As Rena Stavridi-Patrikiou observes, these Socialist intellectuals adopted
the view, already widely disseminated in the Europe of the 1910s,
that the Socialist transformation of society necessarily presupposes
the stages of capitalism, industrialization and urban dominance.
Georgios Skliros, a leading figure in the Greek Socialist bloc,
in 1907 published the work To Koinoniko mas Zitima (Our Social
Issue), the first Marxist intrepretation of Greek history. It demanded
that the state adopt liberal republican principles of modernization
as a precondition for the materialization of its irredentist visions,
which he shared, and thus he legalized the alignment of the Socialists
with Venizelism. Educational demoticism was the major ideological
bridge between the two camps.
To sum up, the conditions that prevailed in the period 1917-20 were considered
by Socialist intellectuals as appropriate for the promotion of their reforming visions
through their cooperation with a progressive (in their view) bourgeois party.
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