Communist Party of Greece
by Aleka Paparigha

Dear Comrades,

The communists of our country, the members of KNE, the
Central Committee welcome you to Athens, to our new
meeting. The friends of the Party, along with the forces
which we have cooperated with in the recent period in
political and social struggles as well as electoral
battles, many progressive people, are awaiting with great
interest the exchange of opinions and experiences.

We proposed the specific topic because many of the
comrades who had attended previous international meetings
had expressed their thoughts on this issue. The topic was
at the center of discussion as well at many important
international initiatives such as at the meeting of the
Forum in San Paolo, the meeting for cooperation in the
Mediterrenean that AKEL hosted and others.

Important events have marked the year that has passed and
new initiatives that are becoming visible now make even
more timely this exchange of opinions around the issue of
cooperations and alliances. We are referring to the
mobilizations against capitalist integration, known as
globalization; to the mobilizations in Seattle, in Davos,
in Washington. We are referring to the initiative of the
group of 77, to the developments in the struggle in
Colombia, and in a series of countries in Latin America,
to the mobilizations against NATO and the war in
Yugoslavia, to the intensification of the conflict in
Palestine, in Cyprus, in the Ukraine, in South Africa, and
in all of the African continent. In practice this means
struggle in many areas of the world.

We are referring to new initiatives that are being
prepared such as the mobilization against the WTO in Prague
in September that is being supported by the CP of
Czechoslovakia and other forces.

First: The issue of political alliances of communist and
workers' parties is inseparably tied to daily struggles but
also to our final goal, socialism, that today is becoming
more and more timely. Especially today when capitalist
restructuring and the new dogma of NATO have an even deeper
impact on all the countries, independently of whether they
are members of imperialist alliances, independent of the
level of capitalist development in one or the other,
independently if they are on the path to building
socialism. Today, we have a clearer picture of how the
opponent outlines his own policy of alliances, how he
encourages or makes use of obstacles. We know the methods
that are being used to push the Communist Parties and in
general the anti-imperialist forces or to attract them
through outside pressure into a line of consent and class
submission.

Second: We are not discussing today the general neccessity
for alliances but the specific experiences that we have
gained in a period where the most important struggles of
the past decade have been expressed in many countries
around the world, in places where resistance had come to a
standstill. Certainly the movements that are developing and
the coalitions that are appearing have a lack of
uniformity. They do not always have continuity, they are
characterized by a certain fragmentation. Despite all of
this, the myth of so-called globalization is starting to
be called into question.

Third: The policy of alliances provides the answer to the
agonizing question of how it will be possible for the
people to obstruct and put a stop to imperialist policies.
How will as many countries as possible break away from
imperialist integration, dependence and subjugation. The
policy of alliances is inextricably linked to the
strategically important question of how we will pass into a
new period of development of powerful social movements,
revolutionary movements. It lends wings to hope, to
optimism, to the defeat of fatalism.

In 1996 at the 15th Convention of our Party the strategy
of alliances of the Party was elaborated in the proposal
for the constitution of a social- political alliance with
the form of a Peoples' Front that would rally social and
political forces around it, socio- political elements that
would agree that the struggle must be conducted in the
direction of opposition to the interests of monopoly
capital, and of imperialist alliances.

At the end of the year our 16th Convention will take
place. There our estimations will be made public, placed
before the people. What have we done for the building of
the Front? What results have we had? What experience can be
extracted?

The Anti- Imperialist, Anti- Monopoly Democratic Front
(AADF) as an alliance with all-Greek character and a
programme of action has not been formed yet. Such decisions
that are inevitably tied to the sharpening of the class
struggle and the maturing of the political consciousness of
the people are not pushed forward within such severe
time-lines. The AADF does not constitute a plan on paper.
Clearly however we are not all at the same point. We can
say that we have laid some groundwork for its
construction, inadequate as of yet. The responsibility is
not all our own. It is not possible for some obstacles to
be overcome from one day to the next: the negative
situation that exists in the trade union movement with the
responsibility of its leaders, the climate of compromise
and consent that prevail in the forces that are considered
as left and progressive by some elements of public opinion.
We will continue and we will increase our initiatives. We
believe that in the next years on a national and
international level the contradictions will be sharpened,
and we must be prepared to jump in and move ahead without
delay.

The proposal of KKE causes debate, causes activity around
it and our Party comes under attack. Today, one especially
intense wave of ideological and political attack has our
16th Convention in its sights. The mechanisms of
imperialism that were especially bothered by the
anti-imperialist initiatives of the Party which expressed
the will of a broad spectrum of peoples' forces,
non-communists, are participating actively in this attack.
A few years ago, they accused us of acting alone, under
the pretext then that we had not yet managed to widen our
affiliations. Today, now that positive tendencies exist in
the policy of alliances, today we are under attack again
because supposedly we make bad alliances. We have reached
the point of attack-commedy, as we are being accused by the
class enemy that the alliances we make distort our
communist character. The bourgeoise parties and their
mechanisms want us either at the absolute fringes or for us
to participate in alliances to their liking, so that they
have us under control.

1. Alliance: yes, there is no other choice, but with whom,
in what direction and for what purpose. Each day we are
more and more convinced by the developments in Greece and
in all of the world that the minimum line of
coalition-building at the social and political level must
be the expressed decision to oppose the options of monopoly
capitalism and the imperialist alliances, to stand against
the regime of the monopolies to the point of confrontation.
Behind this line not many other hopes exist. The danger of
integration exists. We know however, that it is not
possible from the beginning for an alliance on an all-Greek
level to have the necessary political depth. It would not
be possible from the beginning to judge its stability or
even its viability with great certainty until the end of
its declared goal. However, from the beginning a tough
direction of overall opposition must be guaranteed, that
describes the prospects for getting out of the framework of
today's system.

Greece is not on the path of alignment in the EU and NATO.
It has been integrated and it participates actively,
actively in imperialist schemes in the area. It is not
possible today to get round the fact that generalized
privatizations are taking place in areas of strategic
importance, and that lax working relations are being
introduced, social insurance is being overturned, that a
mercenary army is being founded in our country for action
even within Greece itself against the peoples' movement,
and in the Balkans and in the Black Sea.

2. We are not merely standing by. We are continuing our
political initiatives.We are helping in the maturation of
the pre-requisites for the Front within smaller individual
fronts of struggle and organizing around anti-monopoly,
anti-imperialist goals that for us are the torrents, the
streams towards the big river. In this way, we meet with
social and political forces, socio-political elements where
in practice we are all being tested as to whether we can
agree on overall goals. We already have obtained good
experience with cooperations in the struggles against
NATO, in the war against Yugoslavia, in workers' and
farmers' struggles, in the struggles for education, in
issues of democracy. In the recent electoral battle, 1/3
of those participating in our electoral platform were not
members of the party. They came from other areas; they
were cooperators. We cooperated as well with a new
political grouping that is called Communist Renewal. Of
course, all of the cooperative actions and all of the
fronts and organizing do not constitute the Front but they
sow the seed. They accelerate to one degree or another
positive actions towards its construction.

3. In the lines of the Front we see the participation of
class, radical organizations and the movements of the
working class, of the petit bourgeoise sections of the
cities, of the countryside, small businesspeople and the
poor farmers, movements for peace, for the rights of women,
the youth, movements for the environment, for democracy,
against the roots of social criminality, of drug-abusers,
etc.

It is an alliance of social and political forces that is
not limited to the above struggle, to the support simply of
mass movements, in the demand for a change of the balance
of forces in the Parliament only, but an alliance that aims
at the organization of the people and the conducting of its
struggle from the top and from the bottom, with the
prospect of opening up a different road of development for
Greek society. It acts in today's institutions but at the
same time it helps within the popular struggle for the
birth of new peoples' institutions.

An alliance that will help to gain concessions in favour
of the people, it raises the question of power.

4. The AADF will encompass dissimilar social and political
forces. Consequently it will be marked as much by the
element of unity as by the differences that demand a
particular struggle within its ranks. It will be based on
neccessary compromises because we want to help in the
integration of as many forces as possible, compromises
however that will not lead the peoples' movement into
dissolution and towards the logic of managing the system.

5. We are aware of our responsibility to preserve unity of
action, for the ranks of the Front to be widened, enriched
and re-aligned with new forces that will appear. When we
say to the people that KKE must be strengthened we say it
because this is in the interest of the Front. The alliance
will be judged especially in periods of heightening of the
attack by the bourgeoise class and by international
organizations, when the greatest decisivness, stablity and
militancy is required.

6. We believe that alliances such as the one we are
proposing inevitably will shelter forces with different
concepts about the character of power, so much more so that
the AADF will not be built on agreement about socialism.
The progress of the struggle, the balance of power, the
existence or not of a revolutionary sistuation, will decide
the final outcome. Other disagreements that will appear or
that already exist and may be strengthened will also have
an impact, independent of the initial agreement. It is not
possible for us to speak in Greece about the prospect of a
way out towards another road of development without taking
into consideration that we have to solve the knotty issue
of obedience or not to the EU and NATO, resistance or not,
participation or not. Consequently, the alliance can only
have a direction openly declared to the people.

If a government with anti-imperialist anti-monopoly
character appears in the course of the struggle of the AAD
Front , when the neccessary pre-requisites for socialist
power have not yet taken shape, that government had better
put through in as short a time as possible substantial
changes, otherwise it will find itself under attack from
two sides. One the one side, from the people who are not
satisfied with their life, and on the other from the enemy
who will hammer on it in order to overturn it. Detailed
and specific choices cannot be outlined analytically from
now. However, at least one general direction must exist
from the viewpoint of the Front so that the people can be
politically prepared.

7. We do not consider correct the concept that a struggle
on a national level is a dead-end, that solutions can be
obtained only through world-wide based struggle that will
bring simultaneous world-wide results. The enemy knows that
the national field of struggle cannot be abolished under
the pretext of so-called globalization. It strives to
integrate it, obedient and subjugated to its own
imperialist policies. Clearly today the
internationalization of the class struggle, of the
anti-imperialist struggles and the fight for socialism have
taken on greater weight. Clearly today there is the need
for us to conduct simultaneous coordinated strikes at the
centers of imperialism. However, the internationalization
of the struggle cannot bring results unless a powerful
peoples' movement, a workers' movement with class
orientation, a powerful CP with a correct policy of
alliances that guides in the solving of the issue of power,
in the detaching of its country from the international
imperialist system, exists at a national level. The
difficulties and weaknesses that presently exist must not
be converted into a theoretical concept proposing that on
the national field everything is over, or that the national
field is out of date. Uneven development is being
intensified today, therefore the struggle will have an
uneven course. That which has importance is that the
movements at a national level will make as many advancing
steps as they can, to claim significant changes and
overturns and in this way can give momemtum to the change
in the international balance of forces.

Precisely because the internationalization of the struggle
has still greater weight today, we support the need for the
workers and communist parties to be coordinated, for us to
fight to develop a broad discernible pole of the communist
movement but also generally of the anti-imperialist
struggle, so that international support and solidarity can
be promoted.

We believe that we, the communist and workers' parties,
the anti-imperialist forces, the radical forces that exist
all over the world, must undertake more seriously the
support of the existing or the creation of new
international movements, of initiatives with the form of
international organizations, especially now that the
imperialist alliances are spreading so-called
non-governmental organizations everywhere, a large part of
which they have under their control or on their side.

Temporary facts from the EU for our country state that
from 1985-1991 24 non-governmental organizations were
given aid while in the period 1995-1996 their number
reached 73.

We must contribute to the coordination of the struggle of
the class trade union movements and organizations at the
center of capitalist restructuring. The
internationalization of the struggle without basing it on a
class oriented workers movement is almost impossible.

An issue of special importance is the support of
international and regional movements against NATO and the
international monopolies, against the militarization of
Europe, against the anti-ballistic system of the USA,
against nuclear arms, imperialist intervention and military
occupation, against the changes in borders. The struggle
against laws with the pretext of terrorism lead to the
creation of an individual file, to the suppression of
movements, prosecutions, murders, etc. Very serious
problems exist which are caused by genetically engineered
products, generally the use of science and techniques at
the expense of human beings. The problem of hunger
starvation and of poverty.

We believe that he international communist and generally
the anti-imperialist movement must have strength at a
national level, and the national forces will become
stronger if all together we give a dynamic push to the
international movement.

It is not a luxury but a need and of interest to the Greek
movement to be concerned and to organize solidarity actions
based on whatever happens in the Middle East, in Africa, in
Latin America, in South-East Asia. Actions concerning the
debt that is hanging like a noose at the expense of
countries that have fallen into the noose of the IMF and
World Bank . It is to the benefit of every people to be
interested in and to fight against the crimes of
imperialism that are taking place in the Balkans,
against"euro-atlanticism", for what is happening at the
expense of the Palestinian people, for what is happening in
Cyprus, in Cuba.

We believe that we must counter-attack as well on the
ideological front. We must unmask the myth of so-called
globalization. It is important that the people do not get
trapped in non-class terms. We must de-mythologize the
theories around capitalist integration, that underestimate
willingly or not the case of uneven development, the
inter-imperialist contradictions, the circle of countries
that have in their interest to resist relations of
dependence and in inequality that they are condemened to as
members and allies of imperialist unions.

To counterattack for the neccesity of socialism, to
project our scientific world-theory and the principles of
Marxism-Leninsm, without inhibitions due to the overthrows
or the mistakes and deviations that were noted. For us to
project the vision of socialism in every country.

No people, no working class will become a vanguard
revolutionary force condemming only imperialism, fixed on
some fragmented goals and struggles. Nor is the projection
of the vision of socialism enough if we do not manage to
help in the organization of struggles, the struggle for
conflict and the overthrow of the foundations of the
capitalist system, on all of the fronts in the area of
work, education, in social policies, in the area of
culture, athletics, the environment, the media, struggles
of all kinds.

The alliances in the direction of conflict with the
monopolies and imperialism give the possibility to the
people to limit the consequences, and to even extract some
concessions but also to counterattack with the goal of
final victory.