The Second Volume of the Essay on the History of the KKE was published in November 2011 after many months of discussion in all the organizations of the Party and the Communist Youth of Greece. The whole process was concluded with the Nationwide Conference, on the 16th July 2011, which approved the final text of the Essay.
The Second Volume includes the period 1949-1968. It covers the period after the end of the armed struggle waged by the Democratic Army of Greece for three and a half years (12th February 1946-29th August 1949) till the 12th Plenum of the CC of the KKE (5th-15th February 1968) when the KKE split and those who left the party, who had formed a right-wing revisionist (euro-communist) group, founded a new party called the “KKE Interior”.
Although the Essay deals with the period 1949-1968 it also refers to the 1940’s. The reason is that the documents of the party in the period which is examined extensively concern themselves with the 1940’s as the elaboration of the party’s policy under the new conditions required that it draw conclusions concerning its activity in that period.
The counterrevolutions which climaxed in 1989-1991 forced our party to examine more deeply its activity, its history. Reality forced us to make a more deep historical assessment of the choices and the activities of the KKE, according to the fundamental conclusions from the above mentioned negative developments, which were incorporated into the resolutions of the Congresses over the last twenty years especially of the 18th Congress (2009).
The KKE believes that the study of its history is a necessary element for its development since historical experience makes the activity of the party more incisive and effective in the organization of the class struggle, for the abolition of the exploitation of man by man. In that sense the study of party’s history becomes a process of inspiration for conscious activity.
The most important issue which is assessed by the Essay is the strategy of the KKE. the following axes are the criteria for this assessment:
1. Our era is an era of transition from capitalism to socialism, since capitalism has entered its reactionary stage for over a century. The era of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions, that gave impetus to social progress overthrowing the power of feudal lords abolishing the remnants of the feudal relations of production, has ended once and for all. The overthrow of the socialist construction with the victory of the counterrevolution in 1989-1991 does not negate the necessity, the timeliness and the prospect of this revolutionary social-political activity.
2. The character of the revolution is not defined according to the current correlation of forces but by the maturation of the material conditions for socialism. The minimum required degree of maturation of the material conditions exists even when the working class constitutes a minority as a percentage of the economically active population once it becomes conscious of its historical mission with the foundation of its party.
3. There is no intermediate socio-economic system between capitalism and socialism; therefore there cannot be any intermediate type of power. The character of the power will be either bourgeois or working class (proletarian). The view-position on the possibility and necessity of the establishment of an intermediate power has not been confirmed in any country.
This issue was discussed at the 18th Congress of the KKE that underlined that the character of the power should not be confused with the transitional “moments” of historical time and reiterated the programmatic position of the 15th Congress on the transitional “moments”:
“Under conditions where the class struggle and the popular movement are on the rise, when the revolutionary process has begun, there may be a government, as the instrument of the people’s power, which will have the approval and consent of the struggling people, without general elections or parliamentary procedures. This government will be identical with, or merely formally separate from the power of the working class and its allies.” (…)
It is clear for our party that the character of the power is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, without being confused with intermediate forms of power. It is a different issue to discover in retrospect, i.e. through historical research, the various forms that might emerge from the process where the bourgeois power has not yet been overthrown but its weakening, its shaking has begun. The forms that the levels of the shaking of the bourgeois power can take on in each historical period are an issue for historical research. e.g., the first governments formed by the anti-fascist fronts in the countries liberated by the Red Army had not been revolutionary workers’ power (Dictatorship of the Proletariat), bourgeois forces participated as well. For that reason the struggle on the question “who rules whom” was soon developed. In most cases it was resolved through the conquest of revolutionary workers’ power (Dictatorship of the Proletariat). This course should not be detached from the existence of the forces of the Red Army. (…)
In the case of the Cuban Revolution there is no intermediate power or intermediate social economic formation. The link for the beginning of the revolutionary process had been the armed struggle for national independence that settled and objectively solved the problem through its transformation to struggle for socialism. [1]
4. The alliance policy of the CPs must be based on the correct evaluation of the interests and the position of the social forces in the capitalist society, to serve the line of winning over popular strata from the influence of the bourgeois class, their rallying together with the working class with the goal of changing the character of power and not the alternation of parties in bourgeois governance. That is to say the need to form a socio-political alliance in conflict with the economic dominance of the monopolies, their political power, and their imperialist unions. This is the basis so that the pressures to cooperate politically with bourgeois and opportunist forces with a fraudulent programme for the “cleansing” of the system can be rejected.
5. Opportunism has an objective basis. An important source of opportunism is the petty bourgeois strata which are being compressed or destroyed by the process of the concentration and centralization of capital, by the expansion of the monopoly groups.
But the working class is not uniform. It is comprised of sectors with varying income and different political and class experiences since the working class expands through the constant expansion of salaried labour in new and old sectors.
In particular we should stress the stratum of the labour aristocracy, i.e. the sector of the working class which is bought off by the capitalist system, which forms another main source of the opportunist phenomenon as it constitutes the vehicle of class collaboration in the labour movement.
The opportunist forces are often reinforced during the sharp turning points of the class struggle, either during its rise or during its retreat. Due to the great wave of the counterrevolutions over the past twenty years the pressure of the bourgeois ideology was expressed by means of a general revision of fundamental positions of the communist ideology and the opportunist adaptation to the system.
6. Unrelenting ideological and political struggle against opportunism, regardless of its disguises, its mutations and adaptations in the various phases of the class struggle and the changes in the correlation of forces. The positive and negative experience as to how the stance against the expressions of opportunism developed, at some times with a sharpened ideological-political struggle against them , at other times with the choice of electoral or more long-term cooperation with them, confirms the following conclusions: the cooperation with opportunism, i.e. the section of the communist movement that has renounced and revised fundamental and basic principles of revolutionary struggle and has adapted itself to bourgeois politics, means in practice cooperation with bourgeois politics in the labour movement, it is used with the aim of corroding and mutating the Communist Party, and for this reason in any case it is vigorously supported by the bourgeoisie and its staff. The opposition to opportunism is related to the confrontation with it in the direction of organizing the masses, in the direction of the people’s struggle, regarding the content of the alliances. This was apparent over all the previous period from the experience of the KKE when it dealt with the opportunist appeals for “left unity”, “unity on the problem”, “for an anti-neo-liberal struggle”, today for “ anti-memorandum unity” etc