The experience of Greece¶
Core Argument¶
The Greek civil war of the mid-1940s is presented here not as an isolated national tragedy but as a concentrated model of the class dynamics and imperialist strategies that would define post-war Europe. The chapter argues that Greece’s explosive convulsions arose from the accumulated antagonisms of three decades, during which the bourgeoisie proved incapable of either liquidating feudalism or solving the democratic tasks of the revolution. Instead, it repeatedly paved the way for monarchist reaction, culminating in the Metaxas dictatorship, which aimed to atomise the working class and peasant movement. British imperialism, treating Greece as a sub-colony for financial and strategic reasons, actively assisted this reaction.
The war itself radicalised the situation. The Greek ruling class collaborated with the German occupiers as quislings, crystallising mass hostility. When German troops withdrew, the masses—having fought the SS and largely liberated the country themselves—held de facto control through ELAS. The provocation of police firing on unarmed demonstrators was sufficient to precipitate an armed uprising. Yet the chapter insists this heroic action was doomed by the absence of a revolutionary party. The Stalinist leadership, operating through the popular front, diverted the movement into the straitjacket of bourgeois parliamentarism, laying the ground for defeat and capitulation. The central polemical thrust is therefore directed against Stalinism: without a revolutionary party, the masses cannot conquer power, and the Stalinist bureaucracy functions as a brake on revolution, not its instrument.
The chapter also delivers a sharp analysis of British imperialist strategy. Churchill’s policy of unrelenting repression was dictated by the need to secure the Mediterranean against the backdrop of Stalinist dominance in the Balkans via the Red Army. Yet even in a small country of six million, the dangers of open military repression became evident. The most sober sections of the British ruling class opposed Churchill’s adventurism, and imperialism was compelled to compromise with the petty-bourgeois traitors in the EAM leadership. The resulting Plastiras and Voulgaris governments represent an uneasy Bonapartist equilibrium, preserving mass organisations in attenuated form but leaving the balance fundamentally unstable.
The chapter concludes that this equilibrium cannot last. Either monarchy will be restored, leading to systematic extermination of proletarian organisations, or reaction will manoeuvre with a republic. Only one thing is predetermined: Greece will pass through one crisis after another, its fate tied to developments in Western Europe, the Balkans, and Britain. The Greek experience is thus presented as a microcosm of the post-war European impasse—a terrain where the class struggle, betrayed by Stalinism and repressed by imperialism, remains unresolved and explosive.