Koutsoumbas at 52nd KNE-Odigitis Festival: “Socialism or Barbarism is a question of today”

The 52nd KNE-Odigitis Festival concluded in Athens with a mass political gathering at Tritsis Park and a speech by Dimitris Koutsoumbas, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), who called on workers and youth to strengthen their struggle against capitalist exploitation, imperialist war and Greece’s involvement in US-NATO plans. 

 

According to 902.gr portal, tens of thousands attended the closing gathering, while hundreds of thousands had taken part in Festival events across Greece. 

 

Koutsoumbas rejected claims that the counterrevolutionary overthrow of socialism in the early 1990s had brought an “end of history.” Capitalism, he argued, continues to move from crisis to crisis, while sharpening the fundamental contradiction between the increasingly social character of production and the private appropriation of its results. Wars, he added, cannot disappear while their underlying causes — capitalist profit, competition and uneven development — remain intact. 

With imperialist antagonisms and war preparations intensifying, Koutsoumbas called for Greece’s disengagement from the plans of the US, EU and Israel, the removal of foreign military bases and withdrawal from NATO. Referring to the forthcoming visit of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he declared him “unwelcome” in Greece. He also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people and reiterated the KKE’s support for an independent and united Cyprus without foreign troops, bases or guarantor powers. 

Turning to domestic politics, the KKE leader attacked both the New Democracy government and social democracy, rejecting the idea that capitalist growth and profitability can eventually deliver popular prosperity. The recurring demand for workers to make “sacrifices,” he said, has accompanied successive crises, while billions continue to be directed toward NATO armaments and the interests of big capital. 

🚩 The Internationale at the closing event of the 52nd KNE-Odigitis festival in Athens, Greece. Communism is the youth of the world! https://t.co/7oKq8KJkj9

— In Defense of Communism © (@id_communism) September 26, 2026

Koutsoumbas presented socialism not as a distant aspiration but as what the KKE considers the necessary answer to the contradictions of the 21st century: a society in which human needs, rather than capitalist profit, determine economic and social development. “Socialism or barbarism,” he stressed, is not a dilemma belonging to the past or to some undefined future, but one concerning “today, now, the lives of all of us” — the continuing struggle between people’s lives and capitalist profits. 

“The issue is no longer whether the world is changing,” Koutsoumbas said, “but who will put their stamp on the direction in which it changes.” The KKE, he concluded, fights for a Greece and a Europe of socialism, which it presents as the “realistic, necessary and mature answer” for the 21st century.

Being one of the country's most significant annual cultural events, the KNE-Odigitis festival spans a history of over 50 years. The 1st festival of KNE and her newspaper "Odigitis" took place on September 1975, just months after the collapse of the 7-year old military dictatorship. 

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