De Griekse Vakbeweging in de jaren 40 en de marges van de politiek (review)

262 Reviews Angelos Avgoustidis, De Griekse Vakbeweging in de jaren 40 en de marges van de politiek. Amsterdam: V.U. Uitgeverij. 1988. Pp. xi + 353. Dfl. 52.50. This book, the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation, analyzes the history of the Greek trade union movement in the 1940s. It supplements Lawrence S. Wittner's American Intervention in Greece, 1943—1949 (1982) and Heinz Rich ter's British Intervention in Greece: From Varkiza to Civil War, February 1945 to August 1946 (1985). The author makes use of hitherto unexplored Greek sources, both written and oral, in addition to American and British sources. He has produced the first history of trade unionism based on broad research. Must developments in trade unionism be understood if we are to explain political developments in the postwar period? Although Greece in the 1940s was a barely industrialized society, with only 15% of the labor force in the industrial sector, the trade unions represented the most modern portion of the economy and were able to mobilize the urban proletariat, which meant a great deal in a country where state power was concentrated in the cities. The tenacity with which the rightist trade union leaders clung to their positions is also proof of trade unionism's importance. Motivated by self-interest and relying on the power of the political right in Athens as well as the repressive state apparatus, these leaders felt threatened by the massive swing of the Greek trade unions to the left. The author develops his central thesis in chapters three, four, and five, where he explains how the Γενική Συνομοσπονδία Εϕγατών Ελλάδος (GSEE), as a consequence of Greek labor's massive support of the communist-led underground trade union movement during the war period, acquired a leftwing board at first provisionally and then officially when this board was elected in March 1946 by the first postwar trade union congress. However, this leadership was barely able to function. Although it had received 70% of the votes in the 1946 elections, it was driven underground again in the summer of 1948 after endless maneuvering and compromise by the Greek government and its foreign advisers, leaving the GSEE in the hands of the opportunist rightwing leader Fotis Makris. Trade union democracy had no chance at all. In explaining this, the author avoids a conspiracy theory and claims that the non-democratic result was not what the majority wished. On the contrary, the foreign labor advisers desired a democratic trade union movement. The problem was that they also had to keep political realities in mind. In the case of the delegates from the Trades Union Congress, there was the fact that the British government wanted to keep Greece within the UK's sphere of influence. In the case of mediators from the World Federation of Trade Unions there was the need to keep their own organization together, it being already threatened with a split into opposing camps oriented toward the West and the Soviet Union. From January 1945 until the summer of 1947 these foreign delegations tried to stimulate gendemen's agreements and compromises in an atmosphere poisoned by die repressive aftermath of the Dekemvriana. After the summer of 1947, the American labor advisers active from that point onward wanted to oust the communists and to reconstruct the trade unions around moderate centrist leaders who were meant to gain support owing to a gradual improvement in the Reviews 263 general economic situation. But Greece at this time was sliding into the third round of the civil war. AU of the foreign labor advisers, hampered as they were by political preoccupations and also by their general lack of insight into the Greek trade union world, hesitated to restrain the right-wing trade union leaders, who simply clung to their positions and refused to compromise. The audior argues diat the Communist Party of Greece—in his opinion neither guided nor supported by the Soviet Union during this period—viewed the trade unions as a conveyor belt carrying the Party's policy to the workers. The Party's decisions, especially its refusal to participate in the 1946 parliamentary elections and the halfhearted manner in which it engaged in armed struggle in 1947, were a sad...