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26 Αυγούστου 2013

*This article was written by using different sources including trotskyist ones.

Agis Stinas was born in the island of Corfu (nort-western Greece) in 1900. His real name was Spyros Priftis. He started involved in revolutionary politics and action following the October Revolution of 1917, after he was encouraged by the local doctor, who had known Lenin in Switzerland and felt that for the young Stinas the best introduction to Socialism would be the reading of Hegel’s Logic and Goethe’s Faust.

Stinas became a founding member of the Greek Socialist Workers’ Party (SEKE) which changed its name to Communist Party of Greece (KKE) in 1924, and played a leading and important role in organising workers and also in printing and circulating clandestine magazines, bulletins and leaflets.

Initially hostile to the ideas of trotskyism and the Left Opposition, Stinas was eventually convinced by the ludicrous consequences of the Stalinist 3rd Period when it was put into action in Greece at the beginning of the 1930s. Together with Pouliopoulos (who in 20s before been expelled was the general secretary of KKE) became one of the leaders of the Greek trotskyist movement, and was specially mentioned in the resolution «A salute to our living martyrs and our heroic dead», adopted at the 1938 Founding Conference of the Fourth International.

During the war, isolated from all contact with any trotskyist group outside Greece, Stinas and his group argued against the defence of the USSR (although still believing that the USSR was a degenerate workers’ state), and argued that there was nothing progressive in any national struggle whatsoever.

His group, the Communist Internationalist Union (KDE), remained outside the stalinist-dominated massive EAM/ELAS liberation movement believing that the biggest revolutionary task was to make the war a social revolution against the national dominant classes. KDE participated in the July 1946 reunification of the Greek trotskyist movement, but in Spring 1947 Stinas broke out any ties and links with trotskyism and leninism. He shortly later became the principal representative in Greece of the «Socialism or Barbarism» current (Castoriadis etc.), and towards the last almost 20 years of his life was moving closer and closer to Anarchism.

Stinas’ political evolution is interesting as he was an extremely capable organiser with boundless energy.

For those who do not know about Greek 20th century political and especially left and revolutionary history, in his autobiography Stinas provides ample material to explain the series of coups and counter-coups which punctutated the first 40 years of the 20th century.

Also, in his autobiography Stinas concentrates much of his discussion of the 1920s on the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) intervention into the working class. The workers Stinas refers to are electricians, tramway workers, weavers and tobacco workers. The genuinely industrial working class is never mentioned, actually because it barely existed. In the early decades of the 20^th century the Greek society was crushed by the exploitative weight of British, French, Italian and Turkish imperialism.

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