By Barry Weisleder
For ten days in September, my partner Elizabeth and I visited Athens. It was our third trip there. Once again, we paid homage to the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Theatre of Dionysus, and amazing museums. But there was much more. In the ancient capital of Greece, a country of 10 million in the south-east corner of Europe, we witnessed inspiring political events. This included a mass demonstration on the 13th anniversary of the murder of popular rapper Pavlos Fyssas by a member of the fascist party Golden Dawn. We joined a rally for migrant workers’ rights, and a protest by teachers against new unfair government regulations. I spoke to scores of activists at a roof-top celebration of Jose Marti Brigadistas who recently delivered material aid to revolutionary Cuba.
A highlight of the entire visit was a two-hour meeting with leaders of the anti-capitalist united front ANTARSYA. The name is an acronym. It embodies the tumultuous history of the workers’ movement in Greece: “Anti-capitalist Left Cooperation for the Overthrow”. It formed in 2009 in response to a growing, multi-layered crisis. There was a chronic deficit (due largely to non-payment of corporate taxes). The crisis was compounded by usurious loans from foreign bankers, especially German financiers. This led to credit downgrades, a market lockout, and spillover effects of the global Great Recession. The EU insisted on making the working class pay for the capitalist crisis by slashing wages, benefits and social services. Banks closed. Automated teller machines stopped allowing cash withdrawals. Pension money dried up. One after another, conservative parties like New Democracy, and fake leftists in government, namely Syriza, capitulated to the Troika. The Troika is the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Culminating in 2015, the massive assault on the working class saw unemployment spike and living standards plummet 25%. Millions experienced instant poverty. These conditions set off a wave of protests and 33 one-day or two-days general strikes. Sadly, social democracy (in the form of PASOK), and an ultra-sectarian Stalinist party (KKE) derailed the movement. The promise of the so-called ‘radical’ coalition, Syriza, that it could ‘reform’ the bourgeois institutions of the state proved to be utterly false. After its leader Alexis Tsipras agreed to a breathtaking austerity package, replete with the projected sale of public assets, it was put to a referendum. To the shock of the Syriza P.M., 61.3% voted NO. Tsipras chose to ignore the overwhelming majority and bowed to the bankers. The bitter lessons from the defeat modified the political landscape, uniting a portion of the anti-capitalist left. A similar movement called the Workers’ Left Front-Unity in Argentina is larger. A leading member of the Argentine Front, plus a leader of ANTARSYA, will be featured speakers at the Socialist Action education conference on November 14 via Zoom.
Today, ANTARSYA has over 2,000 members. Over half belong to the coalition as individuals. Affiliated parties include the Alternative Ecologists, the Initiative for an Anti-capitalist Revolutionary ANTARSYA, Communist Liberation (a large split from the KKE), the Organization of Communist Internationalists of Greece–Spartacus (the Greek section of the Fourth International), the Revolutionary Communist Movement of Greece (EKKE), the Socialist Workers’ Party (SEK), and the Youth of Communist Liberation.
ANTARSYA is actively involved in many labour unions and social justice campaigns. It fields candidates for parliament and local councils, with the aim of raising working class consciousness. It does so without fostering any illusions in the capitalist state. This united front is widely recognized, usually garnering under 1.5 percent in national elections, 2 to 4 percent in regional contests. It can easily field over 500 candidates, including allied groups and personalities. That’s proven to be a solid, durable social base.
ANTARSYA identifies its priorities as anti-capitalism, workers’ rights, and socialist transformation. How does it function? Its positions are expressed in party congress decisions and official declarations, adopted by majority vote. To amend the constitution a two-thirds majority is required. Every participating party is guaranteed representation on the central committee. Most of the seats in the national leadership are filled by the direct election of slates and individuals. One person, one vote is the rule. It has a number of working committees that animate outreach and political campaigns.
ANTARSYA advocates the unilateral cancellation of Greece’s public debt, which it considers illegitimate and unsustainable. It calls for Greece to exit the Eurozone and the European Union, arguing that membership prevents any meaningful anti-austerity or anti-capitalist policy. The party also supports nationalization of banks and major industries under workers’ and popular control, without compensation where mismanagement or layoffs have occurred. Does this bring to mind the lying and cheating steel-making company in Ontario, known as Stelco, owned by Cleveland-Cliffs Incorporated?
The Greek coalition prioritises rebuilding class-based labour and social movements, restoring collective bargaining rights, along with wages and pensions reduced under austerity, and it stands for defending trade union freedoms. It calls for workers’ control of production, including cooperatives and factory occupations in sectors facing closure or redundancies.
ANTARSYA rejects external supervision by the EU, European Central Bank, or International Monetary Fund, and promotes popular sovereignty free from international lenders. It supports radical democratic reforms, expansion of participatory mechanisms, and defends civil liberties against authoritarian legislation.
The coalition places strong emphasis on ecological struggles, linking them to anti-capitalism. It opposes extractivist projects such as large-scale gold mining in northern Greece, calls for the abandonment of fossil fuels, and supports investment in renewable energy under social and community control.
ANTARSYA supports the rights of migrants and refugees. It demands safe and legal routes, and full social and political rights for all residents. It campaigns against racism, xenophobia and far-right violence, and strives for gender equality and LGBTQI rights.
ANTARSYA is in explicit opposition to the “social reformism” of Syriza and its leadership (former P.M. Alexis Tsipras), which ultimately supported austerity policies.
The coalition also supports a comprehensive banning of layoffs; a decent minimum salary, currently determined to be in the amount of 1,400 euros per month; a reduction of working time to 35 hours per week, without reduction in wages; complete disarmament of the Hellenic Police; the granting of full political and social rights to all immigrants; and an eco-socialist response to the ecological crisis.
The coalition describes itself as a “front of the anti-capitalist,[1] revolutionary, communist left, and of radical ecology” in Greece. Its major positions are:
- Exit from the European Union and the Eurozone, with re-adoption of a national currency,
- Default on Greece’s debt, and
- Nationalization without compensation of all major industries in the country.
So, does this political program seem familiar? No wonder. It parallels the policy of Capitalism Can’t be Fixed.
When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney proposes ‘associate membership’ in the EU, we ought to remember the bitter experience of Greece. We ought to uphold the goal of socialist transformation – starting with a break from NATO and Norad.
The current Greek government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis (New Democracy) tightly embraces the Zionist state and fervently backs the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. To safeguard the recent visit of American war criminal Marco Rubio, Mitsotakis banned all demonstrations in the country. It is clear that ‘forever wars’ for imperial plunder can be stopped only by international working class solidarity in action. But how? What can we learn from history? During World War 1, the famous Zimmerwald Conference brought together ostensibly anti-war workers’ parties. The Zimmerwald Left, led by V.I. Lenin, paved the way for the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the launch of the Communist International in 1919. Instead of liberal pacifism, the position of the Z Left was ‘No War but Class War.’
The anti-war gathering, held in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, from September 5 to 8, 1915, was the first of three international conferences convened by anti-militarist socialists in response to the outbreak of World War I and the resulting collapse of the Second International. Those participating in this and later conferences at Kienthal and Stockholm are known as the Zimmerwald movement. The Conference began the final unraveling of the unprincipled amalgam within the Second International between revolutionary socialists, known as the “Zimmerwald Left” who supported Vladimir Lenin‘s line, and the reformist socialists.
The conference issued a manifesto which denounced the war, blaming it on reactionary capitalist governments, and called for working-class unity and for a peace without annexations or reparations. It also established the International Socialist Commission to work for an end to the hostilities. However, Lenin opposed the conference majority. He criticized the adoption of peace as the overriding goal. He instead argued for the fighting to be transformed into socialist revolutions, and for the foundation of a new international, which was realized in the Russian October Revolution of 1917, and in the Comintern, founded 1919.
When the Second International, the primary international socialist organization before World War I, was founded in 1889, internationalism was one of its central tenets. “The workers have no Fatherland”, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had declared in The Communist Manifesto. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, in his keynote address at the International’s founding congress called upon socialists to be “brothers with a single common enemy […] private capital, whether it be Prussian, French, or Chinese”. Despite this commitment to internationalism and the establishment in 1900 of the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) based in Brussels to manage the movement’s affairs, the International remained but a loose confederation of national organizations, which considered political issues in national terms.
The French delegate Edouard Vaillant told the Second International’s founding congress that “war, the most tragic product of present economic relations, can only disappear when capitalist production has made way for the emancipation of labor and the international triumph of socialism.” Opposition to war became a pillar of its program, but the question of what to do if war broke out would preoccupy socialists throughout the International’s history and was the most controversial question discussed among the International’s leading figures. Domela Nieuwenhuis from the Netherlands repeatedly suggested calling a general strike and launching an armed uprising if war should break out, but his proposals failed. The Second International did not seriously address the question of how it intended to oppose war until its 1907 congress in Stuttgart, after the 1905–1906 Moroccan Crisis brought the issue to the forefront. In Stuttgart, the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) suggested employing all possible means to prevent war, including demonstrations, general strikes, and insurrections. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was strongly opposed to any mention of general strikes. As a result, the resolution the congress promulgated was contradictory. It called on workers to “exert every effort to prevent the outbreak of war by means they consider most effective,” but rejected resistance to war as impractical, instead favoring the organizing of political opposition. When the 1912 Balkan War threatened to escalate into a wider conflict, the socialists organized a special congress in Basel, not in order to debate, but to protest military escalation. Like the 1907 meeting, it failed to yield any agreement on what tactics to employ in order to prevent war.
The socialist movement was beset by fundamental political disagreements, which led to splits in several countries. The International’s wavering on anti-war tactics reflected these political differences. The revisionist right wing advocated a gradual evolution towards socialism within the framework of the nation-state, defended European colonialism, and supported patriotism. Centrists at times pushed back against these positions, but also supported certain forms of patriotism. The German social democrat August Bebel, for example, was determined “never to abandon a single piece of German soil to the foreigner.” The French leader Jean Jaurès criticized Marx and Engels’ maxim that the “workers have no Fatherland” as “vain and obscure subtleties” and a “sarcastic negation of history itself.” In 1912, Karl Kautsky, one of the chief Marxist theorists, began to push back against the notion that capitalist imperialism necessarily leads to militarism. He predicted an era of ultra-imperialism in which capitalist cooperation could maintain international peace.
The radical left was most decidedly anti-war. It considered war a consequence of imperialism. This became a central concept in the left’s analyses. “Imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. The mere tendency toward imperialism by itself takes forms that make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe”, according to Rosa Luxemburg. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky similarly argued against the idea of defending one’s own nation.
It is increasingly evident today that a high priority is to unite the anti-capitalist left globally — to forge a worldwide anti-imperialist, anti-war united front. Such forces in Greece, Canada, Argentina, and across all the continents should be included. ANTARSYA leaders, with whom I spoke directly, expressed strong support for this perspective.
What would this mean for CCBF? Actually, there was a discussion about it on the CCBF interim steering committee on October 8. We agreed that the starting point would be an affirmation of mutual solidarity, and a plan to have observers at each other’s national conventions, usually conducted via Zoom. Anything more than that would be premature. Anything less than that would be inadequate. We cannot afford to underestimate the existential threat to humanity. Should the resolve to share information and analysis, to consider common action against genocide and environmental destruction, be limited solely to revolutionary movements in Greece and Canada? Clearly, there are similar united front political formations in Argentina, the Philippines, India, and new instances of rebellion, for example by students and their allies in France, Spain and Belgium, that may give rise to new forms of unity and international collaboration. While being very careful not to exceed our capacities, it would be short-sighted not to be willing to learn from like-minded overseas movements, and to share our experiences in publications, campaigns, and online meetings.
What we are talking about, then, is the concrete application of internationalism. In the view of Lenin and Trotsky, internationalism was not a sentimental luxury, but strategically essential: it requires the global unity of the working class, support for oppressed nations, and opposition to imperialist wars. It combines theoretical clarity with practical tactics, guiding both revolutionary movements and the foreign policy of a Workers’ State toward the goal of worldwide socialism.
At a time when Ottawa responds to bullying by Washington with emotional appeals to Canadian nationalism, we can see which class stands to benefit most from ‘elbows up” posturing. Former central banker Mark Carney and his billionaire cronies are determined to pad the profits of big business. This they do largely at the expense of workers’ rights, Indigenous health, and mother nature. To Carney’s nationalist charade we counter-pose proletarian internationalism. Global solidarity, in practice, will sharply distinguish the CCBF from pro-capitalist parties. Together with our class allies around the world, socialist internationalism will win the hearts and minds of a new generation of anti-capitalists.