KKE "sectarianism" (Pt. 1)

My google search on the words "KKE" and "sectarianism" yielded a stunning 823,000 results. It's as if there exists some kind of Word feature that inserts the second word after every use of the first: the KKE is "sectarian" with the same phrasal predictability that the sky is "blue", the summer is "hot", or that kittens are "cute".

But then, what does "sectarian" really mean?

In an article entitled "Understanding the Greek Communists" (as in "Understanding the sexual rites of Kiribati", or "Understanding bipolar disorder"), published in the inevitable Jacobin, Nicos Lountos glosses it this way:

The reality is that the KKE has been paying for its sectarianism more than its radicalism. The KKE not only opposes common action with other political forces on the Left, but it’s stood apart from the broader mass movement in recent years.

KKE "sectarianism", then, appears to involve two nominal features: a. the refusal of collaboration with other political parties allegedly on the Left and b. the refusal to participate in the "broader mass movement."

Honesty galore

I 'm copying from Jacobin mag's interview with SYRIZA MP (but not SYRIZA member) Costas Lapavitsas, which is is being touted on the social media as an "honest interview":

So you dismiss the argument that said a minority government was possible?

That’s just nonsense. In the circumstances, nothing else was feasible. The real blame lies with the Communist Party, of course. Which, once again, has not measured up to the demands of history, and has chosen a line of complete opposition and complete hostility to Syriza and what it stands for, and therefore it forced Syriza to make this government with ANEL.

Let's restrict ourselves to a single aspect of this astounding response, in which "political responsibility" consists in laying the blame for one's own decisions elsewhere: Lapavitsas says that under "the circumstances" (meaning, ostensibly, of the electoral result), SYRIZA was "forced" into partnership with ANEL.

SYRIZA and Golden Dawn: A Parliamentary Chronicle of what the "Global Left" doesn't want you to know

On March 4, 2015, prominent US intellectual Noam Chomsky was reported to have stated in an interview with Democracy Now that the reaction of European elites to SYRIZA, i.e, the pre-emption of its salutary social-democratic function as a means of saving capitalism from itself, "could lead to a right-wing response [...] The alternative to SYRIZA might be Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi party."

It wasn't in any way an original formulation of the "Greek dilemma" in terms of a choice between the "carrot" and the "stick", between EU fiscal support for the Social Democratic desire to use a possible slackening of finance capital's stranglehold on the masses in order to curtail working-class militancy and the harsher, far less "attractive" alternative of holding the working class in its place through formal class dictatorship -- fascism. SYRIZA MP, Finance Minister and Anglo media darling Yanis Varoufakis had already put things in the same way in his Press conference with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble a month before, on February 5:

SYRIZA "dissidence"

Much has been the hype, internationally and (far more grotesquely) nationally about supposed "dissidence" within SYRIZA regarding the Eurogroup agreement. First of all, it would be good to establish once and for all what the balance of formally expressed forces is within the party: in the elections held in 2013 for the constitution of SYRIZA's Central Commitee, the forces involved were as follows:

1. The Unity Ballot (that is to say, the "SYRIZA establishment"), 67.61%, 135 members of the CC

2. The "Left Platform" (the alleged "SYRIZA Left Wing", led by Panagiotis Lafazanis -- pictured above winking at us while voting in the aforementioned party elections; this is also the formation of the Jacobin's exceedingly verbose Stathis Kouvelakis) 30.15%, 60 members of the CC

3. The "Non-Allied", 1.03%, 2 members of the CC

4. The Communist Tendency (of which a gigantic amount of hype globally), 0. 74%, 2 members of the CC

5. The "Members' Intervention", 0.27%, 1 member of the CC

6. The "Unity Intervention", 0.21%, 0 members of the CC.

Is there a class in this text?

"The comparative lack of elaboration concerning the matrix of political and economic challenges of today is in part the result of the absence of academics from the environs of the KKE. This is something SYRIZA inherited from Synaspismos, where there was always space for the coexistence of Keynesianism and Marxism. The crisis, the organizational involvement of Synaspismos with social movements, made the theoretical arsenal of the new party even more prosperous [sic].  On the contrary, in the KKE, the absence of any relation to the new centers of reaction against austerity guaranteed the continuation of the existing ideological arsenal."

George Charalambous, Red Notebook (SYRIZA Website). Trans. Lenin Reloaded. 

Below, a recent sample of the "absence of any relation to the new centers of reaction against austerity" in KKE, 1 November 2014. 1000 Unions, 100,000 workers. Took 3 weeks to organize.

2+2=5: A Lexicon of Greek Ideological Discourse, 2009-15

Adapted from text published in Greek, Lenin Reloaded, 7 February 2013

Anti-Stalinism=The conviction that because it is theoretically better than fascism, communism is also practically worse, since it committed equally great crimes. Consequently, the silent preference for fascism over communism. 
Autonomy=The ability of capital to automatically adjust every facet of social life.
Constitutional Arc=The spectrum of political parties guaranteeing submission to the ruling class.
Dignity=The means of rationalizing and embellishing mass submission to the power of capital.
Dogmatism=The condition of having a conscience and principles.
European Family=The Boards of multinationals based on European Union countries; the network of finance and political institutions of European imperialism.
Freedom=The right of capital to expand spatially and over social relations.
Front (of the Left)=A form of electoral collaboration aiming at maximizing the occupation of well-paying parliamentary posts.
Hegemony (Left wing)=The unconditional surrender of the New Left to the terms and interests of the bourgeoisie.
Isolationism=The refusal to participate in shady deals between political demagogues.
Legality=Conformity to the power of capital in the legal sphere.
Movement (Social)=A collective form of activism aimed at obscuring the class character of society, usually funded by other nation-states and their secret services, by corporations and by NGOs.
Negotiation=A form of legitimating what has already been decided through the media cultivation of delusional suspense.
Obsolescence=The common feature of all theoretical ideas that actually defend the working class and teach it how to fight for its interests.
Patriotism=What is left to the masses as a specter of the "popular" after the elimination of class consciousness.
Postmodern, postmodernism=The totality of modes of thought after the end of hopes for human emancipation.
Radical change=The loss of working class rights in a specific sector or in all sectors; alternatively, a rhetorical equation of thin air with objective reality.
Rationalization (in economic planning)=The demolition of obstacles to capital accumulation.
Renewal=The invigoration of dominant ideology through its fusion with a rhetoric that appears to resist it.
Responsible Government=A government that is committed to the responsibility of the working class to yield profit to the bourgeoisie.
Radical Leftism=The preference for a different bourgeois government than the current one.
Realism=Renegacy that has successfully rid itself of guilt.
Restructuring=The demolition of obstacles to the functional totalization of a system of exploitation.
Scholasticism (sterile)=Paying attention to the actual meaning of words, defending concepts from distortion.
Second Coming (socialism of the)=The belief that socialism is actually possible in contemporary society.
Sectarianism=The belief in your ideas, accompanied by the lack of willingness to prostitute them in the interests  of bourgeois ideology.
Social Cohesion=The lack of protest or reaction against social injustice.
Sovietism=Keynesianism, state intervention of any form, the welfare state, state ownership of any form.
Totalitarianism=The idea that social life under capitalism is a structured whole whose change has to be thorough and radical, or it cannot really be conceived as a "change" at all.
Unity=The cultivation of divisions within the working class, so that it can be replaced by the collaboration of its self-appointed representatives with the bourgeoisie.
Violence=The obstruction of the freedom of movement of capital and of its right to shape social life and social relations in their entirety.

Provocation against “Rizospastis” – The response of the workers was immediate

(Video of slanderous attack on KKE from SYRIZA newspaper "Avgi" youtube channel)

Provocation against “Rizospastis” – The response of the workers was immediate

In recent days, there was an attempted provocation against “Rizospastis” and of course against the KKE. The protagonists in this were representatives of the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government, “Avgi” newspaper that belongs to SYRIZA, and of course dozens of “anonymous” and “independent” blogs that rushed to regurgitate the provocation.

On the 11th of February, a text entitled “You won’t believe your eyes- the advert carried by Rizospastis on its last page” was uploaded on the website of the well-known journalist Spyros Karatzaferis [NB: extreme right publicist, brother of extreme right party leader Giorgos Karatzaferis, frequent slanderer of KKE and under investigation for bribery for armaments deal]. The text was accompanied by a photograph of Rizospastis, which carried a Coca Cola advert on its last page.