
the nation and the fatherland are in our era nothing other than the defence of
imperialism, of the social system which provokes wars, which cannot live without war
and which leads humanity to chaos and barbarism. This is as true for the big
imperialist powers as it is for the little nations, whose ruling classes can only be
accomplices and associates of the great powers. So to participate in the resistance
movement, under whatever slogans and justifications, means to participate in the
war. At the social level The growth of the resistance movement destroys class

consciousness, reinforces nationalist illusions and hatred, disperses and atomises the
proletariat into the anonymous mass of the nation, submits it even more to its
national bourgeoisie, bringing to the surface and to the leadership the most
ferociously nationalist elements.
Specifically, in Greece, this movement, because of the war which it conducts in the
conditions of the second imperialist massacre, is an organ and appendage of the
Allied imperialist camp.
In the service of Allied imperialism
In an introduction to Stinas Memoirs, the leading Trotskyist, Michel Pablo, rejects
the argument that it was simply a question of a nationalist movement in the service
of imperialism because of the attacks on EAM/ELAS by British imperialism and
right-wing factions of the Greek ruling class from the time of the departure of the
German forces. Far from refuting the argument, this confirms the imperialist
framework. In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin had agreed, in the carve-up of
Eastern Europe, that Greece would be in the British zone of influence. However,
although Stalin provided negligible assistance to the KKE, Churchill was not going to
leave anything to chance, and so, as the Russian bloc emerged, EAM/ELAS were the
targets of a Greek state backed first by British and then US imperialism. More people
died in Greece in the Civil War that lasted until 1949 than did in the World War. In the
same way that the Civil War cant be detached from the early days of the Cold War,
the Greek resistance cant be separated from the World War.
The population of Greece not only suffered from the brutality of the German
occupation, and the complete destruction of nearly 900 villages, there were also
widespread famine conditions which resulted in death by starvation and related
diseases for up to 500,000 in a population of seven million. A sustained British naval
blockade was a more important factor in the food crisis than German exports of
supplies to North Africa. Against these conditions there was a will to fight, a fight for
life. However, EAM/ELAS were a force for both social order and channelling the will
to fight into the nationalist anti-fascist struggle that served Allied imperialism, not the
interests of the workers and peasants of Greece.
On the libcom site you can read articles about the role of anarchists in the resistance
in Italy, Hungary etc. The anarchist heritage certainly includes examples of genuine
internationalist opposition to imperialist war, but it also contains many examples of
this participation in nationalist movements in the service of imperialism. The
revolutionary marxist heritage, by contrast, includes Stinas and the group that
reconstituted itself in Athens in 1943, having escaped from various camps and
prisons. Within days they were producing leaflets and daubing slogans on walls: It is
capitalism in its entirety which is responsible for the carnage, devastation and chaos,
and not just one of the two sides!; Fraternisation of Greek workers and Italian and
German soldiers in the common struggle for socialism!; National unity is nothing
but the submission of the workers to their exploiters!; Only the overthrow of
capitalism will save world peace!; Long live the world socialist revolution! This is
the real working class spirit in action. Car 17/10/06.

Memoirs of a revolutionary (A. Stinas, Greece): Nationalism and

antifascism
Submitted by InternationalReview on January 16, 2005 - 23:57
See also :
Memoirs of a revolutionary (A. Stinas, Greece): Nationalism and antifascism
The extracts we're publishing from the book by A Stinas, a revolutionary communist
from Greece (1), are an attack on the antifascist Resistance during the Second World
War. They thus contain a pitiless denunciation of the fusion of three mystifications
which are particularly murderous for the proletariat: the 'defence of the USSR',
nationalism and 'democratic antifascism'.
The explosion of nationalisms in what used to be the USSR and its empire in eastern
Europe, like the development of huge 'antifascist' ideological campaigns, in the
countries of western Europe in particular, make these extracts, written at the end of
the 40s, as relevant as ever (2).
Today it is becoming harder and harder for the established order to justify its rule. The
disaster that its laws have led to prevent it. But faced with the only force capable of
overthrowing it and building another kind of society, faced with the proletariat, the
ruling class still has at its disposal ideological weapons that can divide its enemy and
keep it subjected to national factions of capital. Today nationalism and 'anti-fascism'
are at the forefront of the bourgeoisie's counterrevolutionary arsenal.
A. Stinas takes up the marxist analysis of Rosa Luxemburg on the national question,
recalling that once capitalism reaches its imperialist phase, "... the nation has
accomplished its historic mission. Wars of national liberation arid bourgeois
democratic revolutions are henceforth void of meaning". On this basis he denounces
and destroys the arguments of all those who called for participation in the 'antifascist
Resistance' during the second world war, on the pretext that its 'popular' and
'antifascist' dynamic could lead to the revolution.
Stinas and the UCI (Union Communiste Internationaliste) were part of that handful of
revolutionaries who, during the second world war, were able to swim against the tide
of all the nationalisms, refusing to support 'democracy' against fascism, to abandon
internationalism in the name of the defence of the USSR'(3).
Since they are almost unknown, even in the revolutionary milieu, partly because their
work only existed in the Greek language, it is worth giving some elements on their
history.
Stinas belonged to that generation of communists who went through the great
international revolutionary wave which put an end to the First World War. All his life
he remained faithful to the great hopes raised by Red October in 1917 and by the
German revolution of 1919. A member of the Greek Communist Party (in a period in
which the Communist Parties had not yet passed into the bourgeois camp) until his
expulsion in 1931, he was then a member of the Leninist Opposition, which published
the weekly 'Drapeau du Communisme' and which referred to Trotsky, the international
symbol of resistance to Stalinism.

In 1933, Hindenburg gave power to Hitler in Germany. Fascism became the official
regime there. Stinas argued that he victory of fascism signalled the death of the
Communist International, just as 4 August 1914 did for the Second International, and
that its sections were definitively and irretrievably lost to the working class. Having
begun as organs of the proletarian struggle, they had now become part of the class
enemy. The duty of revolutionaries all over the world was thus to form new
revolutionary parties, outside and against the International.
A sharp debate provoked a crisis in the Trotskyist organisation, and Stinas left it, after
being in a minority. In 1935 he joined an organisation, Le Bolshevik, which had
detached itself from archeomarxism and which now became a new organisation
calling itself the Union Communiste Internationaliste, At that time the UCI was the
only recognised section in Greece of Trotsky's Internationalist Communist League
(ICL); the Fourth International wasn't created until 1938.
From 1937 on, the UCI rejected a fundamental slogan of the Fourth International: the
'defence of the USSR'. Stinas and his comrades didn't reach this position through a
debate on the social nature of the USSR, but through a critical examination of the
policies and slogans to be adopted in the face of an imminent world war. The UCI
aimed to eliminate from its programme any aspect which could allow the infiltration
of social patriotism, under the cover of the defence of the USSR.
During the Second World War, Stinas, as an intransigent internationalist, remained
loyal to the principles of revolutionary marxism, such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg
had formulated and practically applied during the first world war.
Since 1934 the UCI had been the only section of the Trotskyist current in Greece.
During all the years of war and occupation, isolated from other countries, this group
was convinced that the Trotskyists were fighting along the same lines, for the same
ideas, and against the stream.
The first news they got about the real positions of the Trotskyist International left
Stinas and his comrades open-mouthed. Reading the French pamphlet 'Les trotskystes
dans la lutte contre les nazis' provided proof that the Trotskyists had fought against
the Nazis like all the other good patriots. They then learned about the shameful
attitude of Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party in the USA.
In the war, i.e. in conditions which put the organisations of the working class to the
test, the Fourth International had crumbled to dust. Its sections, some openly through
'the defence of the fatherland', others under the cover of the 'defence of the USSR',
had passed to the service of their respective bourgeoisies and had in their own way
contributed to the massacre.
In autumn 1947, the UCI broke all political and organisational links with the Fourth
International. In the years that followed, the worst period of counter-revolution at the
political level, when revolutionary groups were reduced to tiny minorities and when
most of those who remained faithful to the basic principles of proletarian
internationalism and the October revolution were completely isolated, Stinas became
the main representative in Greece of the Socialisme ou Barbarie current. This current,

which never managed to clarify the completely capitalist nature of the social relations
in the USSR, developed the theory of a kind of third system of exploitation, based on
a new division between 'order-givers' and 'order-takers'. It moved further and further
away from marxism and finally fell apart in the 1960s. At the end of his life, Stinas
didn't really have any organised political activity. He moved close to the anarchists
and died in 1987.