To understand why Greece’s KKE continues to attack China, we need to investigate the root cause of the KKE’s problems: crude economism. This is a particular breed of opportunistic behavior, one that’s usually characteristic of self-described socialist parties which hold some degree of power (even if it’s just stagnant minority electoral power, like in the KKE’s case). Economism is distinct from ultra-leftism, because though both tendencies can lead a party to take positions like opposing China, economism comes from a place of wanting to preserve narrow rules for political practice (while ultra-leftism comes from wanting to take the most radical stance). The reason why the economism has led the KKE to be anti-China is that whereas the KKE insists on staying in an antiquated mode of practice, China’s ruling party is among the parties which have adapted to the modern era.
“Economism” describes the KKE’s ideological stagnation because as Lenin wrote, what defines economism is
its incomprehension, even defence, of lagging, i.e., as we have explained, the lagging of the conscious leaders behind the spontaneous awakening of the masses. The characteristic features of this trend express themselves in the following: with respect to principles, in a vulgarisation of Marxism and in helplessness in the face of modern “criticism”, that up-to-date species of opportunism; with respect to politics, in the striving to restrict political agitation and political struggle or to reduce them to petty activities, in the failure to understand that unless Social-Democrats take the leadership of the general democratic movement in their own hands, they will never be able to overthrow the autocracy; with respect to tactics, in utter instability (last spring Rabocheye Dyelo stood in amazement before the “new” question of terror, and only six months later, after considerable wavering and, as always, dragging along at the tail end of the movement, did it express itself against terror, in a very ambiguous resolution); and with respect to organisation, in the failure to understand that the mass character of the movement does not diminish, but increases, our obligation to establish a strong and centralised organisation of revolutionaries capable of leading the preparatory struggle, every unexpected outbreak, and, finally, the decisive assault.
This way of thinking and acting is opposite to what’s led China to achieve the things it has. That’s allowed the PRC to utilize markets for eliminating total poverty, in defiance of the dogmatic opportunism which had previously afflicted the CPC. The essence of what Deng and his camp did was restore democratic centralism to the party; the ultra-left camp had been holding the party back from adopting the market reforms China needed, then Deng managed to correct this problem. Today, the structure of the CPC is so far from the rigid dogmatism of the past that the party has actually transcended democratic centralism as it used to be practiced; it’s needed to allow for a wide range of viewpoints, nurturing the kind of dissent that can hold corrupt elements accountable and push back against unpopular policies.
This is what rejecting dogmatism looks like from a workers party that already has full state power, and all aspiring revolutionary projects must learn from it. But the KKE in its current form is not able to learn from the CPC, because it’s shown itself to be fundamentally economistic in nature. What demonstrated this was how the KKE responded to the new wave of austerity that was imposed by the Greek government and its banking masters, which took advantage of the financial crisis by condemning the country’s people to even worse economic subjugation. As described by Turkey’s Labour Party, the KKE could have directed the masses to a Marxist-Leninist program by entering into a broad progressive alliance, but instead chose the economist path of narrowly restricting popular agitation:
it was possible for the KKE to establish a platform that incorporated the urgent and pressing demands of workers and the public, join in a wide alliance with Syriza and other progressive forces through this platform, and make adhering to these demands as a precondition of its alliance with Syriza. This was essential under the current level of awareness and expectations of the workers’ movements. This tactical move would of course not expect Syriza to follow a revolutionary line; on the contrary, this would have helped workers base their demands from Syriza on solid and real foundations in that they don’t pass the accomplishment of their demands on to Syriza and develop and protect their own initiative to make these come true. Under conditions of a wide progressive alliance, the support of the working masses would not have been left to Syriza. The KKE could have proven that it is the most reliable defender of the demands of the masses and the strongest force to meet urgent needs of the people and resultantly take the opportunity to use this position in breaking prejudices among the masses of workers and public in general against itself and socialism…
Unfortunately, the KKE could not focus on workers, their level of awareness, expectations, perception of events and the change in their mood as much as it focused on the social reformist character of Syriza. Is it not these points that we should always, and especially in the current situation, focus on?…Isn’t it the duty of communists today “to watch carefully over the real condition of whole class conscience and preparation, not only the advanced forces but the whole of the working masses” and not only the most aware leaders? Is it possible to know how to ‘act as a party of the masses’ without going down to the ‘level of the masses’, without tailing and grovelling to the masses and without giving up on telling them the cruel truth? It of course is possible and obligatory because of the need to protect and develop this dialectical relationship which seems as a ‘contradiction’! As Lenin put it “communists only task is to know how to make those who aren’t aware believe, and know how to work amongst them, not to come up with otherwise childish ‘left’ slogans and separate from them.”
Of course, for the KKE to have brought the masses into a Marxist-Leninist program, it would have needed to offer Marxism-Leninism in the first place. And when a party rejects the masses during the critical historical moments, it’s not really Marxist-Leninist. This is the most practical kind of problem with the KKE and the other organizations in its camp: they actively lead the workers away from the actions and alliances which can being proletarian victory. Their harmful geopolitical positions are downstream from this ill, though these two aspects of the KKE’s harm are intertwined. When the KKE seeks to divide global communists from China, or smears anti-fascist coalitions because they don’t see Russia as imperialist, or assists in instigating a split within the global workers movement by attacking Maduro, it comes from a lack of genuine commitment to fighting for the proletariat’s interests.
Because of this corrosive impact that the KKE is having, it’s in a way a bad thing that the KKE claims to uphold Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union, because this allows it to distort these things. When the KKE and its defenders say that they represent the continuation of Lenin and Stalin’s legacy, or point to the KKE’s heroic anti-fascist history as evidence that we should support it today, what they’re really doing is continuing the legacy of Khrushchev.
It was Khrushchev’s crude economism that led him and his faction to weaken the USSR’s commitment towards the class struggle, catalyzing the collapse of Soviet socialism. And the modern adherents of this faction maintain great influence over the international communist movement; which for parties that lack full state power looks like isolating these parties from the masses, while setting them up against the existing workers states and the global anti-imperialist forces. That this faction is so stagnant and rigid makes it vulnerable; we can take away its influence by exposing its damaging acts, and building a working-class movement that’s truly connected with the globe’s popular struggles.
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