- Dimitris Troaditis
- English
Stavros Kouchtsoglous born in Istanbul (Turkey) in 1878. According to his nephew Nickos Kouchtsoglou, a lawyer, Stavros Kouchtsoglous’s was descended from Propontida, Thrace. Sent to attend high school of Tsotylion, Kozani, a reformatory school of this period. But he was devoted, instead, since his early years in the struggle for the social revolution. Since he was a boy he worked as a cigarette maker and also in Piraeus as a seafarer.
He lived a turbulent life and influenced by the ideas of Michael Bakounin as well as the ideas of other anarchist thinkers. He traveled to several countries of Europe, where he participated in many anarchic outbursts and social unrests. According to his nephew, probably in 1912, he participated in an anarchist conference in Spain. He thus obtained lots of links and contacts with anarchist organisations and newspapers of several countries. In Istanbul and Alexandria he was amongst the protagonists in workers’ and social mobilisations, which often evolved into violent clashes with government and employers. Also, at an early age, he allegedly participated as a volunteer in the Garivaldi’s army and took part in several wars with revolutionary and liberating character.
He was both a serious scholar of the works of Bakounin, Kropotkin, Reclus, Grave and Malatesta (who he had personally met and worked with him in Egypt). Stavros Kouchtsoglous was a genuine and integrated anarchist, and had an extensive theoretical education and treat easily extracts by all anarchists theorists as Agis Stinas wrote.
He wrote “Down with the Mask”, a response to various Marxist theories, especially by Nikolai Boucharin, about anarchists. This text reveals that Kouchtsoglous was clearly an anarchist commounist with syndicalist views and content of action. At some point he exercise an indirect criticism on anarchist socialism (collectivism), rather not as a matter of principle, but, obviously, because he aimed to oppose the Leninist left who then began to appear in Greece and of which he predicted in some extent the development and extension of that trend through the full control of the trade union movement from the 1920s onwards.
In 1912 in Cairo he issued a brochure with the same title «Down with the Mask». He also wrote another brochure under the title «The birth and partition of socialism », a study on the future of the Communist International (which has been lost), several articles in magazines and newspapers as well as revolutionary poems.
After the persecution against the anarchists and socialists in Egypt, he went in Athens and together with Kostas Speras, Yannis Fanouraki and others tried to persuade the workers to resist the danger the then newly formed trade unions to be subjected and controlled by the also then young SEKE (Socialist Workers’ Party of Greece, after KKE – Communist Party of Greece)). He then settled in Volos where he tried to promote the anarchist communist and syndicalist ideas and wrote several articles for the daily revolutionary syndicalist newspaper «Defense» whose editor was Heracles Apostolidis. Some of these articles were «Down with the Mask»...
- P. Pomonis
- English
Written by P. Pomonis
Part of the pamphlet “The early days of Greek Anarchism” published by KSL (end of the 19th - begining of the 20th century)
Social radicalism, which grew in Europe during the 19th century, marking future history with movements, revolts and revolutions, had an important influence in Greece. According to M. Demetriou: «....The ideas of social radicalism were introduced in Greece from Europe, with its ideological radiance and revolutionary traditions, in the 1870’s. In Europe, that period was marked by the 70 days of popular revolutionary power of the Paris Commune (1871)... At the same time, important social...
- Andrew Flood
- English
by Andrew Flood
* This talk is based around the Solidarity pamphlet ‘The Greek Tragedy’, subtitled ‘the failure of the left’ published in 1968 as a response to the coup in Greece the previous year. It states the left put up little resistance to the coup and places the reason for this in the lack of a tradition of self-activity in the working class. In particular the response of the Spanish workers to Franco’s coup of 1936 is contrasted with what happened in Greece. This is the text of a talk given to a meeting of the Workers Solidarity Movement...
Στο κτήριο της Ελληνικής κοινότητας της Μελβούρνης στις 18/07/2019
Με τον Ελευθεριακό στο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο Στέκι Πέρασμα, 22/01/2018
