I became a student in 1956. My family was conservative so I was born into a not particularly political milieu. My first experience of politics was in high school when we organised demonstrations against British imperialism in Cyprus. I was anti-imperialist but in a very confused manner. I went to university in the years when it started to open up and expand. The first demos that I took part in there were for free education. Up to then you had to pay fees. The university started to attract poor kids from the countryside and working class kids from the cities, so the whole problem of not being able to pay became real.
We lived under a very right wing reactionary government. We had to face government repression and the police. In every town the leaders of demonstrations everyone could end up in a cell. That's the way I started moving to the left. In 1957 I joined the Communist Party. It was illegal so it had built a front party called EDA (United Democratic Left). The same initials meant Peace, Democracy and Independence. It began as a party of a few MPs and a few old Communists so it started from above, but we built the youth section, which meant it became a mass party open to workers.
I had to fight with myself to join the party because I was brought up in a period of civil war. My family supported the army against the Communists so for me to go to the left was a big step.When I was first asked to join the Communist Party my immediate memory was of 1945. Then, when I was almost five, my house was just at the divide between the British army and the resistance fighters. In December 1944 the British army on one side of the house started attacking the resistance, bombing the headquarters which was on the other side of my house. I remember getting up at five in the morning with lots of glass over my head as the whole house had fallen apart.
I opened the windows and watched the whole fight going on before me. I remember the dead bodies of the freedom fighters being buried, so my left wing ideas had to fight this picture of what a revolution means. The comrade who recruited me said if you want to change the world you can as an individual but only if you act in an organised way along with others. That was the argument that convinced me.
Things changed when the scars from the civil war had gone. You had the revival of both the students' and workers' movement. The beginning of the 1960s saw the first fights of a rank and file workers' movement which started building its own unions, which had been totally destroyed by the right wing government.
In 1958 the CP front became the second party in the elections. That's how we started realising the shortcomings of reformism. You saw them with 80 MPs, all the workplaces in uprising and a youth which controlled the universities at the end of the 1950s. We were very strong. But instead of using all these gains, the left wing party compromised with the right wing government and then with the new government which was liberal democratic.
There were the biggest demonstrations in Athens and all around the country in 1965 with the slogan, 'Down with the king', because he had dismissed the liberal prime minister. A million people came out on to the streets. But instead of this movement opening up an argument about the whole system, the CP put pressure on to stop the demos and strikes and ended up compromising with the government and the king. As the movement was pushed back a coup was being organised. Compromises with the king and the generals gave the right the opportunity to prepare for two years and then impose dictatorship. That was the big crisis of the reformist left.
This experience was the way that I, along with lots of other people, moved to revolutionary politics. It was my experience of reformism and the sell outs, as well as my personal experience. I had moved to London and was at the London School of Economics. I first met members of the IS [forerunners of the SWP] in 1966 which was my first experience of Trotskyist politics. I remember a meeting where Isaac Deutscher was speaking about Trotsky and the IS comrades got up and criticised him because he was soft on Russia. My introduction to such politics was not a soft landing, immediately we were thrown into the debates about state capitalism or a degenerated workers' state.
There were lots of meetings at the LSE during that period, on Vietnam, South Africa, everything. Tony Cliff stood up after the meetings and said, 'Tomorrow we are going to the Barbican site or Dagenham at 5.30am, to sell papers', asking people if they'd like to come along. These arguments had an impact on me.
So 1967 had started, there were occupations inside the universities and I was part of the LSE occupation. When the Junta took power in Greece we occupied the Greek embassy in protest. They kicked us out but that gave us a sense that we had to do something more important. The 1967 events made me break from the reformists and the 1967-68 world events plus my relations with IS brought me to revolutionary politics. Then we started building the first Greek group in Britain and published a newspaper that was called Midwife, from Marx's, 'Violence is the midwife of revolution.'
In 1974 when the Junta fell we all went back to Greece. We started building OSE, with IS politics, with around 15 people. We quickly moved to 50 members but we faced an upsurge and revival of Maoist politics. The turning point for us was the 1980s when the Socialist Party PASOK came to power and we had the right analysis about them. People felt tremendously happy at the result, feeling it was our government. When PASOK started facing a crisis after five years we were able to link in a very ideological way with people who started questioning PASOK and all the other left parties who supported PASOK.
The first important victory that we got was during the last years of PASOK in the late 1980s years of deep crisis and scandals. The rest of the left started moving to the right and collaborating with the right, even to the extent of forming a government with the right in 1989, for they thought PASOK was finished. We came out against the scandals but argued to get rid of the society which produced them. This opened up an audience for us and new opportunities. We moved to a fortnightly paper. In 1993 when PASOK returned to government we moved to a weekly paper and started growing politically, in numbers and in influence and started transforming ourselves into the Socialist Workers Party of Greece.
This year we had a big rally on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution for the first time since 1927. This attracted for the first time not only a big audience but also a hearing within both PASOK and the Communist Party. That's a transformation. It's a very optimistic situation if you see the class struggle and the crisis of the system. It gives you optimism but also a feeling of pressure that we shouldn't miss anything this time.