Thousands of young people from all over Greece participated in the 23^rd anti-imperialist two-day event of KNE, which this year was held on the beach of Larissa (Stomio), from Friday the 4^th of July to Sunday 6^th of July.

A small city was set up on the beach at Stomio, thanks to the voluntary work of hundreds of young communists. After the tents were set up in the organized section of the camping site, the young people were given a tour of the various areas: the restaurant, the medical centre, the bookshop of “Synchroni Epohi”, press centre, while the beautiful beach of Stomio was a few metres away. An 8 a side football tournament was organized, as well as a 3 a side beach volleyball tournament.

Apart from the concerts, the programme for the two days included a demonstration in Larissa, outside the installations of the 1^st army group, where it declared the demand for the functioning of the EU’s operational command centre there to cease (and in this period it is coordinating the EU’s imperialist intervention in the Central African Republic), that none of the country’s infrastructure and no Greek soldier is provided for the planning and organization of the EU’s and NATO’s military operations.

In addition, the school-student organizations of KNE from all over the country visited the village of Ambelakia, on Friday 4/7, where they were given a guided tour of the Ambelakia museum, which houses the illegal printing shop that printed the material of EAM and ELAS during the resistance period and afterwards the material of the Democratic Army of Greece.

The EU’s command centre must be closed

The Greek Operational Command Centre of the EU that is based in Larissa, at the suggestion of the coalition government, was recently activated in order to monitor and direct the EU’s imperialist intervention in the Central African Republic (CAR). The Greek government was able to ensure that the base in Larissa would function as the operations centre.

Its establishment and functioning are an expression of the sharpening of the EU’s aggressiveness, which since 2003 has unleashed 31 missions of intervention and 16 of them are still underway in Europe, the Middle East, Asia.

Generally, the EU acts militarily all over the world, through the notorious Common Defense and Security Policy. It has the Euro-army and other mechanisms that have the right even to intervene in other EU member-states.

The thousands of members and friends of KNE reached Larissa on coaches and carried out a demonstration, one of the largest held in the city in recent years, that ended up at the EU command centre.

The GS of the CC of the KKE, D. Koutsoumpas, who met the commander of the 1^st Army group, general Tellidis, and the Greek chief of staff of the base, Brigadier Drivas, later stated to the journalists: “We expressed our opposition to the plans of the EU and NATO against the peoples of the region. The KKE, KNE consider that there must be no participation in these plans, no infrastructure of the Greek armed forces must be provided, no soldier must go abroad, all the sections of the armed forces that are abroad must return home immediately.

This demonstration today carried out by the youth of our country, KNE, the youth of the KKE, has a symbolic character, here outside the command centre of the EU in Larissa, which plans the military involvement against the Central African Republic, as well as the other peoples of the region.”

Speech of the GS of the CC of the KKE

In the evening of Saturday 5/7 the GS of the CC of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoumpas, spoke to the thousands of young people.

The GS of the CC of the KKE condemned the government, state authoritarianism which after the seamen, steelworkers, public transport workers, other sectors of workers, is now targeting the struggle of the workers in the Public Power Corporation (DEH) and he added that “Now is the time for the people and the labour-people’s movement to express the greatest possible support and solidarity with this strike struggle. Now is the time for us to realize that no sector of workers is exempt from the unified offensive of capital and governments, no one will escape. So the response must be unified.”

D. Koutsoumpas referred both to the fallacies of the ND-PASOK government, which promises a way out of the crisis, and to those of SYRIZA that claims that the people can be prosperous in the framework of capitalist development.

He called on the people not to be trapped in the rationale of the “lesser evil” and referred to the role of the communists: “The role of the communists however, the role of the members and friends of the KKE and KNE, the role of the vanguard, is to buttress and organize the independent intervention of the labour movement, to organize and intervene in the people’s struggles, the class struggle,”

This means that we can not play a game of wait and see, we can not merely wait for some developments e.g. a government that will emerge tomorrow with another form of management, allegedly leftwing, progressive, patriotic, which will magically solve the problems and indeed with the social-democratic recipes that are well-known in Greece and internationally (..) We are fighting with all our strength so that the alternative political proposal of the KKE becomes widely known and understood, the necessity today more than ever of a radically different power (…)

We do not foster parliamentary illusions, nor do we consider that each small step that takes place is everything, nor do we believe that any successes either in the recent elections, in the student elections, or regarding the gains of the workers and students won through struggle are consolidated, safeguarded, secure forever.

However, we do not underestimate the serious possibilities that constantly exist for forces to be detached and liberated- young men and women that see the KKE as a support in their struggle and trust us.

At the same time, we are fully conscious of the fact that opportunism, social-democracy , the rationale of governmental bourgeois management has an influence and that this makes the liberation of forces from illusions and allegedly easy solutions difficult.

The attempt to weaken and assimilate communist and workers’ parties and movements is not just a question of historical experience, nor is it only related to Greece. It is the fixed aim of the bourgeois system, especially where there are strong and experienced social-democratic parties, the most suitable of all the bourgeois parties for the role of constituting a barrier against revolutionary forces and at the same time a “battering ram” in order to influence the CPs.

However opportunism, social-democracy, must be confronted with a clear line of struggle. This must not only focus on the personalities or a section of the leadership, which is chiefly absolutely identified with the strategic and tactical choices and maneuvers of NATO, the USA, the EU.

The tactics to call for an alliance with a section of social-democracy that occasionally presents itself as being leftwing and even adopts some slogans of the labour movement has not been borne out in Greece or anywhere in the world for decades. This stance has never had a positive outcome for the revolutionary movement. And some people should not go and confuse what we are saying, and speak again for the umpteenth time about sectarianism and the rationale of the hedgehog, we are not referring to ordinary workers, employees, the people and members and ordinary voters of such formations, i.e. those people that we are calling on to mobilize and act together with the KKE inside the movement.

Comrades, we must not at all underestimate the corrosive impact of opportunism even on well-intentioned working class popular strata. The revival of revisionism and opportunism in the ranks of the communist movement always leads to the retreat to bourgeois reformist positions of social-democracy and in Europe to a management programme either in cooperation with it, or through assimilation into it or through its replacement with other similar formations.

D. Koutsoumpas also mentioned the fight of the KKE and the country’s labour-people’s movement against the fascist Golden Dawn, noting that “today they are trying-the same centres that created and tolerated it- to allegedly make it see reason, to curb its extreme behaviour, to place it again in reserve in order to use it at another suitable moment.”

The GS of the CC of the KKE referred to the sharpening of the inter-imperialist contradictions, stressing that “ each time NATO and the EU use various pretexts to conceal the reality that gives rise to competition over the market shares, over the control of the energy resources, their transport routes, the pipelines, the ports, the airports, the road networks etc.

To put it in a nutshell: it is the capitalist barbarity that leads to war”. Furthermore he added: “once again it is clear that the peoples have to thwart the imperialist plans and struggle for the working class-people’s power , overcoming national and religious divisions in order to live peacefully. This is the only realistic way so as to place the natural resources at the service of the people.

Finally he referred to the KKE’s policy of alliances noting that: “ the line that the KKE proposes for the struggle and the rallying of forces takes into account that the alliance cannot have as its basis the agreement on socialism. We do not demand that everybody shares our perception concerning socialism, our views on how the revolutionary transition, the overthrow will take place. The basis is the common interests of all the anti-capitalist antimonopoly forces of society i.e. the working class, the urban and rural petty bourgeois strata. Any step behind this line entails assimilation into the management of the system, defeat and retreat, the sharpening of all social, political and popular problems”. The anti-capitalist antimonopoly people’s alliance that we propose has as its goal the victory at the level of political power, the conquest of working class and people’s power that will organize the economy in favour of the working class, the popular strata”.

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